That's the point, they are setting up the economy to be run by agents and they trust that it is possible. Step 1. Teach AI human knowledge (2022-2023). Step 2. Make AI agentic (2025). Step 3. Start autonomous research and create own corpus of knowledge (2026).
Step 3 will keep compounding (as we are witnessing) and most people will be left behind. I'm not against a revolution, I'm all for it.
Don’t fear change.
My manager was dragging me through useless projects that went nowhere despite multiple people telling him "it ain't gonna work" while shooting down proposals that later turned out to be "high priority tasks required directly by upper management". And he's a well-paid, educated employee with years of experience. Don't even get me started on delivery guys who cannot read a simple instruction like "do not ring the bell, leave the package on the doorstep". They just follow a 50-line script and that's all they can do.
Whenever you mention that AI won't reach human intelligence, remember that this is the benchmark. Not Alexander the Great, it's the millions of people throwing their life savings ($1000 each) into Labubus. Long time ago there was a series of articles in my country about the costs of wedding receptions skyrocketing and some people taking out loans to pay that, and someone made a meme "robots will never have human intelligence!" with reply "bro, you took out a loan to pay for a wedding, I don't want your human intelligence".
Denying this reality is pure cope.
You are showing disagreements with your priorities (mostly money) as unintelligent. You're showing a lack of care and conscientiousness as unintelligent.
You're reducing intelligence to alignment with money and following instructions. Under that framing the argument is already won in favor of AI amd some vague effective maximizing of a cost function.
Many jobs are like this, so it's fine for employment. Maybe the vast majority of mankind was never suitable for reliable employment of the "cost function" style.
But I know two things:
1. Centralization should be avoided. The reality that AI can do most jobs is not a reason to concentrate power behind those portraying that or building AI. We still want local, ideally individual, empowerment. I don't see enough said about this. Maybe we can even say the system must be one people wish to opt in to, to maximize profit.
2. Intelligence is being very narrowly defined and humans value more than an INT score in the RPG sense. The more I meet people outside my belief circles, the more I realize the intelligence of some actions, in the sense of "logically deduced from a higher principle" not "aligned with my western white collar principles". The ultimate role of culture and humanity IS this principle exploration and to say we've reduced that exploration to "maximize X" is crazy.
At some point deciding fate of the company or system or state flows from principles embedded in cultures and that's in danger of being flattened away by optimizing outcomes with machines.
Vague and wishy washy, but its the clearest I can state it.
If the principle embedded in the culture of my manager is to do dumb shit that goes nowhere, then I'm not sure what goals we're achieving.
Denying that reality is pure cope.
If you don’t pay them, you can walk by feet. If they ban you, you can walk by feet. If their infrastructure is damaged, no one and nothing will be able to move.
Good point about infra, but that’s already the case with Cloudflare, GitHub, aws, etc
BTW, when (not if, but when) a war happens, they will become very nice targets to render this exact country completely disabled.
Humans are autonomous, distributed, and adaptable. In a package that weighs ~150 lbs, with very low energy requirements.
You literally cannot wipe them out without a sustained and incredibly expensive ground campaign, and even then it's not likely.
AI in a data center on the other hand... So easily disabled.
And voila. No cargo moved, no code changes or fixes, no medical diagnosis made,etc. A whole country is disabled.
I thought that was an interesting idea, but not something that could ever happen..
Re: war.. that’s why US spends orders of magnitude more on military than anyone else. If any infra is hit on US soil then im heading to the bunker because most of the world will have already been reduced to dust.
Single points of failure are a fact of life.
AI offers relative democratization. What’s going on with model competition is giving us more choice, not less.
Self-driving requires less holistic thinking than imagining, building, and evolving large scale systems. It requires abilities that LLMs do not have. It requires non-symbolic reasoning, intuition, etc. that are beyond LLMs.
Intuition exists outside the human brain?
No.
> Don’t fear change.
Change is inevitable.
What I understood from the comment is that Op fears the boiling frog scenario. [0]
Imagine I am 200IQ, and I can solve things you can't comprehend.
You appear to be saying I should this be able to run any system, including the entire United States fed govt, and anyone who even questions if that may have bad effects should "not fear change".
The industrial revolution was Change, but so is cancer.
It's not only AI. Betting is on the rise, adults and minors are being hooked by dopamine loops, social networks are causing well measured negative effects, children's educational scores are sinking worldwide, appliance manufacturers engage in surveillance...
It truly feels like the wild west.
In the US. When the inevitable legislations start popping up worldwide, don't be surprised when somehow the American consensus will be to do nothing.
fwiw, i think literally all largish corporations have been like that pre AI too? i can gurantee you that nobody understands how the whole system works at all of my last workplaces either...
people just know their small part and hope for the best - so from a devils advocate pov, its already been proved that its sustasinable. now wherever its _worth it_ is another question. large employers are - on average - incredibly wasteful with their resources. not to anthropics degree, but still.
if youre boostrapping, and VC token subventions go away... i suspect it'd be not worth it to develop like that. But i guess we will find out in a few month to 1-2 years
How about the dollar you earned, spent, invested? Do you know how it works?
How about the clothes you wear?
This is just a tiny subset of the enormous complexity we're immersed in, and no individual or collective has a complete understanding of it. If you do, you're truly an outlier and GP's point still stands.
Even for the COBOL based systems someone understands it well enough at the conceptual and business level. And when there's no one to the company migrates and modernizes.
You are conflating the subject matter expert who understands one area well and others not so well with a general newbie who understands nothing well
I don't think it is. @squidmaster specifically noted, 'The "Renaissance man" era is long gone.'
Is that really a problem though? We can solve problems empirically even if we don't keep the entire system's workings in our heads.
I agree that formalizing observations into a system can lead to additional insights, though it would probably be hubris to assume the formalization is faultless.
Yet even without AI, humanity's most complex creations are not understandable by mere single humans, or even groups of them.
For example, the US Healthcare Insurance system runs on the collective power of humans (and likely an increasing bit of AI), but no one human can understand the system as a whole.