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Comment by LeroyRaz | Hacker News Reader

I think there is real difference between a) devaluing someone's work, and b) and voiding work of value. What makes AI different from previous technological innovations is that it seems to have the potential to make peoples labor worthless, rather than merely devalued. To give examples, if your writing is worse than ChatGPTs then your writing is worthless. If your art is worse than stable diffusion then your art is worthless, and if it takes more money to feed, clothe, and train you for construction than it does to run the Atlas robot then your physical labor is worthless too.

I do not think our current social policies are ready for that.

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> I do not think our current social policies are ready for that.

Understatement. (And also, they weren't really ready for the previous waves either)

The upside is we exist as both producers and consumers - and while our value is about to go down (or be voided entirely), so is the price of all the things we want/need. Can't afford a house because the Atlas robot outperformed you at construction? Well, get a few buddies to pool funds to buy an Atlas robot yourselves and get it to build your houses. The barrier of entry is similarly dropping fast. It's gonna be a weird, sad and awkward short-to-medium term as the fluctuation of which drops first - employment or consumer prices - plays out, especially if government doesn't step in to protect people. But long-term I think it's hard to argue that there's not going to be an enormous increase in overall quality of life. (barring some sort of annihilation event...)

How is this different from previous leaps in industrialization or technological innovation? If you make widgets worse than a machine in a factory then your labor is worthless.

We moved from farming and digging ditch to offices where we think for a living. But tell me, what is left after physical labor and thinking? Sex work? I don't think most of us are cut out for that. And with AI taking on creative work it won't be long before someone makes a Cherry 2000.

Well you might be farming again when you have nothing left to do?

I'm sure a shit not going to be laid off due a robot and do nothing about it, I'll be doing whatever I need to do to survive, this might be farming and living a simpler life, even if it's considered a step backwards, I have really no idea how far it will go.

My theory is however, I'll be either building AIs, or developing new ones, helping optimize them etc.

I'm not really sold that we're going to every create an AGI that can reason and will just want to sit in a box all day and work for humans, I think there are some serious ethical considerations there too.

So as long as we're not talking about sentience, these thing are systems, and there will be demand for new and improved systems.

One word: scale.

Correct, most here think that this time isn't different because "unemployment goes down as technology improves since demand increases more than supply". The issue is that AI makes the supply effectively infinite. I claim humans do not have "effectively infinite" demand, and even if they did, the cardinality of the supply infinity is higher than the demand infinity.

But this is the story of technology for two centuries or more. Somehow we kept income and aggregate growth going even as we needed far fewer farmers, factory foremen, and travel agents.

Eh, time to go watch "humans need not apply" again then.

None of us know where we are on the S curve currently.

Arguably there is a larger portion of people unable to adapt as specialization has skyrocketed. Look at how much education is now expected, more than 12y in most industries. And the portion of the working age population under employed or on SSDI.

Except it isn't, and the failure of most people to perceive this nuance could be catastrophic.

We have never created (and we still haven't, but recent advances are starting to become frightening) an artificial replacement for general human cognition. General cognition is the only thing that makes us special and valuable. Replace that, and most of us will be reduced to just another discardable animal.

This could end up great, and could usher in a post-scarcity future. There are also a number of dystopias, and outright near-extinction scenarios that could result if the wrong actors develop AGI first.

At this stage, can’t people just ask the new god , AI to enhance their cognitive abilities to that of a God ?

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