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Almost everyone here will be fine in a world in which only certain non-renewable scarce resources have any value, combined with impending massive currency defla

by sp527 4y ago

Almost everyone here will be fine in a world in which only certain non-renewable scarce resources have any value, combined with impending massive currency deflation. Even a rank and file tier 2/3 engineer will manage to live a princely life in that new reality assuming (s)he saved up enough. Hardly anyone in the tech community is capable of truly empathizing with the vast majority of people, who are born with none of the advantages that they had (genetic, parental, cultural, geographic, etc).

davesque 4y ago
> Hardly anyone in the tech community is capable of truly empathizing with the vast majority of people This is a gross exaggeration.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  It is a gross exaggeration -- but it is also the image that SV has been giving off for a long time now.
  - ChatGTP 4y ago
    These data used to train these models are tagged by people getting paid hardly anything, so why wouldn't it? The same people SV people then turn around and say that these systems will help them get access to free medical care? lol
- sp527 4y ago
  Well that's not a counterargument, but you're also missing the point completely, which is that you have to have a very low capacity for empathy in order to push ahead towards AGI when you know society is not prepared for this and that it's going to induce considerable pain. Americans (let alone people elsewhere in the world) are already struggling. Recent reporting suggests a great many have to work multiple jobs. Almost all of us work an absurd number of hours per week. Many if not most can't afford homes. Plenty are ending up on the streets. Healthcare can literally bankrupt people. A vacation out of the country is an impossible luxury for most. The majority of Americans still don't send their children to college, usually because of affordability. And I haven't even touched on what life is like in most of Africa or Asia. This is the world we're bringing AI into. You have to be something adjacent to a sociopath to be okay with that. So long as our system is predicated on capitalism, AI may very well induce more downstream suffering than anything else humans have ever conceived.
  - pdonis 4y ago
    People aren't "strugging" because there is no work for them to do. They are strugging because the powers that be have jiggered our economic system in order to hamper, instead of facilitate, free market cooperation, specialization, and trade. Governments micromanage everything. That is what needs to stop. If "AI" ends up making governments think they can continue to micromanage and get away with it, yes, that will cause more suffering. But that's not the failure mode any critics of "AI" are trumpeting about.
  - davesque 4y ago
    > Americans (let alone people elsewhere in the world) are already struggling I agree. And I agree with your overall sentiment about the risks of pursuing AGI. I'm as cynical as anyone about the likelihood that the average person will really be any happier in a world with AGI (controlled by tech billionaires no less). That being said, to claim that hardly anyone in the tech community is capable of empathizing with the average person is a wild overstatement that brings nothing to the discussion. Just adds to the noise.
    - sp527 4y ago
      Late reply here but I wanted to point out that you still don’t get it. True empathy in the tech community would be e.g. having the courage to say that building HLAI of the kind we’re now approaching is guaranteed to cause tremendous amounts of suffering for ordinary people (who will not be able to respond elastically to so abrupt a tectonic shift), and therefore the whole enterprise is fundamentally evil. Let’s get real concrete about what’s going to happen: people will lose their jobs, then their homes, they’ll become destitute, they’ll experience divorces, some will commit suicide, they will suffer desperately in myriad other ways due to economic disenfranchisement, kids will be deprived of a comfortable upbringing, etc. How many in the tech industry are genuinely discussing the very real consequences of nonlinear degrees of automation for the kinds of ordinary people they barely interact with? How many are pretending that there isn’t something disgustingly immoral about having some of the most affluent and economically insulated people devise and inflict this reality upon countless millions? I will maintain that this industry is morally bankrupt and nearly entirely devoid of empathy. These are not the people who should be in charge of our future.
gordian-mind 4y ago
[flagged]
pdonis 4y ago
> a world in which only certain non-renewable scarce resources have any value If you think this is the world "AI" is leading us toward, I think you need to think again. There are a huge range of skills that only humans can provide, and that will continue to be true. GPT-3 can't fix your plumbing or your HVAC when it breaks. It can't fix your car. It can't build houses. It can't build roads. It can't build computers. And on and on and on... Nor are AI enthusiasts trying to get "AI" to do any of these things. Humans are real-world creatures with real-world needs that we supply to each other by free markets, specialization, and trade. The "tech community" might take all this for granted, but that doesn't mean it just happens by magic. It happens because real humans do real work. "AI" is not going to take that over any time soon.
- sp527 4y ago
  What do you think happens when AI compresses the economy and leaves us almost exclusively with manual labor jobs, most of which are already low-paying? And you may not be aware of this having never done such a job, but physical labor is often brutally taxing on the body, putting people at risk of a wide array of potential health complications. I've seen this abjectly atrocious argument about manual labor made by a number of people on HN and it's astounding how poorly thought through it is.
  - pdonis 4y ago
    > when AI compresses the economy How? How will it do this? Basically, people seem to assume that "AI" has some kind of magical power to do whatever bad thing they can imagine, and then they extrapolate from there. I don't see it. > physical labor If you think the jobs I described are purely "physical labor", or that the physical labor involved is so highly taxing that people can only do those jobs for a short time before they wear out, you definitely need to think again. (You also definitely need to think again if you think those jobs are low paying. Plenty of people make quite a healthy living doing them.)
    - sp527 4y ago
      > You also definitely need to think again if you think those jobs are low paying. Plenty of people make quite a healthy living doing them. Will they still make a healthy living when there's an influx of laborers fleeing more automated parts of the economy? GS just put out a report today estimating the impact of AI: https://www.businessinsider.com/generative-ai-chatpgt-300-million-full-time-jobs-goldman-sachs-2023-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/generative-ai-chatpgt-300-mi.... I wonder sometimes if these accounts on HN making insane arguments that generative AI somehow won't be economically calamitous are bots. In fact, if I was at OpenAI and the goal was to avert scrutiny long enough to get to AGI, unleashing a torrent of AI shill bots might be near the top of the agenda.

by sp527 4y ago

davesque 4y ago

> Hardly anyone in the tech community is capable of truly empathizing with the vast majority of people This is a gross exaggeration.

JohnFen 4y ago
It is a gross exaggeration -- but it is also the image that SV has been giving off for a long time now.
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  These data used to train these models are tagged by people getting paid hardly anything, so why wouldn't it? The same people SV people then turn around and say that these systems will help them get access to free medical care? lol
sp527 4y ago
Well that's not a counterargument, but you're also missing the point completely, which is that you have to have a very low capacity for empathy in order to push ahead towards AGI when you know society is not prepared for this and that it's going to induce considerable pain. Americans (let alone people elsewhere in the world) are already struggling. Recent reporting suggests a great many have to work multiple jobs. Almost all of us work an absurd number of hours per week. Many if not most can't afford homes. Plenty are ending up on the streets. Healthcare can literally bankrupt people. A vacation out of the country is an impossible luxury for most. The majority of Americans still don't send their children to college, usually because of affordability. And I haven't even touched on what life is like in most of Africa or Asia. This is the world we're bringing AI into. You have to be something adjacent to a sociopath to be okay with that. So long as our system is predicated on capitalism, AI may very well induce more downstream suffering than anything else humans have ever conceived.
- pdonis 4y ago
  People aren't "strugging" because there is no work for them to do. They are strugging because the powers that be have jiggered our economic system in order to hamper, instead of facilitate, free market cooperation, specialization, and trade. Governments micromanage everything. That is what needs to stop. If "AI" ends up making governments think they can continue to micromanage and get away with it, yes, that will cause more suffering. But that's not the failure mode any critics of "AI" are trumpeting about.
- davesque 4y ago
  > Americans (let alone people elsewhere in the world) are already struggling I agree. And I agree with your overall sentiment about the risks of pursuing AGI. I'm as cynical as anyone about the likelihood that the average person will really be any happier in a world with AGI (controlled by tech billionaires no less). That being said, to claim that hardly anyone in the tech community is capable of empathizing with the average person is a wild overstatement that brings nothing to the discussion. Just adds to the noise.
  - sp527 4y ago
    Late reply here but I wanted to point out that you still don’t get it. True empathy in the tech community would be e.g. having the courage to say that building HLAI of the kind we’re now approaching is guaranteed to cause tremendous amounts of suffering for ordinary people (who will not be able to respond elastically to so abrupt a tectonic shift), and therefore the whole enterprise is fundamentally evil. Let’s get real concrete about what’s going to happen: people will lose their jobs, then their homes, they’ll become destitute, they’ll experience divorces, some will commit suicide, they will suffer desperately in myriad other ways due to economic disenfranchisement, kids will be deprived of a comfortable upbringing, etc. How many in the tech industry are genuinely discussing the very real consequences of nonlinear degrees of automation for the kinds of ordinary people they barely interact with? How many are pretending that there isn’t something disgustingly immoral about having some of the most affluent and economically insulated people devise and inflict this reality upon countless millions? I will maintain that this industry is morally bankrupt and nearly entirely devoid of empathy. These are not the people who should be in charge of our future.

gordian-mind 4y ago

[flagged]

pdonis 4y ago

> a world in which only certain non-renewable scarce resources have any value If you think this is the world "AI" is leading us toward, I think you need to think again. There are a huge range of skills that only humans can provide, and that will continue to be true. GPT-3 can't fix your plumbing or your HVAC when it breaks. It can't fix your car. It can't build houses. It can't build roads. It can't build computers. And on and on and on... Nor are AI enthusiasts trying to get "AI" to do any of these things. Humans are real-world creatures with real-world needs that we supply to each other by free markets, specialization, and trade. The "tech community" might take all this for granted, but that doesn't mean it just happens by magic. It happens because real humans do real work. "AI" is not going to take that over any time soon.

sp527 4y ago
What do you think happens when AI compresses the economy and leaves us almost exclusively with manual labor jobs, most of which are already low-paying? And you may not be aware of this having never done such a job, but physical labor is often brutally taxing on the body, putting people at risk of a wide array of potential health complications. I've seen this abjectly atrocious argument about manual labor made by a number of people on HN and it's astounding how poorly thought through it is.
- pdonis 4y ago
  > when AI compresses the economy How? How will it do this? Basically, people seem to assume that "AI" has some kind of magical power to do whatever bad thing they can imagine, and then they extrapolate from there. I don't see it. > physical labor If you think the jobs I described are purely "physical labor", or that the physical labor involved is so highly taxing that people can only do those jobs for a short time before they wear out, you definitely need to think again. (You also definitely need to think again if you think those jobs are low paying. Plenty of people make quite a healthy living doing them.)
  - sp527 4y ago
    > You also definitely need to think again if you think those jobs are low paying. Plenty of people make quite a healthy living doing them. Will they still make a healthy living when there's an influx of laborers fleeing more automated parts of the economy? GS just put out a report today estimating the impact of AI: https://www.businessinsider.com/generative-ai-chatpgt-300-million-full-time-jobs-goldman-sachs-2023-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/generative-ai-chatpgt-300-mi.... I wonder sometimes if these accounts on HN making insane arguments that generative AI somehow won't be economically calamitous are bots. In fact, if I was at OpenAI and the goal was to avert scrutiny long enough to get to AGI, unleashing a torrent of AI shill bots might be near the top of the agenda.