3 ms·

TL;DR: Humans can be worse than robots in everything and still have well paying jobs due to comparative advantage. Comparative advantage: https://en.wikipedia.

by nabla9 3y ago

TL;DR: Humans can be worse than robots in everything and still have well paying jobs due to comparative advantage. Comparative advantage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

mitthrowaway2 3y ago
Yes, unfortunately, Noah's argument rests on at least two assumptions that do not hold: 1) That constraints on compute will mean that humans will have jobs to do that AIs are too busy to do, because they're fully maxed out on capacity doing more important jobs. This doesn't hold up when the marginal cost of creating and running a new AI instance falls below the marginal cost of raising and feeding a human. Noah believes it will not because he assumes: 2) that the resources that AIs need (compute) are not in competition with the resources that humans need (food). However, they are. We can repurpose farmland and irrigation water to datacenters, fabs, and cooling towers. Maybe that wouldn't matter if all the AI-created wealth meant that you didn't need to do valuable labor to feed yourself, but: 3) If vast wealth is created by AI, there will be enough for everybody, so there's no need to be rushing to accumulate capital now. In his article, dismisses the people who are worried that the AI's owners will accumulate all the wealth and be the only ones who can afford food or housing. Comparative advantage provides no reassurance here; there's nothing in economics that prevents productivity gains from being outpaced by a growing wealth disparity that provides all the productivity gains to the top and then some. And it's exactly the outcome you'd expect without government redistribution.
rvnx 3y ago
The main advantage of humans for now is interaction with the physical world, once that it is solved (near end of the year will start with Tesla bot and similar), then it is going to make humans be less at an advantage. This way humans can fallback to their main activity: which is not art; because art has been taken by AI; but eating. At least eating is not something AI plans to do.
- ardaoweo 3y ago
  Have there actually been advances in robotics that could make them mainstream, or is the progress still painfully slow? I think robotics would be the next logical step after AI hype, but I'm having hard time figuring out which company will be the next Nvidia there.
  - hlfshell 3y ago
    No one is there yet. We have made enormous jumps with transformer models (language models being integrated in the stack, and vision language models (VLM), and even vision language action models (VLA)). Pair this with recent advances in reinforcement learning and we can do things we couldn't do a few years ago; the whole space is fascinating! ...but we're nowhere near usable robotics in complex human environments for complex multistage tasks yet. It's an incredibly difficult problem where we still don't have the hardware, the software, or the sensors for it. The other thing to keep in mind is that since it's so expensive and difficult to do, there's no marketplace yet driving significant advances like we had with phones to hone in on such efficient amazing pieces of tech across the industry. I wrote a bit about where we're at with the research last year; it's a bit out of date with even cooler advancements, which is why I'm working on another article in the same vein now. https://hlfshell.ai/posts/llms-and-robotics-papers-2023/ https://hlfshell.ai/posts/llms-and-robotics-papers-2023/ I also did a project (Master's thesis) integrating an LLM into a ROS2 stack as a high level action planner, specifically to prove that LLMs have contextual understanding of the real world that can benefit planning missions. https://hlfshell.ai/posts/llm-task-planner/ https://hlfshell.ai/posts/llm-task-planner/ Always happy to talk this subject.
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  Not just eating, but reproducing and seeking pleasure from anything they can.
- frituur 3y ago
  Clearly you haven't heard about EATR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energetically_Autonomous_Tactical_Robot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energetically_Autonomous_Tac...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
amelius 3y ago
Yes, but this is an advantage that will become less and less true, very quickly. It's not like we will converge to some state where AI workers and human workers will coexist in some ratio.
- nabla9 3y ago
  From your response it looks like you don't know what comparative advantage is. Comparative advantage does not mean that humans are better than AI at something. "Comparative advantage" != "Absolute Advantage" Comparative advantages don't usually disappear just because one party gets better and better.
  - amelius 3y ago
    Hardware is getting cheaper and more plentiful. If you need AI to do more work and you need more hardware, you just buy more hardware. And this becomes more true with time.

by nabla9 3y ago

mitthrowaway2 3y ago

Yes, unfortunately, Noah's argument rests on at least two assumptions that do not hold: 1) That constraints on compute will mean that humans will have jobs to do that AIs are too busy to do, because they're fully maxed out on capacity doing more important jobs. This doesn't hold up when the marginal cost of creating and running a new AI instance falls below the marginal cost of raising and feeding a human. Noah believes it will not because he assumes: 2) that the resources that AIs need (compute) are not in competition with the resources that humans need (food). However, they are. We can repurpose farmland and irrigation water to datacenters, fabs, and cooling towers. Maybe that wouldn't matter if all the AI-created wealth meant that you didn't need to do valuable labor to feed yourself, but: 3) If vast wealth is created by AI, there will be enough for everybody, so there's no need to be rushing to accumulate capital now. In his article, dismisses the people who are worried that the AI's owners will accumulate all the wealth and be the only ones who can afford food or housing. Comparative advantage provides no reassurance here; there's nothing in economics that prevents productivity gains from being outpaced by a growing wealth disparity that provides all the productivity gains to the top and then some. And it's exactly the outcome you'd expect without government redistribution.

rvnx 3y ago

The main advantage of humans for now is interaction with the physical world, once that it is solved (near end of the year will start with Tesla bot and similar), then it is going to make humans be less at an advantage. This way humans can fallback to their main activity: which is not art; because art has been taken by AI; but eating. At least eating is not something AI plans to do.

ardaoweo 3y ago
Have there actually been advances in robotics that could make them mainstream, or is the progress still painfully slow? I think robotics would be the next logical step after AI hype, but I'm having hard time figuring out which company will be the next Nvidia there.
- hlfshell 3y ago
  No one is there yet. We have made enormous jumps with transformer models (language models being integrated in the stack, and vision language models (VLM), and even vision language action models (VLA)). Pair this with recent advances in reinforcement learning and we can do things we couldn't do a few years ago; the whole space is fascinating! ...but we're nowhere near usable robotics in complex human environments for complex multistage tasks yet. It's an incredibly difficult problem where we still don't have the hardware, the software, or the sensors for it. The other thing to keep in mind is that since it's so expensive and difficult to do, there's no marketplace yet driving significant advances like we had with phones to hone in on such efficient amazing pieces of tech across the industry. I wrote a bit about where we're at with the research last year; it's a bit out of date with even cooler advancements, which is why I'm working on another article in the same vein now. https://hlfshell.ai/posts/llms-and-robotics-papers-2023/ https://hlfshell.ai/posts/llms-and-robotics-papers-2023/ I also did a project (Master's thesis) integrating an LLM into a ROS2 stack as a high level action planner, specifically to prove that LLMs have contextual understanding of the real world that can benefit planning missions. https://hlfshell.ai/posts/llm-task-planner/ https://hlfshell.ai/posts/llm-task-planner/ Always happy to talk this subject.
mewpmewp2 3y ago
Not just eating, but reproducing and seeking pleasure from anything they can.
frituur 3y ago
Clearly you haven't heard about EATR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energetically_Autonomous_Tactical_Robot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energetically_Autonomous_Tac...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

amelius 3y ago

Yes, but this is an advantage that will become less and less true, very quickly. It's not like we will converge to some state where AI workers and human workers will coexist in some ratio.

nabla9 3y ago
From your response it looks like you don't know what comparative advantage is. Comparative advantage does not mean that humans are better than AI at something. "Comparative advantage" != "Absolute Advantage" Comparative advantages don't usually disappear just because one party gets better and better.
- amelius 3y ago
  Hardware is getting cheaper and more plentiful. If you need AI to do more work and you need more hardware, you just buy more hardware. And this becomes more true with time.