Hacker News Reader

Toil for toil's sake is some Sisyphean bullshit. Our goal should absolutely be to eliminate the necessity of work. If you can't find reason to live in such a scenario, you've whole-heartedly bought into Capital's propaganda, and frankly, lack imagination.

You're always free to set your own goals, and pursue them as you see fit. Hell, look at the leisure rich: They're liberated from work already. Their lives don't seem particularly miserable.

I have no objection to eliminating some toil, like working 9-5 in an office. That's indeed bullshit. And of course, I could find reasons to live. Going against AI would already be enough reason for me.

My post was more subtle than that anyhow. I don't advocate work for work's sake, especially working FOR some worthless corporation. But swamping the world with AI-created things will also make most leisurely creative activities difficult for humans to do. So even purposes you create will be difficult to share with other people.

I think it might actually be beneficial for artists, in the long run. Assuming that AI will remove the need to work for a living[1].

I recently saw a “modern art” exhibition and one of the things on display was quite literally a black square in a white wall. That’s it. AI could have produced that long ago. But presumably the artist, and at least some of the people viewing it, got something out of this as a means of expressing “something” (I don’t know what, I clearly didn’t “get it”). If AI liberates artists from having to make money from their art, then they can focus on expression and “art for arts sake” without having to worry about appealing to whoever is likely to pay them.

Sure, the AI could create the same art, but it could create that black square too, long ago. That didn’t stop this particular artist.

[1] I don’t think it will, automation has already improved productivity and production a thousand fold over the past 100 years, yet we still have to work just as hard while a handful of rich people are richer than ever before, with more personal wealth than sone nations. More likely, AI will make a handful of rich people even richer still leaving the rest of us in the dust, probably being put to work on meaningless grunt work — don’t want to waste valuable AI time on flipping burgers now do we!

The black square may have been Malevich’s famous painting.[0] Even if you got nothing out of it, it has long since become part of the canon. A great deal of literature and later painting makes reference to it, so one benefits from seeing it in a museum and learning about its historical context regardless of what one thinks about the painting itself.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Square_(painting)

I create things to express my own feelings, for my own satisfaction in the act of creation. Nobody else can do that for me, including an AI. So far I just share with people I know, and AI won't make that more difficult.

It may not make it more difficult for you, but AI will make it MORE difficult for other people to even make friends. Friendship and even family bonds are partially dependent on needing other people, and with advanced AI and other technologies, we are approaching a world where we need less people all the time.

AI also floods the world with a surplus of random content, which will make people less likely to appreciate what you share with them. Perhaps you are old enough to have developed a good network of people, which gives you some shielding against it, but for babies born today, they will have a much harder time developing such a network and they will not grow up right.

The people I share with can already find plenty of better stuff online. So what? They're friends with me so they care about seeing what I've been working on, and what I have to say.

I'm not sure what you mean by "needing other people." If you're talking about emotional need, I don't think AI really substitutes. If you mean pragmatic needs, then that's not what real friendships are based on.

When I go to see an obscure band playing in a rundown club I go for being there, not for the quality of their riffs or for the acoustics of the space (which I expect both to be bad). This can't be replaced by a future AI as it cannot be replaced by the current radio playing in my car, this is the human part mentioned above.

I tend to agree with you, but people like us need to face the fact that many people do live through work. I've seen it happen to a number of people where they are healthy, retire, and then their health goes downhill and they sometimes die. Depression rates can be terrible. If all we do for these people is say "you've whole-heartedly bought into Capital's propaganda, and frankly, lack imagination," we're going to have blood on our hands. I don't want to slow or halt the progress toward lack of scarcity, but we do need to figure this problem out and it won't be easy because millions of years of evolution have made us creatures who get satisfaction from accomplishing tasks that help us survive and thrive.

> Our goal should absolutely be to eliminate the necessity of work ... You've whole-heartedly bought into Capital's propaganda.

It is not just capitalism that demands hard work but even some challenges to capitalism. I am again reminded of a bit of 1960s Maoist literature translated from Chinese into English that I once found in a Chinatown bookshop: in discussing the Peking Man fossil, it claimed that what set Man apart from his ape forebears was that he had the capacity to labor. Those who did not wish to dedicate their lives to labor, the book claimed, were reverting to primitive ways.

It's safe to say the average HN reader has been exposed to more Capitalist propaganda than ML/Maoist propaganda, but it is a good point. Harping on the virtue of work is a pretty common motif between authoritarian regimes of all manner of political ideology. It's an easy way to make people do what you want them to.

I'm retired with enough money to hire someone to do any task I don't feel like doing, and buy anything I actually want (which isn't all that much). At first it was actually a bit depressing. Then I started focusing on tasks I enjoy doing myself, and challenges that nobody can do for me. Gratitude for my good fortune, and appreciation of the world's natural beauty, are also pretty helpful. Altogether it's a fantastic life and if AI and robots make it possible for everyone, I'm all for it.

AI certainly won't do that. They will make resource use even more efficient, promoting the death of the world's natural beauty. Do you think all this AGI shit will be for free? AI will want to consume everything natural to construct a disgusting technological system.

And can you really say that you would have appreciated getting to where you are, and FINDING your purpose if your WHOLE life were provided for by AI all along the way??? Sounds like you might have actually worked a little to get where you were. Imagine a life where you didn't have to do any of that....would you have the same WISDOM to appreciate where you are now??

Doesn't it bother you to describe humanity as a plague? The overall point is fine but these are people you're talking about, and NOT bacteria. It's just so anti-human to think of people that way. Souls. But a plague on the Earth, I guess.

It's just a depressing viewpoint imo

Well, if you spend a lot of time looking at the damage we cause every day, studying reports and seeing innocent creatures like sharks being killed by the hundred millions, thousands of species being rendered extinct, endless garbage being dumped left right and center, habitats being destroyed endlessly by the millions of square kilometers, yeah, we do look like a plague.

And now we're trying to use AI to become even more resource-intensive, burning up endless energy to be even more powerful consumers...give me a break. It's sick. As individuals there's nothing seriously wrong with most people but en masse with modern technology, that is exactly what we are, a plague.

A plague? A plague to what? The problem with our pollution and garbage and global warming is that it makes the world worse for us. The planet doesn't suffer, it just is. Plants and animals kill each other in a ruthless cycle of violence, too. We're just really good at it.

There is no good without humans. Any philosophy that asserts otherwise fails Camus's fundamental question.

>The problem with our pollution and garbage and global warming is that it makes the world worse for us

It's not just us. Earth might be fine but a great many species won't

>Plants and animals kill each other in a ruthless cycle of violence, too. We're just really good at it.

It's not at all comparable lol. Not in scale or function.

@OkayPhysicist: You are wrong..what we are doing is making the world worse for us and other creatures. Because of us, the extinction rate is much higher than the background extinction rate.

> we're trying to use AI to become even more resource-intensive

Who has that as a goal?

Perhaps trying implies too much deliberateness, but it sounds like an inevitable outcome to me.

One thing that the market will reward handsomely is bringing costs down. When costs go down, people consume more. If you're 40 or older, think about how many computers your family owned in your house growing up. We owned some hand-me-downs, and purchased 1 computer in my first 15 years. We bought about 4 in the next 3 years because they were advancing rapidly, but more importantly, because they had become much cheaper than they had been 5-10 years before. Today, many families might have a laptop for each person, replaced every 3-4 years.

One of the first things an AGI would be put to work doing is manufacturing, as we're already finding that it's hard to get people to do these stressful manufacturing jobs except in places where they're really desperate. Witness the moving of jobs from US -> China -> Southeast Asia.

I wouldn't be so quick to make that call. It's definitely a serious possibility, but at the end of the day I think it's hard to imagine exactly how people would fill their time and adapt. I think there are a lot of opportunities for challenges / goals outside of the typical profit-based economy.

I actually think that the disadvantages of having few goals would become immediately obvious to almost everybody, and a whole new type of skill / creative / athletic based "economy" might emerge. But with lower stress and lower stakes

So instead we should just roll the dice, wait to see what happens, and then what? With every new technology, it is hard to go back once it's out there. Maybe the professors and computer scientists will find new things to do but the vast majority of people certainly won't.

> So instead we should just roll the dice, wait to see what happens, and then what?

As opposed to what? Trust your hunch and halt technological progress. Wrap it up folks, we're all done with R&D now.

Your concern about purpose strikes me as odd. When people derive purpose from their work, it's often because they feel they're playing a role in a community. To deprive people of purpose would require that we make communities fully automated and impersonal. I don't think anyone wants or is proposing that.

Absent a requirement to spend one's time earning money, some people would probably degenerate into sloths, but plenty of people are otherwise motivated by self-expression, socialization, competition, etc. People would still interact and do things because people like interacting and doing things.

> Your concern about purpose strikes me as odd. When people derive purpose from their work, it's often because they feel they're playing a role in a community. To deprive people of purpose would require that we make communities fully automated and impersonal. I don't think anyone wants or is proposing that.

It is really not about wanting or proposing anything. It is about the effect of technology and what it will mean. Don't you think that communities are already becoming a bit more impersonal and automated? With ChatAI replacing customer service, self-checkout aisles, online dating, etc...

It seems to me that communities are indeed becoming more and more impersonal, especially if you compare them to communities thousands of years ago.

> With ChatAI replacing customer service, self-checkout aisles, online dating, etc...

Definitely these interactions have become less personal, but aside from online dating, which is its own can of worms, the interactions are all transactional. I actually much prefer to interface with a predictable machine when purchasing things or making an RMA request or whatever. I don't want to stop to chit chat or worry about maintaining a relationship with the village cobbler's son to ensure he'll do his best fixing up my field boots.

The ongoing disentanglement of socialization and daily necessities is liberating. It allows one to associate with others by choice. I'm not a huge fan of the tools we have for this sort of voluntary community building at present, but I see no reason why they couldn't be improved, especially if people were able to spend their time and skill doing so free of profit motives.

You could always live an Amish lifestyle. I'll stick with the tech.

> A world where AGI fulfils every need is more like being in a senior's home where everyone does everything for you.

Or like being mega-wealthy.

There are plenty of folks at senior homes enjoying the ability to try new things they didn't previously have time for.

You would be amazed at the amount of unsolved problems that Intelligence as a mechanism helps solve. Goals would still be abound as that is the Consequence of maintaining a highly entropic system. It would be more interesting bluntly.

I certainly don't think solving problems is really helpful any more. It's become an industrialized enterprise towards mindless economic growth. We need to focus less on solving complex technical problems to make resource-use more efficient and focus more on sustainability, which certainly does not require AI.

But can help and be accelerated by such. As this has been the tune for a long time as things have been presented as being solved. A wild west is how you open back up marketplaces to solve these issues. Especially as those issues are fundamental towards handling a rapid rise of productivity/entropy. This is the challenge of now. And intelligence as a mechanism is an actionable route, versus waiting for people to change perspective. Especially as the question can be whether the current now is capable of even handling an increased amount of Entropy. In addition that rise of Productivity is Unavoidable.

I thought that Deep Blue and Alpha Zero would be the demise of Chess and especially online chess. Why play when a machine can trivially beat you, or worse, score how "correct" your moves are?

But somehow people don't mind...

Your final statement is grossly misleading. People do mind. I actually follow the chess world.

It is much easier now to cheat at chess than it ever was, and it even happens at the grandmaster level. In some ways, the most recent controversy with Magnus Carlsen is due to computers and cheating. Moreover, many people cheat at online chess.

Finally, chess is becoming less interesting for sure, now that computers have introduced such a high level of mechanization in the study of it.

SURE, people STILL enjoy chess, but one could CERTAINLY argue that computers, Deep Blue, and Alpha Zero have made chess less interesting due to cheating and over-analyzing. That is why some people have even got to playing random chess (random starting position), because the overemphasis on highly-studied opening plays, especially by computers, makes the whole process a little too machine-like.

I think humans will always create their own goals, drama, and social structure.

I look at Burning Man for an inspirational example of what a post-capitalist economy could look like; a bunch of people bringing cool art together, not for any monetary gain, but simply because it’s cool to watch people enjoying something you built.

Now, if AI gets better at doing even that (rather than just freeing us from toil by producing radical material abundance) then things could get fraught.

For me the most scary end state (that still involves humans in control and existing) is mainlining / wireheading on generated VR content that is in a feedback loop with brain scanners to maximize hedonic enjoyment. Plausibly this could displace our more-human desires and drives.

But I think there is a big gap between “automation frees us from toil” and “automated maximization of uniquely human art”.

To be FAIR, I started my original comment quoting the author of the article, who didn't say AI freeing us from toil would be a utopia. He specifically said, "provide for our every need". Big difference.

I see, that wasn’t how I read “wants” in that passage, but I agree it’s a valid interpretation. Maybe the author does intend to include everything up to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as “wants”.

Will AI meet our needs for love, friendship, and self-actualization? That’s more problematic. Though I could still see room for utopia if it does; would the world not be a better place if there was “universal basic friendship” and nobody was completely abandoned? In that world we might still prefer human companions, yet never fall into complete loneliness.

I’m not sure Burning Man today is a good example for post-capitalist idealism. Longtime veterans of the event have complained that Burning Man today (and for years now) is largely attended and driven by people who spend most of the year acquiring wealth through cutthroat capitalist means, and then only come to the event to blow off steam.

Good point, I should have clarified on time period, my experience was circa early 2010s, and I hear it’s more commercialized now.

I didn’t intend to claim that BM is actually solving these problems or going in the right direction, just that in a specific time and place and community, there was a glimpse of something very different. (I understand it’s a lot to do with community size and selection effects.)

AKA "the WALL-E future"