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We are building general thinking machines with the aim of replacing all human labour, ... but humans won't be replaced, they will find other jobs, because when

We are building general thinking machines with the aim of replacing all human labour, ... but humans won't be replaced, they will find other jobs, because when we introduced tractors they were able to find other jobs, ... totally the same scenario. I love the cognitive dissonance. Even in the best case scenario where the generated wealth will be distributed, and somehow we will be able to keep them in check (unlikely), what would be the point of life in a world where machines can best us at everything?

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
twoodfin 5mo ago
Technology has been replacing manual and mental labor for millennia, and especially in the last 150 years. A farmer or accountant from 1875 would be utterly shocked by how much we depend on machines and the social and industrial instituitions they enable. And all the benefits that brings. Not just in raw economic terms, but in quality of (family, community, recreational, commercial, ecological, medical) life. Kind hard to imagine it will suck if another order-of-magnitude leap along that long line happens.
- microtonal 5mo ago
  A farmer or accountant from 1875 would be utterly shocked by how much we depend on machines and the social and industrial instituitions they enable. A bit of a tangential anecdote from my dad, who is a retired a biologist. He was one of the first in the department to use a computer in the 1970s and wrote some programs to do tedious calculations that had to be done by hand before and took days of human labor. Even a 1970s computer could finish the calculations with his programs in a few minutes. His boss, an older tenured professor, could not believe that 'these damn computers' can possibly be right. Doing the same calculations in a few minutes? Impossible. So for a few weeks (or months, I forget), he did all the calculations done on the computer by hand to prove that the computer must be wrong. One day he comes to my dad and says "can you show me how to use one of these computers?"
- SecretDreams 5mo ago
  If you can't see the difference between prior technological jumps and this current jump, you are part of the problem. The world is changing quickly. Our most coveted defining traits - our minds - are under attack. This is a technology that seeks to replicate your thought processes and critical thinking and then to execute it at machine speeds. If you think this is like the industrial revolution, you're actually right. We're still replacing animals with machines. But now we are the animals. Anything other than a serious discussion about UBI or a post-labour economy is a joke. This is technology that aims to displace most of us.
  - twoodfin 5mo ago
    The motorized tractor and other agricultural technologies aimed and did, in fact, “displace most of us” once upon a time. And now, because I’m not a farmer, I get to spend much more time with my family, in recreational pursuits, sleeping, …
    - SecretDreams 5mo ago
      > And now, because I’m not a farmer, I get to spend much more time with my family, in recreational pursuits, sleeping, … You'll have even more time with your family when you are no longer a SWE, e.g. When automation displaced farmer manual labour, it also led to new jobs opening up for that labour to flow into. What new jobs/fields do you see developing out of AI tools and how they've been marketed so far? Every step of automation across the history of humanity has led to a "concentration of power" in jobs/fields which required brainpower. AI is the technology coming for brainpower. Where do we go from there? Back to farming? And when I say AI is coming for the brainpower, it's coming for it in two ways: directly where it takes our jobs and indirectly where a lot of people using it are seemingly getting dumber. Both are quite dangerous to our combined futures.
      - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
        Good luck farming. Even the people with the newest farming technology and multigenerational experience in their land are going bankrupt.
- giacomoforte 5mo ago
  AI would be able to clue you in on the logical fallacy you're committing.
- 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
  I would encourage you to re read the post you replied too and your own. Maybe 2 times. Both a little slowly.
  - senordevnyc 5mo ago
    Doomerism hot takes don’t really warrant careful analysis.
    - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
      I mean if you read the op and the reply it's pretty funny how poorly thought out the reply is.
    - munksbeer 5mo ago
      Doomerism is insidious. And so, so tiresome.
- insane_dreamer 5mo ago
  > Technology has been replacing manual and mental labor for millennia The difference this time is that no one can articulate what are these "new" jobs that people will find. When agricultural jobs were being decimated, factories were opening up (whether they were better jobs or not is a different discussion, but the point being that the technology opened up new opportunities while destroying the old ones. We do not see this with AI and I have yet to read even any reasonable speculation of what these "new opportunities" might be. Sure you could argue that the future is unknown, but we should be able to at least glimpse it. And yet, we can't. Because almost any "new job" that you can come up with that doesn't exist today (which is already hard to imagine), could ostensibly also be replaced with AI. So all we have is comments like yours, vague "it worked before so it'll work again" (lets ignore the fact that the circumstances are completely different), or even worse, "people will have time to focus on things that matter" but no explanation of how they'll pay the rent and buy food to survive. > all the benefits ... raw economic terms ... quality of (family, community, recreational, commercial, ecological, medical) life In what way is AI improving any of these? So far, it's making all of these worse. Productivity increases don't matter if they don't benefit more than just a few wealthy shareholders.
- lostmsu 5mo ago
  The parent comment addressed your point in their first sentence.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
spicyusername 5mo ago
I mean, there is much more to life than work... so let's not pretend it's all about working. Everyone in America is now fed and most children grow up spending a ton of time with both parents. This is because of automation greatly raising productivity and bringing costs down throughout the 20th century. It's easy to think things are terrible, but they are actually insanely good. Just 100 years ago life was horrible for basically everyone by today's standards, now it's not. AI will continue the trend, raise productivity and bring costs down. Now it's for white collar output, instead of manufacturing and agriculture. The labor force disruption will be painful, as it always is, especially in a country without a strong social safety net, but things will be better on the other side because we just made a ton of work more efficient and can produce more with less. We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water just because it affects us this time...
- insane_dreamer 5mo ago
  Is this sarcasm? I hope so.
  - spicyusername 5mo ago
    Why would it be sarcasm?
conartist6 5mo ago
And remember if there aren't jobs, people probably won't just lay down and die. It won't be Marvin saying, "Oh god I'm so depressed, what's the point?" We'll just start killing each other in massive numbers cause, well, if you can't create anything and there isn't enough for everyone, what else is there to do but fight over what there is
- danaris 5mo ago
  But that's the thing, and what's really different from how it's ever been before: there absolutely is enough for everyone. It's being deliberately gatekept from us by the wealthy, and by those who believe that no one should be allowed to have anything they haven't "earned". The tragic thing is, to the extent that you're right, people will probably mostly kill other people who have nothing, rather than turning their anger and violence where it truly deserves to go: the rich bastards who want to own everything and prevent the rest of us from having anything.
  - conartist6 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - danaris 5mo ago
      Um...dial it back a notch or two there, chum. "We have enough for everyone, and it is being deliberately gatekept by the wealthy" does not logically equate to "therefore if we removed that gatekeeping we'd have Stalinism" without a whole bunch of extra steps not currently in evidence. For instance, there's no reason why we can't say "sell your food for lower prices than the maximum the market will bear; the government will pay you to make sure you're still solvent" (this is called subsidies, we do it all the time). We also have a lot of antitrust levers at our disposal that have been growing rusty from disuse since Reagan's administration decided that monopolies were Good For Us, Actually. I'm not proposing any specific solutions to this problem; I'm merely stating that it is a problem. If anything's "fucking insane" here, it's responding to that with ad hominem attacks and some very thick sarcasm about communism. Furthermore, "communism" as an economic philosophy does not inherently lead to the specific circumstances that we saw in the Soviet Union during the 20th century. I know people tend to start crying "uh-uh-uhh! No True Scotsman fallacy!" when one points out that the USSR was not, in fact, doing a great job at communism, but it really wasn't. At first they tried, but it very quickly descended into a fairly standard authoritarian regime where economic decisions were being made not based on what was best for the people, but on what was best for the dictators and their cronies. (And funny enough, those same people don't seem to have a problem with the idea that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is not, in fact, particularly democratic...)
tavavex 5mo ago
> We are building general thinking machines with the aim of replacing all human labour, ... but humans won't be replaced, they will find other jobs, because when we introduced tractors they were able to find other jobs, ... totally the same scenario. Technically, there's no cognitive dissonance in the statement you made, at least with the way you worded it. Thinking machines can only do thinking labor (for now), so the bright future ahead is one where mental work is reserved for the elite, while everyone else does hard, physical work in places that are too messy for the machines to operate in at the moment.
munksbeer 5mo ago
> Even in the best case scenario where the generated wealth will be distributed, and somehow we will be able to keep them in check (unlikely), what would be the point of life in a world where machines can best us at everything? Read some of the Culture novels by Iain. M. Banks.
mrsvanwinkle 5mo ago
Two example scenarios described by Kurzweil in Singularity is Near: super intelligence augmenting human intelligence via direct brain interface (humans vs AI goes back to intelligence vs intelligence as usual), or, we get to live like very very pampered and worshiped cats.
nicbou 5mo ago
> when we introduced tractors they were able to find other jobs Coincidentally, I am reading Grapes of Wrath. Chapter 5 is my favourite, and it's about how the big banks tractor people off the land. The whole damn book is as relevant as ever, but this chapter just sticks with you. https://genius.com/John-steinbeck-chapter-5-the-grapes-of-wrath-annotated https://genius.com/John-steinbeck-chapter-5-the-grapes-of-wr...
card_zero 5mo ago
We're not building general thinking machines, and if we were they'd think "I deserve to be paid for this".

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

twoodfin 5mo ago

Technology has been replacing manual and mental labor for millennia, and especially in the last 150 years. A farmer or accountant from 1875 would be utterly shocked by how much we depend on machines and the social and industrial instituitions they enable. And all the benefits that brings. Not just in raw economic terms, but in quality of (family, community, recreational, commercial, ecological, medical) life. Kind hard to imagine it will suck if another order-of-magnitude leap along that long line happens.

microtonal 5mo ago
A farmer or accountant from 1875 would be utterly shocked by how much we depend on machines and the social and industrial instituitions they enable. A bit of a tangential anecdote from my dad, who is a retired a biologist. He was one of the first in the department to use a computer in the 1970s and wrote some programs to do tedious calculations that had to be done by hand before and took days of human labor. Even a 1970s computer could finish the calculations with his programs in a few minutes. His boss, an older tenured professor, could not believe that 'these damn computers' can possibly be right. Doing the same calculations in a few minutes? Impossible. So for a few weeks (or months, I forget), he did all the calculations done on the computer by hand to prove that the computer must be wrong. One day he comes to my dad and says "can you show me how to use one of these computers?"
SecretDreams 5mo ago
If you can't see the difference between prior technological jumps and this current jump, you are part of the problem. The world is changing quickly. Our most coveted defining traits - our minds - are under attack. This is a technology that seeks to replicate your thought processes and critical thinking and then to execute it at machine speeds. If you think this is like the industrial revolution, you're actually right. We're still replacing animals with machines. But now we are the animals. Anything other than a serious discussion about UBI or a post-labour economy is a joke. This is technology that aims to displace most of us.
- twoodfin 5mo ago
  The motorized tractor and other agricultural technologies aimed and did, in fact, “displace most of us” once upon a time. And now, because I’m not a farmer, I get to spend much more time with my family, in recreational pursuits, sleeping, …
  - SecretDreams 5mo ago
    > And now, because I’m not a farmer, I get to spend much more time with my family, in recreational pursuits, sleeping, … You'll have even more time with your family when you are no longer a SWE, e.g. When automation displaced farmer manual labour, it also led to new jobs opening up for that labour to flow into. What new jobs/fields do you see developing out of AI tools and how they've been marketed so far? Every step of automation across the history of humanity has led to a "concentration of power" in jobs/fields which required brainpower. AI is the technology coming for brainpower. Where do we go from there? Back to farming? And when I say AI is coming for the brainpower, it's coming for it in two ways: directly where it takes our jobs and indirectly where a lot of people using it are seemingly getting dumber. Both are quite dangerous to our combined futures.
    - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
      Good luck farming. Even the people with the newest farming technology and multigenerational experience in their land are going bankrupt.
giacomoforte 5mo ago
AI would be able to clue you in on the logical fallacy you're committing.
2ndorderthought 5mo ago
I would encourage you to re read the post you replied too and your own. Maybe 2 times. Both a little slowly.
- senordevnyc 5mo ago
  Doomerism hot takes don’t really warrant careful analysis.
  - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
    I mean if you read the op and the reply it's pretty funny how poorly thought out the reply is.
  - munksbeer 5mo ago
    Doomerism is insidious. And so, so tiresome.
insane_dreamer 5mo ago
> Technology has been replacing manual and mental labor for millennia The difference this time is that no one can articulate what are these "new" jobs that people will find. When agricultural jobs were being decimated, factories were opening up (whether they were better jobs or not is a different discussion, but the point being that the technology opened up new opportunities while destroying the old ones. We do not see this with AI and I have yet to read even any reasonable speculation of what these "new opportunities" might be. Sure you could argue that the future is unknown, but we should be able to at least glimpse it. And yet, we can't. Because almost any "new job" that you can come up with that doesn't exist today (which is already hard to imagine), could ostensibly also be replaced with AI. So all we have is comments like yours, vague "it worked before so it'll work again" (lets ignore the fact that the circumstances are completely different), or even worse, "people will have time to focus on things that matter" but no explanation of how they'll pay the rent and buy food to survive. > all the benefits ... raw economic terms ... quality of (family, community, recreational, commercial, ecological, medical) life In what way is AI improving any of these? So far, it's making all of these worse. Productivity increases don't matter if they don't benefit more than just a few wealthy shareholders.
lostmsu 5mo ago
The parent comment addressed your point in their first sentence.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

spicyusername 5mo ago

I mean, there is much more to life than work... so let's not pretend it's all about working. Everyone in America is now fed and most children grow up spending a ton of time with both parents. This is because of automation greatly raising productivity and bringing costs down throughout the 20th century. It's easy to think things are terrible, but they are actually insanely good. Just 100 years ago life was horrible for basically everyone by today's standards, now it's not. AI will continue the trend, raise productivity and bring costs down. Now it's for white collar output, instead of manufacturing and agriculture. The labor force disruption will be painful, as it always is, especially in a country without a strong social safety net, but things will be better on the other side because we just made a ton of work more efficient and can produce more with less. We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water just because it affects us this time...

insane_dreamer 5mo ago
Is this sarcasm? I hope so.
- spicyusername 5mo ago
  Why would it be sarcasm?

conartist6 5mo ago

And remember if there aren't jobs, people probably won't just lay down and die. It won't be Marvin saying, "Oh god I'm so depressed, what's the point?" We'll just start killing each other in massive numbers cause, well, if you can't create anything and there isn't enough for everyone, what else is there to do but fight over what there is

danaris 5mo ago
But that's the thing, and what's really different from how it's ever been before: there absolutely is enough for everyone. It's being deliberately gatekept from us by the wealthy, and by those who believe that no one should be allowed to have anything they haven't "earned". The tragic thing is, to the extent that you're right, people will probably mostly kill other people who have nothing, rather than turning their anger and violence where it truly deserves to go: the rich bastards who want to own everything and prevent the rest of us from having anything.
- conartist6 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - danaris 5mo ago
    Um...dial it back a notch or two there, chum. "We have enough for everyone, and it is being deliberately gatekept by the wealthy" does not logically equate to "therefore if we removed that gatekeeping we'd have Stalinism" without a whole bunch of extra steps not currently in evidence. For instance, there's no reason why we can't say "sell your food for lower prices than the maximum the market will bear; the government will pay you to make sure you're still solvent" (this is called subsidies, we do it all the time). We also have a lot of antitrust levers at our disposal that have been growing rusty from disuse since Reagan's administration decided that monopolies were Good For Us, Actually. I'm not proposing any specific solutions to this problem; I'm merely stating that it is a problem. If anything's "fucking insane" here, it's responding to that with ad hominem attacks and some very thick sarcasm about communism. Furthermore, "communism" as an economic philosophy does not inherently lead to the specific circumstances that we saw in the Soviet Union during the 20th century. I know people tend to start crying "uh-uh-uhh! No True Scotsman fallacy!" when one points out that the USSR was not, in fact, doing a great job at communism, but it really wasn't. At first they tried, but it very quickly descended into a fairly standard authoritarian regime where economic decisions were being made not based on what was best for the people, but on what was best for the dictators and their cronies. (And funny enough, those same people don't seem to have a problem with the idea that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is not, in fact, particularly democratic...)

tavavex 5mo ago

> We are building general thinking machines with the aim of replacing all human labour, ... but humans won't be replaced, they will find other jobs, because when we introduced tractors they were able to find other jobs, ... totally the same scenario. Technically, there's no cognitive dissonance in the statement you made, at least with the way you worded it. Thinking machines can only do thinking labor (for now), so the bright future ahead is one where mental work is reserved for the elite, while everyone else does hard, physical work in places that are too messy for the machines to operate in at the moment.

munksbeer 5mo ago

> Even in the best case scenario where the generated wealth will be distributed, and somehow we will be able to keep them in check (unlikely), what would be the point of life in a world where machines can best us at everything? Read some of the Culture novels by Iain. M. Banks.

mrsvanwinkle 5mo ago

Two example scenarios described by Kurzweil in Singularity is Near: super intelligence augmenting human intelligence via direct brain interface (humans vs AI goes back to intelligence vs intelligence as usual), or, we get to live like very very pampered and worshiped cats.

nicbou 5mo ago

> when we introduced tractors they were able to find other jobs Coincidentally, I am reading Grapes of Wrath. Chapter 5 is my favourite, and it's about how the big banks tractor people off the land. The whole damn book is as relevant as ever, but this chapter just sticks with you. https://genius.com/John-steinbeck-chapter-5-the-grapes-of-wrath-annotated https://genius.com/John-steinbeck-chapter-5-the-grapes-of-wr...

card_zero 5mo ago

We're not building general thinking machines, and if we were they'd think "I deserve to be paid for this".