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Comment by mirblitzarmaven | Hacker News Reader

Is it bad I quietly hope AI fails to live up to expectations?

I am not sure that we are not presented with a Catch-22. Yes, life might likely be better for developers and other careers if AI fails to live up to expectations. However, a lot companies, i.e., many of our employers, have invested a lot of money in these products. In the event AI fails, I think the stretched rubber band of economics will slap back hard. So, many might end up losing their jobs (and more) anyway.

Even if it takes off, they might have invested in the wrong picks or etc. If you think of the dot com boom the Internet was eventually a very successful thing, e commerce did work out, but there were a lot of losing horses to bet on.

If AI fails to continue to improve, the worst-case economic outcome is a short and mild recession and probably not even that.

Once sector of the economy would cut down on investment spending, which can be easily offset by decreasing the interest rate.

But this is a short-term effect. What I'm worried is a structural change of the labor market, which would be positive for most people, but probably negative for people like me.

AI not sucking up 90% of all current investments? Sign me up to this world!

Yes, it's bad. Because we're all dying of cancer, heart disease and auto-immune disease, not to mention traffic accidents and other random killers that AI could warn us about and fix.

I don't mind losing my programming job in exchange for being able to go to the pharmacy for my annual anti-cancer pill.

Fair point on improvements outside of garbage generative AI.

But, what happens when you lose that programming job and are forced to take a job at a ~50-70% pay reduction? How are you paying for that anti-cancer drug with a job with no to little health insurance?

The usual answer to this question is that LLMs are on the verge of making Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism a reality.

Which is completely detached from reality. Where are the social programs for this? Hell, we've spent the last 8 months hampering social systems, not bolstering them.

I'd love that, but I have the feeling that Altman is not in that same page.

you move out of the US to a country that doesn’t hate its own people lol. That’s one option. Or pray you have good insurance.

Or the funding for ai might have gone into curing cancer, heart disease, better research for urban planning, whatever that isn't ai

You're afraid to die so we should reorder society to fail to prevent it because reasons.

>I don't mind losing my programming job in exchange for being able to go to the pharmacy for my annual anti-cancer pill

Have you looked at how expensive prescription drug prices are without (sometimes WITH) insurance? If you are no longer employed, good luck paying for your magical pill.

It's very easy to imagine a world where all these things are solved, but it is a worse world to live in overall.

I don't think it is "bad" to be sincerely worried that the current trajectory of AI progress represents this trade.

I mean, that presumes that the answer to generating your anti-cancer pill, or the universal cure to heart disease has already been found, but humans can't see it because the data is disparate.

The likelihood of all that is incredibly slim. It's not 0% -- nothing ever really is -- but it is effectively so.

Especially with the economics of scientific research, the reproducibility crisis, and general anti-science meme spreading throughout the populace. The data, the information, isn't there. Even if it was, it'd be like Alzheimer's research: down the wrong road because of faked science.

There is no one coming to save humanity. There is only our hard work.

cancer is just aging . we all have to die somehow when its time to go.

How exactly do you wish death comes to you?

Cancer is just aging like dying from tetanus or rabies is just aging. On a long enough timeline everybody eventually steps on a rusty nail or gets scratched by a bat.

If you solve everything that kills you then you don't die from "just aging" anymore.

news to me that tetanus and rabies predominantly is affliction of the old

https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-...

> Children aged 0-14, and teenagers and young adults aged 15-24, each account for less than one per cent

> Adults aged 25-49 contribute around 5 in 100 (4%) of all cancer death

oh yea can cancer has nothing to do with age, its just all random like stepping on a nail.

If not for everything else that kills you first, then tetanus and rabies is an affliction of the old.

But of course it's not, because we have near-100% cures for both. Just like we should have for every other affliction, which would make being old no longer synonymous with being sick and frail and dying.

- 19% were in those <20 years, including a single neonatal case

- 20% in those 65 and older.

for tetanus

Age would be irrelevant even if cured everything else

I don't see how thats affliction of old

Cool. Tell that to my 35 year old friend who died of cancer last year. Or, better yet, the baby of a family friend that was born with brain cancer. You might have had a hard time getting her to hear you with all the screaming in pain she constantly did until she finally mercifully died before her first birthday, though.

Even if AI could help, it won’t in the current system. The current system which is throwing trillions into AI research on the incentive to replace expensive labor, all while people don’t have basic health insurance.

>Yes, it's bad. Because we're all dying of cancer, heart disease and auto-immune disease, not to mention traffic accidents and other random killers that AI could warn us about and fix.

Any disease cured/death avoided by AI yet?

There's rumors that ML played a part in the creation of the covid mRNA vaccines.

Possibly psoriasis, as a canary test case https://www.abcellera.com

Is this really a useful argument? There is clearly potential for AI to solve a lot of important issues. Anybody saying "and has this cured x y or z?" before a huge discovery was made after years of research isn't a good argument to stop research.

It is in the face of naive, overoptimistic arguments that straight up ignore the negative impacts, that IMO vastly outweigh the positive ones. We will have the cure of cancer, but everyone loses their jobs. This happened before, with nuclear energy. The utopia of clean, too cheap to meter nuclear energy never came, though we have enough nukes to glass the planet ten times over.

Stop pretending that the people behind this technology is genuinely motivated by what's best for humanity.

What's the benefit for the AI masters to keep you in good health? Corporate healthcare exists only because it's necessary to keep workers making money for the corporation, but remove that need and corpos will dump us on the streets.

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