11 ms·

I wonder at the long term vision for humanity. We have AI replacing a lot of art, writing, coding, etc. We have a bunch of robotics companies racing to replace

• tonygrue 2y ago
  My thoughts are a few: There is a lot of undone labor in the world. In developing countries the middle class has drivers, cooks, housekeepers. That’s only possible due to inequality. With automation we can all get that. These people with tons of help by and large live fulfilled lives. You find fulfillment in family, friendships, and non necessary creation (art, research, etc); whatever makes you happy. But most of all, the Industrial Revolution made people think we’d all be idle and nothing can be further from those predictions. Many more people, and many more jobs, and most of the world still lives in relative poverty and various forms of insecurity and unmet material and labor needs. Finally there are a lot of problems we have (thousands of health conditions, the environment, autocrats) that will prob take centuries to tackle even with ai, robotics, and being freed up from menial labor.
  • prettyStandard 2y ago
    No health problems if there's no people to have them.
    • forgetfreeman 2y ago
      Additionally issues around global carbon footprints quickly become tractable when you eliminate the bulk of humanity.
      • ben_w 2y ago
        Only at the 99.9% level, and only briefly before the majority of the remainder look at the open and empty planet and go "oo, nice, free land for a big family". If you "solve" this in any way other than giving people better options for them that are inherently also better for the environment, it's unstable — even if almost every nation tries to enforce it at the same time, whoever defects (in the Nash game theory sense) literally inherits the Earth. (And that's why I'm also expecting Von Neumann machines to be the environmental disaster of the solar system within a century of someone making one: game theory says that whoever does that sucessfully, inherits the future light cone).
        • forgetfreeman 2y ago
          I must have deadpanned that a little too hard. Was intended as sarcasm.
          • ben_w 2y ago
            Ah, fair enough. Difficult to tell, as I've seen that position held seriously here.
            • forgetfreeman 2y ago
              I mean, bricking the human population would certainly reduce our species carbon footprint, so the position itself should be fairly uncontroversial. Expressing excitement at the prospect seems pretty broken however.
  • aljgz 2y ago
    As optimistic as your comment is, the fact that there are lots of problems does not mean that we will tackle them. In my opinion, if we don't aim at doing anything about it, the gap between the rich and the poor will widen. Both between societies, and within one society. I'm now in Canada, but in my childhood country, most of the recent "smart" (meaning connected) devices and the recent AI models are not available. This is starts a viscious cycle that makes things worse and worse. For the less connected high teck devices, the ratio of the price (That's set based on supply/demand in the richest countries) to income (that's damanged by sanctions and general government stupidity) is getting so high that it's really hard to get high-end devices. As the labour required to produce goods and services is automated, one possible scenario is that fewer and fewer people will stay "relevant", while the rest will sink and become invisible. Things can be avoided, but looking at countries that have been unable/unwilling to ensure housing (as one of the 3 most fundamental material needs of the human: food, housing, clothing) stays affordable, does not raise hope. In my opinion, the housing problem is extremely easy to solve when looking at the problem as a technical one, and impossible when you include the way economic incentives are working at it. I hope I'm wrong, but when I project the current path into future, it's not bright.
    • tonygrue 2y ago
      I share all your concerns. I considered mentioning them but figured I should keep my reply focused on idea of freeing people up isn’t inherently bad. In particular zero sum resources like land ownership will be an increased challenge. And our governments have been slow to respond to things like climate change and we could be slow to respond here.
    • seventhtiger 2y ago
      Is our goal to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor, or to improve the lives of the poor? Because the gap itself is actually irrelevant to poor people's lives. Rich people's improvement outpacing poor people's is not necessarily an issue. Second, a financial gap does not necessarily translate to a material gap. Someone with 1,000,000x someone else's net worth still buys the same iPhone and drinks the same coca cola. Many important wellbeing factors are not actually blocked by finance, like healthcare and education. Even if you take all the rich people's money and repurpose to education not much will change. Maybe an iPad for every kid, but what good does that do? Housing is actually a great example. Real estate has a way of sucking up entire GDPs worth of money. As a country you can't pay your way out of housing problems. Look at something like China which has been consistently overbuilding housing for decades now. They still have housing issues.
  • rqtwteye 2y ago
    "Finally there are a lot of problems we have (thousands of health conditions, the environment, autocrats) that will prob take centuries to tackle even with ai, robotics, and being freed up from menial labor." I am very worried that autocrats will use AI and robotics to get rid of the opposition problem. I can't even imagine what Hitler or Stalin would have done with the technology we have now or will have soon.
  • amelius 2y ago
    I'm curious, do we see a decline in art freshmen in recent years?
    • BitPolice 2y ago
      I'm not sure first year students always have selected a major, but if we go by degree at graduation, I think this article (and the charts therein) is useful: https://www.chartr.co/newsletters/2023-10-08 https://www.chartr.co/newsletters/2023-10-08 (n.b. No archive.org evergreen link available, alas) > " 20 years ago, roughly 8% of all US bachelor degrees were attained in the 4 core humanities subjects — a figure that’s fallen every year since 2007, with the share now sitting at just 4% per data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Conversely, STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and math) have been growing at an unparalleled pace, as students swap Charles Dickens for computational dynamics and Jane Austen forJavascript." > "Indeed, computer science has risen from a 2.7% share of all degrees in 2009 to 5.4% by the end of 2022, while engineering has risen from 7.2% to 9.4% in the same time frame — more than double the share that the core humanities subjects currently occupy."
  • insane_dreamer 2y ago
    > But most of all, the Industrial Revolution made people think we’d all be idle and nothing can be further from those predictions. The Industrial Revolution is often used as a benchmark of sorts for how society will adapt to a new technology that eliminates many of the jobs that were previously needed. But what is very different with AGI, or something close to it (i.e., a robot that can learn to do almost any physical job, an AI software that can learn to do almost any digital job), is that there is no new set of jobs that humans can turn to since, by definition, a physical or digital AGI should be able to learn those too. So even if humans discover a whole new set of professions -- as we did with factories and then with computers -- companies will quickly train robots/AIs to do those better and faster.
  • fraboniface 2y ago
    Creation is the single most fulfilling human experience after having children (which is also creation). I'm not sure we want to take that away from us.
• bamboozled 2y ago
  I was down voted before for asking a similar question, I have no idea what the plan is but I struggle to understand what the future looks like when we literally have nothing to do. Why would I even bother with a hobby when a robot can do everything 10x better? Maybe just "enjoy nature" would be the best bet if we survive the robot wars.
  • bithive123 2y ago
    What do you do now when there is nothing you have to do? Are all hobbyists doing it to be "better" than someone else? If I get to choose between the status quo, where I have to work for 30+ years to have a chance at an uncertain retirement, or spending the rest of my life exploring the question of what to do with my time, I know which I'd pick.
    • bamboozled 2y ago
      Society is imposing the 30+ year working requirement on us. It's not really required nor as it been for basically ever. We don't need advanced robots to stop that madness.
  • golol 2y ago
    Inbetween the current world full of labor scarcity, and the philosophical dilemma "what do I even do" post-scarcity utopia, is a world similar to our current one with much less labor scarcity and much more quality of life. That's what we're aiming for right now. What comes afterwards we can worry about then.
    • forgetfreeman 2y ago
      Quality of life for who, though? That's kind of the point of all this back and forth isn't it? Because if prior examples are anything to go on the likeliest outcome is we're talking about further increasing QoL for a small minority of individuals who least need it at the expense of basically everyone else.
      • 2y ago
• RoadRunner_23 2y ago
  Imagine these kind of robots in the home of of 2 or more kids. Roomba doing vacuuming, this robot doing laundry and folding. Parents would be spending quality time with her kids, helping them with their homework or helping with their practice - sports or music, instead of getting frustrated looking pile of laundry and kids don't have nothing to wear. Kids now have more questions due to quality engagement. So they would visit library or if they are into sports, parents spend more time with them. Automation has always been there. We just pick up things we didn't get a chance to pick up. We travelled on cars when horses were no more needed. We built bigger and better things, when we don't have to make our own hammer. Also, we created more problems from these and needed more innovation to fix them. We always worked around 40 hrs a week since time immemorial. So, we will continue to work 40hrs.
  • plaguuuuuu 2y ago
    More likely, parents are going to be working while robots pick kids up from school, read them some books, assist with homework.... In countries where labour is cheap enough relative to the professional class (eg Singapore) humans are currently hired to perform these tasks.
  • shiroiushi 2y ago
    >Roomba doing vacuuming This is a bad example I think: Roomba seems to be dying, as other competitors are making vacuum robots that look similar yet are technically far superior. It's almost like talking about spreadsheets and giving Lotus as the canonical example.
  • david-gpu 2y ago
    I find household chores to be a welcome break from paying constant attention to our children. They are exhausting. We deserve some "me time".
    • grahamj 2y ago
      yeah I want robots so I can take a nap :D
  • 2y ago
• hackable_sand 2y ago
  Nothing has changed. We'll still be doing the same things we've been doing for thousands of years. This is nothing new.
• petra 2y ago
  What roles did monks praying play in this World? What role do people in the Fashion industry(for ex.) play in this World? It's all a bunch of made up stories. We'll make up other stories.
  • shiroiushi 2y ago
    People in the fashion industry do the same thing, basically, that architects and car body designers and other product designers do: they design the clothes that people wear. Apparently, people don't want to just keep wearing the same designs that were popular in 1950 or 1850 or even 10 years ago, so clothing designers create new designs. Many of them go nowhere, but some are popular are sell well. Over time, this results in fashion trends changing, which is why you can look at photographs of people in the 1980s or 2000s and see that their clothing styles are noticeably different from now. Of course, this generally seems to be more noticeable to women than men as they generally have a greater interest in being fashionable (though plenty of men do too, though probably far, far less among the crowd that frequents HN).
• ho23i43242324 2y ago
  Nothing. I'm 99% sure that old ideas of eugenics will crop up massively (together with a new strain of pro-colonial history-denialism in the "truth-spouting" right), and a new age of genocidal wars with robots will take place for taking over material resources. We under estimate how much of "Western morality" has nothing to do with the "goodness of our hearts" (just see the propaganda for wars over the years). Very dark times ahead.
• marsten 2y ago
  There are many jobs where people prefer other people to fill those roles, irrespective of the ability of machines. Most people don't want to watch computers play chess, or spend money on computer-generated art, or go to a robot therapist. Ah, you say: But such jobs don't employ many people! Most people do things that nobody cares if they're automated away. Surely we can't all be chess players or artists? To which I say: The job market will adapt, and people will move into those jobs where customers prefer to have a human. We have no real idea what those jobs are today, but some of them might be the things you wish you had more of, but are too expensive for most of us to hire someone for. (Interior decorator? Personal chef? ...)
• emmanueloga_ 2y ago
  Basic universal income makes sense to me. I imagine a society where everyone is free to create art or relax in hammocks all day. A basic universal income would not be enough to fund world travel, your fav consumer items, or ambitious projects, so I don't foresee it causing an intellectual meltdown in society as some fear-monger (As an aside: I speculate people afraid of this may likely be the actual lazy members of our current society :-). If everybody had their basic needs covered, that should actually lead to more prosperity and reduced crime, leading to more people being able to produce superior knowledge, art and enterprises of all sorts. To make science or art or whatnot, you first need to be able eat! The question of whether Silicon Valley's "AI luminaries" are genuinely pursuing this utopia or have a more selfish hidden agenda is another matter entirely.
  • nightski 2y ago
    There's no need for UBI imho. If the technology really advances to that point it will be very cheap to live.
    • carapace 2y ago
      > If the technology really advances to that point it will be very cheap to live. Yes. But the flipside of that is that it's hard to earn money. The cheaper it is to live, the harder it is to make money. The problem UBI solves is when most humans can no longer compete with machines in the economic system. Once that happens there are only a few options, and the least unpleasant is simply to give them (us) money tokens.
      • emmanueloga_ 2y ago
        Right! Also note that some concerns in this thread include displacement of humans in jobs that are likely to be automated first. UBI mitigates a lot of those concerns.
      • nightski 2y ago
        Humans don't need to compete with machines in the economic system. Machines aren't out to make a profit. Only humans are. The truth is if this technology really advances to the point we are talking about money won't really be a relevant concept. Money at it's essence imho is a claim on future labor. If that labor is extremely cheap, then all money is nearly worthless. But LLMs/transformers are not this technology. We need some significant advancements before we start seeing things like this.
• torlok 2y ago
  Hopefully we transition into a post-work society. Socialist countries will stick the landing, while the bottom of the American society plunges more into poverty. It's never too late to stop voting for people who despise you, and think that "temporary hardships" are necessary as they plan to cut government spending.
  • CaptainFever 2y ago
    Do you mean social-capitalist (welfare state) countries? There's almost no socialist countries nowadays, perhaps maybe North Korea and Cuba. But yes, I share your vision for a post-scarcity society.
    • derektank 2y ago
      I would argue Saudi Arabia is the closest thing to a post-scarcity / socialist society we have to compare to. Something like 70% or citizens are employed by the state of Saudi Arabia (which obviously is funded by oil sales). All you have to do is swap out the migrants that do all the real labor for robots and you basically have a sneak peak at the future
• eMPee584 2y ago
  We could transition to an open access economy, with universal basic services (instead of monetary income), open source products and federated and trade-free coordination of resource flows. We could liberate ourselves from the compulsory race of competition and its manifold symptoms.. no time pressure, no low-quality products and we could become friends with the machines to avoid (ani)matrix-like escalation..
  • ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago
    What would the incentives be to provide all of that other than to curb the eventual chaos?
    • realce 2y ago
      Why do you need incentives? We're talking about the "do art all day because you're bored" phase of the singularity. If people exist, they'll do it because it's just fun to do.
      • hackable_sand 2y ago
        This is correct. We are already doing everything correctly. We just need these efficiencies distributed to more people. Eventually we should plateau into few hour work weeks for vital labor.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  • insane_dreamer 2y ago
    This is along the lines of what we need -- but those who control the world's resources would never allow it. I'm not optimistic.
  • nradov 2y ago
    And who will provide those universal basic services without getting paid? And let's not have some pseudo-religious nonsense claim that magic robots are going to do it all for us.
• reducesuffering 2y ago
  Obsolescence by unfathomably powerful systems, by the track we're on
• abraxas 2y ago
  Wall-E in the best case, Manna (https://marshallbrain.com/manna https://marshallbrain.com/manna) in the most likely scenario. But I'm a pessimist.
  • ConspiracyFact 2y ago
    Manna is such a cool story. It’s too bad the author copped out at the end instead of fully exploring a world with AGI but no robots.
• xanderlewis 2y ago
  Fixing the AI/robots when they inevitably go wrong and can’t repair themselves, no matter how sophisticated they are. It seems reasonable to think this is a possibility. We might get something that could be called ‘AGI’ but that still frequently requires human intervention.
• mch82 2y ago
  Your question is great. It’s easy to forget that people are the point, not the tech. When I was in college, automation was envisioned to reduce injuries to people, increase access to goods, and to create more discretionary time. Somehow we’ve lost the focus on human outcomes.
• visarga 2y ago
  I would not say "replacing" but rather "helping". Replacing means there is a fixed lump of work, but in reality work scales up when capability improves. When you make the road wider, more cars fill it up to the max again. To think that work is fixed means to believe we can't possibly want more, better and faster. It's not like we are out of ideas. Take software for example - with each new language, library or project on Github we can automate and make it easier to build things, yet after 60 years of self-cannibalizing software we have more developers than ever.
• austhrow743 2y ago
  We will work jobs where being human is an innate part of the value proposition eg. servants, wait staff, sex workers. There are also jobs you wouldn't historically thought of where being human is an innate part of the value proposition but I've seen takes on here from people saying they'll stop watching movies and go to see live plays when movies become purely AI generated.
• scooke 2y ago
  The movie, "The Matrix", actually is a clue. In it humanity is reduced to mere batteries. But in fact it IS the energy we bring which is crucial. No AI, made by no machine, would ever exist without our energy - focused thought, industry to make machines, ideas to put them to use, insight to see problems. The future is still humanity.
• deleted 2y ago
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• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Important question. I think it could go two directions: - one is that those who control the resources become wealthier, by cutting costs, and societies become even more unequal as they are now, with the lower economic classes, who are largely unemployed, scrape together a sorry existence; disgruntled masses cause social instability (and crime) which means governments have to take a firmer hand and become more authoritarian to control them. You could also end up with social revolutions. - another is that we transition to a different type of economy altogether, based not on scarcity of resources (as is presently), but on all citizens having their needs met without having to work for them. This has been anathema throughout history, so I'm not hopeful. In either case, these ideas that "AI will do everything and we'll be free to do the things we enjoy doing" is complete fantasy, or at least limited to the few who will have jobs/money. You can't enjoy doing anything if you're not putting food on the table.