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> Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? You don't necessarily need jobs because you don't need money. What you need is wealth. I

> Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? You don't necessarily need jobs because you don't need money. What you need is wealth. I am going to leave it to PG to explain the difference [1]: Wealth is not money. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn't need money. Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing to buy, it wouldn't matter how much money you had. In the next 10 years, AI/robots will generate wealth at an unprecedented scale. Food, clothing and shelter will be plentiful. The industrial revolution didn't make human lives miserable, it made it better. AI/robots will be the same. Because of productivity gains humans will work very little, and yet live comfortably. As a practical example of how this works, look to Alaska. If you lived in Alaska last year and had a pulse you received $3,284 just for living there. Where does the state get money for this? Oil. Oil is not the only possible source of wealth. AI & robots will generate wealth at unprecedented scale, and humans will reap the benefits, the same way Alaskans reap the benefits of their natural resources. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

hooande 4y ago
> In the next 10 years, AI/robots will generate wealth at an unprecedented scale. Would love to see the reasoning behind this. Nothing I've seen about LLMs makes me think they will produce any kind of bounty for anyone.
- lanstin 4y ago
  I do remember feeling the same thing would be true of networked software in the early 90s. It is hard to tell to what extent it has happened.
JohnFen 4y ago
> The industrial revolution didn't make human lives miserable, it made it better. I think this is a point that is genuinely debatable. At least, it's pretty easy to argue both sides of that proposition.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  And the comparison with the industrial revolution is a poor analogy because the industrial revolution never proposed as a goal to automate humanity in totality, merely to automate human drudgery. AI is an anti-industrial revolution, because it proposes to start with the most fulfilling aspects of human existence: writing, the arts, and to automate people engaged in those jobs, and to only later come to automate human physical labour. It’s a regression.
  - bbor 4y ago
    If angels came from the heavens and offered to take care of our needs, would you fight them? I think it’s a coincidence that it’s threatening some kinds of artists first - I don’t see that distinction lasting long with the advent of plugins, and art has a fundamental, semi- necessary human quality that is not present in knowledge work.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      > If angels came from the heavens and offered to take care of our needs, would you fight them? That entirely depends on what price the angels would extract for doing so.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    Also it will be fucking terrible at those things. In a thousand years middle schoolers will learn about this era of vacuous, meaningless, copycat art as a dark age.
- bbor 4y ago
  … it is? Medicine, food, entertainment, rationalism? You’d trade all of that for… what, agriculture work in a feudal society? I’d love if you could elaborate or link to a good argument on this (besides the Unabomber…) I’m curious.
  - dumbaccount123 4y ago
    https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/international-mental-illness-part-one https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/international-mental-il...
musicale 4y ago
> AI & robots will generate wealth at unprecedented scale, and humans will reap the benefits, the same way Alaskans reap the benefits of their natural resources. Vast wealth will certainly be delivered to owners of the robots and AI systems. What reason is there to believe that they would share the wealth with ordinary citizens? A typical alternative to the Alaska model is one where oil companies extract all of the wealth and resources and citizens get nothing.
- petilon 4y ago
  A lot of people are already benefiting from ChatGPT. I know I am, and I am only paying $20 a month for a digital assistant that is expert in everything.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    An expert that bullshits part of the time. You get to figure out when it's the expert and when it's the bullshitter.
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      It also will never be possible for a transformer model trained on words and optimized to put valid sentences together to even "know" WHEN it is "right" or "wrong". A lie or falsehood is just as valid a sentence as a fact. When and with what subjects it makes shit up is also heavily dependent on training data, and the result is straight up a black box. What good is a fact generator that can't be trusted?
      - nicksrose7224 4y ago
        I see this argument all the time. Why are you assuming that this technology just "stops" at the LLM level? If I'm openAI or Google or whatever, I'm definitely going to run extra classifiers on top of the output of the LLM to determine & improve accuracy of results. You can layer on all kinds of interesting models to make a thing that's generally useful & also truthful.
thomasahle 4y ago
> Because of productivity gains humans will work very little, and yet live comfortably. Wouldn't this imply humans should already be working very little compared to pre industrial revolution? Instead it seems we work more [1]. And with less fulfilling work. I agree however that we have may have more stuff (or wealth). So going by this projection, in the future we'll have even more stuff, and work even more in even less fulfilling work. That is, assuming the people who control the AI/robots are willing to share the wealth generated. [1]: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
- gordian-mind 4y ago
  Well, pre-industrial societies usually enjoyed a very efficient type of political system. Maybe replacing our current one with some form of AI with let us enjoy these blessed times again.
  - pdonis 4y ago
    > pre-industrial societies usually enjoyed a very efficient type of political system. Really? What system is that?
    - gordian-mind 4y ago
      Aristocracy, of course!
      - bbor 4y ago
        Only at hacker news would I have to question my sarcasm detector on this statement lol. But I’ve settled on: good one
- pdonis 4y ago
  > Wouldn't this imply humans should already be working very little compared to pre industrial revolution? No, because human wants aren't fixed. When you give a human everything they want now, tomorrow they come back with a whole new set of wants. And so on ad infinitum... Of course, as an individual it's your choice whether, and for how long, you stay on this merry-go-round. But there will always be a significant number of humans who will.
joegibbs 4y ago
If we had that magic machine, then there would be something else that money could buy that everyone would want, and spend their whole lives competing over. Maybe it would be a house with a specific view or an original of a painting or whatever. I think most people want social status, and money is a good proxy of that. Even in a hypothetical moneyless society there would still be things to compete over. Due to the hedonic treadmill, in an automated society where anyone can have any good then those things will become worthless. We'll probably still have poor people, and from their perspective they'll be poor, but from ours they'll be very wealthy.
pdonis 4y ago
> AI/robots will generate wealth at an unprecedented scale. Food, clothing and shelter will be plentiful. How is this going to work? "AI" can't make any of these things. "AI" is not the magic machine PG describes. It's not even close.
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  Kind of like how clothing and food are produced by some of the poorest people ever, mostly people think it's all due to automation.
nice_byte 4y ago
> In the next 10 years, AI/robots will generate wealth at an unprecedented scale. Food, clothing and shelter will be plentiful. Anyone who believes in the possibility of post-scarcity society must be either naive or trolling. Something cannot be made from nothing, therefore scarcity cannot be overcome, even assuming that all planning and execution is performed by superhuman synthetic minds. Assuming that it's theoretically possible to utilize existing resources in a very efficient manner (e.g. motor running on a grain of rice for a century) and we just need AI to help us figure it out, is a _gigantic_ leap of faith and i would not bet a cent on that. Let me paint a more realistic possibility for you (with a broader time horizon): most of the value created by automating knowledge work will be captured by private capital, and middle class will all but disappear. Education beyond basic reading and writing will become unattainable (and, frankly, unnecessary), most population will be reduced to the state of semi-literate serfdom dependent on the newly minted lords for survival. The lords wouldn't have to worry about feeding their subjects for too long though, as mass death brought about by climate change will take care of that problem. Under that scenario, there will be no new enlightenment age to come and save us. The only reason we get to enjoy whatever freedoms we have today is that a (semi-)intellectual population is absolutely necessary to keep the complex modern economy running. Even then, those above you will do absolutely everything to limit your agency - by withholding information, lying, or just outright taking freedoms away. Do you know what happens once our participation in propping up the economic machine becomes unnecessary? Demotion to the default state of a human throughout history - a groveling, suffering serf who has no idea what's going on. "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever."
- JW_00000 4y ago
  > Education beyond basic reading and writing will become unattainable (and, frankly, unnecessary) Is this possible in democracies with free (i.e. state-provided) education? Why would a majority vote to abolish education?
  - nice_byte 4y ago
    i didn't say it would get abolished, more like wither away. here's a possible path to it: 1) school program getting progressively dumbed down; 2) fewer and fewer people choosing to continue education after school. continuing education is mostly necessary to become specialized and perform knowledge work, it would be a waste of time to do so with emergence of a.i. agents capable of performing these functions even at a level _comparable_ to humans (let alone exceeding). repeat this for a few decades and you have a new dark age.
JW_00000 4y ago
> In the next 10 years, AI/robots will generate wealth at an unprecedented scale. Food, clothing and shelter will be plentiful. GPT cannot create food, clothing, or shelter. The article talks about "automating away all the jobs", but GPT does not automate farming, making clothes, construction work, driving a car, delivering packages... Anything that requires interfacing with the real-world (i.e. outside of language), is not what GPT is doing. E.g. I wouldn't say research in self-driving cars has advanced now that LLMs exist. The magic machine you describe is exactly what GPT can NOT do. In my opinion, GPT is a huge leap forward, but in one particular niche (language-based tasks). It does not advance the state-of-the-art in automation of physical systems, so it cannot replace any job that has a physical part to it.
thatfrenchguy 4y ago
Have you ever set foot in a farm, a clothing manufactory, or in a construction site? Maybe mediocre programmers and program managers will be obsolete but none of those three jobs are getting more automated than they already are.

hooande 4y ago

> In the next 10 years, AI/robots will generate wealth at an unprecedented scale. Would love to see the reasoning behind this. Nothing I've seen about LLMs makes me think they will produce any kind of bounty for anyone.

lanstin 4y ago
I do remember feeling the same thing would be true of networked software in the early 90s. It is hard to tell to what extent it has happened.

JohnFen 4y ago

> The industrial revolution didn't make human lives miserable, it made it better. I think this is a point that is genuinely debatable. At least, it's pretty easy to argue both sides of that proposition.

zarzavat 4y ago
And the comparison with the industrial revolution is a poor analogy because the industrial revolution never proposed as a goal to automate humanity in totality, merely to automate human drudgery. AI is an anti-industrial revolution, because it proposes to start with the most fulfilling aspects of human existence: writing, the arts, and to automate people engaged in those jobs, and to only later come to automate human physical labour. It’s a regression.
- bbor 4y ago
  If angels came from the heavens and offered to take care of our needs, would you fight them? I think it’s a coincidence that it’s threatening some kinds of artists first - I don’t see that distinction lasting long with the advent of plugins, and art has a fundamental, semi- necessary human quality that is not present in knowledge work.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    > If angels came from the heavens and offered to take care of our needs, would you fight them? That entirely depends on what price the angels would extract for doing so.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  Also it will be fucking terrible at those things. In a thousand years middle schoolers will learn about this era of vacuous, meaningless, copycat art as a dark age.
bbor 4y ago
… it is? Medicine, food, entertainment, rationalism? You’d trade all of that for… what, agriculture work in a feudal society? I’d love if you could elaborate or link to a good argument on this (besides the Unabomber…) I’m curious.
- dumbaccount123 4y ago
  https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/international-mental-illness-part-one https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/international-mental-il...

musicale 4y ago

> AI & robots will generate wealth at unprecedented scale, and humans will reap the benefits, the same way Alaskans reap the benefits of their natural resources. Vast wealth will certainly be delivered to owners of the robots and AI systems. What reason is there to believe that they would share the wealth with ordinary citizens? A typical alternative to the Alaska model is one where oil companies extract all of the wealth and resources and citizens get nothing.

petilon 4y ago
A lot of people are already benefiting from ChatGPT. I know I am, and I am only paying $20 a month for a digital assistant that is expert in everything.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  An expert that bullshits part of the time. You get to figure out when it's the expert and when it's the bullshitter.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    It also will never be possible for a transformer model trained on words and optimized to put valid sentences together to even "know" WHEN it is "right" or "wrong". A lie or falsehood is just as valid a sentence as a fact. When and with what subjects it makes shit up is also heavily dependent on training data, and the result is straight up a black box. What good is a fact generator that can't be trusted?
    - nicksrose7224 4y ago
      I see this argument all the time. Why are you assuming that this technology just "stops" at the LLM level? If I'm openAI or Google or whatever, I'm definitely going to run extra classifiers on top of the output of the LLM to determine & improve accuracy of results. You can layer on all kinds of interesting models to make a thing that's generally useful & also truthful.

thomasahle 4y ago

> Because of productivity gains humans will work very little, and yet live comfortably. Wouldn't this imply humans should already be working very little compared to pre industrial revolution? Instead it seems we work more [1]. And with less fulfilling work. I agree however that we have may have more stuff (or wealth). So going by this projection, in the future we'll have even more stuff, and work even more in even less fulfilling work. That is, assuming the people who control the AI/robots are willing to share the wealth generated. [1]: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

gordian-mind 4y ago
Well, pre-industrial societies usually enjoyed a very efficient type of political system. Maybe replacing our current one with some form of AI with let us enjoy these blessed times again.
- pdonis 4y ago
  > pre-industrial societies usually enjoyed a very efficient type of political system. Really? What system is that?
  - gordian-mind 4y ago
    Aristocracy, of course!
    - bbor 4y ago
      Only at hacker news would I have to question my sarcasm detector on this statement lol. But I’ve settled on: good one
pdonis 4y ago
> Wouldn't this imply humans should already be working very little compared to pre industrial revolution? No, because human wants aren't fixed. When you give a human everything they want now, tomorrow they come back with a whole new set of wants. And so on ad infinitum... Of course, as an individual it's your choice whether, and for how long, you stay on this merry-go-round. But there will always be a significant number of humans who will.

joegibbs 4y ago

If we had that magic machine, then there would be something else that money could buy that everyone would want, and spend their whole lives competing over. Maybe it would be a house with a specific view or an original of a painting or whatever. I think most people want social status, and money is a good proxy of that. Even in a hypothetical moneyless society there would still be things to compete over. Due to the hedonic treadmill, in an automated society where anyone can have any good then those things will become worthless. We'll probably still have poor people, and from their perspective they'll be poor, but from ours they'll be very wealthy.

pdonis 4y ago

> AI/robots will generate wealth at an unprecedented scale. Food, clothing and shelter will be plentiful. How is this going to work? "AI" can't make any of these things. "AI" is not the magic machine PG describes. It's not even close.

ChatGTP 4y ago
Kind of like how clothing and food are produced by some of the poorest people ever, mostly people think it's all due to automation.

nice_byte 4y ago

> In the next 10 years, AI/robots will generate wealth at an unprecedented scale. Food, clothing and shelter will be plentiful. Anyone who believes in the possibility of post-scarcity society must be either naive or trolling. Something cannot be made from nothing, therefore scarcity cannot be overcome, even assuming that all planning and execution is performed by superhuman synthetic minds. Assuming that it's theoretically possible to utilize existing resources in a very efficient manner (e.g. motor running on a grain of rice for a century) and we just need AI to help us figure it out, is a _gigantic_ leap of faith and i would not bet a cent on that. Let me paint a more realistic possibility for you (with a broader time horizon): most of the value created by automating knowledge work will be captured by private capital, and middle class will all but disappear. Education beyond basic reading and writing will become unattainable (and, frankly, unnecessary), most population will be reduced to the state of semi-literate serfdom dependent on the newly minted lords for survival. The lords wouldn't have to worry about feeding their subjects for too long though, as mass death brought about by climate change will take care of that problem. Under that scenario, there will be no new enlightenment age to come and save us. The only reason we get to enjoy whatever freedoms we have today is that a (semi-)intellectual population is absolutely necessary to keep the complex modern economy running. Even then, those above you will do absolutely everything to limit your agency - by withholding information, lying, or just outright taking freedoms away. Do you know what happens once our participation in propping up the economic machine becomes unnecessary? Demotion to the default state of a human throughout history - a groveling, suffering serf who has no idea what's going on. "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever."

JW_00000 4y ago
> Education beyond basic reading and writing will become unattainable (and, frankly, unnecessary) Is this possible in democracies with free (i.e. state-provided) education? Why would a majority vote to abolish education?
- nice_byte 4y ago
  i didn't say it would get abolished, more like wither away. here's a possible path to it: 1) school program getting progressively dumbed down; 2) fewer and fewer people choosing to continue education after school. continuing education is mostly necessary to become specialized and perform knowledge work, it would be a waste of time to do so with emergence of a.i. agents capable of performing these functions even at a level _comparable_ to humans (let alone exceeding). repeat this for a few decades and you have a new dark age.

JW_00000 4y ago

> In the next 10 years, AI/robots will generate wealth at an unprecedented scale. Food, clothing and shelter will be plentiful. GPT cannot create food, clothing, or shelter. The article talks about "automating away all the jobs", but GPT does not automate farming, making clothes, construction work, driving a car, delivering packages... Anything that requires interfacing with the real-world (i.e. outside of language), is not what GPT is doing. E.g. I wouldn't say research in self-driving cars has advanced now that LLMs exist. The magic machine you describe is exactly what GPT can NOT do. In my opinion, GPT is a huge leap forward, but in one particular niche (language-based tasks). It does not advance the state-of-the-art in automation of physical systems, so it cannot replace any job that has a physical part to it.

thatfrenchguy 4y ago

Have you ever set foot in a farm, a clothing manufactory, or in a construction site? Maybe mediocre programmers and program managers will be obsolete but none of those three jobs are getting more automated than they already are.