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Comment by A_D_E_P_T | Hacker News Reader

> The first is our duty to the global poor. There is a real possibility that AI will displace human labor at very large scale. If that happens, supporting those displaced will be a moral imperative of historic proportions.

This guy doesn't understand what the global poor actually do for a living. They're not lawyers or paper-pushers, nor do they work in medical diagnostics. They're usually farmers. Sometimes they work in craft businesses, in fishing boats, or in various mercantile trades.

Nobody's even talking about how AI is going to displace that kind of labor, because it's hard to do, hard even to conceive, and it doesn't seem likely to happen in the near term. Lawyers and judges can already be automated, but a yeoman farmer?

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The displaced human workers risk joining the global poor, is what he’s saying. And that would increase competition for the manual labor jobs, thus worsening the situation for the global poor. Not to mention what will happen when robotics take off for these kinds of jobs.

Or they provide leadership and organize the global poor.

Because the global poor have been too stupid to organize until now?

No just too busy surviving.

In this vision, then, everybody is so unimaginative that all they can think of to do is compete over the same old manual tasks, without inventing new ways to be useful, while robots are better than them at everything intellectual. We have a duty to the global dull.

(If there's some doubt, I don't think it would pan out that way, because humans are imaginative.)

This is about compassion.

The rice workers in Vietnam just need to follow your podcast. The problem is they were just too dull this whole time.

(I have no idea about Vietnamese rice workers' quality of life, so I don't mean to assume one way or the other. But it's interesting that what they and we think of their life, according to card_zero the cause is a lack of imagination)

No, it isn't. It's about displaced workers from the knowledge economy. You're invoking a pernicious trope here about blaming the poor for being poor, in order to explain why everybody will be poor when those workers are displaced from cliche-churning jobs, because supposedly they're just that helpless.

Fair enough but it means you're giving a lot of credit to these white-collar workers losing their jobs. I've seen enough to know office workers are not the intellectual savants their college sold them on. People are mostly trying to pay their debts.

I was thinking about it like this: in the apocalyptic vision mentioned above, there's still just as much food being made, and still just as much fancy-pants stuff too, IP and services, except those are being made by robots. So all these displaced workers can be fed, practically speaking, except supposedly all the money goes to owners of robots while the humans are out in the fields and unable to buy beans. They're being punished for being useless.

Well, I don't believe the economy is limited to bland things AI can do on one hand, and paddies and beanfields on the other. I don't believe there's a great mass of useless people who we've been looking after so far through a kind of polite fiction of makework. I'm not saying they'll get rich, and I don't expect them to be brilliant, but I expect them to display low cunning and be less than completely feckless. Sometimes for complex reasons, forces beyond our control trap us in poverty. I don't see why that would be a universal effect that applies to these displaced office workers.

I have a completely different expectation, based on what has happened with every major discovery or invention from electricity to refridgeration to transistors: Everyone has gotten wealthier relative to those who came before. The average "peasant" in every nation without a corrupt or totalitarian parasitic government live in more opulence and have a higher quality of life than every king of the past.

That doesn't always translate to happiness but I fully expect AI will reduce costs for all kinds of things, and those things that are now either rare or non-existent will become common. Today not everyone has a robot vacuum, I think in 20 years or so everyone who wants one will have a robot vacuum, and those who can afford the luxury of a robot vac today will be able to afford real robots who can do much more complex things. I'm quite excited about the next few decades, as long as we can keep despots from monopolizing the technology.

How about the power consolidation that’s brewing as we speak? How about the all encompassing surveilance to come? I don’t doubt AI could be used to take us towards a utopia but it could also lead us in the opposite direction.

For sure, there's a line in Ecclesiastes : "he who breaks through a wall may be bitten by a snake". We have no idea what snakes await us beyond the next few years, but like nuclear power, the internet, and even social media (which IMO is toxic to large swathes of the population today) we'll eventually arrive at a place where we can harness the blessings while controlling the risks. The first nation to align their laws to a sane governance model will reap the most rewards.

I bought a robot vacuum years ago for 80€. It’s not a luxury at all

I think you’re referring to the short term impacts of AI and he’s thinking more long-term.

Also, AI, even short term, is going to make some people and some countries extremely wealthy, so maybe this isn’t such a bad time to be thinking about those who are still extremely poor and who won’t benefit.

That line comes across as a wink to investors. They aspire for AI to displace human labor, as does he. Reading between the lines, it just confirms business as usual, and consequences aren't even worth thinking through.

His argument is not that the existing global poor are going to be automated by AI, but that a great many people are going to join the global poor as their current livelihoods are automated.

A statistically average representative of the "Global Poor" -- e.g. the farmer working a smallholding in India or the DRC -- is unlikely to have his day-to-day activities affected by AI on any foreseeable time horizon, nor is his wealth likely to meaningfully increase or decrease.

The speech should have referenced the poor in industrialized nations, who are very likely to be affected, though I doubt they'll join the ranks of the global poor in most circumstances.

I’m not sure what you mean, there’s a lot of people talking about farming automation and its effects on working farmers.

It's unclear how agentic LLMs are going to automate farming in the Global South.

I am responding to “There is a real possibility that AI will displace human labor at very large scale.”

In this usage I read the term “AI” to more broadly refer to all advancements in machine intelligence, not narrowly “agentic LLMs” as you’ve said. In the farming automation world it’s very clear that advances in machine learning and multimodal LLMs will enable the use of expanded automation.

In particular the Global South is often seen as a field for investment where governments make international development deals with western governments to provide farming automation equipment in exchange for debt. Then western companies bring in equipment and establish extractive industries while displacing local subsistence farmers. Now alienated from their land, the poor farmers often end up with little choice but to work in new factories also established through these practices.

Robotics as a field is obviously growing. It’s long been common for global south governments to displace their own poor to make space for multinational development deals, And this will only expand as embodied intelligence becomes more capable in the real world.

In places like Africa and India? (Which is what he means when he brings up the "global" poor.) Dude, a lot of them don't even have tractors.

> https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2146927&re...

> Overall, the operation-wise average mechanization levels across crops are 70% for seed-bed preparation, 40% for sowing/planting/transplanting, 33% for weeding and inter-culture, and 34% for harvesting and threshing, resulting in an overall average mechanization level of 45%.

See also: "Percentage of workers engaged in Agriculture = 45.8%"

See my related comment. The poor won’t be buying AI tractors they will be getting displaced by global development deals between governments that bring in such equipment to be operated by western firms.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48271200

The poorest of the poor, subsistence farmers are barely producing enough to feed themselves; they trade and barter the little bit they can manage but it is not much and has little impact that goes beyond a tiny village-level radius. Nobody is displacing that because nobody needs to compete with that.

Very commonly governments will displace these poor to build factories or expand large scale farming practices with international development deals. The land gets taken from the poor and they are left with little choice but to work in these new factories often in abusive conditions.

Even if most are farmers, I imagine there are some urban dwellers who work in call centers.

We already have the ressources to solve world hunger. We - as a whole - refuse to do so, because it would be inconvenient to special interests.

As I already wtote in a previous comment months ago, they speak of AI finding ways to solve this and that grand problem, but never do they wonder if we are ready to listen to the answer. Solve global warming? Burn less petrol. Solve cancer? Eat less meat.

Not only we won't listen to answers, but chatGPT and Anthropic and others will eagerly lobotomize AI to stop it from giving the answers we don't want because of "too woke" or something, to keep juicy government contracts. After all, "Reality has a liberal bias", as the (recently unemployed) Colbert once said.

Scientists are still hounded six years later for having developed a good vaccine against COVID-19. What can AI do? The first AGI model should be called Cassandra.

if they asked their latest and greatest model "how do we solve climate change?" and it answered "humanity should deprioritise growth for 2-3 generations to transition to renewables, and AI development should be paused until then" they literally wouldnt listen anyway - so its all bunch of BS

> Solve cancer? Eat less meat.

That doesn't solve cancer at all... At best it would modestly reduce certain kinds of cancer. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't do much at all for the most common kind of cancer (skin cancer) and I reckon wouldn't do much, if anything, for the deadliest kind of cancer (lung cancer. At least in terms of how many people die from it.)

I know that wasn't the point but it nonetheless does detract from the point when it is suggested that we have all the answers. We could lower cancer moderately by lowering air pollution and improving diets in general (not necessarily requiring everyone to go vegan) but that is neither simple nor a panacea. (It would still be totally worth it.)

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