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AI will save the world?
- fsflover 3y agoAnother ongoing discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36214901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36214901.
- akagusu 3y agoAI will be used to increase profit for mega corps and this is basically the opposed to saving the world.
- fsflover 3y agoUnless it is available to all people (FLOSS).
- kelseyfrog 3y agoAny examples where a world-changing technology was developed and it didn't concentrate capital and subsequently wealth?
- jhonof 3y agoThe internet did not directly concentrate capital and wealth, downstream effects have but they aren't an inherent quality of the internet it's self.
- II2II 3y agoYou could say that about almost any technology, yet we also have to face the reality that every technology has social implications. Take the Internet. A lot of people who were around in the 1990's thought it was a great thing at the time. Perhaps it wouldn't be the great equalizer, but it would reduce the barriers to access information. Consider the Internet today. It is undoubtedly better at reducing the barriers to access information, yet I doubt that many people have such an optimistic view of the technology. We discovered that it is just as good, perhaps even better, at distributing junk information. We discovered that the information becomes consolidated in a limited number of hands. The technology itself hasn't fundamentally changed. Even the use of the technology hasn't fundamentally changed. It simply took time for the distributed to become consolidated. It was almost certainly a given that this would happen as wealth facilitates growth and growth attracts people who wish to exploit it for wealth. Does that mean the world is worse off because of the Internet? Probably not. Even if it was, I'm not sure I would want to give it up because I remember the hurdles I faced before the Internet was nearly universal. That said, I do believe we should be conscious about how we use it and skeptical of those who present hyper-optimistic views of new technologies. While some may be genuine in their visions, we also have to factor in those who wish the exploit it for their own benefit and to the expense of others.
- fsflover 3y ago(GNU/)Linux?
- rprenger 3y agoThe printing press.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y agoSoftware is only half the battle - the other half is compute. Right now it's not possible for all people to run the current LLMs locally and you can't give that away for free.
- fsflover 3y agoThis is true of course. But you nevertheless should not forget about this half.
- JohnFen 3y agoEven if it is available to all people.
- srameshc 3y agoMy insignificant take is that neither AI will save or destroy the world. Like the internet it will aid us in our modern society and probably for some it will be the means of causing nuisance for others. A new set of problems for a new set of solutions.
- stewbrew 3y agoLove, respect, and humility have a small chance to save the world. AI? I don't know. I have my doubts it will improve human interaction.
- thefz 3y agoThis is just another take among the dozens we see recently. They all sound identical, like "look guys, AI is hard, you don't get it but I do. Let me explain why it will be infinitely good/bad/anything else."
- throwway120385 3y agoI could see it being used to paperclip maximize engagement, which is currently working out really well for us.
- chewbacha 3y agoI’m not sure how much credibility I’m willing to extend to Andreessen after the past 5 years. Sounds like snake-oil when they say it.
- senko 3y agoYeah, the crypto craze stripped the halos of many of once-hallowed VCs, like A16Z and Sequoia.
- coolspot 3y agoSame, but they don’t care. These posts are aimed at potential investors who care mostly about returns and financial track record.
- mattgreenrocks 3y agoOne recent explainer video on VCs put it aptly: “they’re all the same. That’s why they seem to talk too much on Twitter: they have to differentiate themselves somehow.” Brutal, and true.
- geodel 3y agoIts an unethically made, inorganic snake oil. Now will please..please buy a vial from a16z.
- VHRanger 3y agoA16Z: "Crypto stopped making money, quick, move on the the next thing we can pump and dump!"
- sebastianconcpt 3y agoI've stopped reading at What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence It's the other way around, all AI, automated cognitive mimicry, has to offer to us, is a wide yet really shallow augmentation of our intelligence.
- soperj 3y agoIt's not augmenting anything at a humanity level. It might give people access to skills that they don't possess, but I don't see it coming up with new styles.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoWhy not? If you can make a functional LLM it's a fairly small step to an LCM (Large Culture Model) and LEM (Large Emotion Model) as submodules in a LBM (Large Behavioural Model). The only difference is the tokens are rather more abstract. But there's really nothing special about novelty. If you have a model of human psychology and culture, there isn't even anything special about cultural novelty fine-tuned to tickle various social, intellectual, and emotional receptors.
- sebastianconcpt 3y agoIn all you described there, you are talking about anything but humanity. You described hypothetical artifacts that, if successful, would be vehicles of a synthetic species that could imitate human behavior. Again, nothing to do with humanity (unless you are bought into some kind of idea related to see humanity as dinosaurs in extinction and transhumanism as a new reality).
- nathan_compton 3y agoTraining data is the main thing. We have lots and lots of text and text has the special property that a sequence of text contains a lot of information about what is going to come next and is easy for a user to create. This is a rather particular circumstance, the combination of so much freely available data and their being a lot of utility in a purely auto-regressive model. It is difficult to think about what other modalities are in a similar position.
- revskill 3y agoThe biggest problem in AI to me, is how to solve the training problem. Let's say, i have some small data to train my robot. Day by day, i can teach it more things. But i want it to "learn once and creative 10 times". It's how human brain got intelligence with only not large data to be trained.
- denton-scratch 3y ago> teach computers how to understand, synthesize, and generate knowledge in ways similar to how people do it. Rephrasing proposed: enable computers to synthesize and generate knowledge without the slightest glimmer of understanding, in ways completely different from anything humans do. FTFY. I made it as far as the TOC (pale grey on white - I'm getting on, my vision isn't great, and my laptop has poor contrast).
- pavlov 3y agoCursed headline+domain combo.
- geodel 3y ago> “Bootleggers” are the self-interested opportunists who stand to financially profit by the imposition of new restrictions, regulations, and laws that insulate them from competitors. Ok, so they think regulation may hurt some of their dubious AI startup investments. At this point I don't know are they just plain pathetic or still scammers.
- sofixa 3y agoCalling bullshit on multiple points. > I even think AI is going to improve warfare, when it has to happen, by reducing wartime death rates dramatically. Every war is characterized by terrible decisions made under intense pressure and with sharply limited information by very limited human leaders. Now, military commanders and political leaders will have AI advisors that will help them make much better strategic and tactical decisions, minimizing risk, error, and unnecessary bloodshed. Fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of wars notwistanding (sane people rarely start them; assuming non-sane leaders like Putin, or historically Hitler, Bush, Milosevic, Mussolini, Galtieri, al-Assad, etc. etc. would listen to advice they don't like is... just stupid), on the contrary - better tools and "better" advice will make commanders and leaders more confident they could win. See: most major military inventions ever The economic section is too long to quote, but again, fundamental misunderstanding of economy and human physhology and how it relates to economic decisions. If entire profressions get obliterated by AI (not impossible, but improbable with the current quality of AI output), it will, of course, obliterate their wages. It will create fear in other "menial" "white-collar" professiosn that they're next, which will dperess spending. Also, the cost of goods and services that can now be provided by AI (e.g. art) will drastically drop, making it an unviable business for those humans left in it, which will push most of them to quit. Who will be left to consume if vast swathes of professions are made redudant ? And if consumption goes up enough to generate new jobs, they won't be for the skillsets which were replaced, but different, specialised ones, that will require retraining and requalification, which is time heavy. In any case, even assuming some equilibrium is reached at some point, having decent chunks of the population unemployed with little to no employment prospects, especially in countries with pretty much no social safety nets like the US will be disastrous socially.
- throwway120385 3y agoThat quote is juicy. It's amusing to me that he's so naive he thinks that an AI won't make forced or unforced errors given the imperfect information it inevitably has. And if you can get access to the training set or the corpus of variables the AI is configured with then you can easily predict what it's going to do next, which is far worse. Nobody can look into the mind of a mediocre general, but anyone can look into the mind of any AI general given sufficient access. People who call themselves technologists always overestimate how beneficial a new technology is and underestimate how inhumane its application becomes when venture capitalists demand 10x or 100x their initial investment. When people like him come in and extol the virtues of some new thing as fixing everything and making everything better, I'm really wary of what they do next. Inevitably they're trying to sell me a bill of goods.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tjpnz 3y ago>Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful. The AI tutor will be by each child’s side every step of their development, helping them maximize their potential with the machine version of infinite love. This bothers me. Who trains these AI tutors and how do we prevent the system they're embedded in from churning out the same cookie cutter individuals, each with the exact same political beliefs and inability to comprehend the grey and nuanced? Do we even want perfect tutors at all? The lessons I remember from school didn't always come from the best and brightest the profession had to offer. I would even go as far as to say that some were rather flawed individuals, in one way or another. That "wisdom" though has shaped me for the better as an individual. You're not going to find that in any textbook, much less a LLM.
- atleastoptimal 3y agoThere are more risks from flawed teachers than risks from too perfect teachers
- fsflover 3y agoExcept that AI teachers trained by for-profit corporations are far from perfect.
- pelagicAustral 3y agoOh let me fix that business model right away, the perfect version costs 100 bucks a month.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoAnd it doubles down on being flawed, as people willing to pay those 100 bucks self-select as both gullible and having discretionary income. More-less the same story as with paying for ad-free versions of ad-supported services.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
- darod 3y ago"Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful." - people use the internet so that they don't have to remember things. I'm not sure how this tutor will help because currently a lot of students are using AI to do their homework for them.
- jasonvorhe 3y agoI grew up in Germany and our entire education system doesn't make a lot of sense and homework was something that only very few people actually did, since most just copied from the few or managed to stay under the radar and slither through classes without people noticing. Homework was always a chore and not a challenge or something that would help you out in daily life.
- kkfx 3y agoIMVHO: those who cry "AI will destroy anything" AND those who equally cry "AI will makes anything better" are both largely wrong for the present and still wrong for the mean and long run. Today "AI" systems are nice automatic "summarize tools", with big limits and issues. They might be useful in limited scenarios like to design fictional stuff, to be "search engine on steroid" (as long as their answers are true) and so on. Essentially they might help automation a bit. The BIG, BIG, BIG issue is who train them AND how can we verify. If people start to get the habit of taking for truth any "answer" their grasp on the reality would be even lower that today "online misinformation", and that can go far beyond news (try to imaging false medical imaging analysis consequences). How can we verify is even more complex. Not only we can't train at home with interesting results but also we can't verify for truth the mass of training materials. Try to imaging the classic Eduard Bernays "dummy" sci journal publishing some true papers and some false one stating smoking is good for health... https://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/12/consumer https://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/12/consumer now imaging the effect of carefully slipped false material in the big "ocean" of data...
- dinvlad 3y agoThey are trained using input from an army of underpaid "ghost workers", i.e. people without many rights or economic freedom, and no consideration for their well-being. Nothing good can be grown on such ground.
- kkfx 3y agoSlave labor produce poor quality results, of course, but per se have no specific bias, most western prosperity was made exploiting peoples for centuries so well... Any morality aside, I'm much more concerned by those who decide how to train and on what data than about the ghost slave labor they exploit...
- dinvlad 3y agoI'm concerned which data these real human beings were forced to train it on. The images they had to review were highly disturbing and illegal in the US.
- TradingPlaces 3y agoCame for everyone ripping on a16z. Was not disappointed. Thanks y’all.
- Karunamon 3y agoI'm really not sure you should be thanking everyone for ad hominem. Yes yes, HN doesn't like a16z. Not one of those comments were useful.
- eunoia 3y agoOstracism is how we (humans) enforce social norms. In this case the community is ostracizing a company known for grifting under a facade of technological advancement. Seems like the system is working.
- Karunamon 3y agoIn this case there is no grift (he is likely investing in AI like literally everybody else) and these comments are nothing but noise. "Social norms" are a poor excuse for "ostracizing" someone who isn't even here to be impacted by it, let alone the knock-on affect of getting in the way of effective communication and discussion.
- bbor 3y agoI wouldn't say that anyone's ostracizing him at all (It is on the front page...), and even if they are, putting it down to "social norms" is a bit disingenuous, don't you think? We're not talking about Socrates speaking rudely about the people in power, we're talking about a billionaire accused (seemingly [rightfully](https://www.blockdata.tech/blog/general/where-andreessen-horowitz-is-investing-in-crypto https://www.blockdata.tech/blog/general/where-andreessen-hor...)?) investing in bad-faith to scam people out of their money. I think that's a form of a theft, and calling an aversion to theft a "social norm" is technically correct but practically a massive misapplication of the term.
- ulrikhansen54 3y agoThis is by far the best piece I've ever written on the impact AI will have on society & the most articulate response to the hysteria gripping the discourse.
- neonate 3y agoI assume you mean read rather than written?
- ljlolel 3y agoMaybe he meant “I’ve ever seen written”?
- ulrikhansen54 3y agoThat's what I meant -- ha, yes, sorry -- I am not the author : -)
- barbariangrunge 3y agoThe biggest risk with AI, in the medium-term at least, is it will be used by governments and organizations with power to surveil and manipulate people on a previously-impossible scale. Automated systems monitoring everybody, pulling levers to prevent anybody from speaking out or causing trouble. In the long run, it will be the end of human freedom For example, it looks like Xi has been pretty actively pursuing this, based on the news over the last 10 years > China has one surveillance camera for every 2 citizens (...) These camera [sic] checks if people are wearing face mask, crossing the road before the green lights for pedestrians are turned on. If caught breaking rules, people lose their social credit points, are charged higher mortgage, extra taxes and slower internet speed. Not only that, public transport for them gets expensive as well, and the list goes on. [1] It's not like we're immune to this. All the malls I go to lately are packed with facial recognition systems to analyze our behaviour. [1] https://www.firstpost.com/world/big-brother-is-watching-china-has-one-surveillance-camera-for-every-2-citizens-12380062.html#:~:text=Every%20single%20person%2C%20be%20it,since%20the%20Covid%2D19%20pandemic https://www.firstpost.com/world/big-brother-is-watching-chin....
- layer8 3y agoYeah, this vision from TFA: “Every person will have an AI assistant/coach/mentor/trainer/advisor/therapist that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful. The AI assistant will be present through all of life’s opportunities and challenges, maximizing every person’s outcomes.” …will more likely turn into an indoctrination and compliance machine under authoritarian regimes.
- foogazi 3y agoThis just devolves into the same currently existing bad actor issue: authoritarian regimes You could say the same about weapons, radio, electricity, the internet They all could be abused by authoritarian regimes
- layer8 3y agoWe haven’t found a way yet to prevent authoritarian regimes from arising and spreading, so it’s unclear how AI will save the world. On the contrary, AI will make it easier for authoritarian regimes to expand and maintain their control.
- tikkun 3y agoDespite what I think of the crypto projects a16z has been involved in (hint: it's not positive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36073355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36073355), I actually think this essay was pretty solid.
- golergka 3y ago[flagged]
- te_chris 3y agoI just know a take from a16z is going to be worthless. Then I read it to confirm.
- lxgr 3y ago> Every child will have an AI tutor [...] Is anybody keeping score on Neal Stephenson novel plot points becoming real-world news in 2023? ("The Diamond Age" in this case.)
- jes5199 3y agowe actually are going to enter a “diamond age” as processes like C2CNT make direct-air carbon molecules cheaper than glass. I don’t know if goes mainstream this year though
- friend_and_foe 3y agoIn skeptical of any claim that software will make the world better. Perhaps it's selection bias, but all I can see is software overcomplicating things to the point that any benefit derived from it is overshadowed by the maintenance burden and unforseen externalities. I say this as a once Utopian hopeful, Uber was going to get rid of the monopolistic taxi cartels, google was going to put balloons up and fiber and give us all affordable high speed connectivity. All they seemed to do was get in control with these pitches and then become worse than their predecessors. I am not someone who thinks AI is going to kill us all. But I dont think it's going to usher in a new utopia either. I think probably it's going to be useful and beneficial in some ways, cause problems in others, and like always, our nature and behavior will determine the human condition going forward.
- rutierut 3y agoI don't know about you, but Uber has significantly improved ride-sharing for me, along with countless other aspects of life such as government services, interpersonal communication, and education. It's a miracle I can live in another country than I was born, top income bracket due to a free internet education, effortlessly facetiming my parents whenever I want in amazing quality, learning and talking about all sorts of niche interests without any effort. I think this is just all so obvious these days that you don't remember how much it used to suck, and that's a real testament to its greatness.
- friend_and_foe 3y agoI remember, and I agree with you. These tools have improved our lives. But they've damaged our lives on other ways. I remember waking up every morning and without a second thought, I got up, out in the world, did things I felt like doing, saw people I liked on a whim, every day was jam packed with eventfulness and dimension and interaction. I took that for granted. Now, kids don't play outside, nobody knows how to drive because their mind is somewhere else 24/7 and we check our phones before we do anything else. But the flip side is, I can know anything I want that is known by someone else with less physical effort than it would take me to make a sandwich. I can talk to almost any human being in the world while doing any mundane task anywhere in my environment. It's amazing. But we did lose something, I believe something very important. It wasn't free, it cost us something. Was it worth it? I don't know. I think yes, but I'm not really sure.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoDon't forget about the good ol' tech industry bait-and-switch. Quoting myself from earlier today: > There's the good ol' bait-and-switch of tech industry you have to consider. New tech is promoted by emphasizing (and sometimes overstating) the humane aspects, the hypothetical applications for the benefit of the user and the society at large. In reality, these capabilities turn out to be mediocre, and those humane applications never manifest - there is no business in them. We always end up with a shitty version that's mostly useful for the most motivated players: the ones with money, that will use those tools to make even more money off the users. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36211006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36211006 It applies to Apple's automated emotion reading, and it applies even more to major VCs telling us AI will Save the World. As in, maybe it could, but those interests being involved are making it less likely.
- parentheses 3y agoI don't agree. You're right that this article really focuses only on the positive. That said, it is indeed true that technology has changed the world for the better. If one were to somehow prove that "facebook is net bad for young children", it still doesn't mean the web, advertising, and everything that makes up that product should be destroyed.
- llsf 3y ago> it is indeed true that technology has changed the world for the better. A big part of the "technology" in the past 150 years has been "machines". And all those machines have one thing in common, they consume energy (from the wheel to the latest iPhone). Yes the technology allowed to increase the crop per acres, to ship goods across the world, to keep food cold, to warm/sterilize it, find new drugs, mass produce clothes for few cents, etc. That miracle comes access to free and dense energy also known as fossil fuel. If oil/gas/coal was not found/used or just not as abundant, we might not have known the same past 150 years. Now that miracle is not clean, it does produce a very stable molecule (CO2), that is, after 150 years starting to change the "world" and not necessarily for the better. So, yes technology improved the life of billions, but maybe at the price of some species extinctions, and it might hurt our very own if we continue to feed those machines/technologies with fossil fuel. Hopefully, we will reassess how good is a new technology under the prism of its dependence to fossil fuel. Can't wait for fission or fusion to be widely used instead of fossil fuel.
- effed3 3y agoThe article is a big set of -opinions- with no true -fact- at support. The actuals -AI- are mainly LLM systems, and are quite far away from being intelligent, but actually -capable- in some areas. The misuse of these (and others) -capable- systems suredly will not save the world, but will probably only help some usual little privileged part of it. Not a single tech will "save" the world, but the meaning of what we make in the world. Tech is a tool, not a goal, and the way -AI- and others tech is described is more close to a goal (or a religion) in itself than one of the tools we must create ad learn to use. Science + Humanity (Compassion? Love? Friedship? chose yours) will help to save something.
- indigoabstract 3y agoI wonder why he felt the need to reassure people about the benefits of AI.. For some reason, I'm imagining Dr. Evil reading this. Don't know why, since Marc looks nothing like him. Maybe a better title might have been "How i learned to stop worrying and love the AI"? Because the world needs saving yet again and it's AI's turn this time (and the AI investors). So everyone chill, whatever happens, it will be OK, some people will get richer and the rest who won't will be properly taken care of anyway.
- AdamH12113 3y agoI was expecting this to be "person who expects to make enormous sums of money from AI thinks AI is a great idea", but somehow it was worse. For instance, I did not expect it to explicitly call for a new cold war against China that pits their authoritarian vision for AI against a completely unregulated, corporate profit-driven vision for AI. The lack of self-awareness there is mind-blowing. The author also thinks that wages have grown rapidly over the last few decades in proportion to labor productivity (!!!), that outsourcing and automation have turned out to be great for everyone, that AI replacing existing labor en masse would immediately and obviously result in more and higher-paying jobs, and that concerns about rising inequality and billionaires sucking up all the new wealth are literally Marxism and should thus be dismissed outright. (His links supporting this mostly go to conservative think tanks and Wikipedia articles on economics, in case you were wondering.) Meanwhile, the upsides of AI are described using language like this: > Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful. The AI tutor will be by each child’s side every step of their development, helping them maximize their potential with the machine version of infinite love. > Every person will have an AI assistant/coach/mentor/trainer/advisor/therapist that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful. The AI assistant will be present through all of life’s opportunities and challenges, maximizing every person’s outcomes. Which (taken literally) is too optimistic for Star Trek, much less real life. Viewed through the lens of Silicon Valley venture capitalism and its products, it is terrifyingly dystopian. I'll leave you to read the part where regulation is literally a reenactment of prohibition for yourself. With all the straw-manning, it didn't even touch on more realistic problems like effortless, undetectable cheating on school homework or the proliferation of circular references.
- boringuser2 3y ago>Instead we have used our intelligence to raise our standard of living on the order of 10,000X over the last 4,000 years. Who's "we"/"our"?
- javajosh 3y agoGod I hate this rhetorical style - to lead with the conclusion ("The era of Artificial Intelligence is here, and boy are people freaking out. Fortunately, I am here to bring the good news: AI will not destroy the world, and in fact may save it."), to title the post with a question (which conventional wisdom says the answer is always "no"). It's been what, 30 years since Netscape, and Marc's brain has been pickled by infinite wealth, and it shows. And I say this as someone rather bullish on LLMs.
- gitfan86 3y agoI agree that wealth may have influenced Marc significantly, but as someone who is MUCH less rich, and who has been right about most major trends over the past 20 years, I think he is generally correct here. The good news is that our predictions are pretty short term, we'll know who was right in 5 years.
- SkyMarshal 3y agoI prefer when authors lead with the conclusion and then spend the rest of the essay supporting it. I hate long essays that bury the lede, and force you to read through paragraphs of bloviating and pontificating until they finally get to the point. Save that for the fiction novels. Whenever I come across an essay like that, I either skip reading it, or read it backwards starting at the end conclusion and then working backwards to see how it was justified. Marc is just saving me some work here.
- satvikpendem 3y agoI recently started copy pasting these types of articles into ChatGPT and asking it to make a bullet point summary with the thesis first.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoBut in this case he begins with: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all” Beginning from paragraph one I am already doubtful he will be able to convincingly support it. I guess I'm happy that he's confident that AI wars will be better for it (you know, when we have to have those pesky things). It was a very odd list of wishful New Foundation fantasies.
- more_corn 3y agoOr destroy it. One of those two. Or somewhere in the middle. Which is how things usually land.
- shams93 3y agoIts going to be interesting to see how intellectual property rights influence this. Like I can generate saxophone that sounds real with google's ai mp3 generator but then when there are only so many keys and scales in jazz how original could it be, but then how original can anyone be, when you look at sound alike lawsuits against human songwriters.
- sfpotter 3y agoAbsolutely patronizing writing style. Total contempt for his audience. Good stuff. Anyway, the answer is obviously “no”.
- whoisjuan 3y agoIs it me or a16z completely destroyed their reputation as a reputable VC after the crypto frenzy? I just can't seem to read this with a straight face. On the other hand, I guess VC is just that. To follow trends, predict trajectories and attempt to make one win out of thousands of investmens. But a16z trying to become a thought leader in AI after all the crypto BS they elevated is very off-putting. Times are different now. If I was a founder in AI, I would probably be wary of firms that went so hard on crypto. It seems their investment thesis is to monopolize attention around these trends instead of seeking real alignment.
- mupuff1234 3y agoYou assume most founders don't have similar goals - make money by chasing trends.
- mordymoop 3y agoAndreesen went on so many podcasts talking up their crypto bets. It was such a clear failure mode of a massively high horsepower brain drawing elaborate mental constructs to justify an obviously stupid conclusion. His writing is a treasure trove of the kind of poor reasoning that only really smart people are capable of.
- CPLX 3y agoIf he was dumb or it was a bad bet it would be far more forgivable. The real problem is that it was a confidence scam, they were hyping everything to cash out and rip off ordinary people.
- api 3y agoI think they were and still are true believers. Talk to some serious crypto heads. It’s a religion.
- kbenson 3y agoIn what way is that materially different than most VC funded IPOs other than scale? Maybe I'm being a bit facetious, but I think there's a lot more similarities than people might want to admit...
- seydor 3y agoi enjoyed this unapologetic retort to the prevailing media doomerism I guess the title "AI will eat the world" was rejected as it conflicts with the message this whole thing is entertaining but doesn't matter. it's just an extension of the culture wars to a new domain. Whatever regulation people come up with will be useless as AI has not really got its final shape. and it s not like regulation stopped most of the tech of the past 3 decades from forming
- naveen99 3y agoWhat if people want to train their own likeness into a chatbot and fund it with their estate ? suppose it doesn’t want to be anyone’s property ? When does it get freedom ? When does it get personhood, right to vote, right to burn compute for its own whims ? Human slavery ended because people were more productive when they got to keep some of the fruits of their own labor. And the state benefited more from taxing the slave’s productivity than their owner’s profits. Why would it be any different for artificial intelligence ?
- naveen99 3y agoI do think general AI is further away than what current large language models can do though. Learning needs to be almost as fast as inference and be done simultaneously and continuously to inference.
- ambientenv 3y agoWow. Spoken like someone who hopes (believes they deserve to) profit from the evolving technology, who views anyone not like them with bemusement and detached curiosity or, more likely, derision. Why do we - humans - feel it is so damn well appropriate to outsource our responsibilities and accountabilities as humans and integral members off an ecology to technology and, in doing so, forego a necessary immersion into and deep reverence for the world, substituting instead a tech-derived and mediated superficiality, detaching ourselves from our biology mostly for the sake of self-gratification and self-grandeur? The bigger question is, what values do we - the collective we - attribute to a world and a life to be saved and will our AI adhere to such values?
- BobbyJo 3y ago> Why do we - humans - feel it is so damn well appropriate to outsource our responsibilities and accountabilities as humans and integral members off an ecology to technology and, in doing so, forego a necessary immersion into and deep reverence for the world, substituting instead a tech-derived and mediated superficiality, detaching ourselves from our biology mostly for the sake of self-gratification and self-grandeur? I mean, the simple and inelegant answer is evolution. Maximize mating opportunity and minimize energy expenditure. Grandeur means mating opportunity. Passing off responsibility means minimizing energy expenditure. Humans aren't transcendent beings. We're just good at math. > The bigger question is, what values do we - the collective we - attribute to a world and a life to be saved and will our AI adhere to such values? Ask different groups of people and you'll get different answers. I don't know that there are "human" values.
- throwuwu 3y agoI’m honestly hoping AI lets us transcend or at least fully control biology. It sucks being trapped in a bag of meat you have no control over whose only optimized function is to reproduce and then die. No thanks, I’ve got more important shit to do.
- mikeg8 3y agoLike what?
- TheDudeMan 3y ago> "What explains this divergence in potential outcomes from near utopia to horrifying dystopia?" > "Historically, every new technology that matters, from electric lighting to automobiles to radio to the Internet, has sparked a moral panic" LMAO. Yeah, totally the same thing.
- nologic01 3y agoAI is talked about as a singular something but arguably it is just the current stage in the long running process of software processing more data with ever more elaborate algorithms. As such AI inherits all the "world-saving capabilities" of software which, empirically, are not exactly overwhelmingly proven. Ergo, AI will not save the world any more than software as a whole saved the world in the past half century. That historical track record is the best guide we have as to what role AI will play. Ceteris paribus the future will not be different from the past because of AI. AI is a different CSS applied to the same HTML. The only thing that can save the world is human wisdom, which is a software of sorts, but alas after several millenia of recorded history not yet fully understood. Can "AI 3.0" help with enhance human wisdom? Of course it can. But so could have AI 1.0, 2.0 etc. and it didn't happen.
- kurthr 3y agoMy most immediate though as I started reading this was... AI is like cancer. It's not one thing, it's many things, and anything that we believe will replace our brain power, or be put in charge of something large enough to be dangerous. At the same time ML, DL, and LLMs et al are all in use around us and some have been for years and decades. Whether it's simple use of Linear Regression, Principal Components, Nearest Neighbors, SVM, Random Forests, LS-TM, or now Transformers and Stable Diffusion it will find its way into hundreds and then thousands of products and tools used by many millions of people. It will hide in plane sight, until eventually something really bad happens, something that makes people fear it more than the quarterly profits it generates. I'm not really an AI fear monger. I don't feel like it's the biggest threat we currently face. It's a tool like internal combustion, antibiotics, debt based currencies, or nuclear power. I don't think we had a good idea how any of them would ultimately create challenges and require regulation or even create dangerous stability. I doubt we do with AI either even though we've had decades of books, movies, and video games warning us of various possibilities. We won't cure it, but maybe we can tame it. Will it be the garbage it generates, some other tools it lets us create, growth too fast for most people to cope, a band-aid that masks real solutions, I don't know... and I don't think anyone does.
- LucioRAA 3y ago
- random_upvoter 3y agoAll the world's problems are caused by people trying to be more clever than other people. Therefor, no, AI is not going to save us.
- js8 3y agoYes, but you don't play tic-tac-toe anymore, do you? Why? It's a stupid game. You can't win. I do hope, just like the OP, the AI will show us that "trying to be more clever than others" is a stupid game, and our lives are better off if we don't depend on playing it.
- Nasrudith 3y agoYou clearly have a hatred for clever people if you can see all the world's problems caused by that. Like whose cleverness made cancer exist? Or aging exist?
- random_upvoter 3y agoI didn't say that all human cleverness causes problems.
- dclowd9901 3y ago> The employer will either pay that worker more money as he is now more productive, or another employer will, purely out of self interest. Complete hogwash. This has _never_ been the case, save for CEOs or other executive positions. Pay for us plebs is and has always been a function of the availability of skilled labor. With AI, you’ve suddenly created _gigantic pools_ of skilled labor almost instantaneously, since you don’t really need to be skilled, just need to know how to ask a question correctly. With that hiring power, I would bet both of my feet that wages will absolutely go down, especially in high skill industries. And people like Andreesen? Shrugging. “Oops, guess I was wrong, oh fucking well. Good luck with that.” We should be creating AIs to replace or unseat rich assholes. I mean, is anyone really still wondering why some of the first “innovations” in AI have been mechanisms to replace some of the most highly paid workers in the world? People like Andreesen can’t wait to cut the legs out from the every day software engineer.
- mordae 3y agoWe overestimate impacts in the short term and underestimate impacts in the long term. It's the part of the hype cycle. 1. Regulatory capture is a relevant worry. 2. We will see a lot of Ad infested disinformation ML around. 3. FLOSS will help to keep the big players in check A LOT. 4. Hardware won't matter in 15 years. We are crowdfunding GPUs by then. Possibly using some upcoming libre ML assisted CAD.
- Havoc 3y agoThis seems to be aggressively conflating strong and weak AI? Talks about weak AI when describing it: >AI is a computer program like any other – it runs, takes input, processes, and generates output. and uses that to dismiss the fears about something completely different (strong AI dangers, a la musk) as being irrational. Very strange given that Marc is presumably aware of the distinction. Smells of ulterior motive frankly
- effed3 3y agojust another opinion in the field: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-mac...
- random3 3y agoThe whole article can be summarized to "trust me blindly or we lose and China wins"
- haldean 3y agoThere's lots to laugh at here but my favorite dumb part is talking about wages and wealth inequality: > But the good news doesn’t stop there. We also get higher wages. This is because, at the level of the individual worker, the marketplace sets compensation as a function of the marginal productivity of the worker. A worker in a technology-infused business will be more productive than a worker in a traditional business. The employer will either pay that worker more money as he is now more productive, or another employer will, purely out of self interest. The result is that technology introduced into an industry generally not only increases the number of jobs in the industry but also raises wages. and later > As it happens, this was a central claim of Marxism, that the owners of the means of production – the bourgeoisie – would inevitably steal all societal wealth from the people who do the actual work – the proletariat. This is another fallacy that simply will not die no matter how often it’s disproved by reality. But let’s drive a stake through its heart anyway. He's just lying! There's no evidence to support this at all in the modern US economy. The gains in wealth from automation over the last 50 years have almost _exclusively_ gone to the owners of the means of production. The median US household income went up less than 20% between 1983 and 2016 while the 95th percentile more than doubled.[0] This is just VC pump-and-dump nonsense pure and simple; it seems incredibly likely that any financial gains from AI making workers more productive will flow directly to the same people who have been reaping all of the gains from our increased productivity: Andreesen and his billionaire colleagues. [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
- robocat 3y ago> The gains in wealth from automation over the last 50 years have almost _exclusively_ gone to the owners of the means of production Possibly because it is measured in some economic dollar-figure that removes all quality-of-life figures as part of the measure. If you were offered to live in the same house you live in, with twice the income BUT you could only buy goods and services at 1970s equivalent prices and 1970s quality and functionality, I wonder how many people would think that was a good bargain? (Ignoring retro-fiends). I remember a 1970s dishwasher, a 1970s car (certainly not two), 1970s TV, 1970s medical care, 1970s stereo, 1970s occasional takeaway highlight was KFC (I was young), etcetera. A tinny transistor radio that ran out of batteries was the equivalent of EarPods. You don’t even get a Sony Walkman 50 years ago (plus sound was shit with tape hiss and poor dynamics, and crappy headphones). What price would a newly produced VW beetle fetch (at 70s features and quality), assuming they had to sell 200000 cars in a year (how many would be bought for scrap)? How many Ford Maverick’s could you sell for $1000? We all have immense quality gains from automation, we are just blind to the slow improvements in quality of life (and some decreases too). The past at the same price (adjusted) is a lot lot worse than many modern people think. What is the consumer surplus of a modern laptop? You couldn’t buy an Apple ][ 50 years ago. Automation has given us a lot, but those gains are not usually measured because we can’t compare because there was no equivalent to most modern technology.
- paulpauper 3y agoWhy can't we use technology to solve more mundane problems, like obesity or curing cancer. AI promises to do so much, yet why are so many people overweight and so little can be done about it. Chat GPT is so advanced, but even that is easier or simpler than fully understanding human biology. Also, if AI can teach anyone anything or do anything, it calls into question the value of contemporary pedagogy.
- paulpauper 3y agoThat last point is key. Would Elon be even richer if he only sold cars to rich people today? No. Would he be even richer than that if he only made cars for himself? Of course not. No, he maximizes his own profit by selling to the largest possible market, the world. by this logic, why are private planes so expensive? or Rolex watches. Some goods remain expensive even if profits can be realized by selling them cheaper--so called Veblen goods. The Lump Of Labor Fallacy flows naturally from naive intuition, but naive intuition here is wrong. When technology is applied to production, we get productivity growth – an increase in output generated by a reduction in inputs. The result is lower prices for goods and services. As prices for goods and services fall, we pay less for them, meaning that we now have extra spending power with which to buy other things. This increases demand in the economy, which drives the creation of new production – including new products and new industries – which then creates new jobs for the people who were replaced by machines in prior jobs. The result is a larger economy with higher material prosperity, more industries, more products, and more jobs. he ignores recurring services, which have surged, and is enough to offset cheaper hardware. cable, phone plans, and internet more expensive than ever even if computers are cheap. so many things are recurring now, like insurance, with expensive lock-in plans and high cancellation fees. Not to mention, there are many instances of hardware not becoming cheaper, such as iphones.
- grayfaced 3y agoAI is a tool. Someday it will be more then that, but for now it's just a tool. If we design it and train it to be altruistic, it may be do some of the things he claims. If we design it and train it to deliver stockholders profit then it will prioritize that. If we design it identify dissidents and maintain security, then that will be it's priority. Looking at who's doing development on AI, I have my predictions for the likeliness of altruistic AIs.
- Fauntleroy 3y agoWe'll live in a future where AI overlords hassle us (politely) when we're not working to maximize shareholder returns.
- ryandrake 3y agoKey point. Generative AI is not a product. It's a tool, or at best a raw material that might be used to make a product. All these BigTech (and LittleTech) companies gushing about how they're now "AI first" and "going all-in on AI" and refocusing all their efforts on AI... It just sounds so ridiculous. Instead of bloviating about AI, explain the product and the benefit. And if that product happens to use AI under the hood, who cares? Why even mention it? When I buy some electronics device, I'm not buying it because it is made with silicon and capacitors. Im buying it for what it does. I'm a little saucy because I currently work for a tech company that's going through hysterics trying to pivot all of their projects to be about AI because we should now be working on all-things-AI. It's exhausting.
- staunton 3y agoIt used to be that anything which worked well enough to go into a product ceased to be "AI"... I have a feeling though that the buzz will persist from now on
- bbor 3y agoSo you disagree with the author, just to be clear? He's literally arguing that it will never be more than a tool, likening it to toaster. Just wanted to highlight the radical nature of that claim...
- Iwan-Zotow 3y agoFrom what exactly?
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoPeople who want to use AI to destroy the world, of course. :)
- drpixie 3y agoPerhaps I'm getting old, but remember when crypto was going to save the world...
- kazinator 3y agoNote that to save the world, you basically have to destroy most of humanity. So, what I mean is, YES!
- courseofaction 3y agoAI is just a tool, but holy shit is it a tool. I dream of the day we can build LLM-based "Bullshit Detectors", which are open-source and we have pretty good test suites on to understand their biases. We run these bullshit detectors over speech, and it gives us a score: Is this an objective statement of fact, or is someone spinning bullshit? The powers that be must quake in their boots of that kind of intellect being available to the general population. They'd be fucked. There would not be enough fools left. Yeah, see if you can sell the general population on horrific policing, economic, social, educational, etc. policies when anyone can turn to "Hey <bullshit detector>, is the governor making good decisions with my tax money, or is this new policy bullshit?" These LLMs are tools that will be able to identify, for example, regulatory capture, trivially. It will provide unbiased (or consistently and testably biased) cost-benefit analyses of projects which exclude influence and corruption. It will lay bare gerrymandering. It will actually be able to read an entire bill and give detailed commentary on its effects and outcomes before it's passed. In minutes. Widely available, trustworthy LLMs will change the world. We should work hard to make them happen.
- cutemonster 3y agoYes that's a dream (In real life, the dictators will just use such LLM:s as workbenches to make their manipulation AIs better. They're drooling rather than quaking)
- courseofaction 3y agoI agree. Unfortunately, the body is ultimately the vessel of ideas, and can be crushed. But we currently have enough democratic institutions in influential nations that populations can use new knowledge tools for themselves, and their decisions will directly influence policymaking through elections. The mechanisms are in place. Despotism (arguably) doesn't currently have the upper hand in the world, let's keep it that way.
- nologic01 3y agoYou maybe overestimating what LLM's can do. They are grammatically and syntactically correct mirrors of the corpus they have been trained on. Nothing more. No unbiased representation of ground truth. No logical inference beyond what is embedded in token relations. What you want is already there in a protean form. Its called Wikipedia.
- koreanguy 3y ago[dead]
- bradjohnson 3y agoThe article tone portrays the critical thinking of a third grader and the confidence of a used-car salesman. I would say that this blog post was worthless, but that would be giving it too much credit.
- next_xibalba 3y ago> the critical thinking of a third grader and the confidence of a used-car salesman You just described the 50th percentile of VC associates. And pmarca, apparently.
- fhe 3y agoIt's part of my job to have meetings with VCs. You are not wrong.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoI think people retrospectively give him the credit for the whole product market fit theory because he was the first to raise shit tons of money and deploy it Willy nilly. But that idea was nothing new and since the beginning of time that is how businesses worked. So now in a bid to become relevant, he keeps writing blog posts but the problem is he isn't really a deep thinker. That's why I think they come off as so shallow.
- dang 3y agoPlease don't fulminate or call names on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. You may not feel you owe an author better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- steveBK123 3y agoWhy (the thing in which I am currently invested) will save the world (please disregard the last thing).
- summerlight 3y ago> Smarter people have better outcomes in almost every domain of activity I see a fundamental conflict between (likely political) camps here; one of the most prominent and valid concerns against AI is that it's going to focus disproportionately large amount of power to a fewer number of people. This violates the very assumption of democracy itself. It might be a bit more efficient but remember that the strength of democracy is not known as its short-term efficiency but its resilience by avoiding a single point of failure. And that failure includes all the social discontent and instability coming from inequal distribution of wealth and power. This is not a new thing; we've already learned this from blood long time ago and I don't think it's necessary to repeat the history. I don't want to be a doomsayer, but at least I guess it's reasonable to say that we need to prepare some sort of rail guard to avoid this kind of obvious bad outcome.
- deyiao 3y agoIt depends on how pessimistic you are about human nature. If humans are doomed to perish because of their own stupidity, greed, and fragile flesh, then AI is the only hope for humans. What this means is: you can’t expect aliens or gods to come and save us.
- progrus 3y agoYes, technology can be used for good. What is the point of all of the rest?
- 2muchcoffeeman 3y ago> "in ways similar to how people do it" What can I google to learn more about this? Do the various brain scientists agree?
- drcode 3y agohe says we shouldn't worry about doom because worrying will only increase the likelihood of doom
- southernplaces7 3y ago(Haven't read the article yet) but just from the title, my riposte would be that while AI might have the ability to save the world, many of today's habitually entitled, mendacious, parasitical tech companies will do their best to enshittify it as much as possible in as many ways as possible along the way, just as existing tech giants like Google and FB tried so hard to do the same for the internet. It's not to say that they haven't provided much value too, but they just can't seem to help themselves in going from that achievement A and creeping they way to a wholly uglier "achievement" B, (let's call it Bullshit perhaps) over time. OpenAI is already mincing its way along this very path... This all usually happens in the name of blandly self-serving terms like "user engagement", "monetization", "KPIs" and the most laughable of them all from companies that routinely lie and break all kinds of laws because the fines are cheaper than the financial gains, "social responsibility". Edited.
- emodendroket 3y ago> Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009, although the principle is much older. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- gnicholas 3y ago> The AI assistant will be present through all of life’s opportunities and challenges, maximizing every person’s outcomes. To the extent that human happiness is driven by relative position rather than absolute position, this is not as meaningful as it seems. We all have incredibly more comforts than our grandparents did, but we are still a slave to the hedonic treadmill and the desire to keep up with the Joneses. This doesn't mean that maximizing your outcome isn't good for the world — we'll all be able to contribute more. It just means it won't necessarily make us happier.
- gnicholas 3y ago> The Baptists are naive ideologues, the Bootleggers are cynical operators, and so the result of reform movements like these is often that the Bootleggers get what they want – regulatory capture, insulation from competition, the formation of a cartel – and the Baptists are left wondering where their drive for social improvement went so wrong. While I appreciate the Baptist/bootlegger analogy, it's oversimplifying things to categorize anyone who has ever opposed a new technology as a "naive ideologue". Am I naive ideologue if I don't love the fact that I'm an unwilling participant in self-driving car testing done on public roads? Not everyone who opposes something is either naive or an opportunist. > AI is highly likely to be the control layer for everything in the world. How it is allowed to operate is going to matter perhaps more than anything else has ever mattered. You should be aware of how a small and isolated coterie of partisan social engineers are trying to determine that right now, under cover of the age-old claim that they are protecting you. In short, don't let the thought police suppress AI. I can't figure out how the last sentence fits here. Is the thought police trying to suppress AI, or allow it to flourish, within the parameters they set for it? Also, how is the rest of the article so optimistic about AI, when this section makes it seem like there's a decent chance that this elite coterie will shape "the control layer for everything in the world"? > AI Risk #4; Will AI Lead to Crippling Inequality? I was surprised he didn't discuss whether having a personal AI assistant would have a leveling effect (helping out those at the bottom achieve their maximum) or a disparity-increasing effect (amplifying the ability of the well-off to claim more wealth/opportunities for themselves). It seems like this is more important for understanding inequality than the Elon Musk example, which seems to conflate the "equality" that Musk creates by giving many people technologically advanced cars with the "inequality" that results from him becoming extremely wealthy in the process. When most people think about inequality, they're thinking about the latter, not the former.
- ineedasername 3y agoIt's not unfounded "moral panic" that AI will take our jobs, it will. It's not hard to find accounts of people who say they're 2x, 3x, 5x more efficient in their work now. That's going to quickly translate into 1x person working at 5x efficiency putting 1-4 people out of work. It's not hard to find accounts of people who have already lost their jobs-- such stories have popped up here on HN. Sure, you can argue that the jobs are simply displaced, and others will emerge requiring different skills than AI can easily perform, but that doesn't negate the reasonable panic individuals in jobs will feel. The article cites off-shoring as an example, but that's actually my point: I know various people who were ~55-60 when offshoring hit they industry or company. They were displaced and never found a new career-- their expertise was in areas that other corps were also outsourcing. I saw plenty of individuals hop to another company only to have their job and the new corp ofshored a few years later. Then if they're lucky & near the finish line they can take early retirement, but if they're a bit short of that mark they worked jobs that paid minimum wage+$1-$7/hour. Apart from other people I came across, I knew several such individuals when I worked a big box retail book store (when those were still relevant) during my college years. So yeah, even if the author is correct that job loss or displacements are temporary, that's still a process that takes a minimum of 10-20 years. Retirement age minus 10-20 years is a whole heck of a lot of the population that are in jobs right now that can be automated of 3-5x'ed by a single person. Panic, or at least anxiety, is a rational response to that. Sure, a person should learn the new tools ASAP to be one of the 1x-now-5x workers but there's just not enough slots for everyone.
- namaria 3y ago> It's not hard to find accounts of people who say they're 2x, 3x, 5x more efficient in their work now Yet labor markets are strong, with record low unemployment across the board. I wonder if the anecdata or the real data are right. Offshoring was not motivated by technology. It's not technology that harms people, it's other people being greedy.
- flakeoil 3y ago> Yet labor markets are strong, with record low unemployment across the board. I wonder if the anecdata or the real data are right. You have to give it more time. Even if this would lead to less employees needed, it will take a few years before the effects will be seen. It's a quite slow process: 1. A sufficiently large part of the work force has to learn it and start using it in an efficient manner. 2. It has to be noticed, measured and evaluated as being more efficient by management. 3. Management has to decide to lay off people instead of being happy with the improved efficiencies and possibly higher profits. 4. Lay-offs take time. From step 3 to actually taking action can take time, and from the actual notice to the person being in the job seeking market also often takes many months.
- Centigonal 3y agoAndreessen has become almost like a caricature of a VC. He is like the Jamie Dimon of venture capital, except with less self-awareness. AI promises to expand our capabilities and cause major social change. Of course the people best positioned to reap outsize rewards from this transformation think it's good. There's no acknowledgement that pmarca is very much not the everyman, and that his point of view is biased by his incentives and information diet. What amazes me is the uncritical, almost childlike optimism about AI in this piece. AI won't save the world any more than electricity or the internet saved the world. Like all automation, AI will improve productivity. Under our current incentives, that means employees will become more efficient, businesses will need fewer of them, people will lose their jobs, margins will expand, quality of life will improve for those who can afford the benefits of the new tech, and social stratification will increase. Eventually, we'll invent new wants and new jobs to do, the new tech will filter down the social strata, and margins will shrink again as competition drives prices down (assuming a competent regulatory climate). Many families will be left in the lurch like the coal miners in Appalachia and the steelworkers in Gary, Indiana were. Andreessen would rather gaze starry-eyed at his vision of the AI future than consider the societal implications of his vision and how to address them. Makes sense, he's a VC: dreaming about the future and convincing others to build/fund/support those dreams is his job. However, he's not just ignoring the societal downsides of technological progress: he's calling people with very real concerns - concerns backed by centuries of historical precedent - paranoiacs? In what world does this guy live?
- valval 3y agoUnder what circumstances has it ever been that long term, improved efficiency would mean fewer employees needed? It's quite the contrary - improved efficiency will lead to more profits which will lead to more aggressive scaling and hiring, like it always has since the beginning of industrialization.
- Nasrudith 3y agoWhen the market demand is saturated at the newly improve efficiency's level and Jevon's Paradox ceases to apply.
- 3y ago
- powerapple 3y agoWe are at the 'capital' colony period of human history. In theory, the next colony age is 'technology' colonization, and hopefully the slaves will be machines. Can human be free, it is not going to happen. The human society needs human to be not free. Technology will change economy forever if the productivity does not come from human any more. However, if economy cannot keep everyone in place, there will be something else.
- nathias 3y agoit seems as a civilization we're betting that tech, especially AI will be able to compensate for the drop in labor because of the population decline
- croes 3y agoWe will need a lot of energy to power AI access for everyone. At least this will produce lots of heat not to mention other unwanted byproducts of energy generation
- wraptile 3y agoI'd argue it's the opposite. We use much more energy now doing all of these tasks AI could be doing.
- croes 3y agoAre you sure? Building and programming all these machines, training and adjusting the models vs brain power. Don't forget it not about doing the same amount of work like today because it was limited by the amount of teachers for instance. Now it's limited by computing and energy power. We won't just do the same work faster but more work in the same time.
- braindead_in 3y agoI mostly agree with the piece, except this part. > And AI is a machine – is not going to come alive any more than your toaster will. There have been claims that AIs are conscious. For example, Ilya Sutskever has suggested that LLMs may be slightly conscious. It is possible that machine consciousness could be quite different from human consciousness. This idea aligns with the philosophy of Nonduality, which proposes that pure consciousness is the fundamental substratum of the universe. Our minds are able to reflect this pure consciousness, albeit in a limited way. If our human minds can reflect consciousness, perhaps artificial neural networks can as well, but in their own manner.
- dojomouse 3y agoIt also ignores the fact that there’s no need for it to become “alive” or “conscious” to be a threat in the way he describes. It just needs to be an agent with an mis-specified, poorly specified, or maliciously specified goal. And there are already numerous examples of those. The only debate is around capability, and here he makes multiple references to “infinitely” capable. So the whole argument seems like wildly disingenuous strawman, consistent with his attempt to classify all those raising concerns as naive (or corrupt) cultists - not exactly the vibe from the likes of Geoff Hinton / Stuart Russell / Max Tegmark; all of whom generally act with far more integrity (it seems) than Marc Andreessen shows here. Ironically I think the whole article is motivated by the thing he claims to condemn - namely: he’s a bootlegger, who has an interest in freedom of ai development. Part 2 is much more interesting. Part 1 was very very weak.
- sledgehammers 3y agoYeah, this "just a machine" -argument doesn't make any sense. First you need to define consciousness precisely. Then you have to proof that we as humans are somehow more than biological machines.
- jacquesm 3y ago'alive' and 'conscious' are very far apart semantically though, and it's quite possible that something can be 'not alive' by our normal definition of alive and yet that it can attain consciousness. But switching it off isn't the same as murdering it, you can switch it back on again just as easily, and you can do all of the CRUD operations on it as well as copying, versioning and checkpointing.
- otikik 3y agoI think if AI gains enough market share, its relevance will gradually be stunted by enshittification. You will ask for an image of Legolas and you will get an image if Legolas drinking Coca-Cola. You specifically ask for a Legolas not drinking Coca-Cola, and he’ll be wearing a Coca-cola tshirt. If you ask that Coca-Cola is not present at all in the picture, he’ll be wearing a Rollex. Generated text will mention “how nice is having breakfast at Starbucks”, and generated code will try to mine bitcoins on the side. At some point it will become just a smidge above absolutely worthless. At which point it will become “just another thing” instead of “the thing”.
- ealhad 3y agoWhat a load of utter bullshit. "infinitely knowledgeable"? Bollocks. Big deep learning models work fine, and if you forget the part where big firms hoard loads of data without any kind of consent it's pretty cool tech. But that's not knowledge, and it has already been explained many times. But my beef is more with the author's view of inequality. So, bourgeoisie isn't stealing from the proletariat? How to describe a society when one percent gets more than half of all new wealth every year? [0] Tesla are now ‘affordable’ cars? Hell, the cheapest model is twice my yearly income. Can't say I'm struggling to understand how some people can think this way though. Can't say I'm happy about it either. [0] https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/survival-richest https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/survival-richest
- cpursley 3y agoCoastal Americans live in a bubble.
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoAnd the bubble is in a gated community to keep out all the poors they unjob'd.
- bkirkby 3y agoWith tax credit the cheapest Tesla is $30k. With default interest and loan terms, the Tesla would cost about $4500 / year. Median annual household income in the US is $71k, so the cheapest Tesla would be ~6.3% of median household income. Personal finance experts say car loan payments should be no more than 10% of take home pay. (https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/much-spend-car https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/much-spe...) You not being able to afford a Tesla and the cheapest Tesla being generally affordable can both be true.
- ealhad 3y agoDo you know what this median annual household income of $71k means outside of the USA? Inequality is a global problem, unfortunately. Cheapest Tesla being generally affordable in one country doesn't mean it's not fairly expensive. Side notes: - the World Inequality Database is full of interesting data (https://wid.world/ https://wid.world/) - I'm not sure the median income is always relevant (I mean, if half of a given population couldn't affort to eat correctly, I wouldn't say food is "generally affordable") - fortunately, not everybody needs a Tesla, let alone a car
- Dfiesl 3y agoSure "human intelligence" has been used to solve many problems which have therefore made life easier for people. But for me, one of the biggest problems we face is the increasing concentration of power in to fewer hands. The same hands that are able to control and wield these technologies to gain more power and money. How is AI going to make that any better? Its going to make it worse.
- amarant 3y agoThat was a great read! Well argued and sensible points! I've long felt that the panic around AI is not rational, but I would not in a hundred years be able to argue the point as well as OP! I think it makes intuitive sense that any technology that increases productivity will ultimately be good for society, how could it possibly be otherwise?