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Comment by nicoco | Hacker News Reader

> at least as significant as — if not more than — agriculture

Are there really people out there who believe that? I mean, agriculture was a BIG BIG BIG deal for humanity, it is not unreasonable to thing that this will have been out biggest deal.

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Yes. Depending on improvement trajectory and implementation velocity, this could replace a material amount of global aggregate knowledge work.

EDIT: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-18/ai-can-do... | https://archive.today/b37TG ("Bloomberg: AI Can Do Your Admin Tasks, Britain Tells Its Public Workers")

> Governments around the world are increasingly turning to AI to help streamline operations and increase productivity in public services as they face higher costs and aging populations.

> In the UK, Hunt said that Al is already helping doctors and nurses treat stroke victims, and build high-quality lesson plans for teachers.

> Further use of the technology would cut teachers’ workloads by as many as five hours each week over three years, while new technologies could save the country’s police force around 750,000 hours every week he said.

I think that may hold true if we put AI as one part of the greater Computer Revolution.

It's fair to say influential scholars, ranging from Turing to Wolfram, share the view that thinking computers are an inevitable outcome of computing's evolution.

[edited for clarity]

Depends on how you measure the bigness of the deal. AI, over the long term, will render humans mostly useless. We'll basically only be tasked with keeping ourselves entertained. Agriculture, if you disconnect it from the industrial revolution, really only allowed us to stay in on place while mostly not starving to death. Although, when the weather went bad, we did still starve to death.

> AI, over the long term, will render humans mostly useless

Doesn't AI depend on humans feeding it data. how can it be self sustainable.

It will feed itself data, more or less in the same way as we do it.

i have hard time accepting that our brains are just generating new stuff based on probabilities. AI feeding on its own BS sounds awful.

I meant by interacting with the world.

The world with humans in it?

Yes. Humans and birds and rocks and stars.

No? AI already generates data via interacting with the world. Right now that experience happens mainly by proxy through humans, but, even now, that isn't strictly necessary.

> that isn't strictly necessary

i guess i don't follow what this means.

it means that AI isn't limited to ChatGPT on the web interface. AI can also be a robot with sensors (like a camera) and an internal model that processes sensory information and turns it into knowledge. Humans would only be needed to bootstrap such a robot, at which point it would be autonomous. Give it the ability to replicate and you've just made humans obsolete.

> Give it the ability to replicate and you've just made humans obsolete.

What will they be replicating once humans are obsolete?

> AI, over the long term, will render humans mostly useless.

This statement is nonsensical. Unless you consider the end goal to be something other than humanity, which is obviously silly if you give it 5 minutes of thinking, various applications of ML can be either helpful or harmful but it cant make humans useless any more than a electricity and its application as washing machine can make clothing wearers useless.

I understood from the comment, given the remark of "over the long term", the meaning over decades/centuries/millennia.

Which isn't that nonsensical, if an AGI is created and follows similar processes as humans to acquire knowledge, skills, etc. it is a quite logical conclusion that it will be able to render humans useless: a very advanced AGI can imagine and develop technologies just like we do, it can direct resources and machinery to build whatever it creates, including self-replication, given access to resources it can potentially render humans useless.

That's at least what I interpreted from the comment.

No technology can render humans useless, since technology is the “how” whereas humans are the “why”. Technology can be seen as good/bad/neutral to humans in some ways, but rationally speaking—religious views aside—humans cannot logically be qualified in those terms with respect to technology.

One could say some future technology might be so good that humans need to do almost nothing in order to survive. Perhaps that’d pose some challenges in terms of mental health, but that is a very different issue, assuming it would be a issue at all (and assuming such technology is even possible in theory).

One could say some advanced technology could go out of control, or magically acquire self-awareness and agency (same thing in a philosophically dubious wrapper), or (more prosaically) be (intentionally or not) misused by humans so that it harms humans, but that just puts it into the bad category.

I think where we diverge is that you are assuming we will be in control of such technology. I'm in the camp which doesn't think we would be really in control of a superhuman intelligence.

Well, in that scenario I stand by my comment: if there is some technology that humans are in control of at all (as in, it literally performs in ways we are unable to predict), then that technology is harmful (because inability to predict significantly complicates things like survival). However, crucially, in no scenario it can make humans useless.

That said, I do doubt it is likely. What is much more likely is that, more prosaically, humans can control it, but some humans misuse it and, intentionally or not, harm other humans; a story as old as civilisation itself.

Even if AGI was strictly human level, you'd have human level intelligence that was immortal, never got tired, and was instantly replicatable. Could you compete with a human that never needed sleep, had been studying for decades or centuries, and could make copies of itself on demand? I couldn't.

Why would you need to compete with such an entity? What does "compete" even mean here? Can't instead everyone get one (or 10) of these to.. assist them? I don't understand why we are jumping directly into dystopian scifi vs what past tool revolutions actually look like.

who’s going to give everyone one? How? In what world does AGI not end up being in the hands of corporations , wiping out jobs, causing mass unemployment before governments have the ability to enact effective legislation?

If you have 10 "assistants" who are smarter than you, what are you actually doing that would take more than 5 minutes of your time? How could you convince yourself you're still necessary in that situation?

Surely it's been a reality for years world over that stupider people end up occupying higher positions. One can have 10 subordinates each 10x smarter than the higher up and all that happens is subordinates get 100x work and the higher up in question gets a promotion. But remember that this is bad analogy because it is talking about humans and assistants have basic human stuff like rights and feelings and self awareness just like their boss.

If we are talking about some software tool, you can't be unnecessary because the tool exists for you not the other way around. If your tool starts occupying your place in life, getting all the praise, taking away your job, taking away all your purpose of life, living in your family, parenting your children, taking care of your parents, sleeping with your wife (OK I'm joking at this point) then maybe the tool is harming your human rights, bad tool should be banned. Maybe someone who runs this tool now gets paid more and they should answer to the law. Maybe they even trained this tool on your data and you didn't think to object back then.

Im not actually sure what you're trying to say here. Your first paragraph seems to suggest people with smarter assistants are indeed deluding themselves by thinking they're necessary. The second suggests you cant be unnecessary because we wont want AGI helping in our homes?

If you want to take care of your parents and do stuff in your home yourself, why would AGI force you not to? Id classify that as entertaining yourself. With purpose sure, but still.

You are only confused if you can't distinguish tech and humanity

> people with smarter assistants are indeed deluding themselves by thinking they're necessary

If they were not necessary then they would not be in a higher up position would they?

> If you want to take care of your parents and do stuff in your home yourself, why would AGI force you not to?

Yes. You can't be rendered useless by tech if tech is there for your benefit. (Though you can be harmed by tech if it is harmful or someone uses it against you for own benefit as part of obsolete dog eat dog society dynamic.)

> AI, over the long term, will render humans mostly useless.

An extraordinary claim needs extraordinary evidence. If you use the word "may", then I agree. But I don’t think it’s a certainty at this point.

Yeah, why not a mix of carbon and silicon ?

It’s of course hard to directly compare, in large part because the AI revolution wouldn’t be possible without the agricultural revolution. But yeah, a lot of people think AI is a BIG BIG BIG BIG (note: I used one more “BIG” than you) deal for humanity.

Yes, people that delusional actually exist.

I’m bullish on AI but with comments like that I sympathize with people who think it’s just a bunch of rebranded cryptocoin scammers.

I’ll say it as pithily as possible: agriculture was the beginning of work, AI will be the end of it. Those are some significant bookends!

There will never be an end of work, no matter our technological advancements. At least not while we have capitalism, it just goes straight against its core philosophy.

If I understand it correctly.

Do you think its possible to have universal income/"plenty" and not have insane inflation?

It's obviously absurd but yes, people believe it, especially around here.

Yeah, I believe it's bigger than agriculture. Agriculture was just food. AI may be immortality if we kind of merge.

@DavidSJ's exaggerating. I'd put AI almost on par w/ the invention of the internet but still WAY off agriculture, come on.

comparing chalk and cheese

Which one is the cheese?

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