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I'm not that young anymore but when I hear Dario Amodei speak and gesticulate enthusiastically about how AI will soon make my job redundant, from a positio of s

I'm not that young anymore but when I hear Dario Amodei speak and gesticulate enthusiastically about how AI will soon make my job redundant, from a positio of someone who can retire now and who benefits from AI possibly replacing workers, it's very hard to like him.

bbor 2mo ago
Talk about shooting the messenger…
- solid_fuel 2mo ago
  The CEO of a major AI company is not “the messenger”
- JustResign 2mo ago
  A CEO of a large AI company is hardly just a "messenger" here. Come on now.
  - superze 2mo ago
    He is just the poor little head of the snake.
  - bbor 2mo ago
    I… yes, he is. He wasn’t born when this was put in motion by Turing in 1950, and he quit OpenAI to try to stick to their original mission, which was exclusively and ambitiously to prevent what most (who cared to look at it) assumed was inevitable. AI isn’t a new iPhone moment, it’s a fire moment. Dario Amodei didn’t bring it into existence, physics did — we’re just slowly working out the cognitive science for the first time after Crysis machines ended up being really good at something that our type of intelligence relies on (intuitive framing via huge neural networks — see The Frame Problem). Also this doesn’t really matter in anthropic’s case, but FWIW: we should try to blame CEOs a bit less, and shareholders (capitalists) a lot more. Our system isn’t named ‘officerism’, after all!
    - shibapuppie 2mo ago
      Absolutely! I mean, they didn't start the fire so why are we mad at them for fueling the fire?? It's not their fault!!
      - bbor 2mo ago
        Anthropic has not been “fueling the fire”. They’re the reason most of y’all even know there’s a fire.
        shibapuppie 2mo ago
        ...right.
    - caterwhal 2mo ago
      Terribly interesting that being a messenger these days is so lucrative. $15.5b net worth, while definitely not at the top of the food chain, is really living in this day and age, wouldn't you say? Simply wonderful to be just aligned so nicely in the progression of the universe, because all this was decided long, long ago after all, to just be leaving us all a kind note that everything humanity has achieved thus far is moot, there is nothing in our current system we should carry forward, that there isn't any possibility that we could use our very small minds to come up with any concerns or reasons why this might be the best path, and that no, we don't have any say in it, and for his paltry and humble service to us on the behalf on Physics, Dario squeaks out a living just like the rest of us. So kind also of Physics himself to have gone to such trouble, to have invented all these brilliant GPUs in the first place, synthesized trillions of dollars to build the data centers to hold them, and burned the midnight electrons mining all that coal and natural gas to fuel the power plants it built too. All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds in which inevitability steers our destiny. You know, I've really been considering getting a lobotomy myself. I guess it's a pretty grand idea that thinking is now categorically outmoded. But then again I might really should have done it when they were cheaper in 2010, because Physics had it all under control anyway! The fundamental delusion of this take is why we are suffering this lunacy. When the crash happens after the circular ponzi scheme hanging all its risk on the public breaks apart the hatred for these lunatics will be justified. But then I guess the lunatics would simply claim that they didn't have enough situational awareness as they run away with our tax money after the bailout.
- happytoexplain 2mo ago
  He's the guy doing the thing that he is delivering the message about...
giancarlostoro 2mo ago
Lets suppose everyone in the world miraculously loses their jobs to AI, who is paying for it? How? What are they selling? What stops the rest of humanity from turning data centers into a pile of ash? These people are so disconnected from reality.
- scotty79 2mo ago
  You also just explained how people fearing that AI will take all jobs are equally disconnected from reality. Although in less joyful manner.
  - r_lee 2mo ago
    what kind of bargaining power will you have with "well someone must consume!"?
    - scotty79 2mo ago
      All of the power? Without consumers, no business has any reason to exist. You can do business without workers, investors, shareholders. You can't do business without consumers.
      - r_lee 2mo ago
        so how will there be any other class than a basic UBI class that gets the bare minimum, with no way to climb the ladder in any way? why would businesses need everybody to participate when a specific portion of people are enough?
        scotty79 2mo ago
        I don't think only UBI will remain. People will be getting money through a lot of different schemes, some merit or effort based. So there will be ways to climb. Just not through "hard work" because the "work" part is going to be mostly missing. To see how climbing the ladder might look in the future look at spots in our society that perform no useful economic activity. Military, prisons, government offices, the rich, homeless. How you get ahead there is going be the way you go ahead everywhere in a society where human work is obsolete. > why would businesses need everybody to participate when a specific portion of people are enough? For business nothing is ever enough. It creates products and customers for them out of thin air. The only required thing is money in the consumer pocket. Business itself is going to pressure governments to give more people more money, by whatever means necessary, so it can scoop it up off of them. What even some millionaires now realize is that it's very hard to take the money away from other millionaires. They don't spend that much. But if you tax them and give the money to consumers, suddenly, as a rich person, you have clear path to taking this money for yourself, just by having a successful customer facing business. That (among other things) is why some rich advocate for higher taxation of the rich. If everyone around you is poor it's very hard to get any richer yourself, regardless of how much you already have. And rich people like getting richer most of all.
piloto_ciego 2mo ago
Man, I see this stuff, and I think, "my god! think of the opportunity we have to replace the current economic system with something where we're not all in a fierce knife fight to try to stay employed so we don't starve!" We have to stop fearing the machines and start fearing the firmware running on our brains! It's capitalism that's the problem, not the robots... if anything the robots can liberate us from capital's death grip!
- grebc 2mo ago
  It’s amusing to imagine the oligarchs are going to anymore charitable than currently.
  - SR2Z 2mo ago
    It's not their choice, no matter how much they'd like it to be. The Chinese models are able to distill outputs into a model of slightly worse performance within a few weeks of each release, and the same copyright exemptions which protect these guys scraping also protect China. As long as their lobbyists don't win (and the deck is stacked against them, make no mistake) the future of AI is not going to be owned by the frontier labs.
  - piloto_ciego 2mo ago
    They don't have to be charitable. We can literally take it from them. I get why people don't like to think about that sort of thing, but... yeah. We could make AI a sort of public good and do something like the Permanent Fund Dividend or something. There's lots of options even in the "reformist" way of thinking about it. But we shouldn't be naive.
    - grebc 2mo ago
      Oh yeah don’t be naive, but we’ll just take what we want. Ok bro.
      - piloto_ciego 2mo ago
JKCalhoun 2mo ago
Is it the replacing workers thing so much or are young people just fucking sick of tech (and Silicon Valley in general) and AI is the latest whipping boy? (Or maybe I'm just projecting.)
- digitaltrees 2mo ago
  I think tech has shifted. It was a relatively balanced political ecosystem, not the far right fever swamp like finance. There were libertarians and communists, now the libertarians that read atlas shrugged have accumulated enough power to make a push to escape democracy, capitalism, and any constraints on their power. So tech isnt what it was when it was the hippie dreamer open source all the things culture people liked.
- red-iron-pine 2mo ago
  before tech had the potential to make my life easier, more fun, smoother. say what you will about uber but it is a seamless service. there are a lot of great apps out there. now tech isn't making things better it's rapidly converting to aggressive rent seeking, and everyone can see it. only a rube thinks Big Tech is going to make tomorrow better for everyone.
h05sz487b 2mo ago
TBH the promise of many technologies has been making work redundant. But they used to be more diplomatic about it.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

bbor 2mo ago

Talk about shooting the messenger…

solid_fuel 2mo ago
The CEO of a major AI company is not “the messenger”
JustResign 2mo ago
A CEO of a large AI company is hardly just a "messenger" here. Come on now.
- superze 2mo ago
  He is just the poor little head of the snake.
- bbor 2mo ago
  I… yes, he is. He wasn’t born when this was put in motion by Turing in 1950, and he quit OpenAI to try to stick to their original mission, which was exclusively and ambitiously to prevent what most (who cared to look at it) assumed was inevitable. AI isn’t a new iPhone moment, it’s a fire moment. Dario Amodei didn’t bring it into existence, physics did — we’re just slowly working out the cognitive science for the first time after Crysis machines ended up being really good at something that our type of intelligence relies on (intuitive framing via huge neural networks — see The Frame Problem). Also this doesn’t really matter in anthropic’s case, but FWIW: we should try to blame CEOs a bit less, and shareholders (capitalists) a lot more. Our system isn’t named ‘officerism’, after all!
  - shibapuppie 2mo ago
    Absolutely! I mean, they didn't start the fire so why are we mad at them for fueling the fire?? It's not their fault!!
    - bbor 2mo ago
      Anthropic has not been “fueling the fire”. They’re the reason most of y’all even know there’s a fire.
      - shibapuppie 2mo ago
        ...right.
  - caterwhal 2mo ago
    Terribly interesting that being a messenger these days is so lucrative. $15.5b net worth, while definitely not at the top of the food chain, is really living in this day and age, wouldn't you say? Simply wonderful to be just aligned so nicely in the progression of the universe, because all this was decided long, long ago after all, to just be leaving us all a kind note that everything humanity has achieved thus far is moot, there is nothing in our current system we should carry forward, that there isn't any possibility that we could use our very small minds to come up with any concerns or reasons why this might be the best path, and that no, we don't have any say in it, and for his paltry and humble service to us on the behalf on Physics, Dario squeaks out a living just like the rest of us. So kind also of Physics himself to have gone to such trouble, to have invented all these brilliant GPUs in the first place, synthesized trillions of dollars to build the data centers to hold them, and burned the midnight electrons mining all that coal and natural gas to fuel the power plants it built too. All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds in which inevitability steers our destiny. You know, I've really been considering getting a lobotomy myself. I guess it's a pretty grand idea that thinking is now categorically outmoded. But then again I might really should have done it when they were cheaper in 2010, because Physics had it all under control anyway! The fundamental delusion of this take is why we are suffering this lunacy. When the crash happens after the circular ponzi scheme hanging all its risk on the public breaks apart the hatred for these lunatics will be justified. But then I guess the lunatics would simply claim that they didn't have enough situational awareness as they run away with our tax money after the bailout.
happytoexplain 2mo ago
He's the guy doing the thing that he is delivering the message about...

giancarlostoro 2mo ago

Lets suppose everyone in the world miraculously loses their jobs to AI, who is paying for it? How? What are they selling? What stops the rest of humanity from turning data centers into a pile of ash? These people are so disconnected from reality.

scotty79 2mo ago
You also just explained how people fearing that AI will take all jobs are equally disconnected from reality. Although in less joyful manner.
- r_lee 2mo ago
  what kind of bargaining power will you have with "well someone must consume!"?
  - scotty79 2mo ago
    All of the power? Without consumers, no business has any reason to exist. You can do business without workers, investors, shareholders. You can't do business without consumers.
    - r_lee 2mo ago
      so how will there be any other class than a basic UBI class that gets the bare minimum, with no way to climb the ladder in any way? why would businesses need everybody to participate when a specific portion of people are enough?
      - scotty79 2mo ago
        I don't think only UBI will remain. People will be getting money through a lot of different schemes, some merit or effort based. So there will be ways to climb. Just not through "hard work" because the "work" part is going to be mostly missing. To see how climbing the ladder might look in the future look at spots in our society that perform no useful economic activity. Military, prisons, government offices, the rich, homeless. How you get ahead there is going be the way you go ahead everywhere in a society where human work is obsolete. > why would businesses need everybody to participate when a specific portion of people are enough? For business nothing is ever enough. It creates products and customers for them out of thin air. The only required thing is money in the consumer pocket. Business itself is going to pressure governments to give more people more money, by whatever means necessary, so it can scoop it up off of them. What even some millionaires now realize is that it's very hard to take the money away from other millionaires. They don't spend that much. But if you tax them and give the money to consumers, suddenly, as a rich person, you have clear path to taking this money for yourself, just by having a successful customer facing business. That (among other things) is why some rich advocate for higher taxation of the rich. If everyone around you is poor it's very hard to get any richer yourself, regardless of how much you already have. And rich people like getting richer most of all.

piloto_ciego 2mo ago

Man, I see this stuff, and I think, "my god! think of the opportunity we have to replace the current economic system with something where we're not all in a fierce knife fight to try to stay employed so we don't starve!" We have to stop fearing the machines and start fearing the firmware running on our brains! It's capitalism that's the problem, not the robots... if anything the robots can liberate us from capital's death grip!

grebc 2mo ago
It’s amusing to imagine the oligarchs are going to anymore charitable than currently.
- SR2Z 2mo ago
  It's not their choice, no matter how much they'd like it to be. The Chinese models are able to distill outputs into a model of slightly worse performance within a few weeks of each release, and the same copyright exemptions which protect these guys scraping also protect China. As long as their lobbyists don't win (and the deck is stacked against them, make no mistake) the future of AI is not going to be owned by the frontier labs.
- piloto_ciego 2mo ago
  They don't have to be charitable. We can literally take it from them. I get why people don't like to think about that sort of thing, but... yeah. We could make AI a sort of public good and do something like the Permanent Fund Dividend or something. There's lots of options even in the "reformist" way of thinking about it. But we shouldn't be naive.
  - grebc 2mo ago
    Oh yeah don’t be naive, but we’ll just take what we want. Ok bro.
    - piloto_ciego 2mo ago

JKCalhoun 2mo ago

Is it the replacing workers thing so much or are young people just fucking sick of tech (and Silicon Valley in general) and AI is the latest whipping boy? (Or maybe I'm just projecting.)

digitaltrees 2mo ago
I think tech has shifted. It was a relatively balanced political ecosystem, not the far right fever swamp like finance. There were libertarians and communists, now the libertarians that read atlas shrugged have accumulated enough power to make a push to escape democracy, capitalism, and any constraints on their power. So tech isnt what it was when it was the hippie dreamer open source all the things culture people liked.
red-iron-pine 2mo ago
before tech had the potential to make my life easier, more fun, smoother. say what you will about uber but it is a seamless service. there are a lot of great apps out there. now tech isn't making things better it's rapidly converting to aggressive rent seeking, and everyone can see it. only a rube thinks Big Tech is going to make tomorrow better for everyone.

h05sz487b 2mo ago

TBH the promise of many technologies has been making work redundant. But they used to be more diplomatic about it.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]