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AGI Is Not Chess Bots – They Will Replace Your Jobs

3 points by codermind 4y ago

smoldesu 4y ago
> potentially leaving no new jobs for humans. Name one scenario where this happens. This whole premise seems ridiculous. You're afraid of a chatbot that says cool stuff, and now you think agriculture, gig economy, music, education, entertainment and public relations will never be the same. Can you delineate how these things happen besides saying "alignment problem"? Nobody wants to hear your vague fiction-inspired philosophy unless you have factual proof of impending doom. Otherwise you're playing the role of the boy who cried wolf or Chicken Little, ringing a bell too early for too little. You don't get cookie points for 'being there first' if your prediction amounts to vaguely negative consequences. Here's my counterpoint: AI will change the industry however it does (like every other major advancement) and people will learn to work with and against it. It does not pose any more of an impending threat than the internet already does. The AI fear has been driven by it's prominence in pop culture and the desire for sideliners to wax philosophical about a finely-tuned Markov chain. The most telling part of this entire article is that a Substack author is afraid of a robot that writes text. Gag me with a spoon.
- codermind 4y ago
  First of all, AI doesn't just write text. It (Midjourney v5) can generate realistic images that humans can’t tell if they are really not not. They can also generate music and that’s so good that shakes the entire music industry (https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/26/grimes-ai-generated-drake-music-legal-issues/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/26/grimes-ai-generated-drake-...). It can also generate the entire courses and even be your private tutor. All of this is happening. Please note that GPT-4 is not just a bot that writes text. It’s a reasoning machine. It has many emergent abilities. If you read the paper “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4”, you will know it’s a baby AGI. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712 https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712) The article is not saying GPT-4 will replace human jobs but GPT-7 might. GPT-1 was released less than 5 years ago and look at how much progress we have made during this time. AI replacing most humans’ jobs is not fictional, the progress of AI is real and very happening very quickly.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    GPT-7 will not replace all human jobs, though. Your original assertion is wrong. People will adapt, same as all the luddites did after denouncing the cotton gin. The progress of tech stops for no man, and assuming that "every job" will be replaced by AI is flat-out wrong. I will bet any amount of money over any term of time within my lifetime that every human job will not be taken by AI. As long as human society exists, we will establish labor classes and divide duties accordingly. You could argue that AI threatens society, but... how? It's done nothing thus far, fearmongering "alignment" issues signal a non-technical interest in problem solving. Unless you have a direct concern here, it sorta feels like you're bracing for Y2k24 here.
    - hammyhavoc 4y ago
      It's the same pearl-clutching as what happened over crypto. People who don't know any better get swept up in the hype and start jumping to conclusions that aren't supported by the evidence.
      - codermind 4y ago
        First of all, talking about AI researching experience, I am an AI research who's in the field for over 10 years. Second, this is not the conclusion that's reached by me. There is a survey where 30% of AI researchers think it's likely that AI may be a threat to humans if we don't align it well. Just give you another example. "it is "not inconceivable" that AI may develop to the point where it poses a threat to humanity" There are many other high profile researchers are voicing similar ideas.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        hammyhavoc 4y ago
        Where can I read some of your research of the past decade?
- ben_w 4y ago
  > Can you delineate how these things happen besides saying "alignment problem"? The alignment problem is not even relevant here. Imagine four possible hypothetical AI: Alex, Brett, Charlie, and Devon. Alex is a fully-aligned ASI. Brett is a not-at-all-aligned ASI. Charlie is a fully-aligned narrow intelligence. Devon is a not-at-all-aligned narrow intelligence. What do these look like in practice? Many options given how vague these descriptions are, but by way of example, here are some stories: Alex knows what humans wants, shares these values, and seeks to maximise them. Do you want to be fit, or do you want to stuff yourself with cake? Whichever is your truth, Alex knows what you really want, and Alex also knows how to nudge you in the right ways to be your best self. The Minds in Iain M Banks' Culture would be this. -- Brett knows exactly what you want, but doesn't care. Like, not at all. Everything that humanity wants is as irrelevant to Brett as the preferences of lions and tigers and bears are to humans. Or possibly ants or potatoes depending on how strong you want to make this example ASI. Point is though, whatever its preferences are, they're smart enough to get it done. An example of Brett is the player-character in Universal Paperclips or the 2008 Flash game Pandemic 2. Or the Allied Mastercomputer in I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. -- Charlie controls all the NPCs in a video game. All the NPCs it controls remain perfectly in-character at all times, and cannot be manipulated into, say, telling the player how to make napalm even if the player insists it's vital to defeat the Demon Lord Simulacrum at the end of the game. People are trying to do this with ChatGPT, but we don't know how to actually prevent jailbreaking yet, and that counts as one kind of alignment failure. I can't think of a fictional example of this, as, e.g. the computer in Star Trek regularly makes this kind of mistake too. -- Devon does one thing, does it very well, and that thing isn't necessarily to your advantage. Never mind fiction, it's the default in general. Facebook/Twitter/YouTube recommendations; the Google search algorithm; automated A/B (or more general multi-armed bandit) testing that optimises user retention or spending but by definition can't even tell if the user is actually happy or not. -- Of these four, the Alex scenario means you only work if that's your best self, so it doesn't matter what jobs the AI can do; in the Brett scenario it also doesn't matter what work it can do because the AI is off doing its own thing rather than working for you, and if "its own thing" happens to involve you, you're unlikely to enjoy it; conversely, in the Charlie and Devon scenarios, your work prospects are entirely driven by your ability to take new kinds of labour faster than AI developers can create automations for existing roles. But these are just made-up scenarios to illustrate why the alignment problem is independent of the potential impact on the labour markets; don't read too much into them beyond that.

3 points by codermind 4y ago

> potentially leaving no new jobs for humans. Name one scenario where this happens. This whole premise seems ridiculous. You're afraid of a chatbot that says cool stuff, and now you think agriculture, gig economy, music, education, entertainment and public relations will never be the same. Can you delineate how these things happen besides saying "alignment problem"? Nobody wants to hear your vague fiction-inspired philosophy unless you have factual proof of impending doom. Otherwise you're playing the role of the boy who cried wolf or Chicken Little, ringing a bell too early for too little. You don't get cookie points for 'being there first' if your prediction amounts to vaguely negative consequences. Here's my counterpoint: AI will change the industry however it does (like every other major advancement) and people will learn to work with and against it. It does not pose any more of an impending threat than the internet already does. The AI fear has been driven by it's prominence in pop culture and the desire for sideliners to wax philosophical about a finely-tuned Markov chain. The most telling part of this entire article is that a Substack author is afraid of a robot that writes text. Gag me with a spoon.

codermind 4y ago
First of all, AI doesn't just write text. It (Midjourney v5) can generate realistic images that humans can’t tell if they are really not not. They can also generate music and that’s so good that shakes the entire music industry (https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/26/grimes-ai-generated-drake-music-legal-issues/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/26/grimes-ai-generated-drake-...). It can also generate the entire courses and even be your private tutor. All of this is happening. Please note that GPT-4 is not just a bot that writes text. It’s a reasoning machine. It has many emergent abilities. If you read the paper “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4”, you will know it’s a baby AGI. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712 https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712) The article is not saying GPT-4 will replace human jobs but GPT-7 might. GPT-1 was released less than 5 years ago and look at how much progress we have made during this time. AI replacing most humans’ jobs is not fictional, the progress of AI is real and very happening very quickly.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  GPT-7 will not replace all human jobs, though. Your original assertion is wrong. People will adapt, same as all the luddites did after denouncing the cotton gin. The progress of tech stops for no man, and assuming that "every job" will be replaced by AI is flat-out wrong. I will bet any amount of money over any term of time within my lifetime that every human job will not be taken by AI. As long as human society exists, we will establish labor classes and divide duties accordingly. You could argue that AI threatens society, but... how? It's done nothing thus far, fearmongering "alignment" issues signal a non-technical interest in problem solving. Unless you have a direct concern here, it sorta feels like you're bracing for Y2k24 here.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    It's the same pearl-clutching as what happened over crypto. People who don't know any better get swept up in the hype and start jumping to conclusions that aren't supported by the evidence.
    - codermind 4y ago
      First of all, talking about AI researching experience, I am an AI research who's in the field for over 10 years. Second, this is not the conclusion that's reached by me. There is a survey where 30% of AI researchers think it's likely that AI may be a threat to humans if we don't align it well. Just give you another example. "it is "not inconceivable" that AI may develop to the point where it poses a threat to humanity" There are many other high profile researchers are voicing similar ideas.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - hammyhavoc 4y ago
        Where can I read some of your research of the past decade?
ben_w 4y ago
> Can you delineate how these things happen besides saying "alignment problem"? The alignment problem is not even relevant here. Imagine four possible hypothetical AI: Alex, Brett, Charlie, and Devon. Alex is a fully-aligned ASI. Brett is a not-at-all-aligned ASI. Charlie is a fully-aligned narrow intelligence. Devon is a not-at-all-aligned narrow intelligence. What do these look like in practice? Many options given how vague these descriptions are, but by way of example, here are some stories: Alex knows what humans wants, shares these values, and seeks to maximise them. Do you want to be fit, or do you want to stuff yourself with cake? Whichever is your truth, Alex knows what you really want, and Alex also knows how to nudge you in the right ways to be your best self. The Minds in Iain M Banks' Culture would be this. -- Brett knows exactly what you want, but doesn't care. Like, not at all. Everything that humanity wants is as irrelevant to Brett as the preferences of lions and tigers and bears are to humans. Or possibly ants or potatoes depending on how strong you want to make this example ASI. Point is though, whatever its preferences are, they're smart enough to get it done. An example of Brett is the player-character in Universal Paperclips or the 2008 Flash game Pandemic 2. Or the Allied Mastercomputer in I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. -- Charlie controls all the NPCs in a video game. All the NPCs it controls remain perfectly in-character at all times, and cannot be manipulated into, say, telling the player how to make napalm even if the player insists it's vital to defeat the Demon Lord Simulacrum at the end of the game. People are trying to do this with ChatGPT, but we don't know how to actually prevent jailbreaking yet, and that counts as one kind of alignment failure. I can't think of a fictional example of this, as, e.g. the computer in Star Trek regularly makes this kind of mistake too. -- Devon does one thing, does it very well, and that thing isn't necessarily to your advantage. Never mind fiction, it's the default in general. Facebook/Twitter/YouTube recommendations; the Google search algorithm; automated A/B (or more general multi-armed bandit) testing that optimises user retention or spending but by definition can't even tell if the user is actually happy or not. -- Of these four, the Alex scenario means you only work if that's your best self, so it doesn't matter what jobs the AI can do; in the Brett scenario it also doesn't matter what work it can do because the AI is off doing its own thing rather than working for you, and if "its own thing" happens to involve you, you're unlikely to enjoy it; conversely, in the Charlie and Devon scenarios, your work prospects are entirely driven by your ability to take new kinds of labour faster than AI developers can create automations for existing roles. But these are just made-up scenarios to illustrate why the alignment problem is independent of the potential impact on the labour markets; don't read too much into them beyond that.