A lot of the magic of LLMs, I think, has been tarnished by these CEOs and other FAANG companies. It might have been a far more interesting world if they didn't bring "AI" or "AGI" into the conversation in such a politicized way.
When most engineers and Marvel fans watched Tony Stark in Avengers collaborating with Jarvis they thought of Jarvis like "an AI with Google's knowledge where I can interact with him". It's true that we're close to that level interaction. However, the ultimate goal is to get as much as possible automated on Jarvis, to the point where Tony Stark is not needed or Tony Stark can be replaced by anyone with a mouth.
In this example, Jarvis isn't the goal but a checkpoint. The goal is a genie, providing software and research to anyone who is loaded with money, and knows how to rub the metaphorical lamp the right way.
Personally, the tools don't need to change hands at all. They are already in the hands of people who are deploying them at a scale to serve goals I cannot and do not support
The people running AI companies right now are some of the most evil motherfuckers on the planet
Not only that, but by how blatantly and openly these owners are discussing the tool's power. They are publicly crooning about their product's ability to replace workers. It's the first line of their sales pitch. And also, their customers (business CEOs) are publicly crooning about how awesome it is that they can reduce their headcount! Both the AI producers and their customers are absolutely bragging about worker displacement, and not a single guillotine has been constructed in the streets yet.
If we thought of all of this as 'stochastic data systems' then our heads would be in the right place as we thought about it just as 'powerful software' that can be used for good or bad purposes, and the negative externalizes will be derived from our use of it, not some inherent property.
Cryptocurrency is an interesting technology with some niche use cases, but it was pitched as replacing the entire money system. LLMs are extremely useful for certain types of work, but are pitched as AGI ending all work. Etc.
Labour displacement leads to an erosion of standards of living and in a world that ties purpose to work is an existential threat on a very practical level.
It was always going to be met with violence once it became more than a curiosity for tinkerers.
I don't disagree that we tie purpose to work and severing that tie will have negative societal consequences, but it is far more impactful that we tie the ability to continue to exist to work (for anyone not lucky enough to already be wealthy).
If I suddenly became unemployable tomorrow I'm positive I could find alternate purpose in my life to fill that gap, I already volunteer for various causes and could happily do more of the same to fill in the gaps left by lack of work. What I couldn't do is feed myself, keep myself housed, and get medical care (especially in the US, where this is very directly tied to work).
The really big fuckup we are committing as a society in the US (may or may not apply to each person's country individually) isn't just this looming threat of massive labor displacement due to AI, it is that instead of planning for any sort of soft landing we are continually slashing what few social safety nets already exist. We are creating the conditions for desperation that likely will result in increasing violence as outlined in the linked post.
Think of the alternative, though: If we planned for a soft landing and implemented safety nets and started transitioning ourselves to a society where people didn't have to work to survive, then a few trillion dollar companies would make slightly less profit every year. We simply cannot allow that. Won't someone think of those trillion dollar companies for a minute?
That's not to say we should just throw up our hands and accept every social injustice. But IMHO we shouldn't go around simplistically implying that all social ills will be solved by neutering the billionaire class.
The biggest problem we currently have with billionaires is that they are now so rich that the world becomes like a game to them and some of them are deliberately pushing us to a dystopia where non-billionaires become functional slaves (c.f. Amazon workers).
Not to put too fine a point on it but this was basically how the Japanese post war economic miracle was achieved.
In this case it was America which ordered the Japanese oligarchy to be stripped of its wealth.
We've had decades of propaganda telling us that this is the worst thing we could do for economic growth though so it's natural to doubt.
You’re right. Instead of implying, we should be taking active steps to do it.
a) Decouple the value of human life from labour.
b) Watch as the value of human life rapidly approaches zero.
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Though I'd expand this by adding "technically alive" is not a very good standard to aim for. Ostensibly we're already heading for something like poverty level UBI + living in pod + eating the proverbial bugs. We need a level above that!
A great exploration of the pitfalls of "preserve humanity" as a reward function is the video game SOMA. I think you also need "preserve dignity" to make the life actually worth living.
(Path `a` is not without its pitfalls: what lack of survival pressure might do to the human culture and genome, I leave as an exercise for the reader! But path `b` I think we already have enough examples of, to know better...)
You forgot C: Butlerian Jihad. mass outlaw AI research, AI usage, AI building, AI infrastructure, on penalty of death
It may not be a good option but it's there
"Vibe coding a house" will increase housing supply, (and automation at every step of supply chain too), but the costs will still be nonzero.
In addition, it's all fine and good to say "people will still need to buy food clothes an shelter"
But what is the price gonna be? Who can afford it if no one has a job? Who's going to sell it and to who? For what profit?
The two biggest labor displacements in human history were the agricultural and industrial revolutions, both of which resulted in enormous gains in human living standards. Can you think of a mass labor displacement that resulted in an overall erosion of living standards? I cannot.
Then there's the minor issue of AI deciding to just wipe us out because we're in the way.
Taking everything together, AI more powerful than that which currently exists must not be created. This needs to be enforced with an international treaty, nuking data centers in non-compliant states if need be.
How much truth there is to it we don’t know for sure. But it’s not something to be ignored.
— in the 1960/1970s, when compilers came out. "We don't need so many programmers hand-writing assembly anymore." Remember, COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) and FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) were marketed as human-readable languages that would let business professionals/scientists no longer be reliant on dedicated specialist programmers.
— in the 1980s/1990s, when higher-level languages came out. "C++ and Java mean we don't need an army of low-level C developers spending most of their effort manually managing memory, and rich standard libraries mean they don't have to continuously reimplement common data structures from scratch."
— in the 1990s/2000s, when frameworks came out. "These things are basically plug-and-play, now one full-stack developer can replace a dedicated sysadmin, backend engineer, database engineer, and frontend engineer."
While all of these statements are superficially true, the result was that the world produced more software (and developer jobs) than ever, as each level of abstraction freed developers from having to worry about lower-level problems and instead focus on higher-level solutions. Mel's intellect was freed from having to optimize the position of the memory drum [0] to allow him to focus on optimizing the higher-level logic/algorithms of the problem he's solving. As a result, software has become both more complex but also much more capable, and thus much more common.
While this time with AI may truly be different, I'm not holding my breath.
Literally the same thing.
> humans will be economically obsolete and worthless
Only if we are talking about a socialist system (and they are making pretty small progress in the field of AI). A human's value under a capitalist system is equal to their ability to create goods and services. And AI cannot make this ability smaller in any way.
A people's well-being is literally the goods and services created by that people. How can it decrease if the people's ability to produce those goods and services is not hindered in any way?
So, when it comes to the entire nation benefiting from AI, the most important thing is to preserve capitalism, and then the free market will distribute all the benefits. The main danger is a descent into socialism, with all these basic incomes, taxation out of production, and other practices that would lead to people being declared economically obsolete and mass executed to optimize their carbon footprint or something.
Yes they can. Your ability to produce goods and services depends on the infrastructure around you. When that's all run by AIs for AIs, humans won't be able to compete.
See that land over there producing food you need to eat? It turns out it's more economically efficient to pave it over with data centers etc.
Under a US-style capitalist system the rich (i.e. the AIs and AI-run businesses) control politics, the courts, etc, so the decisions the system makes will favour AIs over humans.
> So, when it comes to the entire nation benefiting from AI, the most important thing is to preserve capitalism, and then the free market will distribute all the benefits
...to the AI-run companies!
> The main danger is a descent into socialism, with all these basic incomes
Without UBI most people (or maybe everyone) would starve.
Yeah, and who is creating those infrastructure? Jesus? This is the same part of goods and services.
> When that's all run by AIs for AIs, humans won't be able to compete.
So what? The ability to produce goods and services (and therefore general well-being) will not decrease because of that.
> It turns out it's more economically efficient to pave it over with data centers etc
By the way, a good argument against your position. Agricultural land is very cheap, but the vast majority of people who believe AI will put people out of work and worsen overall well-being are for some reason reluctant to buy this asset, which would see a catastrophic increase in value under such a scenario. So these people are either incapable of analyzing the economic processes, and their predictions are worthless, or they don’t really believe in such a scenario.
> will favour AIs over humans
Let me repeat: it does not reduce the ability to create goods and services. Under capitalism, this is the only characteristic that determines people's well-being.
> ...to the AI-run companies!
I think this is a fairly unlikely scenario. But even in this very unlikely case, people's well-being will not be reduced. Simply because of the mechanisms of creating well-being.
> Without UBI most people (or maybe everyone) would starve.
Economic theory (and 20th-century economic practice) demonstrates the exact opposite. In every country that attempted to effectively implement UBI, it led to a sharp decline in production and mass starvation. Literally every single time.
The mass evictions of the Scottish Highlands [1] in which peasants were driven at the point of bayonets to the lowland city slums to make way for the British government to transform Scotland into a mass sheep/wool production monoculture economy.
The use of kidnapped Africans as slaves in the Americas was also an example of a labor displacement - by introducing a source of mass human labor with absolutely no human rights - to scale the agricultural commodity economy (cotton, tobacco, sugar), which resulted in horrendous living standards for the enslaved, and an erosion for the poor paid peasants whose labor they replaced. Slavery was a very "efficient" way to use labor.
For a very specific example: the cotton gin likely increased the demand for slave labor in the American South, leading to harsher conditions for slaves, increased acrimony between slaveholders and abolitionists, and eventually the Civil War (the decimation of the Southern economy, the pivot of Northern society to a war footing w/ associated disruptions, and 600,000 Americans dead).
Humanity has taken control of its own evolution and no longer relyies on natural selection to be the driving force for change. Using evolution as an excuse to make bad and immoral choices is a poor argument and should be left back in the stone age.
Has it taken full control of it or just partial control?
It has nothing to do with society; there is infinite demand for medical care. The upper limit is whatever it takes to live until the universe's heat death in good health. That takes a lot of resources.
However much society spends on medical care, there is always more that could be spent. The modern era has the best, most affordable medical care in history and people are showing no signs of being satisfied at all.
While war spending generally just causes pain for no gain it doesn't change the fact that there will never be enough available to satisfy people's demand for medical care. Every single time people get what they want they just come up with a new aspirational minimum standard.
Soviet Union lost due to an inferior societal model, but this too is too much along what once was a relatively sustainable path. The American dream is now a parody of itself, as it takes more to end up with the rest of them, I could go on about the irony of wanting to escape the pit but not wanting to acknowledge the pit is the 99% of the U.S. -- Not Altmans, Bezos'es, Musks or Trumps or their hordes of peripheral elites.
Point being, the model doesn't work _today_ with its cancerous appetite and correspondingly absurd neglect of the human, _any_ human. We can't have humanism and the kind of AI we're about to "enjoy".
The acceleration of wealth disparity may prove to be nearly geometrical, as the common man is further stripped of any capacity to inflict change on the "system". I hope I am wrong, but for all their crimes, anarchy and in a twist of irony -- inhumane treatment of opponent -- the October revolutionaries in Russia, yes bolsheviks, were merely a natural response to a similar atmosphere in Russia at the turn of the previous century. It's just that they didn't have mass surveillance used against them in the same capacity our gadgets allow the "governments" today, nor were they aided by AI which is _also_ something that can be used against an entire slice of populace (a perfect application of general principles put in action). So although the situation may become similar, we're increasingly in no position to change it. The difference may be counted in _generations_, as in it will take multiple generations to dismantle the power structures we allow be put in place now, with Altmans etc. These people may not be evil, but history proves they only have to be short-sighted enough for evil to take root and thrive.
Sorry for the wall of text, but I do agree with the point of the blog post in a way -- demanding people become civilised and refrain from throwing eggs (or Molotovs) on celebrities that are about to swing _entire governments_, is not seeing the forest for the trees.
There's also no precedent in a way -- our historical cataclysms we have created ourselves, have been on a smaller scale, so we're spiraling outwards and not all of the tools we think we have, are going to have the effect required in order to enact the change we want. In the worst case, of course.