Honestly as a human who grasps how the economy works, this doesn't sound like a good thing, but I don't see any path to trying the fundamental changes that would be required for really good general AI to not be an absolute Depression generator.
The only thing I'm wondering is, will the wealthiest ones, who actually have any power to influence these fundamental thing, figure this out before it's too late? I really doubt your Musks and Bezoses would enjoy living out their lives on ring-fenced compounds or remote islands while the rest of the world devolves into the Hunger Games.
This is complete nonsense. An LLM has no ability to innovate or 'try new things'.
Just what the shit do you think Google/Microsoft/Amazon are pouring billions of dollars into machine learning/AI for? The first one that creates a self improving-self learning machine wins the game (or destroys the earth with a paperclip maximizer).
You and your human intelligence are not magic. You're biological hardware and software that a lot of people are spending a lot of time and effort on reproducing in a digital format.
This is (materialistic) nihilism. Materialism is a philosophy and not a new one, but an exceedingly sterile one, in my view. If you want to take that philosophical position you can, but others are free to reject it (and most people do) because it is only a philosophical position, not a proved description of reality (how can it be?).
97% of jobs used to be working on the farm. Now it's something like 2%.
Ted Faro is alive today. We just aren't sure which of the FRANK'S he's at.
Ted Faro was a horrible human being blinded by delusions of grandeur, but he wasn’t “evil” - he was even convinced he was saving humanity by ending the threat of both war and climate change.
I don’t see GPT itself as representing a new Faro Plague, but I do see a lot of wannabe Ted Faros making the decisions at the top.
If LLMs come even close to achieving their short-term potential, we’re unleashing a bigger destabilizing force on the world than the smartphone/social media combo - and the world of 202x seems blatantly incapable of absorbing that level of disruption.
That is no longer the case.
Think of it instead as cognitive habitat. Sure, there has been habitat loss in the past, but those losses have been offset by habitat gains elsewhere.
This time, I don't see anywhere for habitat gains to come, and I see a massive, enormous, looming (ha!) cognitive habitat loss.
-- EDIT:
Reply to reply, posted as edit because I hit the HN rate limit:
> Your job didn't exist then. Mine didn't, either.
Yes, that was my point. New habitat opened up. I infer (but cannot prove) that the same will not be true this time. At the least, the newly-created habitat (prompt engineer, etc.) will be miniscule compared to what has been lost.
Reasoning from historical lessons learned during the introduction of TNT was of course tried when nuclear arms were created as well. Yet lessons from the TNT era proved ineffective at describing the world that was ushered into being. Firebombing, while as destructive as a small nuclear warhead, was hard, requiring fantastic air and ground support to achieve. Whereas dropping nukes is easy. It was precisely that ease-of-use that raised the profile of game theory and Mutually Assured Destruction, tit-for-tat, and all the other novelties occurrent in the nuclear world and not the one it supplanted.
Arguing from what happened with looms feels like the sort of undergrad maneuver that makes for a good term paper, but lousy economic policy. So many disanalogies.
Your job didn't exist then. Mine didn't, either.
This prediction has occurred with every technology revolution. It hasn't been borne out yet.
> the sort of undergrad maneuver
It's a variation of the broken window fallacy.
So what? You are performing 'induction from history', which is possibly the hand-waviest possible means of estimating what is next to occur.
Discontinuities occur. Fire gets tamed. Alphabets get invented. What went before is only a solid guide to the future absent any major disruption to the status quo. There is no a-priori reason to think that this time will be the same, either. Burden of proof is yours.
> It's a variation of the broken window fallacy.
I appreciate parsimony as much as the next academic but I'd appreciate you fleshing out your position here, so I can take it apart at the joints, in the custom and manner of my people >:)
The "this time it's gonna be completely unlike anything seen before!" is much more suspect.
> fleshing out your position here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
The parallels with your theory are unmistakable. Prosperity doesn't come from jobs that are little more than make-work.
I propose that you invest in a more convincing line of argument. The burden of proof lies heavy upon you.
Secondly -- for the life of me -- I don't see how we got from "prosperity doesn't come from jobs that are little more than make-work" (a claim, by the way, that Keynes would take exception to) to the view that automating most of the intellectual work on the planet will have nugatory impact, or that we'll all just vy to become celebrated Twitch streamers or influencers or whatever (assuming that synthetic influencers don't take off -- oh, wait, they did: https://www.synthesia.io/glossary/ai-influencer)
Even were you correct (and Keynes wrong), the instantaneous conversion of meaningful labour --- journalism, counselling, engineering -- into, as you say, "make-work" (the position I infer you are taking) would have tremendous cost.
Need I invoke Rawls here on widely-distributed self-respect/self-esteem? It's actually one of the prerequisites, he notes, for a stable civilization; https://academic.oup.com/book/32571/chapter-abstract/2703665...
At minimum, the psychological impact of such a transition would make the developed world's COVID hangover look like a day at the zoo.
Finally, the Parable of the Broken Window specifically refers to destructive work. Non-productive work is not covered. https://finshots.in/archive/dig-holes-and-get-paid-to-fill-t.... And that is to say nothing about how economic fruits are distributed -- a whole other matter, upon which, I again infer, you have no further comment.
Up until Louis Pasteur invented the germ theory of illness, it was broadly understood, across many different cultures, that disease had its origins in one or all of: witchcraft, possession, loose morals, blocked meridians, etc.
Were you to do historical induction on the spawning of illness theory, you might well conclude that no theory of illness would be scientifically verifiable. You might have argued that anyone claiming a radical change in medicine was deluded, alarmist, or simply excitable.
And you would have missed out on the multiple decades of extra health that you've had on account of antibiotics, sterile procedure, and disinfectant. Your induction from history would have caused you to miss the disanalogy.
Something to think about next time you're at the doctor.
As to distribution of economic fruits, as I mentioned before, replacing labor with machines made the US the most prosperous country in history, along with the richest poor people.
Your country, the USA, is very close to system collapse because of its inequal distribution of fruits. I daresay it makes good popcorn-time.
Sorry, but breaking a window and then fixing it is non-productive.
> Your country, the USA, is very close to system collapse because of its inequal distribution of fruits.
Hardly. If the US will collapse, it's because of the current leftist swing of the government engaging in ever-increasing wealth redistribution.
> I daresay it makes good popcorn-time.
It's the equal distribution of income countries that repeatedly collapse. France is in the news currently because they've discovered that the math of redistribution does not work, and the people who cannot accept the math are rioting.
Good night and good luck
And yea you can say that birds are dinosaurs but the transition was very messy.
I wonder how long it will take politics to appreciate the deep societal problems that may soon arise. Probably it will be too little, too late.
The luddites were trying to defend their livelihoods, communities etc. It's the same rational thing people are looking at now: How to survive
Fast forward to today. I received a solicitation for a charity in the mail the other day. They enclosed pictures of the poor kids. The kids were all wearing fashionable, spotless clothes in perfect condition.
That's what industrial textile machines gave us.
Any source for those starvation deaths? I would like to learn more about what prevented them from simply doing what the survivors did.
You can not easily buy a weaving machine (there are some second hand ones) or easily go to your local maker space and use the weaving machine to create the design you desire. Open source in the space of textile making is in its infancy even though there are some projects. I bet it is easier to get a low volume tape-out of some custom chips than it is to get a custom roll of textile. (you can get printing but that's not the same thing)
Textiles have become way cheaper and both higher quality (when demanded) and lower quality (cost saving fast fashion) and available in far higher quantities.
Some things were lost in this transition.
I've seen people use them to make rugs and things for sale in gift shops.
There's nothing stopping you from doing this.
My point was that access to the technological advancement has not trickled down and that this creates an imbalance of power.
Compare how easy it is to get a custom textile (not a custom print) made to how easy it is to get a custom PCB made (it is reasonably easy to etch a double sided board and multi-layer and flexible ones can easily be ordered online). The situation with regards to knitting is somewhat better.
Saying that a "a basic loom isn't hard to make" in a world of high speed air jet digital looms is equivalent to saying that perf-board still exists in a world of SMD components.
Tangent, I’m looking for some sci fi about this topic. Any suggestions?
But we can technically do much better waterproof concrete or whatever - however our incentives are also not aligned in the same ways.
Here's a tangential link to monks building a Gothic cathedral with modern machines: https://carmelitegothic.com/
Which really makes you wonder if F/OSS was a good idea in the first place.