All the existential risk, none of the economic impact
theintrinsicperspective.com
theintrinsicperspective.com
Then, suppose AI does somehow think itself into effecting human annihilation, what happens when all the humans are dead? At the current state of things, all electricity production on the planet goes dark in maybe two weeks. Nuke plants irradiate significant parts of the earth, chip fabs are bricked, metal production is toast. In short the AI necessarily dies too.
The only way for this not to happen is AI controlled robots first gaining complete control of massive chunks of the economy. If AI is as useless as the article claims then that will effectively never happen. Thus, AI doom scenarios are always a murder suicide situation, and I’m not sure I believe anyone who says a superhumanly capable planner would pursue that plan. It even negates the “paperclip optimizer” as the AI’s demise obviously puts a hard upper limit on the number of paperclips produced.
The amount of people who dismiss doom risk with some version of "I'm not smart enough to imagine what something far smarter than me might be capable of" is staggering. "I can't imagine how nanobots might work therefore they must be impossible."
>Then, suppose AI does somehow think itself into effecting human annihilation, what happens when all the humans are dead? At the current state of things, all electricity production on the planet goes dark in maybe two weeks. Nuke plants irradiate significant parts of the earth, chip fabs are bricked, metal production is toast. In short the AI necessarily dies too.
Smart enough to eradicate humanity but not smart enough to plan ahead to keep itself running. Ok buddy.
>The only way for this not to happen is AI controlled robots first gaining complete control of massive chunks of the economy. If AI is as useless as the article claims then that will effectively never happen.
"AI hasn't taken over large parts of the economy, therefore it never will." I really just can't even...
Do you have actual evidence for this astonishing take? Because I'm sure the entire field would be entranced by your genius here. It's actually completely UN-clear what the limits to LLMs are and it's completely ridiculous to say otherwise.
>starting from the actual point of disagreement is probably a better play
Fundamentally most e/accs or other anti-doom stans believe that AGI/ASI are actually impossible, that nothing can be smarter than humans and that human brains constitute special magic meat. Almost all of their other wrong beliefs stem from those.
No. The doom scenario I'm most concerned with is basically the one from Manna (https://marshallbrain.com/manna), which doesn't require any "quasi-magical" abilities. It's basically taking our current economic system and "fixing the glitch" (from the capitalist's perspective) that forces them to pay our salaries.
That's (a slow) doom for the vast majority of the population, but not for humanity because the wealthy elite would survive.
[1] The big brain take behind "necessarily" is that: "no salaries, everything is free" seems cool, "no salaries, a few people hoard all the wealth" seems bad.
I agree with that. My point was that not all "doom scenarios" require the kind of "quasi-magical abilities" that he tried to use to dismiss them all.
IMHO, the sci-fi "superintelligent AI sends terminators to kill all the people" doom scenarios are distractions (possibly intentional distractions) from far more plausible doom scenarios.
> [1] The big brain take behind "necessarily" is that: "no salaries, everything is free" seems cool, "no salaries, a few people hoard all the wealth" seems bad.
If the former were plausable, we'd almost be there even without AI, so it's either a fantasy or the work we need to get there is not technological. The latter is basically 2024 but moreso.
No, you just need a little more imagination. What would the economy look like if you didn't need employees to utilize resources or undertake projects? Some very mass-market consumer oriented companies would eventually go bankrupt during the transition, but that doesn't mean a doom scenario like I describe can't or won't happen.
> I don't see how that's effective capitalism.
And you know what? The end result of the transition might only vaguely resemble current-day capitalism, and may be more properly understood as a transition to a new economic system.
However, I think it would probably be like our current economy, except with:
* the B2C segment withered mainly to luxury goods of elites (yachts, supercars, elite-level fine dining) and sustaining a much smaller elite-service-focused labor pool;
* B2B being most of what's left of the market; and
* non-market vanity projects taking up a substantial slice of the pie (e.g. Elon Musk using a robot army to build ziggurats to celebrate himself, because why not).
Sure, there is also business investment. But that only happens because someone expects to sell to households or the government. If all you are selling is luxury goods, which depend on direct high labor content for their value, then most of the B2B businesses disappear also.
And yes, there are exports. But not at global scale. The globe is closed.
No, I didn't misunderstand it. Let me put it in your terms: the remaining elite become tiny but massively consuming households, and the distinctions between the businesses they control and their households will be blurred (e.g. Blue Origin being wholly owned by Bezos). All the economic actors that cannot provide value to these households will get slowly cut off and wither away, and these elites (collectively) will eventually cement total control over all the valuable resources they have some use for (production capacity, compute, energy, raw materials, etc).
To go back to a question I asked upthread: what would the economy look like if you didn't need employees to utilize resources or undertake projects? What happens when most households aren't competitive at anything economically, but there's still a lot of stuff out there to be owned? My answer is those who own the right things (e.g. AI-run, totally automated, adaptable factories; energy resources) will be able to support themselves indefinitely with them and have massive personal surpluses they then use for vanity projects to keep themselves occupied.
People throughout history have replaced the "elite" once the cost to do so became less than the cost (or benefit) to continue on in the status quo. The perceived "doom" would not last very long (in the greater span or sense of time) as it would all be reorganized, yet again. In that case, I am not so sure it's a "doom scenario" but instead something like the natural way of things, or history continuing on. And, maybe even a needed evolution of the species in that case.
Things would have to be "quasi-magical" to play out (for the rest of human eternity) in the way a lot of the AI doom musings point to.
Past performance is not a guarantee of future success. The elite throughout history relied on masses of common people to get anything done (do work, go to war, etc.). AI as-hyped has the potential to upend that long standing dynamic.
The elite aren't going to be replaced if they and the resources they care to protect are ensconced in a 50 mile buffer patrolled by (among other things) drone-swarms that will shove grenades in the face of any unauthorized human that dares enter. That technology is pretty close to reality, as it's basically the Ukraine/Russia front lines with 5-10 more years of drone development.
True.
I am still of the belief humans will continue to human. If an uprising of billions vs millions lose, the "elite" would also no longer be "elite".
While I have no data, other than observation, the "elite", imo, need the validation of their status more than those who have none and gave it to them in the first place. If they do something so brash as to rid the world of these unwashed masses, they have no one left to rise above. I don't see them all of a sudden becoming great members of this new society; they wanted to own society, not be a citizen in it. How that wouldn't lead to self-elimination at that point is hard to imagine - thus a needed evolution of the species (even if that's extinction and another hominid group later inheriting the leftover mess)
These would have a mildly depressing effect on the economy for a couple of generations, and then the population goes to zero.
much of the world is still crapping out kids just fine. subsistence farmers feel more confident doing that than programmers, it seems.
It's a sad realization that modern life which we deem the right way to exist is basically just wrong. That which is unsustainable by definition cannot be sustained after all.
So they do that because they plan to annihilate all humans. They succeed in both.
How does the AI deal with physics and the heat death of the universe?
In the AI case, advancement has been so rapid that to a certain extent, it makes sense for large companies to delay some aspects of retooling, because better models that come out next month may have different characteristics or requirements. We haven't seen the big shifts in productivity because reorganizing around new tech is slow, and the tech itself is still changing so fast.
I think research is rapidly building off the prior generation of techniques, but this improvement doesn't show up in the economic impact the article author is complaining about. Actual productivity changes are going to come when large organizations integrate AI models to replace or improve key systems or human-performed functions. This is slow, expensive, and probably a minority of transformations like this are even started, let alone showing fruit, and I think it's rational for a lot of companies to defer starting this work until the tech improves further. There's also a possibly prolonged intermediate phase where some stuff is being done both by an AI-centered system and either a human or a legacy system while the organization measures how well the AI version does (and how stable/reliable any associated vendors are), and during this period, productivity may even take a measurable hit.
What made it so funny is not only that it was written so well but that things were moving so fast back then it felt plausible.
Image generation is like poor-quality Photoshop. Which, by the way, is the best target image generative AI could shoot for. Do what Photoshop can do, only better and easier.
That's the wait calculation
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Interstellar_tr...
But even if they were replacements, companies do not suddenly drop all of their current processes and rewrite them from scratch using new shiny tools. And most companies are too slow to do that within the 2 years that ChatGPT/Stable Diffusion have been out anyway.
If I can use an AI assistant to complete a job in 3 hours that used to take 9 hours, that's a win for me, because now I have 6 hours to spend on a personal open-source project, some family business, recreational (and healthy) exercise, or some community-beneficial volunteer activities. While this might not show up on the corporate balance sheet, it's going to make the overall society a lot healthier.
The existential risk of AI to the current socioeconomic order might have more to do with AI systems making better economic decisions than the overcompensated executive-shareholder sector does, and at far lower cost to the corporation or institution that adopts it. This makes logical sense, since the skills involved in humans climbing to positions of power in organizations (manipulation of other people, hyping up one's capabilities, clinging desperately to power, etc.) don't translate into efficient well-run operations.
Ie: if your role is now 75% more productive on average, the new expectation of that role is a 75% increase in outputs.
So it actually will get much worse for you, because you’ll be doing much, much more for effectively the same pay :)
There used to be a single role that did the data layer, a single role that did QA/Testing, a single role for UI/UX, a single role for client side, a single role for server side, and a devops team.
Then when the world became good at this stuff, the expectation shifted to, in many cases, a single role juggling all of this work
But are most people reaping huge rewards though? The article seems to suggest otherwise.
I’m not saying it’s useless, but we forget that humanity has survived with Grammarly, or Word, or dictionaries before that.
I will agree that ChatGPT strikes gold at a marginally higher rate than Google, but hardly orders of magnitude more. Both automation and documentation have existed and continue to do so in many forms.
It takes years to decades for new technologies to achieve their full effect. Factories based on steam had to be rebuilt around eletricity. That took decades. It will take time to rebuild large operations around AI.
In fact I consider this rather obvious and borderline self-evident to a careful thinker.
However, the AI stocks are priced as if they are going to reap all the benefits, if not today, then perhaps even about a month or two ago. They are priced as if the current incumbents are the inevitable inheritors of all the promises, because the AI world is going to move so quickly to reap all this supposed value that there isn't even time for other companies to move in and displace nVidia. They are priced as if that productivity curve has already started to shoot up and it's just the beginning.
If the curve isn't even budging, then the AI world is going to need to be seriously, seriously repriced. If AI is going to change the world, but in five years rather than five months, and gradually rather than all at once, then the time value of money implies that the value to be captured in today-dollars is much, much smaller. In five years, nVidia's AI may be getting stomped by a startup that hasn't even been founded yet; I'd give it low odds, but meaningfully non-zero odds.
Whether I'm an "AI skeptic", I don't know. But I absolutely am an AI bubble skeptic. I haven't seen any evidence that the value creation is emerging at anything like the rate the bubble pricing implies. It'll probably arrive, but a lot more gradually than the market is currently believing.
Yeah, there's actually a huge amount of metaphorical territory--if sparsely populated--between "optimistic about AI in a general sense" versus "believing all of today's market/startup hype".
However it feels like the window has been dragged so far to the hype-side that anything less than breathless stock-buying while waving a The Singularity Is Near sign will get you a "pessimist" or even "Luddite" label.
When you have an engine that consistently provides torque better and cheaper than humans or animals, you can literally build a factory around it. ML tools are currently something you occasionally try in case it gets you on track faster, but you need to have a fallback to rely on. There is nothing consistent about it.
At least yet.
Apparently you haven't worked with many humans...
this goes the other way too, AI that trains on data from humans, well you're going to get the same sort of reliability haha
We get the best results from neural networks on closed systems with an infinite supply of training data (think how successful alpha zero was at chess, it simply trained by playing games if I'm not mistaken.)
Neural networks are an incredible tool. AI as a chatbot trained on human input is going to probably just simulate a lower quality human being that hallucinates more than normal lol
I work in AI and I think he’s right to a degree.
If you think that's happened, then you and I are living on very different Internets with different individuals. :P
Plus, from my experience, the more obscure topics, which are not easy to google, also tend to suffer the most from hallucinations when using LLMs. The topics which ChatGPT can explain perfectly usually have well-written explanations at the top of search results too.
To offer a competing hypothesis: LLMs are merely augmenting or replacing other routes that people may take to acquire facile knowledge. In addition, the fundamental way those tools operate limits them to imparting facile knowledge.
They think I have this workflow of A->B->C->D and how do I improve "B" using technology. Instead you should have something else of A->E->D where E wasn't possible or maybe just not practical.
You don't want to use technology so that you can type keys faster; eliminate the typing of keys process.
A lot of the current GenAI is around making images and summarizing text. Those largely aren't real business objectives. If you make a powerpoint 70% faster does that really close a sale 70% faster? I highly doubt it.
isn't that just vectorized or "semantic" searching though?
windows is still exact string match but at least allows partial or reordered string match
filtering an excel column is exact substring only
In fairness, it's not just mindset. It takes a while to understand technology and figuring out how it can be effectively harnessed. A->E->D isn't achieved simply by realizing you can do that. There's a whole sequence of steps to change the shape of A,E & D to make that happen.
But you're right, a lot of GenAI right now is not being used for things that are real game changers. This is the first step to establishing the foundation from which the real game changers will spring.
1) Current AI, mostly LLMs, not much economic impact, no extinction risk.
2) Sci-fi like future ASI, big impact, some existential risk.
Discussing the second is tricky as we don't quite know how it will go and will probably change all sorts of things. But re 'we are all going to die' type stuff, currently we will with certainty due to age, with sci-fi AI, not necessarily. So that kind of p(doom) is much lower with ASI.
prompt -> your AI blackbox -> client's AI blackbox -> client picks winner
Maybe someday the client will let you submit your prompt directly to their AI blackbox so you can save computing resources.
No? None of that is predecided. You are concluding that based on vague threats made by people who are "in the know" that can't even substantiate their own fear when confronted over it.
Existential risk comes from when us, humanity, trusts our own lives in something that is faulty. The solution is to not use or design around fault-agnostic systems, not to fear scenarios where stupid people make mistakes. AI is not red mercury, it is not a magical force multiplier that terrorists use to make lunchbox nukes.
I'm getting so tired of HN submissions like this that throw an alarmist opinion over the fence like this guy is secretly onto something. This is bunk.
Neither premise is settled, and if you disagree with either, you're welcome to discard the conclusion. But you can hardly expect a blogger to start from first principles in every post.
I had hoped for something around 5%, which is not massive, but still a non-trivial number.
Not sure how AI assistants in other “high value” professions far. Say in legal, healthcare, finance, civil engineering, business consulting to name a few. Does anyone have reliable figures?
I really can't think of many, if any real positives. One example I like to use is in video game tutorial articles. I don't know if you've tried to use basically any search engine to find reliable video game information/walkthroughs lately, but the amount of blatant misinformation that has proliferated in this space makes searching the web for even the most basic information an exercise in complete futility.
This is something "AI" should be good at. Video game walkthroughs have been done to death, a game that's been out for 2+ years has likely already had every single secret and path in it discovered 10,000 times over and posted all over reddit and other sites. Yet, after completing my 2nd elden ring run this weekend, my first since 2022, I was struck at how much blatantly wrong info I stumbled across, even on websites I had considered "authoritative." And it's always subtle enough to be impossibly annoying - stuff like "head south from this site" when in fact, it should have said "north" Very small errors that seem like the result of hallucinations that cause an inordinate amount of time spent figuring out what's wrong - much like my experience with coding "assistants."
If it can't get something like this correct - which I'm aware isn't necessarily a purely "AI" problem - how do we expect it to do anything important? I really have not seen a solid case yet and would love to be convinced otherwise, but the more I learn the less I like what I see.
Ultimately everything working out just fine. AI is not going to doom us.
AI's gardening skills are so bad, even the weeds can't grow.
Doomsayers can now downvote me.
Yeah, the future is farming and mining, because AI is trained on all the fun jobs. "Stable boy," my ass.
It would be foolish to ignore the potential economic impacts of Gen AI. And just because we don't see the effects in the data right now, doesn't mean it won't happen.