Comment by dogcomplex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dogcomplex | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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