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Comment by null_object | Hacker News Reader

My main problem with AI, is that all around me in this world I still see grinding poverty, war, starvation, suffering, diseases, deadly pollution, insanitary living conditions, underfunded schools and healthcare.

What AI has ‘solved’ so far: almost all the activities that humanity has found fun and life-fulfilling for hundreds, if not thousands, of years - creativity, art, writing, solving intellectual challenges.

As we accelerate ever-faster into a future dystopia of overlords (the richest 100 people in the world increased their collective wealth by 9% in 2021) while the rest of us are ground ever further into the dirt, I assume that AI will continue to steal the fulfilling parts of our lives from us, and leave us with the suffering and slavery.

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Those problems are real but completely unrelated to AI so I don't get how they're relevant here. I don't understand the expectation that AI should solve a specific set of complex economic and political problems, or that humans should solve those problems before they do anything with AI, neither of these ideas makes sense.

The tech is ahead of social development.

as usual

The argument was that so much energy has been put into solving problems that aren't actually hurting people.

Our success in having the ability to generate sonnets in seconds will be seen in our future similar to the emperor commissioning golden statues whilst his people starved.

I think you radically underestimate how much AI will revolutionise our economy. Sure, sonnets are frivolous but there are countless applications that won't be.

And those applications will let more work be done by fewer people, show people more effective ads, and make the rich richer in myriad other ways.

So you think the future is:

1. Fewer people working so fewer incomes

2. More ads to sell products to the fewer people who have incomes

3. A few people only getting rich (and buying all the stuff in the ads I guess?)

This makes no coherent sense.

Ads as a business model only make sense if there is a mass consumer market to sell stuff too. But if there are less people working and earning, ads by definition cannot be as effective.

No, we are going to see bigger changes and more radical changes than poorly thought-out dystopia scifi plots.

Could you offer an alternative vision?

I think there will be immense social dislocation as all white collar workers simultaneously get 100x more productive virtually overnight without a corresponding increase in work to do.

At the same time more people will be able to build on their ideas than ever. A few things that seem obvious to me would be:

- Private AI tutors that can go at a student's pace will revolutionise schooling (say goodbye to a teacher shortage anywhere)

- Helpdesk work will vanish

- Art will explode like nothing we've seen before. I'm already experimenting with writing stories in collaboration with AI and this is only the beginning.

- Numerous improvements in a huge number of machines and data analysis in particular will likely get much better.

- Due to widespread white collar work unemployment almost certain to be UBI's springing up all over the developed world.

- Far more workers will end up back in physical jobs of various types. Environmental clean up, farm work, construction, etc.

- Vastly more software will be built as the effective price of building will go way down.

- Robots is another area I'm interested in seeing what happens. My understanding is that building robot hardware that is useful is much easier than the software. So if this allows for much more rapid software development we couod see an explosion on robotics too.

I'm more certain of some of these than others but those are the ones off the top of my head. Out atm but you could also ask the Chatbot haha.

It will be a new level of irony if because of AI people instead of focusing on fun or creative tasks will go back to manual labour

Immediately conjured images of humans crafting more and more elaborate offerings to a man who lives in the sky, and felt oddly, familiar.

> A few people only getting rich (and buying all the stuff in the ads I guess?)

Yes? What is incoherent about this?

Especially when you consider that while some products are commodities you can just produce more of, a couple of important ones aren't: real estate, influence, power. Unless we change course, the latter will get concentrated on fewer and fewer hands, and maybe we get more of the former in return.

Well, this is a summary of the 2000s and 2010s, so it both not far fetched to imagine the trend continuing, and an understandable failure of imagining how the trend is going to stop (because we don't know yet.)

Perhaps there is a tipping point of unemployed people in the areas affected by AI where people outlaw some usage, funnel the funding, etc...

Perhaps the disappearing of "free" energy puts people back in the fields to ensure subsistence, and the few remaining intellectual tasks are automated to hell.

Perhaps this AI is astonishing us today before becoming boring and failing at the next hard task, buying us some time.

I think it's still very much in our power not to blindly follow decisions written automatically on a computer screen.

Don't give it a gun anytime soon, though.

I would argue that more work can be done by more people because more accessible tools enable anyone to produce based on ideas rather than only a small subset of people blessed with the required skills.

Did digital art tools, compared to something like oil painting, destroy art as a field? No, there's more art and artists than ever.[1]

I believe the same thing is true for music.

I don't see AI replacing the artist or the author or the musician. I see AI enabling more artists and authors and musicians to produce even greater art.

[1] https://www.arts.gov/news/press-releases/2019/new-report-rev...

I don't. I use AI every day at work and agree that it will revolutionise most industries. I do however stand by the fact that at the end of the day, companies like Google and OpenAI want to spend billions on AI, and less on other things. Thus my gold statue comment.

I see the point, an I think it’s a little overhyped.

But protein folding with ai might be really helpful for the medical field. (Alpha fold). We also use it to score (rate basically) prospective crispr designs, which along with some other parameters

So it might not be a net negative.

I think the big problems the OP alluded to are more about politics and cohesion than these neat science puzzles. Medical innovation does not inspire me when the medical system which administers these innovations remains so dysfunctional.

What a cynical reply! Are you not impressed by the incredible medical breakthroughs in mRNA vaccines from BioNTech and Moderna in the last three years? And billions of vaccines have been distributed and injected at record pace in human history.

Also, this phrase: <<medical system which administers these innovations remains so dysfunctional>> feel like someone writing from a US(-tainted) persepctive. Have you experienced well-functioning public health systems in other highly advanced countries? They are impressive.

How much of those advances are due to AI though?

I want better systems and I am cynical about pursuing other ends in this willfully politics-blind isolated manner, impressiveness of their achievements having a slightly tragic quality under that light.

I am not from the US but I think the US is a great case study in the disconnect between technological progress and improved general conditions (in particular for but not exclusively relating to healthcare). I think cynicism is the correct response to this trend.

> The argument was that so much energy has been put into solving problems that aren't actually hurting people.

That's not an argument, since the same thing can be said about anything else that does not solve world hunger, for example. Authors put energy into writing entertainment products while people starve.

While true the volume of money and effort put into AI is considerable, and according to some an existential threat to life as we know it today. I'm not ready to panic just yet, though would appreciate putting some of that energy into more practical improvements.

> While true the volume of money and effort put into AI is considerable

As opposed to the metaverse [0], marvel movies [1], video games [2], soccer [3], or NFL [4]?

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-lost-30-billion-on-meta...

[1] https://bgr.com/entertainment/marvel-spent-over-1-billion-on...

[2] https://www.eurogamer.net/star-citizen-has-now-raised-more-t...

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/henryflynn/2022/11/27/qatar-has...

[4] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/sport/2022/...

Sure, I'd prefer some of the energy poured into those also went to more fundamental efforts to improve society.

In my experience the people making that criticism tend to have done even less with their lives than the creators of whatever thing they are criticizing.

This is research. It helps discover things you might not have anticipated. Unlike engineering, you don't have a a project description and a known target market.

AI research seems to have hit a lode that yields solutions to recognition and generation of texts and images. Good thing, but not something what could have been predicted, let alone planned, 20 years ago.

One of the solutions for world hunger, synthetic fertilizers, have been discovered by the same chemical research that produced explosives and poisons.

Why do you think it doesn't make sense? In the worst case inventing AI before solving economic and political problems could potentially cause a massive societal collapse, hunger and/or poverty.

I think it makes perfect sense to get our act together before creating something that can be so potentially devastating, to reduce the likelihood of bad outcomes.

You can apply the same logic to conclude that Mesopotamians shouldn't have invented the wheel while they still fought wars with their neighbours and had people living in reed houses.

While it is true that the Mesopotamians faced many challenges at the time they invented the wheel, it is not an apt comparison to the development of advanced AI. The wheel was a simple technology that greatly improved the lives of the Mesopotamians, whereas AI has the potential to vastly surpass human intelligence and fundamentally alter society in ways that are difficult to predict.

The development of AI requires careful consideration and planning, particularly in regards to potential negative outcomes. In contrast, the invention of the wheel was a relatively straightforward decision that did not carry the same level of risk.

Poverty, war, and starvation are all political and/or cultural problems, not technical problems.

To a large extent so is suffering, deadly pollution, insanitary living conditions, and underfunded schools and healthcare.

So pretty much everyone is not working on these problems in a capacity that matters. If you want to be, you need to be in the realm of politics, not technology.

They are largely cultural and corruption problems. And the biggest parts of the corruption problem is inherent to this conversation - wealthy people have massive advantages at maintaining and increasing wealth whereas the poor have almost none. This sort of tech will accelerate that, and if not stopped, a modern French Revolution is waiting (or just dystopia).

Dystopia is more likely, because why would a wealthy kleptocratic dictator need citizens… there’s no upside compared to AI and robots.

> Poverty, war, and starvation are all political and/or cultural problems, not technical problems.

I beg to differ. Currency, weaponry, and agriculture are all technologies.

The problem however is not that we do not have the technology to help others. The problem is its distribution on this planet. It almost does not matter what you invent, unless it reaches the places, where it is actually needed. And that is a political and cultural problem.

I don't disagree that there is a distribution problem. And I firmly adhere to Gerald Weinberg's advice on giving advice on technical problems: "No matter what it looks like, it's a people problem." [0]

That said, my point is to not excuse technology. Currency and agriculture were both technical solutions to problems of poverty and starvation and I don't see a reason to exclude it from taking responsibility now.

[0] 'Secrets of Consulting', Gerald Weinberg

Distribution is a technical problem. Politics and violence maintain the existing channels of distribution. That's a different kind of problem, but one which technology can also be brought to bear. It just requires some lateral thinking and a willingness to make enemies.

politics/governance and culture are a technology problem too in a way.

One could easily solve the problems you mentioned if you had abundant cheap energy and millions of cheap robots that efficiently distribute food/goods on the planet. A system that could keep track of resources of the planet and efficiently provide a minimum level of food, shelter, safety for everyone. There’d still be the gradient of “if you work hard and create value for others, you get to keep your gains”. However the taxes paid would create a minimum bar of opportunity access for everyone.

One could say that what we need is a resource driven economy instead of a simple capitalistic economy that yields to monopolies and too much power in few hands.

I disagree with the pessimism. Wealth disparity, while on the surface feels discouraging, economics is not zero-sum. There’s too much focus on wealth differences when we should instead focus more on quality of life outcomes. They’ve been better than ever and the trend is improving over time.

Further, humans will always value human labor, it’s an inherent bias. If a bot can automate something and do it better than us, then we will find something else it can’t do and then trade that thing.

Further, technology and humans are intertwined, you cannot separate the two. There’s no stopping this train so we should learn to embrace it and find creative ways to use it to our benefit.

At least that’s what puts me to sleep at night.

I see your point, but I still think the wealth disparity is a major issue that needs to be addressed. While it's true that economics is not zero-sum and that quality of life outcomes have improved over time, there are still many people who struggle to make ends meet. Moreover, while it's true that humans will always value human labor, automation is becoming increasingly sophisticated and is starting to replace jobs that were once considered safe from automation. This could lead to even more inequality and hardship for many people.

Furthermore, while technology and humans are intertwined, that doesn't mean we should just accept the negative consequences of technological progress without trying to mitigate them. We need to find ways to use technology to benefit all people, not just the wealthy few. This will require careful planning and coordination, as well as a willingness to consider alternative approaches to economic growth and development. Ignoring the problem and just hoping for the best is not a viable solution.

Every time wealth disparity comes to the forefront in society the powers that be stamp that out real quick. I feel a lot of the left-right confrontations are just so we are pre occupied amongst ourselves. Divide and conquer and all that.

If you couldn’t tell, my post above was generated by the Assistant with a ‘get me a pessimistic rebuttal of the following comment’ prompt… it used arguments which I agree with, but when asked for an optimistic agreement it produces convincing rationales, too.

The problem here is this technology very obviously pro-wealth concentration since I can’t see a way which in the limit doesn’t make everybody need it to stay competitive.

(If you can’t tell it’s the real me, not the AI - the AI is so much better at plausible rants it isn’t even close)

Look at how quickly they replaced 'Occupy Wallstreet' with more left / right identarian division.

The entire raison d'etre of left politics is that gross wealth disparities are a leading indicator of one class of economic actors exploiting another to the general detriment of the latter. The socialist ideal is that everyone works a bit and nobody has to work too much because the system selects for maximizing the collective good rather than hoarding and leverage. This is, of course, never attained in practice early socialist thinkers had an overly simplistic view of humanity and thought that it was just a matter of raising people with a different set of values for a generation or two.

On the other hand, the capitalistic view of humanity as creatures of pure self interest or the economic notion of people being rationalist utility maximizers are also deeply flawed.

Pardon me, but I do have an issue with generations of rent-seeking.

A technology comes along, and people who are capable and able, will be cut out of the equation - whether that's truck drivers, coders, whoever.

But, the group at the top who own everything are fine. Perhaps, in the dim and distant past, some progenitor did something of note (though I suspect it was most likely a crime) and for that they are able to buy into whatever the technology is (AI, self-driving cars, etc) and increase their fortunes.

This is nothing to do with merit. This is simply leveraging a fortune to buy the future too - and it is not complicated.

I don't object to people making lots of money on merit, but the rent-seeking elites we have, who steer the world in the direction that best maintains their situation, making slaves of the rest of us, is terrible. I don't expect anyone to help either - the governance structures we have are bent to their benefit too.

The only answers in my book, are for people to embrace their individuality, look to themselves for answers, reject the governance system and consciously uncouple from the dystopian system. A system that shows every indication of becoming far more dystopian, with technocrats being able to manage every resource, for every individual, in every circumstance, in the near future. Also unfortunate, is the fact that I don't think people are capable of making any such change, nor do they really care as long as they are being entertained.

> we should instead focus more on quality of life outcomes. They’ve been better than ever and the trend is improving over time.

For me, the idea of 'continuous improvements' or 'better quality of life' is only a story. The utility of the story is that serves to support the idea that the current direction of travel is better than previously. This narrative gets your buy in and investment - and you cannot complain too harshly about your harness, as - you believe - the present to be so good!

As long as history is always smeared, this will always be true, right? But who can really know what the past was like? Who can say the past was actually worse, even if that's what present day records tell us?

To me, this is a bountiful world, with plenty for everyone. But if one group takes access to all the resources, with the presumed consent of the rest, the gaslighting solutions that are offered can seem like the 'only way' or the 'right way'. The constraints to living freely are artificial - we are in an open-air prison - and most of us seem to be happy about it!

Your comment is full of metaphors and abstractions, and with nothing concrete. I could make your comment regardless of the circumstances in the world.

Please help connect with reality.

Perhaps you are overly connected with reality.

If you and I were on a desert island, and attempted to forcibly extract 40% of your foraging efforts, saying I was going to invest it for the greater good, you would probably rise up and attack me, finding the idea unacceptable.

Now, if I and 5 others did the same you might feel forced to accept the proposal. I hope you would agree that the idea of forcible extraction of your wealth is still not right. Well, at what point does it become right? How many people need to go along with forcible extraction to make it a just social contract?

The answer is - it is never right. Any time even one individual is forced, it is wrong. But its not a case of one individual - we are all infringed upon multiple times daily, even though we are doing no harm to anyone.

This is a perverse system, that will even try to mould and entrain its citizens, for the benefit of a tiny minority who would preserve their power. (Its not even about money for them, as they control the printing presses, and means of production.)

People will often say anarchy would ensue if this system stopped - we are better with the devil we know (a hierarchical governance structure, that restrains the individual). But, the truth is, while we choose this system we can never be free - this is a certainty. We choose to always be slaves, and to be ruled by the worst of us (psychopaths who are unburdened by care towards others) who rise to the top.

Again: Abstractions and analogies, with no concrete connection to the real world.

I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying that if someone agrees with your comment, it is because they already know what you're talking about in the context of the world we live in. For those who do not know what you're talking about, your comment does not enlighten in the least.

Put another way, I can agree with everything you said in the abstract, and still not see what it has to do with reality. I can set up all kinds of hypotheticals involving islands, and have them all be logically correct, and yet have nothing to do with how the world really is.

Giving examples is a rather basic expository technique. I'm not here to philosophize.

I'm glad you can agree with my reasoning in the abstract. Bear in mind, HN is not a wildly tolerant place to air unpopular opinions - if I keep to the abstract, its hard to dismiss.

In fact - this is something I hope for - to make a reasoned philosophical case - to provide a hypothesis that other individuals can test for themselves and see if they find it to be true (as I have). This is contrast to the feel good nonsense most believe, despite no evidence, and no personal verification.

I'm not sure what concrete connection you require. What is it you want? Names, places?

Perhaps you should take a look at my submission and comment history - I do sometimes go into more detail.

> I'm not sure what concrete connection you require. What is it you want? Names, places?

I want what you mention here:

> This is contrast to the feel good nonsense most believe, despite no evidence, and no personal verification.

Evidence. As I said: Giving examples is a rather basic expository technique.

I mean, the literature is out there and it seems crazy to me that you’re pretending to have never seen a well-sourced article about wealth inequality and rent seeking, but here:

Trends in wealth inequality - https://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/

Rich kids stay rich, poor kids stay poor - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/rich-kids-stay-rich-poo...

How rent seeking is at the heart of America’s economic troubles - https://jpia.princeton.edu/news/something-nothing-how-growin...

I could go on there’s about a million articles about this. I’m sure you’ll find something to criticize but at this point it’s like denying climate change.

Most people believe all sorts of stuff - simply because someone has told them.

You probably believe in gravity, why? Are alternative explanations possible?

You probably believe in evolution, why? Or perhaps you believe in some religious texts, again why? Did you verify anything?

You probably believe in h2o, why? Have you put hydrogen and oxygen gases together to make water?

You probably don't believe in the aliens we saw in the film 'Independence Day', why? Is it because you were told it is fiction?

You probably do believe the world is getting warmer, and that we are in danger of a mass extinction event, why? How was this proven to you? If one scientist says something, is that proof? If 100 say the same thing, is that better proof?

Etc.

What measure do you use to filter the truth from noise, lies and reality? Is it just what you are told - do you doubt your lying eyes? Or is there internal discernment and primary experience is the gold standard?

> economics is not zero-sum

Sure, but large portions of the economy are zero sum, including some of our basic needs (land for shelter).

> As we accelerate ever-faster into a future dystopia of overlords (the richest 100 people in the world increased their collective wealth by 9% in 2021) while the rest of us are ground ever further into the dirt, I assume that AI will continue to steal the fulfilling parts of our lives from us, and leave us with the suffering and slavery.

In addition to that any developer/coder who wants to remain competitive (and still employed in not so distant future) needs to start to learn how to use this tool right now - and this means paying up to the big corps who built and own models, even further empowering them and allowing to build bigger and more sophisticated tools

Sure, there can be some opensource attempts but: it will be used by corporations to advance further, cost of the required computing power may be forbidding

I don't enjoy writing code any less just because Copilot can write boilerplate for me (in reality, I don't even use Copilot, but I wouldn't face existisitential dread if I did).

I can understand Artists having this viewpoint (they're less technically inclined and dare I say more susceptible to flights of imagination). I just see it from the Gary Kasparov viewpoint (humans + AI is a really great combo). At the very least, doesn't the fact that an AI an generate a kick ass CSS style sheet in 5 seconds that would take you 20 minutes give you more time to think about the big problems of the world?

What if AI can solve world hunger, but along the way we need to make Chatbots, so this Chatbot may be not useful now but it's an important milestone in something bigger? Sure it might be fulfilling to be the person to solve world hunger, but I'd rather an AI solved it instead hoping that a human also does it, but gets fulfilled along the way. Really your intellectual challenge is entirely selfish, no one really cares what intellectual challenge you solved besides the guy pairing with you.

If all you see is the news then no wonder you think AI is automating just the creative parts.

AI is everywhere. It does boring tasks reliably and in a consistent way, without getting tired. It is present in medicine, science, manufacturing, IT, education, transportation, military, and for personal use.

AIs can read invoices, classify messages, unlock screen phones by face recognition, drive tractors and cars, fly drones, control the cooling system of a data center or the traffic lights in a city. The list is endless.

It's not used just for the creative bits. It raises the quality of life for the whole society by improving everything.

Maybe, but maybe not.

So far advances like these have, historically, improved our life in terms of poverty, living conditions, schooling, and healthcare.

300 years ago, in Europe, most of the population lived as peasantry because somebody had to cultivate the farms. 2000 years ago in some place slaves made up 60% of the population.

Thinking that with AI only one dimension of our lives will change seems highly improbable to me. The printing press took way jobs from the scribes, but the revolution that book printing brought is one of the reason most people have electricity and tap water in their homes now.

So I'm more optimistic, I see AI being democratized and improving life overal in ways we can't imagine. There will be down-sides that we also can't imagine but there are a lot of down sides to how we live today.

There's also the reality that a lot of the economy is already pretty frivolous if the concern is misallocated resources away from poverty. AI development is a far worthier cause than say, luxury handbags, massive sports stadiums (how much did the Football world cup cost?), video games, etc etc.

AI compared to many other things has a far more plausible path to helping solve those issues.

And 30,0000 years ago people lived as foragers, the world was much more equitable and people had more leisure time.

Sure, it's true that humans on average are now better than 2000 years ago, but this doesn't mean it was always the case nor that this trend will continue. It's entire possible that the average human will be worse off in 100 years from now.

How do you feel about ant colonies and queen and worker ants ?

Maybe hunter gatherers did live more equitable but their life quality has nowhere near what an average human has today with technology. Even in developing countries.

Depends on how you define life quality. Everything is relative.

And back then you’d break a leg foraging, no way to set it, and be a cripple for the rest if your life. Fab.

And if "the gods" decided your part of the world was to be stricken with drought, well, it was game over for you.

Not true. Foragers were quite resilient to stuff like drought, because they could just move along and ate foods from many different sources. Drought etc. started to become a real problem only once people were dependent on agriculture.

It's quite interesting how some of the richest people in the world are concerned about AI turning into skynet and subjugating humanity, all while they spearhead a system which already does the same to so many people.

Probably because currently multiple rich people can subjugate humanity, while AI would allow the single richest person to subjugate everyone, even second place

People like Musk are more concerned with AI exterminating humanity.

The difference is that they profit from the one model, while the other subjugates them as well as the rest of humanity.

I've been thinking along the same lines for a while, how is it that these models can do amazing things but we still can't keep up with eg. evolving COVID variants? All the while it seems more and more futile to aspire towards improving oneself creatively or learn a new field since AI could just "do it better (or will soon).

>> but we still can't keep up with eg. evolving COVID variants?

I believe that's a political problem. See Corbevax for something with broader protection that's not restricted to spike proteins. Then figure out why we can't get it. AI can't solve that.

Well put. Aside from tools to enable remote work, which was already a strength area, big tech was woefully inadequate at providing rapid innovation to solve a major pandemic.

Indeed, all the major cash-flush companies doubled down on non medical, non quality of life improving technology.

AI has the potential to reshape the world for good by unlocking people's creativity, but if the models are so large and compute intensive that only the wealthy can afford to leverage them, it's going to be the ultimate dystopian enabler.

I don’t get why “creative” people see AI created art or stories as some kind of death blow.

Like I have seen many people lament how now that anyone can create art with Dall-e or Stable diffusion they won’t get paid, but many people using these AI would have never paid in the first place so in fact this will only increase the amount of art and art projects in the world. Sure the simplest projects will now be handled with AI, but you should see this as just another tool in your toolbox - just like people could learn how to use photoshop, but you still had your job so will you have it if you embrace the AI as assistant

Same with stories. Now you can leave minor details to the AI. Need a minor character? Just generate one and fill in the stuff you need to fit him into your story. I am excited to use AI for my next DND campaign just for this kind of filler detail that doesn’t really matter but makes the world more lived in and rich

Just go to a thread about AI-generated software. What people are annoyed about is not that it kills creativity but that the painstaking acquisition of technical skill over many years has been abruptly devalued. It's really hard to make a living in the arts while you wait for the success fairy to pick you out somewhat at random and make you famous.

I don’t see the issue. Unless the issue is that now they have more competition since there are easier tools to use, which is just stupid. It is like ancient lumberjack complaining how much easier it is to cut down trees with a chainsaw compare to just using axe and how that is killing lumberjacking industry. If you can’t compete after AI tools your business was built on lies

Technical skill was already devalued. Modern art is about ideas, and many of the most expensive and renowned works of recent require almost no technical skill. At the very least, technical skill is rarely what distinguishes a great artist anymore.

I don’t necessarily disagree with your point, but there are lots of people using AI for big problems. Medical diagnosis is basically undergoing a complete transformation right now.

The reason creative pursuits get tackled first is because they’re plentiful and pretty universal. The same person can develop an AI and admire a painting. This is not true of diagnosing disease.

What you say is somber but sadly hard to dismiss. AI is relatively new though (even deep learning didn't take off till 10 years back) and it's rapidly improving as it tackles low hanging fruit (relatively speaking), like writing stories and playing games. The hope is that as it matures you will see applications in addressing the big problems you mentioned.

I do not agree that AI will necessarily lead to a future dystopia. While it's true that AI has the potential to disrupt many industries and potentially lead to job losses in some areas, it's also important to remember that AI can be used to improve people's lives in many ways. For example, AI can be used to help diagnose and treat diseases, improve crop yields and food security, and improve the efficiency of various industries. Additionally, AI can be used to help tackle some of the global challenges you mentioned, such as poverty, war, and disease.

Furthermore, it's important to remember that the development and deployment of AI is not inevitable. It's up to us as a society to decide how we want to use this technology, and to ensure that its benefits are widely distributed. By working together, we can use AI to improve people's lives and create a better future for everyone.

this is GPT3-provided reply, isn't it

Not the op but I believe you are right. That answer is very much the chat gpt answer structure. Makes me wonder if stylometry can be applied to the default chat gpt style to detect generated responses

It could be but you can also ask for answers given "in the style of..." and it does a good job changing it up.

I've seen more sentences that start with "Furthermore," in this thread than in any other thread I remember. It's certainly repetitive.

It is. Well spotted!

This is a very pessimistic viewpoint. I really don't have any evidence to the contrary though. That's worrying.

It's really just a question of who controls the technology (echoes of Marxism and 'seize the means of production' I suppose). My favorite line when people bring up automation is to note that most corporate board members - and all the shareholders -could be replaced by AI bots with little or no effect on the corporation's daily business operations, and a significant savings (i.e. profits could be reinvested in R & D and production instead of distributed elsewhere).

Yep, the important question is how we should deal with it. Even if it is banned, somewhere people will be making it as well.

People would like to hunt and gather, but people will start farming eventually

I still can't get gpt3 to create all the games / ideas I have to my liking . So I suppose there's still a reason for me to get up and code in the morning. When it finally can magically generate all my game / app fantasies it will be depressing but at the same time I'll have some cool things to try

It improves exponentially. So give it like 5 years and you will be able to do all those things

> almost all the activities that humanity has found fun

It makes sense to use AI for those though. You don't really need AI to automate most of the tasks. Most of the work we do are basic tasks that can be easily automated with simple scripts or with some basic (but accurate) robotics.

(rewritten previous comment with a help from gpt-3, so it’s more understandable)

I work in climate tech and I think GPT-3 will be very helpful for us in researching new projects to tackle.

I tested it on a few subjects that we're working on and it provided really good feedback. It's not always correct, but neither are the humans we ask for feedback on projects. So that's one example of how GPT-3 can help with global issues.

Another issue is access to education. GPT-3 can speak many languages and can be used by people to learn things. Of course, it's not always right, but the same can be said for human teachers. For instance, my girlfriend is learning about financial instruments and will be using GPT-3 to help her. She has regular training materials, but it's also helpful to talk about the subject with someone.

Human teachers are great, but they're not always available and don't always respond quickly. So there you have it, two SDG goals, education and climate change, that GPT-3 can help with.

What will be the point of learning anything if A.I will soon do everything better?

To understand what AI expects of us, and perform what it wants properly. Of course.

So you don't learn anything that you're not the absolute best at? Impressive.

Some people learn things for pure pleasure (like learning Japanese or playing an instrument) but most things we learn are absolutely not for pure pleasure. Think school, college and all the stuff you learn for work. That's like 95% of the learning we do.

But everything you learned in school, college, work, etc you consider yourself the absolute best at? Or perhaps is it the case that there has always existed someone better than you at everything you do, and the fact that an AI will soon do the same doesn't change anything?

The difference is that "someone better than me at any task" means only 8 billion people, whilst an AI better than me at any task can be copied over any amount of times, works for only operating cost, and can work 24 hours a day, 365.2425 days a year without losing focus or needing a vacation.

Still, it's comforting to know that the AI will be able to take over all tasks humans do eventually, hopefully the computer overlord will soon deem us unnecessary and we'll be able to follow in the footsteps of the dodo, the great auk, and all the other innocent critters we drove to extinction.

> hopefully the computer overlord will soon deem us unnecessary

Imagine a guy like Putin with this kind of power. Why the heck would he need 120 million angry citizens when the robots can do EVERYTHING faster and better? Sure he will need a few concubines and keep a few family and friends...all the rest seem to be quite redundant...Same goes for Iran, China. I'd be surprised if there aren't American billionaires entertaining similar thoughts, us redundant masses suck up resources and pollute and create emissions. Robots don't have to eat and you won't need 8 billion of them.

Kind of a false equivalence. Human talent is not infinitely replicable. AI talent is

this is the same vein of question a third grader has asking why he should learn how division or multiplication works when a calculator (or computer) can do it better and faster no matter what... which is akin to asking why learn carpentry when a drill can place screws more perfectly than you twisting the head with your thumb and forefinger.

It's important to have an understanding of the fundamentals of your task before relying on the tools to do the complex version of it, so you can reason about the next step and decide what the task is, not just how to do it.

Did you shirk software when it came for everyone else's jobs? I don't expect anyone will shed a tear when better computing starts putting the software-manufacturing tradespeople out of work - just as it has done in every other industry.

AI, just like code, is a tool to get things done. My take is that advancements will enable some incredible creativity that can help to solve problems like what you stated.

The rich will get richer and the poor will get richer at a slightly slower pace, as always, but quality of life for all will increase.

AI will probably vastly increase both rates of change, more for the rich than the poor, but things will be better in 20 years for the poor with AI than without it. They will just be even further behind the super rich than they were before, even if they're better off.

Some people would prefer a more equal but worse-for-everyone world. I'm not one of them, but I understand that it's a POV, and I can even semi-understand some of the arguments (sim to Communist talking pts, there's a real effect where people care more about how they rate vs other people rather than their absolute level of wealth/comfort). I fully reject them, but to each their own.

Since wealth is concentrated more and more into a minority, redistributing wealth is surely aligned with increasing the quality of life for a majority of people. Why do you say it would be worse for everyone?

And this my friend is why the richest 100 people all advocate for a disarming and dumbing down of their respective populace. It's bleak.

From an MBA perspective though, it sounds like it can 'solve' 90% of the coding problems, and the expense therein.

That's progress, right?

We should be getting rid of MBAs though. Those that don't produce anything are more easily automated - that is the top commenter's point.

These technologies are trained off of the fruits of the actual contributors, so the workers are being robbed. I haven't seen any componsation from AI learning off me. Have you?

> I haven't seen any componsation from AI learning off me. Have you?

No. AI to me is like basically like all technology. Lots of talk about how we will have a better life, be healthier, have more time to follow our passions, when the reality is more like we are more distracted, have superfluous human interactions, waste more of our (precious) time.

Technology, for me, is a tool of control. We have given up privacy, independence, opened ourselves up to distanced and automated control and sold our the future for a paycheck and an entertaining slave tracking device.

Nah, they'll create a convincing enough boot licking machine and then release the murder drones.

A major root of the problems you enumerate is constant money printing by Central Banks.

It makes life more difficult each year by 3% (as was the wisdom on needed inflation), now each year 10% more difficult to get the same bread.

No wonder we see the gloom, disease and poverty brought by that policy all around us.

Be the change that change you desire.

This comment is nonsensical, it genuinely feels like it was written by GPT-3

How sad it must be to never find fulfillment in doing anything anyone else has ever done before. I can't recommend this mindset at all.

AI is just making it obvious what is repetitive. Humans find repetitive tasks soothing, but don't confuse them with art.

Coding is like woodwork. Deciding what to code could be art (maybe).

Also, this constant allusion to "the problems of the world" is rather vague and unconducive to a solution for them. If those problems bother you, work in those areas. Otherwise stop using the hunger of the world as a wildcard to discard the importance of everything you dislike or fear.

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