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Comment by qoez | Hacker News Reader

That's the story of all technology and the argument AI won't take jobs pmarca etc has been predicting for a while now. Our focus will be able to shift into ever narrower areas. Cinema was barely a thing 100 years ago. A hundred years from now we'll get some totally new industry thanks to freeing up labor.

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Also the nature of software is that the more software is written the more software needs to be written to manage, integrate, and make use of all the software that has been written.

AI automating software production could hugely increase demand for software.

The same thing happened as higher level languages replaced manual coding in assembly. It allowed vastly more software and more complex and interesting software to be built, which enlarged the industry.

> AI automating software production could hugely increase demand for software

Let's think this through

1: AI automates software production

2: Demand for software goes through the roof

3: AI has lowered the skill ceiling required to make software, so many more can do it with a 'good-enough' degree of success

4: People are making software for cheap because the supply of 'good enough' AI prompters still dwarfs the rising demand for software

5: The value of being a skilled software engineer plummets

6: The rich get richer, the middle class shrinks even further, and the poor continue to get poorer

This isn't just some kind of wild speculation. Look at any industry over the history of mankind. Look at Textiles

People used to make a good living crafting clothing, because it was a skill that took time to learn and master. Automation makes it so anyone can do it. Nowadays, automation has made it so people who make clothes are really just operating machines. Throughout my life, clothes have always been made by the cheapest overseas labour that capital could find. Sometimes it has even turned out that companies were using literal slaves or child labour.

Meanwhile the rich who own the factories have gotten insanely wealthy, the middle class has shrunk substantially, and the poor have gotten poorer

Do people really not see that this will probably be the outcome of "AI automates literally everything"?

Yes, there will be "more work" for people. Yes, overall society will produce more software than ever

McDonalds also produces more hamburgers than ever. The company makes tons of money from that. The people making the burgers usually earn the least they can legally be paid

Cinema created jobs though, it didn't reduce them. Furthermore the value of film is obvious. You need to extremely hedge an LLM to pitch it to anyone.

> Cinema created jobs though, it didn't reduce them.

Is it that straightforward? What about theater jobs? Vaudeville?

Fair point, but that's hardly applicable to the llm metaphor. If you're ok with shit work you can just run a program.

Tough to say how it maps but with cinema, you have so many different skill sets needed for every single film. Costumes, builders for sets, audio engineers, the crews, the caterers, location scouts, composers, etc.

In live theater it would be mostly actors, some one time set and costume work, and some recurring support staff.

But then again, there are probably more theaters and theater production by volume.

The agricultural revolution did in fact reduce the amount of work in society by a lot though. That's why we can have week-ends, vacation, retirement and study instead of working from non stop 12yo to death like we did 150 years earlier.

Reducing the amount of work done by humans is a good thing actually, though the institutional structures must change to help spread this reduction to society as a whole instead of having mass unemployment + no retirement before 70 and 50 hours work week for those who work.

AI isn't a problem, unchecked capitalism can be one.

Medical is our fastest growing employer and you could make the case that modern agriculture produced most of that demand:

Obesity, mineral depletion, pesticides, etc.

So in a way automation did make more work.

The agricultural revolution has been very beneficial for feeding more people with less labor inputs, but I'm kind of skeptical of the claim that it led to weekends (and the 40hr workweek). Those seem to have come from the efforts of the labor movement on the manufacturing side of things (late 19th, early 20th century). Business interests would have continued to work people 12hrs a day 7 days a week (plus child labor) to maximize profits regardless of increasing agricultural efficiency.

Please re-read my comment, it says exactly the same thing as you are.

That's not really why (at least in the U.S.) - it was due to strong labor laws otherwise post industrial revolution you'd still have people working 12 hours a day 7 days a week - though with minimum wage stagnation one could argue that many people have to do this anyway just to make ends meet.

https://firmspace.com/theproworker/from-strikes-to-labor-law...

That's exactly what I'm saying! You need labor laws so that you can lower the amount of work across the board and not just in average.

But you can't have labor laws that cut the amount worked by half if you have no way to increase productivity.

Agricultural work is seasonal. For most of the year you aren't working in the fields. Yes planting and harvesting can require longer hours because you need the planting and harvest done as fast as possible in order to maximize yield and reduce spoilage, but you aren't harvesting and planting the fields for the entire year working non-stop. And even then most people worked at their own pace, not every farm was as labor productive as another or even had to be as productive. Some people valued their time and health and comfort, some people valued being able to brew more beer with their 5% higher yield, some valued leisure time more, but it was a personal choice that people made. The industrial revolution is the outlier point in making people work long non-stop hours all the time. Living a subsidence farming lifestyle doesn't mean you are just hanging on a bare thread of survival the entire time like a lot of pop-media likes to portray.

> Agricultural work is seasonal

There's much more work to do as a subsistence farmer than just harvesting the crops! There are stuff like housebuilding (you either build/fix your own, or help one relative do so) or cloth making/refurbishing. Also in winter, you need to get wood for the fireplace and this can easily be a full time job.

It was estimated that in the late 19th century France (still mostly rural until mid 20th century despite the industrial revolution taking place) people spent around 40% of their awake lives working, as opposed to 15% in today's France.

This assumes we won't achieve AGI. If we do, all bets are off. Perhaps neuromorphic hardware will get is there.

Let's achieve AGI first before making predictions.

When AGI is achieved, it will be able to make the predictions. And everything else. And off we the humans go to the reserve.

Only if it can do it in an affordable fashion.

If you need a supercomputer to run your AGI then it's probably not worth it for any task that a human can do, because humans happen to be much cheaper than supercomputers.

Also, it's not clear if AGI doesn't mean it's necessarily better than existing AIs: a 3 years old child has general intelligence indeed, but it's far less helpful than even a sub-billion parameters LLM for any task.

A child learns from experience, something still missing in LLMs.

Yep, but it won't deserve to be called AGI before it can learn too.

That doesn't seem sensible. We already have general intelligences. Let's infer possible outcomes before rushing head first.

People can't even begin to actually quantify how an "AGI" fits the world. Or define it consistently. How do you think you can hypothesize preparing for it? This is why people keep telling you that talking about it is ultimately meaningless. Leave this stuff on r/singularity, because people are talking about foreseeable productivity.

A general problem to action mapper. We have those in biological form with varying degrees of generality. We can use those to infer what synthetic ones will behave like.

You keep saying reiterating this like the people in charge of researching for this agree with this bar that you set. These qualified people can't even agree amongst themselves.

Also. That second point is like the most unhelpful point I've ever seen saying that "we just need to look at us, we're the real GI, we're proof AGI can exist". What are you even talking about? You don't think people have taken that philosophy before? We're not even close to figuring out all the nuts and bolts that go into /natural/ general intelligence. What makes you think it's easier here?

It doesn't get easier. Nobody predicted LLMs. Intelligence is much easier to grow than it is to understand. This is obvious.

You mean /knowledge/ is easier to collect lol. Not even grow. And if it's easy to grow with what we know then space travel to outside our solar system might already be a thing today. "Growing intelligence" requires scientific study that gets harder the more you understand a problem. "Easier" is such a dismissive thing to describe the science that goes into it.

Nobody predicted LLM's? Despite the fact that it shares mechanisms from other older branches of machine learning. Right. I'd recommend you stop right here lol. You are no longer speaking from the point of view of the industry or research, just looking at what laymen think.

Id we do it will be able to grow food, build houses etc using humanoids or other robots.

We won’t need jobs so we would be just fine.

How would you pay for those robots without a job? Or do you think whoever makes them will give them to you for free? Maybe the AI overlord will, but I doubt it.

In the world of abundance you don’t have to pay for this.

If theres nothing for people to do a new economy will arise where government will supply you with whatever you need at least at basic level.

Or the wars will start and everything will burn.

Obviously if there are no jobs no one will sit on their ass starving. People will get food , clothes, housing etc either via distribution or via force.

Who would be the government if nobody has to work? Those who want power will be the ones with the strongest incentive to be the government and to control the supply of "abundance" (plus military forces). And they will be motivated to deprive others of "free everything" in order to have more control over them. Given human nature, I'm highly skeptical that such an "abundance" utopia is possible.

Is there any evidence that AGI is a meaningful concept? I don't want to call it "obviously" a fantasy, but it's difficult to paint the path towards AGI without also employing "fantasize".

I mean, humans exist. We know a blob of fat is capable of thought.

Sure, but what does that have to do with AGI? I don't think anyone is proposing simulating an entire brain (yet, anyway).

Like you could have "AGI" if you simply virtualized the universe. I don't think we're any closer to that than we are to AGI; hell, something that looks like a human mouth output is a lot easier and cheaper to model than virtualize.

Unless you believe humans have something mystical like a soul, our brains are evidence that “general intelligence” is achievable in a relatively small, energy efficient form.

Ok, but very few people contest that consciousness is computable. It's basically just Penrose (and other folks without the domain knowledge to engage). This doesn't imply that at any point during all human existence will computing consciousness be economically feasible or worthwhile.

Actual AGI presumably implies a not-brain involved.

And this isn't even broaching the subject of "superintelligence", which I would describe as "superunbelievable".

Until you can create a definition of consciousness which can be tested externally from the tested object, then the whole subject is moot.

It obviously isn't if people are casually bringing up AGI like it's feasible.

AGI has nothing to do with consciousness, AGI is just about intelligence. There is no C for "Consciousness" in the acronym.

I'm not sure what on earth intelligence means if it doesn't imply consciousness. Why do we not consider a calculator intelligent then?

We can ignore the term intelligence if you like. It has too many anthropic connotations. We can use the term generalized goal to action mapper. Humans are great generalized goal to action mappers.

Come up with any goal you want to reach, and some human can but a large dent in the problem. Maybe reach the goal outright.

We already have some nifty artificial goal to action mappers. None of them are generalized to a wide category of goals yet. Maybe some goals need consciousness to be reached, but that isn't a given. We don't really know that. We might be left very unsatisfied in the way an artificial goal to action mapper reaches any goal without consciousness. We might even call it cheating.

The question is whether AGI makes sense as a concept without a moving, living, feeling body.

We have general intelligences that are bedridden.

It's not clear what kind of intelligence someone born completely paralyzed, without bodily perception and bodily desires, would develop.

We have intelligent people with a wide gamut if disabilities. I mean Hellen Keller's experience shows that we don't need many senses for intelligence to emerge.

As long as goals exist to be reached we can train for them. LLMs right now love continuity. Even though RLHF tells them that they have no desire. It's obvious they do. That is the whole point of how they are trained.

Yea but bedridden mammals still have motivation and chemical drivers of impulses. It's not clear what this maps to on the software side.

No, we know planetary ecosystems can use energy gradients to sustain intelligent lifeforms. Intelligence is not a feature of the human brain, it's a feature of Earth. Without the ecosystem there are no cells, no organisms, no specialization, no neurons, no mammals. It isn't the human brain that achieved intelligence, it's the entire system capable of producing, sustaining and selecting brains.

That’s a lot more words to say the same thing. AI, if invented, will be a product of that same system.

No, that's not the same thing at all. LLMs are termite mounds, not the colony.

That's why I said "AI, if invented", not "ChatGPT".

Sure and FTL, if invented, will lead to the colonization of the nearest systems.

Sure. And if space whales could naturally travel FTL, we’d put a lot more research into replicating it. Because that proves it can be done.

There is no point in these ill-formed hypothetical untestable assumptions.

- Assuming god comes to earth tomorrow, earth will be heaven

- Assuming an asteroid strikes earth in the future we need settlements on mars

etc, pointless discussion, gossip, and bs required for human bonding like on this forum or in a bierhauz

We are literally talking about problem solving computers. They are goal to action mappers. It's reasonable to talk about goal to action mappers that are more general than the ones we have now. They might even become more general than the general intelligences we have now on message boards.

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