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Comment by bluefirebrand | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm crazy but the picture you're painting sounds like it will lead to the death of society to me

It would certainly radically reshape it.

Maybe the end state is a utopia of human flourishing where no one has to do the shit jobs and we direct AI to create a paradise.

Maybe the ends state is a cyberpunk dystopia where power and wealth concentrates in the hands of those who control the AIs, and the masses fight each other to have the opportunity to sell their soul to be a suit while the rest starve.

Maybe AI progress takes a surprisingly long time, and the next 100 years sees a gentle continuation of the 20th century automation trend.

But I'd be surprised if we could put the genie back in the bottle.

> Maybe the end state is a utopia of human flourishing where no one has to do the shit jobs and we direct AI to create a paradise.

So AI can repair sewer pumps? Since when?

once we have a remote operators and capable dumb robots in few years, it will require a lot less working people to repair those? once robot is at certain location, operator will connect and with help of maybe 1 onsite worker it will mean a lot less working man and man hours? normally maybe 5 people would drive there for 2-3 hours and work on it? but with robot, remote operator, who has an experience will be able to fix many places in a day, across the country? send the robots and connect at certain hours, then request them back to warehouse. sounds possible to me.

Why didn't this happen with literally any other technological progress that has resulted in job losses?

Because there were other jobs, since there were still jobs that humans could do better or cheaper than machines could. An AI that is able to replace humans at every currently existing economic activity is probably going to be able to replace humans in whatever new industries are created in the process. What's left for humans to do, but receive UBI?

> An AI that is able to replace humans at every currently existing economic activity

Except this isn't close to reality.

We weren't talking about reality we were talking about a hypothetical future after this slope has been slipped

If it comes to pass it sounds very grim

And it does seem like the direction we are heading in, with less and less likelihood of slowing or reversing course

The grim future you are painting is one where humans have no jobs because everything is automated. So then we can just play games perform art and let ai do all the crap. Sounds good. People who own the land/resources will want to be paid and there will always be jobs for performers, custom chefs, machine maintainers, teachers of how ai works, politicians that govern use of ai in and across borders. Stop being a child and think about how the world works.

I think this is myopic and you're the one describing an utopia. Or a dystopia, depending on how one looks at it.

Are you paying attention to the sorts of things that AI is currently being used for?

It's generating drawings and music and games and such

It's not replacing fast food service workers, or retail or farmers or plumbers. It's not replacing the shitty grunt work

It's replacing the creative, beautiful stuff

I'm not being childish. I'm simply looking at reality without my head in the sand

Haven't seen any AI potters, quilters, muralists or landscape gardeners yet.

It's replacing work that is purely to do with information.

Years ago there was talk about the "anywheres" vs. the "somewheres" - people who can do their jobs from anywhere (home, a cafe, a plane, the other side of the world) vs people whose work is necessaily rooted to a particular place. Your plumbers and farmers and retail workers.

AI can replace "anywhere" work, but there is little progress in robotics. Replacing "somewhere" work is many years away.

>but there is little progress in robotics. Replacing "somewhere" work is many years away.

I agree there's little progress in robotics, relative to AI. But "many years away" might mean just 10 years away. You can buy this robot for 16 grand USD:

https://www.unitree.com/images/Unitree%20G1%20EN%201080p%20%...

To me, it feels like the barrier now is more on the software end than the hardware end. Is this your impression too, or do you disagree?

What types of jobs do you think humans will remain superior at forever? Or are you only commenting on the short-term improbability of humans becoming generally outcompeted?

Highly tactile jobs and those in unstandardized environments (plumbers, electricians, etc) are famously difficult for machines to do, and they’ve made little to no progress in that department.

It's true that general-purpose robots have made little progress, compared to general-purpose AI, but the reasons for that might just be financial. AI has become a self-justifying busines model whereas generalist robots are still academic projects, kind of how deep learning was a decade+ ago. Maybe making tactile-aware robots that can navigate random environments will end up being subsumed by ML algorithms using cheapo hardware, kind of like this:

https://mobile-aloha.github.io/

AFAIK this is the current for-profit SOTA robot, which goes for $16,000:

https://www.unitree.com/images/Unitree%20G1%20EN%201080p%20%...

My guess is that it's just an expensive toy, only useful to robotics researchers. But I can imagine in 10 years the big LLM+vision models could somehow pilot them, perhaps very slowly compared to a human, but as long as they can finish the job at 0.1% of a human's wage, it might not really matter how much slower they are.

You might want to read OpenAI charter. [0] It might be not very close to reality currently, but building this replacement and becoming the gatekeeper is literally their declared goal and purpose of existence. And this is what you probably should see as the main "AI threat" (not from the tech itself but from the people controlling it), because if it's possible at all, it might come to reality way earlier than the nonsense rogue AGI fantasy used as a red herring to distract everybody.

[0] https://openai.com/charter/

> is probably going to be able to replace humans in whatever new industries are created in the process

That's an assumption.

https://xkcd.com/605/

It is an assumption, but hypothetically, can you give examples of something that such an AI won't be able to do, assuming that it's already far superior to you at every job that exists today?

Bad premise.

AI is not far superior at every job that exists today.

Like, nursing. And a thousand others.

> AI is not far superior at every job that exists today.

I wasn't claiming that. I was responding to what you wrote: you quoted the part of my comment that said "[An AI that is able to replace humans at every currently existing economic activity] is probably going to be able to replace humans in whatever new industries are created in the process", which you called an assumption. When you quoted me, were you referring to something else?

Okay to be clear your initial premise was bad too

Farmers went from 70% to less than 20% of the population in a single lifetime.

How frequently do you lament their disappearance?

The health and environmental impacts of centralizing and industrializing food production are lamentable, even if most Americans don't think about it.

Less lamentable than the health impacts (famine) of not centralizing and industrializing food production!

Centralizing and industrializing food production has its own famine hazards, like if a strong solar flare were to happen.

Assuming it were feasible, do you wish you were a farmer?

I may be in the minority in this very diverse crowd, but yes, I would prefer that over my corporate job.

You would certainly be in the minority.

The vast majority of mankind has left farming, once the opportunity presented itself.

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