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Comment by jkhdigital | Hacker News Reader

All major technological advancements have eliminated some jobs and created others. In general, producing more with less human input is how society becomes richer. Is it a tragedy that we no longer need telephone switchboard operators, ice cutters, and lamplighters? There were surely countless mini-tragedies as the people who made their livelihoods that way struggled with stagnant wages and unemployment, but the next generation became free to pursue other more productive forms of work and accumulated greater wealth as a result.

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> have eliminated some jobs and created others

genuinely asking: Do you see LLMs creating jobs? I see them taking 10 jobs to create one

Sure there might be a world down the line where one does NOT need jobs and everything is practically free because AI makes infinite of it. But the transition period could be quite painful

Yes, but this time the automation (AI) can immediately displace humans in the newly created, "more productive form of work" jobs too. Recursively.

Could you describe what you imagine an end state to look like? If you could, please be quite specific. How do people go about their days?

"There is no good answer to that" is precisely my concern.

You could speculate though. Presumably you're detail oriented enough to dig in.

Yet the change isn’t without hardship, though. For the people who lose jobs due to new technologies, the transition can be difficult. But I agree innovation may seem disruptive in the short term for some, in the long run, it’s part of a broader process

> in the long run, it’s part of a broader process

Well put. And what is this broader process? Those who say new jobs will always be created as others become obsolete think that the broader process is standing still in stream: job titles change, average wealth and comfort increase, but the structure of civilisation will never change. That we'll all still have jobs and won't become unemployable. Eternal stasis sounds absurd to me.

But I don't assume that the change that happens will be bad. And I don't think all jobs will go. I think we'll end up with a fraction of people employed and well off, such as tradespeople, while the majority will busy themselves with unpaid labour. I already do.

> Is it a tragedy that we no longer need telephone switchboard operators, ice cutters, and lamplighters?

As a society? No. For those individuals that were caught up in the transition? Probably.

Well if we have machines that can think, plan and reason and also exhibit incredible amounts of infinite empathy and patience and an IQ of a PHD physicist wtf is there for us to do exactly?

Sure, we'll have work for people taking care of children and the elderly (and even this might start to fade away as we get humanoid robots that become cheaper and more capable, staff losing it and beating up children is a frequent occurrence where I'm from) but what about the tens of millions of other jobs we all do?

I'm talking about the theoritcal case AGI is in fact achieved. For now - we're not there at all.

> For now - we're not there at all.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic think it’s a question of a couple of years at most. Gwern, who has a good track record of predictions, think so too. We’re pretty much here.

I arrived at the same conclusion independently. Not because I’m a genius like Gwern and Could Work at a Big Lab if I Wanted, but because it is in fact pretty obvious. People focus way too much on the current limitations of current models, not enough on their strength. The core strength of current LLMs are already superhuman (speed, memorization, ability to navigate long context) by a significant margin. Their overall ability is heavily constrained by their weaknesses (mainly planning — hallucinations is a non-story). There are known solutions to this. AlphaZero is "training to plan" and predates GPT-2, you just have to adapt it to the LLM paradigm. What did you think AlphaProof was ? An idle experiment just for fun ?

The only hope now is that there’s some non-identified and non foreseen weakness, where LLMs currently sit well below human-level but has been obscured by the lack of planning, that significantly limit capabilities of the planned models in the same way that planning limits current models, and that has no obvious solution. But at that point that’s just Copium.

Or that we collectively fucking wake up, realize that "we’re pretty much there" and "we don’t want this", and do something. But at that point that’s just Copium too: the governing elites got the memo and are okaying this (cue Andreessen on the Trump camp, the last Biden EO ordering to fast-track AI-scale datacenters on the Democrats camp).

The big issue is that people who don’t want this (the vast majority of people I believe) think we’re not here, and people who think we’re here want this (the labs, the two big parties).

It does not helps that usual human irrationality kicks in heavily on this topic. "I don’t like AI and its consequences" => "I enjoy disparaging AI and consuming content disparaging AI" (look at those 10 epic fails of ChatGPT !) => "I’m going to inflate their weaknesses and downplay their strength" (I can’t believe it can’t count the r in strawberry !) => "Yes AGI is Very Bad News but it’s not there, have you looked at where we’re at ?". Expect a lot of Pikachu Faces in the following months/years.

2028 was the initial timeline given by, I believe, Shane Legg. He recently said he’s on track. You better give some credence to that or wake up with some very, very nasty surprise very soon.

You could be right. I don't have enough knowledge in the field and I'm not sure 'trend predictions' work that well. Why aren't there autonomous vehicles already? Why does Waymo have to deploy them city by city? When I learned to drive I learned to drive - you didn't have to teach me how to drive in L.A , then San Francsisco, Then Pheonix etc. Is it only about Waymo being careful or are these things not yet good enough at generalizing? We will see soon enough. Personally I learned to let go - I don't have a dog in this fight. Whatever has to happen will happen, there are pros and cons for all of us in this (con: losing your job. pro: the best health care you can imagine. the best education for your kids. etc etc).

> Why aren't there autonomous vehicles already?

There’s a lot of reasons. Not in the order of importance, just what in the order of what comes first in my mind :

1. While Real World Interactions (robotics, autonomous driving, factories automation,…) are somewhat parallelizable with Purely Digital AGI (games, text, videos, programming,…), it is way more easy to do AGI first and Real World Interactions second. This is why you see the Big Brains and the Big Money going to Anthropic/DeepMind/OpenAI. If you have AGI you have Waymo. So predictably, OpenAI/DeepMind/Anthropic will go faster than Waymo.

2. The source of the difficulty gap is easy to understand. It is hard to parallelize and scale experiments in the real world. It is trivial in the digital world, just takes More Money. AlphaZero is an AI engine doing dozens of millions of games playing against itself, eventually reaching super-human capabilities in chess and go. Good luck doing that with robotics/cars.

3. "I learned to drive faster" : It is unknown how much bits of priors evolution have put in the human brain (we don’t even know how genes encode priors — a fascinating question). It is certainly not zero. Evolution did that hard work of parallelizing/scaling the "learning to interact with the world" before you were even born. Hell, most of the work on this problem was probably already completed by the start of the mammalian line. No wonder you find this easy and Waymo find this hard. It is not that the problem is inherently easy and "how bad are AI are to fail this simple promble ?" It is that you are custom-tailored-built for it.

4. We have higher standards for AI than humans, and regulation reflect that.

> con: losing your job. pro: the best health care you can imagine. the best education for your kids. etc etc

The con is that humanity is going to lose pretty much any influence on the future. "losing you job" is a pretty bad way of picturing it.

It is a frustrating topic. Let me try to explain you the stakes in a few words, and let’s start with this image :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_revolution_of_1918%E2%8...

It’s a communist militia in Berlin at the early stages of the Weimar Republic. The specifics doesn’t matter, you don’t have to judge who was right or wrong. I could have taken a picture of the proto-nazis, or the SDP, or anyone really. The story is the same.

Why are those humans here ? In the cold, in a potentially dangerous situation ? What’s going on in their head ?

"This a an important moment. I have to be the Best Person I can be, take the Best Actions I can take. If I am right, and I do this right, my actions will help better my future. It will help my family. My neighbor. My community. The World. My actions and my choices here Matter. I Matter".

Those two words, "I Matter" is I believe a fundamental requirement of what is it to be human. To my great surprise, there are people who actually actively disagree with that. "Mattering does not matter very much". Maybe you are one of those, I don’t know, I don’t know you. Those people should indeed accept and welcome the AGI. No human will matter anymore but who cares ? Great healthcare, great education, great entertainments.

But AGI being way better in all cognitive domains : Business/Economy, Policy/Politics/Governance, Science, Arts,… means exactly this : humans will no longer have any place in those domains, and this "I Matter" feeling will be lost forever.

EDIT: I forgot a point :

> and I'm not sure 'trend predictions' work that well

It’s not trend prediction. It’s engineering. Roadblocks have been identified. Solutions to those roadblock have been identified. Now they are just the phase of "implement those solutions". Whether those solutions are sufficient to go all the way to AGI is a bit more speculative, but the odds are clearly in the "yes" side.

> We have higher standards for AI than humans, and regulation reflect that.

This is the most likely reason that we won’t see widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles in the next 30 years.

Around 120 people die in automobile accidents every day and people shrug. But if 12 people died in accidents caused by autonomous vehicles in a year (yes I changed units), they will quickly be banned.

> Those two words, "I Matter" is I believe a fundamental requirement of what is it to be human. To my great surprise, there are people who actually actively disagree with that. "Mattering does not matter very much". Maybe you are one of those, I don’t know, I don’t know you. Those people should indeed accept and welcome the AGI. No human will matter anymore but who cares ? Great healthcare, great education, great entertainments.

Yes there will be a crisis of meaning, in fact in most secular societies there already is one (how much meaning can you derive from preparing a balance sheet or handling customer support tickets?). Some societies will deal much better with unemployment - mostly religious societies. If we can create societies of abundance (where you get most services for pretty much free due to A.I) I think we will solve the crisis of meaning with family, friends, hobbies and really good next generation T.V and computer games.

In the grand scheme of things most of us understand we don't matter at all (at least I don't think I matter in any significant way, nor does humanity as a whole imo), but we do need a reason to get up in the morning, somewhere to go and interact with society. We matter to our families and close friends if it makes you feel better.

Your conclusions seem overly optimistic. Best healthcare? You'll get economically-optimized healthcare - in other words, at some point when you have no economic value left, or your healthcare costs exceed what you're willing and able to pay, care will be shut off. Best education? It will be full of bias inserted by the programmers, with no way to debate or consider alternate viewpoints. And who's going to spend time learning anything when the AI is deployed to do all the possible work anyway?

> at some point when you have no economic value left, or your healthcare costs exceed what you're willing and able to pay, care will be shut off.

This tech is not expected to be that expensive, it will most likely become widely deployed and available for the masses. Sure, you still need MRI machines and nurses to give you meds etc, but getting a diagnosis will be improved and possibly we won't need as many doctors so costs will go down. Only today I read Demis Hassabis saying in 2025 A.I developed drugs will go through clinical trials. If we have AGI we can accelerate real breakthroughs in cancer treatments, diabetes etc.

> or your healthcare costs exceed what you're willing and able to pay

I know the U.S is different but in most of the developed world you get a decent basic health care regardless of your employment status / economic value. We've decided collectively some things should be available for everyone.

> And who's going to spend time learning anything when the AI is deployed to do all the possible work anyway?

That's a good point. If we do reach true AGI there won't be much point in traditional learning. I think a greater emphasis will be put on emotional development. I think A.I assistants can do a great job in that actually.

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