Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrvarela56 | Hacker News Reader

This whole ‘what are we going to do’ I think is way out of proportion even if we do end up with agi.

Let’s say whatever the machines do better than humans, gets done by machines. Suddenly the bottleneck is going to shift to those things where humans are better. We’ll do that and the machines will try to replace that labor too. And then again, and again.

Throughout this process society becomes wealthier, TVs get cheaper, we colonize Mars, etc. The force that keeps this going is human insatisfaction: once we get these things we’ll want whatever it is we don’t have.

Maybe that’s the problem we should focus on solving…

View on HN

> Throughout this process society becomes wealthier, TVs get cheaper, we colonize Mars, etc. The force that keeps this going is human insatisfaction: once we get these things we’ll want whatever it is we don’t have.

What makes you think the machines will both be smarter and better than us but also be our slaves to make human society better.

Is equine society better now than before they started working with humans?

(Personally I believe AGI is just hype and nobody knows how anyone could build it and we will never do, so I’m not worried about that facet of thinking machine tech.)

The machine doesn’t suffer if you ask it to do things 24/7. In that sense, they are not slaves.

As to why they’d do what we ask them to, the only reason they do anything is because some human made a request. In this long chain there will obv be machine to machine requests, but in the aggregate it’s like the economy right now but way more automated.

Whenever I see arguments about AI changing society, I just replace AI with ‘the market’ or ‘capitalism’. We’re just speeding up a process that started a while ago, maybe with the industrial revolution?

I’m not saying this isn’t bad in some ways, but it’s the kind of bad we’ve been struggling with for decades due to misaligned incentives (global warming, inequality, obesity, etc).

What I’m saying is that AI isn’t creating new problems. It’s just speeding up society.

Does that mean you just don’t believe we will make AGI, or it will arrive but then stop and never evolve past humans?

That’s not what the AI developers profess to believe, or the investors.

The problem is that the term itself is not clearly defined. Then, we discuss 'what will it do once it arrives' so all bets are off.

You're right that I probably disagree as to what AGI is and what it will do once "we're in the way". My assumption is that we'll be replaced just like labor is replaced now, just faster. The difference between humans and the equine population is that we humans come up with stuff we 'need' and 'the market' comes up with products/services to satisfy that need.

The problem with inequality is that the market doesn't pay much attention to needs of poor people vs rich people. If most of humanity becomes part of the 'have nots' then we'll depend on the 0.1%-ers to redistribute.

Rough numbers look good.

But the hyper specialized geek that has 4 kids and has to pay back a credit for his house (that he bought according to his high salary) will have a hard time doing some gardening, let's say. And there are quite a few of those geeks. I don't know if we'll have enough gardens (owned by non geeks!)

It's like cards are switched: those having the upper socioeconomic class will get thrown to the bottom. And that looks like a generation lost.

building on what you're saying, it isn't as though we are paying physical labor well, and adding more people to the pool isn't going to make the pay better.

About the most optimistic is that demand for goods and services will decrease because something like 80% of consumer spending is coming from folks that earn over $200k, and those are the folks ai is targeting. Who pays for the ai after this is still a mystery to me

you should check out what happened to steelworkers when the mills all moved to cheaper places.

I don't think this is a fair comparison. It's easier to move and retrain nowadays; there's also more kinds of jobs. These things will probably become even easier with more automation.

The moving thing is not true; or if it is easy we're at a historic low of people doing easy things (at least in America)[1]. Internationally, it sure looks to me like folks want to tighten borders and reduce international movement [no cite; just vibes].

As for retraining, I am skeptical. I think it, at best, puts an older demographic in competition for entry level jobs, and generally at a disadvantage[2].

[1] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/geograph... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/the-fa...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com