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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

> which would cause mass unemployment.

Ever since the spinning loom, this claim has been made. It’s been made about the combine harvester, welding robots, computers, and now AI.

And it has never once been true as the improved productivity led to different jobs as human wants are pretty unlimited.

And the jobs eliminated of are jobs that today would be near impossible to fill, as the modern jobs are much better.

Next to nobody would take a job standing in a wheat field chopping it down with a knife on a stick. Yet people protested the combine to try and save them.

I don’t see why the programmer wouldn’t just be the AI’s overseer, in the same way a farm worker now drives a combine instead of slashing wheat by hand.

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You posted basically the same thing I posted right before I did, and I completely agree with it.

It's not like we will ever get to a point where we say "all the potential work that could happen is done!". There's always more work to do, as human resources get freed up they get reallocated to other tasks.

It's sort of like Gustafson's Law [1]; it's easy to see all the work we have right now as automate-able and therefore assume "there won't be any jobs", but I think that's making an incorrect assumption that the number of jobs is a fixed size, and I just flatly think this is not true.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law

Once AIs are significantly smarter than humans, working humans become a problem, like "working" toddlers would be a problem today. They are useless at best and worse than useless at worst. There will be no economic incentive to pay humans to work.

Well, there's no economic incentive to pay low-skill workers minimum wage. The incentive is violence! They voted saying you gotta, and you'll be fined (I guess that's economic), imprisoned, or killed if you refuse. :p

Currently you have to pay low skilled workers minimum wage only if you actually need the job done by some human. The law just says: either you don't employ a human at all, or you pay him at least minimum wage. This is compatible with mass unemployment. The alternative would be to force companies to hand paychecks to "employees" which don't do anything. Which seems like taxation+UBI by another name.

I'm not looking forward to my new role an as an AI Therapist*.

* Not to be confused with an AI Whisperer, who performs the same tasks but didn't complete his certification.

>I don’t see why the programmer wouldn’t just be the AI’s overseer,

We need orders of magnitude fewer AI overseers than we need humans to do the work of the AI. This will flip society on its head.

We need orders of magnitude fewer farm workers than we did a century ago.

We don’t miss the jobs. Indeed, our society would collapse if we needed that many farm workers today.

It will flip society on its head. For the better, as there is tons of additional productive capacity.

The problem is the jobs you imagine people moving to won't materialize because AI will do those too. In the past, efficiency increases lead to the realization of new modes of transactions becoming economically viable. The people made obsolete moved to entirely new jobs because the tech was narrowly applicable. AGI is fully general, there is no space of jobs that humans could do but AGI cannot do. This is the end game for human labor. Society is not ready, and probably never will be.

What makes you think that we're actually close to AGI? I'm actually asking, because it seems like a buzzword that the media throws around a lot of handwaves the details away and just acts like it's inevitable.

The latest thing I saw about it seemed to indicate that OpenAI was looking to build a dedicated nuclear power plant because AGI on current hardware might be possible with that much energy [1]. Even if they do crack AGI with that, it's not like its energy consumption will be justifiable.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/openai-nuclear-fusion-ene...

This article[1] does a good job of laying out the argument from trends and arguing that taking the trends seriously suggests reaching AGI in a few years.

Admittedly, my own argument in favor of near-term AGI is much less sophisticated but is also largely based on extrapolating trends and noting the leaps in capabilities that can come from singular architectural innovations. The GPT family has been amazingly productive, and they result from largely a single architectural innovation. They have glaring deficiencies, but their failures are fairly well understood and overcoming them are basically engineering problems at this point. Whereas 10 years ago no one had any idea how to get from the SOTA at the time to AGI, I see a clear path to it from here.

[1] https://situational-awareness.ai/from-gpt-4-to-agi/

If LLMs start thinking, we should expect to see entire new industries that didn't used to exist because they required too much menial work.

But that's a big "if." They seem to be parroting stuff without knowing or caring what's true.

> we should expect to see entire new industries that didn't used to exist

Why would anyone need a human here when the AGI could do that too?

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