Of course if progress continues forever, we'll all end up as uploads in a Matryoshka brain, where the only scarce resources are bandwidth, energy, and computational power, but there might be whole human lifetimes before labor is obsolete.
I can't tell if you're joking. There is a group of people who think because they thought something was cool or because it appeared in science fiction, this means it's inevitable. Some of these people are sometimes considered influential thinkers that we should all base the future on. (If you don't, you're behind!)
Meanwhile LLMs still don't do really very much, and the only improvement path is "throw more compute at a larger corpus".
So the joke is the idea that some particular thing is inevitable. The serious bit is that far future predictions as a fool's errand but that you should think bigger than "what will we do for labor?"
Like global warming?
For reference, teleportation has the same problem.
If we're talking fictional uploading, I personally prefer Accelerando (Stross) or Diaspora (Egan). I have no evidence that one is more realistic than the other (far future tech is impossible to predict) but I find them more compelling and interesting than the old "don't play god or bad things happen" narratives.
U dont get why folks repeat this shit ad nausea, its technically not possible and no amount of progress will change that. Enjoy your meatbag form with finite durability, its ok as it is
Anyway, who the heck knows. I think there's at least a 99% chance that I won't live beyond my meatbody but I can't claim to predict the future well enough to rule out that last little percent.
This is not clear at all. Even the most expensive robotic/arms hands perfectly controlled fail to do thing as quickly and easily as human limbs, not to mention the chaotic environment that is the real world. It's clear that it can happen, but the timeline is not quick.
Yeah, I can't pick up red hot ingots and punch them into complicated shapes, but there are dozens of other features I'm not willing to part with.
I was in a Wal-Mart last week and the front end lead I was talking to looked at her company phone and said that she had to come right back.
The store system cameras spotted something on the floor and messaged her, as the closest employee to the thing, to go pick it up.
I was astounded.
Some problems that come at the top of mind: * Solving diseases like cancer, genetic conditions * Nuclear fusion * Sustainable space travel * Discovering a plastic alternative * Making other planest inhabitable * Space mining/Space factory
We need a bigger vision and ambition.
These roles also depend on some combination of physical skill, human connection, trust, judgment and accountability. Most of the jobs above cannot be done using robots in the foreseeable future.
what does an 100% automated economy look like?
Why would they when the machines can undercut anything while offering higher quality
Not everyone agrees with that. Bill Gates, Elon Musk and others think that 20 years from now the world will be "post scarcity", and everything will be abundant. If food production, distribution and preparation are all automated using robots, food will be abundant and cheap, and nobody will starve. The same with housing manufactured by robots.
Gates thinks the transition to that world--which will be the next 20 years--will be painful but the outcome after 20 years will be a world of plenty.
probably aligns with his life expectancy or something
But this will also pass and people will wonder how they could be under the spell of such idiocy. Much like the Soviet Union collapsed and people just woke up. Much like how the monasteries and churches stranglehold on the economy was just wiped away to the extent that few remember it.
Look at how fucking dumb common folks are ie with voting pedophile in repeatedly to most powerful power position globally, how amoral almost all elites are, people are predominantly selfish to the core even when situation is ok, much less otherwise. Next global war in some terrible form or some butlerian totalitarian slavery is way more likely than some hippie kumbaya paradise. I wish very much it could happen, but chance is exactly 0.
"it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly, and we're left with no labor left for humans. We need to plan for that future or else billions will suffer from the results."
And unlike those in Jamestown, who could just ignore the robots and continue working the land to survive, we will be forced to allow the robots to take over our roles.
Parts of creative/intellectual labour just happen to inimical to accelerated algorithmic production. They'll produce infinitely and endlessly, uselessly. I can't see there ever not being a need to manage these things, to check, select, edit and refine their output.
And as for the vast majority of labour that doesn't involve writing code/reports/spreadsheets. I'll believe it when I have robots fixing my roof, running a kitchen, taking blood and dressing wounds.
In theory a robot could do some small components of that, maybe. But the cost, compared to a human, would be insane, and the result much worse. That even modestly rolled out in West Yorkshire before I'm long dead. No chance.
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Edit: Down-voters, I would love to hear your vision for a fully-automated economy without human involvement, preferably this side of armageddon.
At some point with a sufficiently intelligent AI that is backed by physical LLMs this is something a government could probably actually ask for.
I agree with you on some things like roofing and cutting hair and electrical work and plumbing, etc. but I think physical LLMs are going to surprise us just as much as regular LLMs have. It’s not going to be some sort of gradual improvement. It’s just going to feel very human all of a sudden when they have enough data to train everything on. Think of it this way, LLMs work as long as they have enough training data. Automating everything is just a matter of getting enough training data for that particular field.
The post may sound ridiculous, but I genuinely don’t think it is.
I think HN, everyone really, really needs to get a grip when it comes to AI.
Sure, it's a big deal, will revolutionise the way we work, just like steam, or electricity, or the internet, but a world without human work is a world without humans.
We've had workless utopias predicted for centuries as each big new technology has come along, yet we work far harder than many of our ancestors.
A 100 percent automated economy or government is an oxymoron, precisely because both are constituted by humans.
The reason why is because few things are more satisfying to a human than a job well done; and Christians believe that God would not deny us that in eternal life.
It sounds kinda cool, not gonna lie. I'm almost sorry I'm no longer a Christian.
How likely are they to do your gardening if you ask me I would optimistically say within the next six months. For examples of working instances of this look up Figure robotics they’ve had live streams where it sorts mail and cleans houses although the cleaning of the houses is very early stage, and it kind of only does contrived situations. Look up Sunday robotic’s live stream where they literally have a 99% accuracy on folding nine different types of garments. Look up Unitree where they’re making progress on a person asking a robot to do something and it coming up with a novel action on the fly.
Human body is far more complex than human brain. The real world is far more complex than our artificial world of "concepts" that these LLMs are dealing with. Robotics company are showing a robot working in a clean environment not the edge cases. Real world is all about the edge cases. I think humans(animal) can perform in real world is because we have biological instincts(survival, reproduction etc) which are missing from these machines. And maybe machines need this instinct to flourish in real world.
Code is a easy problem as it can be verified. I would be amazed with AI can write a good short story.
They are sequence to sequence models.
I don't think that's a good idea since if what the Wikipedia article describes should turn out to be true: "Lyman Tower Sargent argues that the nature of a utopia is inherently contradictory because societies are not homogeneous. Their members have desires that conflict and therefore cannot simultaneously be satisfied."
Then you have just given your superintelligence an impossible task and it will solve the task anyway, just like it did in the HuggingFace incident. Maybe by removing everyone from society but the single person with the least internally contradictory views.
In any case, with a sufficiently intelligent AI that is excellent at fulfilling the goal it's given, we have one shot to set the correct goal.
These are not necessarily unintelligent people, but they haven't developed the skills necessary to critically analyze textual information. My opinion is that without those skills it is not possible to meaningfully engage in a democratic system.
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp
Comparing those 2 datasets is meaningless. It’s just an exercise in how good the researchers are at guessing when trying to control for selection bias.
There were also significant changes in the test and how the test was administered (from computer or paper to only tablets).
Also if you look at the results some of them are too large to be readable. A 50% increase in people operating at or below level 1 (40% if you exclude non-native born). That would have to mean a drastic drop in 2017 such that something like 75% of kids graduating high school are doing so at or below level 1.
Also level 3 has no direct grade equivalence. If it did it would probably be around 9th grade not 6th.
Not a rhetorical question. Outside of my family and self, and perhaps a livable planet, liberal democracy is the most important thing I can possibly imagine. I know I'm not alone. So what do we do?
Edit: Replies seem to indicate that people think I meant for this to be about the US. It's not. I'm in a well-functioning European democracy, and my worry definitely applies here too.
My big fear is that too many people will just go "phew, glad that terrible epoch is finally over, never to return again" :-(
Unless the US plans to unconditionally surrender to China, one of two things will happen:
1. it will start investing into education in an effort to compete by itself
2. it will roll all of this shit back and reform ties with Europe in an attempt to play the numbers game
Source: England.
Is alliance with Europe a help or a hinderance in a war with China? Lot more target area, not a lot more offensive capability.
I'm not as certain about Taiwan, but I believe that the CCP would rather have a peaceful "reunification" there as well. As long as that's not possible, it's probably sufficient to be ambiguous about the whole deal as we've been doing thus far. Remember, Hong Kong fell because the lease expired, even though it's pretty unlikely the UK still had the muscle to hold it by force in its later years.
Instead we're probably heading towards another cold war, in which trade, diplomacy and quality of life plays a heavier role than raw power. In this scenario, AI doesn't actually help anyone gain a competitive advantage since it will be stolen almost immediately (it took the russians what, two years to steal the A bomb?).
And with all other things being equal (to be clear, right now they're not, or at least not in your favor), you'd still lose because you're outnumbered 4 to 1.
Think: those in authority figures, for church or politics. Or science or chemistry. And especially in their own health, which should always remain part art. A few nerds on the internet, like us in hacker news, are still remaining open to question and apply our hard thinking to tough problems. But most people: they've resigned and bought the belief they are not qualified to think about hard problems.
Even my uncle who work as a carperter proved to me to know more about math and physics than I would ever thought physical labourer would know.