8 ms·

AI Will Transform the Global Economy. Let's Make Sure It Benefits Humanity

44 points by mindracer 3y ago

UberFly 3y ago
AI will benefit the few that are agile enough to implement it. The rest of us will get what we get and like it. Pretty much the same as always.
- valine 3y ago
  It’ll come down to who invents AGI. If it were me I’d open source it. I’m sure a lot of people would do the same.
weekay 3y ago
The risk of exposure in emerging and low market economies is significantly lesser than advanced economies according to this report . The nature of work in advanced economies by comparison then is going to significantly change. If 60% of jobs in advanced economies are at risk am surprised with statements from these countries that they are well equipped and ahead of the curve to deal with it . Is anyone seeing anything tangible being proposed and planned to deal with apart from educating people to use this technology? Or is this all a prelude to another AI winter I wonder as we start to make these forecasts and raise expectations
paganel 3y ago
This coming from the IMF blog (?!), i.e. the head of a vile institution like the IMF writing about a bubble-y subject like AI while everyone else is economically and socially struggling, is the next level of late-stage capitalism. These guys and ladies are losing it, they're losing all contact to the reality on the ground.
mmkos 3y ago
Cynical view: without new regulation in the area of AI, it will reduce the value of labor in many domains and completely eliminate the need for it in many others. Profits will go to companies like OpenAI, unemployment will rise and people will be left to fend for themselves, and it's exactly what's going to happen.
- Kichererbsen 3y ago
  optimistic (slightly distopian) view: governments will step in and build national artificial intelligence machines. OpenAI will be competing with open source LLMs. we'll all re-create society structured around a priesthood / ceremonial worship of a big ai that symbolizes how great your "tribe" is and compete with the followers of the other gods.
  - adzm 3y ago
    we are humans, we need something to worship
  - hardlianotion 3y ago
    Well that made the cynical view above look a little more appealing.
- quonn 3y ago
  I agree, except for the OpenAI part. These subscriptions are currently much cheaper than labor - about 100x even for poorly paid jobs - and so there is simply not that much value to capture in terms of total size of the economy. In other words, if the employee costs $2000 and OpenAI charges $20, then $1980 are captured by the company using the tech, not OpenAI. So there would be a problem of course, but it‘s not like the value would necessarily go just to the tech industry. Instead it might go increasingly to those who own „the means of production“ to use a Marxist term for analysis purposes. And if the prices they charge go up, it should be possible to compete with open products.
- neilwilson 3y ago
  How can there be profits without wage income to buy the output? The paradox of productivity will kick in and prices will plummet.
  - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
    Well, there's other kinds of income, like dividends. They just get paid to shareholders, rather than laborers.
Flopoto 3y ago
Biggest thing will be ai based robots. They are coming and I have seen more impressive demos the last few weeks.
ycdxvjp 3y ago
Well IMF just keep tabs on the AI billionaire/millionaire underling production rate every quarter. If it's going up then AI is definitely doing something dumb and unnecessary. To fix track them down and ship them off to China's jack ma center of reeducation. And humanity will be just fine.
gumballindie 3y ago
I too remember 2017 and headlines about millions upon millions of people being replaced by robots around 2025. I even saw videos of little bots peforming the job of baristas, trucks self driving, and all sorts of other crazy things. Not that they are not doable but you know, they are difficult to implement by people that have no clue how things work, let alone how humans interact.
- deyiao 3y ago
  They underestimate the difficulty of the technology, which does not mean they overestimate the impact that technology can have.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    The difficulty of the technology is crucial to understanding what is happening right now. Developing ai is _hard_, unless you cheat and steal content, plagiarise people, and the promise riches to those replacing said people. What caught my eye is that according to the IMF jobs in the west will be affected harder than elsewhere. Meaning poor countries will benefit more. Also as with manufacturing jobs will be sent there since lower skilled workers can now perform the same task better and cheaper. The only real issue with ai is that people will indeed be replaced, not fully, but where they are expensive by those that are cheap. Furthermore, services such as health care and education will regress significantly in the west. Instead of solving the underlying issues your doctor will be replaced by a fast and concise google search made by ai on your behalf. The future looks bleak in the west to be honest. So called ai will in fact mean a massive transfer of knowledge from rich to poor countries, while keeping poor countries rich, and people in rich countries poor and docile - as it has always happened when tech was designed to “help and enhance”.
euroderf 3y ago
Between AI and robots, we're looking at the privatization of the very concept of automation. Bodes ill.
__loam 3y ago
By now I think many people have seen my takes on this forum regarding AI and know I'm an enthusiastic skeptic. I think the capability of this technology is being exaggerated to the benefit of the large corporations that have made huge investments in it. I think a lot of the so called AI experts have put their eggs in the basket of throwing a shit load of data at a pretty limited number of relatively simple models. I think a lot of the people trying to apply AI to every field they can get their hands on are non-experts in that field and lack the knowledge and skill to know if their AI is any good or if it's just dogshit. I think LLMs will never be reliable enough for applications where correctness matters and we're never going to solve the hallucination problem. I think the people telling you we can solve those problems are trying to sell you something. I think the end result of all this bullshit is going to be a lot of wasted computational cycles and an entirely undeserved devaluation of knowledge work until the MBAs trying to fire all their knowledge workers realize they've made a huge mistake. I think this technology is going to make the internet worse and the biggest beneficiaries are the charletans and liars that never cared about truth in the first place.
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
AI runs on electricity, which we can produce a joule directly of for much cheaper than we can produce a joule of food to feed a human on. This is a fundamental consequence of thermodynamics. It will eventually require us to ask ourselves whether we are willing to arbitrarily prioritize our own species over the cheaper to run alternative. We human beings, however, have both the first mover advantage and a natural instinct to preserve both ourselves and our ingroup. So I don't ultimately see this law as being hard to pass. Enforcing it is another issue, but mostly also solvable issue via financial bounty systems.
- RiceRichardJ 3y ago
  This is such a bizarre post. Tools are built to serve man. AI is just another tool. When mechanization replaced human labor there were no questions about prioritizing machines over people. This is no different. You have a distorted framing of the situation.
  - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
    > Tools are built to serve man. AI is just another tool. This logic reads as an attempted proof that no man-made machine or technology can ever possibly be net harmful. That seems like an argument easily punctured. "This is no different" is also a leap, because humans have a large but finite number of ways to be of service to each other. Mechanization augmented one of them, which shifted more value onto the remainders (mostly intellectual and emotional work). If AI can replace the latter, it's not implausible that this really will broadly displace the majority of human labor skills without growing new value areas, similar to how mechanization replaced horses.
    - joshuahedlund 3y ago
      > humans have a large but finite number of ways to be of service to each other. I’m not so sure this is finite. My entire career is a service job that didn’t exist two generations ago.
      - 3y ago
JohnKemeny 3y ago
Related: AI to hit 40% of jobs and worsen inequality, IMF says. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38997636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38997636 (96 comments)
andirk 3y ago
If what I do as a seasoned software engineer becomes redundant because of "artificial intelligence", so be it. Then I'll need to learn more, which I am! I'm not in the business of stiffening technology like an oil baron. I do understand that IP, for example using an actor's likeness via CGI+AI, is a very real issue that needs to be addressed.
- hedgew 3y ago
  What exactly do you think you can learn at that point, that'd give you market value?
  - eurekin 3y ago
    AI
    - azan_ 3y ago
      Honest question - if AI will take over software engineering, why wouldn't it also make AI experts obsolete?
      - eurekin 3y ago
        At that time, there still will be a "A100/H100/successor replacement specialist" probably necessary. Or any other variant of a data centre hardware admin
  - bsenftner 3y ago
    Seriously: it's time to get an MBA if you've ever considered it. Why? Because an MBA teaches one how organizations operate, from non-profits, to government agencies, to startups, and all the transitions to a major conglomerate. As AI proposes to change how all this is done, those of us that understand the essentials of designing, implementing, and maintaining dynamic automated systems that incorporate AI to operate organizations are in the positions to change how business is done for a very long time. It's an extreme power seat, if and only if you also have the professional communications to convince, create collations, and manage the confusion that is sure to arise as AI changes fundamental methods of running organizations.
zeofig 3y ago
Am I still allowed to be skeptical?
EZ-E 3y ago
> one of the things that sets AI apart is its ability to impact high-skilled jobs Am I the only one that fundamentally disagree with this? AI rather impacts low-skilled white collar jobs. Or the "low skill" part of a high skill job. For a dev one example is AI is good at writing the boilerplate for you.
jcfrei 3y ago
One thing that's very likely to happen is that major economies (US, EU, China, India, etc.) will start to isolate. Because AI will have such a profound effect on the competitiveness of companies and the regulatory environment between these blocks will be so different their respective companies are all potentially at risk. Within months let's say a US based and entirely AI run company could quickly supplant all European companies in the same field because the respective European companies don't have the computing power or expertise to compete or can't fire the now redundant workers due to some trade union influence. Rather than allowing all those European companies to be replaced there will be intense lobbying to effectively shut out any non-EU companies. AI will effectively end globalization with the exception of basic commodities trading.
ProllyInfamous 3y ago
My personal anecdote: Parents recently sold their $1.5M+USD house (2021) to the owner of an online transcription/translation company (human staffed) -- an "expensive rich house" where they live. The free Whisper.app (works on Mac, including Intels) delivers the new homeowner's entire company product [transcription/translation] about 40x faster than real-time-playback, which is hundreds of times faster than any human employee could listen and translate. For FREE. I expect to see new owner's forclosure notice any moment. Certainly human worker(s) still check over the translations, but for most [potential] customers a perfect document is not necessary, particularly considering Whisper.app is FREE to use off-line [1]. An absolutely incredible piece of software — runs lighting fast on my M2Pro. [1] https://openai.com/research/whisper/ https://openai.com/research/whisper/

44 points by mindracer 3y ago

AI will benefit the few that are agile enough to implement it. The rest of us will get what we get and like it. Pretty much the same as always.

valine 3y ago
It’ll come down to who invents AGI. If it were me I’d open source it. I’m sure a lot of people would do the same.

weekay 3y ago

The risk of exposure in emerging and low market economies is significantly lesser than advanced economies according to this report . The nature of work in advanced economies by comparison then is going to significantly change. If 60% of jobs in advanced economies are at risk am surprised with statements from these countries that they are well equipped and ahead of the curve to deal with it . Is anyone seeing anything tangible being proposed and planned to deal with apart from educating people to use this technology? Or is this all a prelude to another AI winter I wonder as we start to make these forecasts and raise expectations

paganel 3y ago

This coming from the IMF blog (?!), i.e. the head of a vile institution like the IMF writing about a bubble-y subject like AI while everyone else is economically and socially struggling, is the next level of late-stage capitalism. These guys and ladies are losing it, they're losing all contact to the reality on the ground.

mmkos 3y ago

Cynical view: without new regulation in the area of AI, it will reduce the value of labor in many domains and completely eliminate the need for it in many others. Profits will go to companies like OpenAI, unemployment will rise and people will be left to fend for themselves, and it's exactly what's going to happen.

Kichererbsen 3y ago
optimistic (slightly distopian) view: governments will step in and build national artificial intelligence machines. OpenAI will be competing with open source LLMs. we'll all re-create society structured around a priesthood / ceremonial worship of a big ai that symbolizes how great your "tribe" is and compete with the followers of the other gods.
- adzm 3y ago
  we are humans, we need something to worship
- hardlianotion 3y ago
  Well that made the cynical view above look a little more appealing.
quonn 3y ago
I agree, except for the OpenAI part. These subscriptions are currently much cheaper than labor - about 100x even for poorly paid jobs - and so there is simply not that much value to capture in terms of total size of the economy. In other words, if the employee costs $2000 and OpenAI charges $20, then $1980 are captured by the company using the tech, not OpenAI. So there would be a problem of course, but it‘s not like the value would necessarily go just to the tech industry. Instead it might go increasingly to those who own „the means of production“ to use a Marxist term for analysis purposes. And if the prices they charge go up, it should be possible to compete with open products.
neilwilson 3y ago
How can there be profits without wage income to buy the output? The paradox of productivity will kick in and prices will plummet.
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  Well, there's other kinds of income, like dividends. They just get paid to shareholders, rather than laborers.

Flopoto 3y ago

Biggest thing will be ai based robots. They are coming and I have seen more impressive demos the last few weeks.

ycdxvjp 3y ago

Well IMF just keep tabs on the AI billionaire/millionaire underling production rate every quarter. If it's going up then AI is definitely doing something dumb and unnecessary. To fix track them down and ship them off to China's jack ma center of reeducation. And humanity will be just fine.

gumballindie 3y ago

I too remember 2017 and headlines about millions upon millions of people being replaced by robots around 2025. I even saw videos of little bots peforming the job of baristas, trucks self driving, and all sorts of other crazy things. Not that they are not doable but you know, they are difficult to implement by people that have no clue how things work, let alone how humans interact.

deyiao 3y ago
They underestimate the difficulty of the technology, which does not mean they overestimate the impact that technology can have.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  The difficulty of the technology is crucial to understanding what is happening right now. Developing ai is _hard_, unless you cheat and steal content, plagiarise people, and the promise riches to those replacing said people. What caught my eye is that according to the IMF jobs in the west will be affected harder than elsewhere. Meaning poor countries will benefit more. Also as with manufacturing jobs will be sent there since lower skilled workers can now perform the same task better and cheaper. The only real issue with ai is that people will indeed be replaced, not fully, but where they are expensive by those that are cheap. Furthermore, services such as health care and education will regress significantly in the west. Instead of solving the underlying issues your doctor will be replaced by a fast and concise google search made by ai on your behalf. The future looks bleak in the west to be honest. So called ai will in fact mean a massive transfer of knowledge from rich to poor countries, while keeping poor countries rich, and people in rich countries poor and docile - as it has always happened when tech was designed to “help and enhance”.

euroderf 3y ago

Between AI and robots, we're looking at the privatization of the very concept of automation. Bodes ill.

__loam 3y ago

By now I think many people have seen my takes on this forum regarding AI and know I'm an enthusiastic skeptic. I think the capability of this technology is being exaggerated to the benefit of the large corporations that have made huge investments in it. I think a lot of the so called AI experts have put their eggs in the basket of throwing a shit load of data at a pretty limited number of relatively simple models. I think a lot of the people trying to apply AI to every field they can get their hands on are non-experts in that field and lack the knowledge and skill to know if their AI is any good or if it's just dogshit. I think LLMs will never be reliable enough for applications where correctness matters and we're never going to solve the hallucination problem. I think the people telling you we can solve those problems are trying to sell you something. I think the end result of all this bullshit is going to be a lot of wasted computational cycles and an entirely undeserved devaluation of knowledge work until the MBAs trying to fire all their knowledge workers realize they've made a huge mistake. I think this technology is going to make the internet worse and the biggest beneficiaries are the charletans and liars that never cared about truth in the first place.

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

AI runs on electricity, which we can produce a joule directly of for much cheaper than we can produce a joule of food to feed a human on. This is a fundamental consequence of thermodynamics. It will eventually require us to ask ourselves whether we are willing to arbitrarily prioritize our own species over the cheaper to run alternative. We human beings, however, have both the first mover advantage and a natural instinct to preserve both ourselves and our ingroup. So I don't ultimately see this law as being hard to pass. Enforcing it is another issue, but mostly also solvable issue via financial bounty systems.

RiceRichardJ 3y ago
This is such a bizarre post. Tools are built to serve man. AI is just another tool. When mechanization replaced human labor there were no questions about prioritizing machines over people. This is no different. You have a distorted framing of the situation.
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  > Tools are built to serve man. AI is just another tool. This logic reads as an attempted proof that no man-made machine or technology can ever possibly be net harmful. That seems like an argument easily punctured. "This is no different" is also a leap, because humans have a large but finite number of ways to be of service to each other. Mechanization augmented one of them, which shifted more value onto the remainders (mostly intellectual and emotional work). If AI can replace the latter, it's not implausible that this really will broadly displace the majority of human labor skills without growing new value areas, similar to how mechanization replaced horses.
  - joshuahedlund 3y ago
    > humans have a large but finite number of ways to be of service to each other. I’m not so sure this is finite. My entire career is a service job that didn’t exist two generations ago.
    - 3y ago

JohnKemeny 3y ago

Related: AI to hit 40% of jobs and worsen inequality, IMF says. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38997636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38997636 (96 comments)

andirk 3y ago

If what I do as a seasoned software engineer becomes redundant because of "artificial intelligence", so be it. Then I'll need to learn more, which I am! I'm not in the business of stiffening technology like an oil baron. I do understand that IP, for example using an actor's likeness via CGI+AI, is a very real issue that needs to be addressed.

hedgew 3y ago
What exactly do you think you can learn at that point, that'd give you market value?
- eurekin 3y ago
  AI
  - azan_ 3y ago
    Honest question - if AI will take over software engineering, why wouldn't it also make AI experts obsolete?
    - eurekin 3y ago
      At that time, there still will be a "A100/H100/successor replacement specialist" probably necessary. Or any other variant of a data centre hardware admin
- bsenftner 3y ago
  Seriously: it's time to get an MBA if you've ever considered it. Why? Because an MBA teaches one how organizations operate, from non-profits, to government agencies, to startups, and all the transitions to a major conglomerate. As AI proposes to change how all this is done, those of us that understand the essentials of designing, implementing, and maintaining dynamic automated systems that incorporate AI to operate organizations are in the positions to change how business is done for a very long time. It's an extreme power seat, if and only if you also have the professional communications to convince, create collations, and manage the confusion that is sure to arise as AI changes fundamental methods of running organizations.

zeofig 3y ago

Am I still allowed to be skeptical?

EZ-E 3y ago

> one of the things that sets AI apart is its ability to impact high-skilled jobs Am I the only one that fundamentally disagree with this? AI rather impacts low-skilled white collar jobs. Or the "low skill" part of a high skill job. For a dev one example is AI is good at writing the boilerplate for you.

jcfrei 3y ago

One thing that's very likely to happen is that major economies (US, EU, China, India, etc.) will start to isolate. Because AI will have such a profound effect on the competitiveness of companies and the regulatory environment between these blocks will be so different their respective companies are all potentially at risk. Within months let's say a US based and entirely AI run company could quickly supplant all European companies in the same field because the respective European companies don't have the computing power or expertise to compete or can't fire the now redundant workers due to some trade union influence. Rather than allowing all those European companies to be replaced there will be intense lobbying to effectively shut out any non-EU companies. AI will effectively end globalization with the exception of basic commodities trading.

ProllyInfamous 3y ago

My personal anecdote: Parents recently sold their $1.5M+USD house (2021) to the owner of an online transcription/translation company (human staffed) -- an "expensive rich house" where they live. The free Whisper.app (works on Mac, including Intels) delivers the new homeowner's entire company product [transcription/translation] about 40x faster than real-time-playback, which is hundreds of times faster than any human employee could listen and translate. For FREE. I expect to see new owner's forclosure notice any moment. Certainly human worker(s) still check over the translations, but for most [potential] customers a perfect document is not necessary, particularly considering Whisper.app is FREE to use off-line [1]. An absolutely incredible piece of software — runs lighting fast on my M2Pro. [1] https://openai.com/research/whisper/ https://openai.com/research/whisper/