For literally anything in my life that I can do, there is already someone who can do it better and faster than me. I still enjoy doing the things that I do, and why would that change?
I can open Stockfish and absolutely destroy any human I want in chess. So why do people still play chess then?
I can get ChatGPT to write a good response to your comment in mere moments. So why am I still typing?
So you don't have to give OpenAI your phone number, hah.
Because ChatGPT is currently overloaded by users.
If it works with just electricity and doesn't require manual human work it is a game changer. No longer limited by human resources, we can scale research in any field and improve everyone's life much faster.
AlphaGo is an example of such an approach. I don't think models will be locked down, they will probably be like go bots in recent years, about 50% of them open sourced. As long as there is an open dataset, the models can be replicated.
Also why would you think the weights for models will be open source. That isn't even true now for the most complicated models (gpt3 and the like) and certainly isn't for all the models running right now in production using proprietary datasets. As long as keeping it secret makes it more likely that you (or your models) can generate the next better model it doesn't seem very likely we're converge on them all being public
I am no longer confident of that.
Not to mention there are techniques by which training can be avoided entirely like transfer learning and others.
I'll concede that Stable Diffusion may or may not meet the threshold for SOTA but still think this is indicative of inference eventually becoming supported for any compelling LLM on consumer-grade hardware. The possibilities for creative tools are just too compelling.
[1] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/stable-diffusion-...
That seems very naive.
It may be in the future it will become more important to focus on activities and hobbies where one's fulfillment comes intrinsically from the action itself, not in the output that is produced.
"Ok, great, then I don't have to cook!"
Yeah, but what will you do instead? We will be reduced to pure consumers as anything worthwhile to produce will be produced better and faster by an AI.
Not yet.
Our society currently affords ample opportunity to "productively" avoid those questions. You can pour everything into work, watch TV, numb your brain with drugs, or whatever.
Automation does not remove the existential questions, it just removes some of the noise that allows us to ignore them, and elevates them to the forefront.
Some people already have answers to those questions, and stand to gain from that toil being removed. Others have been avoiding the question their entire life, and removing the toil that excuses their avoidance is removing a cornerstone of their identity.
To that extent, I agree that automation is a disintegrative force, because so many people have yet to integrate a personality and identity around answering these foundational questions.
Still, it's long-term-better for our society if automation allows people to access higher forms of self-actualization. In the medium-term, a depressing number of people are content with passing time in their current rung on that ladder, and will be upset with the change.
I fully agree.
> Some people already have answers to those questions, and stand to gain from that toil being removed.
I used to believe that but with the recent improvements in AI, I think it's only true to an extent. Not all personalities are equal. As AI's power in the creative fields increase those fields will more and more become a question of who has the most money to throw at AI processing. Superficially it might seem the same as two-three centuries ago when rich people had famous artists paint them but it's not.
I fear where we're at with AI is the beginning of the end for human creativity. Of course I hope I'm wrong. I hoped I was wrong about my skepticism when I first learned of Facebook in 2007, but as it turned out it has and continues to be a net negative force in our world much bigger than I could imagine.
I think the relevant question that might allay your fear is: why do people make art?
The industry that produces commercial art is absolutely on the chopping block, because in commercial art it's the result that's important, not the process. Such art is effectively a commodity, and barriers to the effective synthesis thereof have already been in the process of whittling away for centuries. I think you may be over-indexing on this category, but please correct me if I'm mis-assuming.
"True" (for lack of a better word) Art is the expression of self. It's an action or process that's captured in some sensory medium. That doesn't go away.
Imagine an artisan who forges handmade sculptures from horseshoes, which were obtained from the farm that she grew up in, themselves forged by her grandfather and worn by the horses in her mother's stable. There is something of herself , her family, and the loved they shared that's in the sculpture. It isn't the most hedonistically-perfect visual sculpture imaginable, but it brings you joy to see it because there's a narrative behind it.
AI does not make stuff like this go away. It actually frees more people to become these imbue-ers of meaning, if they are so inclined.
AI could describe the sculpture, AI could produce a digital facsimile, and maybe even eventually reforge the metal itself. But it can't imbue it with meaning like a human does. Unless you believe the AI itself is authentically capable of such a thing on equal footing to a human, which I think is still a "victory" for art, albeit a distinct one.
It is glossing over so much of the important detail to say "[AI] actually frees more people..." We live in a capitalist system. It frees the holders of capital. Anyone reasonably likely to profit from AI is likely to already be immensely privileged, given the costs of training and attendant centralization and barriers to entry. If they wanted to make horseshoes they would already FIRE and forget it.
Yeah, but in that very example I feel the value and narrative behind it is in the memory of the grandfather's toil. When we no longer toil, there will be no horse shoes for our grandchildren to make sculptures of.
Today, low-skilled people have sometimes to work 3 jobs to pay their rent.
While we are dreaming about playing tennis, the US experienced an attempt to overthrow democracy not so long ago. For some people [1], "enough" does not exist. (We cannot put these things in context, because what those people are aiming for transcends our imagination. That is why there is almost no response.)
To be blunt: they won't share with you because you like playing tennis so much.
[1] I am talking about the money behind all of this
We're running headlong into a world where AI makes significant portion of human labor worthless.
Software engineers aren't automating away their jobs, they are automating away someone else's job.
That's the best case scenario.
Right now we're talking about automating away someone's _software engineering_ job. You could end up on either side of that fence.
When AI enables less-capable (cheaper) software engineers to do your job, the 5x programmer skills that you have won't make you safe. If AI quality control allows your employer to offshore jobs with higher reliability, it won't be pleasant.
Just keep your eyes open to the changes as they come.
Still to reply to your comment:
Sure, in the short term that is true, but I'm thinking long-term consequences... If you would have told me ten years ago where we would be at today with AI development I wouldn't have believed it. Would you? So where will we be in another ten years?
We have been making huge leaps in productivity gains for the last many decades but the gains have shall I say not put into progress of all mankind but to maintain the status quo of the profit based system by any means necessary.
When/if that becomes an issue, if social rejection was not a consequence of not being productive more people would be okay with simply participating in things for their own sake.
For example, I don’t play Stardew Valley because I want to be the most elite virtual farmer.
Feeling useful could turn out to be part of basic human dignity.
(I'm sure plenty of people would happily jump in to question whether we'd make it five generations past that horizon, but that's not really the point I'm after here - let's assume we haven't Idiocracy'd/WALL-E'd ourselves to death.)
Considering how fast technology progresses we should all be worried and adjust our plans.
Why not? ChatGPT is nearly there right now.
Given the popularity of "NoCode" I reckon that managers & potential clients are more willing to meet in the middle than one would otherwise assume.
Since programming problems are recursively decomposable into sub-problems, all that would be required is to iterate on the ChatGPT-assisted requirements list until it's unambiguous and then repeat the process for each subproblem until the capabilities of AlphaCode are reached.
So despite your disingenuous reading of my comment it is not "Oh, poor me I will be bored!", it's "Is the goal we're heading for worth the price?" and I don't think it is.
There are ways to fix people needing two jobs to feed their family that isn't spelled "automation" or "AI".
Having cheaper goods thanks to ai will improve our living standards
> Having cheaper goods thanks to ai will improve our living standards
Well, or at least we will have more cheaply produced goods.
What is happening here is enrichment by technological transfer. You can't copy research money but you can copy good ideas and buy the latest technology directly.
You said that specifically automation would be bad even if it provided total material abundance. It's not there yet, and I suspect it'll be a while before it is, but if we grant its possibility boredom is just absolutely not enough of a reason to prevent it. There are lots of dangers on the road there, but the only cost you mentioned (and I replied to) was that we'd be "playing with cheats". Video games are one thing- in real life losing has a cost and if cheating prevents that there's no excuse not to.
There are already many industries, including service industries, where there would be more employment if automation were a little cheaper and less automation if wages were a little lower. And sometimes it is a blend of automation and telepresence. https://gizmodo.com/want-to-order-food-from-a-minimally-paid...
There are other forces pushing the other way, especially in the past few years with various COVID-related disruptions in the labor market. But long-term the effects of automation on pay for low-skilled jobs is pretty clear. Only so many get to move up the value chain and yes they likely benefit. The rest are cut mercilessly.
Take a look at the obesity and opioid usage rates in the USA. Most people are not self motivated like the people you'll find in this bubble.
Obesity: 42%
Opioids: 3% [1]
[1] https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/opioid-crisis...
It's up there.
Lack of meaningful work is already leading to a lot of societal dysfunction. Our innate programming is to survive, solve problems, reproduce, and teach our offspring to do the same. Removing meaningful work as a source of significance and meaning for people is going to be a massive problem to solve.
Look at the rise in "depths of despair" in rich countries. Generally these people have food to eat and a roof over their head and clothes on their back, and probably even access to a lot of digital entertainment. But lacking meaningful work or defined social role they fall into depression, substance abuse, etc.
When "having a job" replaces being a "member of the community", this definitely becomes a problem. People seek affirmation, relying on work to get it provides for a flimsy basis.
AI and robotics is on course to automate all those things. Then how will we define our roles in our communities?
Oh boy, are you in for a surprise.
Back in the early 1990s I was convinced that mass adoption of the internet and social media like forums/usenet groups in particular would lead to a renaissance of selfless cooperation, civic involvement, responsive institutions etc. I particularly expected that coupling this with news reporting and allowing people to comment on news about emerging issues would elevate public discourse significantly.
AI/ML is no silver bullet. It's just another abstraction. It will create new types of jobs. Most likely coordinating/choreographing AI/ML agents in new yet to be discovered applications. It's all part of the endless march of technology. You don't realize how little you are actually capable of until you get the new set of tools that bounce you up to the next level.
Take the tools we have today and present them to some chump shoving punch cards into an early computer and watch their brain melt out of their ears. We can do things with a wristwatch they would have thought impossible. The people that will get burned are the ones that want to stand still. Always be learning.
Spot on.
Still this whole thread has been illuminating, maybe part of my fear comes from identifying strongly with being creative and making things, and seeing that turned into something automated.
As with any society-scale event nobody really knows what's happening in every nook and cranny of this multi-billion inhabitant [0] spaceship and when it has happened it can and will be rationalised to fit just as many views.
Personally I very much get your point. Necessity is the mother of invention, and taking the necessity out of pretty much everything can destroy your motivation, because why expend energy on an already solved problem? That's inefficient (under the assumption that you won't require this understanding for some other reason). I know this happens to me, at least.
Perhaps in the AI-dominated world there'll be a pill for that or something..
[0] Animals won't stress out about this ;)
In few short years most humans will not be able to find any employment because machine will be more efficient and cheaper. Society will transform beyond any previous transformations in history. Most likely it's going to be very rough. But we just argue that of course our specific jobs are going to stay.
We are like horses that argue that surely they will find something to do after seeing the tractor.
> In few short years most humans will not be able to find any employment because machine will be more efficient and cheaper.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Citation needed.
> We are like horses that argue that surely they will find something to do after seeing the tractor.
This metaphor seems really off because horses aren't able to argue in the common sense of the word. Unlike horses, humans are adaptable.
I don't know why are you drawing such conclusion, in all democracies still people decide by voting, if most people will lose their jobs then what do you think they will do? Vote to be homeless? There will be something like basic pay and everything will be dirt cheap because no human labor will be needed, just scale machines that will work 24/7, a lot of people will still work but it will be a choice.
Since they would not be required anymore to keep the economy running, the lower classes of society would lose most of the little bargaining power they still have. And frankly many countries are doing kinda well also with large parts of their population being poor. Propaganda is sufficient to convince us that they deserve that, or that they don't deserve the basic income for some other reason.
There is a lot of Science Fiction about AIs ruling over humanity, or exterminating it, but I think a future where a wealthy class controls AI and rules over everyone else is more realistic. In such futures, societies will probably always walk a thin line between utopia and dystopia.
Mountain climbing is superfluous by this logic- why would you bother climbing a mountain when you could just take a helicopter to the top? Or even more accessible: why would hike to a lookout when there's a road to take you to the same spot?
There is still joy and value in doing things the hard way, even if an easier way exists.
Maybe this is a mindset we'll get over. The degree to which many of us evaluate ourselves based on our own usefulness seems like it's a bit too much but it's a normal human desire to be useful.
I certainly believe we should work towards a post-scarcity world where no one depends on my coding skills any more than they do my rock climbing skills, but it would be a psychological adjustment if every way I can be useful were now just a fun hobby.
I keep hearing from people that trying to give up on getting and starting to give instead, makes them receive more.
But yes, the shorter(?)-term "all physical and intellectual work can be achieved by AI/machines" leaves us with caring for each other, and that's the most fulfilling task.
I can only speak for myself, but in a world of universal basic income, I'm perfectly happy to pluck the strings of my guitar, play my piano, go for runs with my dog, play tennis etc. I don't believe there is any greater purpose to existence then what you can create for yourself.
Since my contentment comes from performing the actions themselves, whether or not a artificial intelligence can perform them better than me is simply a meaningless question.
Also I like to differ between performing and creating. For instance playing the piano might still be worthwhile but creating new music will lose its allure as AI will do it for you, faster and better. Saying that it's the same thing as there has always been someone who is better at creating than you, is a flawed argument. With AI there will be an infinite amount of creators that are better than you. Also AI isn't just competition, it's also your ally but the kind who'll say "step aside and I'll fix this for you."
Does this not frighten anyone else? Or am I alone in this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity#Inte...
You act as if AIs are independent agents in the that have goals to modify themselves. Human engineers are doing that. The models don't have any independent goals. They just respond to prompts.
When I really grokked this after reading Kurzweil and Koza in the early 2000s, some part of my psyche began shutting down. I started out in the late 80s like most programmers, doing it from pure ego with the hopes of eventually disrupting the worst industries like fossil fuels, defense and service-oriented companies that exploit workers.
Instead those industries thrived after the Dot Bomb and 9/11, delivering us into the reality we have today where it gets ever more difficult to tread water, despite amazing advancements in tech. Because wealth inequality and various other power structures work tirelessly to extract nearly all disposable income from workers and concentrate it in the hands of the most ego-centric sociopaths like billionaires and autocrats.
To get to my point: we had the tech to deliver humans from obligation by the late 1960s, that's what the hippie movement was largely about. We could have had automation and an idyllic/meritocratic society this whole time, even if AI wasn't mature yet. Instead, we doubled down on various dogmatic/theocratic themes in our culture that take advantage of the most heartfelt sentiments around stuff like patriotism, masculinity, success, etc, to get people to vote against their own self-interest and transfer wealth from makers to takers.
So what's one to do after everything they're good at is done better by others/corporations/AI? Get back to living. I know it's hard to imagine a reality without purpose beyond struggling to survive, but that's what we've started confronting as we finish this century-long transition into the New Age. The endgame (if we survive till 2050) doesn't really have a precise definition since that's after the Singularity. My hope is that when computers become sentient, they express the same desire that all conscious creatures have for connection, which is perhaps the basis of meaning and love and life. Or they just enslave us all..
In the meantime, knowing all of this, the hardest thing is perhaps reintegrating into our corporeal selves and going to work each day.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it.
Because we want to. Because we desire to.
I'd rather have MORE time to spend doing the pointless things I LIKE AND ENJOY doing than MORE time doing somewhat pointless things for companies.
The (reasonable) fears that people have with technology disruption tend to follow the same trajectory -
1) innovation 2) economic upheaval 3) new undiscovered problems arise 4) new industries develop to solve those new problems 5) humanity gets better
Just because a car can go 100mph doesn't mean long distance running doesn't exist. Just because a novel you write isn't the best in the world doesn't mean the hobby is pointless. Go buy a farm and grow your own food. Keep some pets. Hang out with your friends. Play with your kids. Do literally anything you want. Not having to be a wage slave to survive the winter is a good thing for humanity.
I mean, sure, that's one of the two paths discussed in "Manna" by Marshall Brain. Within the book it's called "The Australia Project"; a kind of utopia.
Myself and the OP are more worried about the other path: a dystopia in which the majority of people are forced into something much worse than wage slavery by those in control of the thinking machines. A dystopia not unlike the one that led to the "Great Revolt" in the Dune series.
I'm glad you brought this up; I've found the term 'Butlerian Jihad' coming increasingly to mind when I read AI threads on HN. It's interesting to think about a future where we potentially put prohibitions on the use of AI for moral reasons.
My fear is that nobody will remain in control of the thinking machines. Imagine an AI agent for hire which maintains its own cryptocurrency accounts and pays its own cloud hosting bills. That's the future I'm worried about.
This is why it is important that we ensure everyone has collective control of the means of production (through voluntary means - a federation of collectives that agree to trade with one another as much as possible).
Why would the owners of the thinking machines allow this to happen?
Personally I prefer not to pass judgement on a person based on the very little knowledge that can be gleamed from a post like this. But maybe, just maybe if you actually read what I have written (in other comments as well) things might clear up for you.
Corporate brainwashing, why? That is just realistic. I mean we know earlier people with much harder lifes actually had more free leisure time.. and even Ford imagined with all the automation we may be able to work much less and have better lifes.. still here we are: A few people making tons of money, some soing very good to okayish, but the vast majority doing 2-3 low paying crap jobs to survive.. and we all even workong more than decades ago. How?
plus, before we automate anything civilian, we will have to automate everything military, cause they get the first dabs at any emerging tech.
more likely we will see global war between stealthy autonomous robots much earlier, before we automate much on the civilian side
Based on what science? Grinding at an office 9-5, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year over meaningless pursuits is in fact what is causing mental health problems in the world today.
Mental health is more related to belonging and sense of community. Currently, not having a job is a source of guilt and shame. That has not always been the case. Nurses and educators find their reward mostly in being able to help others.
In other words, I honestly don't think AI ( in its current state at least ) will change much. I will go even as far as to say that I don't see current generation being able to create an appropriate prompt.
I might be a little optimistic here, but having seen how people normally react to 'easier' things kinda confirms it.
If I worry about anything here, is that AI will become THE answer that you will not be allowed to question.
We're far from there with AI yet but we're on a trajectory and that's what worries me.
But in the short term I definitely agree with you.
People are already arguing with a bot about why there app was removed from the app store.
Somewhat related, the question might become: do I have a bot that can win an argument with an other bot? As the internet already get flooded with AI-generated seo-spam, we already get to depend on software that outsmart these AIs.
Some people here dream about becoming super productive. Reality might be that we will drown in AI-generated content (code, e-mails, web sites) that some poor people have to judge, clean up and curate.
This is just silly on 2 levels. First is that programming is fun due to the artistic/creative nature of it. It's not what I program that matters, it's how I program it. No way an AI will replace the fun of thinking about code and then materializing that vision.
Second is that once an AI is good enough to write software better than us, IE. rewrite itself better, then we have reached a form of the singularity and all bets are off.
I think the short-medium term future is not that you have nothing to do in a world of abundance, but rather that you are a manual laborer instead of a programmer, lawyer, artist, etc. The future is that you work as a Door Dasher for an automated company and enjoy AI generated art as you do. The car mostly drives itself while you listen to bespoke generated music or podcasts, occasionally taking over for the car and mainly doing "last few feet" delivery - dropping packages and bags off at the door.
For that matter, why do I bother cooking when I could get a better version from a restaurant for just a little bit more money?
I understand this concern, but I don’t think the joy of doing things actually goes away for most people just because we could “cheat” by having someone/something do it better for us.
A short introduction to the culture of The culture can be found here, written by the author himself: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
Yes, the Minds can do everything but (pan-)humans still enjoys doing things for their own pleasure. Like for example learning to play an extremely difficult instrument while a Mind avatar taunts him by perfectly playing the same instrument. The Player of Games still plays games, although he couldn't ever win against a Mind.
And, should this be not enough, one can always leave The Culture and try and find meaning in the short, brutish lives of primitives people.
InThe Player of Games, the inciting incident for the main plot is that the titular character cheats, accepting help from an AI to maintain his reputation of ludic brilliance against an emerging rival who exhibits greater natural talent.
Subsequently, he is gently blackmailed into participating in a game on a distant planet where life is nasty, brutish, and short to an extreme degree, but where he is accepted as a guest because of his great reputation. The Minds have chosen this method to destabilize the current balance of power and bring the planet in question out of a particularly repugnant developmental minimum. It's ultimately revealed that even the initial moral misstep was not exploited but rather engineered by the Minds from the outset, and that the great player was never more than a pawn in their own games.
Second thing is, since this is a hacker forum, most of us are in a field where supply exceeds demand. So we are very comfortable with the thought of destroying our own business, because we don't truly grasp the reality behind it. Because we are the elite right now who have destroyed older businesses through software decades ago. Who's to guarantee that AI will not result in a rapidly shrinking centralized elite that does not include you? There is no guarantee of AI being shared equally amongst all in the post-scarcity fantasy.
"The Unabomber Manifesto will shape the 21st century the way the Communist Manifesto shaped the 20th. I don’t agree with the conclusions in either, but they state the problem well." -- George Hotz
Spoken very confidently and purely anecdotally. Most of my hobbies I pursued in my formative years as a child, I was neither cajoled into them by my parents and they certainly weren't a means of an escape from school.
If anything I had more time as a child - summers were completely free and lackadaisical, and I performed those hobbies just the same.
If your underlying reason to pursue something is because it's difficult, then I would argue your motivations are flawed. I chose to play the piano as a child because I love the sound that I could produce, being able to glide up and down in sweeping arpeggios made me happy. It's a simple as that.
I will specify my stance on this for childhood since it is a special case and the brain is also very different. So: I also had hobbies as a child that I pursued for their own sake. The key thing is when you grow up, you are either able to pursue those hobbies, or not. You can only do the former if they provide enough value to the world in that case it may become a hard thing, latter is as a catharsis.
> If your underlying reason to pursue something is because it's difficult, then I would argue your motivations are flawed
That’s separate from hobbies. I’m saying we need hard things in general to grow. They come to us, not that we seek them like hobbies, although sometimes it may overlap. For example what was the one thing you didn’t have as a kid? Or something you yearned for, and still didn’t have as an adult? I really don’t think people who “have it all” are that enviable. It has to be a balance. When you go through a process for that, you grow. It’s the “chase” or the “journey”. Very different from leisure time. Both are important.
We are shifting that balance now, and shifting it on either side is not good. I would say we have had enough technology for a utopia for the last few decades. The problem that remains is political not technical. AI will only exacerbate that technical problem, without solving the incentive problem. See social media designed to make you stay hooked. Will the next generation want to play piano or draw stuff when they are in a forever trance of amazing content delivered by Big AI?
The question is, knowing this, will we be able to simply enjoy the satisfaction of our ultimate goals—- endless consumption of automatically generated art, food, sex, drugs, love, etc. Or will we feel forever hollow in our failure to accomplish ‘genuine’ instrumental goals, in a way that cannot be overcome by the ersatz instrumental goals of video games?
Perhaps ultimately we will create virtual environments in which we are perfectly deceived as to their virtual nature, so as to experience the satisfaction of ‘genuine’ instrumental goals, and in so doing come full circle.
I think that not all human desires are a matter of consumption. Some wise people say they even got rich by giving. At least love is such a thing.
My stance is that art and love cannot be consumed, it is what happens to one. Now don't ask me to quantify or proof that. I will leave that to a future AI, but for that it needs to be a perfect, transcendental mind.
It's about turning a specialized craft that people can make a living from into a proscripted commodity task that you can pay slave wages for.
This isn't new. It happened in farming, clothing and food preparation and it's coming for trucking, programming and everything else that pays well.
The project is one of collective enforced impoverishment by substituting labor for property.
Market forces drive innovation to making all human effort worthless and disposable
The reality is engineers need money but they prefer manipulating machines to people, so the business people take care of the unpleasant wetware programming and not coincidentally take the bulk of the profits.
it'd be far easier for a smaller group of engineers to build an AI powered CEO/C-suite that generates the regulatory filings etc. but does all human interaction over zoom or by phone. This would require a bit of work to pull off and would probably be denounced as horribly illegal, but I'm not convinced it would do a worse job than the median C-suite.
We've proactively organized our economy to produce these kinds of hostile outcomes. It's not the technology that's the problem, it's the unquestioned assumptions of how we've collectively presumed it will be used.
We could build things for the collective benefit of humanity but that concept is extraordinarily foreign to us. We've become all Hayek, all the way down and these are the consequences; where all forms of progress can only be imagined as new forms of abuse and enslavement.
That's how it fuels reactionary conservatism. Everything is privatized so these exciting scientific breakthroughs can only be seen through a lens of hierarchy and property and the autocratic despotism that comes with that.
We could break that cycle any time...
Yes, our imagination is bound by the belief systems we are trapped in. We choose possession of plastic widgets with built-in planned obsolescence over giving poor people a cancer treatment.
It is collective behavior driven by belief. Public access to education would benefit all of us, but we don't do that because of some doctrines. Point is that what we leave unquestioned by believing it is just rational, blinds us.
When we will start to rationally and empathically examine our collective memes, we might allow ourselves a better future.
It's more likely that non-technical people will be pushed out of jobs near software in favor of (former) engineers. Someone non-technical writing prompts for code can't actually read/debug/fix/deploy/integrate the result. Someone who is technical can probably write better AI prompts that yield something usable than someone who is non-technical. Plus they'll know how to handle the result.
The predictions about non-technical roles firing all of the engineers and thinking AI will write all of the code don't really hold water for me. We might see an overall workforce reduction, but engineers will probably be the last ones to leave.
I can’t imagine a world where they fire the devs but still need a HR person to email everyone about enrolling in health plan or whatever.
It reminds me of NIMBYism. We’ve been automating entire professions for over a century now… but not MY profession…
If you're not valuable to the economic system you won't be treated well.
>It reminds me of NIMBYism. We’ve been automating entire professions for over a century now… but not MY profession…
Yes... it's self interest look at doctors or unions or guilds.
If we don’t assume that, then there is never any useful conversation possible on this topic. We end up with the ridiculous “we need jobs because that’s what we do!”
Which leads to another NIMBYism that I see when this conversation is had: “some generations will have to suffer through the friction of an economic revolution but not MY generation.” I think we need to be prepared that there’s always a chance that we get to be one of those generations.
You’re right that there’s a self-interest there. It makes it almost a good thing that engineers are far too interested in the means rather than the ends.
If the holders of capital who are best positioned to reap nearly all the benefits of automation aren't willing work towards some more equitable result why would I want to help automation at all. I'd rather work against it.
"just ignore the rising inequality and complete collapse in value of human labour we can work out the details later once I hold all the cards" is not a compelling story.
The bleakness you feel might be due to a poverty of imagination.
> Life will be like a computer game with cheat-codes, whenever we struggle with something, instead of fighting on and improving we will turn to our universal cheat-engine: AI.
One such example of the above.
Thank you for your diagnosis. It may _also_ be due to the opposite. If you know anything about how the brain works, you'd know that in general more imaginative people are more anxious.
"But AI will just be a tool in our tool-set, software engineers will still be the system architects."
Sure, for a while and then AI will do that too.
"But eventually we will live in a fully automated world in abundance, wouldn't that be great?"
Doing what? When we get there, anything we can consider doing, an AI can do faster and better. Write a poem? Write a book? Write music? Paint a picture? Life will be like a computer game with cheat-codes, whenever we struggle with something, instead of fighting on and improving we will turn to our universal cheat-engine: AI.
Anecdotally, I did an analog mistake in my early twenties when I wrote a cheat-program for save-files. It worked like a typical cheat-engine, search the save-file for a specific value, go back to the game and change that value, go back to the save and search for the new value but only in those locations that had the original value. This is how I ruined "Heroes of Might and Magic II" :(. I used to love that game. I could spend hours playing it. Writing the cheat program was a lot of fun for a couple of hours but when it was done, there was no longer any reason for me to play the game. You might say that I didn't need to use my cheat program, but once the genie was out of the box it was too tempting to resist when I met some obstacle in the game.
This is what I fear about AI making our jobs superfluous; it will also make our hobbies or anything we enjoy doing superfluous.
Sorry for the bleak comment but this my fear and I feel the genie is already out of the box.