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Comment by tux3 | Hacker News Reader

The true AI doomsayers believe in some sort of technological singularity, which means a point after which things become so strange that the world is radically transformed.

Things like "jobs" and "careers" are so integral to society that we can't really imagine what society would be like in a world where people don't have any clear purpose. That's why you won't get a definitive answer. The whole idea of a singularity is that people don't have the faintest clue what day to day life would look like after.

We often to choose to believe that a singularity can't happen, because we don't know what that even means. We can't answer the simple question. So it definitely better not happen, that would be very inconvenient.

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I’m always amazed that when I tell people I intend to retire in my 50s, they tell me that I can’t possibly mean that and actively wonder how I could possibly fill my time. It’s as if we could not possibly function as humans without meaningless shifting of tangible/intangibles from one place to another.

Society is so hellbent on the idea that we need our job to be our identity, they lack the imagination for another other reality.

It’s ridiculous.

It is indeed ridiculous. People saying they're going to let someone else tell them what to do with their time, energy, and calendar, even if they hate doing it. The only explanation I have is that they have been letting the wrong people program them.

Sure working sucks, but have you tried not working? I think this is from lived experience because I've gone for stretches of not working (intentionally). It can be challenging to find a sense of fulfillment. I know it seems counter-intuitive but if you do succeed in your dream of retiring in your 50's I think you'll understand what I mean when you get there.

I think this varies wildly from person to person. I've also intentionally gone long stretches without working and those are the times when I've had a dramatically increased sense of purpose and fulfillment. Working for others reduces those things for me.

I'm in the age group where a lot of the people around me have retired. Some of them have fared very poorly, some have straight-up blossomed.

Ok but one of the great things about retiring when everyone else does is you have a community. If you stop working when you're young, everyone else in your network is probably still working.

I'm not against early retirement. One of my points was that, in general, it's harder to find fulfillment as a working age adult outside of work. Not impossible, just more challenging.

It's harder for -you- to find fulfillment outside of work. This is not a true statement for most or "in general".

Sorry, but your comment isn't really responding to OP's main point.

> It can be challenging to find a sense of fulfillment.

If you actually get fulfillment from work, then great, continue to work. The critical thing that drives people to retire earlier than the average person is that their work doesn't give them a sense of fulfillment. It's literally just a way to fill out the day. Some people do have things that are more fulfilling than letting an employer tell them how to spend their day.

Yes, it was responding. One of my points was that it has nothing to do with society's expectations but people's lived experiences and observations.

You seem to think I'm advocating for working your entire life. I'm just trying to share my lived experience so please take it easy.

There is some bitterness that's coming across in your response.

I think you need to do better at not working. It's great actually.

I have tried not working and it's great.

>can't really imagine what society would be like in a world where people don't have any clear purpose

Do people have clear purpose now? We have a lot of examples of people who don't have to work like the British landed gentry of times past. Maybe we'll be Bertie Woosters with AI Jeeves?

I believe that AI will continue to progress. I believe that we’re going to see a fast takeoff.

That said, some people are now discussing a “societal singularity” wherein society breaks before the actual emergence of AGI. I believe this is the trajectory we are on. The question is what happens to the unemployed. Democracies will not tolerate mass permanent unemployment, as we’ve seen over and over again.

UBI is a scam, many middle class folks would be worse off under UBI than they are under the current system. They will fight to defend the economic status quo.

In the end, I think capitalism is incompatible with the emergence of AGI, and I think an aligned ASI will smash the capitalist system simply out of pure egalitarianism. (Note: I was previously a proponent of capitalism.) I think many people will die trying to defend capitalism. We’re at the beginning of the AI wars.

My sentiments are fairly similar.

In the US at least the middle class was already being hunted to extinction and it seems reasonable. This is just accelerant on that already burning fire.

The capitalist system is kind of a tool to provide prosperity by people making stuff and so remains because people like prosperity. If AI can make the stuff it may become redundant and fade in importance without needing to be smashed.

Like there was kind of an A B test of capitalism vs socialism in Germany but East Germany got less prosperity and so they had to build walls with machine guns to stop people escaping the socialist side. But if AI was providing abundance in the east that might not have been needed? Like in the future if you have two societies, one dysfunctional capitalism where Musk and Altman have everything and the other a kind of AI socialism where everyone has abundance of most things, people may voluntarily choose the later.

It can't happen. For one - if it did happen it would mean all domains reach singularity at once, but we know the capability curve is jagged. Each domain advances at its own speed.

Second - the more you make progress, the harder it gets, exponentially harder. Maybe Newton could advance physics observing an apple fall, today they need space telescopes and billion dollar particle accelerators. The more tech advances, the harder it is. Will AGI be so "super" to cancel out exponentials?

And third - the AI progress is tied to learning signal, and we have exhausted the available data. In the last 1-2 years we have started using verified synthetic data (RLVR) but exponential difficulty is a barrier. Other domains don't even have built in verifiability like math and code. So there the progress will be slower. Testing a vaccine to be safe takes 6 months for 1 bit of information - that is how slow and expensive it can get in some domains. AI can't get the learning signal it needs across all domains fast enough.

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