A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.It's also a quote from a character who's literally immortal and so has all the time in the world to learn things, which really undermines the premise.
I think most farmers would be somewhat capable on most of that list. Equations for farm production. Programming tractor equipment. Setting bones. Giving and taking orders. Building houses and barns.
Building a single story building isn’t that difficult, but time consuming. Especially nowadays with YouTube videos and pre-planned plans.
Isn't that cheating? Shouldn't a properly self-reliant human be able to come up with the plans too?
That is exactly how our ancestors built houses. Also a traditional wooden house doesn't look complicated.
The only homes built by our ancestors that you see are those that didn't collapsed and killed whoever was inside, burned down, were too unstable to live in, were too much of a burden to maintain and keep around, etc.
That being said, buildings collapse a lot less frequently these days. House fires happen at a lower rate. Insulation was either nonexistent or present in much lower quantities.
I guess the point I'm making is that the lesson here shouldn't be "we used to make our houses, why don't we go back to that?" It also shouldn't be "we should leave every task to a specialist."
Know how to maintain and fix the things around your house that are broken. You don't need a plumber to replace the flush valve on your toilet. But maybe don't try to replace a load-bearing joist in your house unless you know what you're doing? The people building their own homes weren't engineers, but they had a lot more carpentry experience than (I assume) you and I.
>If a house builder built a house for a man but did not secure/fortify his work so that the house he built collapsed and caused the death of the house owner, that house builder will be executed.
If even professionals did get it wrong so often that there had to be law for it... Yeah, maybe it is not that simple.
"That I lived so much longer, just means, that I forgot much more, not that I know much more."
Memory might have a limited capacity, but of course, I doubt most humans use that capacity, or well, for useful things. I know I have plenty of useless knowledge ..
> Literally all progress we've made is due to ever increasing specialization.
Then we don't really need plural examples, right?
Anyway - language, wheel, fire, tool-making, social constructs like reciprocity principle - I think gave us some progress as a species and a society.
Even in mankind's beginning specialization existed in the form of hunter and gatherer. This specialization in combination with team work brought us to the top of the food chain to a point where we can strive beyond basic survival.
The people making space crafts (designing and building, another example of specialization) don't need to know how to repair or build a microwave to heat there for food.
Of course everybody still needs to know basic knowledge (how to turn on microwave) to get by.
I'm not sure how you get from pre-agricultural humans developing fire, to dentists building cars.
I don't doubt that after fire was 'understood', there was specialisation to some degree, probably, around management of fire, what burns well, how best to cook, etc.
But any claim that fire was the result of specialisation seems a bit hard to substantiate. A committee was established to direct Thag Simmons to develop a way to .. something involving wood?
Wheel, the setting of broken bones, language etc - specialisation happened subsequently, but not as a prerequisite for those advances.
> Even in mankind's beginning specialization existed in the form of hunter and gatherer. This specialization in combination with team work brought us to the top of the food chain to a point where we can strive beyond basic survival.
Totally agree that we advanced because of two key capabilities - a) persistence hunting, b) team / communication.
You seem to be conflating the result of those advancements with "all progress", as was GP.
> The people making space crafts (designing and building, another example of specialization) don't need to know how to repair or build a microwave to heat there for food.
I am not, was not, arguing that highly specialised skills in modern society are not ... highly specialised.
I was arguing against the lofty claim that:
"All progress we've made is due to ever increasing specialization."
Noting the poster of that was responding to a quote from a work of fiction - claiming it was awful - that the author had suggested everyone should be familiar with (among other things) 'changing a diaper, comfort the dying, cooperate, cook a tasty meal, analyse a problem, solve equations' etc.
If you're suggesting that you think some people in society should be exempt from some basic skills like those - that's an interesting position I'd like to see you defend.
> Of course everybody still needs to know basic knowledge (how to turn on microwave) to get by.
FWIW I don't have a microwave oven.
>FWIW I don't have a microwave oven. That was just an example. You still know how to use them hence basic knowledge. Seem like this discussion boils down to semantics
I concur that semantics have a) overtaken this thread, and b) are part of my complaint with OP when they claimed all historical progress was the result of specialisation.
I too liked that quote and found it inspiring. Until I read the book, that is.
IMO it's quite different than using a calculator or any other tool. It can currently completely replace the human in the loop, whereas with other tools they are generally just a step in the process.
The (as yet unproven) argument for the use of AIs is that using AI to solve simpler problems allows us humans to focus on the big picture, in the same way that letting a calculator solve arithmetic gives us flexibility to understand the math behind the arithmetic.
No one knows if that's true. We're running a grand experiment: the next generation will either surpass us in grand fashion using tools that we couldn't imagine, or will collapse into a puddle of ignorant consumerism, a la Wall-E.
Seeing how the world is based around consumerism, this future seems more likely.
HOWEVER, we can still course correct. We need to organize, and get the hell off social media and the internet.
Given what I know of human nature, this seems improbable.
People who organize tend to be the people who are most optimistic about change. This is for a reason.
If education (schools) were to adopt a teaching-AI (one that will given them the solution, but at least ask a bunch of questions ), may be there is some hope.
I encourage you to take action to prove to yourself that real change is possible.
What you can do in your own life to enact change is hard to say, given I know nothing about your situation. But say you are a parent, you have control over how often your children use their phones, whether they are on social media, whether they are using ChatGPT to get around doing their homework. How we raise the next generation of children will play an important role in how prepared they are to deal with the consequences of the actions we're currently making.
As a worker you can try to organize to form a union. At the very least you can join an organization like the Democratic Socialists of America. Your ability to organize is your greatest strength.
Well, you know, we'd all love to change the world...
The social contract lives and dies by what the populace is willing to accept. If you push people into a corner by threatening their quality of life, don't be surprised if they push back.
And I can tell you from experience that "letting a calculator solve arithmetic" (or more accurately, being dependent on a calculator to solve arithmetic) means you cripple your ability to learn and understand more advanced stuff. At best your decision turned you into the equivalent of a computer trying to run a 1GB binary with 8MB of RAM and a lot of paging.
> No one knows if that's true. We're running a grand experiment: the next generation will either surpass us in grand fashion using tools that we couldn't imagine, or will collapse into a puddle of ignorant consumerism, a la Wall-E.
It's the latter. Though I suspect the masses will be shoved into the garbage disposal than be allowed to wallow in ignorant consumerism. Only the elite that owns the means of production will be allowed to indulge.
If the product is not commoditized, then capital will absorb all the increased labor efficiency, while labor (and consumption) are sacrificed on the altar of profits.
I suspect your assumption is more likely. Voltaire's critique of 'the best of all possible worlds' and man's place in creating meaning and happiness, provides more than one option.
You can solve stuff like:
> If you walk 1 mile in 7 minutes, how fast are you walking in kilometers per hour?
$ units -t "1 mile / 7 minutes" "kilometers per hour"
13.7943771428571
There are examples where you need much more advanced knowledge, too, meaning it is not enough to just have a calculator, for example in thermodynamics, when dealing with gas laws, you cannot simply convert pressure, volume, and temperature from one unit to another without taking into account the specific context of the law you’re applying (e.g., the ideal gas law or real gas behavior)", or for example you want to convert 1 kilowatt-hour (kWh) to watts (W). This is a case of energy (in kilowatt-hours) over time (in hours), and we need to convert it to power (in watts), which is energy per unit time.
You cannot do:
$ units -t "1 kWh" "W"
conformability error
3600000 kg m^2 / s^2
1 kg m^2 / s^3
$ units -t "1 kWh" "J"
1 kWh = 3600000 J
$ units -t "3600000 joules / 3600 seconds" "W"
3600000 joules / 3600 seconds = 1000 W
It applies to LLMs and programming, too, thus, I am not worried. We will still have copy-paste "programmers", and actually knowledgeable ones, as we have always had. The difference is that you can use LLMs to learn, quite a lot, but you cannot use a calculator alone to learn how to convert 1 kWh to W.
I believe there is some truth to it. When you automated away some time-consuming tasks, your time and focus is shifted elsewhere. For example, washing clothes is no longer a major concern since the massification of washing machines. Software engineering also progressively shifted it's attention to higher-level concerns, and went from a point where writing/editing opcodes was the norm to a point where you can design and deploy a globally-available distributed system faster than what it takes to build a program.
Focusing on the positive traits of AI, having a way to follow the Socratic method with a tireless sparring partner that has an encyclopedic knowledge on everything and anything is truly brilliant. The bulk of the people in this thread should be disproportionally inclined to be self-motivated and self-taught in multiple domains, and having this sort of feature available makes worlds of difference.
I agree that AI could be an enormous educational aid to those who want to learn. The problem is that if any human task can be performed by a computer, there is very little incentive to learn anything. I imagine that a minority of people will learn stuff as a hobby, much in the way that people today write poetry or develop film for fun; but without an economic incentive to learn a skill or trade, having a personal Socratic teacher will be a benefit lost on the majority of people.
There's also the problem of developing critical thinking skills. It's not very comforting to think of a time where your average Joe relies on an AI service to tell what he should think and believe, when that AI service is ran, trained, and managed by people pushing radical ideologies.
This is the existential crisis that appears imminent. What does it mean if humanity, at large, begins to offload thinking (hence decision making), to machines?
Up until now we’ve had tools. We’ve never before been able to say “what’s the right way to do X?”. Offloading reasoning to machines is a terrifying concept.
And what happens to those coders? For that matter--what happens to all the other jobs at risk of being replaced by AI? Where are all the high paying jobs these disenfranchised laborers will flock to when their previous careers are made obsolete?
We live in a highly specialized society that requires people take out large loans to learn the skills necessary for their careers. You take away their ability to provide their labor, and it now seriously threatens millions of workers from obtaining the same quality of life they once had.
I seriously oppose such a future, and if that makes me a Luddite, so be it.
Some will manage to remain in their field, most won't.
> Where are all the high paying jobs these disenfranchised laborers will flock to when their previous careers are made obsolete?
They don't exist. Instead they'll take low-paying jobs that can't (yet) be automated. Maybe they'll work in factories [1].
> I seriously oppose such a future, and if that makes me a Luddite, so be it.
Like I said, the Luddites were right, in the short term. In the long term, we don't know. Maybe we'll live in a post-scarcity Star Trek world where human labor has been completely devalued, or maybe we'll revert to a feudal society of property owners and indentured servants.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/bessent-fired-federal-workers-manuf...
>or maybe we'll revert to a feudal society of property owners and indentured servants.
We as the workers in society have the power to see that this doesn't happen. We just need to organize. Unionize. Boycott. Organize with people in your community to spread worker solidarity.
https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries
https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/united-...
It's remarkable that reading and writing, once the guarded domain of elites and religious scribes, are now everyday skills for millions. Where once a handful of monks preserved knowledge with their specialized scribing skills, today anyone can record history, share ideas, and access the thoughts of centuries with a few keystrokes.
The wheel moves on and people adapt. Who knows what the "right side" of history will be, but I doubt we get there by suppressing advancements and guaranteeing job placements simply because you took out large loans to earn a degree and a license.
Even humans have gotten shocks like this. Things like the Black Death created social and economic upheavals that lasted generations.
Now, these are all biological examples. They don't map cleanly to technogical advances, because human brains adapt much faster than immune systems that are constrained by their DNA. But the point is that complex systems can adapt and can seem to handle "anything," up until they can't.
I don't know enough about AI or LLM's to say if we're reaching an inflection point. But most major crises happen when enough people say that something can't happen, and then it happens. I also don't think that discouraging innovation is the solution. But I don't also want to pretend like "humans always adapt" is a rule and not a 300,000 year old blip on the timeline of life's existence.
Automating thinking and self-expression is a lot more dangerous. We're not automating the calculation or the research, but the part where you add your soul to that information.
Hmm, millions of humans are spending a bulk of their lives plugging away at numbers on a screen. We can replace this with an AI and free them up to do literally anything else.
No, let's not do that. Keep being slow ineffective calculators and lay on your death bed feeling FULFILLED!
Not anything, but something useful. And in exchange for that useful they'll get resources (which will become more abundant).
And if all needs are already satisfied... Why worry about work? The purpose of work is to satisfy needs. If needs are satisfied, there is no need for work.
No, I am not assuming that. "Together" are not required. It's just combination of needs, ability to satisfy them and ability to exchange - creates jobs. And nothing of this will be thwarted by AI.
>More likely is that the property owning class acquire AI robots to provide cheap labor
Doesn't matter. Your everyday person either will be able to afford this cheap AI labor for themselves (no problem that required solving) or if AI labor for them are unaffordable - will create jobs for other people (there will be jobs on market everywhere)
Where is the existing work these people would take up? If it doesn't exist yet, then how do you suppose people will support themselves in the meantime?
What if the new work that is created pays less? Do you think people should just accept being made obsolete to take up lower paying jobs?
Everywhere in human society. "Jobs" is literally when you do something that someone needs, so that in exchange they do something that you need. And in human society, because of AI, neither people’s needs, nor the ability to satisfy them, nor the possibility of exchanging them will suddenly disappear. So the jobs will be everywhere.
>Do you think people should just accept being made obsolete to take up lower paying jobs?
Let's start with the fact that on average all jobs will become higher paying because the amount of goods produced (and distributed) will increase. So the more correct answer to this question is "What choice will they have?".
AI will make the masses richer, so society will not abandon it. Subsidize their obsolete well-paid jobs to make society poorer? Why would anyone do that? So the people replaced by AI will go to work in other jobs. Sometimes higher paying, sometimes lower.
If we are talking about real solutions, the best alternative they will have is to form a cult like the Amish did (God bless America and capitalism), in which they can pretend that AI does not exist and live as before. The only question in this case is whether they will find willing participants, because for most, participation in such a cult will mean losing the increase in income provided by the introduction of AI.
This remains to be seen. Inequality is worse now than it was 20 years ago despite technology progressing. This is true across income and wealth.
No, that's just logic. AI doesn't thwart the ability of people to satisfy their needs (getting richer).
>Inequality is worse now than it was 20 years ago despite technology progressing.
And people are still richer than ever before (if we take into account the policies that are thwarting society's ability to satisfy each other's needs and that have nothing to do with technologies)
I would happily support automation to free myself, and others, from having to work full-time. But we live in a capitalist society, not StarTrek. Automation doesn't free up people from having to work, it only places people in financial crisis.
Of course lots of speculation, but I am not particularly worried by the fields we can wipe out in future with automation and AI.
There is endless amounts of cheaply produced slop in stores today. By and by I don't give a fuck about affording those kinds of goods. I care about being able to afford a home, having access to good healthcare, being able to travel, etc. These are the kinds of goods and services that I doubt will come down significantly in price.
All the things you mention have a certain objective quality that can be reduced to an approachable minimum. A house could be a simple cabin, a tent, a cave; a piece of cloth could just be a cape; metal can be screwed, glued or cast; a transistor could be a relay or a wooden mechanism etc. ...history tells us all that.
I think when there's a Homo ludens that wants to play, or when there's a Homo economicus that wants us to optimize, there might be one that separates the process of learning from adaptation (Homo investigans?)[0]. The process of learning something new could be such a subjective property that keeps a yet unknown natural threshold which can't be lowered (or "reduced") any further. If I were to be overly pessimistic, a hardcore luddite, I'd say that this species is under attack, and there will be a generation that lacks this aspect, but also won't miss it, because this character could have never been experienced in the first place.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_the_human_species#Li...
And even at work, the coworkers that don’t have a lot of general knowledge seem to work a lot harder and get less done because it takes them so much longer to figure things out.
So I don’t know… is avoiding the work of learning worth it to struggle at life more?
I started way back in my 20s just figuring out how to write websites. I'm not sure where the camel's back would have broken.
It has, of course, been convenient to be able to "bootstrap" my self-reliance in these and other fields by consuming goods produced by others, but there is no mechanical reason that said goods should be provided by specialists rather than advanced generalists beyond our irrational social need for maximum acceleration.
There is no single human alive that can understand or build a modern computer from top to bottom. And this is true for various bits of human technology, that's how specialized we are as a species.
I'm not saying some degree of specialization isn't desirable in the world, just that it's overrated.
Do we need a modern computer?
Reminds me of the Nate Bargatz set where he talks about how if he was a time traveler to the past that he wouldn't be able to prove it to anyone. The skills most of us have require this supply chain and then we apply it at the very end. I'm not sure anyone in 1920 cares about my binary analysis skills.
Why not? I mean that, quite literally.
I don't know how to make an ASIC, and if I tried to write an OS I'd probably fail miserably many times along the way but might be able to muddle through to something very basic. The rest of that list is certainly within my wheelhouse even though I've never done any of those things professionally.
The peer commenter shared the Heinlein quote, but there's really something to be said for /society/ of being peopled by well-rounded individuals that are able to competently turn themselves to many types of tasks. Specialization can also be valuable, but specialization in your career should not prevent you from gaining a breadth of skills outside of the workplace.
I don't know how to do any of the things in your list (including building a web site) as an /expert/, but it should not be out of the realm of possibility or even expectation that people should learn these things at the level of a competent amateur. I have grown a garden, I have worked on a farm for a brief time, I've helped build houses (Habitat for Humanity), I've taken a hobbyist welding class and made some garish metal sculptures, I've built a race car and raced it, and I've never built a toaster but I have repaired one (they're actually very electrically and mechanically simple devices). Besides the disposable income to build a race car, nothing on that list stands out to me as unachievable by anyone who chooses to do so.
Being a well-rounded individualist is a great, but that's an orthogonal issue to the question of outsourcing our skills to machinery. When you were growing crops, did you till the land by hand or did you use a tractor? When you were making clothes did you sew by hand or use a sewing machine? Who made your sewing needles?
The (dubious) argument for AI is that using LLMs to write code is the same as using modern construction equipment to build a house: you get the same result for less effort.
Sure. But somebody has to know these things. For many jobs, knowing these things isn’t beneficial, but for others it is.
Sure, you might be able to get a job slinging AI code to produce CRUD apps or whatever. But since that’s the easy thing, you’re going to have a hard time standing out from the pack. Yet we will still need people who understand the concepts at a deeper level, to fix the AI messes or to build the complex systems AI can’t, or the systems that are too critical to rely on AI, or the ones that are too regulated. Being able to do those thing, or to just better understand what the AI is doing to get better more effective results, that will be more valuable than just blindly leaning on AI, and it will remain valuable for a while yet.
Maybe some day the AI can do everything, including ASICs and growing crops, but it’s got a long way to go still.
I think you're missing the point of my comment. I'm not saying that human knowledge is useless. I'm specifically arguing against the case that:
> The irreducible answer to "why should I" is that it makes you ever-more-increasingly reliant on a teetering tower of fragile and interdependent supply chains furnished by for-profit companies who are all too eager to rake you over the coals to fulfill basic cognitive functions.
My logic being that we are already irreversibly dependent on supply chains.
Maybe it’s fewer people, yes, but it’ll take quite a leap forward in AI ability to replace all the specialists we will continue to require, especially as the less-able AI makes messes that need to be cleaned up.
Kind of like how an ignorant electorate makes for a poor democracy, an ignorant consumer base makes for a poor free market.
Yes, but that horse has long ago left the barn.
I don't know how to grow crops, build a house, tend livestock, make clothes, weld metal, build a car, build a toaster, design a transistor, make an ASIC, or write an OS. I do know how to write a web site. But if I cede that skill to an automated process, then that is the feather that will break the camel's back?
The history of civilization is the history of specialization. No one can re-build all the tools they rely on from scratch. We either let other people specialize, or we let machines specialize. LLMs are one more step in the latter.
The Luddites were right: the machinery in cotton mills was a direct threat to their livelihood, just as LLMs are now to us. But society marches on, textile work has been largely outsourced to machines, and the descendants of the Luddites are doctors and lawyers (and coders). 50 years from new the career of a "coder" will evoke the same historical quaintness as does "switchboard operator" or "wainwright."