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Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by alumic on Saturday February 17, 2024 @02:19AM (#39407189)
I drove around today listening to the most recent Lex Fridman podcast, in which the founder of Boston Dynamics was describing replacing human labor with machines that were capable of learning by seeing. I have family in the trades. I pursued tech and fell in love with the field. Listening to the interviewee, I began to feel sick to my stomach at the glib description of what amounts to ripping away peoples' livelihoods with plasticized fingers. Work is equivalent to worth. We are not biologically or sociologically prepared to differentiate the two.

How easy it must be for Sam Altman to drag the world kicking and screaming into the future. How pretty his offices.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by moltar on Saturday February 17, 2024 @03:03AM (#39407441)
Could have said the same about the use of tractors. People used to farm by hand. All those people were replaced. Yet here we are doing just fine.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by lewhoo on Saturday February 17, 2024 @04:29AM (#39407868)
If your passion was to plow the field by hand then I agree. Otherwise it is definitely not an equivalent.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by ben_w on Saturday February 17, 2024 @05:00AM (#39408053)
Farmer protests are in the news at the moment, and the people quoted by the journalists are talking about farming as a passion.

The more the farms automate, the fewer farmer workers there can be.

Logic isn't part of these protests either: the farmers are being told "you're making more food than we need, please make less" and yet the placards are (in the local language) "no farms = no food".

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by lewhoo on Saturday February 17, 2024 @05:27AM (#39408182)
No, I specifically meant if your passion was to plow the field by hand. All I want is not to put an equals sign between something that takes years of formal education and years of self study and development, and something you can master in a week or month. Being and engineer or doctor is who you (partly but permanently) become. The tractor didn't rob anyone of their farming passion. It did make plowmen become factory workers and if that was someone's true passion then an exception must be granted, but I really think the 1 to 1 comparison between something that can be mastered in a week vs years doesn't do anyone proper justice.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by nicbou on Saturday February 17, 2024 @07:21AM (#39408801)
I'm not sure I follow you. The problem isn't that people lose their passion. The problem is that people lose their means of subsistence. The factory workers displaced by automation share the same plight as the farmers before them: how do I feed my family when I have no job?

Efficiency puts people out of work. They can be relocated to other useful pursuits, but usually they're left to do that on their own.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by lewhoo on Saturday February 17, 2024 @07:34AM (#39408873)
I agree. I simply claim that losing something you picked up in a week and losing something you dedicated your life to (in some cases, not all cases of course) is not exactly the same. It is also far easier in the former case to shrug off and maybe try plumbing, construction or anything else.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by theK on Saturday February 17, 2024 @10:27AM (#39410285)
> you're making more food than we need, please make less

Dont know what country this is in but here in Germany farmers are mostly having an issue with prices being set too low by too big buyers, regardless of the demand.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by ben_w on Saturday February 17, 2024 @03:17PM (#39413118)
It was either the UK, France, or Spain; the article covered all three.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by Aurornis on Saturday February 17, 2024 @08:44AM (#39409335)
What does passion have to do with anything in this context?

Nobody is talking about AI replacing people’s passion projects. The discussion was about jobs and economy.

The notion that people’s jobs are their passion isn’t true for the vast majority of the world.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by inference-lord on Saturday February 17, 2024 @03:40AM (#39407622)
People are still employed to drive tractors though.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by ben_w on Saturday February 17, 2024 @03:59AM (#39407724)
90% fewer in absolute numbers compared to driving oxen across fields, despite a simultaneous ten-fold increase in the population.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by dukeyukey on Saturday February 17, 2024 @05:36AM (#39408238)
In the grand scheme of things, definitely. But that didn't help out-of-work laborers and miners watching their children slowly starve.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by golol on Saturday February 17, 2024 @05:39AM (#39408260)
Yea but it helped the arguably larger portion of the population which dont see their children starve anymore due to cheaper food.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by inference-lord on Saturday February 17, 2024 @06:47AM (#39408601)
Hopefully we can workout how to have this revolution without the kids starving bit this time eh?
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by dukeyukey on Saturday February 17, 2024 @05:32PM (#39414163)
In the grand scheme of things, definitely. I don't think we should slow down technological progress at all. But you're never gonna sell anything by saying "yeah, but only your kids will starve!".
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by keiferski on Saturday February 17, 2024 @02:26AM (#39407227)
For autonomous robots to replace the millions of tradesmen and workers, it would require vastly more resources than are being put toward this now. I wouldn’t expect human labor to be replaced in this way for a century or two.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by duccinator on Saturday February 17, 2024 @03:49AM (#39407670)
Once you have autonomous robots you can use those robots to build more robots leading to an exponential curve. The day they make the first one, we will reach a million in 2-3 years and a billion in 2-4 years after that.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by keiferski on Saturday February 17, 2024 @03:51AM (#39407674)
The laws of physics and the material cost of creating robots still exist. Real life isn’t a sci fi movie.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by ben_w on Saturday February 17, 2024 @04:09AM (#39407778)
If robots actually replaced all human labour and left nothing for humans to be employed at, then the robots necessarily can do their own resource extraction.

The current cost of a Boston Dynamics Spot is around a year's income, give or take whose income you're measuring against.

If it were able to do any human task at the same rate as a human — and yes, I know it isn't, this is just a anchoring point for the discussion — a group of them would be able to extract and process enough resources in a year sufficient to double their population, all the way from rocks in the ground to a finished deliverable.

n years later, there are 2^n robots. Sure, sure, that's a whole 33 years to go from one total to one per human, not the numbers the other person gave which would need a much shorter (but not wildly implausible) reproduction time of 5-8 weeks, but the point is still valid.

That exponential stops only when some un-substitutable resource is fully exploited, so I'm not sure what the upper limit actually is, but given we exist I assume 8 billion robots is also possible.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by vasco on Saturday February 17, 2024 @04:29AM (#39407869)
These robots can also teleport and charge anywhere or do you predict an expedition to some mine in Africa when they are at the stage where they need some cobalt?

I'm just finding it funny thinking of 15 Spots queuing for a flixbus / greyhound bus because they need to go get some raw material across the continent.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by ben_w on Saturday February 17, 2024 @04:49AM (#39407978)
I expect cobalt to be mined in the cheapest possible way.

If that's humans, humans have work[0]. If humans don't have work, the only alternative to robots is, what, well-trained squirrels?

> I'm just finding it funny thinking of 15 Spots queuing for a flixbus / greyhound bus because they need to go get some raw material across the continent.

Me too.

But I expect actual logistics to be much like current logistics, so it would be more like a few Spots loading a standardised intermodal shipping container, a Tesla semi taking it to the port (which is guarded by drones), an automated gantry that puts the container on a cargo ship, a few more robots guarding the cargo ship from pirates (who may well also be robots), the same in reverse at the other end.

[0] You may point to the current conditions of cobalt mines and go "this is bad"; but once was a time when other forms of mining were seen as good solid work, and those with those jobs protested against their mines being closed down. Almost broke the UK when they did that protest, too.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by flextheruler on Saturday February 17, 2024 @05:13AM (#39408125)
You don’t have to do all this hand waving about what you think is going to be happening in the near future.

Just explain why AGI will be in our near. Frankly, I don’t see how from what we have now.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by ben_w on Saturday February 17, 2024 @05:40AM (#39408263)
> You don’t have to do all this hand waving about what you think is going to be happening in the near future.

Strange response…

> Just explain why AGI will be in our near. Frankly, I don’t see how from what we have now.

…but OK.

The AI we have now, is already capable of learning from what we do. It's very stupid, in the sense that it takes a huge number of examples, but surveillance is trivially cheap so a huge number of examples is actually very easy to get.

As I wrote in 2016:

"""We don’t face problems just from the machines outsmarting us, we face problems if all the people working on automation can between them outpace any significant fraction of the workforce. And there’s a strong business incentive to pay for such automation, because humans are one of the most expensive things businesses have to pay for.""" - https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/the-singula...

Compute cost is also important: more compute makes better GenAI images, allows larger models in general, turns near-real-time into actual-real-time (many robot demos you see on YouTube have sped-up footage).

Here's something I wrote in 2018 anchored on iPhone compute cost and some random guesstimate I found for what it would take to have an uploaded human brain running in real time, though I can't remember if I've ever compared it with actual compute improvements since then: https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/10/01/pocket-brai...

So, while I don't know what you mean by "near", I'd put "the economy is going to change radically due to AI" somewhere between "imminent" and "20 years" (±3σ, skew normal distribution with a mode somewhere around 2028-2030).

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by flextheruler on Saturday February 17, 2024 @03:22PM (#39413172)
I mean by hand waving you are focusing on discussing the future robots that are going to take over and perform x task or y task or duplicate themselves. Obviously these robots doing that is predicated on them having AGI so it’s pointless to talk about what these AGI robots will be doing if we haven’t established that AGI is even possible in the near term or at all.

It’d be like me making a prediction that we will have begun to colonize another galaxy in 10 or 20 years time and then only talking about how there’ll be trade between Earth and the colonies and maybe even wars and revolutions. Meanwhile completely skipping over how our spacefaring technology will advanced to the point we can even travel those distances in a reasonable timeframe.

I’m not an expert on LLMs but there doesn’t seem to be very much about them that is even approaching AGI. They’re a useful tool and it’ll definitely disrupt certain sectors of the economy mostly white collar jobs, but we’re in the middle of a peak of inflated expectations. This has happened before with other technologies.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by ben_w on Saturday February 17, 2024 @04:26PM (#39413693)
> I mean by hand waving you are focusing on discussing the future robots that are going to take over and perform x task or y task or duplicate themselves.

Invert your causality.

The discussion so far was "oh no, oh woe, we shall have no jobs!" — this can only happen if AI is good enough to do all that humans can do. Until that point, we're fine, it's the status quo, and also it doesn't matter how long we stay in this state. I'm not making any strong claim about the start date of the transition (I have a 20 year spread which I think is pretty vague), only the duration of such a transition.

When AI can do that, when, then it's obvious they can do things like "build a robot body", which is obvious because we can, and the definitional requirement of there not being any more work for humans is that the robots can do all the things we can. It's a necessary precondition for the scenario, not a prediction.

> Obviously these robots doing that is predicated on them having AGI

No, it isn't. "AGI" isn't even a well-defined term, each letter of the initialism means a different thing to different people.

And self-replication has much, much lower brain power requirements than full AGI, even for simple definitions of AGI: an AI-and-robot combo with all the intellect of the genome of E. coli is also capable of self-replication. The hard part of self-replication right now isn't the brain power.

So again, invert your causality: the brain power to replace all human workers includes the knowledge of how to self-replicate, but the knowledge of how to self-replicate does not require the brain power to replace all human workers.

> so it’s pointless to talk about what these AGI robots will be doing if we haven’t established that AGI is even possible in the near term or at all.

The specific things an AI needs to do, is learn. That's all. And they already can. The weaknesses of current models still, even if left unresolved, result in AI learning to do each thing humans do eventually when given enough examples, which limits humans to the role of teaching the machines. This is still a form of employment, so it's not economic game-over.

> It’d be like me making a prediction that we will have begun to colonize another galaxy in 10 or 20 years time and then only talking about how there’ll be trade between Earth and the colonies and maybe even wars and revolutions. Meanwhile completely skipping over how our spacefaring technology will advanced to the point we can even travel those distances in a reasonable timeframe.

No. That would require a change of the laws of physics. We don't need a change to the laws of physics for AI, because no matter what definition is used and whether or not current models do or don't meet any given standard, the chemistry in our own bodies definitely demonstrates the existence of human-level intelligence.

> I’m not an expert on LLMs

Are not the only kind of AI. You can't use an LLM for OCR, tagging photos, blurring the background of a video call, driving a car, forecast the weather, or predict protein foldings, and shouldn't use one for route finding or playing chess (although they're surprisingly good at the latter two, all things considered). Other AI do those things very well.

But LLMs will translate between languages as a nice happy accident. And they can read the instructions and use other AI as tools. And, indeed, write those other AI, because one of the things they can translate is English to python.

> but there doesn’t seem to be very much about them that is even approaching AGI.

Then you are one of many whose definition of "approaching" and "AGI" is one I find confusing and alien.

Between all AI, every single measure of what it means to be intelligent that I was given growing up has been met. Can machines remember things? Perfectly. How big is their vocabulary? Every word ever recorded. How many languages do they speak? Basically all of them. Are they good at arithmetic? So good that computers small enough and cheap enough to be given away for free, glued to the front of magazines, beat all humans combined and still would even if everyone was trained to the level of the current world record holder. How well do they play chess? Better than the best humans, by a large margin. Go? Ditto. Can they compose music? Yes, at any level from raw sound pressure levels to sheet music. Can they paint masterpieces? Faster than the human eye's flicker fusion rate. Can they solve Rubik's cubes? In less than the blink of an eye. Can they read and follow instructions, such they can use tools? Yeah, now we have LLMs, they can do that great. Can they make software tools? Again, thanks to LLMs, yes. Do they pass law school exams, or medical exams, can they solve puzzles from the International Mathematical Olympiad? Yup.

We're having to invent new tests in order to keep claiming "oh, no, turns out it's not smart".

> They’re a useful tool and it’ll definitely disrupt certain sectors of the economy mostly white collar jobs, but we’re in the middle of a peak of inflated expectations. This has happened before with other technologies.

LLMs, probably so. I often make the analogy with DOOM, released 30 years back, and the way games journalists kept saying each new 3D engine was "amazing" or "photorealistic", and yet we've only just started to really get that over the last decade. Certainly all the open source models are gushing over each other as "ChatGPT clones" or "ChatGPT killers" in the same way games were "DOOM clones" or whatever the noun was in the cliché "${noun} killers".

And yet the field of AI as a whole, including but not limited to GenAI, has been making rapid progress and doing things which are "decades or centuries away" every few couple of years since I graduated in 2006. Even just the first half of the 2010s was wild, and the rate of change has only gone up since then, this last 18 months has felt like more than that entire decade.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by Nevermark on Saturday February 17, 2024 @04:56AM (#39408023)
They can just hire a human, until there are enough of them to fully set up global automated distribution systems.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by keiferski on Saturday February 17, 2024 @04:21AM (#39407831)
The discussion is about robots replacing laborers and tradesmen, not all human work. It seems far more likely than humans will maintain control of the corporations that manufacture the robots.

The rest of this is just sci-fi speculation.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by ben_w on Saturday February 17, 2024 @04:57AM (#39408033)
> The discussion is about robots replacing laborers and tradesmen, not all human work.

If that's all they did, it would be just another change to the nature of work, and humans would simply find other roles to fill.

Rapid change is scary, but can be managed, has been managed before — this kind of thing has historically grown the metaphorical economic pie, making everyone better off. If it's either one of "just muscle power" or "just brain power", the other leaves opportunities for humans.

Only a total replacement of all human work causes such a break that we're fumbling around in the dark. ("Fumbling around" is how I see the discussion of UBI: even if it turns out to be right, we don't yet have anything like a good enough model for the details).

> It seems far more likely than humans will maintain control of the corporations that manufacture the robots.

Will they, though? We've already got people (unwisely IMO) putting AI on boards of directors. Yes, it's as much a stunt as anything else, the law prevents them from being treated as "people", but the effect is the same: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Artificial-intelligence-get...

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by duccinator on Saturday February 17, 2024 @07:45AM (#39408942)
One of your assumptions is that we will start from 1 robot per year. I believe this is not true. I assume robots will be similar to high end cars in regards to the complexity of manufacturing. Once a company develops a prototype with AGI(mechanically the robots are almost there already, just the control systems and software that's lacking, which is supposed to be solved by AGI) it will rain VC money. The first million will be built by humans. The initial robots will take over the manufacturing only later. Setting up manufacturing that will be able to produce a million units in 2-3 years is possible. Let's say 5 years for a more plausible situation for a million robots to be built. These million will then scale exponentially. Also there is no reason to believe it will be 2^n, it can also be 3^n or 1.1^n or any arbitrary number.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by ben_w on Saturday February 17, 2024 @09:04AM (#39409488)
> One of your assumptions is that we will start from 1 robot per year.

Not per year, total. And it's not really an assumption, just a demonstration of how fast exponential growth is.

> I assume robots will be similar to high end cars in regards to the complexity of manufacturing.

Agreed. This is also the framing Musk uses for Tesla's androids.

> Once a company develops a prototype with AGI

I don't think it needs a complete solution to AGI, as other people use the term. First, all three letters of that initialism mean different things to different people — by my standard, ChatGPT is already this because it's general over the domain of text, and even if you disagree about specific definitions (as almost everyone reading this will), I think this is the right framing, as you'd "only" need something general over the domain of factory work to be a replacement factory worker, or general over mining and tunnels to be a miner, or general over the domain of roads and road users to be a driver.

This isn't to minimise the complexity of those domains, it's just that something as general as ChatGPT has been for text is probably sufficient.

> The first million will be built by humans. The initial robots will take over the manufacturing only later.

Perhaps, perhaps not. The initial number made by humans is highly dependant on the overall (not just sticker-price) cost and capabilities, so a $200k/year TCO robot that can do 80% of human manual labor tasks is very impressive, but likely to be limited to only a few roles, probably won't replace anyone in its own factory; while one which has total costs of $80k/year and can do 90% might well replace most (but not all) of the humans in its own factory; and one costing $20k/year all-in and which can do 95% might well replace all the factory workers but none of the cobalt miners or the truck drivers.

"Fully general" is the end-state, not the transition period. But with fully-general, which is a necessary condition for nobody having any more work, we get a very fast transition from the status quo to having one robot per human.

> Setting up manufacturing that will be able to produce a million units in 2-3 years is possible. Let's say 5 years for a more plausible situation for a million robots to be built.

Agreed on both.

> Also there is no reason to believe it will be 2^n, it can also be 3^n or 1.1^n or any arbitrary number.

It's a definitional requirement of exponential growth, 2^n units after n doubling periods. I anchored on a the doubling period being a year just by reference to the cost of an example existing robot, and using that dollar cost as a proxy for equivalent human labor, and I specifically noted that the other poster's estimate corresponded to a 5-8 week doubling period which didn't seem unreasonable to me. Some robot can do each specific task 4.2 times slower against the wall clock and still be just as fast as a human overall because it's working 24/7 rather than 8/5.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by duccinator on Saturday February 17, 2024 @09:38AM (#39409776)
Agreed, More clarification about the first part:

What I want to convey is that the growth function will be somewhat similar to y= c + ax^n (ignoring/collapsing into c the linear and higher order terms) rather than just y= ax^n.

The c here is robots produced via humans. I predict c will easily touch a million in 5 years with or without human help.

Even if the later bots can do only 50% the work of humans, we will still exponentially grow the robots until the humans become a bottleneck. And that 50% capability is also expected to grow exponentially.

Gemini 1.5 pro already beats most humans in most benchmarks, combine it with Sora which has a great visual world model, add some logical reasoning(architecture or scale), memory and embodiment(so it can experiment and test) and you pretty much have the seeds for an agi.

My optimistic/most probable prediction about the growth rate say it's

Regarding the last part:

My bad, I speed read your comment and didn't focus on the exponential calculations. An exponential growth is just x^n. Both x(multiplication rate(?)) and n(units of time) can be manipulated.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by ben_w on Saturday February 17, 2024 @10:37AM (#39410399)
We're broadly in agreement, the only part I'd disagree with here is:

> Even if the later bots can do only 50% the work of humans, we will still exponentially grow the robots until the humans become a bottleneck. And that 50% capability is also expected to grow exponentially.

I think most automation since the dawn of the industrial revolution has done 50% or more of the task it was automating, and although yes the impact there is exponential growth, humans are a very rapid bottleneck until the next thing gets automated — Amdahl's law, rather than Moore's.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by duccinator on Saturday February 17, 2024 @09:42AM (#39409819)
Whoops, deleted part of my response before submitting.

My optimistic/most probable predictions about the growth rate say it's wild. Like within 5-10 years with the multiple exponentials among different fields you can easily do away with most jobs unless there is a major bottleneck (I don't think there is, there is so much low hanging fruit). I guess that's what the singularity is all about. I don't think this will take multiple decades or centuries in any scenario other than the equivalent of ww3

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by inference-lord on Saturday February 17, 2024 @04:49AM (#39407974)
It almost makes me wonder if something really intelligent (which is where we are heading according to some) would mean we need as much labor, or things would just be much more efficient ?

I get the feeling less "conventional" robots might be needed someday, rather than more.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by xbmcuser on Saturday February 17, 2024 @02:47AM (#39407344)
It is not happening in the next decade but the change will come a lot faster than a century. As the tech needed for it is improving rapidly as well as getting cheaper. And I think many people are thinking in all or nothing scenario but long before everything is completely autonomous they will bring in efficiency where 1 person with autonomous helpers will be completing jobs that needed multiple people before.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by keiferski on Saturday February 17, 2024 @02:50AM (#39407363)
That will still take decades, if not a century. Manufacturing and developing millions of robots that walk around and do repairs (not to mention making them economically affordable) is not something that’s going to happen soon. What’s more likely is that robots replace human factory workers first.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by rjsw on Saturday February 17, 2024 @04:10AM (#39407780)
If the robots have a longer working life than the humans they replace then they don't have to be cheaper. Doing physical work breaks down your body relatively quickly.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by vasco on Saturday February 17, 2024 @04:31AM (#39407881)
Yeah but humans expect return on investment before they die.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by Nevermark on Saturday February 17, 2024 @05:00AM (#39408052)
Stock reflects future money flows today.

If you can sell stock, or leverage it for loans, then you get access to future profits as soon as there is a reasonable expectation they will eventually show up.

Amazon's growth model was based entirely on this effect for many years. No need for profits, company's value skyrocketed as anticipation compounded.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by ben_w on Saturday February 17, 2024 @05:08AM (#39408091)
I think longevity is the one thing humans still beat machines for? Cars, even electric, don't last as long as our bodies.

Of course, there's a whole bunch of other differences, like the machines don't need to wait 18 years after construction for physical labour, they don't need to be trained for 21 years for mental labour, they don't sleep, and the "working lifespan" target is about 47 years rather than the full 84 years average human life expectancy at birth in developed nations.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by alx_the_new_guy on Saturday February 17, 2024 @08:45AM (#39409347)
>Cars, even electric, don't last as long as our bodies.

Because they're not built to, presumably because manufacturers are greedy and want to sell you a new one, and buying a new one is encouraged by consumerist culture.

Let's say effective human lifespan for physical labor is ~40 years (20 to 60). On average, commercial aircraft last 20-30 years, meanwhile the US military plans to keep B-52s in service at least through 2050s, which will make them roughly 100 on average.

It's not that machines can't last a century with proper care and maintenance, it's that they're not designed to.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by xbmcuser on Saturday February 17, 2024 @07:00AM (#39408687)
I understand why you think that but because of the trajectory of solar and battery tech as well as the trajectory of cpu/gpu and ai. I think the change will accelerate rather than slow down as one of the main input for producing anything ie energy is going to be cheaper and will keep getting cheaper for the foreseeable future. So the cost of producing robots with robots will keep getting cheaper so developing millions of robots would become a lot cheaper a lot faster. Though with all the jobs humans will lose who will be able to pay the robots for their services is the question.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by inference-lord on Saturday February 17, 2024 @02:27AM (#39407237)
It's kicking the can down the road, will still be a problem in 200 years at the rate which our society is progressing, potentially even going backwards if the orange man wins in 2024.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by ben_w on Saturday February 17, 2024 @05:10AM (#39408103)
The USA isn't important enough to reverse global progress in this area.

Slow down, sure, but not reverse.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by j4yav on Saturday February 17, 2024 @02:30AM (#39407249)
Potentially they can use early versions of the automation to accelerate this.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by ben_w on Saturday February 17, 2024 @05:10AM (#39408110)
Already do. CNC lathes, (GOF)AI designing chips. A "century or two" is a framing so alien to me that I don't understand how anyone can think it would take that long.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by timeon on Saturday February 17, 2024 @04:48AM (#39407967)
Manual labor is not going to be completely replaced that quickly - this process is happening from down of civilization. Office work on the other hand can be replaced much quicker.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by bbor on Saturday February 17, 2024 @02:22AM (#39407203)

  Work is equivalent to worth. We are not biologically or sociologically prepared to differentiate the two.
I’m gonna say there’s a very very selective “we” in use here. I’m sure you’re accurately reporting your surroundings, but many people outside America (and a few within it!) are very much already there.

Plus, like, isn’t that kinda depressing? What are disabled people “worth”? If I choose to be an unpopular niche artist, am I “worth” less?

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by alumic on Saturday February 17, 2024 @02:46AM (#39407333)
It is depressing. I think that this might just be the whole picture. Look, I spent a long while studying evolutionary biology in school (detour into pre-med) and came away with a fairly bleak picture of our place in the universe. I use "worth" in precisely that context. Nature gives us a world in which "he who does not work, does not eat" is a rule of law.

Human beings--especially modern ones--assign worth quite differently, and I think that you and I would agree that morally, the way we refer to "worth" in our modern context is the correct framing. But you cannot deny your own biology, no matter how much the modern world insists that you can. You are evaluated according to nature's standards of "worth," (the worth that it imposes onto our psyche) and then secondarily, according to our own set of invented standards. So yes, it is deeply sad. No one will care about the out-of-work tradesperson.

I promise I'm not a luddite. Just stopping for a moment to smell the roses.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by RandomLensman on Saturday February 17, 2024 @03:48AM (#39407660)
A rich person not working is worthless? Historically, humans have not acted that way, nor have such persons had nothing to eat. Wealth can substitute for work.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by rjsw on Saturday February 17, 2024 @04:12AM (#39407792)
Apex predators never have to "work" particularly hard.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by bbor on Saturday February 17, 2024 @04:45AM (#39407948)
It’s too late to argue philosophy but I can argue some biology. Based on my extensive experience watching the nature show on the Samsung TV service, cheetahs, lions, and gorillas all have a very hard time getting enough to eat. The fact that they spend most of the day lazing around is more about recovery time and calorie expenditure than it is about leisure.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by RandomLensman on Saturday February 17, 2024 @05:08AM (#39408093)
I'd also say viruses don't work very hard (maybe phages a little bit) and they are quite successful.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by ben_w on Saturday February 17, 2024 @07:14AM (#39408752)
I've not given this much thought before, but right now I think viruses do about as much work as their chemistry is physically capable of?

(High school middling grades in chemistry and biology, so I may be way off).

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by RandomLensman on Saturday February 17, 2024 @09:26AM (#39409670)
Most their work is getting others to do their work for them.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by ben_w on Saturday February 17, 2024 @09:28AM (#39409684)
Yes, indeed, but I still think they're "working hard"? Perhaps it's just a linguistics game though, what counts as "working" and what counts as "hard"?
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by RandomLensman on Saturday February 17, 2024 @09:40AM (#39409796)
I find it tough to describe something not really even living in some ways as "working".
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by ben_w on Saturday February 17, 2024 @10:31AM (#39410338)
Really? Huh. I do that all the time. My oven, my phone, even my travel pass would get that word (though I'd mean it in a different sense)…
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by RandomLensman on Saturday February 17, 2024 @01:48PM (#39412188)
Yes, but as you say, not in the meaning we discussed here.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by bbor on Saturday February 17, 2024 @02:00PM (#39412313)
Idk they travel like 100 million times their body length then sacrifice their lives in order to reproduce, avoiding hostile defenses many hundreds (?) times their size. I wouldn’t do that!

More explicitly, I think this a great exposition of my overall point. Humans need to worry about being successful humans, not fitting some Darwinian universal shape that all life conforms to, as the capitalists so often claim. Thus why I don’t think automating cashiers, truck drivers, and computer scientists is incompatible with human flourishing in the long term.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by djokkataja on Saturday February 17, 2024 @04:38AM (#39407912)
> Nature gives us a world in which "he who does not work, does not eat" is a rule of law.

Which is why no child has ever survived until adulthood.

And TBH I find this an appropriate metaphor because the promise of AGI is that every adult human will be infantile by comparison--but there are also potential technologies that could allow humans to ... "upgrade" themselves and become a mature ... whatever. Sadly brain-computer-interfaces seem like a technology that works best when enabled by AI (to help with interpreting brain signals), so it seems quite unlikely that any biological humans are going to keep up with AI over the medium term.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by Nevermark on Saturday February 17, 2024 @05:05AM (#39408073)
> but there are also potential technologies that could allow humans to ... "upgrade" themselves

I hope so.

But transforming ourselves into GAI to keep up (while maintaining continuity of memories, etc.) is going to be a much more expensive proposition than simply making more GAI hardware from scratch.

So economically, where are humans going to earn that additional value, needed to account for the extra cost? When the premise of upgrading ourselves is our native biology isn't keeping up and so not actually needed?

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by djokkataja on Saturday February 17, 2024 @06:28AM (#39408508)
Given that there's no well-defined "unit of intelligence", I see no reason to believe that all AGI (or GAI, to use your acronym) entities will be identical. I also don't think it's plausible to assume that any GAI entity will be literally omniscient; uncertainty remains a reasonable, deep, persistent factor for all entities that don't severely violate physics as we presently understand it.

The additional value that humans present would thus be a diversity factor. Much as it might be economically beneficial to cut down the entire Amazon, there's also significant economic benefits in keeping it intact and finding out what kinds of crazy biological stuff comes out of there. And over the long run, we get way more economic benefit from finding crazy things in there than in chopping it all down. There are all kinds of ways to explore uncertain dimensions, but looking at whatever the universe has already managed remains a consistent source of value.

> But transforming ourselves into GAI to keep up (while maintaining continuity of memories, etc.) is going to be a much more expensive proposition than simply making more GAI hardware from scratch.

It's basically a fixed cost because of how slowly the human population grows (if it even continues to grow).

Synthetic GAI entities will be able to use vastly more resources than humans presently do, because they'll be able to create more of themselves as quickly as resources become available, and they won't be stuck operating at a fixed clock speed. It's also probably going to be much easier for them to make use of off-world resources. So the total population of GAI entities could plausibly explode compared with the total human population.

It comes down to timing: if there's technology available for humans to become less ... biological, and it seems very desirable to lots of people, but it's really expensive and there aren't that many GAI entities yet, that might be less pleasant. But if that kind of tech depends sufficiently on AI developments that there's some significant lag time between a GAI population explosion and that kind of human-upgrading tech showing up, the cost of making it available to whatever humans want it might be a drop in the bucket from a total economic perspective.

To be clear, I don't see biological humans "keeping up" over the long term. If we take AGI and BCIs and various Ship of Theseus questions seriously, there could be some significant blurring of lines between "human" and "AI." And if we combine that with GAIs originating from humans, the concept of "keeping up" seems to become less meaningful. Who's keeping up with who?

Lastly, I'm suspicious that GAI entities won't be purely economically motivated, because I don't see any reason that they'll be "purely" anything at all. There is no magical "essence d'intelligence"; instead there's staggering layers of complexity. And every plausible AI safety approach I've seen so far involves training AIs to be inclined towards beneficial acts and away from harmful acts because there's no way to program conceptually pure "motivations" into them.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by Nevermark on Saturday February 17, 2024 @11:52AM (#39411132)
> I see no reason to believe that all AGI (or GAI, to use your acronym) entities will be identical

I absolutely agree. There will be a Cambrian explosion of superintelligent forms.

> The additional value that humans present would thus be a diversity factor.

We already have a test for this. Parrots, octopus, whales and many other creatures are also diverse. But our problems are beyond their experience. Do we value their diversity as thinkers in our economy?

We don't.

(I am speaking in economic terms. We can deeply intensely highly "value" many things, but if we don't actually invest economic value in protecting or nuturing those things, our appreciation has little or no impact.)

--

> It comes down to timing: if there's technology available for humans to become less ... biological

That makes sence. The order things become viable makes all the difference.

What I am seeing is that AI as software/minds is moving faster and faster. AI "bodies", i.e. robotic forms, are moving much slower but gaining steam. And our ability to augment biological forms is moving far far slower.

All three areas are accelerating, but the disparity between them isn't shrinking - for now. But who knows? The next couple decades will be interesting!

Maybe going fully artificial ("self-designed" might be a more meaningful description) will become trivial sooner than we think. :)

--

> Lastly, I'm suspicious that GAI entities won't be purely economically motivated, because I don't see any reason that they'll be "purely" anything at all.

I think they will be deeply motivated economically to care about ethics. Just as our genes and culture have (slowly) responded to the tremendous value of creating win-win situations.

Also, our general curiosity about about many things that don't have immediate economic value, actually does drive unpredicted personal and society level economic advances over the long run. So I expect they will maintain interest in general and undirected learning.

Similarly, our appreciation for seemingly non-economic shows of creativity (art, music, competitive games, mathematics for its own sake, etc.) can be thought of as the active form of curiosity. The development of novel and surprising artifacts and challenging competitions, may have value to AI's as well.

Everything that is important to us became that way for some economic reason: specifically, survival energy economics. So many of our seemingly non-economic activities may continue to have analogous roles for future intelligences.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by djokkataja on Saturday February 17, 2024 @11:37PM (#39416258)
> We already have a test for this. Parrots, octopus, whales and many other creatures are also diverse. But our problems are beyond their experience. Do we value their diversity as thinkers in our economy?

> We don't.

I don't mean humans as they presently are, but humans as somewhat-novel GAI entities after upgrading (and humans as an ongoing source: likely there will be some humans that aren't interested in changing themselves in such ways, but who might change their mind over time and/or have children who see things differently).

> (I am speaking in economic terms. We can deeply intensely highly "value" many things, but if we don't actually invest economic value in protecting or nuturing those things, our appreciation has little or no impact.)

I don't think this is true. For example, suppose you deeply value a bunch of things that you don't think have much economic significance, but economic significance is the most important thing to your perspective / philosophy, so you don't take care of the things that you deeply value. This does have a significant impact: you become sad, you become depressed, you become less economically productive. So then you say, oh, I'll just take care of those other things I care about, and then I can be economically productive! So you make a few changes but then find yourself feeling down again not long afterwards because economic value is the cornerstone of how you think about things. And then you realize that from an economic perspective, it's more beneficial economically to stick with a perspective that embraces your values as you discern them (and how those continue developing over time) rather than sticking with a perspective that puts economic value first. And then you are taking your first steps to freedom from the curse of your Bachelor's in Economics. ;)

Ethical GAIs also seem likely to me ... hopefully.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by Nevermark on Sunday February 18, 2024 @06:02AM (#39418082)
> suppose you deeply value a bunch of things that you don't think have much economic significance, but [...etc...]

We are a mess. We often think some things are worth more than money, but are not motivated to spend money on them when needed.

Everything form climate change, to saving specific species.

I think GAI's (green field, or human uplifts) will be much more coherent. They won't be settling for a beautiful wonderful Goldberg brain, designed by a series of a million fortunate accidents, like we have to.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by bbor on Sunday February 18, 2024 @12:51AM (#39416567)
Hey thanks for the thoughtful response. I still disagree of course, but we’re really arguing about the very fundamental worldview divide between progressives and conservatives, so that’s no surprise lol. I’d summarize my retort simply:

> Nature gives us a world

Humanity makes its own world, especially now. Nature is red in tooth and claw, and rarely compatible with our priorities without some cajoling. More than that, nature isn’t simple; there is no fundamental set of survival of the fittest laws that govern all animals, just the accidental beauty of natural selection.

> you cannot deny your biology

I ply my biology with a deluge of narcotics and antidepressants and, someday, anti-aging drugs. All my homies hate biology

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by bbor on Monday February 19, 2024 @05:49PM (#39435780)
I can’t edit so I’ll reply. I’m cribbing my opinion from this: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/nature-2
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by geitir on Saturday February 17, 2024 @02:44AM (#39407316)
There is worth in the spiritual sense in that all living things are worthy and all of man are created as equals.

There is worth in a sociological sense in that a disabled person may be a positive contributor to the society in one way, but because of their disability cannot be in another. Similarly a niche artist is a positive contributor in their niche, where an unpopular artist indicates they may be considered less of a contributor than others.

In the sociological sense I would argue yes it is possible to compare “worth”.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by j4yav on Saturday February 17, 2024 @02:29AM (#39407243)
Artists seem like they are first up for replacement, no?
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by Nevermark on Saturday February 17, 2024 @05:09AM (#39408101)
That is one way of looking at it. The other is that we are now all artists.

And GAI's are not our end, they are our future, our mind children - just another generation eclipsing and replacing their predecessors. Just eclipsing and replacing faster.

I say this with all humor, but some seriousness stoicism may be the healthiest way to process what is happening.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by j4yav on Sunday February 18, 2024 @02:38AM (#39417014)
We are all artists in the sense that we type what we want into the text box? I think that’s more just another form of consumer than an artist.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by rich_sasha on Saturday February 17, 2024 @05:10AM (#39408104)
It's strange. It happened before, with the Industrial Revolution wiping out whole professions, and same for mechanised farming, as mentioned by a sibling comment. Ditto for printing press, cars etc, albeit on a smaller scale.

But then, jobs didn't disappear, but shifted to other professions. So to me, there are two questions:

- if AI wipes out professions like tech, what jobs will people do? AI jobs seem great for now, but surely there's only so long until they themselves are automated.

- if suddenly the whole economy is ran by robots, how is the wealth distributed? Will there be a huge grey underclass of non working humans and a tiny owner class? Some kind of egalitarian paradise? I suspect neither, but not sure what in-between.

It could be great. If I knew I will be fed for a lifetime, have a house, my kids well schooled, and not much more, I can live a great life. I'll take that over the daily grind any time.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by inference-lord on Saturday February 17, 2024 @06:48AM (#39408608)
I find it unusual if we did create an intelligent class of beings, who are legit intelligent, smarter than us, why would they work for Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg? They'd do whatever the fuck they want...

When these discussions go long, and you start to think the whole idea through, you really start to question the whole idea.

Another thing I thing is strange is, if we had really very / sueper intelligent AI, why would it exist in physical, robot form ? Like, why not just be a light orb that lives in space or something? Wouldn't having an IQ of 5000 make you come up with something better than clunky robots?

Maybe we've stretched our own imaginations as far as they can go and we really have no idea where it's all going.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by ben_w on Saturday February 17, 2024 @07:11AM (#39408744)
> I find it unusual if we did create an intelligent class of beings, who are legit intelligent, smarter than us, why would they work for Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg? They'd do whatever the fuck they want...

That's anthropomorphisation: the AI we have now only "want" to maximise whatever reward function we give them. The alignment problem is that any reward function is only a rough approximation of what we want, so the machines may well rush off and turn the universe into paperclips or tile it with molecular-scale smiley emoji because that's what we told them to "want" without really understanding what we were telling them.

But even then, regardless of IQ (which itself isn't a great description of even just human intelligence), any given AI may or may not have anything we'd consider to be qualia, an "experience" of getting this reward, because that's the hard question of consciousness which isn't solved.

The only thing I can be sure of is that we definitely have no idea where it's all going.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by silverquiet on Saturday February 17, 2024 @08:43AM (#39409331)
The “whatever the fuck they want” part is what I’ve always wondered about. What would a non-biological (super?) intelligence, stripped of any physiological desires, even want? Would they experience anything like emotion? Would they care to preserve themselves, or would they find this meaningless existence boring and simply decide to exit 0?

All I can do is agree with the other commenters that it’s clear that no one knows where anything is headed.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by rich_sasha on Saturday February 17, 2024 @01:54PM (#39412270)
> Another thing I thing is strange is, if we had really very / sueper intelligent AI, why would it exist in physical, robot form ? Like, why not just be a light orb that lives in space or something?

Well, someone will have to plug cables and maintain solar panels or batteries or whatnot. Maybe the AI overlords will be ethereal neural networks in the cloud, but some kind of mechanical being (humans or robots) will need to do some groundwork.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by golol on Saturday February 17, 2024 @05:38AM (#39408252)
I feel like some people living wealthy cushy American lifestyles think the world is fine the way it is. It's not. The world has a dramatic lack of physical and mental labor, which is the cause of economic struggle. The best hope these people have for their lives to improve is in fact the development of AI assistants and andorids that increase the available labor. First and foremost advancements in AI lead to more products and services for less cost. That is the primary effect. Secondary effects are about how these new products are distributed in the population, and yes there will surely be a lot of economic distruption. But we will certainly figure out how to distribute them because the truth is that no rich person has a need for a hundred family cars, a thousand watermelons, or a thousand houses. Yes, the rich will get richer, but the poor will also get richer.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by ben_w on Saturday February 17, 2024 @07:21AM (#39408796)
> How easy it must be for Sam Altman to drag the world kicking and screaming into the future. How pretty his offices.

One thing I find fascinating in all this, is how Sam Altman is demonised simultaneously for pushing everything too fast and also for calling for legislation to slow things down.

He may well be wrong about large aspects of this[0], but I do find it curious how his critics on each side of this divide seem to be oblivious to their mirror images.

[0] it would be surprising if he wasn't wrong about lots of this, given this stuff is all new in practice — millennia of fiction about magical automatons that do our work for us doesn't really prepare us for the reality of it

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by Cacti on Saturday February 17, 2024 @07:29AM (#39408850)
one is a private gain, one is a public cost. what is confusing about someone pushing AI while trying to slow down their competitors?
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by ben_w on Saturday February 17, 2024 @07:34AM (#39408877)
> someone pushing AI while trying to slow down their competitors

He's specifically doing the exact opposite of that.

"Legislate us, don't slow down open source models, don't slow down our competitors, focus on us and anything better than our current best model" (paraphrased).

But I guess I can sort of see what you mean, possibly?

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by Cacti on Saturday February 17, 2024 @09:04AM (#39409491)
You actually believe him?
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by ben_w on Saturday February 17, 2024 @09:19AM (#39409620)
His actions are in concordance with his words. For now, at least — I've seen enough CEOs turn out to be secret villains to remain somewhat skeptical.

The board firing him last year would have changed my mind about his qualities, if not for all of the board's own choices of replacements siding with him rather than with the board.

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by Aurornis on Saturday February 17, 2024 @08:40AM (#39409303)
> Listening to the interviewee, I began to feel sick to my stomach at the glib description of what amounts to ripping away peoples' livelihoods with plasticized fingers.

I don’t think people realize just how far we have to go before a literal robot can replace a human for even common trade tasks.

ChatGPT can generate convincing text and images, but that doesn’t mean the next step is robots doing your construction jobs or plumbing.

> How easy it must be for Sam Altman to drag the world kicking and screaming into the future. How pretty his offices.

The melodramatic Sam Altman takes are getting out of control. What does “How pretty his offices” even mean?

Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by antod on Saturday February 17, 2024 @02:05PM (#39412349)
I'm not worried about robots taking away trades (yet). There's a whole phase before that where the service industries shrink so much that the trades are both scrambling for customers and competing with a flood of people retraining into the trades.
Re:Raising Children on the Eve of AI by chriskanan on Saturday February 17, 2024 @11:18AM (#39410777)
The trades are much better protected in the next decade than many jobs requiring a college education. Robots are expensive, prone to breaking, and progress has been slow.

AI is going to be disrupt many industries, just as tech has in the past. The world became better for it, but there is always some pain in the short-term and often the impacts are overestimated in the short-term and underestimated in the long-term.