Hacker News Reader

Things are either going to end up being really awesome for everyone, or really terrible for most of us. There is absolutely no middle ground where things somehow stay "the same".

The fact that these technologies seem to be exclusively the playground of well-resourced corps and governments does not give me too much hope for a positive outcome.

Regardless of the outcome, it should be a fun ride.

This future isn't going to happen all at once, so like you said, it's going to be a fun/interesting ride. It'll take a long time for this level of robotics to trickle down to where the little people can afford one. First it'll be industrial use where things are simply too dangerous and robots are cheaper than humans. Say they start with a cost of $3 million. Personally, I can't afford that. so my dreams of having a robot help with maintaining apartment are sadly a long ways off, even after the technology is here. Look at self driving cars. Waymo’s got it figured out - it's here and it works, but if you’re not in Phoenix or San Francisco, LA, or soon to be Austin, you’d think it’s still a work in progress. They haven’t put Uber/Lyft out of business just yet though. So that middle ground will exist, though one can't say for how long. One possibility I see is the upper-upper middle class, with their wealth, will be able to become full time patrons of the arts, knowing full well that the human is leveraging AI in their creations for their patron to enjoy. More than they are already, I guess. There is a certain skill to using AI effectively and while the argument is that improvements to AI mean that skill won’t be necessary, that remains to the seen. So I think it'll just take so long for the middle ground to exist that, well, the end state remains to be seen. The future will be unevenly distributed for a long time yet.

summarized we might reach an age of even more abundance and leisure like Paradise before things turning to hell. I think even Sama said something similar

We've transitioned from "most people were farmers" to "most people make stuff" to "most people are in services". Both transitions eliminated the majority of jobs. By corralary I'd be willing to bet that robots increase employment rather than decrease it.

But i wouldn't give very great odds.

>* By corralary I'd be willing to bet that robots increase employment rather than decrease it.*

I guess that begs the question - how? The transitions you mentioned, as you said, eliminated a ton of jobs. This appears to be no different in the sense that computers and robots will do more both traditionally "skilled" and "unskilled" jobs alike. Perhaps the notion of what a job actually is, or how people view work. I don't know.

I imagine each time the next step was obvious. This time not so much.

It was far from obvious. The first transition spawned a huge amount of philosophical treatises on what to do when a lot of the jobs go away. Marx being the most well known.

And even today the second transition is still not obvious to everybody. There are still a lot of people today who think jobs making stuff are "real jobs" and service sector jobs are lesser.

These transitions also enable new forms of mass killing until society figures out the new equilibrium. The genocidal regimes of the 20th century wouldn't have been possible without multiple technologies (train lines to orchestrate, long-distance mass media to bind a group of people around a single narrative). We may have to go through another wave of mass death or dictatorship enabled by AI. It's hard enough to escape a dictatorship as is, but when they get their hands on the asymmetric power of robots and AI surveillance, they're probably impossible to remove.

Military/police power that doesn’t depend on actual humans following orders does sound like a scarily stable system. Can’t exactly carry out an insurrection if all humans are outgunned 100 to 1. At least today, the threat of a coup or mass uprising exists.

In a world without an increasing population (which will happen in ~2050) and indeed in a world where many countries area already in population decline, it is labour that is the scarce resource.

Once the population isn't growing, the only way to increase the level to which peoples' needs are met is through productivity increases.

Imagine how much labour would be required to meet the needs of every human to the level at which only the mega rich currently enjoy.

Now imagine that, as those needs are met, new needs and desires evolve.

The work is never ending.

And of course the US will have all this efficiency gains from AI while my country doesn’t. Not Europe nor China or Russia will catch the first mover SV. I’m sad this will only aid continued dominance of the US empire, who has never been so just of a ruler over the world.

> Not Europe nor China or Russia will catch the first mover SV

Welllll Nvidia manufactures everything in Taiwan so I woudln't be so sure about China there.

Your reply seems like two separate things. On the former, regarding the slowing population growth, I'm with you. But the second part about how the new tech will enable a golden age of humanity, I think misses the point made in the parent post - that even at tge current stage, our technology isn't proving to do that.

Lately all I think about from day to day, as we're inundated with AI advancements that seem to be more rapid and impressive by the month, is that a) we simply have to acknowledge that this is the time to move away from a "winner takes all" economy, and b) that now more than ever, we are insanely far from agreeing upon anything (and getting further away on a daily basis), letalone something like point (a) which requires a complete societal reorganisation, that it's hard not to feel extremely pessimistic.

The optimist in me wants to believe that long term, things like these will grow our food and maintain our houses for free so that labor generally won't be necessary. Once we've fully automated the necessities of life to the degree that it is free for all (no world hunger, no housing crisis, etc.) then we can get to the tough stuff like hard academic problems in physics, solving death, room temperature superconductors, fusion, etc. In the meantime the average person who used to slave away at a 9-5 can now just do whatever they want because they don't have to worry about where their next meal will come from. People not used to having a hobby or any spare time at all might have a hard time adapting here (at least at first), but I think in general people will be happier with life.

If your question is "what's the point of anything when a robot could do it," your real question is "what's the point of life," which is an exercise left to the reader.

This is actually cool. It will free up human potential to do more advanced things.

There will be new jobs, that are going to be more engaging and make better use of our brains.

I am not worried about "robots", but about corporations wielding too much power.

We are probably at the last moment when oligopolies can be broken up and limits set so that corporations can't grow beyond certain size and they can't acquire other businesses.

Then we need to reform investment and pension funds, so that they collectively cannot have a controlling stake in any company.

I'm less worried about corporations wielding too much power than I am about individuals wielding too much power. It wouldn't surprise me if the first person whose company achieves robotic AGI and can bring it to market quickly becomes a trillionaire. Someone with that kind of wealth will be able to buy entire nations. With the change from their sofa cushions they could easily "own" the for-sale politicians running our legislative bodies and have laws changed to their favor. If they were to dare get criticized by the media, the next day, they buy out that media company and install their own flunkies, or just shut the offending company down out of spite like what happened with Gawker. Hell, why not just buy the top 20 media/press companies lock, stock, and barrel for about $450 billion and completely flood the airwaves with favorable propaganda while they go about installing their robo-teachers into our schools and robocops into our police forces?

If there's one thing that past 10 years or so has taught us, it's that at least in the US we are completely okay with oligarchy, and we have no viable mechanism in place to thwart it. At least not after "Citizens United."

If AI/robots can do everything a human can, and if the cost vs productivity of them exceeds humans, then the ruling class would no longer have any interest in keeping humans around.

We fear AIs. What if they don't do what we want? They are unpredictable. What if they turn on us, what if they rise up and kill us? The ruler fears the commoner in exactly the same way. That's why they have always been paranoid about maintaining control, monitoring and censoring communication, restricting access to information. My guess is that many of them would prefer AIs to humans, AIs might be more predictable and easier to control.

What do they need humans for? To protect them, fight their wars, grow their food, make their robots and AIs, and take care of all their needs. Once machines can do all that, a lot of them would feel safer and happier without people around shitting up the place, sharing their resources, spreading diseases, posting things on wikileaks, voting, protesting, revolting.

There's going to be interesting times ahead. Whatever happens it certainly won't involve the have-nots with unlimited leasure time, courtesy of those who control the machines.

Rulers want the social status that they derive from ruling over millions of people. If they were no people to rule over they would have zero status, even if all their material needs were met.

Western ones don't particularly want that anymore, IMO. It's the pursuit of wealth and power. And by power, an army of robots works just as well as an army of subhuman commoners.

Trump does seem like an old school egomaniac who wants to be loved and rule people and have statues of himself. But his kind isn't so common in the west and he is not well liked by the more typical ones who take the cold, scientific approach to wealth extraction and don't seem to care in the slightest how the commoners view them.

I think quite often these days "wonder what Marx would think about all this" ... not trying to be cute here, but probably worth re-reading The Communist Manifesto. We're in for an interesting ride over the next 20-30 years, it's gonna get pretty wild methinks. In my humble opinion.. times a changing. (and I'll add, we have terrible philosophers these days, if we even have any at all, and I'd argue if we ever needed them, it's now)

If we invite a few more economists to this cocktail party there is a reasonable case to be made that the cost of manual labor will drop precipitously. Dangerous jobs like construction and mining could be done by androids instead of humans. The point of contention I think at this cocktail party would then be whether the price of androids becomes low enough that those replaced by the androids are able to buy some androids of their own to start their own construction or mining businesses, or if instead all androids are owned by some megacorporation that rents androids out and thus keeps the displaced workers in poverty.

What I would like to emphasize is that this is a problem of political economy rather than a problem of technology. I think most would agree that which future we end up with depends on if androids end up costing $100,000 per unit or $100 per unit. If the latter case ever arrives we will pass through the former case anyway.

Intellectual property is a license that grants someone the exclusive use of their idea in exchange for advancing the arts and sciences.

Society may need to consider charging for that license and divvying up the proceeds. Not enough to discourage innovation, but enough to prevent society from devolving into the Eloi and the Morlocks.

I can assure you that this will never leave the lab. Check FSD for reference.

I don't feel assured in the slightest. Cherry-picking one of the poorest performing "self driving" systems is a bit disingenuous.

Have you bothered to review what Waymo has accomplished? It's certainly not level 5 autonomy, but within its constrained service areas, it absolutely works.

In large parts of Phoenix, you can download an app and summon a driverless Waymo vehicle.

Due to my lack of access to Phoenix nor the opportunity to ride a Waymo, I am unable ascertain the veracity of your response.

It's live in San Francisco as well as parts of Southern California/LA area basin and soon Austin, Texas as well, and I can confirm it's here. I order a car just like with Uber/Lyft and it just drives itself to my destination without user intervention. I have no idea the backend, all I know is I get in, it drives, and I get there and get out.

The future is here, just unevenly distributed.

You have made an assertion in which multiple people, including myself, find to be short sighted and from a position of lacking in experience.

While anecdotal, my experiences in Waymo have convinced me that Level 5 is possible in my lifetime. Tesla's latest update is also a huge step forward, and I no longer am assured that they won't "pull it off" - although I still have some doubts about them specficially. I still don't trust Tesla's current solution, but it is no longer in a dire state.

There is a long way to go with self-driving, but it took us a very long time to go a very short way. Recently , we have gone a very long way in a very short time.

You put in an order through the app like with Uber or Lyft, the car shows up and you unlock it through the app and get in the back.

The car drives to your destination without a driver, while avoiding the interstate.

It reminds you that your luggage is in the back, and won't let you say you're done until you take it out.

There's also a tablet in the front where you can watch it see different obstacles, people, and cars.

It's pretty cool, and it's very good at a lot of the harder technical aspects of driving, but it doesn't like bushes, and can get lost when it has to make turns/park close to bushes