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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 thes

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).
    - quonn 3y ago
      I think you‘re missing a few things: 1. Not everything is stuff. You can book a flight for 5000 Euros to the other end of the world. 2. Not all prices are the best. You might overpay significantly for said flight in order to not have to think about finding a cheaper one. Same for everything else, such as grocery shopping. 3. Housing. It‘s easy to imagine someone buying a house for 5 million. Depending on the location this may not even buy an _extremely_ fancy house. If you don‘t like debt and want to pay it down in 10 years then 900k (and what really remains of that? 400k?) might be useful. Even if you don‘t care about „stuff“. Maybe all you care about is not having to care about it.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        None of those matter, IMO. A flight ticket itself may be ephemeral, but the plane and the fuel are not. Overpaying for convenience becomes oversupply for convenience, which at the scale of "everyone gets it" requires massive overproduction. Houses will indeed always have a "location location location" premium; but the dynamics of this also changes if everyone has far more economic power — $900k is currently enough to commute by private plane, opening up many small places that are currently too out-of-the-way to get such attention, though I don't have any idea if that can actually scale given airport capacities and densities.
- xbmcuser 3y ago
  Produce 10x what exactly? Earth at current consumption level is not sustainable. where the fuck do you have the resources to produce 10x
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Which bits are and aren't sustainable depends mostly on tech. 10x solar power and we get meet all current electricity demand in a climate friendly way; 10x lithium etc. mining and we can roll out electric vehicles much faster; 10x bioreactors makes… well, very little difference to ethical eco-meat, but mainly because it's still new and the kinks have yet to be worked out, but the principal still applies. (Unfortunately, my point would still stand even if higher production only sped up disaster; the tragedy of the commons is because everyone is motivated to consume more than is sustainable given the size of the group).
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    Why is it not sustainable? Are you talking about fossil fuel usage? Because that can be solved if we had the technology to solve it, via carbon capture, geoengineering, etc, via the help of AI even. The Earth is a massive planet relative to human scales, there are more abundant resources in it than we can use in a thousand lifetimes.
  - raincole 3y ago
    In theory the more productive we are the higher "upper bound of sustainability" is. Cheap energy can be used to recycle garbages from the ocean, recapture carbon from the atmosphere, etc. We just choose not to.
  - PeterisP 3y ago
    For a few decades already growth of consumption/GDP has been decoupled from growth of energy and resource usage. Roughly speaking, we consume more by consuming "better" things rather than "larger" things. A $1000 iPhone is much "more consumption" than a 1990s cell phone plus portable CD player plus a calculator, but takes less resources than those things. Even more so when consumption of digital entertainment replaces live entertainment.
georgemcbay 3y ago
Yeah people generally gloss over the bit where automation doesn't have to be anywhere close to 100% effective to cause massive disruption (unless we drastically modify our economy which seems incredibly unlikely to happen in any proactive soften-the-landing way). The unemployment rate at the height of the Great Depression was "only" about 25%. If 3 people doing the work of 4 is already a huge problem, 1 person doing the work of 50 or 100 is massive. The obvious and oft-repeated response to this would be to point out how automation has been going on for many decades (arguably centuries) and so far people have just evolved into different jobs, which is true, but it seems like a risky bet to me to assume that trend will continue if/when a non-task-specific automation technology has the potential to very quickly cut wide and deep across an awful lot of the job sectors that currently have reasonably desirable jobs. The speed of disruption, I think, is likely to matter quite a lot.
- runeks 3y ago
  > The unemployment rate at the height of the Great Depression was "only" about 25%. If 3 people doing the work of 4 is already a huge problem, 1 person doing the work of 50 or 100 is massive. So your hypothesis is that the Great Depression was caused by a sudden 25% increase in productivity? If so, what data do you have to back this up?
  - digitcatphd 3y ago
    High unemployment means fewer consumption spending, which according to Adam smith is the invisible hand fueling the economy. Remove this hand so to speak, and the economic cycle is at risk of being disrupted. Think of an economy like an ecological environment entangled with interdependence. I think generally it’s hard to think that modern economics has only really exist for the past couple hundred years. The last major shift that created it? The cotton gin starting the Industrial Revolution. AI is akin to the cotton gin.
    - runeks 3y ago
      To be clear: I'm not rejecting the hypothesis, simply asking for supporting data. Ie. data that links the supposedly higher productivity to the higher unemployment at precisely that point in time.
satvikpendem 3y ago
I often see this sentiment regarding AI or automation and it seems to be predicated upon the belief that the amount of work is fixed. I disagree with this premise, there is still a lot of work to do. We don't even have space elevators, nanobots, immortality drugs and all other manner of technologies yet, and just like every other technological innovation in history, I assume that we will reallocate people to do said work. Work expands to fill the time and space (and workforce) available.
- naillo 3y ago
  I guess it depends on amount of talent as well. Lots of people are stuck in low end jobs while the demand for high skilled labor is also high. Maybe some argument is that if low skilled workers can do high skilled labor with the help of intelligence augmenting machines that demand can be met finally.
- matwood 3y ago
  > it seems to be predicated upon the belief that the amount of work is fixed. I've mentioned this before in other AI threads, but humanity has an uncanny ability to use all resources available. As you say, the amount of work will only grow with the increased productivity from AI.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  The amount of work isn't fixed, but the definitions of useful work have changed. AI threatens to make all human-sourced work redundant. Because AI is really an automated culture machine - in the widest sense. It will eventually be able to innovate, rather than replicate, culturally ground-breaking work in art, science, engineering, business, politics, and media. What jobs are humans going to do then? All that's left is manual labour - and eventually that will be automated too. This isn't exaggeration. It's already happening in a very limited way with today's super-crude AI 1.0. AI 5.0 won't be a step change, it will be something entirely new.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    Robotics is much more difficult than software. It will be quite a while until an AI can autonomously build a space elevator. Until then, people will still work. And after that, perhaps we can finally sit back and relax.

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).
  - quonn 3y ago
    I think you‘re missing a few things: 1. Not everything is stuff. You can book a flight for 5000 Euros to the other end of the world. 2. Not all prices are the best. You might overpay significantly for said flight in order to not have to think about finding a cheaper one. Same for everything else, such as grocery shopping. 3. Housing. It‘s easy to imagine someone buying a house for 5 million. Depending on the location this may not even buy an _extremely_ fancy house. If you don‘t like debt and want to pay it down in 10 years then 900k (and what really remains of that? 400k?) might be useful. Even if you don‘t care about „stuff“. Maybe all you care about is not having to care about it.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      None of those matter, IMO. A flight ticket itself may be ephemeral, but the plane and the fuel are not. Overpaying for convenience becomes oversupply for convenience, which at the scale of "everyone gets it" requires massive overproduction. Houses will indeed always have a "location location location" premium; but the dynamics of this also changes if everyone has far more economic power — $900k is currently enough to commute by private plane, opening up many small places that are currently too out-of-the-way to get such attention, though I don't have any idea if that can actually scale given airport capacities and densities.
xbmcuser 3y ago
Produce 10x what exactly? Earth at current consumption level is not sustainable. where the fuck do you have the resources to produce 10x
- ben_w 3y ago
  Which bits are and aren't sustainable depends mostly on tech. 10x solar power and we get meet all current electricity demand in a climate friendly way; 10x lithium etc. mining and we can roll out electric vehicles much faster; 10x bioreactors makes… well, very little difference to ethical eco-meat, but mainly because it's still new and the kinks have yet to be worked out, but the principal still applies. (Unfortunately, my point would still stand even if higher production only sped up disaster; the tragedy of the commons is because everyone is motivated to consume more than is sustainable given the size of the group).
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  Why is it not sustainable? Are you talking about fossil fuel usage? Because that can be solved if we had the technology to solve it, via carbon capture, geoengineering, etc, via the help of AI even. The Earth is a massive planet relative to human scales, there are more abundant resources in it than we can use in a thousand lifetimes.
- raincole 3y ago
  In theory the more productive we are the higher "upper bound of sustainability" is. Cheap energy can be used to recycle garbages from the ocean, recapture carbon from the atmosphere, etc. We just choose not to.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  For a few decades already growth of consumption/GDP has been decoupled from growth of energy and resource usage. Roughly speaking, we consume more by consuming "better" things rather than "larger" things. A $1000 iPhone is much "more consumption" than a 1990s cell phone plus portable CD player plus a calculator, but takes less resources than those things. Even more so when consumption of digital entertainment replaces live entertainment.

georgemcbay 3y ago

Yeah people generally gloss over the bit where automation doesn't have to be anywhere close to 100% effective to cause massive disruption (unless we drastically modify our economy which seems incredibly unlikely to happen in any proactive soften-the-landing way). The unemployment rate at the height of the Great Depression was "only" about 25%. If 3 people doing the work of 4 is already a huge problem, 1 person doing the work of 50 or 100 is massive. The obvious and oft-repeated response to this would be to point out how automation has been going on for many decades (arguably centuries) and so far people have just evolved into different jobs, which is true, but it seems like a risky bet to me to assume that trend will continue if/when a non-task-specific automation technology has the potential to very quickly cut wide and deep across an awful lot of the job sectors that currently have reasonably desirable jobs. The speed of disruption, I think, is likely to matter quite a lot.

runeks 3y ago
> The unemployment rate at the height of the Great Depression was "only" about 25%. If 3 people doing the work of 4 is already a huge problem, 1 person doing the work of 50 or 100 is massive. So your hypothesis is that the Great Depression was caused by a sudden 25% increase in productivity? If so, what data do you have to back this up?
- digitcatphd 3y ago
  High unemployment means fewer consumption spending, which according to Adam smith is the invisible hand fueling the economy. Remove this hand so to speak, and the economic cycle is at risk of being disrupted. Think of an economy like an ecological environment entangled with interdependence. I think generally it’s hard to think that modern economics has only really exist for the past couple hundred years. The last major shift that created it? The cotton gin starting the Industrial Revolution. AI is akin to the cotton gin.
  - runeks 3y ago
    To be clear: I'm not rejecting the hypothesis, simply asking for supporting data. Ie. data that links the supposedly higher productivity to the higher unemployment at precisely that point in time.

satvikpendem 3y ago

I often see this sentiment regarding AI or automation and it seems to be predicated upon the belief that the amount of work is fixed. I disagree with this premise, there is still a lot of work to do. We don't even have space elevators, nanobots, immortality drugs and all other manner of technologies yet, and just like every other technological innovation in history, I assume that we will reallocate people to do said work. Work expands to fill the time and space (and workforce) available.

naillo 3y ago
I guess it depends on amount of talent as well. Lots of people are stuck in low end jobs while the demand for high skilled labor is also high. Maybe some argument is that if low skilled workers can do high skilled labor with the help of intelligence augmenting machines that demand can be met finally.
matwood 3y ago
> it seems to be predicated upon the belief that the amount of work is fixed. I've mentioned this before in other AI threads, but humanity has an uncanny ability to use all resources available. As you say, the amount of work will only grow with the increased productivity from AI.
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
The amount of work isn't fixed, but the definitions of useful work have changed. AI threatens to make all human-sourced work redundant. Because AI is really an automated culture machine - in the widest sense. It will eventually be able to innovate, rather than replicate, culturally ground-breaking work in art, science, engineering, business, politics, and media. What jobs are humans going to do then? All that's left is manual labour - and eventually that will be automated too. This isn't exaggeration. It's already happening in a very limited way with today's super-crude AI 1.0. AI 5.0 won't be a step change, it will be something entirely new.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  Robotics is much more difficult than software. It will be quite a while until an AI can autonomously build a space elevator. Until then, people will still work. And after that, perhaps we can finally sit back and relax.