4 ms·

GPT-4 is giving me existential crisis and depression

34 points by behnamoh 4y ago

atemerev 4y ago
I don’t know. Work is exactly what gives me depression. If money wasn’t a problem, I would happily be not working, focusing on understanding things, research, and the like.
mindcrime 4y ago
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35310891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35310891
jeadie 4y ago
Yeah, starting this https://github.com/jeadie/awesome-chatgpt-plugins/ https://github.com/jeadie/awesome-chatgpt-plugins/ hasn't helped for me
- gloryjulio 4y ago
  Good idea to include this comment in the readme too
cheald 4y ago
The thing that is important to keep in mind with advancements like this is that comparative advantage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage) continues to exist. The most unintuitive thing about it is that everyone has a comparative advantage; this isn't because of absolute advantage or capacity, but because of scarcity and opportunity costs. An AI can become better than us at everything they do - gaining an absolute productivity advantage - and human labor will still be necessary, and even valuable. It's unintuitive, for sure, but so long as scarcity exists, it remains. The reason for this is simple: given an AI which can produce two goods, X and Y, faster and better than humans, one might think that all the world's X and Y needs could be satisfied. But this isn't the case, because resources (including time) are finite, and the AI must choose to produce X or Y with any given set of resources (electricity, GPUs, time, whatever). By producing X (which, let's say, it's better at, or is more valuable per unit of resources input), it can achieve optimal absolute output, but this comes at the cost of not producing Y. So long as the demand for Y remains unchanged, there is a need for some other agent to produce Y. This is the human's comparative advantage in Y production. In short: the total sum of X+Y produced is greater when the AI produces X and the human produces Y, even though the AI is better at producing both, because the AI's opportunity cost of producing Y over X is greater than the cost to import Y from the human. The human can import X from the AI and produce Y and end up with a greater quantity of both than if they tried to create or import both X and Y. Might this mean a reduction in language-oriented jobs for humans? Certainly, even probably. Retraining and exploration of new careers will be necessary. We can expect jobs to go away, and new jobs to be created; the personal computer and word processor flat out killed the entire typist industry, but created a dizzying array of new opportunities. If you stay still, you'll certainly be left behind, but I don't think we're at the point that we need to worry about human obsolescence any time soon. (Of course, if we reach the point where all demanded resources can be produced without any effective opportunity cost, then we've achieved post-scarcity, and all bets are off, but that's not anywhere nearly as simple as just cranking a productivity multiplier up.)
- eldritch_4ier 4y ago
  You don't need to replace all job to cause problems. If you replaced just 10% of human jobs very quickly, there'd be mass unrest. Probably just replace far fewer would be enough to cause a depression the likes of which we've never seen.
  - carlmr 4y ago
    Exactly, peak employment in coal mining was 883K in 1923 [1]. That's less than 1% of the population at that time. Yet politicians still talk about bringing mining jobs back in 2023, 100 years later. Imagine something with 10x the disruptive power. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_States#:~:text=US%20employment%20in%20coal%20mining,declined%20to%2041%2C600%20in%202020 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_St....
- imtringued 4y ago
  Ah yes, the AI nation will buy prompts from us and they will sell us their source code. Also, I am not convinced of the scarcity talk because human labor is them most underutilized scarce resource we have.
UncleEntity 4y ago
[flagged]
- the_only_law 4y ago
  [flagged]
kbelder 4y ago
>GPT-4 is giving me existential crisis and depression I think that only happens to somebody prone to depression anyway. If it wasn't GPT-4, something else would come along and do that to you. The fix isn't to get rid of GPT-4. It's to correct whatever underlying emotional and psychological issues are causing the depression.
- bradwood 4y ago
  Quite. GPT is doing no such thing. OP needs a shrink by the sound of it.
barrysteve 4y ago
I mean yeah, everything scaled exponentially "up and to the right" for ten years, becomes an existential threat. If toilet rolls keep escalating in supply at the rate ChatGPT has changed from last year, to this year, for ten years straight, then we're all doomed by oversupply of toilet rolls. Mathematics is a cruel mistress.. when you use it to extrapolate trends over the top of conscious reasoning, simply because you can?
dusted 4y ago
I think it's interesting how indoctrinated we've become with regards to the necessity of work.. It's not like life HAS to work.. Humans are pretty much the only animals that do that, and while there have been good reasons for it.. It's been pretty artificial for a long time.. Before the industrial revolution, people dreamt of the machines coming to take their toil away, to free them to play and enjoy life. At some point we got lost in our toil and it became our identity and life, we started to live to work.. And now many have been so acclimated to this existence that they cannot even imagine how life could be wonderful without constantly having to work to survive.
- mvdwoord 4y ago
  I think it is partially due to the fact that humans tend to impose their will over others. I guess a lot of people don't trust eachother enough that abundant resources will be shared adequately and fair enough for everyone to enjoy life and play. I think this is warranted to a degree until we figure out how to deal with this.
  - _kulang 4y ago
    Easy! Put the AI in charge!
    - mvdwoord 4y ago
      Mine or yours? :)
- stcroixx 4y ago
  Wild animals spend almost all of their time on providing themselves with food and shelter - if they could talk, I doubt they would describe this as recreation, but work.
0dayz 4y ago
The biggest worry imo about ai is the consolidation of economic power the big tech industry will have with ai, essentially that we get a worse version of the oil/coal monopoly/cartel where waging war and terrorism was part of the plan. In big techs case its less that but more how they will infiltrate governments (just look at the law effectively banning ev cars in a particular state) and potentially create a real oligarchy.

34 points by behnamoh 4y ago

I don’t know. Work is exactly what gives me depression. If money wasn’t a problem, I would happily be not working, focusing on understanding things, research, and the like.

mindcrime 4y ago

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35310891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35310891

jeadie 4y ago

Yeah, starting this https://github.com/jeadie/awesome-chatgpt-plugins/ https://github.com/jeadie/awesome-chatgpt-plugins/ hasn't helped for me

gloryjulio 4y ago
Good idea to include this comment in the readme too

cheald 4y ago

The thing that is important to keep in mind with advancements like this is that comparative advantage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage) continues to exist. The most unintuitive thing about it is that everyone has a comparative advantage; this isn't because of absolute advantage or capacity, but because of scarcity and opportunity costs. An AI can become better than us at everything they do - gaining an absolute productivity advantage - and human labor will still be necessary, and even valuable. It's unintuitive, for sure, but so long as scarcity exists, it remains. The reason for this is simple: given an AI which can produce two goods, X and Y, faster and better than humans, one might think that all the world's X and Y needs could be satisfied. But this isn't the case, because resources (including time) are finite, and the AI must choose to produce X or Y with any given set of resources (electricity, GPUs, time, whatever). By producing X (which, let's say, it's better at, or is more valuable per unit of resources input), it can achieve optimal absolute output, but this comes at the cost of not producing Y. So long as the demand for Y remains unchanged, there is a need for some other agent to produce Y. This is the human's comparative advantage in Y production. In short: the total sum of X+Y produced is greater when the AI produces X and the human produces Y, even though the AI is better at producing both, because the AI's opportunity cost of producing Y over X is greater than the cost to import Y from the human. The human can import X from the AI and produce Y and end up with a greater quantity of both than if they tried to create or import both X and Y. Might this mean a reduction in language-oriented jobs for humans? Certainly, even probably. Retraining and exploration of new careers will be necessary. We can expect jobs to go away, and new jobs to be created; the personal computer and word processor flat out killed the entire typist industry, but created a dizzying array of new opportunities. If you stay still, you'll certainly be left behind, but I don't think we're at the point that we need to worry about human obsolescence any time soon. (Of course, if we reach the point where all demanded resources can be produced without any effective opportunity cost, then we've achieved post-scarcity, and all bets are off, but that's not anywhere nearly as simple as just cranking a productivity multiplier up.)

eldritch_4ier 4y ago
You don't need to replace all job to cause problems. If you replaced just 10% of human jobs very quickly, there'd be mass unrest. Probably just replace far fewer would be enough to cause a depression the likes of which we've never seen.
- carlmr 4y ago
  Exactly, peak employment in coal mining was 883K in 1923 [1]. That's less than 1% of the population at that time. Yet politicians still talk about bringing mining jobs back in 2023, 100 years later. Imagine something with 10x the disruptive power. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_States#:~:text=US%20employment%20in%20coal%20mining,declined%20to%2041%2C600%20in%202020 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_St....
imtringued 4y ago
Ah yes, the AI nation will buy prompts from us and they will sell us their source code. Also, I am not convinced of the scarcity talk because human labor is them most underutilized scarce resource we have.

UncleEntity 4y ago

[flagged]

the_only_law 4y ago
[flagged]

kbelder 4y ago

>GPT-4 is giving me existential crisis and depression I think that only happens to somebody prone to depression anyway. If it wasn't GPT-4, something else would come along and do that to you. The fix isn't to get rid of GPT-4. It's to correct whatever underlying emotional and psychological issues are causing the depression.

bradwood 4y ago
Quite. GPT is doing no such thing. OP needs a shrink by the sound of it.

barrysteve 4y ago

I mean yeah, everything scaled exponentially "up and to the right" for ten years, becomes an existential threat. If toilet rolls keep escalating in supply at the rate ChatGPT has changed from last year, to this year, for ten years straight, then we're all doomed by oversupply of toilet rolls. Mathematics is a cruel mistress.. when you use it to extrapolate trends over the top of conscious reasoning, simply because you can?

dusted 4y ago

I think it's interesting how indoctrinated we've become with regards to the necessity of work.. It's not like life HAS to work.. Humans are pretty much the only animals that do that, and while there have been good reasons for it.. It's been pretty artificial for a long time.. Before the industrial revolution, people dreamt of the machines coming to take their toil away, to free them to play and enjoy life. At some point we got lost in our toil and it became our identity and life, we started to live to work.. And now many have been so acclimated to this existence that they cannot even imagine how life could be wonderful without constantly having to work to survive.

mvdwoord 4y ago
I think it is partially due to the fact that humans tend to impose their will over others. I guess a lot of people don't trust eachother enough that abundant resources will be shared adequately and fair enough for everyone to enjoy life and play. I think this is warranted to a degree until we figure out how to deal with this.
- _kulang 4y ago
  Easy! Put the AI in charge!
  - mvdwoord 4y ago
    Mine or yours? :)
stcroixx 4y ago
Wild animals spend almost all of their time on providing themselves with food and shelter - if they could talk, I doubt they would describe this as recreation, but work.

0dayz 4y ago

The biggest worry imo about ai is the consolidation of economic power the big tech industry will have with ai, essentially that we get a worse version of the oil/coal monopoly/cartel where waging war and terrorism was part of the plan. In big techs case its less that but more how they will infiltrate governments (just look at the law effectively banning ev cars in a particular state) and potentially create a real oligarchy.