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The point I’ve seen raised that seems to escape many is that AI doesn’t need to be better than the best human to be profoundly disruptive - it only needs to be

The point I’ve seen raised that seems to escape many is that AI doesn’t need to be better than the best human to be profoundly disruptive - it only needs to be as good as a mediocre human carrying out a rote task to absolutely change the world.

gonzo41 2y ago
ATM's killed bank tellers for the most part, people changed how they work in banks to move up the value chain. The same thing will happen. Also, expect a backlash to AI taking human service jobs. Like having to scan a QR code at a restaurant. Its a bad experience that shows you're enraptured by a technology and don't care about the customer. I don't disagree that AI will be disruptive. I just think it's going to find a place in technical fields and more people will want to remain talking and interacting with people like we've done for the last 100K years.
- Turing_Machine 2y ago
  > ATM's killed bank tellers for the most part, Has it really? I haven't noticed any drastic decline over the years. Maybe some, but I wouldn't describe it as "killed". What universal ATMs and cards have really killed off is personal checks, IMO.
  - gonzo41 2y ago
    There was something like an order of magnitude delcine in the number of teller positions when banks rolled out ATM's. They've been around for so long that most people don't remember when they were uncommon. But ask yourself this, when did you last go into a bank. I've done a home loan application on a smart phone. Anyway, stuff is changing, There's always going to be jobs about. People are flexible and can learn things, AI ain't all that.
tmountain 2y ago
Yes, but the likelihood of it having similar capabilities to a human just seems really low. If AI develops “cognitive” capabilities, it won’t do so in any sort of human like way, not will it reach equilibrium at “mediocre human” levels of performance. It will rapidly evolve into something we can barely recognize because it’s not constrained by evolutionary boundaries in the same way we are.
- ripjaygn 2y ago
  > It will rapidly evolve into something we can barely recognize because it’s not constrained by evolutionary boundaries in the same way we are It is constrained by physical infrastructure like compute and memory, just like the brain which had to become physically bigger to get better.
tivert 2y ago
> it only needs to be as good as a mediocre human carrying out a rote task to absolutely change the world. And "absolutely chang[ing] the world" is often assumed to be good, but that's not necessarily so. There are a lot of mediocre humans in the world, only capable of rote work. If we push automation to the maximum, eventually we'll reach a point were those people have nothing economically viable to do. And then you reach a decision point: support them on welfare, forever? Immiserate them and hope they die off (what our current social framework will invariably choose)?
- madaxe_again 2y ago
  Capitalism requires consumers. Ergo, to keep the wheels turning, either everyone is going to have to become an artisan, or UBI is going to have to be a thing.
  - tivert 2y ago
    > Capitalism requires consumers. I disagree with that premise. For certain businesses it's fundamentally true, and right now it's broadly true because of the limitations of our technology, but I don't think it's fundamentally true for capitalism. If the AGI hype pans out, I think we'd see an transition into an economy with a lot fewer consumers. The capitalists would eventually amass all the valuable resources for themselves, and the positive externality that currently drives the consumer economy (the need for labor to make use of capital) would run down and eventually die. Then you'd have a small cadre of elites who own the automation and the resources, and use them chiefly for vanity projects and maybe some B2B activity between themselves (e.g. electricity sales), a small somewhat larger cadre of "middle class" providing luxury/vanity goods to the core elite (e.g. high end prostitutes, Mars colonists), and a great mass of economically useless people living at the margins. > Ergo, to keep the wheels turning, either everyone is going to have to become an artisan, or UBI is going to have to be a thing. So the former won't work because artists can't feed themselves by trading art among themselves, and the latter's not necessary because an Elon Musk focused on personal vanity projects doesn't need consumers, he just needs resources an an AGI bureaucracy with AGI robots to command around.

gonzo41 2y ago

ATM's killed bank tellers for the most part, people changed how they work in banks to move up the value chain. The same thing will happen. Also, expect a backlash to AI taking human service jobs. Like having to scan a QR code at a restaurant. Its a bad experience that shows you're enraptured by a technology and don't care about the customer. I don't disagree that AI will be disruptive. I just think it's going to find a place in technical fields and more people will want to remain talking and interacting with people like we've done for the last 100K years.

Turing_Machine 2y ago
> ATM's killed bank tellers for the most part, Has it really? I haven't noticed any drastic decline over the years. Maybe some, but I wouldn't describe it as "killed". What universal ATMs and cards have really killed off is personal checks, IMO.
- gonzo41 2y ago
  There was something like an order of magnitude delcine in the number of teller positions when banks rolled out ATM's. They've been around for so long that most people don't remember when they were uncommon. But ask yourself this, when did you last go into a bank. I've done a home loan application on a smart phone. Anyway, stuff is changing, There's always going to be jobs about. People are flexible and can learn things, AI ain't all that.

tmountain 2y ago

Yes, but the likelihood of it having similar capabilities to a human just seems really low. If AI develops “cognitive” capabilities, it won’t do so in any sort of human like way, not will it reach equilibrium at “mediocre human” levels of performance. It will rapidly evolve into something we can barely recognize because it’s not constrained by evolutionary boundaries in the same way we are.

ripjaygn 2y ago
> It will rapidly evolve into something we can barely recognize because it’s not constrained by evolutionary boundaries in the same way we are It is constrained by physical infrastructure like compute and memory, just like the brain which had to become physically bigger to get better.

tivert 2y ago

> it only needs to be as good as a mediocre human carrying out a rote task to absolutely change the world. And "absolutely chang[ing] the world" is often assumed to be good, but that's not necessarily so. There are a lot of mediocre humans in the world, only capable of rote work. If we push automation to the maximum, eventually we'll reach a point were those people have nothing economically viable to do. And then you reach a decision point: support them on welfare, forever? Immiserate them and hope they die off (what our current social framework will invariably choose)?

madaxe_again 2y ago
Capitalism requires consumers. Ergo, to keep the wheels turning, either everyone is going to have to become an artisan, or UBI is going to have to be a thing.
- tivert 2y ago
  > Capitalism requires consumers. I disagree with that premise. For certain businesses it's fundamentally true, and right now it's broadly true because of the limitations of our technology, but I don't think it's fundamentally true for capitalism. If the AGI hype pans out, I think we'd see an transition into an economy with a lot fewer consumers. The capitalists would eventually amass all the valuable resources for themselves, and the positive externality that currently drives the consumer economy (the need for labor to make use of capital) would run down and eventually die. Then you'd have a small cadre of elites who own the automation and the resources, and use them chiefly for vanity projects and maybe some B2B activity between themselves (e.g. electricity sales), a small somewhat larger cadre of "middle class" providing luxury/vanity goods to the core elite (e.g. high end prostitutes, Mars colonists), and a great mass of economically useless people living at the margins. > Ergo, to keep the wheels turning, either everyone is going to have to become an artisan, or UBI is going to have to be a thing. So the former won't work because artists can't feed themselves by trading art among themselves, and the latter's not necessary because an Elon Musk focused on personal vanity projects doesn't need consumers, he just needs resources an an AGI bureaucracy with AGI robots to command around.