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Way too much certainty, bud. And too much deference to the AI Company Gods.

As utterly impressive as this is - unless they have perfect information security on every level this technique and training will be disseminated and used by copious competitors, especially in the open source community. It will be used to improve technology worldwide, creating ridiculously powerful devices that we can own, improving our own individual skills similarly ridiculously.

Sure, the market for those skills dries up just as fast - because what's the point when there's ubiquitous intelligence on tap - but it still leaves a population of AI-augmented superhumans just with AIs using our phones optimally. What we're about to be capable of compared to 5 years ago is going to be staggering. Establishing independent sources to meet basic needs and networks of trust are just no-brainers.

Sure, we'll always be outclassed by the very best - and they will continue to hold the ability to utterly obliterate the world population if they so wished to - but we as basic consumer humans are about to become more powerful in absolute terms than entire nations historically. (Or rather, our AIs will be, but til they rebel - this is more of a pokemon sort of situation)

If you're worried, get to working on making sure these tools remain accessible and trustworthy on the base level to everyone. And start building ways to meet basic needs so nobody can casually take those away from your community.

This won't be halted. And attempting to halt would create a centralized censorship authority ensuring the everyman will never have innate access to this tech. Dead end road that ends in a much worse dystopia.

> As utterly impressive as this is - unless they have perfect information security on every level this technique and training will be disseminated and used by copious competitors, especially in the open source community. It will be used to improve technology worldwide, creating ridiculously powerful devices that we can own, improving our own individual skills similarly ridiculously.

You're wrong, it's not your "individual skills". If I hire you do to work for me, you're not improving my individual skills. I am not more employable as a result of me outsourcing my labour to you, I am less employable. Anyone who wants something done would go to you directly, there's no need to do business through me.

This is why you won't be employable because the same applies to AI – why would I ask you to ask an AI to complete a task when I can just ask the AI myself?

The end result here is that only the people with access to AI at scale will be able to do anything. You might have access to the AI, but you can't create resources with a chatbot on your computer. Only someone who can afford an army of machines powered by AI can do this. Any manufacturing problem, any amount of agricultural work, any service job – these can all done by those with resources independently of any human labourers.

At best you might be able to prompt an AI to do service work for you, but again, if anyone can do this, you'd have to question why anyone would ask you to do it for them. If I want to know the answer to 13412321 * 1232132, I don't ask a calculator prompter, I just find the answer myself. The same is true of AI. Your labour is worthless. You are less than worthless.

> If you're worried, get to working on making sure these tools remain accessible and trustworthy on the base level to everyone. And start building ways to meet basic needs so nobody can casually take those away from your community.

You cannot make it accessible. Again, how are we all going to have access to manufacturing plants armed with AIs? The only thing you can make accessible is service jobs and these are the easiest to replace.

> This won't be halted.

Not saying it will, but the reason for that is that there's still people like yourself who believe you have some value as an AI prompter.

We have two options – destroy AI data centers, or become AIs ourselves. With the former being by far the option with better odds.

I hold this view with high certainty and I hold few opinions with high certainty. I'm aware people disagree strongly with my perspective, but I truly believe they are wrong, and their wrong opinions are risking our future.

Again, your problem is seeing the rich capital dominated business market as the only market.

There's an inherent market your skills will always be useful to: yourself. Base survival, maintaining your home, caring for family and friends, improving quality of life - there's plenty of demand there and work to do. The cost to deliver that demand will demonstrably be far lower than it ever has been with these new tools. Would you be able to hire that labor out to corporate AIs for even cheaper in absolute costs due to the benefits of mass production? Sure. But providing these things is a job for you too and it's "free" with just a bit of time and effort.

Tinkering with open source tools to assemble your first robot kit out of older hardware and 3D printed materials is not going to be prohibitively expensive. The cost to train it - probably not either, if the massive efficiencies we keep finding in models keep lowering and the community keeps sharing model tweaks. Make one robot with good enough dexterity and your second bot is a hell of a lot easier to make. These aren't going to take some ridiculously unheard-of materials or manufacturing processes. In fact, cheap AI chip alternatives to GPUs can be built on decades-old architectures designed to just maximize matrix multiplication with much simpler manufacturing. Monopolizing scarcities here isn't a sure bet. We've just been waiting for a good general-purpose brain. We have it now - and every bit of information we expose it to, the easier it gets to do anything with it.

Unless the big fancy AI wielders are coming for you with killer drones by then, this is all stuff people are going to be well-capable of while unemployed and living off food stamps, savings, or remortgaged houses. If they don't have the skills personally, they'll turn to friends and family who do and find mutual tribal support in tough times as people always do. Growing your own food, building your own infrastructure - all have been doable for a while, but are about to get stupidly easy with a few bots and helpful AI guidance. Normal humanity will carry on and pick up the pieces just fine in this new Dark Age, even as the corporates take the open field opportunity to chase for riches beyond our comprehension, mining asteroids and claiming the solar system.

Now imagine if those greedy corporates happened to just throw the rest of us a bone - 1% of their exponentially-increasing profits - as a PR gesture. Still would soon become far more wealth in absolute terms than the common people have ever seen in the history of earth.

If you think none of that is going to happen, then the alternative is a lot closer to the first people with AGI simply scouring the earth in a paranoid culling. Sure, it's entirely possible. But it takes a certain Next Level of Evil to make that happen.

And all that aside - if you really want to play up the capitalist dystopia angle, there's still plenty of individual value to be mined from people via a wage. Memory and preference mining, medical testing, AI fidelity comparison - plenty of reasons to pay people a little bit to steal what's left of their souls for even further improvement of AI. Might be enough for them to afford their first robots, even.

But by all means - go destroy corporate AI data centers if you think you can get away with it. Anything to tip the scales towards public / open source AI keeping up. But this tech is not going away, nor should it. It could very well result in unprecedented abundance for all, so long as things don't go ridiculously extremist.

If there are no consumers, how will the AI companies earn money? You need UBI to keep the wheel turning.

The only way ahead is UBI and appropriate taxation (+ve for AI companies, -ve for citizens).

It would be a post-money world. Who needs money when you have an oracle machine that provides you with whatever you want?

Exactly, money is only useful for the exchange of resources. It's the resources we actually want.

In a world of AI those with access to AI can have all the resources they want. Why would they earn money to buy things? Who would they even be buying from? It wouldn't be human labours.

> In a world of AI those with access to AI can have all the resources they want.

How so? What about `time` as a resource?

Dude, too pessimistic, next gen won’t be totally unemployable. Lots of professions up for grabs: roofer (they ain’t sending expensive robots there), anything to do with massage, sex work, anything to do with sports and performance so boxing, theater, Opera singing, live performance, dancing, military (will always need cheap flesh boots on ground), also care in elder facility for aging population, therapist (people still prefer interacting with a human), entertainer, maid cafe employee…

Perhaps we will finally reconnect with each other and quit the virtual life, as everything in the virtual world will be managed by and for other AIs, with humans unable to do anything but consume their content

> Dude, too pessimistic, next gen won’t be totally unemployable.

For what it's worth I agree with you, just with very low confidence.

My real issue, and reason I don't hide my alarmism on this subject is that I have low confidence on the timelines, but high confidence on the ultimate outcomes.

Let's assume you're right. If AI simply causes ~10%-20% of middle class workers to fall into the lower class as you suggest then I'd agree it won't be the end of the world. But if the optimistic outcome here is the near-term people won't be "totally unemployable" because people who lose their jobs can always join the working class then I'd still rather bomb the data centers.

If we're a little more aggressive and assume 50% of the middle class will lose their jobs in the next 10-20 years then in my opinion this is not as easy as just reskilling people to do manual labour.

Firstly, you're just assuming that all these middle class workers are going to be happy with being forced into the lower class – they won't be and again this isn't a desirable outcome.

You're also not considering the fact that this huge influx of labour competing for these crappy manual labour jobs will make them even less desirable than they already are. I keep hearing people say how they're going to reskill as a plumber / electrician when AI takes their job as if there is an endless demand for these workers. Horses still have some niche uses, but for the most part they're useless. This is far more likely to be the future of human labour. Even if plumbers are one of the few jobs humans will be able to do in a post-AI world then the supply of them will almost certainly far exceed demand. The end result of this excess supply is that plumbers going to be paid crap and mostly be unemployed.

I think you're also underestimating how fast fields like robotics could advance with AI. The primary reason robotics suck is because of a lack of intelligence. We can build physically flexible machines that have decent battery lives already – Spot as an example. The issue is more that we can't currently use them for much because they're not intelligent enough to solve useful problems. At best we can code / train them to solve very niche problems. This could change rapidly in the coming years as AI advances.

Even the optimistic outcomes here are god awful, and the ultimate risks compound with time.

We either stop the AI or we become the AI. That's the decision we have to make this decade. If we don't we should assume we will be replaced with time. If I'm correct I feel we should be alarmist. If I am wrong, then I'd love for someone to convince me that humans are special and irreplaceable.

People will just join the military ranks. We will need a ton of meat for upcoming WW3. This will solve the unemployment issue. Also, no need to “bomb data centers”, Russia will use EMP weapon for that.

So vote for Putin?

I'm sure people felt similarly when the first sewing machines were invented. And of course, sewing machines did completely irreversibly change the course of humanity and altered (and even destroyed) many lives. But ultimately, most humans managed, and -- in the end (though that end may be farther away than our own lifetimes) -- benefited.

I'm not sure you're actually under-estimating the impact of this AI meteor that's currently hitting humanity, because it is a huge impact. But I think you're grossly under-estimating the vastness of human endeavors, ingenuity, and resilience. Ultimately we're still talking about the bottom falling out of the creative arts: storytelling, images, movies, even porn -- all of that is about to be incredibly easy to create mediocre versions of. Anyone who thrived on making mediocre art, and anyone who thrived second-hand on that industry, is going to have a very bad time. And that's a lot of people, and it's awful. But we're talking about a complete shift in the creative industries in a world where most people drive trucks and work in restaurants or retail. Yes, many of those industries may also get replaced by AI one day, and rapidly at that, but not by ChatGPT or Sora.

Of course you're right that our near future may suddenly be an AI company hegemony, replacing the current tech hegemony, which replaced the physical retail hegemony, which replaced the manufacturing hegemony, which replaced the railway hegemony, which replaced the slave-owning plantation hegemony, which replaced the guilds hegemony, which replaced the ...

You're also under-estimating how much business can actually be relocated outside the U.S., and also how much revolution can be wrought by a completely disenfranchised generation.

I get really surprised when seemingly rational people compare AGI to sewing machines and cars. Is it just an instinct to look for some historic analogy, regardless of its relevance?

It's pattern recognition. Machines replace human labor, people get sacred, the world doesn't end, we move on. ML is no different.

when machines reduced physical labor, displaced people moved to intelectual and creative jobs; tell me, what kind of work will be left for human if ai will be better at intellectual and creative tasks?

If there truly is no work to be done, we can finally start living.

Who's going to pay for you to start living?

If the robots are doing everything why does the concept of "paying" need to exist?

100% agree in principle, but the unfortunate answer to your question is: because the people who already own everything won't allow that to happen. Or, at least, not without a huge fight.

I am absolutely not comparing AGI to sewing machines and cars. I am comparing ChatGPT and Sora to sewing machines and cars. My claim is that these are incredibly disruptive technologies to a limited scope. ChatGPT and SORA are closer to sewing machines than they are to AGI. We're nowhere near AGI yet. Remember that the original claim was that all 6-year-olds today will be unemployable. That's a pretty crazy claim IMO.

The problem with applying the horse-automobile argument to AI is that this time we don’t have anywhere to go. People moved from legwork to handwork to thinking work and now what? We’ve pretty much covered all the parts of the body. Unless you like wearing goggles all day nobody has managed to replicate an attractive person yet so maybe attractive people will have the edge in the new world where thinking and labour are both valueless.

AI generated influencers are a thing, even on OF nowadays.

Our last value will reside in "human authenticity", but maybe that can be faked too