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Comment by vladimirralev | Hacker News Reader

> With a fully automated economy, all 8 billion of us can have that

We probably can't. I mean why stop at humans? Let's give every pet the same luxury, or ... in the limit we could give this to every living being. Ultimately someone is going to draw the line who gets what and who is useful or not "for the greater good".

It just happens that many living beings don't contribute to the goals of whoever is in charge and if they get in the way or cause resource waste nobody will care about them, humans or not.

Human rights and democracy is all cool, but I think we just witnessed enough workarounds that render human rights and democracy pretty much null and void.

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Exactly right. It's playing out like a bankruptcy: "Slowly at first, then all at once".

Humans have rights insofar they're able to enforce them. Individually by withholding their labor (muscle or brain power), or collectively with pitchforks if need be.

Once labor is dime-a-dozen and pitchforks ineffective (OP's premise of "fully automated economy"), human rights and democracy go the way of dodo, inevitably. Nature loves to optimize away inefficiencies.

Although the "fully automated" bit is quite a stretch at the moment. The end-to-end supply chain required to produce & sustain advanced machinery and AI is too complex, a far cry from "LOL let's buy some GPU and run chatbots".

> Although the "fully automated" bit is quite a stretch at the moment. The end-to-end supply chain required to produce & sustain advanced machinery and AI is too complex, a far cry from "LOL let's buy some GPU and run chatbots".

It's ahead of us, and that's good because we're not ready for it yet either.

But how far ahead? Nobody knows. For all its flaws, ChatGPT's capabilities were the stuff of SciFi three years ago.

We might hit a dead end, or have an investment bubble followed by a collapse, either of which may lead to another AI winter and us doing nothing interesting in this sector for 20 years. Or someone might already have a method of learning as quickly and from as few examples as humans manage, and they're keeping quiet until they figure out how to be sure it's not the equivalent of a dark triad personality in a human.

If I was forced to gamble (which I kinda am by thinking about a mortgage for a new house), I don't think we'll get a complete AGI in less than 6 years at the fastest. My modal guess is 10 years, with a long tail.

Even when we finally get AGI, there's a roll-out period of unclear duration, because the speed of rollout depends in part on how much hardware is needed to run the AGI, but also on the human reaction to it: if it needs the equivalent of a supercomputer, this will definitely be a slow rollout; but it still won't be instant even if it's an app that runs on a smartphone — it's amazing how many people don't know what theirs can already do.

> We probably can't. I mean why stop at humans? Let's give every pet the same luxury, or ... in the limit we could give this to every living being. Ultimately someone is going to draw the line who gets what and who is useful or not "for the greater good".

Eh.

A line, drawn somewhere, sure.

Humans being humans, there's a good chance the rules on UBI will expand to exclude more and more people — we already see that with existing benefits systems.

But none of that means we couldn't do it.

Your example is pets. OK, give each pet their own mansion and servants, too. Why not? Hell, make it an entire O'Neill Cylinder each — if you've got full automation, it's no big deal, as (for reasonable assumptions on safety factors etc.) there's enough mass in Venus to make 500 billion O'Neill Cylinder of 8km radius by 32km length. Close to the order-of-magnitude best guess for the total number of individual mammals on Earth.

Web app to play with your size/safety/floor count/material options: https://spacecalcs.com/calcs/oneill-cylinder/

> It just happens that many living beings don't contribute to the goals of whoever is in charge and if they get in the way or cause resource waste nobody will care about them, humans or not.

Sure, yes, this is big part of AI alignment and AI safety: will it lead to humans being akin pets, or to something even less than pets? We don't care about termite mounds when we're building roads. A Vogon Constructor Fleet by any other name will be an equally bitter pill, and Earth is probably slightly easier to begin disassembling than Venus.

First, don't count on AI being aligned at all. States who are behind in the AI race will increasingly take more and more risks with alignment to catch up. Without a doubt, one if the first use cases of the AI will be as a cyberweapon to hack and disrupt critical systems. If you are in a race to achieve that alignment will be very narrow to begin with.

Regarding the pet vs humans - the main difference is really that the humans are capable of understanding and communicating the long term consequences of AI and unchecked power, which makes them a threat, so it's not a big leap to see where this is heading.

> First, don't count on AI being aligned at all.

I don't. Even in the ideal state: aligned with who? Even if we knew what we were doing, which we don't, it's all the unsolved problems in ethics, law, governance, economics, and the meaning of the word "good", rolled into one.

> Without a doubt, one if the first use cases of the AI will be as a cyberweapon to hack and disrupt critical systems.

AI or AGI? You don't even need an LLM to automate hacking; even the Morris worm performed automated attacks.

> humans are capable of understanding and communicating the long term consequences of AI and unchecked power

The evidence does not support this as a generalisation over all humans: Even though I can see many possible ways AI might go wrong, the reason for my belief in the danger is that I expect at least one such long-term consequence to be missed.

But also, I'm not sure you got my point about humans being treated like pets: it's not a cause of a bad outcome, it is one of the better outcomes.

It's always nice to see someone else on Hacker News who has pretty much independently derived most of my conclusions on their own terms. I have little to add except nodding in agreement.

Kudos, unless we both turn out to be wrong of course.

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