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Let’s assume for a moment that AIs turn up as you say, and that there is nothing nefarious. That outcome will need a lot of foresight and democratic regulation,

by dsign 3y ago

Let’s assume for a moment that AIs turn up as you say, and that there is nothing nefarious. That outcome will need a lot of foresight and democratic regulation, because market forces will want AIs to exploit people. But, let’s assume we find a political system that is smarter than the people wanting to use AIs for bad ends. So, the world would look very much like the world now, where you earn money proportionally to how difficult is to replace you. There probably will be a set of skills incredibly difficult to get that will earn you enough money to live a comfortable life. And that’s the problem. Even now, lots of people never attain those skills, and they end up working at a factory or at an Amazon fulfillment center. If we don’t fix things somehow, how much worse will it be in the age of AI?

Aurornis 3y ago
> Let’s assume for a moment that AIs turn up as you say, and that there is nothing nefarious. The parent comment didn’t say “nothing nefarious” at all. It just said we overestimate the short term impact. This comment section is full of people acting like AI is going to make most jobs obsolete within a matter of years. One of the top comments as I write this is from someone writing melodramatically about Sam Altman taking jobs away from their tradesman relatives with “plasticized fingers” from the comfort of his “pretty offices”. This is the kind of histrionics you get when people identify a trend and extrapolate it to absurd conclusions on unrealistic timelines. I can’t tell if these people actually believe that robots are coming to take our jobs (including physical ones) in a few years or if this is just pearl-clutching at the way the world is changing when they’d prefer that everything stayed the same. > There probably will be a set of skills incredibly difficult to get that will earn you enough money to live a comfortable life. And that’s the problem. Even now, lots of people never attain those skills, and they end up working at a factory or at an Amazon fulfillment center. If we don’t fix things somehow, how much worse will it be in the age of AI? You’re making the same mistake I see throughout this thread, which is assuming that AI can only be a subtractive force and nothing else will change about the world. An AI-centric world isn’t going to look exactly like today’s world but with fewer jobs. The price of those “comfortable life” things would go down and availability would go up if everything was automated away. If you treat the future like a carbon copy of today but with workers replaced by robots then it’s bleak, but that’s a failure in acknowledging that economies evolve with technology. It’s the same reason the world didn’t collapse when technology enabled people to do something other than work on farms.
- dsign 3y ago
  > If you treat the future like a carbon copy of today but with workers replaced by robots then it’s bleak, but that’s a failure in acknowledging that economies evolve with technology. No. Economies evolve with technology. Of that I'm sure. And I'm doing my darnest best to continue benefiting from those changes. But there are plenty of people who haven't fared so well. > You’re making the same mistake I see throughout this thread, which is assuming that AI can only be a subtractive force and nothing else will change about the world. On the contrary; I'm saying that we won't benefit if we continue playing the same games we have been playing so far. But you are right that that's not an AI problem; it's a people problem that we can use AIs to make worse.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  > economies evolve with technology. This is an interesting point - we got a lot of productivity out from pre-AI automation and information technology, but instead of automating away our jobs, we created new ones, some frequently called "bullshit jobs" because the economy as it is defined can't handle a huge mass of people who are not "working" on something. One such overestimation was self-driving cars - we all thought, ten years ago, our cars would have the front seats turned backwards while the car would take us safely to our destinations. That didn't pan out, despite the humongous hype (remember the Dojo computer?) and Uber and Lyft still employs meatware-guided cars.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > This comment section is full of people acting like AI is going to make most jobs obsolete within a matter of years. One of the top comments as I write this is from someone writing melodramatically about Sam Altman taking jobs away from their tradesman relatives with “plasticized fingers” from the comfort of his “pretty offices”. This is the kind of histrionics you get when people identify a trend and extrapolate it to absurd conclusions on unrealistic timelines. "within a matter of years" has two very different meanings: a few years from now, or a few years from when the AI is good enough. > If you treat the future like a carbon copy of today but with workers replaced by robots then it’s bleak, but that’s a failure in acknowledging that economies evolve with technology. > It’s the same reason the world didn’t collapse when technology enabled people to do something other than work on farms. Absolutely agree. Unfortunately, that transition from agricultural to industrial did mess a lot of things up. Some was our own ignorance of the direct impacts of our actions (for example, the first people to realise CO2 would cause global warming thought this would be good), while some other issues were our ignorance of group dynamics and responses to incentives (which is basically why neither laissez-faire capitalism nor communism worked quite as intended), and finally quite a lot of the world was very upset to find itself being ruled over by a small moist island in the North Atlantic whose leaders treated everyone more than 60 miles from St. Paul's Cathedral as primitives and barbarians fit only to provide curios for museums.

by dsign 3y ago

Aurornis 3y ago

> Let’s assume for a moment that AIs turn up as you say, and that there is nothing nefarious. The parent comment didn’t say “nothing nefarious” at all. It just said we overestimate the short term impact. This comment section is full of people acting like AI is going to make most jobs obsolete within a matter of years. One of the top comments as I write this is from someone writing melodramatically about Sam Altman taking jobs away from their tradesman relatives with “plasticized fingers” from the comfort of his “pretty offices”. This is the kind of histrionics you get when people identify a trend and extrapolate it to absurd conclusions on unrealistic timelines. I can’t tell if these people actually believe that robots are coming to take our jobs (including physical ones) in a few years or if this is just pearl-clutching at the way the world is changing when they’d prefer that everything stayed the same. > There probably will be a set of skills incredibly difficult to get that will earn you enough money to live a comfortable life. And that’s the problem. Even now, lots of people never attain those skills, and they end up working at a factory or at an Amazon fulfillment center. If we don’t fix things somehow, how much worse will it be in the age of AI? You’re making the same mistake I see throughout this thread, which is assuming that AI can only be a subtractive force and nothing else will change about the world. An AI-centric world isn’t going to look exactly like today’s world but with fewer jobs. The price of those “comfortable life” things would go down and availability would go up if everything was automated away. If you treat the future like a carbon copy of today but with workers replaced by robots then it’s bleak, but that’s a failure in acknowledging that economies evolve with technology. It’s the same reason the world didn’t collapse when technology enabled people to do something other than work on farms.

dsign 3y ago
> If you treat the future like a carbon copy of today but with workers replaced by robots then it’s bleak, but that’s a failure in acknowledging that economies evolve with technology. No. Economies evolve with technology. Of that I'm sure. And I'm doing my darnest best to continue benefiting from those changes. But there are plenty of people who haven't fared so well. > You’re making the same mistake I see throughout this thread, which is assuming that AI can only be a subtractive force and nothing else will change about the world. On the contrary; I'm saying that we won't benefit if we continue playing the same games we have been playing so far. But you are right that that's not an AI problem; it's a people problem that we can use AIs to make worse.
rbanffy 3y ago
> economies evolve with technology. This is an interesting point - we got a lot of productivity out from pre-AI automation and information technology, but instead of automating away our jobs, we created new ones, some frequently called "bullshit jobs" because the economy as it is defined can't handle a huge mass of people who are not "working" on something. One such overestimation was self-driving cars - we all thought, ten years ago, our cars would have the front seats turned backwards while the car would take us safely to our destinations. That didn't pan out, despite the humongous hype (remember the Dojo computer?) and Uber and Lyft still employs meatware-guided cars.
ben_w 3y ago
> This comment section is full of people acting like AI is going to make most jobs obsolete within a matter of years. One of the top comments as I write this is from someone writing melodramatically about Sam Altman taking jobs away from their tradesman relatives with “plasticized fingers” from the comfort of his “pretty offices”. This is the kind of histrionics you get when people identify a trend and extrapolate it to absurd conclusions on unrealistic timelines. "within a matter of years" has two very different meanings: a few years from now, or a few years from when the AI is good enough. > If you treat the future like a carbon copy of today but with workers replaced by robots then it’s bleak, but that’s a failure in acknowledging that economies evolve with technology. > It’s the same reason the world didn’t collapse when technology enabled people to do something other than work on farms. Absolutely agree. Unfortunately, that transition from agricultural to industrial did mess a lot of things up. Some was our own ignorance of the direct impacts of our actions (for example, the first people to realise CO2 would cause global warming thought this would be good), while some other issues were our ignorance of group dynamics and responses to incentives (which is basically why neither laissez-faire capitalism nor communism worked quite as intended), and finally quite a lot of the world was very upset to find itself being ruled over by a small moist island in the North Atlantic whose leaders treated everyone more than 60 miles from St. Paul's Cathedral as primitives and barbarians fit only to provide curios for museums.