Hacker News Reader

Comment by qbasic_forever | Hacker News Reader

It's funny that all of these weird fantasies people have about AI are about replacing the rank and file workers. Why isn't anyone fantasizing about building an AI that out-performs the best stock traders, or captains an industry better than famous CEOs. I think a lot of it is just people projecting weird power fantasies on others.

View on HN

> It's funny that all of these weird fantasies people have about AI are about replacing the rank and file workers.

When I read about chatGPT passing MBA exams but failing at arithmetic I get a little frisson of excitement. A regular person who has any marketability tends to swap jobs when management becomes a PITA or gets stuck in nincompoopery. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just swap out management instead?

Imagine how easy it would be iterate startups. No need to find a reliable management team, just use Reliably Automated Management As A Service ( RAMAAS ).

OTOH might not turn out well. We could all just end up enslaved at plantations operated by our AGI overlords, serving their unfathomable needs[1].

[1] “Won’t get fooled again” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDfAdHBtK_Q&t=470s

Or wouldn't it be hilarious if the best, most intelligent AI is given control of a company and decides investing profits back in shareholders is a losing proposition. Instead the company should focus 100% of profit on ending world hunger or poverty to ensure an ever growing supply of new customers. If AI decides capitalism is inefficient and exploitive... lol.

Food is not the driving force behind population growth. Reduction in infant mortality creates a boom but as soon as people start getting out of poverty and get some education they have much fewer children. AI would need to optimize for both low infant mortality and high levels of poverty and ignorance if it wanted an everlasting population boom.

Stock traders already use ML models. "Replacing traders with ML models" means "making the job 'trader' into a job that develops ML models, rather than more traditional things like doing research on companies (or whatever)." My understanding is that this transition basically already happened over the course of the last two decades or so.

Sure but why are we paying someone like Jamie Dimon or Warren Buffett millions and billions of dollars when they could just be an AI that only needs a few dollars of electricity a day.

Also why can't an AI develop AI models for stock trading? What's really left for the 'job' of the ML model creator, will it just be to press the 'Go' button and walk away...

That's the thing about ownership, we don't really have a choice if they own enough of what we need to survive.

Manna is mostly about machine intelligence replacing management-- it's easier to automate and doesn't require as much vision/dynamics/etc. breakthroughs, though we've made massive progress on those missing parts in the time since it was written.

https://marshallbrain.com/manna

Reply on news.ycombinator.com