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Comment by mogadsheu | Hacker News Reader

The Ma/Musk AI debate in China showed two very different societal approaches to how to handle the impact of AI.

Ma’s approach is: everybody work less and enjoy the perks.

Musk’s is: learn AI or perish, and beware the consequences.

The two aren’t mutually exclusive, although the messages are different. I believe this because Musk’s assertion of an elite few living in tall spires and the masses living in relative poverty was overtly dismissed by Ma, but I felt that his facial expressions suggested that he was hiding his agreement of it.

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Musk describe what will really happen though. The employer will always hire as few as possible, unless it’s some relative of a director. It’s too early but I think in the long term UBI is pretty much the only solution.

>I think in the long term UBI is pretty much the only solution.

Or...the costs of goods adjust as demand shifts, and things previously not considered "a job" start being considered jobs. I don't know why people get this idea in their head that if suddenly everyone works less for the same amount, everything stays the same price. Producers still want consumers, so prices shift. In the future, you might get paid to judge how moving and emotional music sounds. Or how good food tastes. As long as there exist services that humans want and we can't yet automate, there will always be an economy.

> In the future, you might get paid to judge how moving and emotional music sounds. Or how good food tastes.

Those examples sound pretty tractable for statistics, +/- better measurement technology in the case of food. Emotion isn't magic, there are whole industries that already know how to design things to be "moving and emotional".

> As long as there exist services that humans want and we can't yet automate, there will always be an economy.

The issue isn't "an economy", but an economy where most population can find gainful employment during their entire working age. This is increasingly becoming less likely in the future, and we need to find a way to deal with that.

(Also, the prices are flexible, but if they shift too high or too low, producers start doing problematic things or give up on the product entirely. This is how you end up with farmers letting tons of perfectly good food to rot, while 10 minutes down the road there's a city full of starving people.)

>Those examples sound pretty tractable for statistics

You're missing my point: things that don't seem like jobs, no matter what they are, will be legitimate gainful jobs, as long as people want them done and they can't be automated or are too much effort to automate. Unless you are making the argument that in the near/medium future, nothing falls into that category. If that's the case, then we just disagree. I think the problem lies more with connecting people to those new jobs than them actually existing.

There's a lot of things people want done that can't be jobs. For instance, myself and quite a lot of other people want the surplus CO₂ out of the atmosphere. Yet this isn't a job, and probably won't be for a while, because we can't make money off it. I can't afford just paying for it, not the amounts required. I'd have to make money off it or off something else.

Outside of charity, no job exists without it making more money for the employer than it costs to pay for that job.

I'm making the argument that the pool of things that people want done and can monetize is much smaller, and I'm not convinced it'll grow fast enough to cover for automation-induced job loss.

Everything you said is wrong.

1: Ma said that AI can never be as smart as a human. The core of his argument was that humans will always be more clever than machines because humans create machines. Humans working less is just a byproduct of this. I was amazed to see how stupid Ma is. He is truly ignorant.

2: the core of Elon’s argument is that AGI is detrimental to human society. Elon’s first choice is to not have AGIs come about. Merging with them is his second choice and a stopgap measure. It isn’t learn ai or perish, it’s learn ai and reduce the probability of perishing modestly. You may not realize this without having heard other interviews though.

3: musk never said anything about people living in spires as a societal inequality thing. He said in terms of being able to see what’s coming, some people are atop spires and some people are on the ground. All he’s saying is that some people can see clearly what’s coming (AI turning the world upside down) and most people can’t see what’s coming. Nothing to do with socioeconomics or inequality. Wasn’t a social comment.

Watch Jack speak to Alibaba's original employees and you'll find that most of his musings about technology were off the mark:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up9-C4_8dVo

And yet Alibaba is now worth more than Ebay and Yahoo combined.

He may be ignorant but he's not entirely stupid.

Of course, the irony of him talking about how Alibaba employees should work more hours shouldn't be lost on people.

I was referring to their messages to the public about how to react to advances in AI. Your interpretations are about AI’s impact on society. I don’t disagree with your interpretations, but it definitely doesn’t make mine wrong. They’re different facets of the same conversation.

I don’t follow you. I have accurately described what they actually said in the China video. Your descriptions were wrong. It has nothing to do with my point of view. Go review the video.

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