3 ms·

I feel this is merely stating the obvious. It goes back to the industrial revolution and every revolution before and after. There was a point where they though

I feel this is merely stating the obvious. It goes back to the industrial revolution and every revolution before and after. There was a point where they thought a majority of people would be working as switchboard operators and then telephone switching came along. Horses to cars, etc. Jobs transition, new space is created, people are caught in tbe crossfire of supply and demand curves. Incan agree the bullwhip of this one is going to be aggressive. I think it is a mistake to bet on AI as a driver of meaningful growth in a commercial capacity in the current state. When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium. I think the world at large is "learning on the job" what data scientists and others in ai have known for a long, several decades long, time have already known.

sltkr 1mo ago
> When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium. This is asserted without evidence. There is absolutely no proof that AI requires humans in the loop to function or improve itself. Compare it with Deepmind's go-playing program, AlphaGo, which mainly involved training a neural network on a large database of high-level human games. It defeated one of the top-ranked players in the world, Lee Sedol, but arguably it was drawing from human experience just like you described. But it didn't stop there. After that, Deepmind developed AlphaGo Zero, a version that was trained exclusively through self-play, with no human feedback in the loop. That's what you would call "AI inputs coming from AI outputs" but it didn't have the result of “resulting in delirium”: instead, it became orders of magnitudes stronger than the original version (which it defeated in a 100 to 0 competition after 3 days of training). This shows that AI can improve itself without having access to any human knowledge, and indeed transcend human performance by orders of magnitudes. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that general AI cannot improve itself the same way. People who claim otherwise are engaging in wishful thinking; they just assert their conclusion, but have no rational arguments to back it up.
- mcmcmc 1mo ago
  You have no evidence that self improvement can work at generalized tasks. Go is a simple game with a clear win condition, but deep strategy and near infinite permutations of how a game plays out. Winning a game of Go is a task well suited to machine learning. One might say you are engaging in wishful thinking by believing it’ll just continue to work across all domains. The world is much bigger than a Go board.
  - ewwe 1mo ago
    Anyone who works on stuff, especially novel stuff, quickly exposes the weaknesses of LLMs.
  - sltkr 1mo ago
    > You have no evidence that self improvement can work at generalized tasks. I never made that claim. I just said it's way too early to rule it out: there is no logical reason why AIs will (always) need to have a human in the loop, and we don't have enough experience with LLMs to know what their true limits are. I referenced AlphaGo not because the game of Go is exactly like every other task AI might perform in the future, but because the evolution from AlphaGo (which was trained on human games) to AlphaGo Zero (which was not) shows that at least in certain domains, it's not only possible to take the human out of the loop, it can actually make AI perform better. I'm not claiming this will definitely be possible in every other domain, but people who state it definitely won't be, are jumping the gun.
- mrtesthah 1mo ago
  >>When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium. >This is asserted without evidence. There is absolutely no proof that AI requires humans in the loop to function or improve itself. Nope, it's actually fairly well established. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11269175/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11269175/
  - dwohnitmok 1mo ago
    That paper has had a pretty turbulent reception and looks pretty conclusively wrong at this point. It used an incorrect theoretical framing that assumed that data was being replaced rather than accumulated as a result of more training (see https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01413 https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01413 which explores this). This is incorrect because this simply isn't how real-world datasets are created via synthetic data generation (which generally accumulate more data over time rather than replace their data). As a result most of the theoretical results were invalid. Empirical evidence has also cast a considerable amount of doubt on the paper. For example, Microsoft Phi-4 was an empirical test in specifically what happens if the majority of your training data is synthetic rather than human and it turns out that Phi-4 did significantly better than previous models which relied primarily on human data. There's some nuance to all of this in how exactly you do this, but the original claims of the paper are looking really shaky at this point.
numeri 1mo ago
> new space is created That seems to be the crux here. You think it will be, I (and a lot of other people) aren't sure it will. If new space for jobs are created, I am certain we'll be fine long term. What do you think will happen if it isn't (I know you have strong evidence for and reasons to believe it will be, but just indulge the hypothetical)?
- sghiassy 1mo ago
  Yes that’s the crux of the risk - will new space be created On one hand. We’ve never had a technological revolution that didn’t yield more jobs On the other hand, Terminator
  - smallerfish 1mo ago
    > We’ve never had a technological revolution that didn’t yield more jobs a) How many technological revolutions do you count? b) Of these, which directly created jobs vs in which did the job numbers eventually recover?
    - sghiassy 1mo ago
      Did you know “computers” used to be people? Before electronic computers, rooms full of workers, often women, did the math by hand. That job was decimated. Before ATMs, people went to bank tellers. Before mechanized looms, there were weavers. Look up where the word “Luddite” comes from. Before industrial manufacturing, shoes were made by cobblers. Elevators used to have human operators. There’s never been a technological revolution that didn’t yield more jobs than it replaced
  - DiscourseFan 1mo ago
    There is a theoretical limit, but we can't know when it will occur.
  - ACCount37 1mo ago
    AI is different because "intelligence" is the last thing humans still do better than machines.
azan_ 1mo ago
If AI would become better at cognitive work than humans, I don't really see what new jobs would be created.
- recursive 1mo ago
  Construction for data centers?
  - regular_trash 1mo ago
    Well clearly. But the above comment was about jobs that didn't exist before AI that AI will lead to the creation of. Tiktok arguably led to more datacenters being created, AI is not unique in this regard and it's silly to imply that datacenter jobs meaningfully contribute to employment on the same scale as the loss of jobs AI could potentially lead to.
    - recursive 1mo ago
      Yeah. I didn't mean to imply that. I think it's going accelerate the concentration of wealth.
  - reasonableklout 1mo ago
    This only works until general-purpose robotics gets good enough! There are certain jobs where the human connection fundamentally commands a premium (e.g. celebrities, sports players, the relational economy), but it's hard to imagine a world where this sector employs the majority of people. It would be a precarious existence as these jobs would be the first to go in a crisis such as a war, etc.
    - recursive 1mo ago
      I don't think it "works" at all. I believe the only parties that get a net benefit out of all this are basically the ownership class. They'll get some rental fees out of it. And they'll get a more direct lever to silently manipulate public sentiment. And the working class gets poorer, and more hooked on the dopamine machine.
brikym 1mo ago
Industrial transitions pushed more people from leg-work to hand-work and then brain-work. What is left once AI is better at that?
- lkjsdlfjasdf 1mo ago
  [dead]
hn_submit 1mo ago
This is potentially much more upending since it would put hundreds of millions of people out of work and concentrate all wealth at literally a handful of individuals. We could lead this towards a beneficial scenario with proper taxation, but the individuals who stand to gain will do anything in their power to prevent this.
petesergeant 1mo ago
> I feel this is merely stating the obvious. I think there is value in someone of Gates' stature stating the obvious, plainly.

sltkr 1mo ago

> When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium. This is asserted without evidence. There is absolutely no proof that AI requires humans in the loop to function or improve itself. Compare it with Deepmind's go-playing program, AlphaGo, which mainly involved training a neural network on a large database of high-level human games. It defeated one of the top-ranked players in the world, Lee Sedol, but arguably it was drawing from human experience just like you described. But it didn't stop there. After that, Deepmind developed AlphaGo Zero, a version that was trained exclusively through self-play, with no human feedback in the loop. That's what you would call "AI inputs coming from AI outputs" but it didn't have the result of “resulting in delirium”: instead, it became orders of magnitudes stronger than the original version (which it defeated in a 100 to 0 competition after 3 days of training). This shows that AI can improve itself without having access to any human knowledge, and indeed transcend human performance by orders of magnitudes. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that general AI cannot improve itself the same way. People who claim otherwise are engaging in wishful thinking; they just assert their conclusion, but have no rational arguments to back it up.

mcmcmc 1mo ago
You have no evidence that self improvement can work at generalized tasks. Go is a simple game with a clear win condition, but deep strategy and near infinite permutations of how a game plays out. Winning a game of Go is a task well suited to machine learning. One might say you are engaging in wishful thinking by believing it’ll just continue to work across all domains. The world is much bigger than a Go board.
- ewwe 1mo ago
  Anyone who works on stuff, especially novel stuff, quickly exposes the weaknesses of LLMs.
- sltkr 1mo ago
  > You have no evidence that self improvement can work at generalized tasks. I never made that claim. I just said it's way too early to rule it out: there is no logical reason why AIs will (always) need to have a human in the loop, and we don't have enough experience with LLMs to know what their true limits are. I referenced AlphaGo not because the game of Go is exactly like every other task AI might perform in the future, but because the evolution from AlphaGo (which was trained on human games) to AlphaGo Zero (which was not) shows that at least in certain domains, it's not only possible to take the human out of the loop, it can actually make AI perform better. I'm not claiming this will definitely be possible in every other domain, but people who state it definitely won't be, are jumping the gun.
mrtesthah 1mo ago
>>When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium. >This is asserted without evidence. There is absolutely no proof that AI requires humans in the loop to function or improve itself. Nope, it's actually fairly well established. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11269175/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11269175/
- dwohnitmok 1mo ago
  That paper has had a pretty turbulent reception and looks pretty conclusively wrong at this point. It used an incorrect theoretical framing that assumed that data was being replaced rather than accumulated as a result of more training (see https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01413 https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01413 which explores this). This is incorrect because this simply isn't how real-world datasets are created via synthetic data generation (which generally accumulate more data over time rather than replace their data). As a result most of the theoretical results were invalid. Empirical evidence has also cast a considerable amount of doubt on the paper. For example, Microsoft Phi-4 was an empirical test in specifically what happens if the majority of your training data is synthetic rather than human and it turns out that Phi-4 did significantly better than previous models which relied primarily on human data. There's some nuance to all of this in how exactly you do this, but the original claims of the paper are looking really shaky at this point.

numeri 1mo ago

> new space is created That seems to be the crux here. You think it will be, I (and a lot of other people) aren't sure it will. If new space for jobs are created, I am certain we'll be fine long term. What do you think will happen if it isn't (I know you have strong evidence for and reasons to believe it will be, but just indulge the hypothetical)?

sghiassy 1mo ago
Yes that’s the crux of the risk - will new space be created On one hand. We’ve never had a technological revolution that didn’t yield more jobs On the other hand, Terminator
- smallerfish 1mo ago
  > We’ve never had a technological revolution that didn’t yield more jobs a) How many technological revolutions do you count? b) Of these, which directly created jobs vs in which did the job numbers eventually recover?
  - sghiassy 1mo ago
    Did you know “computers” used to be people? Before electronic computers, rooms full of workers, often women, did the math by hand. That job was decimated. Before ATMs, people went to bank tellers. Before mechanized looms, there were weavers. Look up where the word “Luddite” comes from. Before industrial manufacturing, shoes were made by cobblers. Elevators used to have human operators. There’s never been a technological revolution that didn’t yield more jobs than it replaced
- DiscourseFan 1mo ago
  There is a theoretical limit, but we can't know when it will occur.
- ACCount37 1mo ago
  AI is different because "intelligence" is the last thing humans still do better than machines.

azan_ 1mo ago

If AI would become better at cognitive work than humans, I don't really see what new jobs would be created.

recursive 1mo ago
Construction for data centers?
- regular_trash 1mo ago
  Well clearly. But the above comment was about jobs that didn't exist before AI that AI will lead to the creation of. Tiktok arguably led to more datacenters being created, AI is not unique in this regard and it's silly to imply that datacenter jobs meaningfully contribute to employment on the same scale as the loss of jobs AI could potentially lead to.
  - recursive 1mo ago
    Yeah. I didn't mean to imply that. I think it's going accelerate the concentration of wealth.
- reasonableklout 1mo ago
  This only works until general-purpose robotics gets good enough! There are certain jobs where the human connection fundamentally commands a premium (e.g. celebrities, sports players, the relational economy), but it's hard to imagine a world where this sector employs the majority of people. It would be a precarious existence as these jobs would be the first to go in a crisis such as a war, etc.
  - recursive 1mo ago
    I don't think it "works" at all. I believe the only parties that get a net benefit out of all this are basically the ownership class. They'll get some rental fees out of it. And they'll get a more direct lever to silently manipulate public sentiment. And the working class gets poorer, and more hooked on the dopamine machine.

brikym 1mo ago

Industrial transitions pushed more people from leg-work to hand-work and then brain-work. What is left once AI is better at that?

lkjsdlfjasdf 1mo ago
[dead]

hn_submit 1mo ago

This is potentially much more upending since it would put hundreds of millions of people out of work and concentrate all wealth at literally a handful of individuals. We could lead this towards a beneficial scenario with proper taxation, but the individuals who stand to gain will do anything in their power to prevent this.

petesergeant 1mo ago

> I feel this is merely stating the obvious. I think there is value in someone of Gates' stature stating the obvious, plainly.