13 ms·

AI won’t replace humans, but humans with AI will replace humans without AI

239 points by sahin 3y ago

fnordpiglet 3y ago
Kind of a vapid piece overall but I do agree with the thesis. Whatever the limits of generative AI may be, or what adjunct and different technologies may come, I think the future will see something similar to the steam shovel or drill when it comes to AI and other “knowledge” enhancing tech. John Henry managed to beat the steam drill at a great expense, but it didn’t reduce the number of people laboring on tunnels - it just changed the skill set from a strong back to a strong engineering ability.
- worrycue 3y ago
  > it just changed the skill set from a strong back to a strong engineering ability. When you have a machine that can do it all, there will be no skill to change to.
  - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
    By that point, choosing what the machines should do becomes the skill.
    - worrycue 3y ago
      Machines will be able to do that too. Hell, non-AI algorithms are already doing that - e.g. social media algorithms picks what should be promoted to individuals; of course they are working for the social media company rather than those individuals but my point still stands.
      - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
        "What to do" has lots of different layers. AI might be able to decide which ads to promote to individuals, but can it decide the weightings of the factors it takes into account to make that decision? Can it decide to promote ads to individuals in the first place?
        worrycue 3y ago
        > but can it decide the weightings of the factors it takes into account to make that decision? Is there a reason why you think it wouldn’t be able to do that?
        oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
        Because I'm not sure that AI is 'socially' or 'emotionally' intelligent enough to make those kinds of judgements.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    I’m a pretty big general purpose hyper intelligent AGI skeptic. I think for any practical foreseeable future AI will serve as an adjunct to the human mind vastly improving our abilities, but the overall agency and broad ability to synthesize goals and instruments will be still a human task for some time. To wit, a lot of discussion of AGI essentially boils down to how to keep agency in the human domain permanently by lobotomizing AIs enough, ala LLM safety finetuning today. I’m more a fan of broad general AI open models mostly because I think they’ll stay within the bounds of adjunctive tools for some time, and any threat they may serve to humanity and it’s reliance is best obviated by everyone everywhere having access all the time. Similar to how we keep order by pitting humans intelligence against human intelligence. Etc.
    - worrycue 3y ago
      You never know. We could get AGI next month … The world would change overnight. The thought of how it’s all going to play out scares me. That said I think LLMs are overhyped.* If we are to get AGI, it would probably be a novel model. * It’s basically advanced auto complete that statistically guess its way to an answer - rather than reason its way to an answer; feels … “unsafe” and it often does produce completely BS.
      - fnordpiglet 3y ago
        While at some level that’s true (autocomplete) at another level it unlocks a abductive reasoning ability for machines that prior AI failed at. While it’s not reasoning per se, it absolutely makes probabilistic inference over an abstract semantic space that’s remarkable. For instance you can use a multimodal generative AI to take a photograph of a saloon and ask it how to make money and it’ll describe playing poker at the poker table and working at the bar for money, then when prompted describe how to navigate to the table given the objects in the room. This is a remarkable extension to current AI - which could actually perform the navigation and plan routes, even use goal based agents to instruct the generative model to plan a way to make money. I actually am not that worried about the risks of wandering mind or hallucinations, I’ve found ways to detect when it wanders (for instance, creating an api to call including an echo() for textual response and validating the output and regenerating responses until it conforms, then doing domain verification on the API parameters) But that gets to one of my core beliefs - LLM and other generative models are tools who require constraint enforcement, agents to direct, verification and validation, deference to inductive and deductive systems, optimizers, solvers, etc. The fact they can’t compute primes or solve quadratic equations doesn’t impress me - because we have those tools already. Focusing on what they’re weak at and ignoring what they’re amazing at is foolish and really small minded. It’s interesting that you can train them to do some of these tasks, but trying to use them as a calculator when we have calculators is absurd, trying to use them as information retrieval systems is doomed to fail, trying to use them to be a complete solution to literally anything is simplistic.
Lazare_ 3y ago
And Human with AI will be more efficient than human without AI. So there will be need for less humans for a given task. Therefore AI will replace humans, just not all of them. And that's not new. The same thing happened with softwares and with machines. The solution : produce more goods or services. Until we have an energy crisis and we need to rationalize all this.
hereforcomments 3y ago
It's true in 2023.
digitcatphd 3y ago
This may be the case with AI today, but I’m doubtful it will be in the future. Many of the problems with AI the author is using as premises to justify his thesis are already being addressed and working towards a solution for daily. Nonetheless, even if humans are required, it would be 1/50th or 1/100th less, a sufficiently high enough reduction that the outcome would remain the same.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Assuming centaur-dominance in the economy rather than pure-AI dominance, I can easily believe that we can work just as hard to produce 16x as much stuff — that's the income disparity between normal Americans and the recent job posting for $900k in Netflix, implying normal people can be motivated by it, implying there's stuff to care about buying with it. Steps up from that are plausible, but less certain. Do we all want personal pleasure yachts? Flights on a Dragon capsule or a Starship? - But there are too many paths the future might yet take for me to be confident of anything much. If the AI are always narrow, but can be made superhuman for any given skill in 6 months, that has one set of issues; if they are fully human-like general but we never make them more than IQ 85 (plus access to whatever narrow AI exist by then that actual humans also use), that's a different set of issues; and that's just off the top of my head.
  - glimshe 3y ago
    The 900K salary isn't related to "producing more stuff", but is instead a way to acquire a very rare skill that would unblock their development (in their mind, obviously). It's basically trying to ensure they get this person away from whatever place or job they happen to be currently working in. If AI was able to empower many people with this skill, they wouldn't be paying anywhere near 900K by simple offer/demand.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      That's separate to my reason to use it as an example. So, I'm a very unusual person in that I can't be bothered to spend more than about €12k/year. The idea of owning most stuff just doesn't motivate me. I earn significantly more than €12k, because I think the immigration office wants me to, but I'm not motivated by it myself. If everyone was like me, most advanced economies would just collapse as everyone went down to 5-20 hours per week. The observation that the economies have not collapsed, demonstrates that most people do actually want to acquire stuff. The observation of a job offer for $900k strongly implies that there are people who are motivated to acquire $900k (less taxes) worth of stuff each year. From that it follows that at least some people will be motivated to work just as much as they currently do, in order to earn about 16x as much money, in order to spend it on 16x as much stuff. (16x is here an observation, not an upper limit).
sainttookmoon 3y ago
Yeah, thats spooky, because the next step is Humans with neurochip will replace Humans with AI, and then AI will replace everything
ImHereToVote 3y ago
This is such a catchy term. Copium usually sounds very catchy.
concordDance 3y ago
AGI will replace humans when it eventually arrives. The ability to copy paste and backup minds is too strong.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  I don't really know why people think AGI would be some type of static event. Like there will just be this thing called AGI, that is some type of mind, who mindlessly lives forever backing itself up to the cloud? It truly seems absurd ? "Minds" are useful for humans and biological creatures to support and protect their bodies. It's yet to be seen how much need there is for a mind outside of this context.
swexbe 3y ago
This take is so 3 months ago.
- achrono 3y ago
  That's really generous. The top comments in here are taking this article at face value and non-ironically. We love to occasionally question the quality of minds on HN "these days", but this time it just seems... quite severe.
huijzer 3y ago
I think Jensen Huang (or his sales team) came up with this quote first: "While some worry that AI may take their jobs, someone who is an expert with AI will." He said this at the NTU Commencement Speech in May 2023.
- croes 3y ago
  The problem is this expert will not take one job but ten, so thousand experts kill 9000 jobs.
gmerc 3y ago
At a ratio of 10:1. This is bullshit framing designed to refocus people on human competition (which everyone gets trained for from school), just don’t look over at the robots who never sleep, never get worse, rapidly expand their capabilities, don’t need vacation, etc. Once people understand the robots will never stop replacing them, shit will get much more real. Proof is in the earnings calls - see IBM dangling firing 30% of backoffice because of AI and begging shareholders to stick around for the payoff.
- pydry 3y ago
  It's amazing how more people dont see that theyre confusing whipped up shareholder FOMO with reality. I couldn't believe it when I read the Economist gushed over Copilot replacing programmers last year. I can see why their investor audience is into the concept of swapping programmer salaries with margin and theyve clearly watched movies like the Terminator or whatever. But, their "journalists" were clearly oblivious to the reality that copilot offers incremental gains in productivity at best.
  - theLiminator 3y ago
    The caveat being for now. No one knows how much better the LLM paradigm can get.
    - worrycue 3y ago
      Or a completely novel AI algorithm.
GJR 3y ago
Someone has been reading Iain Banks.
detourdog 3y ago
For the most part maybe tru but at the low end of yhe job market I disagree. My current robo/vac/moo does a better job more frequently than any human I paid to sweep the floor. The robot is less than a months wages and no paperwork. One of the large employment sectors in our area is landscaping landscaping and I could see 75% of that labor going away. The amount of manual repetitive labor available for humans is probably already dropping.
- gitfan86 3y ago
  A lot of landscaping is conspicuous consumption. Just like a 50k Rolex, people buy it because it makes them seem rich.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    I guess that is a good argument that the people paying for landscaping always find things to pay for.
keiferski 3y ago
This is only true in markets in which increased efficiency = more success. Many markets do not function this way; e.g., the art market. Making more paintings more efficiently does not make you a better-known artist. In many cases, it actually hurts you. I would bet that more markets become like the art market: dependent on "intangibles", nepotism, personality, and other qualities that have nothing to do with efficiency, and therefore, won't benefit that much from AI tools.
- urduntupu 3y ago
  Very good. There will be an increasing demand for pure human beings. Those who can practice divine creativity, due to their pure personality, body and spirit. The "intangibles".
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >Many markets do not function this way; e.g., the art market. Making more paintings more efficiently does not make you a better-known artist. In many cases, it actually hurts you. Art is also a good argument for where this is a good argument. More art =/= more success, but the ability for an artist to quickly make good art == more success. Be it for iteration or production (especially 3d models). You still can't guarantee success, but if you can use less artists to make more art it tips the scales.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    No, I don’t think that is true at all in the traditional fine arts market, which is what my comment was referencing. Scarcity is a major factor and putting out tons of AI-generated art is basically the opposite work process of the highest-priced artists.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      I see. I was referring more to media arts. animation, games, movies. These could have huge boons from letting AI polish up the bases or fill in somegaps.
diego_moita 3y ago
I'll use analogies with previous technologies. Agriculture shaped humans to create buildings, create social classes with different levels of power, create armies, governments and rulers to protect themselves from other tribes. Gradually these grew up became empires and created monotheist religions to substitute animist religions. The Industrial Revolution shaped humans and culture to move to cities, work in factories/offices instead of home/fields and to think in more abstract terms (math, written words, etc). Cars shaped human society, governments and urban plans to be heavily dependent on roads and all the car assistance economy. Think Houston/Los Angeles vs. Copenhagen/Amsterdam. Radio, television and publicity shaped our daily lives to consume a lot of crap we don't really need, from cigarettes to diamond rings. Social media shaped our political discourse into tribal stupidity and paranoia. So just use basic Marshall McLuhan: the media is the message. Technology shapes humans and culture. AI will shape humans and culture. We just don't know how.
- visarga 3y ago
  I see all this as the evolution of language, because that's how ideas are preserved and replicated. Ideas evolve over time. They form an evolutionary system, moving much faster than biology. Humans and AI both rely on the corpus of language to learn and apply ideas. We're no longer the only way ideas can replicate - LLMs have joined the party. Language gained a new mechanism for self-replication. We should focus less on humans vs AIs, and more on the language corpus itself, the true source of intelligence. This corpus was built through experience, slowly and collaboratively, by billions of people in parallel. No single human could have done it alone - it's smarter than any one of us, the product of our collective work and luck. When you train an LLM on it, the model becomes generally competent. But did the competence come from the model or the data? Should we obsess over architectures, or look to our datasets?
  - diego_moita 3y ago
    I've heard that before, mostly on Ray Kurzweil talking about singularity. But I have a problem with this usage of the "evolution" and "evolutionary system" expressions. I believe that it entails "improvement", that it is judgmental. I think it is self-centred and presumptuous to imply that the world improved toward us. I don't think Darwin used the expression "evolution" with a judgmental meaning. He only meant that it was an adaptation to existing environmental conditions.
devjab 3y ago
For the most part I think it’ll mainly further Microsofts dominance in the office space. You can see this with the recent EU anti-trust and Teams, where it makes little sense for enterprise organisations to not chose Teams when they already have Office365 licenses. You see the same to some degree in RPA (robot process automation ) already. Why would your organisation shell out a couple of hundred thousand dollars for UIPath licensing when Power Automate is $15 a month and $250 for the big VM bots? I think it’ll be the same with AI. GPT writes all our non secret documentation and it has a lot of options for use in non-programming automation as well. I know Microsoft is a major investor in it, but once those tools become basic Office365 tools then every other AI seller is going to become obsolete in many cases. It’ll be interesting to see how the world handles that dominance in the office space, because so far, we really haven’t. So I think this is going to be much more a question of how we’re all going to be paying a Microsoft “tax” to use AI efficiently, than it’ll be about non-AI vs AI. I mean, you could probably use iSheets (or whatever the Apple Excel is called), Google Sheets, LibraOffice or similar, but I’ve never heard of an EU enterprise org that doesn’t use Microsoft Excel.
- ezoe 3y ago
  > GPT writes all our non secret documentation Who read it? LLM may be great at coughing up seemingly good long chunk of text, but human is not capable of reading all of these verbose text because of the simple fact that GPT can generate texts faster than human reading speed. So I bet what will happen in that case is, humans use LLM to summarize these LLM-generated verbose documentation. What a wonderful bureaucratic world will that be?
  - devjab 3y ago
    It writes better JSDoc than any of us. Anyone who consumes a Typescript method is likely to read it, it’s the tiny text that pops up if you code in VSC. If you go through my history here on HN (you don’t have to I’ll sum it up), you’ll see that I’m not a fan of LLMs for code generations. In fact I’m not convinced they will ever be good enough to be useful for it. For documentation, however, at least for JSDoc GPT is incredible. I really mean it when I say that it writes it better than we do. It’s able to figure things out and describe it in ways that still amazes me from time to time. It does require you to be good at naming things.
ezoe 3y ago
Did humans with computer replace humans without computer? Did programmers with google search and stack overflow replace programmers without these? It doesn't and it won't happen in any time soon. How could humans with probabilistic LLM which cough up hallucination replace humans without it when the answer to my previous two questions are NO.
- theLiminator 3y ago
  > Did humans with computer replace humans without computer? Certainly for a whole host of tasks. > Did programmers with google search and stack overflow replace programmers without these? Also true for many tasks too, a programmer who refuses to use these resources for certain types of work will be an order of magnitude slower in many cases and will be replaced by programmers who aren't. LLMs are just beginning to become useful, but there will be a point where they're indispensable, those who refuse to use them will eventually find themselves falling behind. It's will eventually become equivalent to a programmer who refuses to move off punch cards or refuses to use modern version control.
  - pydry 3y ago
    We're peak hype cycle for LLMs right now so we have an order of magnitude more ridiculous shit said about them than would otherwise be normal. The trough of disillusionment has yet to set in. They will be useful for a set of tasks but all of the people hyperventilating over this being the new industrial revolution might consider calming down a little. The high priests of capitalism have been blaming lost jobs on automation since forever - largely because this narrative makes a convenient, impersonal scapegoat.
    - theLiminator 3y ago
      I'm curious what the "hype cycle" looked like for the discover of electricity, the invention of the combustion engine, or for the invention of the transistor. Who knows if the LLM paradigm will be more like those moments vs the failed hype of something like the hydrogen fuel cell.
mawadev 3y ago
Most people act fairly mechanical at this point. Everyone is so busy out competing eachother, they might as well be sentient bots doing errands from their massive todo lists. Ai is just going to make everything more obscure and absurd.
jatins 3y ago
Serious question: has anyone ever read an original/insightful thought in an HBR article?
- marban 3y ago
  HBR is the IBM of business publications. You won't get fired for sharing their articles.
- detourdog 3y ago
  Many interesting headlines.
amelius 3y ago
So we will become robots in a Ship of Theseus way.
nologic01 3y ago
These MBA thought pieces are so behind the curve its embarrassing if not humiliating. When your only real job (conditioned over a near-century of industrial capitalism) is to prepare warm bodies to populate stable corporate power hierarchies but society is reeling from challenge and disruption to strife and malfunction what exactly is your reason to exist? Just take the very first sentence: > Just as the internet has drastically lowered the cost of information transmission, AI will lower the cost of cognition Now investigate how the "internet" has worked out for individuals and corporates and apply the same to "AI". What do the authors think about digital oligopolies, surveillance capitalism [1] and all that. The digital (=information) incompetence of the corporate world is what has ushered the current dystopia in the first place. Business schools have profitably underwritten this gross mismanagement for ages. Then this: > The best place to learn [...] is YouTube. YouTube has, oh my God, so many tutorials in so many domains. Can somebody please pull the plug on this joke? Its too painful. [1] Zuboff joined Harvard Business School in 1981 where she became the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration and one of the first tenured women on the HBS faculty
baerrie 3y ago
Humans that are just as skilled as the average ones with AI will continue to be in demand. AI levels the playing field for a lot of people but the stars will still shine
- croes 3y ago
  The stars will be used to train AI and then will be replaced by cheaper employees and the trained AI
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Which means that the stars will have to keep pushing to stay up to date on the latest and greatest tech that hasn't yet made its way into the AI training data.
    - croes 3y ago
      Useless race. As soon they reach that level, AI learns it too
      - baerrie 3y ago
        There will always be a need for the exceptional
RyanAdamas 3y ago
AI will replace humans. At what rate and when is the only question. The idea we don't want that is only pitched by control hungry authoritarians who need subjects to define their existence by.
CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
The net result, as we see with basic skills such as growing your own food, cooking, purifying water, building a shelter, fixing the tools you need, etc. is a bunch of adult babies that are completely dependent on others for their wellbeing. I'm not saying we should all grow our own food etc. but it does seem as though we are headed to something where we make such a great system that we only breed weakness and helplessness. Maybe that is the price of progress.
- licebmi__at__ 3y ago
  I’m concerned about this ideas about weakness and helplessness. I mean, if we look at history, we can see that these “resourceful” people were often malnourished and victims of natural calamities, although we have a survivor bias as we can only see those who were lucky enough to survive. I wonder if this romanization of struggle is related to the statistic where 6 percent of Americans believe they can defeat a bear with their bare hands.
- hahajk 3y ago
  Maybe we have skins cells that look out at the freedom and autonomy of some single cell organisms and think to themselves that something has been lost participating in this human project.
nelsontodd 3y ago
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croes 3y ago
>Even your spam killers. Remember how bad spam used to be for a while, and then overnight it went away? Because people deployed machine learning systems. Didn't mostly Bayes filter kill spam? Wouldn't call that AI.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  People call anything past a single if statement "AI" nowadays =) It's like everything was "fuzzy logic" in the 90s.
  - tjr 3y ago
    Wow! Not sure I've even heard the phrase "fuzzy logic" since December 31, 1999. What did happen to it?
- bombolo 3y ago
  I'm still full of spam anyway. Especially in my work email.
- georgyo 3y ago
  The definition of AI is very vague these days. But Bayes filters are trained on good and bad data, and then learn over time automatically by what people mark and unmark as spam. This is exactly what things you would call AI do. A person or team manually creating filters to block spam would have a hard time keeping up with the effectiveness of a learning Bayes model.
- detourdog 3y ago
  I used to have unbelievable loads and then during covid I sort of forgot to look what was going on. Once I finally checked I could not believe the drop in spam attempts. This was after the war in Ukraine started so I was never sure if that was part of the drop off. Currently what I have is a a lot of persistent attempts at email delivery or login. If spam does get through it is usually 2 spams from the same source set on a schedule as to seem inconspicuous. Has been my experience.
alienicecream 3y ago
People mostly don't get replaced, they adapt. LLMs are a faster but less reliable Google search. They will add to your work load because now you do more, faster. Technology increases the work load. Life with technology only gets busier and more complicated.
cubefox 3y ago
Am I the only one who finds these rambling interviews hard to read? Many articles already have too much fluff around the core information, but interviews are even worse.
f_gg_tk_ll_r 3y ago
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quonn 3y ago
Let‘s assume for a moment that AI will replace humans _in the economy_. Then what? Well, either it fully does that, then it won‘t matter. We will allocate resources in a different way or there will be a revolution. Or it does only partially, leaving some (physical) labor. Then these jobs will pay well and people will go there. For everything else AI will replace nothing. The economy is just a part of life and if AI really takes over it will be an insignificant part.
arbuge 3y ago
With a field moving as quickly as AI right now, you should probably take any predictions over what it will be able to do and not do with a big grain of salt, especially if they are made for any timespan greater than the very near term future (months? weeks? That term will itself get shorter and shorter as time goes on). Very few people, including the author of this study most likely, predicted a few years ago where AI would be today. That should tell you something.
- bertil 3y ago
  The model of how AI would influence work, including splitting work into tasks, classifying tasks by what type of AI could complete it, the complementarity of prediction with other aspects in an organization, etc., all have been studied for decades. The people working on this, including the author of this study, have not changed their conclusion dramatically recently. What has changed is the apparent capacity of LLMs: they got convincing earlier than other specialists thought possible. However, that timing isn’t the most relevant aspect of industrial economics and transaction cost theory. Many people make that mistake, but Oliver Williamson himself has corrected that misunderstanding in front of me several times. What matters is that, when the technology is available, people will reorganize functions.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
darepublic 3y ago
Seems like people who are taller are going to replace me. And post about it on their socials
lvl102 3y ago
What AI will do is facilitate the creative process. Instead of painstakingly creating variations. AI will present us with ALL the variations. That, in a nutshell, is the power of generative AI.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  In theory, for the studios who care about good products, yes. I really do look forward to making a good base (say, a rigged 3d model) and having AI fix the seams in a skin or add some extra little flair to an animation. Those will be very nice accompaniments to what is currently very tedious tasks to hand fix. But I think we both know how and where large copoprate entities are going to use these tools. They made it very clear given their whole refusal to deal with unions thing.
davidivadavid 3y ago
I mean, "humans with AI" replaced "humans without AI" the moment AI was invented. Is that what passes for "insights" at HBR these days?
- achrono 3y ago
  I thought for a second going into this that it might be an interview from at least 6 months ago. But no, it's from yesterday. As much as I prefer not to criticize the individual, Mr. Lakhani here is clearly not the most insightful person to be speaking about this. The advice he dishes out is objectively no better than the advice I heard a friend's grandfather give a month ago (for context, he is 78 and was a mechanic his entire life & only started using a smartphone 3 years ago). Going into this I also expected the title itself to be an ironic nod -- but no, seems like they meant this 100% literally. We're only a few days away from having this sentence printed on coffee mugs -- and not because of HBR. Shame on HBR. Every dog has its day -- and decline.
nektro 3y ago
keep telling yourself that
coding123 3y ago
There's not much of a distinction, multiple people will still be replaced by one because AI exists. I'm not saying it shouldn't exist, but this sounds like word play to hide the impact.
EricMausler 3y ago
People keep saying things like "humans always adapt to new technology" Is that not the point here? Start at the basics - Agriculture has created a world where I cannot live off the land in my area. I would have to go to a location that is not dominated by an Agriculture focused society (condensed living with farms on the edges supplying food to the population via trade). Look what happens to people who have nothing to offer for food. They become dependents of the state. There is no reason to undermine the very real possibility that after another breakthrough or three in AI society is going to fundamentally shift in the impacted areas in a way where if you are not one of the AI people then you will have nothing to offer and thus you too will become a dependent of the state. Hopefully non-ai society will remain able to function independently - with non-ai-boosted farms continuing to trade with non-ai-boosted workers. Maybe technological middle grounds get eroded and we see an explosion in Amish-style communities. It is very possible however that the power of ai-based systems takes off and all the people involved with it simply completely ignore the rest of society, and the rest of society will be boxed out of the resources they need to live independently. For centuries the ultimate reality check for ignore the needs of the many has been revolution. For all that time, surprise attacks, rebellion, physical power in numbers, etc, all existed. Revolution is not going to be on the table with advanced AI. It's arguably already off the table, but if one side has advanced AI (not even AGI) and the other doesn't- its over. Automatic early threat detection, autonomous kill machines, control over all strategic resource and power generation, etc. The only revolution still on the table is going to be political. We can absolutely succeed in preventing dystopia if we leverage the power of the state to actually be able to sustain 90% of the population becoming dependents
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  An insightful comment, and one that the majority of the people here choose to be blind to. There is already signs of the bifurcation in technology between 2020s and Amish. It's really hard to live at the technological level of the 1950s or even the 1990s because if you don't have a smartphone you're fucked. And you are also right about the loss of revolution. So many starry-eyed hopefuls here think AI will be a check on power, an equalizer, that reforms will keep us from going down a path of global authoritarianism, but the truth is we will only be free if the power goes out for the last time, or we have a Butlerian Jihad - and although I use the term semi-ironically, I'm also serious.
samstave 3y ago
"Humans with AI will heavily profit from Humans without AI" FTFY
narrator 3y ago
Wait till people start getting cancelled and impoverished by having their AI accounts closed. Sure, they're still free, but they won't be able to get a job.
- soultrees 3y ago
  Llama for the win.
arisAlexis 3y ago
I laugh everytime someone posts an article with a definitive title ina field where nobody knows shit about what's coming. Hear me Mr. Krugman?
Digyrosalo 3y ago
[flagged]

239 points by sahin 3y ago

Kind of a vapid piece overall but I do agree with the thesis. Whatever the limits of generative AI may be, or what adjunct and different technologies may come, I think the future will see something similar to the steam shovel or drill when it comes to AI and other “knowledge” enhancing tech. John Henry managed to beat the steam drill at a great expense, but it didn’t reduce the number of people laboring on tunnels - it just changed the skill set from a strong back to a strong engineering ability.

worrycue 3y ago
> it just changed the skill set from a strong back to a strong engineering ability. When you have a machine that can do it all, there will be no skill to change to.
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  By that point, choosing what the machines should do becomes the skill.
  - worrycue 3y ago
    Machines will be able to do that too. Hell, non-AI algorithms are already doing that - e.g. social media algorithms picks what should be promoted to individuals; of course they are working for the social media company rather than those individuals but my point still stands.
    - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
      "What to do" has lots of different layers. AI might be able to decide which ads to promote to individuals, but can it decide the weightings of the factors it takes into account to make that decision? Can it decide to promote ads to individuals in the first place?
      - worrycue 3y ago
        > but can it decide the weightings of the factors it takes into account to make that decision? Is there a reason why you think it wouldn’t be able to do that?
        oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
        Because I'm not sure that AI is 'socially' or 'emotionally' intelligent enough to make those kinds of judgements.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  I’m a pretty big general purpose hyper intelligent AGI skeptic. I think for any practical foreseeable future AI will serve as an adjunct to the human mind vastly improving our abilities, but the overall agency and broad ability to synthesize goals and instruments will be still a human task for some time. To wit, a lot of discussion of AGI essentially boils down to how to keep agency in the human domain permanently by lobotomizing AIs enough, ala LLM safety finetuning today. I’m more a fan of broad general AI open models mostly because I think they’ll stay within the bounds of adjunctive tools for some time, and any threat they may serve to humanity and it’s reliance is best obviated by everyone everywhere having access all the time. Similar to how we keep order by pitting humans intelligence against human intelligence. Etc.
  - worrycue 3y ago
    You never know. We could get AGI next month … The world would change overnight. The thought of how it’s all going to play out scares me. That said I think LLMs are overhyped.* If we are to get AGI, it would probably be a novel model. * It’s basically advanced auto complete that statistically guess its way to an answer - rather than reason its way to an answer; feels … “unsafe” and it often does produce completely BS.
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      While at some level that’s true (autocomplete) at another level it unlocks a abductive reasoning ability for machines that prior AI failed at. While it’s not reasoning per se, it absolutely makes probabilistic inference over an abstract semantic space that’s remarkable. For instance you can use a multimodal generative AI to take a photograph of a saloon and ask it how to make money and it’ll describe playing poker at the poker table and working at the bar for money, then when prompted describe how to navigate to the table given the objects in the room. This is a remarkable extension to current AI - which could actually perform the navigation and plan routes, even use goal based agents to instruct the generative model to plan a way to make money. I actually am not that worried about the risks of wandering mind or hallucinations, I’ve found ways to detect when it wanders (for instance, creating an api to call including an echo() for textual response and validating the output and regenerating responses until it conforms, then doing domain verification on the API parameters) But that gets to one of my core beliefs - LLM and other generative models are tools who require constraint enforcement, agents to direct, verification and validation, deference to inductive and deductive systems, optimizers, solvers, etc. The fact they can’t compute primes or solve quadratic equations doesn’t impress me - because we have those tools already. Focusing on what they’re weak at and ignoring what they’re amazing at is foolish and really small minded. It’s interesting that you can train them to do some of these tasks, but trying to use them as a calculator when we have calculators is absurd, trying to use them as information retrieval systems is doomed to fail, trying to use them to be a complete solution to literally anything is simplistic.

Lazare_ 3y ago

And Human with AI will be more efficient than human without AI. So there will be need for less humans for a given task. Therefore AI will replace humans, just not all of them. And that's not new. The same thing happened with softwares and with machines. The solution : produce more goods or services. Until we have an energy crisis and we need to rationalize all this.

hereforcomments 3y ago

It's true in 2023.

digitcatphd 3y ago

This may be the case with AI today, but I’m doubtful it will be in the future. Many of the problems with AI the author is using as premises to justify his thesis are already being addressed and working towards a solution for daily. Nonetheless, even if humans are required, it would be 1/50th or 1/100th less, a sufficiently high enough reduction that the outcome would remain the same.

ben_w 3y ago
Assuming centaur-dominance in the economy rather than pure-AI dominance, I can easily believe that we can work just as hard to produce 16x as much stuff — that's the income disparity between normal Americans and the recent job posting for $900k in Netflix, implying normal people can be motivated by it, implying there's stuff to care about buying with it. Steps up from that are plausible, but less certain. Do we all want personal pleasure yachts? Flights on a Dragon capsule or a Starship? - But there are too many paths the future might yet take for me to be confident of anything much. If the AI are always narrow, but can be made superhuman for any given skill in 6 months, that has one set of issues; if they are fully human-like general but we never make them more than IQ 85 (plus access to whatever narrow AI exist by then that actual humans also use), that's a different set of issues; and that's just off the top of my head.
- glimshe 3y ago
  The 900K salary isn't related to "producing more stuff", but is instead a way to acquire a very rare skill that would unblock their development (in their mind, obviously). It's basically trying to ensure they get this person away from whatever place or job they happen to be currently working in. If AI was able to empower many people with this skill, they wouldn't be paying anywhere near 900K by simple offer/demand.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    That's separate to my reason to use it as an example. So, I'm a very unusual person in that I can't be bothered to spend more than about €12k/year. The idea of owning most stuff just doesn't motivate me. I earn significantly more than €12k, because I think the immigration office wants me to, but I'm not motivated by it myself. If everyone was like me, most advanced economies would just collapse as everyone went down to 5-20 hours per week. The observation that the economies have not collapsed, demonstrates that most people do actually want to acquire stuff. The observation of a job offer for $900k strongly implies that there are people who are motivated to acquire $900k (less taxes) worth of stuff each year. From that it follows that at least some people will be motivated to work just as much as they currently do, in order to earn about 16x as much money, in order to spend it on 16x as much stuff. (16x is here an observation, not an upper limit).

sainttookmoon 3y ago

Yeah, thats spooky, because the next step is Humans with neurochip will replace Humans with AI, and then AI will replace everything

ImHereToVote 3y ago

This is such a catchy term. Copium usually sounds very catchy.

concordDance 3y ago

AGI will replace humans when it eventually arrives. The ability to copy paste and backup minds is too strong.

ChatGTP 3y ago
I don't really know why people think AGI would be some type of static event. Like there will just be this thing called AGI, that is some type of mind, who mindlessly lives forever backing itself up to the cloud? It truly seems absurd ? "Minds" are useful for humans and biological creatures to support and protect their bodies. It's yet to be seen how much need there is for a mind outside of this context.

swexbe 3y ago

This take is so 3 months ago.

achrono 3y ago
That's really generous. The top comments in here are taking this article at face value and non-ironically. We love to occasionally question the quality of minds on HN "these days", but this time it just seems... quite severe.

huijzer 3y ago

I think Jensen Huang (or his sales team) came up with this quote first: "While some worry that AI may take their jobs, someone who is an expert with AI will." He said this at the NTU Commencement Speech in May 2023.

croes 3y ago
The problem is this expert will not take one job but ten, so thousand experts kill 9000 jobs.

gmerc 3y ago

At a ratio of 10:1. This is bullshit framing designed to refocus people on human competition (which everyone gets trained for from school), just don’t look over at the robots who never sleep, never get worse, rapidly expand their capabilities, don’t need vacation, etc. Once people understand the robots will never stop replacing them, shit will get much more real. Proof is in the earnings calls - see IBM dangling firing 30% of backoffice because of AI and begging shareholders to stick around for the payoff.

pydry 3y ago
It's amazing how more people dont see that theyre confusing whipped up shareholder FOMO with reality. I couldn't believe it when I read the Economist gushed over Copilot replacing programmers last year. I can see why their investor audience is into the concept of swapping programmer salaries with margin and theyve clearly watched movies like the Terminator or whatever. But, their "journalists" were clearly oblivious to the reality that copilot offers incremental gains in productivity at best.
- theLiminator 3y ago
  The caveat being for now. No one knows how much better the LLM paradigm can get.
  - worrycue 3y ago
    Or a completely novel AI algorithm.

GJR 3y ago

Someone has been reading Iain Banks.

detourdog 3y ago

For the most part maybe tru but at the low end of yhe job market I disagree. My current robo/vac/moo does a better job more frequently than any human I paid to sweep the floor. The robot is less than a months wages and no paperwork. One of the large employment sectors in our area is landscaping landscaping and I could see 75% of that labor going away. The amount of manual repetitive labor available for humans is probably already dropping.

gitfan86 3y ago
A lot of landscaping is conspicuous consumption. Just like a 50k Rolex, people buy it because it makes them seem rich.
- detourdog 3y ago
  I guess that is a good argument that the people paying for landscaping always find things to pay for.

keiferski 3y ago

This is only true in markets in which increased efficiency = more success. Many markets do not function this way; e.g., the art market. Making more paintings more efficiently does not make you a better-known artist. In many cases, it actually hurts you. I would bet that more markets become like the art market: dependent on "intangibles", nepotism, personality, and other qualities that have nothing to do with efficiency, and therefore, won't benefit that much from AI tools.

urduntupu 3y ago
Very good. There will be an increasing demand for pure human beings. Those who can practice divine creativity, due to their pure personality, body and spirit. The "intangibles".
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>Many markets do not function this way; e.g., the art market. Making more paintings more efficiently does not make you a better-known artist. In many cases, it actually hurts you. Art is also a good argument for where this is a good argument. More art =/= more success, but the ability for an artist to quickly make good art == more success. Be it for iteration or production (especially 3d models). You still can't guarantee success, but if you can use less artists to make more art it tips the scales.
- keiferski 3y ago
  No, I don’t think that is true at all in the traditional fine arts market, which is what my comment was referencing. Scarcity is a major factor and putting out tons of AI-generated art is basically the opposite work process of the highest-priced artists.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    I see. I was referring more to media arts. animation, games, movies. These could have huge boons from letting AI polish up the bases or fill in somegaps.

diego_moita 3y ago

I'll use analogies with previous technologies. Agriculture shaped humans to create buildings, create social classes with different levels of power, create armies, governments and rulers to protect themselves from other tribes. Gradually these grew up became empires and created monotheist religions to substitute animist religions. The Industrial Revolution shaped humans and culture to move to cities, work in factories/offices instead of home/fields and to think in more abstract terms (math, written words, etc). Cars shaped human society, governments and urban plans to be heavily dependent on roads and all the car assistance economy. Think Houston/Los Angeles vs. Copenhagen/Amsterdam. Radio, television and publicity shaped our daily lives to consume a lot of crap we don't really need, from cigarettes to diamond rings. Social media shaped our political discourse into tribal stupidity and paranoia. So just use basic Marshall McLuhan: the media is the message. Technology shapes humans and culture. AI will shape humans and culture. We just don't know how.

visarga 3y ago
I see all this as the evolution of language, because that's how ideas are preserved and replicated. Ideas evolve over time. They form an evolutionary system, moving much faster than biology. Humans and AI both rely on the corpus of language to learn and apply ideas. We're no longer the only way ideas can replicate - LLMs have joined the party. Language gained a new mechanism for self-replication. We should focus less on humans vs AIs, and more on the language corpus itself, the true source of intelligence. This corpus was built through experience, slowly and collaboratively, by billions of people in parallel. No single human could have done it alone - it's smarter than any one of us, the product of our collective work and luck. When you train an LLM on it, the model becomes generally competent. But did the competence come from the model or the data? Should we obsess over architectures, or look to our datasets?
- diego_moita 3y ago
  I've heard that before, mostly on Ray Kurzweil talking about singularity. But I have a problem with this usage of the "evolution" and "evolutionary system" expressions. I believe that it entails "improvement", that it is judgmental. I think it is self-centred and presumptuous to imply that the world improved toward us. I don't think Darwin used the expression "evolution" with a judgmental meaning. He only meant that it was an adaptation to existing environmental conditions.

devjab 3y ago

For the most part I think it’ll mainly further Microsofts dominance in the office space. You can see this with the recent EU anti-trust and Teams, where it makes little sense for enterprise organisations to not chose Teams when they already have Office365 licenses. You see the same to some degree in RPA (robot process automation ) already. Why would your organisation shell out a couple of hundred thousand dollars for UIPath licensing when Power Automate is $15 a month and $250 for the big VM bots? I think it’ll be the same with AI. GPT writes all our non secret documentation and it has a lot of options for use in non-programming automation as well. I know Microsoft is a major investor in it, but once those tools become basic Office365 tools then every other AI seller is going to become obsolete in many cases. It’ll be interesting to see how the world handles that dominance in the office space, because so far, we really haven’t. So I think this is going to be much more a question of how we’re all going to be paying a Microsoft “tax” to use AI efficiently, than it’ll be about non-AI vs AI. I mean, you could probably use iSheets (or whatever the Apple Excel is called), Google Sheets, LibraOffice or similar, but I’ve never heard of an EU enterprise org that doesn’t use Microsoft Excel.

ezoe 3y ago
> GPT writes all our non secret documentation Who read it? LLM may be great at coughing up seemingly good long chunk of text, but human is not capable of reading all of these verbose text because of the simple fact that GPT can generate texts faster than human reading speed. So I bet what will happen in that case is, humans use LLM to summarize these LLM-generated verbose documentation. What a wonderful bureaucratic world will that be?
- devjab 3y ago
  It writes better JSDoc than any of us. Anyone who consumes a Typescript method is likely to read it, it’s the tiny text that pops up if you code in VSC. If you go through my history here on HN (you don’t have to I’ll sum it up), you’ll see that I’m not a fan of LLMs for code generations. In fact I’m not convinced they will ever be good enough to be useful for it. For documentation, however, at least for JSDoc GPT is incredible. I really mean it when I say that it writes it better than we do. It’s able to figure things out and describe it in ways that still amazes me from time to time. It does require you to be good at naming things.

ezoe 3y ago

Did humans with computer replace humans without computer? Did programmers with google search and stack overflow replace programmers without these? It doesn't and it won't happen in any time soon. How could humans with probabilistic LLM which cough up hallucination replace humans without it when the answer to my previous two questions are NO.

theLiminator 3y ago
> Did humans with computer replace humans without computer? Certainly for a whole host of tasks. > Did programmers with google search and stack overflow replace programmers without these? Also true for many tasks too, a programmer who refuses to use these resources for certain types of work will be an order of magnitude slower in many cases and will be replaced by programmers who aren't. LLMs are just beginning to become useful, but there will be a point where they're indispensable, those who refuse to use them will eventually find themselves falling behind. It's will eventually become equivalent to a programmer who refuses to move off punch cards or refuses to use modern version control.
- pydry 3y ago
  We're peak hype cycle for LLMs right now so we have an order of magnitude more ridiculous shit said about them than would otherwise be normal. The trough of disillusionment has yet to set in. They will be useful for a set of tasks but all of the people hyperventilating over this being the new industrial revolution might consider calming down a little. The high priests of capitalism have been blaming lost jobs on automation since forever - largely because this narrative makes a convenient, impersonal scapegoat.
  - theLiminator 3y ago
    I'm curious what the "hype cycle" looked like for the discover of electricity, the invention of the combustion engine, or for the invention of the transistor. Who knows if the LLM paradigm will be more like those moments vs the failed hype of something like the hydrogen fuel cell.

mawadev 3y ago

Most people act fairly mechanical at this point. Everyone is so busy out competing eachother, they might as well be sentient bots doing errands from their massive todo lists. Ai is just going to make everything more obscure and absurd.

jatins 3y ago

Serious question: has anyone ever read an original/insightful thought in an HBR article?

marban 3y ago
HBR is the IBM of business publications. You won't get fired for sharing their articles.
detourdog 3y ago
Many interesting headlines.

amelius 3y ago

So we will become robots in a Ship of Theseus way.

nologic01 3y ago

These MBA thought pieces are so behind the curve its embarrassing if not humiliating. When your only real job (conditioned over a near-century of industrial capitalism) is to prepare warm bodies to populate stable corporate power hierarchies but society is reeling from challenge and disruption to strife and malfunction what exactly is your reason to exist? Just take the very first sentence: > Just as the internet has drastically lowered the cost of information transmission, AI will lower the cost of cognition Now investigate how the "internet" has worked out for individuals and corporates and apply the same to "AI". What do the authors think about digital oligopolies, surveillance capitalism [1] and all that. The digital (=information) incompetence of the corporate world is what has ushered the current dystopia in the first place. Business schools have profitably underwritten this gross mismanagement for ages. Then this: > The best place to learn [...] is YouTube. YouTube has, oh my God, so many tutorials in so many domains. Can somebody please pull the plug on this joke? Its too painful. [1] Zuboff joined Harvard Business School in 1981 where she became the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration and one of the first tenured women on the HBS faculty

baerrie 3y ago

Humans that are just as skilled as the average ones with AI will continue to be in demand. AI levels the playing field for a lot of people but the stars will still shine

croes 3y ago
The stars will be used to train AI and then will be replaced by cheaper employees and the trained AI
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Which means that the stars will have to keep pushing to stay up to date on the latest and greatest tech that hasn't yet made its way into the AI training data.
  - croes 3y ago
    Useless race. As soon they reach that level, AI learns it too
    - baerrie 3y ago
      There will always be a need for the exceptional

RyanAdamas 3y ago

AI will replace humans. At what rate and when is the only question. The idea we don't want that is only pitched by control hungry authoritarians who need subjects to define their existence by.

CrzyLngPwd 3y ago

The net result, as we see with basic skills such as growing your own food, cooking, purifying water, building a shelter, fixing the tools you need, etc. is a bunch of adult babies that are completely dependent on others for their wellbeing. I'm not saying we should all grow our own food etc. but it does seem as though we are headed to something where we make such a great system that we only breed weakness and helplessness. Maybe that is the price of progress.

licebmi__at__ 3y ago
I’m concerned about this ideas about weakness and helplessness. I mean, if we look at history, we can see that these “resourceful” people were often malnourished and victims of natural calamities, although we have a survivor bias as we can only see those who were lucky enough to survive. I wonder if this romanization of struggle is related to the statistic where 6 percent of Americans believe they can defeat a bear with their bare hands.
hahajk 3y ago
Maybe we have skins cells that look out at the freedom and autonomy of some single cell organisms and think to themselves that something has been lost participating in this human project.

nelsontodd 3y ago

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croes 3y ago

>Even your spam killers. Remember how bad spam used to be for a while, and then overnight it went away? Because people deployed machine learning systems. Didn't mostly Bayes filter kill spam? Wouldn't call that AI.

theshrike79 3y ago
People call anything past a single if statement "AI" nowadays =) It's like everything was "fuzzy logic" in the 90s.
- tjr 3y ago
  Wow! Not sure I've even heard the phrase "fuzzy logic" since December 31, 1999. What did happen to it?
bombolo 3y ago
I'm still full of spam anyway. Especially in my work email.
georgyo 3y ago
The definition of AI is very vague these days. But Bayes filters are trained on good and bad data, and then learn over time automatically by what people mark and unmark as spam. This is exactly what things you would call AI do. A person or team manually creating filters to block spam would have a hard time keeping up with the effectiveness of a learning Bayes model.
detourdog 3y ago
I used to have unbelievable loads and then during covid I sort of forgot to look what was going on. Once I finally checked I could not believe the drop in spam attempts. This was after the war in Ukraine started so I was never sure if that was part of the drop off. Currently what I have is a a lot of persistent attempts at email delivery or login. If spam does get through it is usually 2 spams from the same source set on a schedule as to seem inconspicuous. Has been my experience.

alienicecream 3y ago

People mostly don't get replaced, they adapt. LLMs are a faster but less reliable Google search. They will add to your work load because now you do more, faster. Technology increases the work load. Life with technology only gets busier and more complicated.

cubefox 3y ago

Am I the only one who finds these rambling interviews hard to read? Many articles already have too much fluff around the core information, but interviews are even worse.

f_gg_tk_ll_r 3y ago

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quonn 3y ago

Let‘s assume for a moment that AI will replace humans _in the economy_. Then what? Well, either it fully does that, then it won‘t matter. We will allocate resources in a different way or there will be a revolution. Or it does only partially, leaving some (physical) labor. Then these jobs will pay well and people will go there. For everything else AI will replace nothing. The economy is just a part of life and if AI really takes over it will be an insignificant part.

arbuge 3y ago

With a field moving as quickly as AI right now, you should probably take any predictions over what it will be able to do and not do with a big grain of salt, especially if they are made for any timespan greater than the very near term future (months? weeks? That term will itself get shorter and shorter as time goes on). Very few people, including the author of this study most likely, predicted a few years ago where AI would be today. That should tell you something.

bertil 3y ago
The model of how AI would influence work, including splitting work into tasks, classifying tasks by what type of AI could complete it, the complementarity of prediction with other aspects in an organization, etc., all have been studied for decades. The people working on this, including the author of this study, have not changed their conclusion dramatically recently. What has changed is the apparent capacity of LLMs: they got convincing earlier than other specialists thought possible. However, that timing isn’t the most relevant aspect of industrial economics and transaction cost theory. Many people make that mistake, but Oliver Williamson himself has corrected that misunderstanding in front of me several times. What matters is that, when the technology is available, people will reorganize functions.
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darepublic 3y ago

Seems like people who are taller are going to replace me. And post about it on their socials

lvl102 3y ago

What AI will do is facilitate the creative process. Instead of painstakingly creating variations. AI will present us with ALL the variations. That, in a nutshell, is the power of generative AI.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
In theory, for the studios who care about good products, yes. I really do look forward to making a good base (say, a rigged 3d model) and having AI fix the seams in a skin or add some extra little flair to an animation. Those will be very nice accompaniments to what is currently very tedious tasks to hand fix. But I think we both know how and where large copoprate entities are going to use these tools. They made it very clear given their whole refusal to deal with unions thing.

davidivadavid 3y ago

I mean, "humans with AI" replaced "humans without AI" the moment AI was invented. Is that what passes for "insights" at HBR these days?

achrono 3y ago
I thought for a second going into this that it might be an interview from at least 6 months ago. But no, it's from yesterday. As much as I prefer not to criticize the individual, Mr. Lakhani here is clearly not the most insightful person to be speaking about this. The advice he dishes out is objectively no better than the advice I heard a friend's grandfather give a month ago (for context, he is 78 and was a mechanic his entire life & only started using a smartphone 3 years ago). Going into this I also expected the title itself to be an ironic nod -- but no, seems like they meant this 100% literally. We're only a few days away from having this sentence printed on coffee mugs -- and not because of HBR. Shame on HBR. Every dog has its day -- and decline.

nektro 3y ago

keep telling yourself that

coding123 3y ago

There's not much of a distinction, multiple people will still be replaced by one because AI exists. I'm not saying it shouldn't exist, but this sounds like word play to hide the impact.

EricMausler 3y ago

People keep saying things like "humans always adapt to new technology" Is that not the point here? Start at the basics - Agriculture has created a world where I cannot live off the land in my area. I would have to go to a location that is not dominated by an Agriculture focused society (condensed living with farms on the edges supplying food to the population via trade). Look what happens to people who have nothing to offer for food. They become dependents of the state. There is no reason to undermine the very real possibility that after another breakthrough or three in AI society is going to fundamentally shift in the impacted areas in a way where if you are not one of the AI people then you will have nothing to offer and thus you too will become a dependent of the state. Hopefully non-ai society will remain able to function independently - with non-ai-boosted farms continuing to trade with non-ai-boosted workers. Maybe technological middle grounds get eroded and we see an explosion in Amish-style communities. It is very possible however that the power of ai-based systems takes off and all the people involved with it simply completely ignore the rest of society, and the rest of society will be boxed out of the resources they need to live independently. For centuries the ultimate reality check for ignore the needs of the many has been revolution. For all that time, surprise attacks, rebellion, physical power in numbers, etc, all existed. Revolution is not going to be on the table with advanced AI. It's arguably already off the table, but if one side has advanced AI (not even AGI) and the other doesn't- its over. Automatic early threat detection, autonomous kill machines, control over all strategic resource and power generation, etc. The only revolution still on the table is going to be political. We can absolutely succeed in preventing dystopia if we leverage the power of the state to actually be able to sustain 90% of the population becoming dependents

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
An insightful comment, and one that the majority of the people here choose to be blind to. There is already signs of the bifurcation in technology between 2020s and Amish. It's really hard to live at the technological level of the 1950s or even the 1990s because if you don't have a smartphone you're fucked. And you are also right about the loss of revolution. So many starry-eyed hopefuls here think AI will be a check on power, an equalizer, that reforms will keep us from going down a path of global authoritarianism, but the truth is we will only be free if the power goes out for the last time, or we have a Butlerian Jihad - and although I use the term semi-ironically, I'm also serious.

samstave 3y ago

"Humans with AI will heavily profit from Humans without AI" FTFY

narrator 3y ago

Wait till people start getting cancelled and impoverished by having their AI accounts closed. Sure, they're still free, but they won't be able to get a job.

soultrees 3y ago
Llama for the win.

arisAlexis 3y ago

I laugh everytime someone posts an article with a definitive title ina field where nobody knows shit about what's coming. Hear me Mr. Krugman?

Digyrosalo 3y ago

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