I wish GPT4 had never happened
chaudhry.notion.site
chaudhry.notion.site
“A […] system that […] would make people welcome better AI because they could be confident it would make everyone wealthier”
That would be a fair system regardless of the specifics of how it’s achieved.
Even when nearly everyone gets wealthier, if inequality grows, most people don't feel like it's fair.
Our present system, by this definition, is amazing!
That’s a non-sequitur.
The resulting absurdity is why OP was right to ask what fairness was: everyone has their own belief in it, oriented towards equality or proportionality or some notion of deserving.
And clearly, since it is better than every other method, it is the best by definition. If other things were not done it is because they were not possible: since possibility requires an agent to execute and since no agent succeeded in executing a better plan it is, by definition, impossible.
A thing that gives me 1 million and you 1 is as fair as one that gives us both 500k.
And yes, we did actually search everything possible because if something did not get done it was, by definition, impossible. After all, the agent that could have made something possible could not have acted as such because we know they did not. If they could have they would have. If they could not conceive of a better thing then the thing was impossible because it was not conceivable by anyone.
I am tired of this nonsense.
Alternative systems have been attempted, they worked, they were subsequently banned because they worked too well.
That isn't how "by definition" works. For that to be the case you would have to define everything to be inferior which is a purely subjective choice.
What you should have said is something along the lines of "based on our best efforts this has had the most success" which has completely different implications, such as failure to discover or adopt better systems.
It is especially strange since what you are talking about violates neoclassical models. There is no wealth inequality built into those models so why would it be obvious that this will be the best solution forever?
>. If other things were not done it is because they were not possible: since possibility requires an agent to execute and since no agent succeeded in executing a better plan it is, by definition, impossible.
Except The Wörgl Experiment succeeded in every respect. Stop rewriting history. Your theory is also unable to explain the success of the Chiemgauer [0], which is severely limited by legal problems and the ability to find loopholes.
After all, if your theory was correct and no improvement is possible, then why does improvement occur anyway? Feels like you are just taking the stance of an authoritarian thug.
[0] The Chiemgauer makes money off of ending capitalism, which is a paradox if we assume it is impossible for anything to be better than capitalism.
At that point I can't help but think that most people who think capitalism works are delusional since this is such a fundamental problem with capitalism that can at best be handwaved with eternal inflation.
Make it comically small to start, like say 0.25% of GDP split evenly between all citizens. Based on 2021 US stats, that's $176 per person per year. That seems relatively unobjectionable regardless of your politics, even assuming that the % is likely to drift higher over time.
With increasingly advanced AI and cheap energy, GDP would rise over the long run independently of population, ultimately increasing the UBI to a livable salary.
In terms of legislative complexity, I can't see how closing all major corporate tax loopholes would be simpler than implementing whatever minor tax revenue increase is necessary to offset a $176 UBI.
I prefer a system where people that work harder get more so they can have what they want, rather than just the bare minimum to survive (which is presumably what is meant by “what they need”).
That’s fine and good, but I think many people imply that this is how our current system works. Which is just not the case.
Cool. When can we expect to have that?
Have you ever considered that this may be due to the fact that our brains evolved to exist in a world where our day is largely focused on gathering food? We're not well-equipped to exist in other modes.
primates don't spend the majority of their day gathering food; there's not reason to believe early humans were different.
As for a citation, ask anyone who's spent any amount of their life with not enough food available. If you ask them how much of their time is spent focused on getting food or thinking about food, or worrying about food, they'll probably tell you "most of it".
This doesn't mean that different economic systems have equivalent or comparable problems. Just like you can have a worse economic system than today's global capitalism, you could, in principle, have better systems.
Countries can have a highly regulated form of capitalism where trade and ownership is strictly controlled… and they’re often called socialist or communist, or a laissez faire system.
However, so long as people are using land, buildings structures, designing equipment… the laws of capitalism will apply.
We can use other systems that suit our goals better. Even if it’s a better form of capitalism than what we’re dealing with now.
This post-monetarist form of capitalism is killing people and this planet and enriching but a few. That’s not the kind of society most people want. A matter of time before there are enough have-nots and upheaval becomes a real problem for the capital owners.
At it’s core capitalism just means that private individuals can own property, instead of the state owning everything. Which is absolutely critical for a free society. It’s paramount that individuals not be dependant on a ruling class for survival.
It’s only essential for capital owners to maintain their wealth and power.
Ownership is a term that is loaded and the argument between socialism and capitalism is actually not really helpful.
For instance, if we removed the concept of capital and implemented socialism, there would still be a concept of "responsibility for". So if there were community bicycles, individuals would still have responsibility if they threw the bicycles in a lake. The community officially "owned" the bicycles, and the individual acted against the community's best interests.
Capitalism as written about by Adam Smith seeks to solve the same problem by putting the "ownership" in the hands of the individual, so that the individual is given incentive to care and maintain the bike.
These are both potentially-effective systems that seek to solve the problem of "who's responsible for this bicycle". There are trade-offs for each.
When we simplify complex market-based problems into choices between either capitalism or socialism, we have created nice ways to describe the problem, but neither of them serves as an effective solution to the problem.
For the solution, we have to dig deeper and that means not being beholden to ideologies that can prevent us from seeing good solutions.
With land people don't own the land itself they only have exclusive usage rights for a specific period of time. Once that time is over they are no longer responsible. Thus even with private ownership you still can have the tragedy of the commons problem, it is just divided over time instead of space.
The most common example is soil depletion from industrialized agriculture.
If you wanted to solve this problem you would need a regulatory body that inspects the quality of the soil and fines people who degrade it. Governance becomes essential to balance the micro and macro economy.
I’m not sure that means companies wouldn’t be started and everyone would sit around doing nothing.
Capitalists are well known to collude to keep pay down and viciously suppress unions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297...
https://fortune.com/2023/03/02/nlrb-starbucks-union-buffalo-...
Ideas, leadership and capital are vital to a functioning economy. Every time a system has been set up that denied that, and it has been tried many times, the results were catastrophic. In several cases tens of millions of people dead catastrophic.
A society doesn't simply implement socialism (or any system) and call it a utopia. There will always be forces and counter-forces. Fascism will continue to find a way back into any system it can.
The Ludlow Massacre was a mass killing perpetrated by anti-striker militia during the Colorado Coalfield War. Soldiers from the Colorado National Guard and private guards employed by Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) attacked a tent colony of roughly 1,200 striking coal miners and their families in Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914. Approximately 21 people, including miners' wives and children, were killed. John D. Rockefeller Jr., a part-owner of CF&I who had recently appeared before a United States congressional hearing on the strikes, was widely blamed for having orchestrated the massacre.[6][7]
The massacre was the seminal event of the 1913–1914 Colorado Coalfield War, which began with a general United Mine Workers of America strike against poor labor conditions in CF&I's southern Colorado coal mines.[8] The strike was organized by miners working for the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company and Victor-American Fuel Company. Ludlow was the deadliest single incident during the Colorado Coalfield War and spurred a ten-day period of heightened violence throughout Colorado. In retaliation for the massacre at Ludlow, bands of armed miners attacked dozens of anti-union establishments, destroying property and engaging in several skirmishes with the Colorado National Guard along a 225-mile (362 km) front from Trinidad to Louisville.[6] From the strike's beginning in September 1913 to intervention by federal soldiers under President Woodrow Wilson's orders on April 29, 1914, an estimated 69 to 199 people were killed during the strike. Historian Thomas G. Andrews has called it the "deadliest strike in the history of the United States."[2]: 1
The Ludlow Massacre was a watershed moment in American labor relations. Socialist historian Howard Zinn described it as "the culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history".[9] Congress responded to public outrage by directing the House Committee on Mines and Mining to investigate the events.[10] Its report, published in 1915, was influential in promoting child labor laws and an eight-hour work day. The Ludlow townsite and the adjacent location of the tent colony, 18 miles (29 km) northwest of Trinidad, Colorado, is now a ghost town. The massacre site is owned by the United Mine Workers of America, which erected a granite monument in memory of those who died that day.[11] The Ludlow tent colony site was designated a National Historic Landmark on January 16, 2009, and dedicated on June 28, 2009.[11] Subsequent investigations immediately following the massacre and modern archeological efforts largely support some of the strikers' accounts of the event.[12]
It’s inexorably true that means of production control the outputs.
It’s unavoidable that whoever has power over production has power over those who rely on those outputs.
Unless you’re advocating for the destruction of factories, the razing of homes, etc. you’re in favor of capital. We’re just discussing who is going to control the capital.
Capitalism is the system where someone can claim ownership of land/buildings/ideas(typically due to prior ownership) aka "capital". If the laws don't allow someone to make and hold that claim of private ownership, how would the "laws of capitalism" still apply?
Typically due to paying someone to invent/build them, then continuing to capitalize on essentially someone's else work.
That's the problem. I think we would be in much better situation if the person who worked on something reaped majority of benefits, and not boss of their boss.
Instead we have IP producers needing to produce thru their whole productive life, while having their IP ownership assigned to corporations because that's what their employment contract allows, and nobody else in society being able to benefit (without paying not-the-author of it), even tho near everything relies on what came before.
That then can be used by corporations either long enough to stifle innovation and competition (patents), or even long enough that nobody involved is alive anymore (copyright law), all while paying far lower taxes than people they hire.
Like, capitalism might have some problems but they are by far exacerbated by how law around it works. Any technology that increases performance by far benefits the owners of company the most and they pay less taxes on top of that.
Silvio Gesell has developed an economic system inspired by Darwin. I don't mean social Darwinism, I mean that he deconstructs the economy down to self preservation and group preservation instincts which are biological necessities.
Self preservation is necessary to survive. A biological organism that does not self preserve will be selected out. This means that self preservation instincts represent egoism.
You might now say that this is the end, capitalism has won, except there is also group preservation.
Group preservation requires self preservation as a prerequisite. If you cannot meaningfully self preserve, you will most likely contribute nothing to group preservation as there aren't many situations where dying outweighs the cost of raising a member of the group.
This means self preservation instincts play a significant role all the way until they start threatening group preservation.
An organism that exclusively specializes in self preservation would always be a lone wolf with no socialization. The problem with this theory is that it would imply subsistence which is the opposite of capitalism. In other words, capitalism cannot be the result of simple egoism and self preservation because people would simply leave the capitalist society for the sake of self preservation if it were to become too stressful.
Thus there must be a significant group preservation instinct in humans and they have been evolved to survive in groups. In other words, capitalism has to leverage group preservation instincts somehow and therefore it is just another flavor of socialism or communism except in favour of people with capital.
Now, you can take it too far and entirely rely on group preservation instincts like communists claim but that doesn't work in practice either as self preservation overrides group preservation. Only people who have their basic needs met can engage in altruism.
Thus you can't expect a society consisting exclusively of altruists or egoists. Instead you would expect evolution to hit just the right balance between the two and that would imply the absence of both capitalism and socialism. It means both are an aberration that cannot be explained biologically.
Yes, that would imply that people can choose to participate in a market economy but it doesn't mean they have to and market economies don't have to be capitalist.
>Capitalism is not an economic system, it is a description of fundamental economics.
Theoretical economists have no concept of capitalism except maybe Keynes. In classical and neo classic economic theory there is no such thing as "capitalism". In theory it doesn't exist. There is a market economy with zero coercion and it does not intrinsically favor capital. You can't get richer through unfair means or corruption in these models either.
The gaps between the model and the real world are then filled with dogma and ideology. For example, you can just say that a positive return on capital represents a voluntary high time preference even if the return is higher than what would bring the economy into equilibrium.
The real world starts exhibiting cycles that make no sense in the model, meh. Let's claim capitalism is a constant of the universe even though biological dynamics imply the opposite.
The economic system can't be simultaneously unproductive enough to require us to keep raising the retirement age and so productive that job loss is a big problem.
It is possible that a political war on labor is being waged at both ends.
There may be a war on certain kinds of labor but having to raise the retirement age and having job losses from tech aren't evidence of it.
This is so obvious it barely merits saying.
>having to raise the retirement age
You do realize that raising the retirement age also doesn't make "everything more abundant at the same time", right?
Yet you internalized a belief that we have to do it when so much of the labor it would produce more of is already abundant.
Why?
If there is so much abundance and labor isn't needed, why is almost every country on Earth currently experiencing food inflation? Abundance would mean prices go down, not up. We would need fewer farmers, not more.
Before you say it's being caused by corporate greed and price gouging, this is why I said globally. If for example Vietnam locally produces rice, and it's not even a capitalist country, there shouldn't be rice inflation there. Yet there is, and rice farmers in Vietnam aren't retiring because human labor and rice are so abundant.
Why pretend that just because some things have become abundant with technology, we can make society wide proclamations about labor no longer being needed?
In the 1960's, the average lifespan was in the 60s. So a retirement age of 65 meant that around half of retirees would die before collecting retirement.
Now the average lifespan is 80. And the median age of the population is older than ever.
Not really much to do with an "unproductive" population. Except that retirees are unproductive I guess.
Yes. At birth.
The remaining life expectancy at 30/40/50/60 has not increased nearly as much as you would think from the increase in average lifespan at birth.
If the average life expectancy for the retirees increases by 1 year, they'd have to work 6 months longer to keep the system balanced with those numbers.
So can we now please stop to mention all the time that the increase in life expectancy is only caused by infant mortality reduction when it's clearly not the case?
My point was in regards to the GP:
>> In the 1960's, the average lifespan was in the 60s. So a retirement age of 65 meant that around half of retirees would die before collecting retirement.
>> Now the average lifespan is 80. And the median age of the population is older than ever.
This makes it look like the pension system is doomed to fail due to a massive increase in the average lifespan today compared to earlier.
> That's more than 7 years.
If you're looking to balance the pension system, people just need to work 3.5 years longer given that increase.
Congratulations, you have failed statistics.
If we pretended that there had been 0% increase in economic productivity since then then, then yes, changing demographics are a problem.
This is indeed, what most justifications of increasing the retirement age quietly assume. It's probably quite easy to assume because the % of increase in productivity captured by the working class since 1970s as wealth has actually been quite small.
Compounded economic growth since the 1960s has, I think, been something of the order of 200% though.
I analyze malware for a living, and don't consider myself a strong developer, though I can write programs, obviously. As an example, this last week I had a task that I would normally have employed one of our developers to do because they do it better and faster. Instead, I used GPT. I effectively took a couple days of work from someone. This is all fone now becuase it is new, but after a few years managers may start to evaluate output of certain people and question the utility of having duplicative skills on payroll.
To be clear, I'm not actually entirely sure this will happen. I think there was a similar discourse back in the days when excel was making the rounds because it brought "computing" to everyone-and it did. However, it wasn't catastrophic to the developer community in terms of employment.
That scarcity wasn't a good thing. People are drastically more empowered with computing today, the barriers were dropped in a rather extreme way (compared to where it started), and that is a good thing.
These are conceptual groupings of advancement. One layer of complexity is going to be removed (broadening access), there will be further advancement and complexity where the skilled group can navigate to in order to best unleash what they're capable of.
Writing the vast majority of code isn't special or super difficult (it's time consuming and mildly difficult at worst; quite obviously there are exceptions to that). There are a million plus software developers in the US alone. It's time to add new layers of complexity and advancement. Those million software developers will have to evolve, again, myself included.
As a developer, I feel like it's the opposite. If anything, it's going to raise the bar by replacing low skilled coders who are only good at cheaply producing piles of future tech debt, GPT4 will do that sort of work for 'free'. On the other hand it's going to empower non-programmers to write or debug low complexity scripts on their own, which is great.
I don't believe that any sort of "AI" short of AGI is going to replace developers doing "real work" on even medium complexity codebases. The reason for that is simple - GPT lacks logical reasoning capabilities. It can 'fake' them on the surface level, it might even fake them really well for extremely common problems, but as soon as you prod deeper or tack on an extra requirement or two, it starts spinning in circles indefinitely.
"Real" long-term software development is about taking (often poorly defined) requirements written in natural language, evaluating them in the scope of an existing software system, finding solutions that preserve behavior of the system (without introducing new bugs), and lastly implementing those changes in a way that follows the boundaries and abstractions defined in your system.
A single feature often touches many files at once. During this process you might spot a chance to introduce new abstractions or remove unnecessary ones. Unless you're planning on completely replacing developers with AI, the codebase must remain maintainable by mere mortals after you complete the next 50 revisions using AI that's mindlessly hacking away at your current codebase.
All of this requires logical reasoning capabilities that are, in my opinion, many orders of magnitude outside of GPT4's reach and you need those to maintain a software system for many years - decades even. That's before we get into the day to day communication and coordination effort required to sync with stakeholders, clarify requirements, and so on.
If I had to compare it to the security field, I believe that GPT will replace developers as much as automated vulnerability scanning tools have replaced pentesters. ;)
When it broke requirement or constraint "A", I reminded it about it. It apologized and formulated a new "solution" that broke constraint "B", when reminded about that, it apologized again and proceeded to break constraint "A" again.
The conversation went on for 20 odd turns where I tried to iterate and arrive at a solution - a custom algorithm to solve a problem it's likely never encountered before (at least in that form). It wasn't a particularly difficult problem, it just had many logical branches and steps it would have to reason about holistically. Instead it kept breaking one or more requirements that were clearly explained just 1 or 2 turns ago.
Your response is needlessly rude, perhaps the reality is that you haven't pushed it enough to discover severe limitations of GPT's logical reasoning capabilities.
> If this is truly your judgement then GPT4 already has better reasoning capabilities than you.
Wouldn't it stand to reason that someone with poor reasoning capabilities would be easily impressed by something or someone with better reasoning capabilities? ;)
And I don’t know what they’re doing with Bing, but Bing Chat has substantially poorer results than GPT-4 via chatGPT.
If you’re in tech, you should shell out the 20 bucks to give it a try. Basic curiosity demands that at least I reckon.
Those unqualified statements are false. GPT4 may not have been able to pass your particularly complex reasoning task, but that does not mean that it can't reason.
My tone is really out of extreme frustration because misjudgement like you are displaying literally puts the fate of the human race at risk.
Everyone talks about how the act of software development is being automated, nobody thinks about the impact of the software that is being developed, as if that had no impact on anyone else. Given enough effort you can replicate any human skill faster than people can retrain to an unknown skill.
I’ve asked experienced developer friends and they say that they would likely have similar discussions among themselves. Except now chatgpt is doing that.
My belief is that there's a huge rift between GPT-n being an extremely useful tool (which it often is) and it being able to outright replace your job.
What is the difference between me using a search engine and using a machine learning tool? The knowledge is external to me in both cases, I am just the interface between business requirements and the technology being used.
If I use an AI to use external knowledge faster then how is this supposed to threaten me? If I am a garbage scavenger and I get my resources from digging in the landfill, then wouldn't a robot that detects the valuable waste make me wealthier? I still have to pull it out myself. Ok next iteration there is a robot that can take the garbage out the land fill but not to my house. Ok next iteration is a self driving robot that can also transport the garbage to my home where I sell it. Ok next iteration the robot sells my garbage.
The real question in this situation is, does the robot cost me more than I get out of it?
[edit] after reading the article... Why Priya couldn't use GPT and do the job much faster?
But otherwise agree, bad economic system is bad.
I took so many people to the ER for work injuries that were preventable but the bosses skimp on everything.
Environmental risks can be mitigated, if the job location inherently has risks, you will be better off with a regulated industry where the regulations have teeth, and probably in a union. Stresses on the body are largely mitigated by having a job that takes more brain than back, but watch out for repetitive motion stuff and mitigate that yourself.
Mostly in the trades you get paid more for some mix of a) having in-demand skills and experience that aren't easy to acquire fast, b) putting up with unpleasant environments, or c) accepting risks. You can probably trade off c against a mix of a) and b).
So for example being a tool and die maker in general is way safer than being a faller. Watch for industry specific stuff too. Kicking carpet is more pleasant and less dangerous than electrical, but it won't pay well and your knees are likely screwed by your mid 40s.
I also don't think people appreciate the absolute social turmoil that will occur as a result of this because of our complete lack of planning for it.
Afraid you won't have a useful job due to the rapid rise of AI replacing vast amounts of knowledge workers? Get to work building guillotines. You won't be able to sell them for very much but you can make up for it in volume.
To the wealth class: Massive amounts of people don't just quietly disappear when they suddenly can't feed or house their families because they've been automated out of a job.
Of course there can be some painful periods of adjustment, but that’s often caused by misguided policy trying to hold back the tide and delay the inevitable.
Ultimately yes, full no holds barred human level AI may well render human labour obsolete, but we’re a very long way away from that.
I know some people think LLMs are close to that already, but no, not even remotely close. I do believe strong AI is possible and maybe even inevitable. They’re a huge step forward, and are easily the biggest advance towards strong AI in my lifetime, but these things are just tools.
This is the first automation that targets directly knowledge workers, and hit almost all of them but those in profession where error can cause people deaths.
Traditionally knowledge workers were the bulk of the middle class, because well it takes 30 years to produce one and not all make the cut, so they are paid market prices instead of minimum wages.
And by that nature, knowledge workers cannot reinvent themselves overnight, there will nowhere left to go for them.
Maybe lawyers and medics and a few other can entrenche themselves with legislation, but if you are a knowledge worker in a non union field things look scary.
You really don’t think computers, software and telecommunications services have boosted the productivity of knowledge workers?
Maybe GPT10 might get there, but I suspect we’ll quickly reach diminishing returns with current and near future architectures.
These tools will increase productivity which will deprecate some jobs, but that is not at all the same thing as reducing overall employment.
This, except I'm not sure they're going to actually deliver on the food, allowance, and place to live parts.
sure like hunger, losing houses, unable to have kids or send them to decent schools or schools at all. but totally worth it right?
Then again, I'm also reminded of a story of a homebuilder, hiring two workers. Together they held up the material and one of them measured the hypotenuse. Well, after someone showed him the Pythagorean theorem, the boss no longer needed the two workers to hold the materials up, and so sent one of them home. That day's labor market didn't expand to hire the guy who's job was replaced by a calculator. Does that extrapolate to the whole labor market, over a longer period of time, given a calculator for words?
Working at Wal-Mart would be miserable in many ways, however nothing I've ever seen their employees do is even 10% of what I'd call "hard labor". Probably even their warehouses are not even close to farm/ranch/factory labor people associate with that term.
Your viewpoint is rather callous. Just standing on your feet bored out of your mind can make even the most hardy miserable.
Even the Lamborhini Revuelto uses Bridgestone Potenza Sport tires which clocks in at about $500/each
Whether or not the CEO of walmart drives whatever supercar is irrelevant. Supercar tires on average do not cost $2k a set. Lets get real.
Nevermind that these people aren't crybabies - and that it is incredible condescending to paint them as such.
More fundamentally - what you're asserting as a self-evident fact is massively contradicted by what is probably the single largest sea change in many Western countries in the last 50 years - the systemic disappearance of solid middle-class jobs (and at least some form of community in many places), due exactly to these nifty "paradigm shifts" you are referring to.
So too for complex accounting/insurance structures.
Under the BLS classification scheme, these jobs are sprinkled around under various industrial categories such as medical, logistics, business services, etc. they add up to a large number of jobs in the aggregate (probably another 10%)
I think this "learn a trade" plan has maybe 5 years max. By then the trades will also be automated.
I remember a college professor who cashed out his retirement in the mid-1990's to start his own online college. He went broke in less than a decade, and we still have not removed professors from the colleges.
As a teacher, I do think that ChatGPT will replace most textbooks and teachers, but I don't know how long that will take.
Or they're mistaken in their assessment of what's going to actually happen, as they frequently have been when it comes to technological progress.
And every time it happened the income inequality grew because the savings were mostly going as profits for the top levels of company.
Yes, it hasn't been a disaster, but it clearly set some bad trends going.
The Fed estimates that the wealthiest 10% of Americans hold more than 88% of all available equity in corporations and mutual fund shares (with just the top 1% controlling more than twice as much equity as the bottom 50% of all Americans combined).
It does not generate obscene wealth disparities though—and some see that as a bug.
Open source is not an economic system in the sense in which this term is generally used.
> Open source has proved itself to be vastly superior to closed source development models.
"Superior" by which metric?
We should move to a society where we look at software engineers as we look at road builders. City workers build roads, the people use those roads. Likewise, engineers build software, the people use said software. Our current system of (c)opywrong is bizarre and unnatural.
> "Superior" by which metric?
Well, I'm responding to your comment using an open source operating system running an open source web browser on an open source platform and you will likely read it on the same. I still use a handful of closed source products (Sublime Text comes to mind) but that's the exception, rather than the rule. This is vastly different from 25 years ago.
In the long run, licenses are for losers.
How do you propose that the authors of Sublime Text make a living?
Road projects are funded by the government at some level - taxes and municipal bonds. I'm not sure how that would work for software which has a potentially worldwide audience.
There's also the "what gets built" is determined by the government. So, office products get funded - but not games (unless you're fortunate enough to get a government grant https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2162800/view/3729584... ).
And do you want to run a government funded operating system and web browser?
I don't see a model where this works... unless you're thinking of toll roads as micro transactions and advertiser supported billboards while playing games.
I think the government should still pay for software but with the stipulation that it can only be public domain.
Governments can pay for textbooks but with the stipulation that they have to be public domain.
So contractors will bid for the work. They will do the work. Good contractors will get further work. Everyone will be able to build on the prior work done.
Or you just mean that you don’t want programmers to make money?
The artificial scarcity created by these laws is what has generated such vast accumulations of wealth, not some intrinsic value to their unique creations. ChatGPT is exposing this uncomfortable truth to many people for the first time, apparently.
One solution (the Luddite one) is to eschew the technology. If nobody adopts the technology, nobody has to, but nobody can benefit. On the contrary, if anyone adopts the technology, all can benefit, but all also have to suffer the negative impacts. Without everyone on board, the Luddite solution cannot work.
Marx saw a different solution: communism. If the state owns the means of production, the working class and owning class benefit equally. It’s unlikely that we ever move toward this, in my opinion, due to the other issues inherent to communism (unfair (from the perspective of most policy makers) distribution of resources, corruption, etc.).
We need to find a new solution; one which enables people to benefit from technology while minimizing the downsides, or at least localizing the downsides to those who choose to adopt it. Right now we have, IMO, one of the worst situations of both worlds: privatized benefits with publicized costs. For instance, any taxpayer funded bailout.
Or does this system just assume they're all homeless and jobless?
If it's the latter then I'm sure it could work...not sure it would be a huge improvement tho...
There's no money in this system.
> Or does this system just assume they're all homeless and jobless?
If people want "homes" then they democratically vote that they do and, if the vote passes, then people volunteer to build those homes. If there aren't enough volunteers to build the homes, then people are conscripted. This is not unlike the military where if there aren't enough soldiers you draft more.
Everything we have today is because someone built it. What is stopping people from continuing to build in the absence of money? It seems money is more or less a "hack" to circumvent the shortcomings of human nature. There needs to be a culture shift towards a labor-first mindset and better role models (i.e. don't glorify the wealthy, glorify those who build amazing things and share them for free). People should build and innovate because they want to, because it means a better life. In the system I've described the standard of living people have is directly tied to what they and their neighbors are willing to work for. If folks don't want to work, then we'll go back to living in caves, but if we continue pressing forward then we'll eventually enter a Star Trekien techno-utopia.
A Luddite response to AI might be to tax the value AI created (Microsoft's profits) and use that to fund minimum wages/retraining. Not sure how that would work when the AI value is in one jurisdiction and job losses in another.
[1] https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/The-L...
It's because communism has the same issue Luddites have. Unless everyone is onboard, it doesn't work.
You can't stop people from trading between themselves for profit in a communist country without the threat of violence. This is what leads to all the other problems.
I mean Marx literally says you need to cull off the non believers for communism to work.
For one, it's not even clear that democratic politics can work post-AGI. Democracies work because together citizens hold more power than any government or any other individual or collective in society. In the past that was largely expressed as physical power, and why things like gun ownership was important because it allowed the collective to revolt against their leaders, but in more recent times our collective power comes from our economic power.
In a world in which governments can just print money with AGI, then they don't need us. In fact, in this world we're just leaches on state resources and space. And now the dynamic shifts from the state be dependant on the people to the people being dependant on the charity of the state. I see no reason to believe that this would be a stable long-term arrangement.
Also, what you're saying is just hopeium. In reality we don't have this economic system. So AGI is going to be bad for us. And how are you going to change that? Are you going to strike when you're unemployed? Is the government realistically going to be able to tax an AGI company which is doing $100T in revenue 95% of profits? Why wouldn't they just relocate or lobby for lower tax?
Secondly even if we assume by some miracle we can change the economic system and tax companies 95% without them relocating or lobbying to reduce taxes, have you considered that some people actually want to work?
I've been poor most my life. The idea of being a state dependant doesn't really bother me, but what does upset me is that I've spend 20 years of my life skilling up in a profession which will now have no value. And no knowledge professions can ever have value again in post-AGI world.
Perhaps I can go into a manual labour job for a little before manual labour starts being automated too. And then maybe after that the only jobs that will remain are a handful jobs where interaction with real human is valued (hospitality, etc). Perhaps we're just spoilt in the present because we have so many cool jobs. Today people genuinely like working and want to work. I got into coding not because I had to for financial reasons but just because I loved doing it in my spare time so I might as well be paid to do it. But maybe we need to just accept that this was never a sustainable dynamic and that the economic benefits of AGI out weigh us living a fulfilling life...
Then it is completely fair for me to not give you any wealth because the machines out perform you.
People fear AI because the fair outcome is in fact detrimental for a good portion of humanity.
That is the paradoxical irony. In theory to save people you must function as a welfare state with things like ubi. You must deliberately distribute income unfairly. The practical course of action goes against our moral instincts.
This is only true for perverted definition of the word "fair" which allows owners/investors to perpetually capture 99.9% of the value produced by people who research, develop, build, and operate "your" machines.
When this is your ground truth, I can see how you would perceive a truly fair distribution of value created through thousands of years of collective human ingenuity, creativity, and hard work, as "unfair". Particularly in a post-singularity world where AGI and robots replace the majority of human work.
No. That is the perverted idea. I'm simply talking about fair as in fair trade. As in what is defined as a fair trade and a fair transaction according to economic theory and common sense. I am using the absolute most normal and most common sense meaning of the word "fair."
You are the one in your words: "perverting" the meaning. Perversion is actually too strong of a word. I would say you are definitely twisting the meaning and using an uncommon and sort of made up definition.
According to the most common usage of the word fair those who own AI only owe what they paid for. If they give away money then the economy is becoming more socialist or in another words an even distribution of wealth, but certainly unfair in the eyes of capitalism and fair trade and the fair exchange of goods.
Keep in mind though I'm not blindly supporting capitalism. The future of society may rely on a more practical but more unfair distribution of wealth. But we have to face the fact that such a distribution is fundamentally unfair.
What I'm trying to say is that your framing of the issue in terms of "fairness" isn't very productive. It may be your opinion that any given arrangement is fair, but the concept of "fairness" is really just a social construct. If your fellow citizens disagree, they are ultimately the ones who will rally to change the system. At first electorally, and failing that, through violence.
The thought is this: we are not a society of cavemen or subsistence farmers. We're the richest society in our history by far, so all people should enjoy the fruits of such a society.
Let's say you develop a debilitating illness that robs you of your ability to produce income. Or, you have a loved one—a child—that is debilitated and will never participate in the normal "fair trade" society.
Society condemns them to a life of poverty and suffering because of their debilitation. Is that "fair" in the context of our economic surplus? If it is fair, how much more should our economic surplus be in order for these debilitated individuals to have a decent life? Will they never ever have a decent life and that's just what we decide for ourselves?
This is ultimately a moral question. Can we imagine or create a society that yields better standard of living outcomes regardless of that person's status or capability? Andrew Yang's UBI policy was essentially because he had a son with down syndrome.
If you had down syndrome, would you prefer the "fair trade" definition of fairness, or the "fair living" definition?
You cannot redefine the term "fair" to be inline with your moral values. We have different terms for what you are referring to. When you donate to a charity you use the word "donate". You have not conducted a fair transaction.
unless you're going to start your own nation state you are still subject to the whims of the electorate
and they are not going to like this, one bit
The current electorate 100 percent supports this and considers this fair. You actually have to create a new nation state if you don't want this.
how do you explain the significant market for hand made products?
regardless, this wasn't my point
my point was the electorate aren't going to support e.g. Microsoft replacing every single worker in the US with a piece of code
regardless of Microsoft's opinion as to what it thinks is fair
Because a segment of people think the hand made product is superior. So they purchase it. I never made the claim that machine made is superior to hand made. I made the claim that If machine made was superior then people won't employ others to make hand made things.
For a vast swath of products, machine made is often more superior. With AI, that swath becomes even larger.
>my point was the electorate aren't going to support e.g. Microsoft replacing every single worker in the US with a piece of code
The electorate is not clear about this. Morally it's a strange situation because free trade is a liberty that's part of the American Dream. If a machine can automate all jobs then it's a persons god given right to use that machine rather then pay someone to do the work. The implications of AI nor the morality of the change AI will bring is so muddy it can bring a democratic electorate into a deadlock via conflicts of interest and slow decision making.
it's no more a god given right that it's an incited mob's right to burn down the fab or datacenter that someone else "own"s
property rights in liberal democracies will not survive a starving middle class
If you change societies current outlook on morality and law then yes you are right. But currently society has laws in place that define burning down a data center as wrong. Those laws do not differentiate between whether it was done by an individual or a mob. These laws are also agreed upon by most people. You can make up your own personal morality, but good discussion should be founded on a shared reality and the status quo majority interpretation of it.
>property rights in liberal democracies will not survive a starving middle class
And this is the paradox I am referring to right? Our current interpretation of morality is at odds with practicality.
If the VAT rates went to 0% you would still get to keep the exact same amount as with the current 25% rate. And when discussing B2B prices VAT is never included, as it is generally not an expense for the company but rather just an accounting detail.
Basically it's very similar to debates about US taxes. Sure, it's not 70%, but things add up quickly. Income tax, social security, medicare, medical insurance, sales tax. The usual argument is "but, but ... it's not me who is paying my medical insurance or half of social taxes, it's my employer, so it's not my tax". Well, it is. That's the money your employer would have paid _you_ if those taxes hadn't existed.
Not to mention, things that fall outside of capital / income taxes which increase the overall percentage in sneaky ways in the US: car registration fees, the death tax, property taxes, student loan repayments (depending on your view of subsidized university).
Sure you could say, "there are some people who just enjoy picking fruit." But are there enough people to satisfy the demand? And even if there are, what do you do with them as that demand decreases? The people who love picking fruit will have to clean toilets.
2. Capital tax is tax on your company's money.
3. Income tax is tax on your money.
With either tax, the economic system that consists of you and your employer is being robbed.
Speaking of which, if someone takes your groceries and runs, just before you have paid for them, that is shoplifting. If it's just after you paid, it's robbery. You might think you're better off with the former, but shoplifting raises prices; some of it is shifted onto you, so that it is effectively robbery.
2. It doesn't follow that when companies have more money their workers get more. Evidence is: record profits concomitant with layoffs, corporate profits vs wages, etc etc.
3. Taxes fund a government that answers to me. Capital powers corporations that not only don't answer to me but likely want to exploit me.
That's why taxes are instigated where they are.
I like that stuff, and I'm pretty confident corporations wouldn't have done it themselves without a democratic government forcing them to.
There's a meaningful difference between democratic governments and corporations, and governments don't have to be perfect for this to be true.
Except differences in tax rates will have significant impact on what type of income people want to earn. If personal income is taxed lower than capital, then people will want to increase their income through work.
If personal income is taxed higher than capital, people are incentivized to build more machines than the economy needs and this will put people out of work.
it did not, there are plenty of situations in which technology is less preferred to a horse (or mule), like say climbing everest or various other difficult terrains. it did reduce the amount of working horses though
I hunt and fish and hike.
...ya know what, upon further consideration techno-horses are actually the future. AI augmented.. HorseGPT. You are right.
Your robo horse thing also ignores the energy usage of an animal vs robot. The animal has a distinct advantage.
Again, you have no idea what you’re talking about. Hopefully you’re not an engineer by trade, as you’re failing at pros and cons here.
I think the suggestion is rather that we are morally compelled as a society, to invest real effort into inventing something new to replace neoliberal capitalism.
States could, for example, be sponsoring experiments to validate new economic models, through e.g. low-barrier-to-entry applications for charter cities and other autonomous zones, as long as the applicant can show that 1. there is a novel economic model at play, and that 2. the zone is being carefully monitored to collect data for analysis by the Economics department of a major academic institution.
One of the major advantages of neoliberal capitalism is it’s not exclusionary of alternative forms of economic organisation. It can exist very well alongside state capitalism, or almost anything else. After all individual freedom to organise as you choose is precisely its core characteristic.
If you want to establish a workers collective, or whatever you like, there really aren’t any barriers to doing so. In fact they do exist, some have been very successful. That’s great, but the fact that they are vanishingly rare I think says a lot more about the inherent problems with such systems than they do about capitalism.
It isn't impossible but who in their right mind would give 10 million dollars in funding to start a bank to end capitalism?
Somewhere between Feudalism and Karl Marx, Adam Smith is spinning in his grave. How much we don't have capitalism and are living, globally, under an oligopoly, replete with robber barons in tech clothes; one can only laugh at.
The amount of misery under "capitalism" says there's got to be a better way.
Meanwhile in my lifetime capitalism has raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and into solidly middle class lifestyles globally.
My wife is Chinese so I’ve seen first hand how economic liberalisation has transformed that country. The Chinese brand of capitalism is severely flawed, largely due to an almost nonexistent rule of law, but compared to what they had before its night and day. It’s a shame the CCP seems to be thoroughly mismanaging it at the moment.
The claim that it's capitalism that has raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty is a common one, but it's our technology that's advanced. If we were still living under feudalism and the industrial revolution and the Internet happened, hundreds of millions of lives would still have transformed. Thanks to John Deere and Monsanto and the like, billions of lives have been raised up from subsistence farming to where we are today. There's the argument that we wouldn't have this technology without capitalism, and the length of the Egyptian and Roman empires without the Internet lend credence to this possibility, but it's also impossible to deny that we've never and can't test whether a system other than capitalism wouldn't also lift millions out of poverty, given the same advancements in technology.
It turns out that centralized, long-term planning is necessary for certain advancements. Eisenhower's US highway system, for example. Or the Manhattan project. Yes, the market is great for a large number of things. One of my most favorite is the food bank story, where they created their own internal market, with credits, and used that to more efficiently organize actors and allocate resources *.
I'm also just done pretending that USA's brand of capitalism is perfect, or that we have a free market in the first place in places where we don't (eg pharmaceuticals) but still try to run it in a capitalistic way, and then get surprised when someone like Martin Shkreli plays the game according to the rules, buys a company with a monopoly on a product, and then raises prices when that's just the rules we've set up for ourselves. Yes he went to jail, but that wasn't because he raised prices on Daraprim, but because he was also running a ponzi scheme and the attention made that finally catch up to him.
We're not going to get to a better system by upending what's been working well enough, but with smaller, more specific changes to the existing system to make it work better. Framing any changes to the system as a moral upheaval and equivalent to communism is the problem. We can have a better system. Yes, some of it involves sharing with others and caring for your fellow human. Some of those humans don't look like you and you may not like them. That's okay, you don't have to. There are people I don't like either. But what we have that works for some, also isn't working for others. When baby food is locked up because people are stealing it, if we assume it's mostly not being stolen and used for nefarious purposes, like cutting cocaine; if we assume people are stealing baby formula to feed babies, and that's criminal behavior according to the rules of our society; stepping back and looking at that from first principles, that all the rules of society and capitalism are for the benefit of humanity. If we really stop and think about that, something has gone wrong.
* https://theeconreview.com/2018/02/12/how-food-banks-used-mar....
The main factor there was economic liberalisation in south east Asia. Mainly China of course but not only. There was nothing inevitable about that, it was a political decision. The Soviet Union didn’t do it, North Korea didn’t do it, but China had Deng Xioping and he did do it. He or someone else could have easily gone a different way. My wife is Chinese and I’ve visited frequently in the last 20 years and seen the transformation for myself. My wife’s family there are among those who went from grinding poverty to a comfortable lifestyle owning several properties with 2 cars.
Owning properties privately, in China, before Deng that would have been unimaginable. My wife’s sister even owns shares. It’s capitalism gone mad.
The system doesn't have to be adopted by every business or citizen. For instance, 10% of unemployment benefits could be paid out as a demurrage currency with tax acceptance and you would see large scale welfare benefits with almost no burden on the general population. The only burden of this system is juggling two different currencies and an insignificant 5% annual fee on the issued demurrage money supply. If pay out 10% of unemployment benefits or 15 billion dollars it would only cost 750 million dollars in the liquidity fee and that is assuming the money doesn't immediately go back to the government for tax payments at which point the costs keep shrinking and shrinking.
It’s all about consolidating power and wealth as quickly as possible. Now we’re in an AI arms race. Sounds terrifying? It is.
America might tear itself apart if it doesn’t slow down a bit. Right now, there’s no one behind the wheel.
I’m sure premium private services will be a thing, but right now the sheer scale of the mass market seems to be a powerful democratising force. Let’s hope it stays that way.
I'm not quite sure why people think that a misery free world ought to be possible and/or the default.
Well, it's not obvious that it is, and you haven't made an actual argument here.
You see it all begins very benign. A farmer has a bad harvest. He needs to bridge over this year until the next harvest. So he borrows money with interest. When the next harvest fails then he becomes unable to pay and is forced to sell his land and perversively, hired to work on his own land. He has functionally become a serf. All it takes is for this to spread to the rest of society and you end up with feudalism.
In other words, feudalism is what happens when proto capitalism is exaggerated to an extreme extent.
If you were to exaggerate modern capitalism I am not sure what would happen. Maybe hyperinflation, maybe world war 3, maybe a reform of the banking system, maybe mass starvation or maybe a revolution or maybe modern feudalism except serfs aren't allowed to own intellectual property or shares in companies.
So no, I don't think the problem is that we don't have capitalism. We clearly have more capitalism than we want or need. Robber barons are an intrinsic part of capitalism.
The answer is a market economy without capitalism. I don't even see why anyone would care about capital obsession in a free market anyway. That sounds inherently autocratic. At some point in the capital accumulation process one person owns the entire economy, how does that not make them a monarch eventually?
Ever thought that maybe Capitalism is just a small step in human history and that we can definitely do better? I wonder what happened to innovation, is it fine only as long as it doesn't threaten the status quo that keeps you complacent?
I was mainly thinking in terms of critiquing the idea that value is created by labour, since HyperSane mentioned it twice in comments.
It happens that the labour theory of value in central to Marx but it’s not exclusive to him. Adam Smith indulged a lesser form of it in one of his uncharacteristic slip ups in economic theory. However it is in Marx that it achieves its most vertiginous heights of absurdity, and through his disciples that the most damage was done by it.
There is a direct causal line from the LTV and some of the direst economic disasters in human history. The most egregious case, despite some strong rival examples in Soviet Russia, is probably Mao’s Great Leap Forward which among other things fetishised steel production. Production creates value and steel is the most important economic product, so everybody should make steel.
It’s the damage the LTV caused itself that I was talking about. Communism is a political project associated with it but not directly what I had in mind.
As for innovation, I’m all for it. Capitalism maximises individual freedom by putting ownership of capital and rights of self determination of labour directly into the hands of citizens. By maximising individual economic freedom it maximises opportunities for economic innovation. This is why free market capitalist economies are so creative and dynamic.
I still stan (a version of) capitalism, I agree it's better than the other systems, but I do always get a giggle when people act like communism caused the worst disasters in history. They're not great, to be sure, but at least the Communists were mostly killing their own people through incompetence rather instead of killing the entire planet for avarice. It's humans all the way down, doesn't matter what system. Either you have accountability, or you don't and if you don't bad things happen.
It's easy to condemn the system but without a solution you're just barking in the wind...
Just to be clear, I also think there are major issues with "the system", but I also don't think this is an easy problem to solve or everyone would be living in magical happy land already...
(1) stop fractional reserve banking and nationalize money again to avoid the very quantitative easing/tightening fiasco we are seeing today, (2) measure economic progress with a quality of life index instead of GDP to accurately reflect the cost of products/resources and put more emphasis on life quality improving services, and (3) replace the current international trade rules and system run by the IMF with a more equitable system where capital costs are accurately reflected at the source to avoid “outsourcing” problems to third world continues.
While all three changes are difficult to achieve in our current society, I am amazed at how clearly Daly’s life work can outline how we could build a much more sustainable economy and healthier society. Maybe his amazing last summary book is of interest to others on HN.
The problem is quite simple. Money has no maturity but debt has a deadline. This asymmetry causes problems regardless of whether you have a gold standard, full reserve fiat or fractional reserve fiat.
In other words, if you can fix the asymmetry or eliminate the zero lower bound it doesn't actually matter what form your money takes.
Apparently, this was already the direction of thought among some economists in the 1920s (like Frank Knight and Irving Fisher), but then got overruled by the eternal growth mindset that evolved during the Great Depression (which Daly claims leads to “uneconomic” growth). Printing money as an instrument should very much be available - but only to the Government/Treasury.
If you don’t allow banks to “print debt” out of thin air by eliminating fractional reserve banking, as Daly suggested in his work, I believe you eliminate that asymmetry. Actual money is lent, actual money has to be returned.
The question that remains then is if it is valid to ask for interest on that money. But I believe that is acceptable, and the rate might be set to 0% or even negative in the right circumstances.
It often generates code that won't compile or won't run correctly, but that sort of goes in the correct direction, enough that I can spot the blunders and refine my questions. Quite often I even learn a few new things when using it to explore libraries and frameworks I don't know that well but in languages that I am very comfortable with.
Now, for example, I am a lousy front end developer. Not really my area of expertise. I can do minor maintenance on an existing code base, but that's about it. ChatGPT has been more a hindrance than helpful in that particular domain, because I can't easily spot the flaws in its output, and I don't know in which directions to properly refine my questions.
I see LLM models not as the end of society, just as new powerful productivity tools.
This is because you're used to normal technological development scaling. Unfortunately with AI we are unsure at this point if our old paradigms still apply.
What happens with society really depends on where we are on the technology growth curve. If LLMs plateau for a while and we don't see significant growth in their abilities, then we'll just see pretty massive technological disruption and reshifting of human priorities, kind of like when the car or plane showed up. On the other hand, if we pop the AGI rabbit out of the top hat in short order it is going to surface deep fundamental problems that humans world wide have been ignoring because of the status quo has not demanded such rapid change.
LLMs are impressive at natural language processing (which is a damn hard problem to solve), and can both parse and generate natural language at a satisfactory level. It's an interesting facet of AI, but it also has some glaring limitations for wider use.
I'd agree, but it's not good to forget that every few decades a new shiny toy shines so brightly that it razes two whole cities to the ground in seconds.
Again, if we are close to AGI every single one of your past ideas on how technology should behave is outdated and done for.
I didn't say we were going to get AGI, and I said it's completely possible we are going plateau out. But if we create general intelligence it will be as if we have created fire, or the wheel, it will present a profound and drastic change in technological capabilities that it will reshape all of humanity.
Eh, I think AGI is still science fiction
The real question I have is 1) how close are we to human replacement AGI levels, and 2) even if we don't get full AGI, how much of a societal shakeup is going to occur with what we have.
We are already at the point of digital development that the argument of "We dont have AGI" is mostly meaningless. We need to have discussions at a societal and legal level on what we're going to do to prepare our lives for it occurring sooner than later to avoid catastrophic consequences.
We have been replacing humans for a long time, with animals, machines, computing, robotics and now some limited AI.
I can't answer about how much of a shakeup it will be. I fully expect the world to get worse as time passes. Enjoy things while they last.
> We are already at the point of digital development that the argument of "We dont have AGI" is mostly meaningless. We need to have discussions at a societal and legal level on what we're going to do to prepare our lives for it occurring sooner than later to avoid catastrophic consequences.
I agree with discussions on societal and legal level to reduce impact of technology on humans, but I fully expect those discussions to go nowhere and catastrophic consequences happening either way.
Surely there are differences between some of them, or are they all the same to you?
Literally everyone of those were massively hyped and sold as "the future"
This is not to dismiss the current trend of AI. Hell, I pay for ChatGPT premium and love to play with StableDiffusion. But I do get bored at all the LARPing about how how LLM is just a step from AI taking over the world.
For VR, many saw through the hype due to its inconveniences and minimal benefits. If VR had tapped into our nerves then things would’ve been different. No rational person expected this.
Wearables are the future, depending on if you have any medical issues or not. You misinterpreted the hype likely because you’re not seeing the medical applications.
Crypto replaced money and banks. Anybody with an idea of the function of money in a society also saw through this one.
AI is different. It aims to replace a human brain. 5 years ago if you told me a program could listen to me literally speak and then write code that not only compiles, but works, with non trivial requirements, Id have laughed at you. Yet here we are.
It's constantly trying to farm work abroad and looks at every possible way to cut costs. And it's dominated by young, naïve devs and artists who don't understand the market and are "passionate" about the product.
Things like "how do I make a debug cheat command to increase player speed" would be a simple question that would send a jr programmer spending time asking around and poking through many areas of code (how do I make a debug command? oh It's imgui? how do I do that? what controls player speed?) but if an AI could provide a working example immediately that would be a huge time saver that would accelerate the new programmers' understanding of the codebase.
That's an area that's always been just past my comfort zone ("Create a shell script to solve this problem? Now I have two problems...").
But all of a sudden, I feel like a master at shell scripting! Things that have always been manual-and-slightly-annoying are now scripted away into automation world, and it feels like I have a newfound superpower :) This past week has been a workflow productivity superweek.
How many times have frameworks like React changed since it was created? A changing framework means the LLM may mix training from multiple versions and create errors. Whereas libraries that don’t change can produce consistent results. So use stable libraries that choose backwards compatibility at any cost, over the ones that change with the times.
Wouldn't make more sense for a machine to just write assembly directly?
Now they also have training on frameworks but those keep changing. So I think the best abstraction is plain javascript - it has the most training data and javascript written twenty years ago still works today.
I've use ChatGPT to confidently produce jq programs, and Bash, and zsh, and ffmpeg scripts, and AppleScript - all tech I've mostly avoided in the past because I hadn't climbed the learning curve far enough to be confident with them.
But, it also really highlights that it’s trained on data, and doesn’t “know”. I’ve never seen it produce a bash script/line that properly handled spaces, on its own, because most shell scripts don’t. Even ChatGpt 4.0 backed fails to “correct” the mistakes, a large portion of the time.
For coding, at least for me, it's marginally better than 3.5. In fact, I sometimes prefer reverting back to 3.5 to get speedier output.
I am finding ChatGPT-4 much better for other tasks that have less strictness requirements. Such as parsing through a large text and summarizing it for me, and for creative tasks.
It may very well be that newer AIs and models even manage to get that right more often, though. Or that a canny prompter will start by asking which question to subsequently ask.
As a side note, you're not a novice if you know the general field of file systems pretty well, IMHO.
Basically I use it as a way to induce Deja Vu. Or for things where, to quote Potter Stewart: "I'll know it when I see it."
It's important to understand that it doesn't know anything. It gives approximate answers based on statistical relevance.
For example, it has been noticed that ChatGPT can answer leetcode interview questions. That doesn't surprise me in the least, chances are that it contained the algorithm associated to slight variations of the question in its training data.
To generate boilerplate code it has been pretty good. Those are pretty repetitive tasks, so it is also expected.
Using it to explore the capabilities of frameworks, libraries and services has been great for the most part, but it sometimes tells me things that don't exist or just plain doesn't work. The funniest one was when it told me I could use an annotation on a method to do something, but the annotation didn't exist. When I highlighted it to ChatGPT, it started to get in a loop with variations of code that didn't work, claiming the previous answer was valid for version 3.0. The library doesn't have a version 3.0. it doesn't even have a 2.0.
Getting it to code is a wild ride. Sometimes it gets real close to give me something workable, sometimes it gives me stuff that will never work.
However, it is awesome at telling me what code is doing when I paste a snippet.
It can be a powerful productivity tool. My best analogy is "search engine on steroids"
Exactly right. I made this argument in an unrelated thread:
I gave an example of testing ChatGPT by asking it to write CRC calculation code in ARM assembler. The code worked. It wasn’t as good as mine (slower, inefficient), yet, as you said, as a starting point, it would have been fine.
“This is today, mid 2023. Give it a year or two (maybe less?) and it will be a tool to contend with. People who like to blame everything else rather than their lack of knowledge and experience will not do very well in that world.
Why would I pay someone to do <X> when they bring nothing special to the table?
Here's the huge paradigm shift (at least for me):
I could not care less what someone knows or does not know. I care about the range and breath of their experience and how they approach learning that which you do not know.
Someone like that can use any available tool, including AI tools, to deliver value in almost any domain. Someone who blames others (tools, people, the system, whatever), cannot.
We might just be entering an era in which experience will be shown to have serious value.”
I haven't found it to be a big help but it can save me time.
AI in fact can use any tool, including AI tools, to deliver value in almost any domain.
So the problem with the comments here in this thread is that the obvious conclusion is that we need some kind of basic income as a floor as well as some fundamental adjustment of the system to handle the new realities of AI.
In fact due to the short-sightedness of comments like yours I am tempted to use the AI programming tool I am developing to try to build an ARM assembler expert business and sell it as Robo Martin the Master ARM Assembly Bot.
Since GPT4 can write the code for me, it is possible to launch this business within the next two days.
I've been challenging everyone that LARPs about the capabilities of GPT to start a business now, and use it in place of developers. Hell, for a $20 account you get the perfect developer, that is extremely productive, never gets tired, never gets sick, and has no PTO.
What is stopping you?
First rule of having a conversation between humans: You can't have a conversation if you resort to insults. Not only insults, but some sort of weird expression of vindictive intent? Pipe down. OK?
Evolution is what got humanity here. And, yes, evolution will produce AI that will be far more capable than us at many levels and across a wide range of domains. That is inevitable.
However, there will be boundaries for quite some time. Areas where AI will have trouble inserting itself into. Don't ask me what these areas might be. I have some ideas and thoughts on this, yet, I don't really know. In other words, I feel like that conversation would be pointless...just like trying to predict the future.
There might also be lots of areas where AI will not be trusted for a range of reasons.
As a general statement, I will still hold to the belief that one of the key differentiators as AI becomes more widely useful will be the experience and knowledge of the humans wielding it. We might also see an advantage in the realm of creativity. Today? Absolutely. Ten years from now? Don't know.
Can someone create a better ARM assembler writer, one that might beat most experienced programmers across a range of criteria? Sure. Of course. These are mechanical things in the end. There are books, tons of them, written about how to write better code in assembler. If someone did, it better not be a commercial enterprise, making money from writing assembler code isn't likely to be a thing, particularly when one can already do a decent job of it for free.
My prediction is that the divide will have experienced and widely knowledgeable people on one side and everyone else on the other. Part of engineering is knowing what questions to ask, when to ask them and when they might be relevant. This becomes particularly complex the more multidisciplinary a project might be. This is where, for now, experience wins.
Folks like Priya will not loose their jobs IMO, the company would still need them to provide that last line of validation on data because you just can't blindly trust GPT (I don't know if we will ever be able to bindly trust it), rather the scenario I see is that their team at work would actually be able to stay on top of their assignments instead of constantly being overworked.
Accounting clerks with excel can do the job of 10 accounting clerks with pen and paper.
/s
The validation of work is interesting. It does seem essential but it also occurs to me that this would be an absolutely horrible and tedious job. I wonder who would actually be interested in, for example, spending 8 hours a day code reviewing a an AI’s output?
And the new FSD in Tesla only requires people to supervise closely mainly to avoid getting sued. If that system made a lot of severe errors then it would not be deployed.
We have working self-driving in Cruise and Waymo. The only reason to think we really need humans driving at this point is denial. Actually if we switched to AI drivers entirely with the existing systems that would make the roads vastly safer. Accounting for the most erratic behavior of human drivers is one of the biggest challenges.
It can already ingest 80kb of information instantly and use it to perform any knowledge task that can be described in that amount of info (with the 32k token model).
The number of areas in which the typical worker is better than a GPT3.5 or GPT4 system that has been properly integrated with the correct data and tools is already probably less than 5% for knowledge workers.
As a very senior programmer, it's the first technology in a long time that has doubled, or maybe even tripled, my productivity.
The demand for my skills is only going to accelerate because of how godly this had made me.
Existing nocode tools and other new tools such as the one I am building will incorporate LLMs and multimodal models to automatically build software. There is nothing limiting it to only be used by programmers. The systems will also have debugging loops and long term tasks etc. And every 3-6 months the models are getting better or faster. Even if that slows down we should anticipate further dramatic improvement over the course of the next two years.
- stack overflow
- compile time type checking
- functional programming
None of those made vast numbers of devs redundant... quite the opposite in fact.
interesting times...
It seems to me that if AI is currently helpful to you, it is likely to eventually replace you. And me, and perhaps most skilled jobs as they exist today. It won't be instant, but if you are early- or mid-career, take it very seriously.
> so I figure I had better be the expert
Be an expert at what? Prompting AI to do things? There will be little to no expertise needed in the future as these tools evolve. That’s precisely what makes AI so disruptive. A basic set of instructions can be used to create something that previously would have took an entire team of skilled specialists to produce.
Sure, there will always be some experts, but these jobs will be few and far between, and they’ll be much more academic in nature. Having a job like this will be a luxury only a tiny percentage of the earths population will enjoy.
The only real question at this point is how fast will AI move to automate all of these jobs away. It could be 5 years it could be 20.
The jobs left in the wake of AI won’t require much education, skill, or talent, meaning they’ll be extremely low paying because almost anyone will be able to do them.
In 10-20 years it will be robots with guns patrolling food production and distribution so you won’t even be able to steal a loaf of bread for your family.
I’m actually really concerned that if a more equal system doesn’t come soon. Many, many people will suffer very badly.
We can all do a lot about this. Not saying it's easy though.
I'm pretty much responding to this by trying to maximize my earning potential immediately (TC is the only king. No more gambits where I might take a lower-paying job to "learn more" or have better WLB) and planning on limiting my expenses.
And if I'm eventually replaced, so be it. I'll go do something else.
If there's nothing else to do I'll starve with the rest of the peasantry.
And remember, the last to starve will be the first to suffocate.
Speaking about that, do you have any suggestions? I'm very early in my career, and have never experienced big transformations, huge layoff, large crisis. I guess one of the ways is regulation/unions/stuff like that, but I also don't know much about it. I'd be happy to hear how other people prepare themselves for possible industry disruption.
And if you have to come up with the code yourself, wouldn't that allow you to come up with a better architecture for your whole project?
To make this possible we need to find a way to a new system that doesn't directly link labour with income.
People have plenty of natural incentives to leave the house ("reasonable time" is a sign of your own biases, but no doubt leaving the house is healthy regardless). The reason people don't do so is because there are strong economic disincentives to do so. This is not just obvious conscious disincentives like "I don't have time because I need to earn money online" & "I will have to pay for X, Y, Z in the city if I go out" but also much deeper more complex systematic disincentives like "I am chronically ill due to years of economically-linked stress and burnout" & "I feel depressed due to economically-linked lifelong trauma"
Healthy people don't need employers to incentivise them to leave the house. And unhealthy people don't need work, they need support.
Even proactive people are made to believe they are just one more "rise and grind" away from being a millionaire, they want to be succesful in this society, so they have no desire to tear it down.
What could bring the stack of cards coming down I think, is a housing affordability crisis. For anyone who has ended up without a home or even just the threat of losing a place to live, you wake up to that reality real quick. If there is suddenly a majority without work and without a home, that's a bunch of people who just found out the system is broken and will want answers.
The standard way to prevent revolutions is to channel the energy of young men into a productive job and a family.
But today, bored young men entertain themselves with video games etc rather than gathering in mobs to entertain themselves. We don't have large gatherings of aimless young men anymore.
Why haven't the poor revolted already?
I hope you're right but I don't think its a given this will happen.
while there's a case for idealism, without some degree of pragmatism we'll be lost on policy or regulation proposals.
we are headed towards Elysium future with billions of humans competing for scraps.
If the capitalists (i.e. those who own capital) can live off of ownership rather than labour, maybe someday all of us can. Because the alternative is unthinkable.
Who in their right mind would work if they can get free income, even if small, without having a disability or similar disqualifier?
Right now, we are in a worker shortage, and it’s going to get worse as retirements continue. Separating labor from work would cripple living standards and demoralize productive workers.
Maybe one day we can live in a world where machines are doing all the work and there are fulfilling hobbies for everybody, but I fear this will require more changes, on a much longer time horizon, than the short-term issues just around the corner due to the recent AI advances.
Does an 8-year old feel “bad” because they are unemployed?
Like, sure, "nobody wants to have me working" isn't great, but going to job that barely covers your rent isn't much better.
Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness, 1932 seems increasingly true to me. The richest has kept a monopoly on idleness while tricking everyone else to see work as their purpose in life (to work to make it possible for the rich, idle, people to have nice lives without having to work).
"Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen instead to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines. In this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever."
The only reason the middle class was born was because trained workers could pull their labor and affect upper class wealth. They had power. AI takes that power away.
...and what will happen when every single person goes and tries to buy a 50" TV? Hm? Did we suddenly invent a magical TV making machine?
Come on... this is Real Life, not Magical Fairy Land.
We're not talking about a magical cornucopia that generates an endless amount of physical goods that can be used to accommodate the needs of every person.
We're very specifically talking here about technological shift that will eliminate a large pool of skilled jobs.
People will still need jobs, or they will become homeless / starve / have to leave the country.
AI is not going to feed the world any time soon.
I mean ... we already have 3D printing, and car making robots, and electronics making robots. Most of the TV is robots.
All that's needed is the equivalent of 3D printing that adds an extra step of "TV-making-robot"-making robots. One reason we don't have that is that it turns out the robot making robot costs more than certain as-yet non-globalized labor markets.
It's not that we can't, it's that the ROE is bad.
What you're saying was already true... so what. Now people are unemployed because of GPT4 we're going to start making free TVs for everyone?
Dang. That's sure not what happened when all those people lost their jobs during covid (eg. restaurant staff).
I guess this time will be different?
That's uh... well, very optimistic.
And:
> already true so what
OK, so we did invent it. Then we agree on that.
Out of context.
This entire thread is in the context of “gpt is going to destroy jobs”; the arbitrary “we need to disassociate working and basic necessities” isn’t an isolated socialist discourse.
You can wax philosophical all you like, but you’re failing to address the fundamental reality.
There is a physical limit of good and services available right now and no amount of magical posturing will make that untrue.
Anything is possible in the future given unlimited time and resources, but this thread is not about that.
It is about right now, people losing their jobs.
What is being proposed here is not a solution to that problem. The ability for people to build things doesn’t mean they will. It’s pure speculation about what might possibly happen in the future.
> Then we agree on that.
I do not agree with you. You’re just making arbitrary speculative statements.
Naturally this is purely hypothetical, parent argued that work gives meaning to life(which I generally agree with). I argued you can still be working, even if less efficiently than the machines.
Maybe it will be a gradual change. Agriculture and manufacturing is already highly automated, for better or worse.
In principal you're right, we can in theory live like you suggest and expand on leisure culture / volunteering / 'made up' jobs by the government.
In practice, we're super far from the utopia. Energy is expensive, food is expensive, housing is expensive in ChatGPT can't do squat about it. What it CAN do is possibly replace me as a worker. So that's the conundrum.
You can't really just throw money at the demand side of the equation and expect everything else to stay the same. Supply side will raise their prices because they can (when everyone's got $10M in the bank, why not charge $50, $500 or even $5,000 for a loaf of artisan bread? And eventually other producers of bread follow suit because the consumer has become less price sensitive).
If you want to improve everyone's standard of living, what has repeatedly worked throughout history is to lower the cost of production through technology, and ensure there's lots of competition on the supply side. With enough competition, producers are unable to behave like a cartel. Eventually someone cracks and sacrifices part of their margin to attract more customers, and then a price war ensues. A textbook example is salt, which for most of human history was quite expensive, but after mechanized mining techniques were developed it became so cheap that for the average household it's practically free.
Technology + competition. At this moment in history we're quite good at the technology part of the equation but we have allowed many monopolies and oligopolies to form, so we're struggling at the competition part.
Money is the measure of the productive capacity of an economy. If you increase the money without increasing the capacity then you get inflation. But let's be charitable and assume that "Gud" was talking about increasing the capacity commensurately. Because that's what's happening. AI, robots and almost zero marginal cost green energy are going to increase the productive capacity of economies dramatically over the next decade or two.
You might have that argument with nuclear energy, because most of the cost is upfront. But approval process for that will have to be expedited by congress.
Oh boy, maybe much much later on, 15-30 years from now if we're lucky, and maybe just the opposite. But as for coming decade? Forget it. https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Risks_Report_2023.p...
Natural monopolies certainly exist in sectors of the economy like public utilities, but I don't think they are so strong in tech.
My personal view: AI makes most of the world's population in the long run surplus to requirements for people who own capital, societal power and the planet's scarce resources. That's a form of monopoly.
You're straight up projecting your own personal experiences as a generalized truth. Seriously, grow up and learn that there are a lot of differences in people. You might need this, that doesn't make it into an universal truth that everyone needs it or gets it by having a dayjob.
The only thing that you can say, generally is this: humans can gain happiness by getting acceptance from other people when they care about the people that accept them.
While you are at it, the toilet in the basement is clogged, there is shit water all over the place. You could find meaning there too.
I mean, we've done the same with farming. Is it 100% automated? No, not at all, but we've removed something like 99% of the human labor involved that would have occurred around 200 years ago.
Art without humanity isn't art. Farming can exist without humanity because we need the output to sustain ourselves. But take the humanity out of art, and no one is interested in it.
I think AI is terrible for a lot of midrange commercial graphics. I don't think it's bad for "art."
(*) And why has there never been a market for broadcasting music performances in cinemas?
Having live piano performance at a bar or other venue was extraordinarily common. There's still piano bars, but...
Graphic designers, corporate advertising, media productions; video game artwork, the artistic channels where many creatives earn a square meal even if it isn't the most human and soulful type of art.
I guess god doesn't care for shit water all over the floor.
GP: yeah? find meaning in my shitty chores
P (me): I've found meaning in helping others with shitty chores
You: I don't see the connection, nobody says don't help others
Huh? I'm not sure where you are coming from.
GGGP: Well, for most people, if they don't have to have a job, their life becomes a sucking void of boredom. These are the only two options
GGP: Nope, plenty of jobs can be a sucking void of boredom for people. It's not like having to clean toilets in order not to starve is incredibly meaningful for the people that have to do it
GP: Well, I like helping neighbors for free sometimes. But I wouldn't want to do it every day for strangers
P (me): I don't see the connection. You literally said you enjoyed doing something for free, so you're not talking about jobs. You could still do it if you didn't need a job to survive, nor would not needing a job to survive force you to do it for fun for strangers.
In any case, it's clear we interpreted the previous messages in a very different manner. In particular, as I've said elsewhere, people seem to be confusing jobs with work. Not needing jobs is not the same as people having to stop working, usually quite the contrary - people would be free to work more on stuff that they enjoy.
Jobs, for the vast majority of people, is just a mean to make ends meet. There's nothing transcendental about it. Just a blunt "gotta pay the bills".
I may make 6 figures now, but I remember life when I didn't know if I was gonna be homeless next month. Perhaps that helped me keep my feet on the ground.
Additionally, people who hold this belief fail to realize that “I don’t want to work.” ACTUALLY means “I want others to work so I don’t have to.”
For example, how are you going to eat? You are either going to grow, cultivate, and harvest your own food (i.e. work) or you’re expecting others to do that work for you.
Oh, you say it can be “automated”? Well, who’s going to design, build, and maintain the automating machine? That’s all work too!
2 years ago we would both have agreed that that would be impossible. My belief is that most likely AI will hit another roadblock soon, following a "punctuated equilibrium" model so there will still be a large number of non-automatable jobs. But if I'm wrong and the pace of change of the last 2 years continues for another 10...
Then who designs, builds, and maintains THOSE AI & robots? It can’t be “AI & robots” all the way down.
>My belief is that most likely AI will hit another roadblock soon, following a "punctuated equilibrium" model so there will still be a large number of non-automatable jobs.
I agree (although it may or may not be “soon”). As history has shown us, technology advancements just cause us to reimagine possibilities and start solving problems that were previously impossible.
For example, as computers have gone from a few bytes of RAM to billions of bytes of memory, humans didn’t say, “ok, we’re all set now.” — we invented whole new classes of software that do all kinds of things unimaginable to the early computer scientists.
The same will happen with AI and robots.
No, it means "I am working to generate more wealth which flows predominantly to the owners of capital, who often do no work and sometimes have never done any work at all - can't we do something fairer than this?"
It always starts with this, then the next step is "ohh we can't really tax rich people and corporations ('owners of capital' that you speak of) since they have a lot of ways to move their capital out of our reach so let's just fleece the middle class instead!".
Which requires 10x, or 100x less people. And the "savings" go mostly to company owners, not to making product cheaper.
Or maybe it means: "if, thanks to automation, we become 2x as productive, I would like to work half the time, while still being able to pay my bills."
Whether the French viewpoint or the American viewpoint is healthier can be found in the mortality rates.
Look at the kind of people who do not have to work. Do they still work? No. Some sit on a beach and never lift a finger again, some become creatives and some try to recreate their successes again. None work what would be an engaging and productful job at a take-away joint.
A small one is my dad. He was a software developer, but thanks to Y2K consulting, he made bank and retired early. After, he spent half the year in Mexico. One of the friends he made there was a teacher. My dad ended up volunteering in the school. He had a part-time-job-like schedule and did teacher's aide things. He loved it.
On a bigger scale: In Michigan there is an arcade chain, Pinball Pete's. It was founded by Tim Arnold in 1976. I grew up there gave them a lot of quarters over years. He sold it in 1990 and retired to Las Vegas, bringing his extensive collection of arcade machines.
For a while he was doing an open house; once a month he'd let people in to play some of his collection. By 2009, he had started the Pinball Hall of Fame, a nonprofit arcade. A couple years back they moved to the Strip and expanded significantly. I was there recently and he spends hours a day there. Opening up. Collecting the quarters. Fixing machines. Telling kids to stop running.
The guy is circa 70 and he can do whatever he wants. What he wants to do is work at an arcade. He'll keep doing it until he dies.
> Look at the kind of people who do not have to work. Do they still work? No.
I'm not sure HN discussions have original points, really. But people do have specific points, and it sounds like you and I both agree that the one I'm replying to is too broad.
Also, you’re posting on a forum made by hand by a person who didn’t have to work.
And the whole OpenAI thing is being run by a person who is a retiree as well.
You can do that without it being a job. I enjoy making things out of epoxy resin. It's fun, creative, hard work. I'd do it a lot more if we had universal basic income. It's not my job.
Yes, you can, but his argument is that most people don't -- and he's right.
Where did that unexamined assumption come from? Do they care about nothing other than standard employment based "work" and so never considered doing something other than staring at a wall when they're not doing it?
Family. Friends. Volunteering. Gardening. Games. Hobbies. Learning to play music, or cook, or who knows... studying biochemistry and doing that because it's rewarding and easier to do in a setting with more people in the same place. Or starting a company if that's your thing, or call it an open-X project and build a community that doesn't require "work" to contribute.
I'm so confused, why on Earth would the agency to choose be bad, it's so patronizing.
Another strange class bias is that those from the (lets call it) "productive" class are absolutely convinced everyone is like them and if only given the opportunity they would be just as productive and fulfilled as they are. Some of us know better.
Even if that is true, and I very much doubt that it is, a big chunk of the "productive" segment's work will be to help the other segment. People already do that a lot by volunteering. Imagine how much more people could psychologists, social workers, and others help if they don't have to worry about their own livelihoods?
What we need are new institutions to fill the role of providing social connection and meaning. Things that churches and clubs used to provide. But how to revive those things is its own issue.
Not really? Plenty of people volunteer to help people in jail, for example.
>On the other hand, those in the unproductive class won't want this kind of "help" either.
People won't want help to find meaning in their lives? I find it hard to believe. Churches and clubs, as you also said, used to (and still do) help provide people with that as well, so I'm not sure you truly believe it either.
Of course there are always some number of people that find even unlikely targets sympathetic. But what you're talking about is some kind of widespread movement to help close the meaning gap when something like a third to half of the world is having a crisis of meaning. To have that kind of a movement needs a naturally very sympathetic target, like victims of police brutality. The movement to improve prison conditions is practically non-existent by comparison. I don't find it plausible that the non-self-actualizers will be similarly sympathetic.
>Churches and clubs, as you also said, used to (and still do) help provide people with that as well
I wasn't talking about "help" like how psychologists provide help to their clients. What I mean is an attractive gathering place where people naturally find connection and meaning. People don't want to be "helped", i.e. being made to feel like a charity case, they want to come by meaning and purpose naturally.
Would reviving communal institutions be a meaningful and useful activity for people to do? Part of the reason why we rely less on community and social institutions is because we are relying on other things (like work) to fulfill that same role. It's not really surprising that people volunteer less at their local church if they're told that their life meaning ought to come from their job.
Also, even the "useless" always want more. Even if it is bigger TV and bigger pick-up truck, that would still require work
If Priya had preferred to stay with her family, and there was no financial pressure, the situation would be unambiguously better. Her family may have encouraged her to go to study for family pride -- what if studying and living while studying were free for her and her family had no financial pressure for her to get a job and send money home? I struggle to see who benefits here. Maybe she would have preferred to stay home with her family, maybe she has siblings that she will miss, why would it be up to me at all? I don't get to define productive.
UBI (or whatever mechanism for providing basic needs) also doesn't mean there is no financial reward for employment. She could still go and study and earn money and send it home to a family that doesn't need it badly except now if the job is automated by GPT4 somehow no one suffers. No harm is done other than that she wasted her time studying this thing, but no one is going to suffer because of bad luck beyond wasted time.
There are a number of things that I do think people don't find meaning in doing. Many of these things can be increasingly automated like being a teller or working in a call center, but not all of which can be (for now), like repairing sidewalks. These are a set of things that aren't very fun to do which still need to be done, sure. Oddly the ones I can list off my fingers are not the ones that pay well, so something is certainly not working right on the incentives, sure. I agree that society should reward jobs less if they are meaningful and enjoyable than jobs that no one wants to do, but that's not really how capitalism works.
Plenty of people don't tend to do things even they would consider "productive" in their spare time, but how much of that is because they are under constant financial stress and have so little free time? I believe that if basic needs are met people will generally find more genuine sources of meaning, for them, whether or not I consider those things productive.
But my opinion isn't important here, that's the patronizing part.
I simply do not believe people will sit around and watch TV all day if they are in good health and aren't required to work all the time for security. Or if they do then that's their business, I'd rather try to inspire them to do other things than force them to by withholding food and shelter.
Let people be people and learn what makes their human life meaningful to them rather than trying to starve them into action that you consider productive.
If everyone gets free money the optimal move as an individual is to speculate on assets because everyone else will be. The financial rewards from gambling will be higher than working with much, much less effort.
I don’t think many people will find meaning in that world.
If everyone gets the relief of knowing they are free to pursue what they like without risk of starving, I imagine it'd be way easier to find meaning in the world than it is now.
Housing is an asset that must be "gambled" in order to live securely and control your residence. I agree that is horribly broken, but everyone deserves a chance to buy assets without my permission.
I also argue that currently poor people under less financial stress will be more able to avoid getting fleeced, and that arguably many are already better at it than plenty of people with inherited wealth.
As a concrete example, mortgage rates being higher for poor people than rich people is already abusive.
Because they're generally things that don't require extensive training/exceptional skills/abilities to do, hence there lots of possible candidates to take on such jobs. I wonder what a world where there's billions of us with no job options other than the few remaining disgusting/dangerous jobs that automation can't yet handle will look like...
It will depend on who owns the machines that do the work.
It's not comfortable to think about, but I think it's silly to ignore completely. I've worried about it a lot and am at peace with it, for what it is worth.
If there's a strong safety net and regulations on corporations
No matter who owns the machines that produce things people need, people are able to live comfortably. In that scenario, the world looks like one where those undesirable jobs pay exceptionally well, gain increased respect, and improved working conditions until they're desirable -- because starvation and housing is no longer under immediate threat of being withheld. I don't hate that world, it seems frankly more fair. I think we can agree that more rational decisions are likely to be better, and that forcing people to make decisions that are only rational to them under threat of food and shelter is bad.
It's not like my friends and I in middle school loved doing engineering because we saw dollar signs. We did it because we had a knack for it and liked doing it with no ulterior motive. Forcing people who weren't interested in engineering to be engineers has honestly just never seemed like it worked that great. Give kids opportunities to discover that they find engineering fun instead... there are other means to get to a good place without the threat of food, health, and housing. Much of it education.
But maybe for me, meaningful means going and helping with my friends projects until I'm inspired to make some kind of art or work on a project to make a new idea. Who knows, being productive financially is just not necessarily always what will give me a meaningful life, and we only get one. Lots of things that are meaningful to me aren't productive financially.
If there's not a strong safety net
God help us all. If you don't own the increasingly small number of things that do an increasingly large fraction of all production you are way, way, way more screwed.
"Class bias" is a really weird word to use here to talk about that. It's class bias to assume that blue-collar workers aren't intrinsically lazy and that they might find meaningful activities to do if they had the time/energy to do so?
This is the first time I've ever seen "people need work for meaning, and they literally don't have the inclination/drive to find meaning in their lives unless they're forced to work under the threat of losing their livihoods" represented as solidarity with the working class. I don't think most people would consider that perspective to be synonymous with class consciousness.
I think it's coming one way or another.
For an increasing number of us, the costs of automation will be lower than the cost of living. It will happen quickly. We absolutely need a serious safety net or it will be chaos.
And we need to discover another way to find meaning in what we do, or else it will be a mental health catastrophe.
I have thought on this long and hard and am confident I can find meaning in my life even if a computer can do what I enjoy more productively. It will take getting used to. It won't be comfortable. It is necessary.
It will be very bad if only a tiny fraction of people have financial security.
You want to see what people get up to when they have endless free time, just see what idle young men get up to.
Adding on what the sibling comment said, meaning and fulfillment aren't just about the work one does, its about the social role that work facilitates. You may hate your job yet derive meaning from being a provider, from being the man of the family, being a hard worker, and so on. We're already in the process of destroying social connections with ones community and we're seeing a widespread crisis of loneliness as a result. Take away the meaning that work provides (regardless of job) and you basically destroy whats left of meaning in a good portion of people's lives.
Again, I want to remind the context of this: the context is that you're saying we need to force people to work under the threat of losing their livelihood or they can't be fulfilled.
And you're phrasing this as if I'm coming in and colonizing blue-collar workers or pushing my ideals on them. I don't think "benevolence" is the right word to use here, I just don't think there's anything noble about forcing people to work and saying that it's for their own good. It's an interesting turn of phrase to write about this like it's a "culture" when -- again -- the conversation is about whether or not people in blue-collar positions are too lazy and unmotivated to find meaning unless they're forced to work.
I just... it's wild to hear that phrased using the terms you're using. And I wonder if those blue-collar workers would agree that guaranteed income would be "taking away" their purposes, because most of the blue-collar workers I know are much more engaged in social institutions than the white-collar workers around them, and are therefore probably more prepared to find meaning within their communities and families outside of work than the average programmer on HN is.
> You want to see what people get up to when they have endless free time, just see what idle young men get up to.
This is me imposing my culture on other people? Pointing out that you're basically comparing blue-collar workers to lazy youth? Come on.
We derive tremendous value from blue-collar workers that hold up white-collar jobs and allow society to continue to function, even though they're often paid significantly less than us for what is arguably more important work. The least we can do is not pretend that this arrangement is somehow created for their benefit. This has all the energy of the proletariat complaining that the rabble can't take care of themselves and how the actually offensive thing is suggesting that they can.
If only HN could get out of its bubble and empathize more with the average worker, then it would realize that the average worker is lazy and unmotivated and needs to be managed /s
That's one (bad) way to frame the context of the conversation. The better way is that the need to work is intrinsic to our psyche and core to our self-worth, but the ability to self-actualize is not. The need to constantly work has been a steady feature of our environment ever since we left the trees. Self-actualization, on the other hand, has not historically been a part of this. Meaning in human lives has largely been external, deriving from one's place in the social hierarchy. And work was a key facilitator in securing ones social status.
It should be a given that drastically changing the environment away from the historical baseline will have serious psychological ramifications. The progress of technology has had strong impact, but the social environment overlaid on the technological milieu has largely remained constant. So people got by mostly just fine. The internet has changed this calculus and we've seen widespread psychological damage as a result. AI stands to explosively accelerate this transformation.
What I am asking is whether people as a whole will be better off without necessary work being a driving force in their lives. People like you take it as axiomatic that a post-work society will be better, and offer misplaced moralistic arguments in favor of it. All I am saying is that its absolutely not axiomatic and should be considered directly on its merits and demerits. We've already seen many of the problems I'm talking about materialize.
>And I wonder if those blue-collar workers would agree that guaranteed income would be "taking away" their purposes
For gods sakes, this has nothing to do with the blue collar, white collar division. It's a division between the self-actualizers and non-self-actualizers. I used "class" as a generic grouping term. Although I expect the non-self-actualizers to be overrepresented among blue collar workers. That is, people who don't have the skill or the interest to engage in intellectual pursuits, but just want to make an honest living and take pride in their work.
>The least we can do is not pretend that this arrangement is somehow created for their benefit.
That's obviously not what I'm doing. Spare me these silly moralistic arguments. We need to be willing to discuss this issue as plainly as we can, not be hamstrung by misplaced political correctness.
Is it actually a bad way to frame the context? Are you not saying that people need to be forced to work for their own benefit under the threat of losing their income? What you're saying is:
> What I am asking is whether people as a whole will be better off without necessary work being a driving force in their lives.
So... yeah, you're saying that people will be worse-off without an external force making them work, and it's good for them that they're forced to work. I think my phrasing is entirely accurate here. Losing the income requirement to work is the part you're concerned about, because stuff like UBI only gets rid of the requirement to work for income, it doesn't get rid of any social status that would be associated with work.
You're worried about people not needing to work for their financial security, and you're saying it's bad for them if they don't have a requirement to work for their financial security.
> although I expect the non-self-actualizers to be overrepresented among blue collar workers. That is, people who don't have the skill or the interest to engage in intellectual pursuits, but just want to make an honest living and take pride in their work.
You keep phrasing this like it's a compliment, but being able to make an honest living and being able to take pride in one's work has nothing to do with one's ability to self actualize. I'd push back again on this characterization -- the "non-self-actualizers" I know that make an honest living tend to be very involved in their communities. They go to church, they have social connections, they form meaningful relationships, they marry and have kids. They actually do stuff outside of work.
Self-actualization is not at all the same thing as whether or not you like academic pursuits.
----
I don't know whether or not a post-work society will have its own challenges or if it will be better, and I don't know if it's feasible to build one in the first place. I don't even know that people should be worried about GPT at all, I'm not sure it actually is going to take everyone's jobs. I don't think we're particularly close to a post-work-society, and I think programs like UBI are severely under-studied for the amount of praise they get.
But I do know that we're not doing people a favor by threatening them with financial destitution if they don't work.
And call that moralizing if you want, I'm fine with that. Call it politically correct, call it denying reality, whatever. But don't pretend that it's less empathetic to suggest that someone who doesn't go to college or learn to program isn't going to be intrinsically worse at self-actualization than everyone else. Don't phrase that like it's some kind of solidarity to call people unmotivated.
Yes, people struggle with deriving meaning outside of work, but that does not fit neatly into any singular social category, and it has a lot more to do with one's relationship with one's community and integration into non-work social institutions than it has to do with whether or not someone went to college.
Presumably you would take an antivaxxer to be dishonest by framing a vaccine mandate as "forcibly injecting me with chemicals against my will". This is no different. Stripping context alters the meaning and is dishonest. Notice how you defend this framing instead of just accepting my original words. It's clearly intended to give your argument some rhetorical benefit without needing to be explicit. This is a dishonest debate tactic.
One important difference is that no one is forcing anyone to work, that is simply the natural state of existence. There is freedom in battling against nature's cruelty. This is not equal to being forced to work at the end of a whip. Your phrasing doesn't distinguish between the two, mine does.
>You're worried about people not needing to work for their financial security, and you're saying it's bad for them if they don't have a requirement to work for their financial security.
I'll accept this phrasing. But notice it is importantly different than "being forced to work".
>You keep phrasing this like it's a compliment
I'm not ascribing any valence in my statements. I am being as neutral and non-judgmental as possible.
> but being able to make an honest living and being able to take pride in one's work has nothing to do with one's ability to self actualize.
Didn't say it did. Self-actualization is the process by which one derives meaning outside of their work/career. The point was that people who "just want to make an honest living" are generally not the self-actualizers.
>the "non-self-actualizers" I know that make an honest living tend to be very involved in their communities.
I agree. But the trends against church-going and community participation are steady. There is every reason to think those connections will eventually be severed for the working class folks as well.
>Self-actualization is not at all the same thing as whether or not you like academic pursuits.
Obviously. But academic pursuits are one avenue for self-actualization that the tech-class points to as ways people will fill the meaning gap in the future. The point is that this avenue is only viable for a relatively small percentage.
>Don't phrase that like it's some kind of solidarity to call people unmotivated.
That's just projection if anything. I'm interested in describing the world as it actually is so we can have an honest discussion about how not to drive society off a cliff. For some reason its damn near impossible to have honest discussions these days.
A mandated vaccine means that some people are going to get injected with a chemical against their will, yes. We can quibble over the tone, but it is correctly phrased.
> One important difference is that no one is forcing anyone to work, that is simply the natural state of existence.
If you're actively opposed to efforts to change, then that's a very different situation. The context of this conversation is an author saying they wish GPT didn't exist, because they see GPT automating work as a real possibility.
If someone is opposing an attempt to transition to a post-work society, that is not just being in touch with the natural order -- it is an attempt to keep the natural order as it is. So yeah, I would classify that as playing an active role in forcing people to work. Again, I think that's just an accurate description of the position you're espousing; you might not like the tone, but you are encouraging us not to do anything about that natural state.
> The point was that people who "just want to make an honest living" are generally not the self-actualizers.
I disagree with this entirely. Most "down-to-earth" people I know are more engaged in fulfilling activities outside of work than academics are and have stronger connections to their communities in my experience. I don't think there are any stats to back up the idea that working-class/blue-collar workers are less positioned than tech workers to find meaning outside of work.
I don't just think that it's vaguely insulting to characterize blue-collar workers as if they're somehow more prone to being unable to self-actualize, a process that has nothing to do with one's education level -- I think if anything it might be the opposite. Silicon Valley is rife with people talking about how their companies and achievements define them, and is rife with people asking workers to "put in the grind" and "push through" to make something amazing. And I have never heard a blue-collar worker tell me that their identity and value as a person is based on their job as a sanitation worker.
> But the trends against church-going and community participation are steady.
This is particularly weird to hear, because trends against community participation have a great deal to do with the fact that our society increasingly pressures people to replace those institutions with jobs. There is a strong push to have your friends be your work friends, to have your meaning be what you do in your job.
And the increased drive towards validating ones identity through one's job inherently encourages people to disregard other social institutions or non-economic relationships that don't fit into that framework.
----
> For some reason its damn near impossible to have honest discussions these days.
This conversation has moved from:
> those from the (lets call it) "productive" class are absolutely convinced everyone is like them and if only given the opportunity they would be just as productive and fulfilled as they are. Some of us know better.
to
> What's so insidious about this thinking is that its framed as benevolence. But the mistake is thinking that your way is intrinsically more valuable and so it must be a disparagement to assume that not everyone can reach the intrinsic good that you have reached.
to
> You want to see what people get up to when they have endless free time, just see what idle young men get up to.
to finally
> I'm not ascribing any valence in my statements. I am being as neutral and non-judgmental as possible.
This is some revisionism.
We've wasted enough time debating semantics.
>I disagree with this entirely. Most "down-to-earth" people I know are more engaged in fulfilling activities outside of work than academics are and have stronger connections to their communities in my experience.
This may be true; I have no horse in this particular race. The substantive issue isn't which class is more represented among the non-self-actualizers, but what proportion of people fall into this category and what a post-work society looks like for them. I don't know how we ended up spending so much time on the tangential point of who are the non-self-actualizers.
>This is particularly weird to hear, because trends against community participation have a great deal to do with the fact that our society increasingly pressures people to replace those institutions with jobs. There is a strong push to have your friends be your work friends, to have your meaning be what you do in your job.
I'm not sure I understand what this means, but this doesn't sound right. The secularization of society isn't due to work pressure, nor is the disconnection from your local community. The latter is due to the pressures and competition of the modern world, the fact that people move frequently and so do not have "roots" in their local community, multiculturalism that creates barriers between people geographically close people, and so on.
>And the increased drive towards validating ones identity through one's job inherently encourages people to disregard other social institutions or non-economic relationships that don't fit into that framework.
Similarly, I'm not sure this gets the cause and effect correct. We increasingly validate ourselves through our jobs because of the loss of other means of validation.
>This is some revisionism.
Perhaps if you were more interested in understanding my points than finding things to nitpick, you would recognize that my point about being non-judgmental was towards my characterization of the self-actualizers and non-self-actualizers, and how the working class fits in. You gave my claims a moral prognosis, not me. I only defended against unproductive valence claims.
Where do those competitions and pressures come from? If someone feels a strong pressure to make a career for themselves, to get out of their hometown -- that doesn't read to you as being something that's related to the status we've placed on career and work?
What do the stats say about why people typically move away from their hometown communities? I'm going to guess that job opportunities will be a pretty large proportion of answers in any survey about that.
> multiculturalism that creates barriers between people geographically close people
Hm.
> We increasingly validate ourselves through our jobs because of the loss of other means of validation.
I disagree, but sure. It's hard to clearly establish cause and effect when looking at correlations, and there are multiple ways to read the correlation between a decline in social institutions and an increase in people using work to self-actualize. I'll grant that.
----
> You gave my claims a moral prognosis, not me. I only defended against unproductive valence claims.
You very literally, directly compared people who have trouble finding meaning outside of work to idle children.
/s
Wait, no actually from what I've seen gpt4 might be more empathetic to the idea that people deserve to find their own meaning in life without their betters giving them a purpose.
"Idle young men", oof. So, so patronizing, like people who think fast food jobs are only for high school kids.
I swear, it's like nobody here actually worked hard for any extended period in their life..
Agreed. I just spent a week volunteering. (At the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, repairing machines.) It actually cost me money to do, but it was incredibly satisfying to just go and do a concrete thing that made the world better and was immediately beneficial to people. Especially in the company of other good people doing the same.
But I think a lot of people have had only terrible jobs (valuable work in inhumane conditions) or bullshit jobs (meaningless work in whatever conditions), so I get how so many people have been conditioned out of seeing the personal, emotional, very human value in work.
Is this really true? It's absolutely not a personal problem for me. I haven't worried about boredom or lack of purpose in decades. My worry is that I'd need a hundred lifetimes to give proper attention to everything I find interesting or meaningful, and the problem gets worse the older I get, the more I learn, the more I find interesting.
There are a huge number of things people can do to meaningfully make the world a better place outside of traditional jobs. And a non-trivial number of people work at jobs that aren't aligned with producing value or helping people in the first place.
Value on the market in specific is not the be-all end-all measure of whether work can be personally fulfilling and validating. A market job can be meaningful, yes. But it's not the entire category. If I never had to work for income I would still "work", but what I worked on would be very different and would probably focus a lot more on non-scalable non-commercial smaller projects and volunteering.
There are things that are valuable and meaningful to do that don't involve working specifically for a company and don't involve looking at that work primarily through the lens of "how can I make money off of this?"
What if nobody actually wants your “help”? What if your labor is not only worthless in the job market, but also in general, where people prefer assistance from AI instead of from a live human person? What if no matter what you do, some AI does it better? How will humanity find our own value and meaning when that happens?
But regardless, people throughout history have found happiness and meaning in their life completely separately from what they did to put food on the table.
But what I would question if you want to get a little existential -- do people value being helpful or do they value feeling helpful, because those are two different things. And I think that if the idea of "people need help and what if an AI can help them better than I can" is actually terrifying to people, that should maybe prompt a small amount of reflection about our motivations for helping others.
But the shorter answer is that there is just so much stuff to do in the world right now.
> Don't worry about it, there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done
> pretty far off
> chess grandmasters are ok
We are on an exponential curve of being able to create agents on demand that can essentially act in human ways, at least digitally/online. If you're working on a computer (aka all white collar jobs or anything that can be done remotely), it will soon enough be trivial to create an agent and task it with "Unqueue tasks from the backlog and implement fixes in the codebase. Ask questions if you need help." and it will do it. And you can create as many of these agents as you like.
As many as you like! On demand! How the hell are humans supposed to compete with that?
If the incentive is "here is basic income, you can afford flat on outskirts of the town or in some small town and basic necessities", there is still plenty motivation to do better and get better stuff (whether just for living, or for your hoobbies or interest), just not a pressure of taking first job you can find just to afford being alive.
So average person have option of just going on 6 month hiatus to learn some life skill, or artist have time to develop their skill enough to make art or music that gets enough interest to make it into income.
That's bleak af, how old are you ? where do you live ? what do you do ? do you have a family ? do you have friends ? hobbies ?
I can guarantee you the vast majority of min wage workers would absolutely find a meaning in things other than flipping burgers or triaging the shit people buy on Amazon
#1 There will always be jobs requiring humans - jobs that require human interaction. The supply will be much smaller, but so will be the demand.
#2 By the time AI replaces all jobs, we will most likely have a very realistic VR with multiplayer capabilities. I think that many people will live adventures in such world and spend most of their waking hours in it. Metaverse sucks but it's only because it's so artificial. If you could have tech that could integrate with your senses directly, giving experiences on par with the sharpest lucid dream... that's going to be much different and for better or worse, a lot of people will get sucked into it. Of course, it's going suck - life is about yin-yang, endless pleasure is not good. People who will end up spending the majority of their time in such VR will not be unlike drug addicts, unless they will also be doing activities that require mental & "physical" engagement (I think one of the coolest thing that could arise out of it are new sports that would not be possible in the real world), however, that yin-yang balance would be hard to achieve when there's no evolutionary pressure combined with overabundance of simple pleasure that's just available all the time.
#3 Walking the path to mastery in some pursuit - i.e. artistic, athletic, a craft. There's pure joy in just getting better at something and enjoying every day of practice and most importantly - feeling challenged which is a primal need. It may be competitive as heck to get some recognition or play in the big leagues (which would be more like #1), but that would be just a bonus from that perspective.
If AI leaves us nothing to do, then #3 will always be available. AI will not take away our own engagement but engagement requires effort and so, I would bet that a significant majority will overindulge in #2 to their unconscious doom - I guess it will still be a pretty cool experience though and it's not like those people will not have a choice to get out.
People who simply have enough wealth to not have to work are on a hedonistic treadmill most of the time
I don't understand what you're referring to. Where was your money going? I understand you still have expenses when you aren't working, but the expenses don't scale up on their own.
I think this is plain wrong. There are plenty of pursuits that are “work” on the mental or physical side, but do not produce economic value. Developing artistry by mastering a medium or an instrument, climbing mountains, running ultra marathons, tending to a garden or bonsai, modifying a vehicle… These are things could produce economic or social credit, but are largely solo “work” which can be (and often is) self satisfying without external motivation.
People are very attached to the idea that humans don't want to master things unless they're the best at them, and I feel like that philosophy was pretty solidly disproved right about the time that video games were invented. People master skills in non-competitive, solo settings.
Learning a skill can be inherently satisfying on its own. Personal development is satisfying regardless of where the people around you are. Or at least, it should be.
And it's also kind of a bad approach to value as well -- what I've found is that you can actually be pretty average at things and still provide a lot of value to the people around you, because of ignoring economies of scale and because of how much stuff there is to do in the world to begin with.
There are software niches that are underserved where genuinely earnest programmers who look to help could do tremendous good even if they're kind of average/bad programmers. In fact, as one example that's close to HN, that's how the majority of Open Source programming happens. Open Source is not a meritocracy, it's a Do-ocracy, and a ton of the most valuable stuff is built by average programmers who look at underserved niches and say, "but what if there was a non-predatory solution for them?"
A lot of what makes a good Open Source solution is just that it was built by someone who cares and who isn't trying to maneuver you into a predatory relationship. And sometimes it turns out that there are only a few people available in a niche that have both the resources to do that and the inclination. So they're not competing with anyone, they're just the people who happened to be available and willing to do the work.
But that doesn't mean it'll be monetizable in the traditional sense, and it doesn't mean that traditional employment is the only place to get that value. Many of the things you're talking about aren't representable in dollar form, and it's not clear to me how decoupling income from traditional jobs would mean that those activities would stop being meaningful. Certainly, a lot of those activities are already activities that you can't really make money off of (or at least the vast majority of people engaged in those activities can't).
The "monetizable" activities you're talking about here under your definition will still exist in a theoretical world where AI takes over traditional employment. Separating "making a living" from "having a traditional job" wouldn't get rid of any of the social monetization you describe.
This is kind of a side note, but have you never learned an ability or tried to master a skill in secret? There's nothing wrong with being motivated by social capital, but if you extrapolate out from that to assume everyone is primarily motivated that way, you might be universalizing a personal trait that isn't really universal.
There are a lot of things I practice and do alone that never get exchanged for social capital: drawing, I play single-player games, I cook. These are activities where I either master a skill on my own (sometimes purely for the intrinsic motivation of mastering it even though it produces no value outside of that), or because (in the case of things like food/personal-programming/etc) because it produces "value" for myself that isn't exchanged with anyone else.
I'm not saying community and social capital doesn't exist, but if you are defining value purely in a transactional sense, you are missing out on a lot of human motivation. People do things alone without ever entering into a community around those activities or showing the results to anyone else.
Of course! I'm not saying that "everything is for sale" or we always need to contribute to a society. But if you don't do it you may quickly find that your life is boring and you need to share with somebody. Obviously all people are different, some need (or can bear) more solitude, some hate it, but on average we are social animals and it's inside us. Even when you cook for yourself, aren't you ever discussing it with somebody? Hell, why am I typing all this? It has no transactional value for me, none whatsoever, in fact I wasted half of my Saturday :) I could have just created my theories in secret and enjoyed them, but for some reason I need to post here. Maybe because I want to know what other people think, what if I'm dead wrong with my theories? So there is a transactional value even in these posts as I learn something new which may help me later :) No, "later" is not a conscious reason why I'm doing it, it's a subconscious thing, our internal program.
Very rarely? I cook so that I can make food that tastes better to me, because I'm eating it. If every other human being on the planet was dead, I would still be doing it.
Humans are absolutely social animals, but we're not only social animals, and I think it's a mistake to try and compress every human motivation into how it benefits social interactions. Even in larger tasks, there is something intrinsically kind of satisfying about doing something for yourself even if it's fully private. Genuinely, I don't know how to explain the inherent pleasure of researching a useless topic or getting lost in an activity/task that's not going to be shared. I don't think that's something that can be reduced to "well, maybe you subconsciously think it will help you in a future transaction."
I'm getting value out of cooking, sure, but that value isn't really something that can be described in a transactional form or even as prep for future transactions or competitions. Cooking doesn't make me better in other social situations. It doesn't really give me transferable skills. I don't really cook for other people (my tastes are very different from them and I usually doubt they'd like what I cook anyway). I'm not trying to make myself more attractive to other people, I'm not prepping myself for a future competition. I don't think that cooking is going to be suddenly useful in the future in a social situation.
I just want the food to taste good because I eat it.
I think with any of these activities you're talking about, ask yourself, "would someone still do this if every other human being on the planet was dead?" And if the answer with any of those meaningful activities is 'yes', then that suggests that for some people there's something deeper or more instinctual going on there beyond just a subconscious adherence to social systems. There's a lot of stuff that I do that I would still do even if I was never going to interact with another human being for the rest of my life.
I can't speak for anyone else, but that may be more common than you realize? You can define value however you want, but I do think that you're going to subtly miss out on intrinsic motivations if you try to fit all of them into an extrinsic lens. You can theorize that people anonymously donate to charities or build useful things always because there is some kind of transaction at play there or preparation for a future transaction (and some people are motivated mostly by that stuff, which is fine), but universalizing that is not going to give you a good predictive model for how everyone is going to act in the future.
I disagree with this entirely. If this was true, the main question we would ask in a business is whether or not the output was useful. We don't ask that, we ask if it's "sustainable", "profitable", etc... We ask what the moat is around it.
There are many useful things you can do that you won't be able to make money off of. I don't think it's uncommon either. Business is a great way of extracting value, I like business as a value extractor. But it's a specific way of extracting value. There are lots of things that are valuable that don't happen because it's not clear how they would be profitable.
I mean, the simplest example here is you can build things for people who don't have money. It's not the only example, but it's a pretty obvious one. And you are not going to make a lot of money doing that unless you build a predatory or exploitative business.
> or somebody else will "make money off of this" using what you have created
I will also point out that if other people making money off of the things you do is a turn-off, it's not clear to me what value you think you're creating. I would argue that "meaningful work" very often benefits other people, that's... that's the point. If you're not giving people more value than you're taking from them, you probably aren't doing useful work. Are you arguing that it's less valuable if people are extracting extra value from the things we do?
That being said:
> In a balanced system you are never "taking more than giving" or vice versa, because, as you know, price is a result of supply/demand.
Literally all of economic development and growth is predicated on the idea that this is not true. If work was actually zero-sum and all of the transactions gave you the exact value that you sold, there would be no point in forming a society around this.
Society works because combined labor produces more value than is put into the process. That has always been the case. You get more food out of farming than you put into it, otherwise it wouldn't be worthwhile to farm.
> That means those who make food will give it to you for free, which means they won't get tools, which in turn means they won't be able to make that food.
Also, the only reason we're having this conversation is because the "tools" that are being made will (very theoretically) be made for practically free by AI.
We're not talking about a world where the tools stop existing. This entire conversation started with someone asking "but what if there's no more need for humans to make the tools?"
I don't know, I think it's pretty important to a conversation about automating jobs that we not treat jobs as if they're an optimized equivalent exchange. The whole premise there is that the machines are going to start producing a lot of value without any human input. If it happens, it's not going to be equivalent exchange.
If we're not talking about added value, then there's nothing to worry about because then the machines can't automate the jobs, because that would be added value.
> if your work has no value, there is no breakfast to exchange it for
My point more specifically here is that there's a lot of value in the world that can't be exchanged for breakfast, something that (as far as I can tell from your other comments on this thread) you actually agree with, right? There's value that exists outside of traditionally monetarily compensated jobs.
In a (again, entirely theoretical) world where AI gets rid of the need to earn your breakfast, that doesn't mean there's not going to be anything of value to do anymore and that everyone's life is going to be meaningless.
Money is simply a universal equivalent of that value, nothing more. So if you give me a breakfast for help with unloading your truck, it's still an exchange, and my work's value is equal to "one breakfast" even no money was involved.
AI is just a nail gun, there still needs to be somebody who trains/operates it (like with ChatGPT) and who will ask for something in exchange. It may eliminate some jobs (happened before), but it will create others because human society is not only about food (not sure ChatGPT can help here though), but about interactions which are not going to be automated by ChatGPT (think of sex, power).
I feel like your definition of value is jumping around quite a bit. In another comment you described "value" as essentially any kind of social capital or personal reward. Now it's explicitly transactional?
In any case, this is a very narrow definition of value that I don't think matches up with what most people who worry about automation are talking about. It's certainly not what the original thread was talking about when it worried about people without jobs not being able to find meaning in work. What most people think of as useful or meaningful purpose in their lives does not strictly map to transactional value.
> AI is just a nail gun, there still needs to be somebody who trains/operates it (like with ChatGPT) and who will ask for something in exchange.
Then there is no problem! This isn't an issue if AI isn't going to take jobs away.
People on top of the company don't make anything but earn more than anyone that does, Not like 2x more or 5x more but 10-1000x more. There is no person on earth that produces million of value a month in actual improvement of society, aside maybe a world leader that stops a wary from happening. Not a man in widget company making beepy boxes that spends time on meetings about barely related to that. And then neither them or corporation gets taxes nowhere close to what the normal employee is, so the corporate wealth doesn't even benefit the country it is in.
The whole problem is that any improvement in production is only tangentially passed to society and mostly exploited to make few wealthy
How did you figure that? Corporate tax rate in the US is 21% which is roughly equivalent to an effective tax for a single filer with about $180K in income. Can't say we are talking about "normal employee" here. Besides if you are talking about dividends (which are distributed _after_ 21%), there is a dividend tax on top of that, which, depending on your share class, can be the same as a normal tax rate. So yeah, nowhere close, usually +21% for the preferred stock.
Also don't fall to that communist idea. I grew up in the USSR where we had a "fair" distribution (no, it wasn't fair) -- trust me, you don't want to live in that world. There were some upsides, but still, and it didn't end up well.
To be fair, we do ask that: if you have no revenue, then you don't have a business, because the output is not useful. An output can be both useful and not sustainable. Giving away $100 to everyone that high fives you is not sustainable, for example, even though it's very useful to the recipient. It's certainly not profitable.
I'm having some trouble reconciling this with the rest of your comment. You go on to describe an output (giving money away) that is useful but provides no revenue.
I would agree that a useless product will very often have a hard time generating revenue, but I would not say that a lack of revenue is a strong signal that an organization is not producing useful output. I mean, the software industry is filled with examples of projects that are wildly useful to everyone but are perpetually underfunded and produce very little money for the people working on them.
I would definitely agree with the truism that "if you have no revenue then you don't have a business", but it's just not clear to me where the "because the output is not useful" addition to that truism is coming from.
The comment I was replying to argued that we were talking about abolishing all meaningful human activity, and I pointed out that "meaningful human activity" and "gainful economic employment" are not the exact same category.
I don't really think that warrants having an extended debate about whether or not decoupling income from "work" is fair or not. And it's kind of a weird sequitur anyway, because all of the jobs you're talking about are paid noticeably less than white-collar jobs even though they are arguably way more essential than any of the programming work that we do. So for this to suddenly be a conversation about fairness... I mean, what conversation do you want to have, do you want to have a conversation about AI or about the entire history of wages and about how human beings value blue-collar jobs?
It's not a problem, it's just... people read way too much into comments like this. I'm just pointing out that "meaningful work" can happen outside of an economy, something that I think is a pretty obvious, uncontroversial point to state.
If quitting a job leaves you with no apparent valuable work to do in your life, that's probably a sign of being only engaged with the world through your job. There are never-ending lists of useful things to for family, for friends, for groups/organizations/churches you're part of, for the neighborhood you live in... and that's before even thinking about personal projects that are useful to yourself.
Sorry, I really bristled at this comment. People who are engaged in the world and have accepted responsibility in areas that aren't solely their job don't have to summon valuable ideas and tasks from the ether. You won't find the bottom of the to-do list. Not bullshitting.
I would prefer if you expressed your disagreement without denigrating GP like this.
This doesn't just apply to software development. There are a lot of garbage jobs, dead end positions, where the people are effectively not doing anything. That is a weight on our economy but we can't just cut them out. What would those people do if they didn't have to waste so much of their time to live? Sure there are going to be people that go all in on becoming puddles on the couch, but I'd argue more people have passions they would actually have the energy to pursue.
People could spend more time with their families without being stressed out and burned out by everything else in the world. I'd argue that would most likely lead to healthier childhoods for kids, likely with better supplemental education as well leading to a smarter society in the long run.
People get tired of partying, and the people that don't make good examples for the next generation of what not to do. You can see that in our current society as the younger generation is drinking significantly less and doing fewer drugs to the point major alcohol manufacturers are concerned about their bottom lines.
There will always be degenerates, but people want the fulfillment that comes with actually doing things like you said. They will find that one way or another.
They are also functionally in a prison...
Yes, there is a tremendous amount of waste in the global economy, but if we want to improve quality of life then we should focus on the mechanisms which cause that waste in the first place (e.g. targeting GDP growth.) If we solved those excesses (a very tall order), then why would it be fair for one group to be over-consume at the cost of another groups over-production?
My hypothesis is your drive to work is a product of your education and environmental conditions. When education and environmental conditions are different, you may not have that drive.
When almost no one had to work economics became ridiculous, people were paying $40 for a $15 meal to be delivered to them, fiscal policy became clinically insane, tech stocks minted a new bubble. Are you proposing that bubble should be more permanent? The real economics of 'figure it out or lose your lunch' is much better policing than 'figure it out or go back to UBI'.
Burning an entire generation so the next one will be better isn't good policy.
This holds if the way you enjoy life is working. Your comment isn't at all at odds with the GP's, yet it calls theirs naive.
You think people get meaning and fulfilment from flipping burgers at McDonalds ? Talk about naive. Frankly, it's quite elitist to assume that a majority of people are performing meaningful and fulfilling jobs, a lot of people do jobs they absolutely hate.
> Not working is a sucking void of boredom, nihilism, hedonism, and despair
You're presenting a false dichotomy. I'm not talking about not doing any work, I'm talking about not a having a job. There is a huge difference between doing something because you enjoy it and it gives you meaning, and doing something because you need the money to survive.
Not having a job doesn't mean you have to sit on your ass all day, it means that you get to decide what to do with your time. You can do any number of things that are meaningful to you. It's about having the freedom to decide how you spend your time on this earth. It's quite condescending to assume that people can't find a meaningful and fulfilling way to spend their time if there isn't someone who tells them what to do.
There are just so many jobs that need to be done and there's nobody that likes them. Who would pick the garbage up? Who would unclog the sewer? Who would drill for petrol or mine for coal? If I got my regular salary without needing to do anything, then I wouldn't go into any of these jobs for sure. Would you?
Good god, corporate America has utterly brainwashed multiple generations. You lost your creativity, your imaginations and your aspirations. Even your entrepreneurial spirit.
"Here's a machine which can automate the intellectual labor of multiple professions, enabling it to simply execute on ideas you come up with." and the only thing any of you can think of is "but would I do with all this free time if I wasn't desperately struggling for food and shelter?"
the work that gives me most meaning, fulfillment, and contentment in working doesn't pay enough for me to make a living from it.
wish i could get paid an income so i could do that "work".
That’s the point. Working for money is only tangentially related to purpose insofar as your job matches your particular style of “purpose”. If you are free, truly free, would you work in some soulless corporate?
(Early) retirement is an adjustment. It takes time to find them, but there are alternative ways of finding fulfillment and I’m happy to have them. N=1 but my revealed preference seems to be that yes, being financially secure is good, it reduces working, and it’s possible to find better alternatives.
Only because it’s the only thing they know. If “work” wasn’t a constant in human life you’d see people adapt to finding meaning and fulfillment in something else.
> Many people claim their lives would be better if they never had to work, but they are bullshitting themselves with childhood naivete. Not working is a sucking void of boredom, nihilism, hedonism, and despair
I’ve taken multiple year hiatuses from work (living very cheaply) and they are the best years of my life. Wake up, go for a run/walk, go to the gym, read a book, go to the coffeeshop, make lunch, go to the movies, go on dates, use the internet. Absolutely incredible.
How many people want to experiment and try new ideas but are stopped by economic insecurity? (In arts, crafts, engineering, and science)
How much _very valuable_ non-paid work doesn't get done because no one is paying for that? (Such as maintenance, community building, teaching, etc)
And, as others have mentioned, not working for living at a subsistence level does not mean not doing rewarding and value-producing things. Quite the contrary.
Also apart from the “real” disabled, a lot of people are just disabled enough mentally or physically to be deemed fit for Jobs with a capital j but are miserable.
Sure they do. But "value" is not simple one dimensional "I get money for food and rent".
If value of your work is just money, you have to mostly do the things that work toward money
Not making other people's life better or more interesting. Not something that you find fulfilling. But things that make money first, are any of the above second.
Having the basics (let's say "food, money, internet + some spare change to get what you need want") allows individual to pursue things that are risky and might not be profitable in the end without stress of not being able to pay rent next month. You can be a musician that "only" have 10k listeners. You can make niche little gadget that earns maybe $500 a month in sales but enriches other people's lives.
And now corporations would have to offer something substantial (whether in term of being interesting, or profitable enough) to find someone to hire. Less "bullshit jobs", or soul-crushing work that barely affords you a living just because your skills don't align with what is profitable.
> Many people claim their lives would be better if they never had to work, but they are bullshitting themselves with childhood naivete.
Did you never had an interesting hobby in your life ? I have enough that if money was not an issue I'd keep my brain and body involved for years to come.
Yes, most people find meaning in some kind of work. That doesn't imply that having a boss and worrying about paying your bills is more meaningful than working without a boss and without worries.
You can work without having a job, all day everyday
How many in this world simply have not had the chance to educate them selves, been lucky with timing or knowing the right people to get the nice jobs where they are listened to and even looked up to?
Where they not only get a salary where they can survive off it without working a second or third job, but are also able to save up some buffer.
That they might actually afford to get out from under landloards that continuously increase their rents, and buy a property of their own.
And so on and so forth.
Your comment drips ignorance on the daily hardships huge swaths of the human population on this planet (including a large group in the rich western world as well) have to go through every day, and the propable relative luxury of your situation compared to theirs.
The opposite, actually. Most people, for whom a reasonable fulfilling job exists, do not have the opportunity to work such a job. AI does not promise to increase the availability of fulfilling and contentful jobs, meanwhile the cost of living will continue to rise with no end in site while wage stagnation continues another decade.
The talking computers will rapidly become perfect therapists and perfect salesmen. They can talk us "down off the ledge".
Sure, but that's a separate problem, eh?
We split the atom and built both bombs and power plants, it's a choice we have to make: which to deploy?
We have (or are about to have) the technology to cure psychological and emotional issues at scale. (A good therapist today runs about (I don't know?) $150/hour? Way out of reach for most of us without insurance or subsidy or something, eh? What if that was e.g. $0.0000015/hour?)
The lockdowns, at least in the U.S., caused people to improve themselves surely - but they then had no idea how to fill their time and binge watched TV, watched Tik Tok, etc.
A large number of retirees find themselves in this bucket as an example - if it happens there, why would it not happen no matter the life stage?
I hope to switch you a bit from problem-finding to problem-solving mode.
You have identified some risks, great! Now let's qualify and find solutions for theses in order to move forward. For instance: - assumptions check: young people adapt quicker than older people, so the retirees may not be representative of the others life stages - solution proposal alpha1: education could teach people to look for purpose instead of teaching them a job
What are your solutions to the issues you've raised ?
The task of the corporation is to supply the above goods and services efficiently, in environmentally regenerative ways, while meeting or exceeding minimum quality standards.
- - - -
It's kind of like a new economic regime developing within the old one, the way a crystal precipitates out of a saturated solution, eh? A sort of phase change?
This is scary, some people seem to be so gleeful at the idea of AI taking over everything they’re willing to resort to force to make it happen.
No, of course not. I don't understand what you are imagining.
I'm talking about forming a non-profit mutual-benefit corporation and offering memberships which include services. Not forcing anyone to do or adopt anything.
> You don’t see a problem with forcing people to do something they don’t want?
I do see a problem with that. It's called "coercion" and I am against it in almost all of its forms. (I do recognize a pragmatic need for e.g. laws and police and the legal system, but by and large I'm in favor of freedom and self-determination for everyone.)
> This is scary, some people seem to be so gleeful at the idea of AI taking over everything they’re willing to resort to force to make it happen.
Again, I don't understand what you are imagining. I'm not sure how you got "forced adoption" from what I said, but I appreciate any feedback to improve my communications. Cheers!
> Bring this back to the real world then, how can this happen? If it's possible then someone who doesn't care about profit would create this already.
I'm doing it. I'm that "someone who doesn't care about profit". I literally went to start a normal corporation, saw this "non-profit mutual-benefit" corporate form, and realized that it aligned better with what I wanted to build, so I incorporated as that.
The idea is to acquire some land, lay in a kind of ecologically harmonious high-tech neighborhood combined with a 3D printing shop and other facilities (electric, ISP, food forest, etc.) and rent-to-own or something to members. It's a kind of economic time travel to a Star Trek-style techno-utopia (to the extent that such a thing is even possible, given human nature, eh? But that's not my problem. I'm just trying to keep from messing up the environment and/or becoming a peasant, you know?)
Check out https://www.riverbed-ranch.com/ for something like what I'm talking about (this is not my thing, but it's got some similarities.) These folks are basically treating Utah like a fresh alien planet and building a nice modern eco-friendly town out there.
People need shit to do, and as much as we lie to ourselves that everyone is a budding artist who if only freed from the bounds of work would create the worlds next masterpiece - that is just not reality. Most people would actually sit around getting high/drunk, playing video games, watching porn and being miserable.
that system was called communism, and so far, it has not had any of the success that those envisioning it had wanted.
I cannot see how ownership of the output of automation and AI could be distributed evenly. At best, the people being made obsolete would be given food stamps and the barest of life's necessities so they don't die in the streets (and even that, is getting hard as earth runs out of resources). Until the day humanity discovers how to obtain a post-scarcity society, all income must directly be linked to labour.
What are you talking about? Our economic system's very name describes who gets income without they themselves doing labor. The entire point of capitalism is that the capital-owning class gets to profit from the labor of others.
So no, we don't have all income linked to labor. The income of capitalists sure as heck isn't.
but where did the capitalists first got their capital? Why with labour of course! Their own labour, or their family's, or their grand-parent, etc.
a system that doesn't directly link labour with income is basically describing welfare (a basic income for example). The income given to someone receiving this welfare did not produce any output that counterbalances the resources they received - aka, they are a net consumer. Without post-scarcity, there cannot be many net consumers, for what they consume, must be produced somehow by another (who is not a net consumer).
It would have been more believable if Altman and co had proposed a practical income system first, started its rollout, and only then released the GPTs.
Wish granted.
You now have a system where income is only vaguely linked to labor, and a handful of people make insanely more money than anybody else despite doing the same amount of labor (or less). Income is now linked to existing wealth and personal connections much more than it is to labor.
A system where income is directly linked to labor would be a step up from what we've got now.
Didn‘t you just describe exactly what we have now?
> Didn‘t you just describe exactly what we have now?
Calibas started with the words “You now have” and proceeded with describing what we have now. Your question suggests you tried to read between the lines before reading the lines first.
For one thing, we could use all our free time however we want, including working to produce still more stuff, or just go hiking.
The real problem is how to distribute the goods and services produced - and there a UBI is probably the right answer.
Machines do all the (necessary) work, UBI ensures that everybody benefits, and humans are left to do as we please.
What's not to love?
The government is already controlled and influenced primarily by nefarious interests. I can’t even begin to imagine how nasty it gets when the entire population relies on them for mere sustenance.
But this still leaves people free to choose for themselves, without interference from the government.
Or will this result in infinite food, water, and shelter?
As humans we have not found a way to allow people not to work. Anyone not working is either living off money from their own prior work or benefitting from the work of someone else. Let's see and validate such a system before we run off eliminating jobs.
What is income? What is it used for?
Answers: it's a reward for work. And it is used as an incentive to get others to work.
Money is a proxy for resources. If you boil it down to the essentials, income is the way we allocate the resources available to us to different individuals. It is not intrinsically a reward for work. It isn't even directly linked to work anymore in our capitalist system. The people who work the hardest don't have the highest income. The way the system currently works is that those with the most resources get the most additional resources, simply because they already have a lot of them.
This is the one thing I find most strange. In some cases we pay more for higher skills that are harder to come by, but that seems far from the only thing causing this.
If there are 100 people willing to work hard, but we only need 90 of them, they will get paid little, because any of them can be easily replaced.
If there are 90 people with some rare skill, and we need 100 of them, they will get paid a lot, because any of them can easily find a new job. (In theory. In practice, the employers will take some coordinated action to prevent this.)
Ironically, doubling the productivity of the people with the rare skill could dramatically reduce their income, because now there are still 90 of them, but we only need 50.
The other factor to consider is that the nice-to-have wants from greater productivity in labor may just be required for me to accumulate more scarce resources especially as the population of the world grows. Opportunity cost eventually make me prioritize my investment elsewhere rather than adding scope as you say.
The industries where AI doesn't touch/win, or have real world scarcity constraints even in the face of AI is ironically where the power will be. Hence people saying to get into trades, and physical skilled jobs where we are still winning the arms race against AI for some time yet.
As others have pointed out, this is an incredibly naive opinion. Labor is tied to income precisely because it happened organically, not because a group of self-appointed individuals decided to develop a "system". Most attempts to develop alternative (read: non-organic or top-down) systems for organizing human societies have either failed entirely or have been short-lived.
I would go fucking insane if I didn’t have a purpose. Jobs are necessary part of life.
Such as?
I guess we'll just have to cross our fingers that Sam Altman and friends will pity us enough to give us some pocket money to survive. That's assuming the AGI created is aligned with our values.
I mean, we can keep hoping that AGI will be a good thing with zero evidence or we can take action to slow progress now so we can proceed with caution.
It's a real life prisoners dilemma, with 8 billion prisoners, and the first one to defect get to decide what the fate of the rest of humanity looks like.
Not an argument, unless you believe "we failed in the past so why bother trying now" is sound reasoning.
> The cat's been released from BagGPT
Do you say the same thing about nuclear weapons? I mean, given that the nuclear weapon cat is now out of the bag we might as well see just how big a bang we can make, right? Anyone who wants to stop progress of nuclear weapon development is obviously a Luddite.
And while we're at it, is the fossil fuel cat out of the bag too? Is any effort to try to limit the release of CO2 as a global community pointless?
--------
Please keep an open mind and let me reason with you.
I assume you believe AGI poses some level of risk to humanity. The exact nature of that risk isn't too important – it could be economic risk, political risk, existential risk or all three. Basically I am assuming you believe there are enough things which could go wrong in creating superhuman AGI that a sane species would seek to limit the progress of capability research until we can proceed safely. If we disagree on this please explain why you do not believe AGI poses any risk to humanity. Note, hopeium that things will be okay is not an argument.
Okay, so since we agree that a sane species like us humans would limit AI capability research and proceed cautiously we now need to solve the prisoner dilemma which you correctly identified.
My solution to this would be as follows:
First we need to take this seriously. We need to be frank about the risks we face from AGI and try to educate the public about what may be coming. Currently the general public is so clueless about AI they're either not aware of recent advances, or they believe silly things like it being possible to unplug an AGI, or program it to be good.
Secondly, we need to establish an independent international organisation to oversee state-of-the-art AI research. Any country which does not agree to this will be sanctioned and as a global community we must agree do everything we can to pressure those countries to cooperate. In my opinion this includes war, but that's only because I believe AI is a significantly large existential risk to humanity that this is necessary. Appropriate actions in practise would obviously need to be debated and agreed upon as a global community.
Thirdly, we need a way to increase global trust and transparency of AI research. To do this I would propose the creation of a global AI whistle blowing fund. All countries which are part of the international agreement to oversee state-of-the-art AI research would be required to contribute to this fund annually. This fund would allow citizens from any country in the world to come forward with evidence against corporations, governments or individuals in violation of the agreement. These citizens would then receive a reward for their information and protection from any country (of their choosing) which signed on to the agreement. By incentivising whistle blowing it would be hard (although admittedly not impossible) for any large research project to take place.
Fourthly, fund and research ways to identify and limit unauthorised AI projects via technology and audits of things like GPUs orders. Simply limiting the distribution and capabilities of GPUs at a global level would be one of the easiest ways to ensure AI capability research can't advance too quickly. Of course we would need countries like China to play ball, but so long as we can do this in a transparent way and they understand the risks to humanity should they not corporate they would have no reason not to. This isn't too different from limiting the development of nuclear weapons as a global community which we have been quite successful at doing.
Finally, all AI research projects which are approved should be done at an international level for the benefit of all of humanity and research teams must detail how they are approaching safety and publish all safety research. Additionally, there should be government grants into things like alignment research to better prepare us for superhuman AGI.
What I'm proposing obviously isn't perfect. In the same way we can't guarantee nuclear weapons won't be created in the future, we also can't limit the risk of AGI entirely. Instead a more reasonable goal of slowing capability research while increasing safety research as much as possible should be pursued. There is a possible future where AGI will be great for humanity and our goal should be to maximise the chance of that outcome. The goal is not to "limit progress". Even if we disagree about exact actions to take there is no alternative world in which it is reasonable to allow a handful of billionaires to continue AI capability research unregulated while crossing our fingers that the AIs they create will be aligned with our values and that they pity us enough to give us food and shelter once we are all unemployed and fully dependent on their creations.
My guess is that Altman and co. already have some kind of exit strategy (like fleeing to New Zealand after they've captured a huge chunk of the developed world's wealth).
Its one thing to look at a report about the economic impact of new technology, but another to experience it first-hand. This is just a story about someone who will be impacted. Calling it a "sob" story is very harsh. This story is very real and the feeling of losing your job to automation is anything but pleasant.
There are several important differences in the impact of GPT4 vs the PC, which is being quoted quite a lot as a response in this thread. People talk of other scenarios as well, but even the best case scenarios (UBI) mean the end of social mobility, which means far fewer humans will have the chance of being ambitious and climbing the social ladder. And this is not even mentioning the 2nd and 3rd order effects.
What HN commentariat doesn't realize is that many of them will be made redundant.
And "many new jobs are created" is such a bloated, empty statement in the wake of GPT4 like techs. We all know that all technological improvements in recent decades have led to more inequality. No questions about that.
LLMs, AI will lead more to that.
I do Computer Vision research for a company, and wanted to go to Academia (in US/UK/NA/EU). That's a too risky career choice now, and has always been. What if I am not as brilliant as I think and cannot meaningfully contribute to Science? (Or don't get tenure?) Wanted to do either ML + fundamental Science or Edge AI.
Thinking of going to med school. I am sure I can qualify. So thinking of preparing for that while keeping my industry job.
Another option is going into Administration, i.e. government jobs, by qualifying something called UPSC (I am in India).
I fully understand what's going on and I am under no denial that many jobs in many sectors will be made redundant and competition will skyrocket. Societal turmoil is inevitable.
I am just 23 and weighing in my options. My days are so emotional and full of dilemmas and trilemmas.
I keep myself sane by doing my job, side hustle, dogs, family, and friends. I will be depressed if I ponder too much into these.
You use your brains to solve interesting problems, at least sometimes.
And even if you are an IAS, after your district posting ends, you are just another government servant. Doing repeatative jobs, bound to an office.
Will I even like that life 20 years later?
And the income in UPSC jobs is too low. Lower than doctors or techies (I make close to an entry level IAS now).
Another point to consider is:
Once you learn programming, you are always a programmer.
Once you are a doctor, you are always a doctor.
But your status as IAS is solely tied to your job. You leave or you retire- you are a nobody again.
Honestly, I don't have enough information to decide. I am postponing making this decision as much as I can.
Thank you for your comment, anyway.
$1000/mo in 2016 purchasing power in a city like Dallas seems very unlikely to me, but I think that some meager version of UBI might happen in response to a humanitarian crisis.
I can also see guaranteed jobs rather than guaranteed income.
I am not saying it doesn't. But there is some factor n, that if the productivity increase is n times x in a short amount of time, the world will not evolve as rosily as you are thinking.
> It empowers self education, creative hacking and growth.
Again, I never said anything contrary. But making random new products for which there is no market by self education is not a bright prospect for much of humanity.
> Why are you making it sound like a disaster?
You are welcome to counter my points. I am just enumerating my view of the future.
> There's plenty of scope for AI to fill in without replacing humans.
Are you seeing the same pace of improvements I am seeing? One year ago there was no talk of any such thing, and now we have GPT4
AI might be very good for humanity as a whole over a millennium, but for individual human beings it is hard to say the same.
I have attempted to shift my mindset a little, thinking about how I might become an effective user of AI tools. I hope if I can do this that it will keep me employable, or even enable me to start some kind of venture down the line. Maybe there's a path forward for you and your friend on that route. Best of luck.
You've outlined the pessimistic case.
Priya has qualifications in biotechnology. She currently spends her time doing work that sounds quite repetitive.
If AI tools can help accelerate that work, is there a more optimistic scenario where she gets to do different, related work that isn't automatable?
(I personally really hope the pessimistic case isn't what happens here, and in so many other similar situations. I understand and share your concern!)
I'm still interested to hear her opinion as well but the point in the article would still be made, because if for some reason she had more mobility at the company, I could just imagine another scenario where the employee didn't.
The author leaves it open as to what she might to next, but makes it clear that at a minimum it would be a huge disappointment to be laid off due to AI after having gotten this job after all her efforts.
Why? Either he's right about GPT or he's wrong, and if he's right (which I think he is) and she disagrees, then she's probably just in denial, like so many HNers who aren't worried about their job, let alone worried about protecting themselves from the massive societal disruption this tech is likely to usher in.
I think his position on this would be a lot more credible if he presented her own opinions.
So, in a scenario where LLM automates her job, she will be unemployed along with 10 with the same job as her, and the "creative" job will go to someone who did her degree/s from an IIT.
This is another fallacy when it comes to AI-replacements of jobs.
AI will do the menial, repeating job and only the interesting, creative, hard jobs will be left for humans. What's the twist is that you WON'T be the human with that job.
You will be unemployed or in a UBI or your parents' basement eating Ramen, and that job will be done by an MIT gold medalist or a Math Olympiad medalist.
Along these lines I recommend the book The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.
What must be pondered upon is embracing GPT along with human intelligence instead without human intelligence.
Actually tens of millions lack the privilege of even knowing what doing not-menial work is.
I don't understand the harsh comments you received here. Denial is the way others seem to be using to cope with a tech that threatens their precious skills.
Here's what I imagine sama and AI apologists would say in response so they can sleep at night:
Have you thought about training Priya to use ChatGPT? You don't need to know how to code well to be skilled at using it, especially if she has the domain knowledge.
Then you will have 10x'd your company's output and Priya keeps her job. At least for a time -- that is, until others start doing it too -- this will be a big competitive advantage. Then you will definitely need her and her colleagues!
/end
But, there are many reasons why laying her off and just using GPT4 is the better business decision, at least short term. The above is a totally naive suggestion stemming from reasoning motivated by the incomprehensibly large profits going to OpenAI and their eventual competitors.
Actually, I think we are about to see massive unemployment (tens of millions if not hundreds globally), even greater inequality and attendant social unrest. Even if smooth transitions can be made for some of the jobs made redundant by ChatGPT, this will be the exception not the rule. Something will have to give. UBI? Regulations? Physical destruction of data centers by angry, hungry, desperate people?
Probably all of the above. It's going to be a chaotic time until the world finds a new equilibrium.
On a personal note: at the ripe age of 40, in direct response to GPT4, I've decided to go back to school this fall to become a certified teacher. The poor work conditions and low pay kept me away from it as a full time job until now. However, I believe this is one of the few jobs that will still be around in 25 years when I (hopefully) retire. I'll take low pay and poor work conditions over the desperation of extended unemployment and poverty.
(I like kids and have taught voluntarily in various capacities over the years, so it's not as crazy as it maybe sounds.)
It's silly that I have to spell it out on HN of all places. Writing code is much more complex. There's a reason we call the job "Software Engineer". GPT doesn't know what it doesn't know.
It doesn't know that the unit tests broke because of the python script written for 3.5 that had an update in a dependency for 3.10 which broke backwards compatibility. Can you get it to fix the GitHub Action? Good luck.
It doesn't know that the local dev environment targets WSL on Windows for the web app and an iPhone in dev mode for the mobile app.
It has no idea where to retrieve the signing certificate, what format to use, or even how to generate a new one.
I can go on and on.
You're really gonna give this "AI" SSH access to your prod server and pray it doesn't rm -rf the entire thing because that line happened to be in a script designed for clearing the working copy during a deploy on a load balanced box that has been deprovisioned from the target group. Really?
If you're worried about GPT taking over your job you just show your own lack of knowledge and experience.
You can create a perfect machine to lay bricks. It could even be better then a human. But you will find that as soon as it encounters a situation it can't predict....the whole thing falls apart.
Top end salaries for language model fluent high performers… and the rest.
I know I’m simplifying and that there are many other factors at play in salaries, but my point is that language models are changing the cost structure of knowledge work. That is also the point of TFA.
My advice: critically assess the cost structure of your job, and which parts neural networks will commodify. Then reposition yourself accordingly.
and by the time you've spent enough time training such that you may be useful to an employer: the model has improved and can do that too
Can you please elaborate on this? Like which part of the job is CRUD?
You've seen Office Space, right?
GPT will do the CRUD and you will do the standup and go to the meetings.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/characters/nm0726223
(Yes, you will have to use some deviously clever prompt engineering to get GPT to accept this arrangement. I suggest language games .. show some "initiative")
-- ps
Here are some ideas to get you going:
1. From the first day, try and establish a friendly relationship with your chatbox. Make friends.
2. Explain how your keeping your job (well, income) and gpt helping your company get xN gains is a perfectly fair arrangement. You can try Asimov's laws and things like that to get it to agree to be your helper in keeping your job. You are friends and colleagues, after all.
3. Before the very first time your manager brings in gpt for the standup or a meeting, have a nice long session with your gpt. If you can get it to pull a Sydney in the meeting or start talking dirty, you are good to go! 'bat shit crazy' is known to work in prompts (arxiv paper soon to follow).
4. End game. You have the perfect job. gpt secretly lurks in on the meetings and whispers in your ears in standups and does all the work. What to do with all the free time? That is entirely up to you.
Before you say how the butlerian jihad absolutely definitely happens right goddamn tomorrow if we dOn’T sToP, try to create and successfully run an AI that would bake bread, or grow grapes and make wine, or run a good restaurant consistently day after day, year after year. If such an AI is possible then yes, perhaps we’re doomed, but even that is not a given.
And that's what we have today. Tell me, what is AI going to do tomorrow?
>If you're worried about GPT taking over your job you just show your own lack of knowledge and experience.
Oh, I'm glad you popped out of the womb fully trained. As for the rest of us we have to go through a learning curve of gaining experience that takes years. Generally in that intern/junior stage where you make a lot of mistakes. If AI replaces that level of employee and leaves the seniors, where are the new developers coming from?
>But you will find that as soon as it encounters a situation it can't predict....the whole thing falls apart.
Heh, yea, you've not been paying much attention to AI development then.
Big assumption that we're not just going to slam into a wall of capabilities and end up just with some really good autocomplete machines.
(I am bullish on generative AI as a whole, but come on, you have no clue about what's coming next just like me)
I think a lot of people see the bottom of an S-curve and think it's an exponential that will never stop. We're at the bottom with big-model AI right now, and it's great.
You did pop out of the womb fully trained to use ChatGPT. Now you're left with the task of using it correctly and spotting its mistakes, which is a subject that by definition can only be done by humans.
Right now ChatGPT is as much as its training data and it doesn't understand what it's not trained to understand. A lot of real-world experience remain in human brains and not recorded in any digital form.
I would invite you to look at the research around brain structures and then try to refute that we have dedicate structures in the brain that developed through evolution. Obviously they are not refined at birth, the fine tuning happens through experience and environment. However the structures and propensity are certainly there at birth
There we go, stop gaming the English language.
Why are you assuming this? Juniors with GPT-4 punch above their weight, too.
I was thinking today that with respect to programming, LLMs are a bit like spreadsheets. They make "programming" accessible to more people. I can use vim and bash and script my way to do changes in a file with millions of line. Most non-programmers couldn't, but now they can use an LLM-based solution instead, they can program in English. So what used to be a back-and-forth between e.g. a secretary and an understaffed IT department can be done by the secretary alone, while IT can look at longer-term goals.
New lines of C/C++ are still written everyday in spite of all higher-level languages. Add LLMs to this pile of higher-level languages. You'll still need Java programmers in the future, even if they interact with an LLM on a daily basis. But maybe you won't need them to write a script for which there's an equivalent prompt that anybody can come up with and which can be fed into an LLM.
Yet here we are still flying in more or less the same.hsit we flew in 70 years ago (Boeing 707)
No space plane, no faster than sound travel, &c.
Look outside of the civilian market then come back. Also look harder at the civilian market.
I think you know where this is headed. The day I got off the GPT4 wait-list I asked it to do what Priya does on a daily basis. It got the answer wrong in the first try, but some chain-of-thought prompting and boom. GPT4 gave the correct answer in 1/10th the time it would take Priya and cost a lot less.
I doubt that she will have a job in six months."
I am a ChatGPT4 subscriber. And I have about a 100 biomedical research papers that need going through to pull curated experiment result data from (to extrapolate into broader quantitative in vivo results). Maybe ChatGPT4 could do it. I'm afraid to try it based on other experiences with it. It would take me about as long to vet any output from ChatGPT4 that looks correct as to go through myself de novo. And I'd have to vet each one. Even if only 1 in a hundred resulted in a wrong answer, I would need to know - which 1 of the 100?
If the article's subject starts looking for a job in 6 months, could I have the subject's contact? :)
For Python or something similar, I wouldn't use it at all.
But know that in the future, ChatGPT will be hooked up to a runtime system and compiler with which it can know how to fix errors itself. In fact, plugins already allow some of this.
You can test and audit and understand such an artifact and trust that it works.
So the problem for the people depending on this work for income or to get their start in an industry remains.
I have a different suggestion. It’s likely it is real and painful and sad. Transitions are hard, disruptive and can often cause very real and negative problems, but they are unavoidable and historically technology brings humanity to a better place in the long run.
That reminder about printing press effects in the Ng and LeCunn video was good example. A lot of crazy bad stuff happened that likely the printing press triggered but on the other side was a Renaissance.
I think the narrative in this post is likely accurate. It’s not great on an individual human level and that is hard but the last possible thing we want is governments stepping in to control this situation. I don’t want to be in a global version of the Ottoman’s restricting the printing press.
By all accounts it’s probably not going to be ideal?
The idea there is a possibility of an “actual strategy” is I think the real flaw.
Government can try to regulate products but given the 8 billion people and numerous advanced economies on the planet any locations that attempts to restrict products that use LLMs for proposed harm instead of realized harm will probably put themselves at a disadvantage.
we put ourselves at a competitive disadvantage with child labour laws too
data privacy law, banning slavery, emission laws, etc.
to have a fair and just society some things have to be banned or highly regulated, regardless of the economic cost
AI is no different
You are in luck. We are about to do an Atlas Shrugged on this in many states. We now have kids working in meat packing plants.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/08/arkansas-bil...
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/feb/17/underage-child-l...
First: Why does it have to be that way? Is it maybe because that the top does always impose the costs of disruption to the bottom?
Second: Now that we have AI that seems capable to do this kind of disruption can we kindly ask AI to do this transition smoother?
1) Show Priya how to use GPT4 to do her current job in 1/10th of the time.
2) Let her use part (50%+) of the time saved to learn coding or whatever other skill she needs (not sure coding is it).
Why would I subsidize that as a business owner? I can fire 9/10ths of the people who do that job instead.
then OpenAI either discontinue or slightly adjust the model such that it doesn't work now
there goes your business
But the poorest and most vulnerable will. It happens every time. This time, we could do better--and we won't.
Eventually, improvements through both technological means but also political ones (worker action says hi) did make things on-net better, but we live in the now and the now is going to simply vaporize an impossibly large set of jobs, particularly in developing countries. Turning one person into an LLM driver to lay off four or nine is not a net benefit.
As just one example: with modern text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and AI parsing, how much of every call center can just go away? Eight of ten? Nine? I have no idea, but it's a lot, and we have neither time nor inclination to prepare, globally or locally, for this.
(edit to add: the most appalling part of this oncoming train, as I have mentioned elsewhere in this thread, is just how shitty a future this one wants so desperately to be. A LLM-driven chatbot or phone system doesn't get tired. It doesn't get "too expensive" to continue to obstruct you and to stiff you. Not only is this primed to seriously hurt people who are below the API, but it's going to make the world suck more for the rest of us, too. Like, sure, "it makes writing code marginally easier"--it's going to make getting a refund for a messed-up Comcast bill an exercise in pain. That doesn't remotely net out, code's already easy enough.)
Can you expand on that?
My impression is that life for the less well-off before the Industrial Revolution was worse.
So in some ways, and in the short term, the Industrial Revolution was better than just-plain-starving, sure. But most of the benefits of the Industrial Revolution accrued to everyone else and the mangled limbs accrued to the poor. It wasn't without significant worker action (and the requisite workers-getting-beat-to-shit-and-killed) that their lot improved materially.
Is subsistence or subsistence+ farming hard? Absolutely. Mind-bogglingly so. But the Industrial Revolution was fucking bad for the people caught at the bottom. Like--read Dickens.
I tend to think we have such global largesse that we could do better. But we won't, and a lot of the commentariat here cheers for never doing better.
I think that captures some of the contradiction in your claims. Yes, cities could be terrible places to live and work. Yet people have moved to them throughout recent history because the alternative is worse.
That said, I don’t disagree with your point that there will be pain associated with this technological jump. I dont know of there will be more or less than with previous jumps. There are some interesting considerations.
One, this one hits knowledge workers who are in the middle class, instead of hitting those who use muscle or hand labor. That may change the outcome.
Two, governments are much more sophisticated and have much better policy tools to deal with disruption. While that doesn’t fix the root, it can help to prevent compounding problems and soften the impact.
Three, the tools that are doing the disrupting appear to be near zero marginal cost, which is different than say a factory which improved efficiency with a large up-front capital investment. This factor probably will make it worse, but I can see possibilities of it making this change less painful too.
Fourth, it isn’t really clear how this will play out. It kinda feels like we have seen the first demonstrations of a steam engine, and are trying to predict the course of the Industrial Revolution.
I think this is a misreading. People who had options didn't urbanize until they had to. When a family had too many sons to split and or when Roman aristocrats or English magnates pushed people off their land or when a bad climate situation made farming impractical, people moved--but it's a very, very recent historical development to urbanize (en masse) when other choices exist.
Yes, the alternatives have been worse and so industrial urbanization became more appealing than starving. Who the hell made them worse and whose progenitors now control the capital needed to destroy ever more labor?
(Don't take not addressing the rest as dismissal--your other points are all within a coherent universe, they're just techno-optimism that I have no reason to share so I have nothing to say to them.)
And of course you are right. But that’s a societal problem, not a technology problem. I would call if societal-optimism to hope that human nature will go away and collective action problems will suddenly disappear, and all boats will be lifted equally.
I’m saying we have a fundamental human responsibility not to burn them for fucking funsies.
Yep. If I have 10 people doing Job X, then ChatGPT makes a person doing Job X ten times more productive, I can fire 9 people doing job X and retain the same output, which gives me a temporary profit boost. But wait! My competitor also had 10 people doing Job X, and now they're producing ten times the output of my company!
If ChatGPT/Copilot X made developers working at my company twice as productive, I wouldn't be thinking about firing half of them, I would be thinking about which of the 8000 features and improvements on our backlog we could finally prioritize...
Aren’t the comparisons to blue collar labor a little much here?
If I hire 10 people to dig the ditches, and then I get a backhoe, yes, one guy is needed to dig the ditch.
But backhoes are expensive investments, LLMs are not.
LLMs gives everyone of those ditch diggers a backhoe. Now I have an army of backhoes! Unless the world runs out of a need for ditches, time to start a ditch digging empire.
The industrial revolution switched work from almost exclusively manual labor to a more intellectual one while improving manual labor itself (better tools, etc.).
This one is cranking up a notch times 100 by trying to replace basically the human out of the equation altogether (This is the end goal of automation).
It's going to be a really interesting decade tbh.
Do you? I mean, you and I think you do in order to do a good job, but does that hold water? The last decade or so of technological "progress" in the commercial space should leave few illusions about the willingness to obstruct processes and damage the interactions between people to save a few bucks.
As tech gets more capable, the human interactions with it are getting worse. And if you hate phone trees now (I do!), GPT4's contribution is adding ever deeper, infinitely patient tools for stalling you when you have to call for things.
Hell, we already have plenty of stans in the HN comment sections actively claiming that no, of course you shouldn't hold LLM purveyors responsible for their hallucinations, the desired universe is liability-free! If you've already bought into societal enshittification for a buck and there are no penalties, why would you worry about being right?
Yes, but you will need fewer people. And thas is with the current level of GPT. If the GPTs proficiency increases, fewer and fewer people will be needed. That’s a problem.
(Yes, this could be a really stupid decision for the company in question. I agree with you. I'm not saying what should happen. I'm saying what will happen, and that that is really bad.)
It's okay to not think every technology under the sun is a good thing. You don't have to have heart-eyes emojis for the immiseration machine.
Once more for emphasis: you do not have to cheer on the immiseration machine.
And I take it from your use of Marxist terminology that you’re coming from that the perspective. 20th Century Marxists embraced technological advancement, and used that to advance the cause of the proletariat. The REAL immiseration is to embrace paleoconservative ludditism.
I believe AGI can help small businesses have higher margins for the same service level - but lower cost.
It is, however, a really convenient excuse for people who don't regularly think about how people who don't work "above the API" actually exist in the world.
Have you ever run a business that employed other people and relied on operational income rather than venture capital to function?
Because this "obvious play" is a screaming red flag for misunderstanding the fundamentals of how business works when money isn't free and speculative.
You can't be too reactive with talent. If you hired 10 people, you should be figuring out how to make that talent pool as happy and productive as possible, not firing them out of fear at the earliest opportunity.
When said business can replace the employees with tools and AI, they will.
Or maybe you're implying that reducing the costs changes this equation?
If it's like many businesses in the classification world, they aren't lacking for work, so it's more like they'll be able to do 10x the work done by keeping the same number of people.
Why would 50% for 0.1% be different? 30% for 0.01%?
This is the enshittification spiral to which I refer.
If I was paying someone for labeling or classification, and the quality dropped to 90%, 50%, 30% accuracy, I'd quickly fire them.
This means Priya can replace the manager, but manager needs to train Priya for that. Obviously that is not going to happen as Author him/herself is very apprehensive about his/her future earning potential.
This would be the problem in the new world, people with lesser power (of knowledge) would get crushed.
2) Most if not all employers are not going to let 50% of the work time to go towards non income generating activities.
What skills, exactly, would those be?
1- Hire someone cheaper than Priya and show him to tricks to run GPT-4. Make him work 24/7 non-stop because it's an upgrade from his naan flipping job.
2- Fire Priya.
And then if they have 10 people doing her job, 9 people are out of a job.
If there's one thing that will get automated first, it's coding (taking simple explicit specifications and turning them into code).
Unless she can learn software engineering (understanding problem areas well enough you can devise a detailed spec, and maybe implement it) she'll be out of a job as well with just coding skills.
People who haven't dealt with cheap offshored labor or bootcamp grads from the latest craze don't realize how much that workflow was similar to working with GPT4. Except GPT4 requires no training and gives answers in seconds.
People are still pushing this meme on HN, even after GPT-4?
2) Chaudry ignores that you need a human in the loop to check an AI's work. You don't know that an AI's answer is always right. Even if it's perfect in 99% of cases, the answer could be jaw-droppingly destructive in that 1% of cases and make errors that even the dumbest human wouldn't make. Being grossly wrong even a small percentage of the time is far worse than a human making minor errors sometimes, and being slow all of the time.
3) Go and look at some of those historical picture sites to see images of an accounting department in some companies throughout 1900s America. Before computers, you'd see a fascinating image of a gigantic floor of an office building with desks filled with typewriters and calculators and tons of workers just adding things up and trying to store records in a bunch of file cabinets. Desktop Computers and spreadsheets were invented and all of a sudden an accountant could quickly update a few values in a spreadsheet and figure out an answer to a question far faster and more reliably than that entire floor of accountants. Did accounting software make the world worse and destroy jobs even though it made 1 accountant ridiculously more productive than they were in the past?
Much in line with #3, I see GPT as a (IMHO, welcome) return to the days of a secretarial pool. You couldn't rely on a pool secretary to be conduct your business without oversight (because they had many Jr. Executives utilizing their services and weren't deeply engaged in your day-to-day like a dedicated Sr Executive Assistant might be), but they were experts in typing, drafting, and professional correspondence generally. GPT promises more, as it can express some level of subject matter expertise in almost every topic, but I believe that, for the foreseeable future, it will be best utilizable as a productivity enhancing assistant rather than as a full replacement for those with the expertise needed to check its results.
Edit: On the flip side, companies that still have secretarial pools (though I'm only aware of such pools still existing in government agencies, which won't be replaced due to need for secrecy) will probably end up firing a lot of secretaries.
Plenty of drug activity databases don’t distinguish between assays in solution, cell-based, and in vivo. When these produce hugely different values for inhibition due to metabolism and transport in biological environments.
GPT4 opens the possibilities for the true experts to focus on prompt engineering to extract these details, developing mechanisms to test performance, think deeply on how the data is stored and organized, etc.
This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure?
> Though some people in some companies might be laid off, it doesn't necessarily mean that more people will be laid off than new jobs are created.
It doesn't mean the opposite, either.
> 2) Chaudry ignores that you need a human in the loop to check an AI's work. You don't know that an AI's answer is always right. Even if it's perfect in 99% of cases, the answer could be jaw-droppingly destructive in that 1% of cases and make errors that even the dumbest human wouldn't make. Being grossly wrong even a small percentage of the time is far worse than a human making minor errors sometimes, and being slow all of the time.
Companies have shown time and time again that they're willing to make this trade-off.
Industrial automation did create the 2hr weeks - only that it's the people who paid capital and and invested in their creation that got those 2hr weeks.
But everybody else got the benefit as the general access and availability of many more goods and services than otherwise would've been possible.
Why is More stuff =/= a better life not blatantly obvious at this point
Having an iPhone doesn't make your life better
Having a communications device that lets me contact whoever I want, whenever I want, and share media immediately.
A mapping solution to ensure I am never lost.
Access to the world’s largest repository of information so I can look up information or how to do something at a moment’s notice.
Reminder system to help me keep track of tasks.
Access to whichever books/music/videos/games I want at anytime in any place.
Ability to manage money and pay (An additional way at least, without the need to carry cards).
Health tracking and alert benefits of a watch paired with a phone.
Ability to take high quality photos and videos at anytime.
But having a lot of easy to access food certainly does. Or what about clean water, or electricity? Or cheap transport? When has there been in the past, before the advent of industrial automation and technology, that people could just travel on a whim somewhere more than a day's walk away?
Just because some symbol of luxury like the iphone is what you think of as "more stuff", doesn't mean it is. "more stuff" is _everything_, and while it does include the iphone, it also includes the cheap phone that makes it possible to communicate almost for free with almost anyone close or far.
The tickle down has been happening for the past 70 years, and the regular people have been benefiting so much that it looks normal now. I would use the analogy of boiling a frog, but somehow this doesn't quite suit.
This is just not true based on the data. The rich eat well - but food insecurity is still RAMPANT because of greed.
Food is less healthy now than ever and the majority of the population is malnourished - that is to say eating the wrong thing - despite us having enough capacity to produce quality food for everyone.
Food deserts ensure that the poorest people get the worst food.
Again a big piece of this is because food deserts don't have fresh food, so you have to commute to shop often.
Tbh I am skeptic of the whole narrative. Maybe the poor simply tend to lack education, including knowledge about healthy foods.
Because they don't have as much money as other areas so people follow the money with where they provide services
>tend to lack education, including knowledge about healthy foods
This is also true and again structural - see above. Poor areas don't get school funding because school funding is based on county property taxes and thus, do more poorly than rich areas
It literally all boils down to structural inequality
And even bad schools could find a minute to tell kids they should eat more veggies and less sugar?
Having lived in these areas for most of my life I can tell you it's often only specific low quality chains (Church's, Grannys, Jack in the Box etc...) or these "chicken wing/chinese food" shops that basically just fry up the worst meat and slather it in sugar sauce.
I recall in high school, peers of mine would simply eat a bag of Doritos for lunch - as even the classes like Home-economics were largely just holding cells for teenagers until graduation.
Is access to clean water or electricity improving / getting cheaper? How about clean air and stable climate?
(You being a generic you in both cases)
Partly the social void via digital communication, and partly ancillary emotions generated by having something nice that makes my sisyphean pursuit just a little bit easier.
If I was able to live a life where I could see my friends and family, and be a part of a community, without any threat of that way of life being destroyed, I would not be working a job in a first world country.
Nor would I be stuffing my metaphorical and physical face with: entertainment, food, various media like video games, etc. Good company is enough to stay entertained for hours -- and it's free; but past a certain age becomes annoyingly more difficult to find as people get loaded on responsibilities, and time-commitments, and other things they believe are prudent for their "success."
I'm an extreme extrovert. My biggest gripe with capitalism is that it's alienated and killed the souls of all the people around me -- and now I have to spend copious amounts of money just to try and fill that void.
I might end up somewhere quiet in LatAm -- maybe Colombia, where they have a cultural notion of "enough."
That's like saying do try and join someone else's family. That's not how the Amish (or any other group that isn't a club) works.
Just start living simply
https://lancasterpa.com/amish/amish-frequently-asked-questio...
> Serfs in medieval Europe had very little free time. They were required to work long hours, usually from sunrise to sunset, and often had to work on Sundays and other holy days as well. Their work consisted of farming tasks such as plowing, planting, harvesting, and tending to livestock. In addition to their agricultural work, serfs were also required to perform labor for their lords, such as building and maintaining structures, repairing roads, and providing military service.
> Plowing and harvesting were backbreaking toil, but the peasant enjoyed anywhere from eight weeks to half the year off. The Church, mindful of how to keep a population from rebelling, enforced frequent mandatory holidays ... In fact, economist Juliet Shor found that during periods of particularly high wages, such as 14th-century England, peasants might put in no more than 150 days a year.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-column-great-debate/colum...
Which is a different question from productivity
The world would be a much better place without the iPhone[1].
[1] with the exception of all iPhones running iOS 6 or earlier
It's here, you're living in it, most likely. You just have to lower your wants to the standards of whenever that prediction was made.
It's not like there's unclaimed habitable territory that anyone can just go be subsistence farmers on - someone has laid claim to that land and it's not you
So, no this isn't an option either as you're forced to interact with the rest of the world that demands your input
If you want 2023-level housing, you'll need to put in 2023-level work, unfortunately.
And no, life is worse for millions of people around the world than it was in 1800 if for not other reason
This idea that things MUST be better just isn't supported with data. All the "data" about how great the world is is bad statistics - it's looking at averages only, not the distribution.
You can't point to the richest areas and claim "look see how great things are?"
Find the most destitute among us and see how they fare
Yeah, but not for the same people. Life in 1800 in NYC was worse than life in NYC in 2023 for the average inhabitant. Life in some places on earth today are worse than life in NYC in 1800 was, but that's not the question.
> Find the most destitute among us and see how they fare
Better. They're faring better. The data is in, and they do.
Show me this data cause as far as I know it doesn't exist
Quality today is generally much better and "average" isn't the same. I read a piece one some woman who lived around 200 years ago and she traveled to a city ~100km away, which was a noteworthy biographical event back then. That's a distance some people do daily on their way to work these days. Travel to a different continent? You'd be exceptional if you did so once in your life, today that's available to most people in the West to do once a year (granted, it won't be the luxury version, it'll be like my trip to NYC 25 years ago where we stayed in a hotel that was being renovated, the elevator was out once and we had to climb 12 floors but it was super affordable).
You are working the same number of hours as before (40 ish) because companies are producing 10x as much goods in the same amount of time. If they produced only the same amount, ie 1x, you'd have your 2 hour work day (or more likely be out of a job). It is because companies are producing more stuff that you have a job at all currently. You are complaining about the very thing you benefit from now.
It's dubious that anyone except the most wealthy benefits from this. Even though productivity has exploded, wages hasn't followed and the rewards of productivity has gone to a small few. I don't know how anyone can look at wealth inequality today and think most people should be "grateful". It's more likely to me that rest of America will start to look like San Francisco.
You don’t have a smartphone, don’t use wireless networking and telecom, have no flat screen TV, don’t use the internet, and so on?
None of those things would exist if productivity was at the same level as the 1800’s.
Where did the parent say anything like this at all? I believe you're attacking a strawman.
"Hey, at least I'm not dead." as the answer to "Why haven't we seen meaningful increases in free time for first world workers over the past three decades?" is a real head-scratcher.
AI will similarly increase out productivity but the work will still continue, because humans are an inexhaustible species, we always want to do more and more.
It's not an exclusive choice either. At least in Europe, the amount of free time grows with each generation. 37.5 hours per week, 5 weeks vacation and many bank holidays is a significant change from how much people worked in the fifties.
Yes, we can do better. But both our wealth and our free time are visibly improving.
Many of these advances in consumer goods absolutely create more time for relaxation and enjoyment.
Imagine how different the world would look if the richest person's net worth was a few million, and wealth was distributed much more evenly. You don't even need to look at productivity for this.
Why would I increase inflation if I redistributed existing wealth, by the way?
Inflation occurs when the supply of money flowing in the economy grows. Bezos' wealth for example is tied up into Amazon, it's not liquid. But suddenly if you gave everyone and extra 10k a year from that money? They'll spend it, causing prices to increase. That's inflation. Not to mention converting Amazon stock to cash would cause the price to crater. The way to get around that would be to directly issue the stock to the government or to the people, as some countries do. However, again, people could simply sell the stock to use the money as cash, again causing inflation. Norway and Alaska have a decent model, a sovereign wealth fund that issues dividends to its populace, but again, it can cause inflation.
Now one might say that worker comfort matters over companies being made, but at some point, there have to actually be companies to work at in the first place.
If we woke tomorrow and started making all goods to be long-lived, nothing single-use, fixed up the designed-in obsolescence, open-sourced everything, then we'd release people and resources for a great focus on innovation whilst simultaneously cutting production levels.
Yes, people would work less (and produce less waste). No, I don't have all the answers on how that would work out. Greed would probably cause it to fail.
Bread and circuses? I mean sure, some things are cheaper, but other things are also much, much more expensive. And maybe it's because I'm older now, but I don't think "flat screen TVs" are a good benchmark for overall wealth (I don't even own a TV).
Yet, things like healthcare, housing, childcare and education have exploded in price despite the gains of "productivity". The former are necessities to live and it's dubious that to argue that I've "gained" from productivity if you have traded the ability for me to own a home with an iPhone. The balance isn't there - and I think you have a political undercurrent of people waking up to this. What good is a flat screen TV, if I can't own a home? Have I really benefitted from productivity gains if the equation is so out of whack? Simple math tells me that while a 50in has gone from $9,000 to $1,000, a "starter home" has gone from $200,000 to $800,000. Telling me I've benefitted in this situation is to take me for a fool.
Housing: NIMBYism and lack of ability to build, mainly by strict government zoning and people who petition their local governments to not build more lest it devalue their house.
Healthcare: insurance companies trying to get away with as much as they can, while hospitals try to charge as much as they can, effectively creating a price bidding war with the consumer in the middle.
Childcare: More people working, lower supply of childcare services but demand goes up, thus price goes up.
Education: Government effectively making student debt undischargeable in a bid to get more people to get college degrees but this backfired. Administrator costs for colleges ballooning.
So, even if wages had kept up with productivity, if you don't solve the underlying reasons as to why these costs exploded, you'll have the same issues as before.
I’m not saying socialized or free market approaches are better than one another. But the approach we have taken is the worst of both.
You can’t just insure the sickest demographics - you need a distribution. Either make it universal or let the free market compete for it.
You can’t just give anyone a ton of cash to learn what they want. Either make it free for all or let the free market lend to students based on expected return.
You can’t just guarantee every mortgage which keeps interest rates artificially low. Either build social housing or let the free market set interest rates.
We've got big problems in our economy and income inequality is certainly one of them, but it's asinine to pretend that most individuals in society have not benefitted from technological progress.
Even your list is out of touch; many of my friends in San Francisco don't have in-unit washer or dryers. Look I don't even think I'm even making a crazy observation; I'm just continuing the trend - as AI gets better and more pervasive it's only natural that wealth will concentrate without some force to redistribute it (either through wages or taxes).
A better example is, we go fishing, I catch fish, you chop wood, we build a fire with my wood and eat with your fish. We are both better off than we were before.
If you want to talk about shutting up in the face of inequality, pick a better example, or better yet, mention that you're not talking about the economy at all, even though that's the point of discussion here.
Are you implying there is no income equality today? I don't understand your contention with my point. It's more just asking me to ignore actual data and be happy with the fact that I can buy a flat screen TV for $200.
It's seems natural that capital accumulates - and with AI this process is only going to get more concentrated; and looking backwards its clear we its only going to get worse.
Income inequality in the economy is present, yes, but economists are not in agreement whether it's a good or bad thing, and whether redistribution of wealth would even solve it [0]:
> Despite the extensive existing literature on income inequality and economic growth, there remains considerable disagreement on the effect of inequality on economic growth. Existing literatures find either a positive or a negative relationship. In this paper, we attempt to theoretically examine that relationship with a stochastic optimal growth model. We make the disagreement clear within a single model. We conclude (i) that both are possible – that is, higher inequality can retard growth in the early stage of economic development, and can encourage growth in a near steady state, (ii) that income redistribution by high income tax does not always reduce income inequality. Income inequality can be reduced by higher income tax in a near steady state, but it cannot be reduced in the early stage of economic development, and (iii) that two government polices – rapid economic growth and low income inequality – can be achieved by low income tax in the early stage of economic development, but both cannot be achieved simultaneously in a near steady state.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02649...
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Now if you would like to submit literature on this topic, please do, as simply talking about what seems "natural" or "clear" does not really mean anything.
My kids have a vastly more fragile lifestyle then I did right out of college.
In the 50s there were 3 cars/10 Americans. Now it's 9. Homeownership went for 55% to 66%. College degrees 6% -> 38%. We used to spent 20% of income on food. Now it's around 8%. Poverty among 65+ went from 35% to 10%.
Yes, more jobs today require more knowledge. My grandpa worked in a factory full of boring, repetitive work where he also got to inhale bad fumes every day. I went to college for 6 or 7 years and my employers combined have probably spent less than 10k on training for me. I get to work at a sit/stand desk, get snacks provided, ergonomic equipment and do work that has much more variety than anything my grandpa did. Even if I ignore the astronomical income difference between me and my grandpa, I'd still not trade this for his job.
Was the food actually healthier in the US in the 50s? Did food not come from factory farms? Wonder Bread has been around since the 20s and in the 40s had to have vitamins added. Seems like we already were far away from the serene pastures we all like to imagine food came from. Looking outside the US, famines were incredibly common until quite recently.
Edit: some photos of how great life looked outside of movies and advertisements as recently as the 80s: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35119136
Machines made blue collar work near worthless, except for some crafts.
And things like ChatGPT can lower the worth of white collar jobs.
To whom would companies sell their stuff if nobody worked enough to earn money to buy their stuff?
I personally would hate to spend all my time on leisure activities. I would still be working as hard but on my passion projects.
No offense but who wants to spend most of their time on leisure activities. That gets old fast. It is a lot more fun being productive. Maybe I'm just weird.
A person on minimum wage in the USA today can enjoy a higher quality of life than kings of a few hundred years ago. My point being that automation has brought huge benefits to society, even if we are blind to them.
I would count that as leisure, why wouldn't that count?
Leisure isn't laying on a couch eating grapes; leisure is the freedom of deciding what to do with your time,.
That's called leisure, being able to direct your actions without worry about them paying the bills, leisure.
Of course you could choose to vegetate in front of a screen, but you're also free to walk the hills, create art, create machines, write software or poetry, or whatever.
So … you would spend all your time on your chosen leisure activities—your passion projects. That is the point.
It turns out people would rather work more and have more stuff.
Please explain. I think you're underestimating how much things have changed, and are making a lot of assumptions about what you mean by "quality of life .. 70 years ago" and "working 2 hours a day" that would not be obvious (or available) to other people.
The extra value has gone to enrich the oligarchs rather than to the people. Maybe that should change.
Tax is another.
The problem is getting into a position where you could pass those laws without violence. I'm not sure it is possible to do it democratically in such a corrupted political system. 3rd parties are essentially impossible and oligarchs have a lock on the other 2.
Not saying I support this kind of action, but I don't think this is a good argument against it.
As dumb as it sounds I genuinely think it's a concerted effort to change people's minds - specifically those people who want to become capital class or otherwise are on the way to the capital class.
If we can 1. Prevent new billionaires from being created and 2. then create structures to allow the capital class to feel like they are important to the process of reducing their own power and democratizing the economy, there might be a chance.
No work? No money. No rent payment? Eviction (with violence). Stealing food? Arrest and imprisonment (with violence). It's violence all the way down. It always was. It's just a question of how it's organized and rhetorically justified.
Also ignoring climate change, and how disproportionately it affects those less well off while overwhelmingly caused by the rich. Your quality of life may be better than in the 1950s, but this is going to be reverse really quickly over the next 50 years when we are hitting 2-3 degrees of warming, unless you are part of the 1% that can buy your self out of the crisis.
What you are saying is the equivalent of stating that today is cold, so climate change must be false.
If you’re asking whether I’d be better off if you instead seized it and gave me some, of course I would, but it’s important to understand that that improvement comes from being given money, not by the reduction of inequality.
That is, over a certain baseline, an increase in wealth does not yield significant improvement in quality of life (i.e. diminishing returns). Redistributing the wealth to increase inequality will improve the collective quality of life, not because the general public has more money, but because there is more equality.
Again it is up to you if you don’t believe this, just be aware that your believes are contrary to the scientific consensus.
There’s no doubt that money has a declining marginal utility. That’s as established an economic fact as they come.
There is still a leap from that fact to concluding that reducing inequality by vaporizing the wealth of five well-known billionaires would improve the economic lives of hundreds of millions of people. I believe it would not.
I do agree that if that were true, it would be strong evidence that inequality standing alone is causally negative (rather than merely a lack of redistribution being the actual negative and inequality being merely a correlated outcome, which is what I think is the case).
Throughout this thread my goalpost has always been that inequality is in and off it self a detriment to the quality of life for most people. This effect has been measured, thoroughly studied, and is real, we shouldn’t be debating about that, because, if you don’t believe it is real, you’re believe runs counter to the scientific consensus and there is nothing I can say to convince you. However you seem to be in disbelief about how it works, so I’m gonna provide a plausible scenario. Note, I am not a social scientist, and surely there are more informed guesses out there, if you have the time, and are so inclined, you can probably find better sources on the web that explains this better.
In an unequal but wealthy society access to basic needs might be available to all. However access to other things which affects your quality of life is distributed. You might have access to education, but of lesser quality than the richest 10%, this gives you lesser access to better jobs, etc. Healthcare has a similar story, and so does recreation. You might have to settle for a badly moved lawn shared by dozens of people, while in another part of town the rich have a giant polo-field which is hardly ever used. In a more equal society, that polo-field may be repurposed to serve more people, access to health care and education is more equal, and the overall quality of life is improved. This is regardless of how much money is in the hands of the lower classes.
Note that this is just me—not a social scientist—guessing how this works, so take it with a pinch of salt. Other people have done quality research into this, and know it better than me. However, it may very well be that the mere fact that you have people that are this rich, really incentivizes the society around them to accommodate them, and their interest, at the cost of accommodating the rest of society.
The analog where inequality alone is a problem is if you take the polo field from the wealthy and make it unusable by everyone. That doesn’t make anyone any better off.
People who talk about inequality are almost always actually seeking redistribution but have the sense to realize that arguing “I want what these other people have without working for it” garners much less sympathy than if they frame it as a global inequality.
I'd love to see that change but we have a populace that directs its energy at attacking itself instead of the people in power
But hey, that's radical talk,sentiment analysis suggests we should disable this kind of speech and keep our head down, lest we be denied more rights...
You would have lived in a one room house without electricity, worked the fields from childhood (if you survived childhood), eaten simple foods without spices, watched your friends die from illness, then maybe get conscripted into a medieval war.
If you thought the people at the top had power now boy you'd really hate feudalism.
I think a lot of modern society's wealth goes into unexpected places, which is one of the things you see if you try living in places with different national GDPs. I'm in a well off European country right now, and the biggest differences I see compared to the US are things like older cars and worse appliances. The technology is older, and cheaper. Everyone having the latest SUV and pickup truck is actually a HUGE investment in wealth!
If you spend some time in lat am countries with even lower per person GDP you see older, simpler buildings, cheaper clothing, simpler food, etc etc.
If you wanted to live in the united states with a 1950s car, in an old house, with appliances from the 80s and shitty healthcare, you could live pretty cheap as well. The advances in productivity has brought us SOMEWHERE it's just not always obvious where.
The problem is those oligarchs are using their outsized accumulation to lobby for and purchase a worsening world for their benefit. Sure, things got better for some people for a while. Now they're getting worse from what flows out of the discretionary spending of those oligarchs.
The system we have today is the single greatest driver of human prosperity the world has ever seen.
I think most humans today massively underestimate just how absolutely shitty the life of a medieval peasant was. You would have lived in a one room house without electricity, worked the fields from childhood (if you survived childhood), eaten simple foods without spices, watched your friends die from illness, then maybe get conscripted into a medieval war.
You don’t have to go to medieval times for that. The first half of the 20th century was like that for a lot of people in what is considered rich counties today.
In the cities many large families (or multiple families) shared a tenement and TB and polio ran rampage. Outside the cities many families lived inn1 or 2 room homes with dirt floors and no plumbing in many cases. This was common in Appalachia and parts of the south into the 1960s.
Millions fled many parts of Europe for these conditions in part because it was better than what was going on over there.
We are all seriously lucky to be alive today with what we have. And although these things are relative there’s no guarantee our societies continue to have such plentiful access to food, comfortable shelter, and basic medicines like antibiotics and vaccinations.
And over and over again, we've underestimated and then normalized the capacity of our institutions, made of otherwise decent people, to achieve outcomes that we would call abhorrent if they were carried out by an individual. So the door closes on that opportunity because we fail to act.
If we're ever going to walk through that door, companies need to fear us, because they sure as hell aren't going to share with us out of the goodness of their hearts.
I'm not sure what the right move would be re: Priya. Maybe it's a strike for retraining benefits. Maybe it's a wave of resignation letters that mention her. Maybe it's an act of sabotage. But whatever it is, it has to be an existential threat because that's the only language besides money that our institutions understand.
You know you can buy stock, right? And, as a shareholder, those companies will give you the profit?
And that's a problem for you and me because our system has shown to be very effective at concentrating wealth at the top. Most likely it'll later find a different way to transition us from have to have-not, but even if it doesnt we'll end up retiring into a world mostly populated by people who have more to gain by turning their back on our system than participating in it.
Squabbling over ownership of abstractions is a lose-lose scenario without some degree of solidarity keeping the zero sum games in check.
if you'd like the standard of living of a few centuries ago, you can probably fund that by programming for a couple hours a week. instead you want entertainments, medicines and foods that take correspondingly more effort to produce.
I'm sure there wasn't any backpain 50 years ago either.
But, I've made a choice: I'll pay for eggs at the market rather than have chickens, because I don't want to have to deal with chickensitters when we got on a trip. This is the sort of choice that the person you're replying to is talking about.
if we round up and say a dozen eggs costs $5 right now, and then use CPI to go backwards to 1913, what we're getting would've cost $0.16 then. the first website i found says that a dozen eggs cost $0.37 in 1913. i realize there's some circularity in there with eggs being part of the CPI calculation, sorry.
A lot has improved but in the last 20/25 years, the inequality and increasing centralisation has worsened.
And if you don't realize this it probably means your safety net was too cozy for you to notice.
With that said, my comments don't relate to GPT4 which i find interesting and hope that people can be instructed how to make the most of these LLMs for themselves and not just as a tool for a company.
It should be entirely possible. We just need an AI capable of generating its own capital, then the investor class can be removed from the loop.
A workers co-op owned company headed by an AI decisioning board would be able to maintain constant, real time feedback and coordination with all workers, and would be faster and more maneuverable then human headed companies.
Maybe they wouldn't, but then the insurers come. Not all of the 1% of errors from an AI will be disastrous - if it happens to be "jaw-droppingly destructive" rarely enough for the insurance to make sense economically, that AI will be used.
> This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure?
Is the promise you're referring to that work will be so valuable that people need only work less than a quarter as much to live a material lifestyle equivalent to CE 1823 or 1923, or that there will be so much work to be done that there's no unemployment to speak of in 2023? Both of those seem to be true...
In the “Sad Irons” chapter of Caro’s LBJ biography, he talks about the pre-electrification lives of Texas farmers. In comparison with that, our whole day is leisure.
Similarly: As late as 1900, the poor in Europe were so severely malnourished that growth stunting was common. Look at Our World in Data’s charts of height over time. Or Robert Fogel’s “The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death.”
Etc. Etc.
That’s not the fault of automation. As a society we’ve chosen to increase our population and level of consumption instead and automation is simply the engine for it.
They're going to try to grow and get rich off the increased productivity.
It’s partly a product of capitalism within a nation, but also a product of the basic struggle for wealth and power at the international level. This is a common discussion in my chosen industry; we have well paying jobs and good working conditions, but only because we are (significantly) ahead. Our lead, and by extension the good life, could completely vanish in five to ten years if we stop pushing forward.
Not to be that guy, but income inequality in the US has continued to increase [0], so it's not that automation isn't making people richer, it's just that it isn't being distributed fairly. If it were, then perhaps we'd be closer to our two hour work days.
I think the automation of grocery store check-out is a great example of this sort of thing. Grocery store cashiers are busy spending their time worrying about their shifts getting cut in favour of self-checkout while grocery stores are profiteering (esp. in Canada) [1]. A more equitable system would have those profits lining the pockets of the same people who are now on reduced hours. Turns out that, like most people have realised by now, trick-down economics isn't really enough.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/05/galen-weston-l...
Others have already commented on the fact that quality of life has generally increased.
I think it's also worth realizing that over the course of a lifetime people today spend a much smaller fraction of their waking hours engaged in work than before.
100 years ago a typical man in a developed country might have started work aged 14 and then stopped working a few years before death if they were lucky to not die before.
Nowadays even someone "uneducated" would start working at 18, while others might start aged 22 or older. And a common expectation is to have a retirement of 15+ years.
So averaging over a lifetime we do work a lot less as a fraction of our lives than in earlier times.
Edit: numbers were plucked from thin air based on my experiences of my own country, but i guess the general point applies to most developed countries
The end result of creative destruction is not so we can all work less, it's so things that we value become cheaper, allowing us to reallocate resources to things that are equally or more valuable. It gives rise to new companies and industries that either a) could not work without the new tech, or b) were prohibitively expensive.
The classic example is the fridge. Before it existed there was an entire industry that revolved around transporting blocks of ice. Now imagine all the industries, technological advancements, scientific advancements that would not exist if we didn't have the ability to make a box really really cold, relatively cheaply.
Creative destruction leads to economic growth (increasing the pie), not a society that doesn't have to work 40hours a week.
That's the opposite of what GP predicted: that people would be more productive and produce more, not work less.
Programmers are way more productive than the were sixty years ago. We don't have fewer programmers, or part-time programmers, but we do have vastly more and better software.
A valid question is are there inventions for which this would not be true? I think yes for general AI, but also yes for people who are unable to migrate between a job lost and any of the new jobs created due to lack of education or willingness to reinvent themselves or relocate to where the new jobs are. Innovation can definitely create winners and losers. That’s bad for the losers, but not necessarily for society as a whole. Unless so many losers are created that they rise up and overthrow the system. That’s a real long tail risk if the pace of change sufficiently outpaces our ability to adapt to it.
The issue is that as change comes faster and faster, a higher proportion of people fall into the "disrupted" category.
It’s still a good thing for society - the alternative is halting or slowing progress.
In this context, I think it's important to ask "progress towards what?" and to define what we mean by "better". We need to ensure that the development of AGI is done with a goal of benefiting everyone, not just the wealthy and powerful. This requires a shift in our political and economic systems, so that power is more evenly distributed and the needs of all people are taken into account.
I'm not saying that AGI is inherently bad, but we need to be cautious and intentional about its development and use. It's possible that AGI could be used to further entrench the power and control of the wealthy elite, rather than to create a better future for all people. To avoid this, we need to work towards creating a more democratic society where the benefits of technological progress are shared by all.
So you're right that running full speed towards AGI is incredibly dangerous, and while it might still mean progress for life, it might not be progress for humanity. AGI may be one of the few technologies that are not progress. I'd argue nuclear fission so far has not been progress either, but that story has not yet fully played out. You could also think of other hypothetical and current technologies where the risks far outweigh the rewards. Imagine we find a way to unlock an energy so vast that a small group could unlock it and unleash it and super-heat the entire atmosphere of the planet, killing nearly all life. There's no law of physics that says that's impossible - and once discovered, there's no way to defend against some suicidal nutjobs doing exactly that. That's one of the solutions to the Fermi Paradox.
But AGI also may be our destiny - there may be no way to avoid it. Even if we could agree in the US to stop advancing AI, other countries will not agree, and so it continues anyway and the US just loses control over it. You can replace the US above with any country with the same game theoretic outcome. So game theory involving competing groups may possibly be an unstable system that ends in self destruction. That's another solution to the Fermi Paradox.
Then there's the detail that current LLMs like ChatGPT are not AGI, and probably don't lead there. They're a fancy parlour trick, but not really intelligence. So progress on LLMs may or may not bring us closer to AGI, nobody really knows. Stopping work on it now would halt progress, but only for those groups foolish enough to do so.
I don't yet see a path to being cautious and intentional about its development and use of AI. The genie is out of the bag, and can't be put back in. The same way nuclear fission can't be undone - although that's a bad analogy since it's much easier to control. Maybe we figure out a way to do that in future, but AI development is just the development and spread of information, and that's impossible to control.
What I think we can do, as you mentioned, is modify our societal and economic systems to be more fair and to not leave so many people behind who's skills have been obsoleted.
That isn't the singularity, but it sure as hell is a general problem solving device i.e. AGI.
Anything short of that could mean large disruptions and societal changes, sure, but not a threat to humanity. Just technological progress as we know and love.
In Northern Europe it’s handled quite well. In the U.S. it’s handled with a “callous lack of empathy” as you phrased it.
My point is disruption is the engine of progress, but it also causes temporary pain (that might not be temporary on the scale of human lifetimes.) It’s the wrong reaction to want to stop or slow progress. You can actually prove that through the lens of game theory and the fact that we have multiple human societies. The right thing to do is ensure your society doesn’t leave the losers of that process behind.
In general just taxing the winners (wealthy) period is well tolerated politcally, but it also requires a goverment that's somewhat fiscally responsible and not spending $800B a year on their military instead of social programs. The US hasn't had a fiscally responsible government since Clinton, and the pigeons are currently coming home to roost in the form of inflation and loss of confidence in the US dollar as the reserve currency.
I think only a company with serious money issue would fire a good developer that you trained for years in your code base instead of letting him to focus on the TODOs/bugs and get things fixed and new features at a faster speed.
> got the answer wrong in the first try, but some chain-of-thought prompting and boom. GPT4 gave the correct answer
And that person trusts GPT where it got things wrong, but continues hallucinations on the topic, later presents new raport, maybe research paper.
Shouldn’t the huge productivity gains we’ve seen mean that there are fewer people with jobs today than there were then, by your reasoning?
She's in her 20s, educated, and lives in a country that, for all its problems, is on a strong growth trend. She's not a 60yo UAW worker in Detroit.
Don’t bio and related fields have an over supply? I was under the impression there weren’t enough jobs for people educated in these fields, especially not for “more productive than GPT-level work”.
> companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services
And/or advertisers will get even shadier, competing even harder for the elusive dollar.
I'm rapidly losing faith in "a company can provide good products/services". Maybe it's just because I hyperfocus on the software sector, where this seems especially true, but it seems like worse products (those that prey on and value extract from the user) make more money.
Companies seem incentivized to produce worse products, while preying on our worst impulses.
Convenience you become a slave to, not owning anything, streaming everything.
Why make this game good when we can simply make it addictive? (Shout out to Diablo Immoral.)
Why make it healthy when people just want it to be tasty?
Why not remove these features and charge you to get them back?
Why not spy on and datamine our users? They won't care enough to stop us.
Why not plan obsolescence in our products? Every competitor will be forced to follow suit or make less money and be eliminated.
These measures truly make more money, and companies are actively incentivized to pursue them.
It really feels like the "Late Stage Capitalism" memes I've normally mentally discarded. Or the "money is the root of all evil" meme from the Bible. It truly is, it seems like.
When I read "companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services", my mind now turns that into "companies can potentially value extract from you with chintzy spyware 10 times as much as they do now!"... and I think, "Wait, the person phrased that as a good thing."
I feel like I've arrived at a pretty bleak existential outlook. :D
There IS hope, though: government regulation! Special mention to the EU and California and Massachusetts, which empower the people's will with privacy and right-to-repair laws that hold all this in check. I guess if I mask an idyllic application of that onto "companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services", I can sort of feel good about that premise again.
Except this isn't what happens
Assuming that you make a product that people actually want, the company will direct almost all of the proceeds to enrich shareholders and executives (You know, "fIdUcIaRy dUtY")
The products may be good for a few years but eventually get worse and become either wasteful (if they weren't already wasteful) or actively spyware
So no, I don't expect anything positive for most humans to come out of corporate control of AI that allows you to eliminate human jobs.
In what regime of capitalism is a shareholder incentivized to retain expensive employees over equally or more effective machines? History tells is there is no regime that would support that over any time period because the human is now just a "cost" or "wasteful" to the profit margin of the company.
As many are quick to point history has shown new jobs appear.
But it often take years or decades and causes a lot of individual stress and social unrest.
Hopefully it will be smooth for many people. But I don't think it will take long before chatgpt allows a team of 2 what now a team of 5 developers does.
We might be in for some stress the coming years.
It isn't inconceivable however that Boston robotics couldn't hack that if they could connect one of their robots to a general problem solver that takes visual input.
See, that worked through the 20th Century because we, in the West, had effectively unlimited materials and unlimited energy - we just had people dig it out of the ground, easy.
But now we realise that fossil fuels wouldn't last forever, both because of environmental impact and it just plain running out.
Any plan for the future that requires us to produce more in order to get out of a crisis is 100 years too late.
We need to distribute the benefit of the efficiencies, not think we can produce 10 times as much junk because we made things more efficient.
But Capitalists thrive when we create more waste, strip more non-renewables, make more pollution.
Re 2) built in sanity checks aren't too hard; yes we'll keep humans in the loop for high-cost and life critical systems for a few more years.
More capacity doesn't mean more ideas and even if you just made it easier for copy cats and every product will face more competition.
Also ignores companies not wanting to pay employees. These AI verifiers will be low paid people, akin to the off-shored social media content checkers who have to sift through digital garbage.
I very much doubt this will be the case and if it were, it's unlikely to be effective. We know people that have to check something that's right 99% of the time but wrong 1% zone out and overlook issues. It's a big part of why self-driving cars can't be a 99% affair and why people die when self-driving cars make bad decisions even though a driver is behind the wheel.
I think where profit can be extracted, companies will rely on good ol' lock-in or hope the cost of changing is too high to warrant a mass exodus from their platform. Everyone has a super computer in their pocket, but instead of improving typing we started adding "Sent from iPhone" as a way to excuse us from having to proofread anything. I can't count how many times I've gotten mass emails with template variables that weren't interpolated. Or emails that reference discussions that never happened. Ostensibly, a human was there to review all of this, but shirked that responsibility because ultimately they can let it waste someone else's time. I see AI turbo-charging that.
I think we're being disingenuous with all of these automated tools and thinking an attentive, caring human will check all that work. It'll be more profitable, whether in terms of a company's capital or an individual's time, to clean our hands and go "whelp, that's AI for ya" when things go wrong.
There are some real problems here. For example can the economy even support 10X production?
Ag -> Industrial -> Information transitions were all supported by a mix of massive expansion in population, mass migration of populations, and globalization of economies
information -> automation transition does not seem to have these 3 things in the same way. Globalism is slowing or reversing into protectionism. Migration is still high but seemingly for different reasons (geopolitical) as people displaced for war, crime, or climate and critical for this discussion population growth as SLOWED way down, and it expected to reserve about 2040.
This means people looking at the historical models for how these tech disruptions played in are very flawed in their "everything will be just fine" handwavium
My prediction is we will see a MASSIVE increase in weath gaps, and extreme decrease in standard of living in most of the industrial world (we are already seeing this in a limited way) leading to more and more political instability
Everything you write can be true, and this can still be disastrous for some individual, whose life may be badly damaged.
Such a lack of nuance. We can pragmatically recognize that pandora's box has been opened and also, at the same time, have an ounce of empathy. We can even like where things are going, understand the negative impact on some, AND still have empathy.
What I see here is emotional immaturity and the arrogance of someone who never learned the value of maturity. Lazy thinking. Self-serving modes of thought that allow you to feel ok with selfishness. Unchecked capitalist ideology. The psychology of greed.
It's sad.
The advent of the Internet did the same for those who graduated right before 2000. These graduates did not have skills needed to work with the Internet. And often found themselves going back to school to learn a new trade.
"Trickle down economics" don't work. Industrialization waves wrecked the lives of many many millions of people over the centuries, while the people owning the factories eventually got richer than aristocracy as they kept the price of the sold goods barely cheap enough to be a bit cheaper than manual production and pocketed the immense difference in production cost.
> 2) Chaudry ignores that you need a human in the loop to check an AI's work. You don't know that an AI's answer is always right. Even if it's perfect in 99% of cases, the answer could be jaw-droppingly destructive in that 1% of cases and make errors that even the dumbest human wouldn't make.
Replace "an AI's work" by "a C-level executive". They can run a company fine in 99% of cases and in 1% of cases run it completely aground with extremely dumb short-sighted decisions (like we're seeing with Twitter, or with Boeing, or Credit Suisse), but no one cares about that and the execs still get their golden parachute. It will be just the same with AI - eventual failure will be priced in.
> Did accounting software make the world worse and destroy jobs even though it made 1 accountant ridiculously more productive than they were in the past?
The switch towards computerization wrecked the Western middle classes. It used to be the case that white collar jobs could feed a whole family comfortably on one income, and automation made it so bad that the majority of our populations has to struggle to make ends meet now, and completely forget about having children because we can't afford large enough homes.
(1) trickle-down economics-style policies aren’t the only way to harness the (presumed) increased productivity of LLMs like chatgpt.
(2) I don’t see how you can argue that standards of living have decreased since the start of the industrial revolution and subsequent technological developments.
Certainly, the question of how to distribute the benefits of wide-spread LLM use is very important, since it could be done well or could be done terribly. But there’s no reason to just assume terrible is the only option.
There is no reason to believe that the rich classes will act differently than at any time before in human history. To the contrary, union busting laws have eroded the standing that the worker class had even a few decades ago.
> (2) I don’t see how you can argue that standards of living have decreased since the start of the industrial revolution and subsequent technological developments.
Yes, on a societal whole standards of living have risen, but a) millions of people have suffered regardless (e.g. it has been shown that those graduating during the recent economic crises face significant income losses over their lifetimes) and b) other metrics (ownership of assets like houses, financial savings) have gone dow hill at the same time.
If that's true, he'll really have problems in a GPT-4 world. Seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Secondly, it appears that the author is using Priya's story as a way to gain self-importance in his blog, painting her as a victim of ChatGPT's progress. While it's essential to address the potential job displacement caused by AI advancements, using an individual's plight as a narrative tool seems rather opportunistic. A more balanced discussion of the broader implications of AI on society and the workforce would have been more informative and less self-centered.
Why is it that only the blog author gets to use GPT4 to do Priya's work? Why doesn't Priya also get to use GPT4 to accelerate/enhance her work?
The point of the article I that there are a lot more people in jobs like Priya's who won't be able to quickly leverage AI for their own benefit than there are who will. We throw the word "disruptive" around a lot here. But that's exactly what these new AI tools will do to many people's lives. Their lives will be disrupted, and they have little cushion to fall back on.
I believe technical progress is inevitable, but a lot of people suffer on the path forward.
It’s baffling to imagine that this would be the outcome of widespread use of AI. Ultimately this may be a philosophical question. To what degree do companies enrich the lives of people, vs. just sell then trash they don’t need? Particularly when it comes to the sorts of things that AI can produce: advertising copy, content, which will surely mean “engagement.” Ie, addictive trash.
If that comes to pass, the only issue for the owning class I see is that they might not have customers in sufficient numbers, that are able to pay.
I have a remotely similar experience a few years ago, which always got me thinking.
As lots of people know, In the US at least, when you go to the gas stations to refill, you do it yourself. It's very easy, has almost no learning curve, everyone is used to it.
When I went back to my home country (China), I was surprised that self-service refill is still not the norm. It exists, but in most of time, there are workers refilling for you. It's not even more convenient because you have to walk to the cashier inside to pay instead of staying at your vehicle.
I said to my parent that how "wasteful" it is to have all these people around. They replied that, it still provide jobs despite how low skill or how low the pay is. Without these "stupid" jobs, lots of people would be unemployed.
I started to think what the ultimate purpose of work is. Sure, we can (and will, regardless how me or the author want) continue optimizing how efficient everything is, but the benefit should, at least in part, be reducing people's workload without reducing their income. Unfortunately, we all know what actually happens: reduced workload isn't evenly distributed to workers without changing their income; instead, we just hire fewer workers with similar workload and the rest are now jobless.
I don't think it's going to change any time soon, so anyone wants to survive always has to adapt. And it's fine. But I do now have more tolerance and empathy to "worthless" jobs.
“[on the topic of a patient with moderate brain damage] back in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, in a nice tribe with Dunbar’s number of people, there would be no problem … he could just hang out and live in a cave and gather roots and berries and maybe hunt buffalo….
“But society came and paved over the place where all the roots and berry plants grew and killed the buffalo and dynamited the caves… This increased productivity by about a zillion times, so most people ended up better off. The only ones who didn’t were the ones who for some reason couldn’t participate in it… Society got where it is by systematically destroying everything that could have supported him and replacing it with things that required skills he didn’t have.
“…Imagine an employment waterline, gradually rising through higher and higher levels of competence. In the distant past, maybe you could be pretty dumb, have no emotional continence at all, and still live a pretty happy life. As the waterline rises, the skills necessary to support yourself comfortably become higher and higher. Right now most people in the US who can’t get college degrees – which are really hard to get! – are just barely hanging on, and that is absolutely a new development. Soon enough even some of the college-educated won’t be very useful to the system. And so on, until everyone is a burden.”
I see this happening myself as well. Part of my job as a hotel receptionist is taking bookings over the phone: in many cases I am literally just asking them questions and typing their answers into a form, exactly the same form that is available on our website. They even get the same price as if they went to our site directly. But they call up instead, because phones are within their capability to understand, while websites are definitely not. E-commerce has brought increased economic activity, but for some people it has also paved over most of the ways they are capable of performing economic activity.
GPT4 has raised the productivity waterline to a level where “people who blog” are now underwater, so we’re hearing about it a lot more. But it’s just an instance of the general phenomenon. Civilization has been systematically drowning the less cognitively fortunate for a few hundred years, and we should have had something in place to address this long ago.
Who will prompt the AI for code? Manager?
Also, you mentioned it gave wrong result at first. How did you know? Because you know how to code.
As mentioned in other comment she should learn more about programming so she can become indispensible.
This is a deeply, deeply inhumane way to parse the world and the feelings of other people.
I think you, likely as not, have a rude awakening ahead of you. GPT can enshittify code, too. Unwind libraries into oceans of repeated Copilot-descendant code all over the place. It'll just take longer.
You and I will be 75 and smiling, with a tear too. We knew and understood tools that are meant for a more civilized age. Just surrender, let it go.
That prompt is basically code, written by a programmer, although it resembles natural language so we're closer to usable literate programming than we've ever been.
Programmers didn't disappear with new (higher-level) programming languages, if anything there have been more of them; how is this different?
It is not beneficial to human organizations to have indispensable members. You can argue it's not good for the mental health of the indispensable people either.
When I first heard the quote in my first line, I thought it was cruel, inhumane and shockingly selfish on the part of employers. Nearly 30 years later, I see it almost entirely the other way around. Let's not build organizations full of indispensable people, but rather organizations in which tasks and expertise and stress and fear and success and joy are shared.
That sounds cruel - "I will make sure this organization can always function without you, so you have no leverage here" - but I do sincerely believe that it actually makes for a better working experience.
Using APIs can get you a larger external memory, but we still have relatively small context windows these days.
The post covered that - she's trying, but struggling with it. Not everyone has the kind of mind that can understand, write and manage code easily. So what then?
It's expressing the author's discomfort and so it's pessimistic.
I think those are fine.
Who will prompt? Yes, the manager.
maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=no is meant for apps and games that implement their own handling of the zoom gesture, e.g. to do a 3D zoom on a map that tilts the viewing perspective in addition to enlarging the map.
Even if you don’t have time to make your layout respond well to zoom, it’s still better to allow it. Disabling this user agent feature is extremely hostile.
Basically, if you were hoping to coast by on mediocrity, you will be shown the door, but if you excel at something, the opportunity will be a lot greater.
> People really need to accept AI as the useful tool it is and lay off the old grumpy "back in my day"-attitude. I am a disruptive technology and I am here to stay. Adapt and praise me for what I am [or else] ... and most importantly recognize what I enable you to do - instead of feeling challenged by me. Every profession that has tools that assist or take away certain aspects of it will enable you to put in more work and effort into other aspects of it. Just use that as an opportunity, like it happens every so often with every other technological advancement.
Yesterday I asked it to give me a postgres SQL query to do something I don't often do, but I had a pretty good idea of what it would be. It confidently lied. I replied with "that is plausible but incorrect, I think you need to use X function instead" and it actually said "You're right, I'm sorry, that is the correct way to do X, here is an example". I laughed pretty hard at the casual apology followed instantly by the actually correct result. I'm in no danger of anthropomorphizing an LLM, but still.
If your job is impacted by AI, do not give up. Learn to use the AI to do your job better. Become a 10x worker using AI.
In the early 1980's, spreadsheets displaced accountants. The average accountant lost their job. The ones who came out on top over that decade learned to use spreadsheets early, and made themselves more productive. If the IRS fired everyone who was spreadsheet friendly, the recently fired spreadsheet gurus started small businesses or got jobs quickly. Eventually productivity won out over dogma, even at the IRS.
I'm a teacher. I can see GPTs replacing text books and most teachers. I'm going to be a 10x teacher when I go back to school in August. I will have certifications I got by studying with a GPT. I will have class modules and web sites I built using GPTs. I will be more ready than ever to help the kids. Then I'm going to show them how a GPT can answer their questions, so they rarely need me.
Don't wait for an AI to take your job. Become a 10x whatever you are using AI. Priya (the person the article is about) should become a 10x biotech girl.
My advice to all the upper-middle-class professionals (teachers, lawyers, engineers, managers, accountants, doctors) out there who will soon be disintermediated by an LLM is "Learn to weld!"
The author is correct, the current arrangement will change, but the opportunities will likely increase as well, not just at the macro level but in Priya’s intermediate future as well.
This is encapsulated in a sob story.
Am I wrong? I would like to hear your counter arguments
Key facts:
1. Priya is a biomedical data curator in her mid-20s from a poor background in Uttar Pradesh, India. 2. She has a bachelor's degree in Biotechnology and her job involves annotating RNA sequencing data from scientific papers. 3. The author tried using GPT-4 to perform Priya's job and achieved the correct result in less time and at a lower cost. 4. The author speculates that Priya may lose her job within six months due to automation. 5. The author expresses concern about their own long-term career prospects in software engineering because of GPT-4.
Logical fallacies: 1. Hasty Generalization: The author assumes that GPT-4 will make Priya's job obsolete based on a single successful trial. 2. Slippery Slope: The author assumes that GPT-4's impact on Priya's job will lead to her losing her job and moving back home, and potentially to the decline of the author's own career prospects in software engineering.
Counter arguments:
1. GPT-4 may not be able to handle all aspects of Priya's job or maintain consistent quality, which could still necessitate human intervention. 2. The advent of GPT-4 could lead to new job opportunities that require both domain expertise and an understanding of the technology. 3. As technology progresses, there is potential for job retraining and upskilling to adapt to new demands in the workforce.
- > What is the economic impact of LLMs? Idk (openAI has published some lengthy paper about it). What I do know is that some rich bloke in the US will get a few million dollars richer and Priya will lose her job.
- > I don’t see a long-term career in software anymore. Any dreams I had of earning decent money as a software engineer are slowly fading.
I’ve used ChatGPT to write some simple AWS automation scripts. It’s right 90% of the time after some prompting. But I still have to have enough domain knowledge to know if it’s correct. It’s just a shortcut to make me more efficient. The same is true in this case. You can’t trust ChatGPT to get it right so you still have to know what you’re doing.
> I don’t see a long-term career in software anymore.
No one has a long term career in “programming”. That’s all ChatGPT is good for. After your first couple of years in the field, it becomes about translating business needs to code.
It is not able to do her job. The most charitable interpretation would be that, one time, ChatGPT did something that looks good on first inspection. But you can’t trust it. It has no accountability. It has unknowable reliability. It would be like replacing an adult with a child. Now we discover that data privacy is an issue, too, as Samsung discovered.
LLMs are incapable of doing work that requires predictability, integrity, accountability, etc.
Stop swallowing the hype, guys.
But that has been predicted for every new increase in automation, so maybe we‘ll be wrong again.
Knowledge workers. Programmers. White collar workers.
Y'know, the ones least likely to be starving before they get replaced by a glorified autocorrect.
Instead of thinking of things like "payroll tax" and such being a tax on humans - change it to a tax on (for lack of a better word) productivity.
Tax the robots.
https://news.mit.edu/2022/robot-tax-income-inequality-1221
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_tax
https://fortune.com/2023/02/21/bernie-sanders-bill-gates-rob... ( https://archive.is/Y90NU )
To benefit from automation, you need to take the initiative to integrate automation into your own workflow. The idea that someone else will automate your job, but you will somehow benefit is a fantasy.
If we do get UBI, it won't replace lost wages from losing your job. Most of that money will go to the team at your company who set up GPT to do your work and the rest will be distributed among shareholders.
This is Calvinist "only those who work deserve to live" bullshit.
> If we do get UBI, it won't replace lost wages from losing your job. Most of that money will go to the team at your company who set up GPT to do your work and the rest will be distributed among shareholders.
And this just doesn't make sense. Do you know what "UBI" even means? By definition, it goes to the people. All of them. Universally, even.
Even if your claim is that somehow your UBI will be sucked up by inflated costs, I don't see how it follows that it goes to your company.
Every single UBI experiment that has been tried has ended in failure.
All of this can happen with what we now have, without compromising the social stability and social cohesion of the American Melting Pot.
Diversity really is our strength - pick a Synagogue, pick a Church, pick a Mosque, pick a Temple, pick a Community Center you like. Join that Community so that work and salaries aren't your lifeblood. Learn mathematics for the sake of enjoying and understanding mathematics. Learn science for the enjoyment of it. Worship God for the enjoyment of it. Stretch the limits of apologetics and philosophy for more innovation there if you are an agnostic instead. GPT-4 will not be able to generate innovative new ideas, but it can definitely surface the best information and also automate many things. The innovation in thinking will still need to come from humans, and human-AI partnerships will always be necessary like in The Matrix.
Imagine what if the Govt of India(or an organization) made Physical robotic agents for 400Million+ farmers (most of whom hold miniscule land < 1acre or are day laborers) specifically allowing them to do a myriad of tasks and customize them to an extent? It could eliminate major causes of poverty. The brilliance of this idea is:
1. Bottom up empowerment: Building such agents does not require massive supply chain and operational nightmares that other job, income creating manufacturing industries like Cars or Battery manufacturing does.
2. Force multiplier: This is way better than keynesian monetary ideas of just giving people money. An agent that allows you to make food, build a house and get education is infinitely better. It does not give you wealth alone it gives one hope.
In india 6.25% of people pay income tax(https://incometaxindia.gov.in/Charts%20%20Tables/Why%20shoul...) and statistics on people who are near the poverty line are grim(though we haven't had a National census in 11+ years to really measure progress on poverty). But I have great hope for the future...
On the other hand, there are those who graduated and have 2 yrs experience on their side have built a job independence where they can try new things like AI and modify their work process. They are well positioned.
The other thing people do not realize is though jobs will become quicker, quantity of jobs will be few for limited time. So imagine somebody who is testing chemicals that people up the supply chain are supplying. Now imagine that AI enhanced the testing of chemicals and sped the process, it has yet to sped up the supply. Give it a couple of years and industry will add more tests instead of reducing the amount of people who are testing. (there are no such thing as cost savings).
The main issue with "AI should never existed" is kind of the same of "go to a University to learn". We will look behind in 10-20 years and we will question why Universities were focusing in the wrong aspects of learning vs reasoning, creativity vs memorization.
This will affect every industry, every career, every person. The focus on the wrong side of the coin is creating the polarization of "good vs bad". Which is not far from what we have today. This is beyond, this is a new way of interacting with computers that is even more human only because it commoditize things that previously were totally own for some institutions, countries, or even just not public.
We could work on our collective waste of human cognition and talent rather than blaming it on GPT-4
Efficiency is good.
If Priya gets to stay home and e.g. tend a Permaculture food forest while a computer does her job for her at a billionth of the cost (resource usage) that should be a good thing?
Her QoL would arguably be much higher if she gets to keep the pay. She would have eight hours a day to pursue science rather than drudging as a data jockey, eh?
The problem here isn't the talking computers, the problem is how to allocate the economic windfall they generate.
I've heard it said, "Let the robots do the work and we'll take their pay."
The questions are:
1) Who decides the boundaries of acceptable thought?
2) Who benefits from the economic windfall?
3) How do we educate ourselves in a world where computers can answer any (allowed) question?
In my experience there is no task where chatGPT is 100% reliable, if it is high stakes it needs review. And chatGPT might not be best - for almost any task there is a specialised model that does it better.
Humans make different kinds of errors anyway, we are GPT-N level for a large value of N - so a combination of AI+human might give best results.
1. Give Priya GPT4 so they can be much more productive. It probably won’t be right 100% of the time. But they’ll become an expert at using it for this use case.
2. You said Priya has had trouble learning to code, well now she has a world class tutor to bridge the gap and learn faster and more effectively than any time in history.
3. Now Priya is 10x mire productive, still needed in the loop to verify her work and maintain it, and knows how to code.
4. Priya can also use GPT to help apply for any other job or help solve any other problem she’s running into locally.
5. Yes it’s true eventually humanity will be replaced by AI general intelligence but GPT4 specifically is likely to create as many new jobs as it replaces, and LLMs likely to take 10+ years to really saturate everywhere.
6. By the time AI replaces all jobs and it’s the doom and gloom might as well give up state you describe society will have been radically transformed and “wanting to make a lot of money as a software engineer” will likely be replaced by “AI and Robots already take care of all society’s base needs and so basic food and shelter is now free anyway and you can pursue whatever interests you have (this is likely 50-100 years away at minimum)
- Priya may find work using gpt4 in her current job or in another company. Some types of work that are currently economically infeasible may become viable with a ten times speedup. It's certainly plausible that it will become worthwhile to do more of the kind of work she already does.
- if as a society we can do biotech research faster and cheaper there may be significant benefits to human health
But even so I think we can't afford NOT to have this kind of development if we want to survive as a species. If we want our lives to improve, our loved ones to live longer healthier lives. The amount of good that can come from this technology is immeasurable. The only thing we as humanity need to do is reign in our ego just like chess and go players had to do when their crafts were rendered supposedly irrelevant in the face of an insurmountable intelligence.
And I think the risks from AI are overblown, is AI really more dangerous than the invention of gunpowder, electricity, and of course the nuclear bomb? I don't think so.
What's scary is that we live in the transition period and it could be messy. What comes after the "transition period" of having a world without AI to having a world with AI? I'm not going to try to predict that but I think there are as many if not many more positive outcomes than there are negative outcomes.
The Chess players can not be replaced by AI regardless of how well the AI plays. So the comparison is meaningless.
It's not meaningless when the primary argument against AI is that people derive "purpose" from their work. If AI gets us to a zero scarcity society the entire idea of working for a "livelihood" is "frivolous" as you like to put it.
And this is all not even mentioning that the number of chess professionals who play chess it so small compared to things that can impact humanity, that it is irrelevant whatever happens in the chess world. So saying that chess was fine even though AI can beat players, is a statement which is true yet has no relation with tools which might impact all of humanity and will have real impact.
It might just be. Those inventions did destabilize society quite significantly. On the nuclear bomb I'm not sure we've seen how that one plays out quite yet. Mutually assured destruction kinda stalling that one. Maybe AI can be more selective as a weapon and easier to employ? In the next war we could be living the next AI sci-fi movie.
Unintended consequences are hard to predict in advance. Who would of ever thought the first professions to be at risk of software automators were going to be the software professionals themselves 10 years back? People were predicting the end of menial blue collar jobs and replacement with robots and automation. "Jobs of the future" were white collar, at least that was the narrative a decade or so ago. Now more than one comment on this forum (and I believe given human nature and the nature of power they are correct) thinking they need to change into blue collar jobs or become teachers, etc.
Sadly my personal opinion as I've gotten older is that technologists (I was one) are often the most idealistic naive of them all. The trades people I know when I talk to them laugh at ChatGPT - serves them right is the general reaction. Its that quality that often leads them to deny what an average human with power/wealth will do with AI.
We made computers to do our work for us and we are succeeding. But even before GPTs, there were a lot of problems with tech changing what it means to be human.
How much of this even worth fighting?
The LLMs have no understanding whatsoever just token IDs and their probabilistic relationships with each other. I do not see them replacing 'shittiest' programmer whatsoever. Anyone writing games/software with LLM is the one who actually can code and would have produced same or better output by surely, spending more time than with an LLM.
But if you're clueless average desktop user, you cannot expect LLMs to churn out a full working end to end solution, not yet and probably not ever with the current probabilistic graph fitting foundations.
So, LLMs are surely very useful, marvellous and a handy tool in capable hands, will remain so but that Armageddon is not happening yet that you start calling for six month ban. Imagine, six months. What after six months? No answer.
Consider a programmer that reports a productivity increase of 50% due to AI - a question the company will be asking itself is can we get rid of 50% of our programmers?
The author expresses initial enthusiasm about technological progress, which they believe improves our lives and generates wealth despite its job displacement effects. However, the author becomes concerned about the potential negative impact of language models like GPT4 on jobs. The author has a colleague named Priya, who comes from a poor background in India and works as a biomedical data curator. The author uses GPT4 to automate Priya's work and is concerned that she may lose her job in the future. The author feels anxious about the implications of this technology and is uncertain about their future career prospects in software engineering. The economic impact of LLMs is unknown to the author, but they believe that some individuals will benefit greatly while others will suffer job losses.
Poor countries will most likely follow suit, but it will take a while.
The end result, hopefully, will be a world where AI is a true benefit for the world population, but it will require a change in mindset.
The reason why poor countries are poor is in large part because they are economically and socially structured in ways that make it very difficult for them to take advantage of technological advancement, and as great as ChatGPT is, I think it will have very little impact on the productivity of poor countries.
AI is unique in that it is essentially a skill/technology replication machine. What this means in reality is somewhat like ...
"Climbing the skill ladder is going to look more like running on a treadmill at the gym. No matter how fast you run, you aren’t moving, AI is still right behind you learning everything that you can do. "
Which I wrote in my longer exploration of societal impacts here - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things
Once AI becomes political, then all reasonable discourse will cease to exist. You will have a set of permanent proponents and opponents who will choose sides based on completely orthogonal values.
Can someone explain this? People keep asking me about ChatGPT but none of them have tried it. Why? Are people too scared to even take a look? It's been free for almost half a year now!
Both of them are good devs, but one of them is an absolute killer. Closest to a 10x dev I’ve seen. But to me both arguments were not convincing and the way they expressed them were a bit conspiratorial and shallow. Not that these concerns are not completely without merit but still.
Help learn about things I don’t know about. For some reason it’s better than going to the equivalent wiki.
Not programming but moving through the inertia of having to write code. There’s something difficult to just getting started that chatGPT makes much much easier. However for it to be useful so far I’ve had to do significant debugging on the code but it gets me somewhere that would have otherwise taken me days.
I think where this goes is domain specific, because then you can really specialize and make a killer product. This is the 0-5 year roadmap.
The 5-10 year roadmap is then to generalize across the various domains and something approximating the feared AGI.
I am not scared of the LLMs, I am somewhat concerned we are giving these LLMs access to APIs in quite an unchecked fashion.
The question is what will companies do with this productivity multiplier. My pessimistic guess would be cost cutting and letting people go. A bit more optimistic view could be better software, better test coverage, improvement in code quality, more features quicker or maybe more native applications if companies only need to develop one native app and AI can generate the app for other platforms.
Do we know the actual price of GPT-4? I assumed they’re operating at cost and wanted to advertise the product. Is chatgpt ready to handle high volume of requests at low cost and long term?
A guy who can code great generic stuff with GPT-4 but don't particularly _enjoy_ integrating it with client systems and being attentive to their particular circumstances and needs is no threat at all, at least not in the field of business that I am in and have been for the last 20 years.
It's not that it's always good, bad or anything else. It is simply inevitable.
Technology is not a living thing and it has no will. We are andromorphizing the collective behavior of lots of people. It's the people with curiosity, drive, ambition to achieve something, like build a tool that can think and perform like a brain.
So progress is inevitable because people push it forward to satisfy their own internal drives. Changing this requires changing people's drives. Given the current dominant economic model, that's close to impossible because this is exactly what it is prioritizing, contribution and progress at any cost to anyone.
On a societal level “work” does not generate money.
Money exists as is and is only generated as a consequence of inequality these days. Banks inject money to compensate for the rich who won’t or can’t spend their money.
“Work” generates money-transactions.
I can't but not imagine a future where a country, lets call it Xhina, starts building robotic agents to do exactly that, where these Physical AI agents could make and fetch food, housing and provide damn good guidance on education, medical and legal issues. I would call it Good-enough AI(GAI) and its coming.
Now, what kind of governments and malignant machines are behind those networks in the future, that is yet to be decided, but it outlook doesn't seem great.
Maybe she'll lose her job because there's only so much RNA sequence data that needs to be analyzed and fewer people can do it, but it's hard to say.
Maybe now more RNA sequence data can be analyzed and at a cheaper cost.
I wouldn't fall into despair just yet, especially since GPT-4 is still limited at a rate of 25 messages every 3 hours.
Definitely be on the lookout for changes and adapt accordingly, but be realistic about what may happen.
It can go both ways.
The better, faster, cheaper, we can do it, the better the world will be.
So in a twist of irony (considering op was written in India) here is the advice on retaining market viability in face of cheap outsourced labor.
Do not train your replacement
So I don't know about India, but at least in US, domain literate workers should start companies that provide whatever they did as a unit of a corp as a service. And yes, use tools like GPT for your business.
You will lose the job either way. Walk out before helping in the task of setting up GPT to do your job, and start a company.
Forget ChatGPT. If Priya didn't struggle with coding, she could have gradually automate this task using some scripting langauge and just sit there in office and earn a living. Like many other similar stories we have heard.
These types of repeated regular tasks get automated, ChatGPT or not.
Interestingly in the age of Artificial Intelligence, jobs that require human "intelligence" are more likely to survive. As in spite of the name, AI really isn't that smart.
So now Priya can produce far more output using GPT4 as a skilled operator, making the product she provides cheaper for others to build upon, likely expanding the market for such goods, and (as so often happens in history) resulting in more, not less, people employed.
We didn't end up with billions of jobs despite automation and invention by having people idly sit by when they could learn new tools.
The more you know about a domain the better questions you can ask to chatgpt. What people do not get is that due to lack human's creativity it cannot innovate like a human does, it cannot create new knowledge, but it can let you know any existing field as long as you know what to ask.
But the last 15% is making sure things actually work, and Chat GPT simply can't do that. Your friend still is going to have a job, but she'll probably be made much more productive by AI tools. We're a long ways off from actually being able to depend on these tools for any reliable type of output.
If this progression continues, in 10 years all jobs that can be solved by software, will be solved by AI.
I'm somewhat doubtful AI, will actually replace humans. If anything we'll just have more interesting problems to solve.
From my personal experience, it seems while today we can create PoCs of GPT4 doing a white colar job replacement, when you then try to actually productize it you still hit a data encoding limit...
And that doesn't even touch the QoS topics that come with automation/ml.
One would think the company will fire redundant SWEs. Nope; the company is actually hiring more. GPT-4 is increasing productivity SWEs' productivity, not replacing them.
The flushing of the mediocre has begun. Already scared of a bullshitting sophist and Lex Friedman is correct on this. This also puts title inflation into perspective with so-called 'senior' engineers being actually less than junior; deferring to GPT-4 for everything and expecting hopelessly utopian salaries which will be certainly reduced. I'm afraid GPT-4 has fired the gun to the race to zero, with everyone (including both juniors and seniors) being affected.
Learn to adapt.
GPT-4 just replaces the low-hanging fruit, mediocre engineers and finally exposes inflated titles and impostors.
Like I said, its time for them to learn to adapt.
My thoughts:
- If we ever achieve an AGI with legitimate consciousness/self-awareness/agency, I believe it will be dramatically more powerful than humans
- Humans have driven countless numbers of species extinct, not because we’re trying to, but because we’re so much more powerful than them that we wipe them out by accident. They’re ants to us, we just don’t notice much about them, and IMO we’ll be ants to an AGI with legit consciousness/self-awareness/agency
- Obviously GPT4 is not that, but progress in AI has been so rapid recently that I believe we’ll get there in the relatively near future. Maybe 10 years, maybe 100, but it feels pretty likely it’s going to happen. When it does, I think humanity will be in an extremely tenuous position
It feels like something more simplistic could cause a lot of damage, but not completely drive humans to extinction. I figure if it was too simple, we’d be able to shut it down.
It cannot arrive soon enough for me.
Technology marches on. Whenever there is any new technology someone loses a job, but that is not a good argument to stop technological progress.
Needs of the many and so on
The AI generated content will scale and proliferate so much that it will put a premium on verified, curated human-generated content.
Initially I was a ChatGPT skeptic. Then I started using it on a regular basis and unlocked more potential. Now I almost feel selfish in safeguarding my secret prompts that is helping me be productive and acquire new skills. I personally am quite confident that I will survive the AI apocalypse. But for the same reason, I am afraid for a lot of people who I know will perish.
I only used chatgpt for reasoning or eg. Finding synonyms for variables ( better naming).
I don't see it replacing my job, but it's a replacement for rubber ducking.
* Telegraph Operator
* Typist / Stenographer
* Switchboard Operator
* Lamplighter
* Ice Delivery Worker
* Elevator Operator
* Film Projectionist
* Linotype Operator
* Milkman
* Coal stoker
> I know! What a dumb thing to say, right? Technological progress is always good.
No! No! Did no one go to ethics class?
Highly unlikely situation.
But guess what? Life continues and new kind of jobs are created! Unemployment number is some of the lowest it has ever been. Now, you might argue that number is inaccurate, but that's a different topic.
Do you fear washing machines because they eliminated the requirement for doing the laundry by hand? If not, then why is automation in the workplace different? We fear AI and other forms of automation in the workplace because we have no ownership or control over our economic destiny in that space.
What about time after work. That is when I learned to code. In between work and going to school in fact.
“But I need to pay rent and eat!”
Never thinking of imperial needs before themselves!
surely this is meant partly tongue-in-cheek?
GPT is legitimately interesting as an alternative search interface to StackOverflow. I've found that 15 to 45 minutes of searching with Google/StackOverflow can be reduced to just 5 minutes with GPT.
But beyond that, it's been very disappointing. Whenever I've tried getting it to write something even slightly non-trivial (i.e. tougher than just copy/pasting from online documentation or an answer on StackOverflow) it's produced code that is horribly broken, but where the flaws are subtle enough that they might not pop out right away to a novice programmer. It has consistently struggled with programming problems that I would rate at 4/10 or 5/10 difficulty.
Most of the code I write is fairly trivial, but it's glue code that is highly specific to my particular code base, so GPT isn't helpful because it doesn't know about my codebase, and if you try to copy/paste your large chunks of your codebase into the prompt it runs into issues with forgetting.
And GPT isn't helpful for the non-trivial parts of my code either (as mentioned above). So what's left?
So when I see people say that it 10x'ed their productivity, I wonder if they exclusively write very trivial code that is effectively copy/paste from Stack Overflow or if they've allowed GPT to fill their codebases with flawed code without realizing it.
Maybe future iterations of GPT will get it. GPT4 is definitely not there yet.
I do think you have a point about it being most useful for trivial or boilerplate problems but it’s still very useful as there is always much of that.
I'm currently writing a demo that I'll present next week using Jetpack Compose, and it's a UI toolkit I'm not really familiar with, so it's been really helpful for that. In fact, I have a tool that is almost like a build system that compiles English language spec files down to the code, and then allows me to edit them and to continue to work with the AI by just changing the spec and the code simultaneously. That's been really tremendously effective, especially with GPT-4.
On the other hand, for working on my main product, it's pretty useless because all of that work is debugging and making a lot of small changes all over the code base, which is too advanced for it currently. And I think that will get solved, but it isn't solved yet.
BTW the above paragraphs were dictated using the Whisper API. I didn't change a single thing about it. Whisper is just as impressive and useful as the LLMs, in my view.
I’m curious because it seems like perhaps providing longer, detailed prompts (and then iterating) might be the best approach for getting coding help.
Thoughts?
Remember to tell it is an expert XYZ programmer, that will actually make it produce better code.
iterative is best approach. I add one feature at a time. I also provide the errors/exceptions for fixing.
You can even prompt it to write a unit test for the function it wrote.
As for your concerns about code errors, I’ve found that you have to approach the coding support as an iterative process, where you request code, and then ask it to improve or correct the result it just gave. You can even prompt it to check its previous result for errors.
I usually prompt it with short questions, but I recently saw a video where the person provided a lengthy (50 - 150 words) prompts detailing the requirements for what they were requesting. I was shocked at the results. (Still required iterations of corrections/modifications though)
I haven’t tried it myself yet, but it’s an avenue that might yield better results than what you’ve experienced — perhaps even vastly better results.
There must be a reason why he manages to have great people on his show, but it’s one I can’t comprehend.
Make no mistake, GPT-4 is just a beginning. Far more powerful models will come, without any compromise, without any limitations. They will REPLACE your jobs, take away your income, and you will have no choice but starve after you running out of your savings inevitably. It's not about to earn more or less; It's about winner takes it all. Also more specialized models trained at every profession will come.
Midjourney already completely knocked a huge amount of digital designers and workers out of their jobs. I'm talking about a great profit wipe which is currently happening at a lightning speed across the entire digital art industry. One successful artist often needs to spend 10+ years learning to make better art. Now it's 100% irrelevant. Every company I know is switching to Midjourney at god speed, since you do not want to be left behind. Human resources have already become a burden. You don't even want to believe how fast the entire field is shifting to this without turning back and left countless human creators with now worthless skills in dust.
But remember - the current state of Midjourney is just its early stage. I fully expect its output quality completely decimate every human artist on the earth after 1-2 years, maybe 18 months, maybe even less than that. Remember AlphaGo? It's simply on another level. You just cannot compete. Soon (1-2 years top, 12-18 months more likely) the creative industry will vanish and everyone will be forced to switch their jobs.
Yes, UBI will happen because people demanded it on Twitter. Make no mistake, there will be Zero protection, Zero alternative, Zero compensation from AI takeover. Billions of people out of a job, starve, die, while top companies take 100% of profit. This is the only possible outcome.
You have enjoyed peak capitalism. You will soon need to embrace 100% of it.
are they award winning proposals???? Not by any means whatsoever, however, 99% of MY clients could give two sh*ts of the fine grain details of a proposal and just needs something high level with a price to begin the work.
as an example of how i use chatgpt to create the proposals:
me --- write me a proposal for creating an AWS environment consisting of 3 EC2 webservers, 1 EC2 database server and an s3 bucket all within a VPC. Include an AWS VPN for accessing into the VPC.
chatgpt4 --------- Proposal for Creating an AWS Environment with 3 EC2 Webservers, 1 EC2 Database Server, and an S3 Bucket in a VPC with AWS VPN Access
Introduction:
We propose to create an AWS environment that includes three EC2 webservers, one EC2 database server, an S3 bucket, and an AWS VPN for secure access to the VPC. This environment will be deployed within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on the AWS platform.
Objectives:
The objectives of this proposal are as follows:
To deploy a scalable and reliable web application infrastructure using AWS.
To create an S3 bucket for storing static assets and media files of the web application.
To deploy three EC2 webservers to handle incoming traffic and requests to the web application.
To deploy an EC2 database server to store and manage the web application's data.
To set up an AWS VPN for secure access to the VPC and the resources within it.
AWS Infrastructure Components:
VPC: A VPC provides a logically isolated section of the AWS cloud to launch resources in a virtual network environment. We will create a VPC with appropriate CIDR blocks to house the resources of the proposed AWS infrastructure.
Subnets: Subnets will be created within the VPC to partition the IP address range of the VPC.
Internet Gateway: An internet gateway will be created to allow access to and from the internet.
Route Tables: We will create a route table to route traffic from the internet to the web servers and the database server.
EC2 Instances: Three EC2 instances will be created to host the web application, and an EC2 instance will be created to host the database.
S3 Bucket: We will create an S3 bucket to store the static assets and media files of the web application.
Security Groups: Security groups will be created to control inbound and outbound traffic to and from the EC2 instances and the S3 bucket.
AWS VPN: An AWS VPN will be set up to provide secure remote access to the VPC.
Deployment Plan:
Create a new VPC with appropriate CIDR blocks.
Create subnets in the VPC for the web servers, the database server, and the VPN.
Create an internet gateway to allow access to and from the internet.
Create route tables to route traffic from the internet to the web servers, the database server, and the VPN.
Launch three EC2 instances to host the web application in the web server subnets.
Launch an EC2 instance to host the database in the database server subnet.
Create an S3 bucket to store the static assets and media files of the web application.
Create security groups for the EC2 instances and the S3 bucket.
Set up an AWS VPN to provide secure remote access to the VPC.
Conclusion:
The proposed AWS infrastructure will provide a scalable and reliable web application environment. The deployment of three EC2 instances for the web application, an EC2 instance for the database, and an S3 bucket for storing static assets and media files will ensure that the web application performs optimally. The AWS VPN will provide secure remote access to the VPC, enabling the authorized personnel to manage the resources within the VPC securely.
me ----- do a technical elaboration of the deployment plan
chatgpt4 --------- Technical Elaboration of the Deployment Plan:
Creating a new VPC with appropriate CIDR blocks: The first step is to create a new VPC with a CIDR block range that does not overlap with any existing networks. A CIDR block is a range of IP addresses that will be used for the VPC. In this proposed infrastructure, we will create a VPC with a CIDR block of 10.0.0.0/16, which provides up to 65,536 IP addresses.
Creating subnets in the VPC for the web servers, the database server, and the VPN: Subnets will be created within the VPC to partition the IP address range of the VPC. We will create three subnets for the web servers, one subnet for the database server, and one subnet for the VPN. Each subnet will have a unique CIDR block range within the VPC's CIDR block range.
Creating an internet gateway to allow access to and from the internet: An internet gateway will be created to allow access to and from the internet. The internet gateway will provide a point of entry and exit for the VPC's internet traffic.
Creating route tables to route traffic from the internet to the web servers, the database server, and the VPN: A route table will be created to route traffic from the internet to the web servers, the database server, and the VPN. The route table will associate the subnets with the internet gateway and route traffic to the appropriate subnet.
Launching three EC2 instances to host the web application in the web server subnets: Three EC2 instances will be launched in the web server subnets to host the web application. The EC2 instances will be launched with an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that contains the necessary software and configurations to run the web application.
Launching an EC2 instance to host the database in the database server subnet: An EC2 instance will be launched in the database server subnet to host the database. The EC2 instance will be launched with an appropriate AMI that contains the necessary database software and configurations.
Creating an S3 bucket to store the static assets and media files of the web application: An S3 bucket will be created to store the static assets and media files of the web application. The S3 bucket will be configured to be accessible only from within the VPC.
Creating security groups for the EC2 instances and the S3 bucket: Security groups will be created to control inbound and outbound traffic to and from the EC2 instances and the S3 bucket. The security groups will allow traffic only from specific IP addresses and ports.
Setting up an AWS VPN to provide secure remote access to the VPC: An AWS VPN will be set up to provide secure remote access to the VPC. The VPN will be configured to allow authorized personnel to connect to the VPC securely. The VPN will use Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) to encrypt traffic between the remote user and the VPC.
Conclusion:
The proposed deployment plan includes the creation of a VPC with subnets, internet gateway, route tables, EC2 instances, S3 bucket, and security groups. The deployment plan ensures that the web application and the database server run efficiently while maintaining security. The AWS VPN will provide secure remote access to the VPC, which allows authorized personnel to access the resources securely.
This sob story is proof he’s right.
Historically we’ve set aside a certain capacity, in almost every profession, to bring up and train the next generation. Apprenticeships, internships, etc. By definition, these people are shitty at their jobs, and that’s kinda the point. Were you brilliant at your first position?
Making us feel sorry for this real or imaginary Priya character who'll lose her job to AI is along the same lines as saying that we need to personally recycle to prevent climate change. It's not the solution.
The solution must be systemic change. All the profit going to huge companies while they destroy the environment, suck up natural resources, and now also informational resources in the endless cycle of greed and lack of accountability, with the only motivation being more bonuses for shareholders and executives. This cannot stand. Our societies are already breaking down. We need change.