Friendship, love, sex, art, even faith and childrearing are opportunities for substitution with AI. Ask an AI to create a joke for you at a party. Ask an AI to write a heartfelt letter to somebody you respect. Have an AI make a digital likeness of your grandmother so you can spend time with her forever. Have an AI tell you what you should say to your child when they are sad.
Hell. Hell on earth.
It's practically the definition of psychopathy.
There are good people everywhere, but bring good and ethical stands in the way of making money, so most of the good people lose out in the end.
AI is the perfect technology for those who see people as complaining cogs in an economic machine. The current AI bubble is the first major advancement where these people go mask off; when people unapologetically started trying to replace basic art and culture with "efficient" machines, people started noticing.
So yeah, it’s just everyone collectively devaluing human interaction.
I use Claude a lot. I have the most expensive Claude Max subscription both for my own consultancy and at client sites, separately. I'm increasingly close to an AI maximalist on many issues, so I'm not at all against extensive use of these models.
But it's not quick enough to of its own accord resort to verifying things before giving answers to be suitable as a general purpose replacement for Google unless you specifically prompt it to search.
Ah, that's a good call-out. I don't use Claude aside from in Cursor; I use ChatGPT for normal queries and it's pretty good about doing searches when it doesn't think it knows the answer. Of course it'll search when prompted, but it'll often search without prompting too. I just mistakenly assumed that your fiancée's usage of Claude implied Claude was actually searching as well.
Claude: "Provide me links to <precise description of what you actually want". Result: 4 or 5 directly relevant links, most of which are useful, and it happens on the first query.
Claude is dramatically more efficient than Google Search.
Which, as I pointed out, is not the point, as you're advocating exactly the kind of prompting I said wouldn't be a problem. It's not how she uses it.
What am I missing?
Who do they think will make their ventures profitable? Who do they think will take their dollars and provide goods and services in exchange?
If automation reaches the point where 99% of humans add no value to the "owners" then the "owners" will own nothing.
I don't think that's right. The owners will still own everything. If or when that happens, I think the economy would morph into a new thing completely focused on serving the whims of those "owners."
There's an old Isaac Asimov book with something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_universe#Solaria (though accomplished more peacefully and with less pain than I think is realistic).
I think the right question is: what would they want from the plebs? And the answer will be nothing.
Right now they want the plebs' labor, which is why things work the way they do.
> The Phools and so the plebs were exterminated, then what?
Is that a reference to this? https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691168319/ph...
> Perhaps we'd finally have Star Trek economics, but only for them, the "owners". Better be an "owner", then.
I don't think we'll have Star Trek economics, because that would be fundamentally fair and egalitarian and plentiful. There will still be resource constraints like energy production and raw materials. I think it will be more like B2B economics, international trade, with a small number relevant owners each controlling vast amounts of resources and productive capacity and occasionally trading basics amongst themselves. It could also end up like empires-at-war (which actually may be more likely, since war would give the owners something seemingly important to do, vs just building monuments to themselves and other types of jerking off).
That the Earth of Star Trek is populated by only the descendants of the capital holders. Everyone else was directly or indirectly exterminated.
Then they created an egalitarian tech utopia for themselves.
I think you might be a little behind on economic news, because that's already happening. And it's also rapidly reshaping business models and strategic thinking. The forces of capitalism are happily writing the lower and middle classes out of the narrative.
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp50...
> I think you might be a little behind on economic news, because that's already happening. And it's also rapidly reshaping business models and strategic thinking. The forces of capitalism are happily writing the lower and middle classes out of the narrative.
No, that doesn't surprise me at all. I'm basically just applying the logic of capitalism and automation to a new technology, and the same thing has played out a thousand times before. The only difference with AI is that; unlike previous, more limited automation; it's likely there will be no roles for displaced workers to move into (just like when engines got good enough there were no roles for horses to move into).
It's important to remember that capitalism isn't about providing for people. It's about providing for people with wealth to exchange. That works OK when you have full employment and wealth gets spread around by paying workers, but if most jobs disappear due to automation there's no mechanism to spread wealth to the vast majority of people, so under capitalism they'll eventually die of want.
tldr: the formal economy will shift to serving plutocrats instead of consumers, it's much more profitable to do so and there are diminishing returns serving the latter
[1] https://www.sourcewatch.org/images/b/bc/CITIGROUP-MARCH-5-20...
Yeah, I see a bleak future ahead. Guess that's life, after all.
In the "learn to love democracy and freedom" sense, sure, but in the economic sense? "Didn't work out" feels like a talking point stuck in 1991. Time has passed, China is the #2 economy in the world, #1 if you pick a metric that emphasizes material or looks to the future. How did they get there? By paying the private owners of our economy to sell our manufacturing base to them piece by piece -- which the private owners were both entitled and incentivized to do by the fundamental principles of capitalism. The ending hasn't been written, but it smells like the lead-up to a reversal in fortune.
As for our internal balance of power, we've been here before, and the timeline conveniently lines up to almost exactly 100 years ago. I'm hoping for another Roosevelt. It wasn't easy then, it won't be easy now, but I do think it's fundamentally possible.
The graph says horse ownership per person. People probably stopped buying horses, they let theirs retire (well, to be honest, probably also sent to the glue factory), and when they stopped buying new horses, horse breeding programs slowed down.
That at least is the fantasy of these people. Fortunately. LLMs don't really work, Tesla cars are still built by KUKA robots (while KUKA has a fraction of Tesla's P/E) and data centers in space are a cocaine fueled dream.
One would argue also if you don't see this, it's because you'd prefer not to.
If we had at least a somewhat functioning safety net, or UBI, or both, you'd at least have an argument to be made, but we don't. AI and it's associated companies' business model is, if not killing people, certainly attempting to make lots of lives worse at scale. I wouldn't work for one for all the money in the world.
and even if AI becomes good enough to replace most humans the economic surplus does not disappear
it's a coordination problem
in many places on Earth social safety nets are pretty robust, and if AI helps to reduce cost of providing basic services then it won't be a problem to expand those safety nets
...
there's already a pretty serious anti-inequality (or at least anti-billionaire) storm brewing, the question is can it motivate the necessary structural changes or just fuels yet another dumb populist movement
I don't exactly know how I feel about those, but I respect those criticisms. I think the grand synthesis is that UBI exists on top of existing safety nets.
Not only would there be more people on the streets protesting against real or perceived cuts;
there also would be fewer movements based on exclusivist ideologies protesting _in favour of cuts_*
* e.g. racist groups in favour of cutting some kinds of welfare because of racial associations
... also, one pretty practical problem with UBI is that cost of living varies wildly. And if it depends on location then people would register in a high-CoL place and live in a low-CoL place. (Which is what remote work already should be doing, but many companies are resistant to change.)
In theory it makes sense to have easy to administer targeted interventions, because then there's a lot of data (and "touch points" - ie. interaction with the people who actually get some benefit), so it's possible to do proper cost-benefit analyses.
Of course this doesn't work because allocation is over-overpoliticized, people want all kinds of means-testing and other hoops for people to jump through. (Like the classic prove you still have a disability and people with Type I diabetes few years have to get a fucking paper.)
So when it comes to any kind of safety net it should be as automatic as possible, but at least as targeted as negative income tax. UBI might fit depending on one's definition.
> And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared.
> I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did.
> But looking at how fast Claude is automating my job, I think we're getting a lot less.
While most of the text is written from cold economic(ish) standpoint it is really hard not to get bleak impression from it. And the last three sentences express that in vague way too. Some ambiguity is left on purpose so you can interpret the daunting impression your way.
The article presents you with crushing juxtaposition, implicates insane dangers, and leaves you with the feeling of inevitability. Then back to work, I guess.
> I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did.
Horses typically live between 25 to 30 years. I agree with OP that most likely those horses were not decimated (killed) but just died out and people stopped mass breeding them. Also as other noticed chart shows 'horses PER person in US'. Population between 1900 and 1950 increased from 1.5B to 2.5B (globally but probably similarly almost 70% increase in US).
I think depends what do you worry about:
1) `that human population decrease 50-80%`?
I don't worry about it even if that happen. 200 years ago human population was ~1 B today is ~8 B. At year 0 AD human population was ~0.250 B. Did we 200 years ago worry about it like "omg human population is only 1 B" ?
I doubt human population decrease 80% because of no demand for human as workforce but I don't see problem if it decrease by 50%. There will short transition period with surplus of retired people and work needed to keep the infrastructure but if robots can help with this then I don't see the problem.
2) `That we will not be needed and we will loose jobs?`
I don't see work like something in demand. Most people hate their jobs or do crappy jobs. What do people actually worry about that they will won't get any income. And actually not even about that - they worry that they will not be able to survive or be homeless. If there is improvement in production that food, shelter, transportation, healtcare is dirty cheap (all stuff from bottom maslov piramid) and fair distribution on social level then I also see a way this can be no problem.
3) `That we will all die because of AI`
This I find more plausable and maybe not even by AGI but earlier because of big social unrests during transition period.
https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/ending-poverty
From 1990 to 2014, the world made remarkable progress in reducing extreme poverty, with over one billion people moving out of that condition. The global poverty rate decreased by an average of 1.1 percentage points each year, from 37.8 percent to 11.2 percent in 2014.
I see quite the opposite, and have very little hope that reduced reliance on labor will increase the equability of distribution of wealth.
Historically, advanced civilizations with better production capabilities don't necessarily do better in war if they lack "practice". Sad but true. Maybe not in 21st century, but who knows.
Check this out - https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart. The US is increasingly a miserable place to live in, and the worse it gets the more their people double down on being shitty.
Fun fact: Fit 2 lines on that data and you can extrapolate by ~2030 China will be a better place to live. That's really not that far off. Set a reminder on your phone: Chinese dream.
We are truly and profoundly fucked.
The AI people point to post 1950s style employment and say 'people recovered after industrial advance' and ignore the 1880s through the 1940s. We actually have zero idea if the buggy whip manufacturer ever recovered or just lasted a year in skid row before giving up completely, or lived through the 2 world wars spurred by mechanisation.
I did a deep research into the decline of horses and it was consistent with fewer births, not mass slaughter. The US Department of Agriculture has great records during this time, though they’re not fully digitized.
I'm not up to speed here -- is Bill Gates doing work to reduce the birth rates in Africa?
When the Covid-truther geniuses "figured out" that "Bill Gates was behind Covid", they pulled out things like this as "proof" that his master plan is to reduce the world's population. Not to reduce the rate of increase, but to kill them (because of course these geniuses don't understand derivatives)...
Epstein was ahead of his times...
One of the many terrible things about software engineers their the tendency to think and speak as if they were some kind of aloof galaxy-brain, passively observing humanity from afar. I think that's at least partially the result of 1) identifying as an "intelligent person" and 2) computers and the internet allowing them to in-large-part become disconnected from the rest of humanity. I think they see that aloofness as being a "more intelligent" way to engage with the world, so they do it to act out their "intelligence."
I wish I knew what you were so I could say "one of the many terrible things about __" about you. Anyway, I think you have an unhealthy emotional attachment to your emotions.
I'm a software engineer, so I beat you to it.
> I always thought intentionally applying an emotional distance was a strategy to help us see what's really happening, since allowing emotions to creep in causes us reach conclusions we want (motivated reasoning) instead of conclusions that reflect reality. I find it a valuable way to think.
And the problem is taking that too far, and doing it too much. It's a tactic "to help us see what's really happening," but it's wrong to stop there and forget things like values, interests, and morality.
> And people tend to vastly overvalue our "humanity" anyway.
WTF, man.
> I'm guessing the ones that displaced horses didn't give much of a fuck about what happened to horses.
Who cares what "the ones that displaced horses" thought? You're the horse in that scenario,and the horse cares. Another obnoxious software engineer problem is taking the wrong, often self-negating, perspective.
Yes, the robber who killed you to steal your stuff probably didn't mind you died. So I guess everything's good, then? No.
> Anyway, I think you have an unhealthy emotional attachment to your emotions.
Emotions aren't bad, they're healthy. But a rejection of them is probably a core screwed-up belief that leads to "aloof galaxy-brain, passively observing humanity from afar" syndrome.
There's probably parallel to the kind of obliviousness that gets you the behavior in the Torment Nexus meme ("Tech Company: "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.'") i.e. "Software Engineer: 'At long last, I've purged myself of emotion and become perfectly logical like Lt. Cmdr. Data from the classic sci-fi Logical Robot Data Wants to Be Human and Feel Emotions."
Yes, actually, because this has been a deep vein of writing for the past 100 or more years. There's The Phools, by Stanislav Lem. There's the novels written by Boris Johnson's father that are all about depopulation. There's Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. How about Logan's Run? There has been so much writing about the automation / technology apocalypse for humans in the past 100 years that it's hard to catalog it -- much of what I have read or seen go by in the vein I've totally forgotten.
It's not remotely a surprise to see this amp up with AI.
At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.
People have been thinking apocalyptic thoughts like these since.. at least Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). That's 227 years if you're keeping score. Probably longer; Malthus might only have been the first to write them down and publish them.
Yes, here's a youtube classic that put forth the same argument over a decade ago, originally titled "Humans need not apply": https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU
Computerization, automation and robotics, document digitization, the telecoms and wireless revolution, etc. have been upending peoples' employment on a massive scale since before the 1970s. The reaction of the technologists has been a rather insensitive "adapt or die", "go and retrain", and analogies to buggy whip manufacturers when the automobile became popular. The only reason people here suddenly give a hoot is because they think the crosshairs are drifting towards them.
It reminds me of "You maniacs! You blew it up! Goddamn you all to hell!" from the original Planet of the Apes (1968), https://youtu.be/mDLS12_a-fk?t=71
Quite ironically, the scene features a horse.
We collectively have a lot of choice on the how we deal with it part. I'm personally optimistic that people will vote in people friendly policies when it comes to it.
I agree we can kinda make the argument that abundance is soon upon us, and humanity as a whole embraces the ideas of equality and harmony etc etc... but still there's a kinda uncanny dissociation if you're happily talking about horses disappearing and humans being next while you work on the product that directly causes your prediction to come true and happen earlier...
So much money is spent on developing gambling, social media, crypto (fraud and crime enabler) and surveillance software. All of these are making people's lives worse, these companies aren't even shy about it. They want to track you, they want you to spend as much time as possible on their products, they want to make you addicted to gambling.
Just by how large these segments are, many of the people developing that software must be posting here, but I have never seen any actual reflection on it.
Sure, I guess developing software making people addicted to gambling pays the bills (and more than that), but I haven't seen even that. These industries just exist and people seem to work for them as if it was just a normal job, with zero moral implications.
In this instance, in particular, I wouldn't expect our preferences to bear any relevance.
I don’t know if you are intentionally being vague and existential here. However, context matters, and the predictive power is zero sounds unreasonable in the face of history.
I think humans learning that diseases were affecting us and thus leading to solutions like antibiotics and vaccines. It was not guaranteed, but I’m skeptical of the predictive power being zero.
It shines through that the most fervent AI Believers are also Haters of Humans.
In the US at least, there is a Congress incapable of taking action and a unilateral President fully on the side of tech CEOs with the heaviest investments in AI.
There is no evidence supporting short term optimism. Every indication the large corporations dictating public policy will treat us exactly like those horses when it comes to economic value.
However, it does seem like time for humanity to collectively think hard about our values and goals, and what type of world and lives we want to have in an age where human thought, and perhaps even human physical labor are economically worthless. Unfortunately this could not come at a worse time with humanity seemingly experiencing a widespread rejection of ideals like ethics, human rights, and integrity and embracing fascism and ruthless blind financial self interest as if they were high minded ideals.
Ironically, I think tech people could learn a lot here from groups like the Amish- they have clearly decided what their values and goals are, and ruthlessly make tech serve them, instead of the other way around. Despite stereotypes, Amish are often actually heavy users of, and competent with modern tech in service of making a living, but in a way that enforces firm boundaries about not letting the tech usurp their values and chosen way of life.
It was always like this. Look at the history, and sometimes quite recent - people were always treated like a tool - for getting rich, for getting in power, to conquer other countries, to serve them.
This is a political problem, not a technical one.
For the Romans, winning wars was the main source of elite prestige. So the Empire had to expand to accommodate winning more wars.
Today, the stock market and material wealth dominates. If elite dominance of the means of production requires the immiseration of most of the public, that's what we'll get.
That's almost 100% backwards. The Republic expanded. The Empire, not so much.
Not sure if by accident or not, but that’s what we are according today’s “tech elite”.
Therefore, the most profitable disposition for this dubious form of capital is to convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/55660903-patchwork-a-p...And low information business leaders will attempt to do all the awful things described here and the free market will eliminate them from the game grid one horrible boss at a time. But if you surround yourself with the AI doomers and bubblers, how will you ever encounter or even consider positive uses of the technology? What an awful place to work Anthropic must be if they truly believe they are working on the metaphorical equivalent of the Alpha Omega bomb. Spoilers: they're not.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, many look forward to harnessing AI to ameliorate hunger, take care of the elderly, and perform the more dangerous and tedious jobs out there. Anthropic guy needs to go get a room with Eliezer Yudkowsky. I guess the US is about get horsed by the other 96% of the planet.
Go ahead, compare me to a horse, a gasoline engine, or even call me a meatbag. Have we become little more than Eloi snowflakes to be so offended by that?
But I guess as long as an electoral majority here continues to cheer on one man draining the juice of this country down to a bitter husk, the fun and games will continue.
I mean if you're the sort that thinks Greta Thunberg and Eliezer Yudkowsky are agents of the Antichrist, it's long overdue to touch grass. And I don't think he believes that, but I think he thought people were stupid enough to buy it so he ran with it. Can't blame him for trying!
But given the right's hatred of renewables and the left thinks nuclear power plants can explode like atomic bombs, I'd be pushing for gas and nuclear to power my data centers too.
TLDR: you're being fed a false narrative that this is a 0 1 choice, but I guess it will take the rest of the world to demonstrate that not the US.
At this point in time, his whimsy is the only thing holding back younger, more extreme acolytes from doing what they want. Once he's gone, lol.
Machines to “take care of the elderly” is one of the worst possible uses of this technology. We desperately need more human interaction between the old and the young, not less.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/te... Look at all the professions on the bottom right: Teachers, therapists, clergy, social workers, etc. It’s not a coincidence that cruel people take top positions.
Every profession attracts people who enjoy it, eg lawyers tend to enjoy adversarial debate. Lots of countries don’t treat their teachers like shit. It’s a choice.
There will always be fucking teachers, pilots, etc, because people WANT to be those things, and it's gonna take more than "nuh uh, Fox News" to dislodge that belief.
That said, I didn't say it isn't a public policy choice, I'm saying the "passion factor" is the reason they are ABLE to offer these jobs at low wages.
Check this out - https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart. Data shows the whole US is increasingly a miserable place to live in. And -- here's the best part -- the worse it gets, the more Americans double down on being shitty selfish evil fucks. Look at you trying very hard not to understand "teachers should be able to afford housing".
Of course it backfires. Crappy educational system => Americans don't understand tariffs => They vote for a guy who trashes the whole economy. That's called karma.
Fun fact: Fit 2 lines on that data and you can extrapolate by ~2030 China will be a better place to live. That's really not that far off. Set a reminder on your phone.
That's going to be a pretty rough transition. I think the economic aspects will be pretty straightforward by comparison to the psychological upheaval!
If you think the purpose of the economy is for the economy to be good then it doesn't matter. If you think it exists to serve humanity then... You really wouldn't need to ask the question, I imagine.
My comments being downvoted, pretty rare lately, were about never discussed but legitimate points about AI that I validated IRL. I have no resonance about the way AI is discussed on HN and IRL, to the point that I can't rule out more or less subtle manipulation on the discussions.
And the votes are pretty random too. Sometimes it'll go from -5 to +10 in the span of a few hours. Just depends on who's online at the time...
And yet don't they pull on our heartstrings? Isn't that funny? A random number generator for the soul...
I think the comparisons are useful enough as metaphors, though I wonder at analysis, because it sounds like if someone took a Yudkowsky idea and talked about it like a human, which might make a bad assumption go down more smooth than it should. But I don't know.
Economically it is no different from the demand for Mitsubishi's decreasing except the vehicle in this case eats grass, poops, and feels pain.
If you want to analogize with humans, a gradual reduction in breeding (which is happening anyways with or without AI) is probably a stronger analogy than a Skynet extinction scenario.
Truth is this is no different than the societal trends that were introduced with industrialization, simply accelerated on a massive scale.
The threshold for getting wealth through education is bumping up against our natural human breeding timeline, delaying childbirth past natural optimal human fertility ages in the developed world. The amount of education needed to achieve certain types of wealth will move into the decades causing even more strain on fertility metrics. Some people will decide to have more kids and live off purely off whatever limited wellfare the oligarchs in charge decide is acceptable. Others will delay having children far past natural human fertility timespans or forgo having children at all.
I believe most people would agree with me that the answer is NO.
The analogy to horses here then is not individuals, but specific types of jobs.