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Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

The thing people forget about whether it's 80/20 (and the last 20 takes infinite time) or whether it's 80/20 (and it happens super-linearly) is the nature of the 20.

One of two things tends to happen.

1) The 20 is a fundamentally different problem, but is itself solved by applying different new developments (e.g. most breakthrough devices: semiconductor manufacture and design, cellular phones, iPhone)

2) The 80 is so useful that work realigns to avoid / ignore the 20 (e.g. most mass market adoptions: horse drawn carriages, trains, automobiles, planes, television, personal and business computing)

The key thing realistic futurists harp on is what drives revolutions is superior utility versus the status quo.

If AI is "same as human, without the labor costs," it will be adopted gradually. If AI is "better than human in a fundamental way," it will be adopted overnight.

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I would argue that horse drawn carriages were a 100% solution for something like 8000 years of human history. It’s been barely over a hundred years where there has been something that could efficiently replace them and the ‘self driving’ modern replacement have maybe 0.01% the smarts of a horse.

I mean, go get drunk and pass out on the back of your horse and the chances are real good it’s going to take you home without running into the back of a parked emergency vehicle sitting on the side of the road without giving it specific directions to do so.

Full disclosure: I’ve never passed out on a horse…

Horses produce a lot of shit, need to be fed, generate rather large biohazards when they expire, and have an oscillating motion that isn't a great match for drunkenness.

"A horse for every person" probably wasn't the best of times.

On the other hand, they are excellent listeners.

They’re also zero-carbon which is fairly important these days.

A good discussion, previously on HN: https://acoup.blog/2022/05/13/collections-ancient-tanks-char... ; the carriage or similar appears to be four thousand years old.

AI doesn't have to fully replace humans (or even be that good) to have detrimental effects on wages and working conditions. Jobs are like oil; if the people who control the supply can reduce quantity by 10 percent, prices spike (this, for workers, would mean that wages decline, work conditions worsen, and hours grow longer).

We're not going to see AIs replacing humans in all jobs any time soon. We are going to see, barring regulation or (better yet) a total overthrow of the corporate system, increasing power accruing to capital--due to AIs' ability to perform the "80" in the aforementioned 80/20 analysis--with devastating human consequences. And this is true even though DALL-E, in the given example, doesn't actually understand (even in a figurative sense) that a third of Africa is desert or that certain facial expressions indicate concentration.

If an AI can do even half of your job--and anything you do as a subordinate probably can, in principle, be done by machines--you should be terrified. You're not going to be working 20 hours per week; you're going to be working for pennies due to wage inelasticity--there's now twice as much competition for jobs. Automation is of course both desirable and inevitable, but we've got to transition to an economic system in which it doesn't result in widespread poverty and homelessness... which is not the one we've got right now.

> If AI is "better than human in a fundamental way," it will be adopted overnight.

Are there any examples of this and how would we qualify them? Do plenty of pedestrian control systems also satisfy that criterion? After all, the SpaceX landing system is a feat of piloting that would probably be impossible for a human , but I don't believe the system is "AI" rather than an extremely well tuned more conventional thing of Kalman filters and feedback loops.

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