The argument was that so much energy has been put into solving problems that aren't actually hurting people.

Our success in having the ability to generate sonnets in seconds will be seen in our future similar to the emperor commissioning golden statues whilst his people starved.

I think you radically underestimate how much AI will revolutionise our economy. Sure, sonnets are frivolous but there are countless applications that won't be.

And those applications will let more work be done by fewer people, show people more effective ads, and make the rich richer in myriad other ways.

So you think the future is:

1. Fewer people working so fewer incomes

2. More ads to sell products to the fewer people who have incomes

3. A few people only getting rich (and buying all the stuff in the ads I guess?)

This makes no coherent sense.

Ads as a business model only make sense if there is a mass consumer market to sell stuff too. But if there are less people working and earning, ads by definition cannot be as effective.

No, we are going to see bigger changes and more radical changes than poorly thought-out dystopia scifi plots.

Could you offer an alternative vision?

I think there will be immense social dislocation as all white collar workers simultaneously get 100x more productive virtually overnight without a corresponding increase in work to do.

At the same time more people will be able to build on their ideas than ever. A few things that seem obvious to me would be:

- Private AI tutors that can go at a student's pace will revolutionise schooling (say goodbye to a teacher shortage anywhere)

- Helpdesk work will vanish

- Art will explode like nothing we've seen before. I'm already experimenting with writing stories in collaboration with AI and this is only the beginning.

- Numerous improvements in a huge number of machines and data analysis in particular will likely get much better.

- Due to widespread white collar work unemployment almost certain to be UBI's springing up all over the developed world.

- Far more workers will end up back in physical jobs of various types. Environmental clean up, farm work, construction, etc.

- Vastly more software will be built as the effective price of building will go way down.

- Robots is another area I'm interested in seeing what happens. My understanding is that building robot hardware that is useful is much easier than the software. So if this allows for much more rapid software development we couod see an explosion on robotics too.

I'm more certain of some of these than others but those are the ones off the top of my head. Out atm but you could also ask the Chatbot haha.

It will be a new level of irony if because of AI people instead of focusing on fun or creative tasks will go back to manual labour

Immediately conjured images of humans crafting more and more elaborate offerings to a man who lives in the sky, and felt oddly, familiar.

> A few people only getting rich (and buying all the stuff in the ads I guess?)

Yes? What is incoherent about this?

Especially when you consider that while some products are commodities you can just produce more of, a couple of important ones aren't: real estate, influence, power. Unless we change course, the latter will get concentrated on fewer and fewer hands, and maybe we get more of the former in return.

Well, this is a summary of the 2000s and 2010s, so it both not far fetched to imagine the trend continuing, and an understandable failure of imagining how the trend is going to stop (because we don't know yet.)

Perhaps there is a tipping point of unemployed people in the areas affected by AI where people outlaw some usage, funnel the funding, etc...

Perhaps the disappearing of "free" energy puts people back in the fields to ensure subsistence, and the few remaining intellectual tasks are automated to hell.

Perhaps this AI is astonishing us today before becoming boring and failing at the next hard task, buying us some time.

I think it's still very much in our power not to blindly follow decisions written automatically on a computer screen.

Don't give it a gun anytime soon, though.

I would argue that more work can be done by more people because more accessible tools enable anyone to produce based on ideas rather than only a small subset of people blessed with the required skills.

Did digital art tools, compared to something like oil painting, destroy art as a field? No, there's more art and artists than ever.[1]

I believe the same thing is true for music.

I don't see AI replacing the artist or the author or the musician. I see AI enabling more artists and authors and musicians to produce even greater art.

[1] https://www.arts.gov/news/press-releases/2019/new-report-rev...

I don't. I use AI every day at work and agree that it will revolutionise most industries. I do however stand by the fact that at the end of the day, companies like Google and OpenAI want to spend billions on AI, and less on other things. Thus my gold statue comment.

I see the point, an I think it’s a little overhyped.

But protein folding with ai might be really helpful for the medical field. (Alpha fold). We also use it to score (rate basically) prospective crispr designs, which along with some other parameters

So it might not be a net negative.

I think the big problems the OP alluded to are more about politics and cohesion than these neat science puzzles. Medical innovation does not inspire me when the medical system which administers these innovations remains so dysfunctional.

What a cynical reply! Are you not impressed by the incredible medical breakthroughs in mRNA vaccines from BioNTech and Moderna in the last three years? And billions of vaccines have been distributed and injected at record pace in human history.

Also, this phrase: <<medical system which administers these innovations remains so dysfunctional>> feel like someone writing from a US(-tainted) persepctive. Have you experienced well-functioning public health systems in other highly advanced countries? They are impressive.

How much of those advances are due to AI though?

I want better systems and I am cynical about pursuing other ends in this willfully politics-blind isolated manner, impressiveness of their achievements having a slightly tragic quality under that light.

I am not from the US but I think the US is a great case study in the disconnect between technological progress and improved general conditions (in particular for but not exclusively relating to healthcare). I think cynicism is the correct response to this trend.

> The argument was that so much energy has been put into solving problems that aren't actually hurting people.

That's not an argument, since the same thing can be said about anything else that does not solve world hunger, for example. Authors put energy into writing entertainment products while people starve.

While true the volume of money and effort put into AI is considerable, and according to some an existential threat to life as we know it today. I'm not ready to panic just yet, though would appreciate putting some of that energy into more practical improvements.

> While true the volume of money and effort put into AI is considerable

As opposed to the metaverse [0], marvel movies [1], video games [2], soccer [3], or NFL [4]?

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-lost-30-billion-on-meta...

[1] https://bgr.com/entertainment/marvel-spent-over-1-billion-on...

[2] https://www.eurogamer.net/star-citizen-has-now-raised-more-t...

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/henryflynn/2022/11/27/qatar-has...

[4] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/sport/2022/...

Sure, I'd prefer some of the energy poured into those also went to more fundamental efforts to improve society.

In my experience the people making that criticism tend to have done even less with their lives than the creators of whatever thing they are criticizing.

This is research. It helps discover things you might not have anticipated. Unlike engineering, you don't have a a project description and a known target market.

AI research seems to have hit a lode that yields solutions to recognition and generation of texts and images. Good thing, but not something what could have been predicted, let alone planned, 20 years ago.

One of the solutions for world hunger, synthetic fertilizers, have been discovered by the same chemical research that produced explosives and poisons.

The tech is ahead of social development.

as usual

Why do you think it doesn't make sense? In the worst case inventing AI before solving economic and political problems could potentially cause a massive societal collapse, hunger and/or poverty.

I think it makes perfect sense to get our act together before creating something that can be so potentially devastating, to reduce the likelihood of bad outcomes.

You can apply the same logic to conclude that Mesopotamians shouldn't have invented the wheel while they still fought wars with their neighbours and had people living in reed houses.

While it is true that the Mesopotamians faced many challenges at the time they invented the wheel, it is not an apt comparison to the development of advanced AI. The wheel was a simple technology that greatly improved the lives of the Mesopotamians, whereas AI has the potential to vastly surpass human intelligence and fundamentally alter society in ways that are difficult to predict.

The development of AI requires careful consideration and planning, particularly in regards to potential negative outcomes. In contrast, the invention of the wheel was a relatively straightforward decision that did not carry the same level of risk.

It doesn't seem practical to tell everyone - "stop, you can't do the research, you can't have this thought, you're now allowed to write the code". If a thing is possible, somebody is going to do it, you can't put a lid on progress, not on a global scale. Are there any examples from history where something similar has happened? I don't think so, and it's obvious why.