AI could replace equivalent of 300M jobs – report
bbc.com
bbc.com
The fair-use argument holds no water, and if we didn't have a broken government in the US, it certainly would doom these tools to being trained only on data they've generated themselves, which is how it should be.
Suddenly people think copying things on the internet is theft again. What happened to "its just a copyright violation and nobody loses anything anyway, it's not theft!" when you're torrenting movies and video games?
>The fair-use argument holds no water, and if we didn't have a broken government in the US, it certainly would doom these tools to being trained only on data they've generated themselves, which is how it should be.
Well surely the "fixed" and "working" governments of Canada and the EU will take action against this promptly! Can you share the bills they've already passed that will doom these tools?
Copying a movie and watching it in your own home and sharing it with your neighbour is different from redistributing a new film you claim is your own but is derived directly from the movie you downloaded; sure your changed the character names and dubbed over a few lines but you didn’t create the assets used and you didn’t attribute the sources of the ones didn’t alter or produce on your own.
I think the argument is that It’d be like those knock-off studios using someone else’s footage in parts of their films without permission.
As to job losses, most ppl especially the prediction making buffoon class, have not worked with these systems long enough to understand a simple fact of life - the more complex system gets, the more bugs the system has. Not less. And then you need ppl to manually handle all those issues.
These systems are overflowing with unhandled issues, just like prev hyped up tech like social media, crypto, the meta verse, self driving cars etc etc
If you had to pay someone for their data to train on, the balance of power shifts to those who have skills worthwhile the AI people want to replace: writers, artists, scientists, developers, etc, and they would not charge cheapely, if at all. Another possibility is a situation similar to software companies today, they'd only give you basic data to train on, leaving the crown jewels under wraps.
If an economic system does not provide utopian outcomes for emerging technology, then the economic system is wrong.
Economic systems that provide dystopian outcomes with emerging technology are meant to be replaced.
Your worries are about an economic system, not AI. Economic systems are tools, means to an end.
If you accept that we live in post scarcity and begin from that principle, everything is not only fine, but we could be entering an amazing age.
If you say - only those who provide value will get value - then you will enforce dystopia.
Are you saying we currently already live in a post-scarcity world? Or are you saying that AGI will get us there, some time in the relatively near future?
The industrialised world already produces more than enough for the whole world, yet not all of the world is industrialised.
Even in Brazil, a low to middle income country, obesity and diabetes is a bigger problem than hunger. And the laptops they buy are made in China same as everywhere else. Notice how Brazil has no local laptop production - that’s because Chinese production is more than enough.
That already tells you what you need to know about “scarcity”. Certainly there is no scarcity of calorie production. And there is no scarcity of laptop production. Just the concentrated production in Shenzen, done by maybe 0.1% of the population, serves large parts of the world. Brazil could have a domestic industry, but there’s no need for one.
Deconstruct the concept of unemployment. Unemployment is simply put, an over abundance of people for the number of available tasks.
An over abundance of people for the number of available tasks is an unnatural situation. Hunter gatherers couldn’t have more people than the tasks available. If you were alive you hunted.
But Industrialised society has meant that a very small proportion of the population produces all the physical goods necessary to the entire population. Hence there is unemployment and underemployment. AI will super charge this.
You could of course say “we will find something for them to do”. Well, yes, sure but you’re increasingly going into what David Graeber called Bullshit Jobs - jobs where if you ask people if they think they are making a difference in the world, they say no. The UK already something like 50% of jobs are like this. My impression is this is correct - a lot of the jobs in the Uk are indeed meaningless. My hunch is that is because they are a post scarcity society in denial.
But scarcity isn't limited to commodities. Services are still scarce. Infrastructure is still scarce. Even in the US, some people don't have access to drinkable water from the tap. I've seen roads in some cities that rival the quality of those in developing African nations, with no exaggeration. The bathroom at the restaurant I went to last week was filthy. None of this can be fixed by ChatGPT-4 or whatever. We're nowhere near "fully automated luxury gay space communism" levels of technology that would satisfy all of these needs without human sweat and toil. And based on historical evidence, I don't think that UBI, or any other form of greatly expanded wealth transfer, is going to get us there quicker.
I'm familiar with the concept of bullshit jobs, and certainly some jobs do appear to be exactly that (and most white-collar jobs probably feel that way at some point or another). But I and many others feel that Graeber's formulation is too strong. Of course most people are going to say that their job isn't making a difference in the world; everyone's a tiny cog in a giant machine. Hopefully those that don't find fulfillment in their jobs will find it in the other parts of their lives. It doesn't mean that we as a society have gotten to the point that everyone can just do what fulfills them and let the robots do the rest.
So yes, this might be the case in the US but only due to the unwillingness of the government in the last few decades to collect enough tax in order to fund infrastructure. The current conditions of major European economies prove that no, infrastructure is not particularly scarce if you are willing to fund it.
The US is richer than europe in many ways. It appears to me that its political structure has just decided not to do it. I can't imagine that the relatively poorer countries in Europe (Portugal, Poland) are somehow solving this problem but the US can't.
AI replacing human workers isn't going to make UBI possible. It's just going to put people out of work. The core problem with UBI remains: it's not affordable without a magical infinite wealth generator.
The USSR provided food and shelter using maybe 20-30% of its economy to do so. What is there a scarcity of? iPhones?
Even middle income countries have more problems with obesity and diabetes than hunger. What is there a scarcity of exactly ?
If ChatGPT designed robots tomorrow that we could build for 99$ that could automate most farming and most construction, we could have food and shelter built at something like a few percent of our economies.
On clean energy, same thing. Ask AI to work up a plan in 10 years. Ask AI to improve solar panel construction.
In 10-20-40 years what is there a scarcity of, exactly ?
I’m not promising avocados, but there’s certainly no shortage of food when obesity is this prevalent.
You were postulating that we already lived in a post scarcity society.
Now the goalposts have moved to require another breakthrough in AI that will have them solving the energy crisis across a period of decades or more.
If you can ask it to design these things tomorrow then why don't you?
10 years from now could be well too late to begin with any of this. 40 years is hard to even imagine with the current rate of climate change.
In order to be able to engage I’d have to ask you what do you mean by energy crisis?
The next 40 years, if they are of unimpeded climate change, sound shitty indeed.
Some 2B people live in constant hot humid weather, if we provide every single one of those people with north american level cooling facility, we'd probably have to increase the world's energy generation by at least 40%. That's no small feat.
An economic system is merely a system, not a fundamental law of nature like current capitalism wants us to believe.
After a century of failed communist experiments all over the world, it's disappointing that people still believe that utopian economic systems are possible.
My point is that if we could simply invent any economic system we wanted, communism would have worked.
Communism failed because it's not possible to do that, because there really are some things about human nature and the way economies and societies work that we can't ignore or change, and those factors prevent utopian schemes from working.
Communism failed, but having capitalism without poverty is doable. On some scale some European countries have virtually eliminated poverty. They still have working economies.
Could we do that for a lot of the world using AI and automation? If we reduce the cost of food and shelter from 10-20% to 3-5% of the economy, why not?
For example, Chile. The US backed a fascist general in a coup to overthrow a democratically elected socialist. The US didn't back this violent coup because the fledgling socialist state was harming anyone and failing or because this was an authoritarian leader forcing the people to live in a dystopian communist state. The US companies were afraid they would lose their investments in Chile and the profits they gained from them.
Human nature is not a fundamental law of the universe like the speed of light or entropy. Such myths that humans are inherently greedy and self-interested are used to ensure that people can't imagine a system outside of capitalism. After all, if greed is as inevitable as entropy then we can't escape it and any system not built around greed will fail!
Except studies by sociologists and anthropologists disagree that there is such a thing as fundamental human nature. If anything we tend towards altruism. People that share resources and work together have a better chance at surviving and improving their condition than those who hoard resources and act for their own self interest. We'd be very different as a species without our ability to socialize and work together towards our mutual survival.
Capitalism is merely one system. And with the current prospects of this tech displacing thousands of jobs and no other jobs to replace them enough of the current capitalist system won't be sufficient for supporting us in the future. We need to change parts of the system or replace it entirely with something better.
We are not inherently greedy and there is nothing fundamental or immutable about capitalism.
UBI has nothing to do with communism either.
Changing the rules and structures of the system is going to be necessary if the system isn’t working for the society it serves.
In order to put a different system in place, somebody has to be in charge of enforcing that system which naturally leads to the outcome of a hierarchy of control that will filter the entire way down.
That's something we can change.
Do you know for sure you know the conditions for the happiness of all humans ? Because if you don't, then having them sort it themselves might be the best solution.
But of course by saying "Receiving value for work makes you happy" you're already saying that somehow our system works great at this.
But isn't it our current system that's causing a massive mental health crisis already?
If we decouple workplace productivity and social validity then people who leave the workforce can find other meaningful ventures in their lives without shame.
How will these people be supported?
Living a meaningful life is a choice left up to the individual. What are most people going to do when we automate everything ?
If people could just change their minds about this, they would have done it by now.
https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/mouse-heaven-or...
I’m sure we will find other forms of inequality to worry about then.
We used to have admins whose entire job it was to find out when people could meet, and they no longer exist (or only in much smaller numbers) because you use your online calendar tool.
We used to have people who would physically fly bank checks from one city to another each night, and in a single day they ceased to exist when you were instead able to transmit just the numbers back and forth.
People who used to sell encyclopedias are out of work. People who used to develop rolls of film are no longer around. We're missing a whole generation of telephone operators.
But people will deal. Because these developments come from every single one of us using tools and adopting things that we choose to, not because it's some decision handed down and enforced by some government against our will. You and I, using Excel, scheduling our own meetings, using direct deposit or even our phones.
I don't even believe yet that these latest models are going to be that transformational, but even if so, people will deal. And new things will take the place of old.
Sure. If you go back a few centuries before that (much less in some regions of the world), you had maybe 90% of the population consisting of unfree agricultural laborers (serfs or slaves), with say 10% as soldiers to keep the serfs in line and defend the land against invaders, and a very, very thin veneer of lords and priests at the top.
> But people will deal.
I agree. They will. No one worries about all the unemployed serfs, because there aren't any. They're all doing other stuff.
“Kill all the poets” —Plato
Gg will bro, not gonna lie you had me there in the first Millenium.
Tyna Eloundou1, Sam Manning, Pamela Mishkin, and Daniel Rock
OpenAI, OpenResearch, University of Pennsylvania
March 27, 2023
Check out a petition for a moratorium to pause training of AI models more powerful than GPT-4 signed by Yoshua Bengio (Turing Award winner based on his deep learning research), Stuart Russell (AAAI fellow and author of the most widely used AI textbook), Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yuval Noah Harari, and many others.
https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experime...
How many would exist in an alternative scenario without regulations?
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU [video][15 mins]