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How is the GGP post (by Animats) trivializing the risk? They're saying "it's a survival issue" and saying the printers became homeless and struggling to feed th

by chongli 2mo ago

How is the GGP post (by Animats) trivializing the risk? They're saying "it's a survival issue" and saying the printers became homeless and struggling to feed themselves. Sounds much more like a warning than a dismissal to me. If 40-50% of the workforce ends up like that then we're living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland failed state.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
rayiner 2mo ago
> If 40-50% of the workforce ends up like that then we're living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland failed state. I a lot less than that. Most people don’t have jobs that can be done remotely, which I think is a good proxy for the ceiling of who can be replaced by AI. Almost nobody on my block besides me is going to be replaced (beer brewer, several nurses, navy servicemen, cops, and teachers).
- Recurecur 2mo ago
  I think you’re failing to factor in the rapid improvement in robotics. I was at the hospital a few days ago, and was pondering the numerous nurses who were wheeling around portable nursing stations with monitors and various types of equipment. They’d stop at a room, take a patient’s blood pressure (among various other things), type some notes, and move on. I can easily imagine most nursing tasks being subsumed by robotics. The same goes for brewers, soldiers, cops, and teachers. Soldier, cop, and teacher robots are already being tested, or actually deployed…and it’s early yet. If a safe, highly dense source of power is developed, that will vastly accelerate the process. At best, there will be far fewer humans involved, monitoring the robots, much as software engineers are now monitoring the agentic AIs. I’m not sure how human society will adapt. The optimistic view (championed by Elon Musk) is that we’re headed for a “Star Trek economy” of essentially endless abundance for everyone. I hope things play out somewhere along those lines… I’ve personally been impacted very heavily by LLM technology. Two of my major skills, coding and writing, have been greatly devalued by it. I’m relying on one of the truly core human traits to compensate - adaptability. That’s an area where LLMs currently lag far behind. We’ll see how things go from here… ;-)
  - kaffekaka 2mo ago
    > I can easily imagine most nursing tasks being subsumed by robotics I think you are greatly underestimating the difficulty of automating nursing tasks. About teachers: some amount teaching profession can be automated, but the parts that cannot (in any reasonable way in the foreseeable future) are perhaps the most core aspects of teaching.
    - buddhistdude 2mo ago
      What does it matter how difficult it is? That only means it's gonna take a while longer.
      - somenameforme 2mo ago
        When things are spread out over time people are able to adjust to the point that society, as a whole, might not even notice there was a problem, even if for some segment of that society it might feel like the end of the world - or at least an incomparable inflection point. The only real problem you have is when things come on hard and fast, like a tsunami.
      - rayiner 2mo ago
        That’s not how technology works. We went from first flight in 1903 to a man on the moon in 1969. Then we basically did almost nothing in aerospace for the next 50 years. We never got past the supersonic barrier for feasible commercial air travel. Apart from somewhat worse fuel efficiency, a 747 from 1969 can achieve basically the same trips in the same amount of time as a 787 or A350. What looks like exponential curves turn into S-shaped curves everywhere. In the last century, coal power plants have gotten less than twice as efficient. A professor at law school was giving a lecture on technological singularity back in 2011. And I pointed out that Moore’s law was already dead. And in fact in the decade since then improvements came far slower than they did from 1990-2000.
        robotresearcher 2mo ago
        > Apart from somewhat worse fuel efficiency It’s better now by roughly a factor of two per passenger mile. The nature of such large improvements is that it’s extremely hard to get such an improvement again!
- palmotea 2mo ago
  > I a lot less than that. Most people don’t have jobs that can be done remotely, which I think is a good proxy for the ceiling of who can be replaced by AI. Almost nobody on my block besides me is going to be replaced (beer brewer, several nurses, navy servicemen, cops, and teachers). That's just first order effects. What's going to happen to the beer brewer when sales are down because the knowledge workers have cut back, and what will happen to those nurses when a lot of those knowledge workers lose their health insurance?
  - nradov 2mo ago
    Beer consumption is already trending down. Numerous smaller breweries have already closed. Younger people are drinking less alcohol in general. Beer in particular has too many carbs. This isn't an AI issue, just a change in consumer preferences.

by chongli 2mo ago

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

rayiner 2mo ago

> If 40-50% of the workforce ends up like that then we're living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland failed state. I a lot less than that. Most people don’t have jobs that can be done remotely, which I think is a good proxy for the ceiling of who can be replaced by AI. Almost nobody on my block besides me is going to be replaced (beer brewer, several nurses, navy servicemen, cops, and teachers).

Recurecur 2mo ago
I think you’re failing to factor in the rapid improvement in robotics. I was at the hospital a few days ago, and was pondering the numerous nurses who were wheeling around portable nursing stations with monitors and various types of equipment. They’d stop at a room, take a patient’s blood pressure (among various other things), type some notes, and move on. I can easily imagine most nursing tasks being subsumed by robotics. The same goes for brewers, soldiers, cops, and teachers. Soldier, cop, and teacher robots are already being tested, or actually deployed…and it’s early yet. If a safe, highly dense source of power is developed, that will vastly accelerate the process. At best, there will be far fewer humans involved, monitoring the robots, much as software engineers are now monitoring the agentic AIs. I’m not sure how human society will adapt. The optimistic view (championed by Elon Musk) is that we’re headed for a “Star Trek economy” of essentially endless abundance for everyone. I hope things play out somewhere along those lines… I’ve personally been impacted very heavily by LLM technology. Two of my major skills, coding and writing, have been greatly devalued by it. I’m relying on one of the truly core human traits to compensate - adaptability. That’s an area where LLMs currently lag far behind. We’ll see how things go from here… ;-)
- kaffekaka 2mo ago
  > I can easily imagine most nursing tasks being subsumed by robotics I think you are greatly underestimating the difficulty of automating nursing tasks. About teachers: some amount teaching profession can be automated, but the parts that cannot (in any reasonable way in the foreseeable future) are perhaps the most core aspects of teaching.
  - buddhistdude 2mo ago
    What does it matter how difficult it is? That only means it's gonna take a while longer.
    - somenameforme 2mo ago
      When things are spread out over time people are able to adjust to the point that society, as a whole, might not even notice there was a problem, even if for some segment of that society it might feel like the end of the world - or at least an incomparable inflection point. The only real problem you have is when things come on hard and fast, like a tsunami.
    - rayiner 2mo ago
      That’s not how technology works. We went from first flight in 1903 to a man on the moon in 1969. Then we basically did almost nothing in aerospace for the next 50 years. We never got past the supersonic barrier for feasible commercial air travel. Apart from somewhat worse fuel efficiency, a 747 from 1969 can achieve basically the same trips in the same amount of time as a 787 or A350. What looks like exponential curves turn into S-shaped curves everywhere. In the last century, coal power plants have gotten less than twice as efficient. A professor at law school was giving a lecture on technological singularity back in 2011. And I pointed out that Moore’s law was already dead. And in fact in the decade since then improvements came far slower than they did from 1990-2000.
      - robotresearcher 2mo ago
        > Apart from somewhat worse fuel efficiency It’s better now by roughly a factor of two per passenger mile. The nature of such large improvements is that it’s extremely hard to get such an improvement again!
palmotea 2mo ago
> I a lot less than that. Most people don’t have jobs that can be done remotely, which I think is a good proxy for the ceiling of who can be replaced by AI. Almost nobody on my block besides me is going to be replaced (beer brewer, several nurses, navy servicemen, cops, and teachers). That's just first order effects. What's going to happen to the beer brewer when sales are down because the knowledge workers have cut back, and what will happen to those nurses when a lot of those knowledge workers lose their health insurance?
- nradov 2mo ago
  Beer consumption is already trending down. Numerous smaller breweries have already closed. Younger people are drinking less alcohol in general. Beer in particular has too many carbs. This isn't an AI issue, just a change in consumer preferences.