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AI will augment people more than it will replace people for the foreseeable future. Anyone who tells you otherwise has a shallow understanding of the tools and

AI will augment people more than it will replace people for the foreseeable future. Anyone who tells you otherwise has a shallow understanding of the tools and hasn't built anything more than demo projects.

bagels 3y ago
It's probably going to be both. If you have 100 people, and you make them 10% more efficient, and demand stays the same, you can just cut costs by 10% by laying off people.
- heyitsguay 3y ago
  But if you're in a competitive market and there's more work to do than you're addressing with 100 people, your 91 people doing the work of 100 will be outcompeted by 100 people doing the work of 110, no?
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    A competitive market doesn’t mean there’s an infinite amount of work to be done. A restaurant is going to sell a finite amount of food no matter what they do. They are incentivized to spend as little as possible on salaries. In terms of work, with zero-friction reallocation, of course automation is a good thing. There are tons of other things which need to be done besides packing boxes in a warehouse or driving people around. But we don’t have anything like perfect reallocation, and we don’t have business models for many of the things which need to be done.
baq 3y ago
'foreseeable future' is getting shorter, faster than ever. What will OpenAI announce by end of year? What will they announce in the next 5 years?
- dmezzetti 3y ago
  Time will tell. Oftentimes things surge out of the gate then stall. I wouldn't expect exponential or even linear growth in features.
kypro 3y ago
I agree, but AI models are growing in capability extremely fast. To put it in perspective when I was learning about neural networks in ~2009 it was still actively debated in the field whether neural networks were even the right paradigm for general intelligence. Back then one even knew how to make deep neural networks work well. They sucked so bad and had sucked for so many decades that most in the field just assumed that they probably weren't going anywhere without some significant advancements. Then in the early 2010s the field exploded after a few minor algorithm tweaks allowed deep neural networks to really begin working. But even then they kinda sucked at a lot of tasks outside of niche applications like image recognition. But then a few years later we made a few more algorithmic improvements and suddenly we had pretty decent chatbots. And then a few years after than OpenAI created GTP-3. What I'm saying is that basically went from most experts in the field doubting whether neural nets would even work to GPT-3 in about 10-12 years. That's absolutely insane progress. With this rate of improvement the "foreseeable future" is probably less than a decade away. Assuming progress continues at this pace I strongly suspect we'll have LLMs able to beat the best humans in software development in 5 years.
Workaccount2 3y ago
ChatGPT4 arrived anywhere from 5 to 20 years early depending on the "expert" you asked in 2019. Same thing happened with AlphaGo. In 2014, beating a human master in Go was still 15 years off. Then it happened a year later. Humans are on the cusp of learning that just like everything else so far, there is nothing special or unique about the meat version of intelligence. In fact it's likely hilariously weak compared to purpose constructed general intelligences. Similar to a bird racing a jet, a cheetah against a V12, or horse pulling against a truck.
- riku_iki 3y ago
  > In 2014, beating a human master in Go was still 15 years off. Then it happened a year later. was it consensus among experts? How did you measure it?
- nonameiguess 3y ago
  Does this even contradict the person you're responding to? Jets, V12s, and trucks are operated by people. They're not fully-automated. Alpha Go has not put anyone out of work and it's been a decade now. 15 years isn't that far off. Go was supposed to be such a monumental benchmark because it was widely assumed being good at it was a sufficiently intellect-complete task that mastering it must mean any software that could do so could surely do just about anything intellectual. Winning Jeopardy was supposed to mean that, too, which Watson did even before Alpha Go was invented, yet Watson has also not put anyone out of work even though it's been around for over 13 years now. Your takeaway seems to be software will always do things ahead of when we expect, whereas my takeaway is we're incredibly bad at guessing what sorts of tests and benchmarks mean software will be able to totally replicate, best, and replace human reasoning and decision-making. Beating games, predicting protein folding, forming reasonable-sounding paragraphs, and scoring high on the LSAT have all turned out to not be enough.
observationist 3y ago
If one person can suddenly do 90% of the work of 100, then all 100 are going to take a massive cut in pay or hours, or 90% of them are going to be looking for another job. Some work requires direct human level control. Other work just requires a human in the loop. We've already exploited most of the things that can be automated without human level reasoning, and LLMs have made inroads on a whole bunch of things that do require reasoning. Augmentation - any significant force multiplier applied to individuals - will result in individuals performing more work or producing more output while the overall workforce is reduced in size. Corporations exist to maximize profit, not to provide meaning and worth to human existence. AI is taking us to a place where human labor is detrimental to value. Hourly wages won't be sensible in the face of software that can do any cognitive work a human can, for orders of magnitude less cost and overhead, with no feelings or rights to account for. Current economic models won't make sense at all without scarcity of labor, intellectual and otherwise. No profession is safe, and things will only accelerate from here. We should probably start thinking about what a social contract means in a post-scarcity world. What does money mean? How should resources be fairly allocated if working for money is actually counterproductive even if companies were willing to hire you? What does the market look like if it's irresponsible to allow fallible human control over a task which can be performed to a higher level of quality and consistency for orders of magnitude less cost? It won't happen all at once. It might take a few years, or it might just pop up and happen this summer, or it could take decades, but AI replacing human jobs is a zero sum game. Once machines can more efficiently and effectively perform any cognitive task that any human can achieve, it's no longer strictly economical to pay humans for those tasks. We'll either have to do pretend-work so we can justify paying humans for work that's less cost effective than paying a machine, or we'll need some sort of Universal Basic Income. I'd love to see alternative ideas, but there don't seem to be any. We're in a very interesting period of human history.
- octopusRex 3y ago
  I'm tired of people saying "we'll just create NEW jobs." We will not create ENOUGH new jobs. They think this is like going from loss of blacksmith jobs when fewer horseshoes were needed to jobs gained in huge Ford motor factories. If we don't protect our resources and enable basic income, we will find ourselves banging on the gates of robo guarded walls begging for food.

bagels 3y ago

It's probably going to be both. If you have 100 people, and you make them 10% more efficient, and demand stays the same, you can just cut costs by 10% by laying off people.

heyitsguay 3y ago
But if you're in a competitive market and there's more work to do than you're addressing with 100 people, your 91 people doing the work of 100 will be outcompeted by 100 people doing the work of 110, no?
- janalsncm 3y ago
  A competitive market doesn’t mean there’s an infinite amount of work to be done. A restaurant is going to sell a finite amount of food no matter what they do. They are incentivized to spend as little as possible on salaries. In terms of work, with zero-friction reallocation, of course automation is a good thing. There are tons of other things which need to be done besides packing boxes in a warehouse or driving people around. But we don’t have anything like perfect reallocation, and we don’t have business models for many of the things which need to be done.

baq 3y ago

'foreseeable future' is getting shorter, faster than ever. What will OpenAI announce by end of year? What will they announce in the next 5 years?

dmezzetti 3y ago
Time will tell. Oftentimes things surge out of the gate then stall. I wouldn't expect exponential or even linear growth in features.

kypro 3y ago

I agree, but AI models are growing in capability extremely fast. To put it in perspective when I was learning about neural networks in ~2009 it was still actively debated in the field whether neural networks were even the right paradigm for general intelligence. Back then one even knew how to make deep neural networks work well. They sucked so bad and had sucked for so many decades that most in the field just assumed that they probably weren't going anywhere without some significant advancements. Then in the early 2010s the field exploded after a few minor algorithm tweaks allowed deep neural networks to really begin working. But even then they kinda sucked at a lot of tasks outside of niche applications like image recognition. But then a few years later we made a few more algorithmic improvements and suddenly we had pretty decent chatbots. And then a few years after than OpenAI created GTP-3. What I'm saying is that basically went from most experts in the field doubting whether neural nets would even work to GPT-3 in about 10-12 years. That's absolutely insane progress. With this rate of improvement the "foreseeable future" is probably less than a decade away. Assuming progress continues at this pace I strongly suspect we'll have LLMs able to beat the best humans in software development in 5 years.

Workaccount2 3y ago

ChatGPT4 arrived anywhere from 5 to 20 years early depending on the "expert" you asked in 2019. Same thing happened with AlphaGo. In 2014, beating a human master in Go was still 15 years off. Then it happened a year later. Humans are on the cusp of learning that just like everything else so far, there is nothing special or unique about the meat version of intelligence. In fact it's likely hilariously weak compared to purpose constructed general intelligences. Similar to a bird racing a jet, a cheetah against a V12, or horse pulling against a truck.

riku_iki 3y ago
> In 2014, beating a human master in Go was still 15 years off. Then it happened a year later. was it consensus among experts? How did you measure it?
nonameiguess 3y ago
Does this even contradict the person you're responding to? Jets, V12s, and trucks are operated by people. They're not fully-automated. Alpha Go has not put anyone out of work and it's been a decade now. 15 years isn't that far off. Go was supposed to be such a monumental benchmark because it was widely assumed being good at it was a sufficiently intellect-complete task that mastering it must mean any software that could do so could surely do just about anything intellectual. Winning Jeopardy was supposed to mean that, too, which Watson did even before Alpha Go was invented, yet Watson has also not put anyone out of work even though it's been around for over 13 years now. Your takeaway seems to be software will always do things ahead of when we expect, whereas my takeaway is we're incredibly bad at guessing what sorts of tests and benchmarks mean software will be able to totally replicate, best, and replace human reasoning and decision-making. Beating games, predicting protein folding, forming reasonable-sounding paragraphs, and scoring high on the LSAT have all turned out to not be enough.

observationist 3y ago

If one person can suddenly do 90% of the work of 100, then all 100 are going to take a massive cut in pay or hours, or 90% of them are going to be looking for another job. Some work requires direct human level control. Other work just requires a human in the loop. We've already exploited most of the things that can be automated without human level reasoning, and LLMs have made inroads on a whole bunch of things that do require reasoning. Augmentation - any significant force multiplier applied to individuals - will result in individuals performing more work or producing more output while the overall workforce is reduced in size. Corporations exist to maximize profit, not to provide meaning and worth to human existence. AI is taking us to a place where human labor is detrimental to value. Hourly wages won't be sensible in the face of software that can do any cognitive work a human can, for orders of magnitude less cost and overhead, with no feelings or rights to account for. Current economic models won't make sense at all without scarcity of labor, intellectual and otherwise. No profession is safe, and things will only accelerate from here. We should probably start thinking about what a social contract means in a post-scarcity world. What does money mean? How should resources be fairly allocated if working for money is actually counterproductive even if companies were willing to hire you? What does the market look like if it's irresponsible to allow fallible human control over a task which can be performed to a higher level of quality and consistency for orders of magnitude less cost? It won't happen all at once. It might take a few years, or it might just pop up and happen this summer, or it could take decades, but AI replacing human jobs is a zero sum game. Once machines can more efficiently and effectively perform any cognitive task that any human can achieve, it's no longer strictly economical to pay humans for those tasks. We'll either have to do pretend-work so we can justify paying humans for work that's less cost effective than paying a machine, or we'll need some sort of Universal Basic Income. I'd love to see alternative ideas, but there don't seem to be any. We're in a very interesting period of human history.

octopusRex 3y ago
I'm tired of people saying "we'll just create NEW jobs." We will not create ENOUGH new jobs. They think this is like going from loss of blacksmith jobs when fewer horseshoes were needed to jobs gained in huge Ford motor factories. If we don't protect our resources and enable basic income, we will find ourselves banging on the gates of robo guarded walls begging for food.