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People are not simple machines or animals. Unless AI becomes strictly better than humans and humans + AI, from the perspective of other humans, at all activitie
by ible 9mo ago
People are not simple machines or animals. Unless AI becomes strictly better than humans and humans + AI, from the perspective of other humans, at all activities, there will still be lots of things for humans to do to provide value for each other.
The question is how do our individuals, and more importantly our various social and economic systems handle it when exactly what humans can do to provide value for each other shifts rapidly, and balances of power shift rapidly.
If the benefits of AI accrue to/are captured by a very small number of people, and the costs are widely dispersed things can go very badly without strong societies that are able to mitigate the downsides and spread the upsides.
- traverseda 9mo agoI'd be more worried about the implicit power imbalance. It's not what can humans provide for each-other, it's what can humans provide for a handful of ultra-wealthy oligarchs.
- jordwest 9mo agoYeah, from the perspective of the ultra-wealthy us humans are already pretty worthless and they'll be glad to get rid of us. But from the perspective of a human being, an animal, and the environment that needs love, connection, mutual generosity and care, another human being who can provide those is priceless. I propose we break away and create our own new economy and the ultra-wealthy can stay in their fully optimised machine dominated bunkers. Sure maybe we'll need to throw a few food rations and bags of youthful blood down there for them every once in a while, but otherwise we could live in an economy that works for humanity instead.
- vkou 9mo agoThe thing that the ultra-wealthy desire above all else is power and privilege, and they won't be getting either of that in those bunkers. They sure as shit won't be content to leave the rest of us alone.
- jordwest 9mo agoYeah I know it's an unrealistic ideal but it's fun to think about. That said my theory about power and privilege is that it's actually just a symptom of a deep fear of death. The reason gaining more money/power/status never lets up is because there's no amount of money/power/status that can satiate that fear, but somehow naively there's a belief that it can. I wouldn't be surprised if most people who have any amount of wealth has a terrible fear of losing it all, and to somebody whose identity is tied to that wealth, that's as good as death.
- faidit 9mo agoGoing off your earlier comment, what if instead of a revolution, the oligarchs just get hooked up to a simulation where they can pretend to rule over the rest of humanity forever? Or what if this already happened and we're just the peasants in the simulation
- jordwest 9mo agoI like this future, the Meta-verse has found its target market
- _DeadFred_ 9mo agoThis would make a good black mirror episode. The character lives in a total dystopian world making f'd up moral choice. Their choices make the world worse. It seems nightmarish to us the viewer. Then towards then end they pull back, they unplug and are living in a utopia. They grab a snack, are greeted by people that love and care about them, then they plug back in and go back to being their dystopian tech bro ideal self in their dream/ideal world.
- xeonmc 9mo agoCharlie Chaplin's speech is more relevant now than ever before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7GY1Xg6X20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7GY1Xg6X20
- jordwest 9mo agoI first saw this about 15 years ago and it had a profound impact on me. It's stuck with me ever since "Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts." Spoken 85 years ago and even more relevant today
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- visarga 9mo ago> It's not what can humans provide for each-other, it's what can humans provide for a handful of ultra-wealthy oligarchs. You can definitely use AI and automation to help yourself and your family/community rather than the oligarchs. You set the prompts. If AI is smart enough to do your old job, it is also smart enough to support you be independent.
- jondwillis 9mo agoWorkshopping this tortured metaphor: AI, at the limit, is a vampiric technology, sucking the differentiated economic value from those that can train it. What happens when there are no more hosts to donate more training-blood? This, to me, is a big problem, because a model will tend to drift from reality without more training-blood. The owners of the tech need to reinvest in the hosts.
- hephaes7us 9mo agoRealistically, at a certain point the training would likely involve interaction with reality (by sensors and actuators), rather than relying on secondhand knowledge available in textual form.
- kfarr 9mo agoYeah I feel like the real ah ha moment is still coming once there is a GPT-like thing that has been trained on reality, not its shadow.
- qsera 9mo agoLook I think that is the whole difficulty. In reality, doing the wrong thing results in pain, and the right thing in relief/pleasure. A living thing will learn from that. But machines can experience neither pain nor pleasure.
- chongli 9mo agoYes and reality is the hard part. Moravec’s Paradox [1] continues to ring true. A billion years of evolution went into our training to be able to cope with the complexity of reality. Our language is a blink of an eye compared to that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox
- baq 9mo agoReality cannot be perceived. A crisp shadow is all you can hope for. The problem for me is the point of the economy in the limit where robots are better, faster and cheaper than any human at any job. If the robots don’t decide we’re worth keeping around we might end up worse than horses.
- ghssds 9mo agoPeople are animals.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- goatlover 9mo agoWhen horses develop technology and create all sorts of jobs for themselves, this will be a good metaphor.
- DangitBobby 9mo agoThe average person doesn't develop technology or create jobs for themselves.
- faidit 9mo agoSounds like something a goat lover would say..
- BeFlatXIII 9mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equestria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equestria
- d--b 9mo agoI was trying to phrase something like this, but you said it a lot better than I ever could. I can’t help but smile at the possibility that you could be a bot.
- marcus_holmes 9mo agoI'm optimistic. Banks used to have rooms full of bank clerks who manually did double-entry bookkeeping for all the bank's transactions. For most people, this was a very boring job, and it made bank transactions slow and expensive. In the 50's and 60's we replaced all these people with computers. An entire career of "bank clerk" vanished, and it was a net good for humanity. The cost of bank transactions came down (by a lot!), banks became more responsive and served their customers better. And the people who had to do double-entry bookkeeping all day long got to do other, probably more interesting, jobs. There are a ton of current careers that are just email + meetings + powerpoint + spreadsheet that can go the same way. They're boring jobs (for most people doing them) and having humans do them makes administration slow and expensive. Automating them will be a net good for humanity. Imagine if "this meeting could have been an email" actually moves to "this meeting never happened at all because the person making the decision just told the LLM and it did it". You are right that the danger is that most of the benefits of this automation will accrue to capital, but this didn't happen with the bank clerk automation - bank customers accrued a lot of the benefits too. I suspect the same will be true with this automation - if we can create and scale organisations easier and cheaper without employing all the admin staff that we currently do, then maybe we create more agile, responsive, organisations that serve their customers better.
- visarga 9mo agoAn ATM is a reliable machine with a bounded risk - the money inside - while an AI agent could steer your company into bankruptcy and have no liability for it. AI has no skin and depending on application, much higher upper bound for damage. A digit read wrong in a medical transcript, patient dies. > There are a ton of current careers that are just email + meetings + powerpoint + spreadsheet that can go the same way. Managing risks, can't automate it. Every project and task needs a responsibility sink.
- marcus_holmes 9mo ago> Every project and task needs a responsibility sink. I don't disagree, though I'd put it more as "machines cannot take responsibility for decisions, so machines must not have authority to make decisions". But we've all been in meetings where there are too many people in the room, and only one person's opinion really counts. Replacing those other people with an LLM capable of acting on the decision would be a net positive for everyone involved.