5 ms·

>The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal. What even is the optimistic outcome if they are right? What are

by slg 4mo ago

>The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal. What even is the optimistic outcome if they are right? What are we all working towards? Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness? Because I legitimately can't see a realistic outcome that actually benefits society as a whole. It all ends with very few obscenely rich people getting even more obscenely rich. But I guess we could tell an AI to put ourselves in the new Marvel movie to pass the time since we no longer have any jobs.

ctoth 4mo ago
What are jobs for? Should we have them? Should they be mandatory? What does it mean to have to work to eat, is this a good setup? Does everyone have to work? Should they?
- ori_b 4mo ago
  Maybe figure out the answers to that before forcing everyone into an economy where they still need to work to make money, but any worthwhile jobs have been automated away. The other question, of course, is what happens to the political power of the newly disposable?
  - ctoth 4mo ago
    Brother, I'm trying to. Any thoughts? Also, what's a "worthwhile" job? Have you read Player Piano? Are brainjobs more important than musclejobs? If we can automate musclejobs so people don't have to die in the heat and we can automate brainjobs so people don't have to lose their sanity in offices, wouldn't that be a better world? Note: it probably won't be, because of what I like to call the "Enterprise High" effect, but here we are. Basically once the only thing people have to compete over is status, shit gets nasty quicklike, think PG's high school essay but for everything and forever. Everything goes into rivalrous goods like who's sleeping with who. Star Trek as soap opera where all their needs are met and the only concern is purely social. But this is probably better than a world where people don't actually have material needs met? I legit don't actually know. Would love to figure it out though, what do you think!
    - ori_b 4mo ago
      > Are brainjobs more important than musclejobs? Try answering that without your brain. We're trying to build a world where there's no advantage to having one, so start living in the future you want to build.
- slg 4mo ago
  Who do you think will be answering these questions in a future in which these AI companies visions become a reality? Because they already have a huge influence on society and that will only increase as the tech improves. The most optimistic answer I can think of is that they will eventually agree to share their wealth under credible threats of violent revolution. That's the most optimistic outcome I see, they concede to threats of violence rather than needing actual violence.
  - ctoth 4mo ago
    > Who do you think will be answering these questions Yes, this is the conversation we should probably be having! Thoughts? Given that this is what is happening, given that we aren't going to stop physics, getting a handle on this indeed seems like one of the more important things we can do. If it will have any chance of working at all. If we don't get paperclipped. But this is at least a much ... (forgive me) less wrong conversation to have compared to the one where everybody assumes we've already lost. What do you think we should do? What powers do we still have where we is general humans who just want a pretty good life? What do we do about the inherent centralization that big models seem to require, but how do we trade that off at the same time from everybody being able to synthesize the next Covid by asking their cell phone a question? What does it mean when most if not all white collar work actually can be automated? Do we all end up playing VCs in our underwear swiping left/right on ideas our agents have to make money? Are we still competing in the market with the AIs? Is there a class war? Is there some other weird thing? I don't know but man ... I sure would like to have those conversations.
    - alwa 4mo ago
      Need work involve money? By far the most important work I do involves volunteer leadership roles above and beyond the things I do for money. Indeed, the whole edifice of modern tech rests on elements of FOSS that are, to within a rounding error, “volunteer”-built and -led. Elon’s an idol, but so is Linus. The Biggest And Richest have Mythos. But does that diminish the utility, to me personally, of my open-weights model? Or even my humble-individual-grade Opus subscription? Relative to what I could do three years ago, computationally speaking? Does a pretty good life have to involve controlling more material relative to members of a specific class, rather than just… deciding what’s enough, materially speaking; and stopping there?
- thewebguyd 4mo ago
  I'd answer: No, we should not have to work to eat, they should not be mandatory, and no not everyone has to work. But those problems need solved first before completely upending the current system. The system does need changed, but that change must happen before mass unemployment, not after the fact.
  - pdonis 4mo ago
    > we should not have to work to eat It takes time and effort and resources to produce the food you eat. If you aren't expending that time and effort and resources yourself, either to produce the food, or to produce something you can trade for it (or trade for money you use to buy it), who will? If the answer is "other people", why should other people have to work to produce the food you eat while you don't? If the answer is "machines", then it takes time and effort and resources to produce the machines, and we're right back to the same question. There are no other answers. There is no magical way to let people eat (much less have all the other things besides food, clothing and shelter that we all want to make our lives richer, such as the medium in which we're having this conversation) without work being done. Ignoring that fact of life is a recipe for disaster.
    - thewebguyd 4mo ago
      Fair enough, we are no where near post-scarcity levels of automation yet despite what frontier lab marketing says. But still, there are more people on the planet than necessary for all of the "meaningful" work of providing for society. It would be a good thing, with the proper safety nets and protections in place (something like UBI) to have a lot of the "bullshit" jobs automated away. That leaves us into a situation like I said that "no, not everyone has to work" nor should we just force everyone to work my effectively making up roles. If half or more of the population finds themselves unemployed due to AI/Automation, the answer shouldn't be make-work "dig a ditch then fill it back up" it should be use our new found productivity and surplus to just take care of everyone's needs without it being tied to employment.
      - pdonis 4mo ago
- kemps4 4mo ago
  These are the right questions to ask. I think about stuff like this often, and just as often people I discuss this with think I'm off my rocker. I, on the other hand, think some can't see past what they have been programmed to see. It's sad really, our lives are finite and much is wasted on a less than optimal layout.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- thatmf 4mo ago
  No, but what are the odds of the robust welfare state that would be required to actually enable some sort of post-work society taking shape here in America? I'd truly like to be optimistic but, politically we have been moving in the opposite direction ever since the end of the New Deal, and the oligarchs who control the technologies are not exactly benevolent.
- vrganj 4mo ago
  No. But capitalism requires them. I'm down to end capitalism, but maybe we should figure that out before we destroy the thing that kinda-sorta made it work?
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  How much do you trust the current US administration to guide us into a future where no one needs a job in order to get health care, food, shelter, etc?
svara 4mo ago
I'm legit pretty excited about applying AI to accelerate biological and medical discovery. It's already happening right now, still in relatively mundane ways, but there's so much to do.
- ceejayoz 4mo ago
  But someone has to be able to buy the results, right?
  - jaltekruse 4mo ago
    It feels like at some point we're going to need to re-evaluate the concept of intellectual property. I don't know how to bring about this conversation in a way that broader society will actually engage with it, but it really feels like software and digital assets are just too fundamentally different from the things we've been selling and buying for most of human history. Even if you think about a printed book, sure we've been defending peoples' rights to restrict reprinting of their ideas for a long time, but that came alongside broad support for institutions like libraries. We now live in a world where you cannot be a professional engineer without expensive CAD software, you cannot run most businesses without some expensive licensed software for managing your books, HR, supply chain, etc. or you will just get destroyed in the market by more efficient competition. I guess my thought process on this is a little simplified, as I was thinking about how software you can run yourself is "infinitely copyable" for free. This question gets more nuanced with SaaS. While some of the enshittification can be argued to be rent-seeking behavior to have a bigger moat, you cannot perform a "DRM crack" of a webapp like you could with software restricted by CD keys and the like, creating SaaS versions of most products provide real benefits. Running a large hosted service is a serious ongoing commitment that takes real investment to maintain. It feels like we haven't finished this necessary conversation in the pre-LLM world, about how software was creating giant powerful institutions that we were totally unprepared to regulate. In a world that looks so likely to be coming pretty soon, where LLMs can maintain a SaaS with very little human input, I just don't think we're ready for the consolidation of power that is coming. And to the particular point being made about biomedical research, it is already pretty trivial to argue we have cartoon villain levels of evil already happening with both deciding how research dollars are allocated (diseases that disproportionately affect the poor are worked on less), and how many people we are leaving out of the modern medical system to just suffer or die at home. We need to grapple with the fact that we have developed really powerful tools to reduce suffering, and alongside that development we have created legal tools and institutions that indefinitely keep innovations behind paywalls with prices chosen by powerful rich people. Maybe these two things need to exist together to create incentives for investment, but it feels like we need to have better conversations about how we can actively manage the knobs and levers of the economy to produce better outcomes for more people.
titzer 4mo ago
One not-so-bad outcome would be that open weight models get better, smaller, more efficient, and easier to use while hardware gets faster, more efficient, and more widespread. Imagine when mobile CPUs have the GPU/NPU power of today's discrete GPUs and models are smaller and faster than today's models. That allows really powerful local-first AI applications, rather than being beholden to AI providers. With the advance of coding agents, anyone can build their own applications. The downstream effects of widespread local AIs is a rise in AI slop that feeds the distraction machine and attention economy as well as surveillance. I don't know what the solution to those is, but the local experience is going to be powerful.
rayiner 4mo ago
> Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness? I don’t get this. It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. It doesn’t make any sense. There is no secret formula to any of this. The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors.
- singpolyma3 4mo ago
  I mean. From a financial PoV that's exactly what happened
  - ben_w 4mo ago
    Did they, though? Intel, IBM, DEC and Honeywell were big names, but they're not FAANG. Other than Nintendo, how many games companies today were around back then?
    - singpolyma3 4mo ago
      ... so your argument is "no actually the second generation did that"? End result for 100-16 % of Americans is the same
      - ben_w 4mo ago
        Other than Apple, FAANG is fourth or fifth generation at least. And my argument is straight assuming you're OK to say the financial PoV is a good PoV, I'm not arguing for or against that claim. > End result for 100-16 % of Americans is the same Yes, but FAANG got all the money without the hate AI has. Well, perhaps, I'm not sure when the public decided F had horns rather than a halo, so I can't be sure how much money they had at the time, but other than that the hate came long after the money.
    - bastardoperator 4mo ago
      Nintendo, Capcom, Activision, Konami, Sega, Bandai Namco, EA, Sunsoft, Atari, Taito, Bethesda, Tecmo and Naughty dog All found in the 80's or earlier and still pretty well known today. It could be argued these are different companies today, but they exist.
atmavatar 4mo ago
If they're right: * Use AI to eliminate all white collar jobs. * Combine AI with robotics to eliminate all blue collar jobs. * Combine AI with military hardware to kill any rabble who may become threats to the ruling class. The most optimistic outcome is that it doesn't happen in our lifetimes. Aside from that, the best you can hope for is that the ruling class enslaves the rest but treats them well enough that most don't realize they are slaves (e.g., the Eloi from the Time Machine). I'm cautiously optimistic about the former, but I expect the resources required by the latter will far exceed what the greed inherent to the ruling class will allow without first purging a significant fraction of the population. All we can hope for is they stop the purge before it takes everyone not in the ruling class, but given how many ultra-wealthy individuals already see the rest of us, I wouldn't bet on that.
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  Well the most optimistic outcome is that our democratically elected representatives start acting in the interests of all they represent, not just those with a lot of money. Ok, you didn’t need to laugh that hard.
hobofan 4mo ago
Most optimistic outcome: Hardware & software advances keep pace; Open weights & locally runnable models keep pace with frontier (at least the open weights part seems to hold), making AI advances widely available to anyone; Individual productivity skyrockets, having knock-on effects in most industries, slowly allowing less and less people to do the work required to maintain the basic needs of our civilization(s); UBI utopia achieved. Do I think that's likely? No, but mostly because it would require parallel uprising of the global working class, which doesn't seem to materialize.
expedition32 4mo ago
Now you are fired by a computer not a completely disinterested person! Progress.
Rekindle8090 4mo ago
[dead]

by slg 4mo ago

ctoth 4mo ago

What are jobs for? Should we have them? Should they be mandatory? What does it mean to have to work to eat, is this a good setup? Does everyone have to work? Should they?

ori_b 4mo ago
Maybe figure out the answers to that before forcing everyone into an economy where they still need to work to make money, but any worthwhile jobs have been automated away. The other question, of course, is what happens to the political power of the newly disposable?
- ctoth 4mo ago
  Brother, I'm trying to. Any thoughts? Also, what's a "worthwhile" job? Have you read Player Piano? Are brainjobs more important than musclejobs? If we can automate musclejobs so people don't have to die in the heat and we can automate brainjobs so people don't have to lose their sanity in offices, wouldn't that be a better world? Note: it probably won't be, because of what I like to call the "Enterprise High" effect, but here we are. Basically once the only thing people have to compete over is status, shit gets nasty quicklike, think PG's high school essay but for everything and forever. Everything goes into rivalrous goods like who's sleeping with who. Star Trek as soap opera where all their needs are met and the only concern is purely social. But this is probably better than a world where people don't actually have material needs met? I legit don't actually know. Would love to figure it out though, what do you think!
  - ori_b 4mo ago
    > Are brainjobs more important than musclejobs? Try answering that without your brain. We're trying to build a world where there's no advantage to having one, so start living in the future you want to build.
slg 4mo ago
Who do you think will be answering these questions in a future in which these AI companies visions become a reality? Because they already have a huge influence on society and that will only increase as the tech improves. The most optimistic answer I can think of is that they will eventually agree to share their wealth under credible threats of violent revolution. That's the most optimistic outcome I see, they concede to threats of violence rather than needing actual violence.
- ctoth 4mo ago
  > Who do you think will be answering these questions Yes, this is the conversation we should probably be having! Thoughts? Given that this is what is happening, given that we aren't going to stop physics, getting a handle on this indeed seems like one of the more important things we can do. If it will have any chance of working at all. If we don't get paperclipped. But this is at least a much ... (forgive me) less wrong conversation to have compared to the one where everybody assumes we've already lost. What do you think we should do? What powers do we still have where we is general humans who just want a pretty good life? What do we do about the inherent centralization that big models seem to require, but how do we trade that off at the same time from everybody being able to synthesize the next Covid by asking their cell phone a question? What does it mean when most if not all white collar work actually can be automated? Do we all end up playing VCs in our underwear swiping left/right on ideas our agents have to make money? Are we still competing in the market with the AIs? Is there a class war? Is there some other weird thing? I don't know but man ... I sure would like to have those conversations.
  - alwa 4mo ago
    Need work involve money? By far the most important work I do involves volunteer leadership roles above and beyond the things I do for money. Indeed, the whole edifice of modern tech rests on elements of FOSS that are, to within a rounding error, “volunteer”-built and -led. Elon’s an idol, but so is Linus. The Biggest And Richest have Mythos. But does that diminish the utility, to me personally, of my open-weights model? Or even my humble-individual-grade Opus subscription? Relative to what I could do three years ago, computationally speaking? Does a pretty good life have to involve controlling more material relative to members of a specific class, rather than just… deciding what’s enough, materially speaking; and stopping there?
thewebguyd 4mo ago
I'd answer: No, we should not have to work to eat, they should not be mandatory, and no not everyone has to work. But those problems need solved first before completely upending the current system. The system does need changed, but that change must happen before mass unemployment, not after the fact.
- pdonis 4mo ago
  > we should not have to work to eat It takes time and effort and resources to produce the food you eat. If you aren't expending that time and effort and resources yourself, either to produce the food, or to produce something you can trade for it (or trade for money you use to buy it), who will? If the answer is "other people", why should other people have to work to produce the food you eat while you don't? If the answer is "machines", then it takes time and effort and resources to produce the machines, and we're right back to the same question. There are no other answers. There is no magical way to let people eat (much less have all the other things besides food, clothing and shelter that we all want to make our lives richer, such as the medium in which we're having this conversation) without work being done. Ignoring that fact of life is a recipe for disaster.
  - thewebguyd 4mo ago
    Fair enough, we are no where near post-scarcity levels of automation yet despite what frontier lab marketing says. But still, there are more people on the planet than necessary for all of the "meaningful" work of providing for society. It would be a good thing, with the proper safety nets and protections in place (something like UBI) to have a lot of the "bullshit" jobs automated away. That leaves us into a situation like I said that "no, not everyone has to work" nor should we just force everyone to work my effectively making up roles. If half or more of the population finds themselves unemployed due to AI/Automation, the answer shouldn't be make-work "dig a ditch then fill it back up" it should be use our new found productivity and surplus to just take care of everyone's needs without it being tied to employment.
    - pdonis 4mo ago
kemps4 4mo ago
These are the right questions to ask. I think about stuff like this often, and just as often people I discuss this with think I'm off my rocker. I, on the other hand, think some can't see past what they have been programmed to see. It's sad really, our lives are finite and much is wasted on a less than optimal layout.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
thatmf 4mo ago
No, but what are the odds of the robust welfare state that would be required to actually enable some sort of post-work society taking shape here in America? I'd truly like to be optimistic but, politically we have been moving in the opposite direction ever since the end of the New Deal, and the oligarchs who control the technologies are not exactly benevolent.
vrganj 4mo ago
No. But capitalism requires them. I'm down to end capitalism, but maybe we should figure that out before we destroy the thing that kinda-sorta made it work?
jimbokun 4mo ago
How much do you trust the current US administration to guide us into a future where no one needs a job in order to get health care, food, shelter, etc?

svara 4mo ago

I'm legit pretty excited about applying AI to accelerate biological and medical discovery. It's already happening right now, still in relatively mundane ways, but there's so much to do.

ceejayoz 4mo ago
But someone has to be able to buy the results, right?
- jaltekruse 4mo ago
  It feels like at some point we're going to need to re-evaluate the concept of intellectual property. I don't know how to bring about this conversation in a way that broader society will actually engage with it, but it really feels like software and digital assets are just too fundamentally different from the things we've been selling and buying for most of human history. Even if you think about a printed book, sure we've been defending peoples' rights to restrict reprinting of their ideas for a long time, but that came alongside broad support for institutions like libraries. We now live in a world where you cannot be a professional engineer without expensive CAD software, you cannot run most businesses without some expensive licensed software for managing your books, HR, supply chain, etc. or you will just get destroyed in the market by more efficient competition. I guess my thought process on this is a little simplified, as I was thinking about how software you can run yourself is "infinitely copyable" for free. This question gets more nuanced with SaaS. While some of the enshittification can be argued to be rent-seeking behavior to have a bigger moat, you cannot perform a "DRM crack" of a webapp like you could with software restricted by CD keys and the like, creating SaaS versions of most products provide real benefits. Running a large hosted service is a serious ongoing commitment that takes real investment to maintain. It feels like we haven't finished this necessary conversation in the pre-LLM world, about how software was creating giant powerful institutions that we were totally unprepared to regulate. In a world that looks so likely to be coming pretty soon, where LLMs can maintain a SaaS with very little human input, I just don't think we're ready for the consolidation of power that is coming. And to the particular point being made about biomedical research, it is already pretty trivial to argue we have cartoon villain levels of evil already happening with both deciding how research dollars are allocated (diseases that disproportionately affect the poor are worked on less), and how many people we are leaving out of the modern medical system to just suffer or die at home. We need to grapple with the fact that we have developed really powerful tools to reduce suffering, and alongside that development we have created legal tools and institutions that indefinitely keep innovations behind paywalls with prices chosen by powerful rich people. Maybe these two things need to exist together to create incentives for investment, but it feels like we need to have better conversations about how we can actively manage the knobs and levers of the economy to produce better outcomes for more people.

titzer 4mo ago

One not-so-bad outcome would be that open weight models get better, smaller, more efficient, and easier to use while hardware gets faster, more efficient, and more widespread. Imagine when mobile CPUs have the GPU/NPU power of today's discrete GPUs and models are smaller and faster than today's models. That allows really powerful local-first AI applications, rather than being beholden to AI providers. With the advance of coding agents, anyone can build their own applications. The downstream effects of widespread local AIs is a rise in AI slop that feeds the distraction machine and attention economy as well as surveillance. I don't know what the solution to those is, but the local experience is going to be powerful.

rayiner 4mo ago

> Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness? I don’t get this. It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. It doesn’t make any sense. There is no secret formula to any of this. The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors.

singpolyma3 4mo ago
I mean. From a financial PoV that's exactly what happened
- ben_w 4mo ago
  Did they, though? Intel, IBM, DEC and Honeywell were big names, but they're not FAANG. Other than Nintendo, how many games companies today were around back then?
  - singpolyma3 4mo ago
    ... so your argument is "no actually the second generation did that"? End result for 100-16 % of Americans is the same
    - ben_w 4mo ago
      Other than Apple, FAANG is fourth or fifth generation at least. And my argument is straight assuming you're OK to say the financial PoV is a good PoV, I'm not arguing for or against that claim. > End result for 100-16 % of Americans is the same Yes, but FAANG got all the money without the hate AI has. Well, perhaps, I'm not sure when the public decided F had horns rather than a halo, so I can't be sure how much money they had at the time, but other than that the hate came long after the money.
  - bastardoperator 4mo ago
    Nintendo, Capcom, Activision, Konami, Sega, Bandai Namco, EA, Sunsoft, Atari, Taito, Bethesda, Tecmo and Naughty dog All found in the 80's or earlier and still pretty well known today. It could be argued these are different companies today, but they exist.

atmavatar 4mo ago

If they're right: * Use AI to eliminate all white collar jobs. * Combine AI with robotics to eliminate all blue collar jobs. * Combine AI with military hardware to kill any rabble who may become threats to the ruling class. The most optimistic outcome is that it doesn't happen in our lifetimes. Aside from that, the best you can hope for is that the ruling class enslaves the rest but treats them well enough that most don't realize they are slaves (e.g., the Eloi from the Time Machine). I'm cautiously optimistic about the former, but I expect the resources required by the latter will far exceed what the greed inherent to the ruling class will allow without first purging a significant fraction of the population. All we can hope for is they stop the purge before it takes everyone not in the ruling class, but given how many ultra-wealthy individuals already see the rest of us, I wouldn't bet on that.

jimbokun 4mo ago
Well the most optimistic outcome is that our democratically elected representatives start acting in the interests of all they represent, not just those with a lot of money. Ok, you didn’t need to laugh that hard.

hobofan 4mo ago

Most optimistic outcome: Hardware & software advances keep pace; Open weights & locally runnable models keep pace with frontier (at least the open weights part seems to hold), making AI advances widely available to anyone; Individual productivity skyrockets, having knock-on effects in most industries, slowly allowing less and less people to do the work required to maintain the basic needs of our civilization(s); UBI utopia achieved. Do I think that's likely? No, but mostly because it would require parallel uprising of the global working class, which doesn't seem to materialize.

expedition32 4mo ago

Now you are fired by a computer not a completely disinterested person! Progress.

Rekindle8090 4mo ago

[dead]