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”.
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.
> 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?
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.