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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

Here is the problem with your argument: our planet is finite, and growth will eventually plateau. It cannot go on forever.

Automation does remove jobs, but so far it's done so on a small scale compared to what AI will do. On the other hand, AI will remove jobs on a large scale on an order of MAGNITUDE more than other automations.

The argument of drawing an analogy with the loom is weak. As technology progresses, the power of it in its scope increases, and computer technology is much more wide-reaching than the loom. Unfortunately, analogy only goes so far.

At some point, there may indeed be more jobs. But even then, they will be (to the human mind) quite meaningless, such as the maintenance of AI machines and of such speciality that people will lose all hope in life by doing them.

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We don't know at all what additional jobs will spring up from AI or will be removed - we already see the hype cycle ending on genAI. For example, I expect an explosion in bureaucracy with associated jobs from AI.

Exactly, which is why I recommend caution and ethical investigations, instead of hoping that this new stuff will just be hype and burn itself out. Caution is a lot better a strategy than guess and check.

If — and it will remain "if" right up until we have actually made it — if we get an AI which is as general as a human mind, then every job can be automated, including the new ones.

What that means depends how much the AI costs to run.

Assuming the hardware stays working long enough to amortise to a rounding error, $100,000 per year at $0.05/kWh is 228 kW (and by extension $10k/year is about 23 kW), so a "good enough" AI can "afford" to draw a lot of electricity while still being cheaper than many experts, or to draw more electricity than most households while still being cheaper than per-capita income in 15 of the G20 countries.

On the other hand, if the best we can figure out how to do while giving it human-level generality is an IQ of 85, and it's a thing that runs on 1 kW, that makes 16% of humans uncompetitive even at the UN "abject poverty" threshold, while smarter people can still be gainfully employed.

Current AI is neither, as it's a combination of absurd training costs, low inference costs, and being very good at specifically and (IMO) exclusivity at the things we use to define "intelligent", but also without the stuff we don't count as "intelligence" because approximately every human has it and it's not a differentiator.

You'd still need to build the physical stuff for the AI, just intelligence is not enough for every job: the bookshelf cleaning machine needs more than thinking.

The hard part of robotics isn't the actuators, it's the brains. We had vacuum cleaners (and pre-programmable factory equipment in the form of punch card looms) for a century before the Roomba.

That hardware costs money and making complex hardware vs using a human could have a non-trivial cost boundary for a long time.

I don't expect a cost efficient bookshelf cleaner robot any time soon (or even a robot vacuum cleaner that works in non-trivial settings).

IQ doesn't mean anything here.

Going to be too bad if no new ones pop up?

There is already a whole compliance industry springing up around AI use.

You don't know any of this.

It was commonly thought that the planet would run out of food until the Wheatbelt was developed.

The fundmental shift is changing the mindset.

- Away from deriving economic tasks from logical goals developed over historical time.

- Into and towards, Men guesstimating and taking risks in bold new directions for global innovation.

The gloomerism is getting kind of boring and unrewarding tbh. We need better criticisms of the future, these "total-meaninglessness" jabs don't hold water.

Are you serious? Of course, when we develop more ways of using resources, we can extend them. But we are already on the brink of climate disaster and we are nowhere near to colonizing other planets. Unless our population radically decreases, we will run out of resources. It's just mathematics: resources are finite.

Also, I am not advocating TOTAL meaninglessness. I am advocating a new way of life that does not include AI, that's it. I never said everything is doomed. I think humans have a chance but that we should proceed WITHOUT AI. That's it.

Resources are finite so long as you stop developing new ones. Resources exist on the planet that are either too expensive in the current market to extract, or do too much damage to the local enviroment to get approvals. They are accessible when times get tougher.

The electrification of the planet is massively reducing the costs to support life. We buy and sell flipped bits to each other and renew our car batteries from home solar. You could live like a monk, automated hydroponics, electric everything and probably not notice the majority of service collapsing except sewage and water.

Water is a weird one because it's often not 'destroyed', just pumped around the ecosystem by natural forces or power plants and dirtied in the process. Developing cheaper water cycling methods could push costs even lower.

The mathematics of finite resources depends heavily on who is doing the mathematics. The pre-wheatbelt guys couldnt guess what was going to happen next.

AI is just a better tool. It has changed the relationship to work, like a car means we no longer ride horses. But we still use cars to do the same thing horses did. The categories have not changed as much as everyone is afraid of. Get out of trivial work, aka working in grammar, rhetoric and logic, and you'll probably feel a lot safer.

What if there was UBI, and everyone was guaranteed food, healthcare, education, and a home. Then they were basically encouraged to just follow their passions, whereever that takes them whether it's art, science, music, etc.

Imagine that everyone who's in replaceable fields simply grew up to be scientists, and entertainers. Those were basically the only fields left to go into, and scientists are more like project managers directing AI towards finding solutions to specific goals, and making new discoveries, etc...

We could fix a shit ton of issues with 70% of the population being scientists or science adjacent in their "careers" which that word is more like "life's work" or a hobby, than what it is today.

"Automation does remove jobs, but so far it's done so on a small scale compared to what AI will do."

But, when automation was new, didn't they say it would automate everything? And it turns out that...it didn't?

It seems that pattern is somewhat likely to repeat...

I think you need to look again. Apart from everything being a fallacy, it’s been pretty much a wipeout.

Agriculture: from 70% of people working in agriculture to 25% in the 70s to 2% now.

Most other physical work, by volume follows the same trajectory.

Everything is meaningless

Everything is more meaningful, do you mean? In developed countries, agriculture is highly automated, and if you want a hobby garden in your leisure time, you can choose how much automation you want.

By the time we exhaust Earth, we will be a space faring species.

That seems highly unlikely, especially because space travel in real life is a lot more difficult than Star Trek makes it appear.

But even so, I find the idea of exhausting earth rather morally reprehensible. There are beautiful life forms on earth such as birds, bears, fish, and flowers that don't deserve our carelessness. Should we not treat them with some basic level of kindess and compassion also?

I agree with your second paragraph but am confident other life forms will ultimately prevail.

What type of life forms do you think will prevail ?

Non-human "life forms on earth" to quote OP. Maybe not birds or bears, could be just a slime mold, but something here will still be going strong after we wipe ourselves out.

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