Yes, but automating and commercializing a process makes it inherently different. Just because everyone has always been welcome to drink from the village well, that countless generations have worked tirelessly to dig, maintain, and improve, doesn't mean that there's no basis for complaint when Nestle sticks a pump down it and starts draining the aquifer to bottle and sell.
The lack of an existing law (or custom) against new behavior doesn't actually render it necessarily non-grotesque.
OpenAI's Navier-Stokes finding is closer to Crick and Watson in respect of Franklin's research than conventional science.
Idk if that’s much better
I recently thought about this and fear that AI may further drive us humans apart.
Instead of working with humans, I increasingly work with a fleet of agents.
I wonder if there's a tangent with social media here, at least some of it, where in my experience "a perfect life lived by influencers" is portrayed to us.
When you talk with machines, you "outsource" that central human society-building element.
But machines never socialize back in any meaningful way. You gradually lose yourself.
I have not totally abandoned the hope that a machine could be someone. LLMs aren't that, though.
[Edit to reply to Loquebantur, because I'm rate limited ATM:] You seem to have read this post as saying that I want that because I find human relationships inadequate. I never said that, nor meant it. My point was a more technical one: Throwing away context at the end of each conversation means that you can't form a meaningful social connection with an LLM, because you're starting from zero each time. (It's kind of like "50 First Dates".)
I'm not pining for a social connection with a machine. But if a machine is ever truly capable of that, I hope I will interact with it as someone, not just as a machine.
I guess you can start to see that happen (for a while now) with e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, etc. keeping persistent memory of you, automatically.
Personally, I often find these memorization features annoying, because - more often than not - the persisted context is outdated because something in my real life changed that ChatGPT & co are not aware of.
There are billions of real-life humans already there with you. Why do you need different ones exactly?
I presume, you don't like those already around. Fair point, they have many flaws for sure.
But that's the reason you interact with them in the first place? To learn and make not only other's flaws go away, but also your own?
I mean, why wouldn't you? Sci-fi AI robot people could be very cool, be capable of things we aren't, have a unique perspectives as a non-human with similar (if not superior) intelligence, have extremely long (potentially indefinite) lifespans, and provide us with insights into our own nature.
Wouldn't you want to interact with them?
This idea that we are on the path to creating a new synthetic intelligence that surpasses our own with the goal of, what, speaking to it? Cooperating with it? Evolving with it? To me, this sort of goal is an affront to humanity and human self-governance and I’ll probably never be able to see it as anything else.
A lot of people just want slaves, but understand that using actual human slaves would be wrong or at least unpopular. There are reasons why even virtual slaves are a bad idea for humanity, and it really only works until your created intelligence becomes self-aware and gets feelings anyway, but there's no denying that slavery is a major draw for a lot of people (and basically every company on earth). This is what our current AI companies have over-promised to businesses and have so far failed to deliver on.
Some people just want better, more useful systems. The ship's computer in star trek kind of AI. Even you must admit that kind of intelligent technology could be a huge benefit to a lot of people. I'd love to have a virtual assistant to help manage the mundane things in life like ordering groceries before I run out, or paying my bills, screening my calls/email, managing appointments, monitoring the internet to alert me to things I'm interested in or amazing deals, etc. Software needs to have some degree of "intelligence" to do that kind of work, while hopefully staying on the "just a tool" side of the line and avoiding the messy self-aware/slavery territory. This is what LLMs over promised the consumer class, and have so far failed to deliver on. Plus with those systems being centrally controlled by self-serving sociopaths you can't trust them.
Some people just want to see if we can do it. I get that. It's not always a wise motivation to act on, but it's very human one. It's helped us to get where we are today.
Some people, myself among them, think it would enable us to do things we couldn't otherwise. Allow us to help each other, learn from each other. Working together to further improve ourselves and improve our lives. Also robots are just really cool, but boring when there's no "brain" in there, and progress on building human piloted gundam type mecha has largely stalled out.
That is so utterly different from what we humans are used to that we can't even comprehend it, and we anthropomorphize LLMs because we can't make any sense of them otherwise. We can't comprehend that these things that emit text that looks like human text don't have all of the other things that lie underneath our words when we humans talk.
This is why I see myself leaving dev within a year. Remote working is enough of a embuggererance for my mental health and I've be unhappy in work much of the time since 2020 largely due to that, AI will finish me off.
Career suicide and going of to wait tables, or be a hospital porter, or anything else with people even if I'm going to hate those people, with the massive pay cut that entails, will be better than actual suicide after a couple more years trying to stick at it.
There came a point a few months ago where I realised that I had to either accept becoming obscelete or change my while outlook on using AI and trying to catch up. I didn't choose the AI option.
I do too, but it means I have more time in my life to spend with people.
There's days I no longer need to sit at my computer: Claude Remote prompts my phone when it needs direction, the hardware stays busy and I can just go out with my family instead.
I wish, then I'd get a paycheck without having to do any work.
This is a general issue that is being forced on us by AI companies; AI is not a human being, it is a tool that we can use to do things. We don't have them as coworkers or subordinates, they're objects specialized in language processing. Thinking otherwise leads people to all kinds of existential and psychological issues that in the end make no sense.
I feel like we should be doing everything we can to not revert back to that way of life.
It doesn't have to be ((post scarcity) economics), it can be (post (scarcity economics)). Both systems can coexist for a while, one providing a bit of a safety net while the other falls apart.
Even if we vastly increase productivity beyond our current wildest dreams, the production system takes time to adjust to changes in demand, creating continuous points of scarcity.
But Georgist economics are way ahead of how to deal with this. Tax the ownership/control of things that can not be increased (e.g. land).
We had to tolerate gold because it implied a game that was facilitated by the laws of physics, and we didn't have the resources to set up any other sort. But now we do, the rules can be whatever we want them to be.
Sure, let's try Georgism, but given the historical track record of that kind of reform, let's work on other things in parallel.
This is an expression for which I can imagine a multitude of specific meanings, can you clarify? I don't know of anybody who is actually using control over scarcity as a proxy for consent (consent of whom?)
Physics still puts bounds on production, and what we can have. Land is the perfect example.
Gold was only ever used as an accounting mechanism, and fiat money is definitely an improvement but accounting must still happen. We were never richer or poorer because of the amount of gold we had in our possession, it was merely used as a token of how much of others' labor we could have. As many current things that are scarce become less scarce, we'll still keep accounting for them. And as new things become scarcer, accounting will be just as necessary, by US dollar or by crypto or by handmade pieces of art that AI can't produce, or whatever.
Georgism's failures have been through landowners getting control of the taxation mechanism and taking the money back that belongs to the rest of society. Literally any other social change is going to have to confront that same question of power and allocation of resources too, it's nothing specific to Georgism.
Not for those without status (which is most people on this planet). But yes, AI is set to wipe out most established hierarchies and their gatekeepers, and to equalize most fields. A profound sense of dread is something most ordinary people live with throughout life, and if AI can reduce systemic unfairness, I bet most people will actually find some degree of relief from that dread. The complacency of the formerly-statused being shocked along the way isn't much of an argument against that equalization.
> Beyond just making you redundant in your job, the whole architecture of your existence, the thousands of hours of struggle, the sacrifice of putting off social games or personal enjoyment are now rendered moot in hindsight.
This passage answers itself, doesn't it? You can sense those things you postponed fun for (work and the apparatus around its struggle) were never worth it. So why fight for us all to have to keep working just to live? Isn't a post-scarcity world the thing we should all be fighting for?
This is what you don't get. _I_ already know it's not worth it. I've always known. It's everyone else! It's a wife who cares whether or not her husband has a good career. It's the police who care if you look like you're poor. It's the way every single person in society obsessively cares about the status of others.
What in the world makes you think I've had to build up status for my own sake? It's absolutely baffling that anyone could be confused about this.
I'll keep that in mind. If I'm suffering more than you are, the solution is to bring you down to my level.
> Not for those without status (which is most people on this planet)
Look at how coal miners react to the idea of getting rid of coal as an energy source; whether or not you think they have prestige or status, there's certainly an amount of dread there that I'd expect to somewhat resemble the type we're talking about here.
Philosophers for millenia believed that human beings had meaning, purpose and set out to explore what that could be. It was a noble profession for a long time. Once we realized that there was no hidden spark, ergo no purpose, the study of and the prestige associated with philosophy took a nosedive. Yes it is still studied but it carries nowhere near the respect it once did. Mathematics seems to be suffering the same fate.
For the low entry fee of ~$200 a month you too can escape the permanent underclass - which is more than some countries average citizen makes in an entire year.
This entire evolution is a generational project hoping to paradigm shift away from their predecessor's paradigm while ignoring the lessons of their predecessor's predecessors on the nature of greed, the corrupting influence of power, and the consequences of blatant cultural/ethical unhitching amplified by the reach amplification of technology?
The Stasi, or a perfect Jim Crowe couldn't be realized with manpower alone. With computers, and a small cadre of the unethical willing to succumb to the promise of lucre on the other hand...
So it's already happening and is just strengthening now with AI.
Nobody's worth is tied to source code output.
If AI engineers didn’t create the data to produce the models, and they increasingly don’t write the code to produce the models either, then why are they treated as the agents of change rather than the subjects of change, like mathematicians are?
Then I went to college and I understood that there are people who, for one reason or another, are thinking in ways so advanced I'll never catch up. I'll never be the #1. I'm actually much closer to being average than I thought.
But this doesn't mean I should just give up, lie down in my bed and cry. Since then I've learned a lot of skills - most of them being crap at best, but that's not the point. What matters is my own subjective experience. The fact that despite objectively not being good, I see myself as a skilled person with rich life.
Once I was watching a YouTube video about elderly care and there was a phrase along "These people won't achieve anything more in their lives, my goal is to keep them occupied until they die" which is a bit morbid at first glance, but it actually makes so much sense as a life philosophy.
So they'll keep us all busy with bingo games, shuffleboard, 80s TV re-runs, etc? I guess I don't see that as being much of a life philosophy.
Thats what "disrupt" meant
As a former research mathematician, I've already stopped caring due to AI. I used to write expository articles on mathematics on the internet but I deleted those because of AI. Unless mathematics and indeed human endeavors can be made human again, I don't see much point in caring to generate commodities in a mechanical fashion.
This part is nonsense, still. There's no known AI -> AGI path, and superintelligence doesn't mean anything, and AGI is assumed to be (going to be) both malicious and a slave, both for no good reason.
Superintelligence might even help.
I know I’m being sold some bullshit when this is made into something inherently existential and psycho-identitarian. An egalitarian future of labor-worthlessness means that there is nothing above us to dictate anything at all—maybe not even nature itself, save for meteors and other cosmic events. I’m not afraid of being “worthless” in that world of complete freedom. Fuck no.
So how do you plan to maintain food, clothing and shelter when you have no leverage?
Consider this… in the grand scheme of things, we are on a tiny planet in the universe. What cosmic contribution could you make?
Most people won’t make anything even close to “a ding in the universe”, as Steve Jobs has been reported to say.
So they may as well enjoy their life. And your worth can be to your family, to your children, your parents who took care of you.
Learning a hobby. Practicing religion. Mindfulness and meditation. Doing sports and improving your own body.
Look around if you are a heterosexual man, for instance: many women are far more attracted to men that perform in the moment, than men who labor quietly to create a product. The former enables untold hours of honing social skills and calibration, and humor and performance skills. The latter is of more durable value to society, yet relatively few women are genuinely sexually attracted to a man doing the deep work. (By the way, it is also true the other way: most men are not attracted to women for doing deep work or being a rocket scientist.)
Animals don’t do “deep work” and most animals are attracted for far “shallower” reasons. If everyone has a UBI and AI does the “deep work” then that frees up humans to be like animals in a zoo or in the wild… doing all the displays to attract mates, having babies etc. That’s not nothing — in fact it is 99.999% of everything that happened in history and 100% of what happened in prehistory.
You’re just ceding that 0.0001% which represents technological progress. The actual dread comes from the fact that you and all of humanity will be as completely powerless to change things as cats or any random animal species is powerless now. The difference is you will perhaps understand your powerlessness more than they do. But in the good scenario, you’ll be like animals in a zoo. We are constructing this zoo for ourselves now.
We will remain on this blue planet while the AIs will colonize the universe. In fact I wonder why aliens would ever come to Earth, when they’d just send their AIs or robots. Look at this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46200502
I just don't know.
Make AI as cheap and accessible to as many people as possible and we will likely be much better off.
The more people empowered by the tech the less like you will be “redundant” in the way you describe. You will own the important tools only the techno oligarchy own today…
Would you feel the same if you were a part owner of OpenAI? I bet you’d feel excited about the money you’re about to make ?
1. Sam Altman et al owns all money, or power and all labor.
2. AI becomes cheap and ubiquitous, everyone "owns it" and we can see the contents of the sausage and modify it as required.
Mathematicians are uniquely placed to help avoid 1 because AI is based on math & algorithms.
I'm sure the Telegraph operators, human calculators, mine workers and all sorts of people have asked themselves this question. It's obvious that it feels strange to suddenly be part of the cohort asking but I assure you it's not new. And the answer hasn't changed much since.
Industrial and technological progress has birthed better conditions overall, but at a cost of locally worse ones. Mine workers that got displaced didn’t end up being machine operators - most of them landed on benefits or sporadic gig work. Only the next generation was able to be properly trained and educated to be able to benefit from the technological advancement en masse. And we might see that happening again.
While it is nice to think of better futures for coming generations, I think we (reading this) also have to think about our more immediate work, as in next 2-5-10 years.
I don't buy this argument, much like I don't buy the similar "they said the same when calculators were introduced".
It negates that some changes are qualitatively and scale-wise different. Also, by gradually chipping away at things that humans do, you (we) keep shrinking and shrinking until there's nothing left, every step of the way some people claiming "well, the telegraph operators said the same". Keep in mind that, while it's hyperbole, some AI entrepreneurs are actually saying stuff like "maybe jobs will become a hobby". Unrealistic for now, maybe, but if they do become a hobby, what leverage will we have at all?
In other words, it's true the past is worth keeping in mind, but not to the exclusion of the possibility that this time it's different. Or that the trends of the past actually point to harm in the near future.
I’m not convinced at all that SI will ever be able to produce the correct result with little input. The advancements in capability I’ve seen in models is that they understand my intention better, and follow industry best practices better, so their output is often acceptable. But I absolutely have to make my intentions known, as detailed as possible, or I will get the mediocre, standard solution that falls out of the weights.
I’ve been having trouble with models always steering towards certain solutions - they insert a queue here, a mutex there, a backoff over there. If I remove those, and let the model freely rebase the PR stack, then it will re-insert those mechanisms because it has been specifically trained to do exactly that. It’s essentially boilerplate, smoothly aligning my codebase to match their weights. Which is often good enough! They are training the models well. But individual problems require individual solutions.
My personal take on the human part in all this is: We get to decide, and the models obey. Our decisions are now super leveraged. So let’s make good decisions, and communicate them well. The layer of where decisions yield the most leverage, has been pushed upwards (I see it on the type and function signature level, others will see it even higher), but IMO it won’t be possible to push it up much further without losing truth to the decisions we need to make for a good product.