I genuinely don't understand why people who have to work for their living are amazed at this. It will have a vast negative impact on your life unless you already live off of your wealth.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49045107.
If renters of your apartments can not afford to rent them, housing crashes because your city was a looser (Detroit style withdrawals).
Even for stocks we don't know who the winners are. The market as a whole usually does not respond that well on serious turmoil.
So yeah. We are likely seeing some very rough years.
The smarter ones among the rich have realized this and are open for something like a universal basic income precisely for that reason: to protect their wealth and the position in the food chain this wealth affords them.
It’s embarrassing at this point. Give it up.
If you play this out, UBI or some near variant is inevitable.
And I would like you to be right, by the way. But why should I believe you?
Think of it this way. The percentage of the population that will not have enough skills, 'smartness' and or knowledge to serve the community in a profitable way, increases over time. Today the group includes mostly the very young, the elderly (which in a way already have a 'kind of UBI', but not the complete lifespan) and people with a severe illness. Tomorrow new groups of people will be included, like people who stopped going to school at 17,18yo or so, and so on.
Suppose society provides those people with only the very minimal money to survive and no entertainment, traveling, proper housing, life choices etc. In that case not only those people, but the society as a whole will suffer because of unrest, riots etc. At a certain point in time, UBI can easily paid for by the wealth that automation will bring. Today probably as well, but the pressure of unevenly spread wealth is still able to keep it from happening, rich people still need enough poor people to work for them directly (house/boat personnel) or indirectly (mine coffee, chocolate, soy, battery minerals, ...)
You don't seem to know your history.
The US was on track to enact UBI. The US was socialist directly after the great depression.
Some of the most successful capitalist societies (the Nordic countries) have socialist elements.
What point do you think you’re making about mass unemployment, exactly? It’s been here for half a decade already.
Again, we can’t even keep social security solvent, which is basically UBI for old people. It won’t work, the math doesn’t math, and everyone who wants UBI to be a thing just completely ignores this fact.
So frustrating.
Money is a claim on productivity.
In a world where both creation and consumption is by humans, the productivity needs to align with consumption.
Arguably, that is a century since that was the case, so we tax extra productive human beings in order to make sure that everybody can consume.
This trend need to be accelerated as productivity accelerates.
Ubi, negative tax, etc. There are many good ideas on how to fix it.
However,if this discussion annoys you, I would strongly recommend you to learn more about the subject as it is indicative that you have some holes in your knowledge.
Profitable companies. This is incredibly obvious. It is where dividends come from already.
You keep mentioning social security but it isn't comparable as it has a relatively low income cap on payroll taxes and raising this easily makes it solvent.
What is actually frustrating is the wealth of the richest 400 people in the US now equals 20% of GDP. In 1982 it was only 2%. THE MONEY IS THERE!
The money isn’t real, and I think you do understand that.
One of the reason democracy has tended to be a stable form of government is that it naturally finds a balance between the haves and the have nots -- the boundary where the haves are comfortable parting with that much to live in a stable society where they keep the remainder, and the have nots are afforded some amount of social services for their most accute needs.
That's all predicated on a "or riots / internal military action" alternative though.
We've lived through a pretty stable post-WWII economic bargain period, and historically there's not a ton of certainty that continues through distributive renegotiations, which tend to be bloody.
If GDP 2x's and labor becomes less scarce (and therefore less powerful), it's as possible that all those gains go to capital as anything else.
In aggregate, capital is not particularly humane, left to its own devices.
How did we end up with the word with the long-o having one o, and the word with the short-o having two?
Neither is pronounced with a long "O" sound or a short "O" sound, and they both have the same vowel sound. (A long "O" would be the vowel sound in "lone", for example. Short "O" is like "log".) The difference is that you use your vocal chords to pronounce the "S" in "lose", making it an English "Z" sound.
English is kinda neat in that it's a fusion of all the different lingua franca's of the time throughout history.
Luckily, we're all in this together. As long as enough people realize the weight of what's happening soon enough, I'm confident the indominable human spirit and the relative momentum of post-enlightenment social & institutional progress will carry us the rest of the way on a wave of clearly-justified solidarity.
To think otherwise --to truly face the spectre before us without hope-- is pathology, I think. Not necessarily incorrect of course, but definitely an unhealthy source of cognitive distress.
Even if you're lucky to be wealthy you'd be living in a city with fewer restaurants, bakeries, shops, anything. Because once a lot of people don't have income they won't be able to go out and buy things and shops will go out of business.
It will also lead to a lot lot LOT LOT LOT more crime. I don't see the semi-wealthy to have an enjoyable life.
Plus it just takes too much time to go to starbucks, especially with all the starbucks job applications I will need to fill out if I want a chance of getting a job.
The problem with AI isn't that it's threating software development. It's that it's _also_ threating pretty much any other job that I could reasonably be retrained for.
Also, I'm pretty conflicted about the overall impact of automobiles.
Demanding better conditions does not just manufacture the technology, infrastructure, and productivity needed to provide the improvement in the standard of living. I think you're in the fantasy realm, my friend.
He does not give a single solitary fuck about you. If you get lucky and your interests align, great. But Musk talks fairly openly about letting many humans die while a few rich elites thrive. And if you're posting on this website, you are not a rich elite.
Because society has found such sustainable solutions to capital wealth concentration in the intervening years.
There are so many great and useful things it can and will do to improve humanity.
Based on the past 40 years track record it seems unlikely that we will see any form of redistribution before it is existential.
That is definitely grounds for being pessimistic.
Every tech gets exploited to make some richer folks more rich. Nothing new. Since the rich-ladder *is* the power-ladder under cap'ism.
In the west "we" forgot how unions and strong labor parties gave us weekends, sick leave, holidays, etc. Now we pay the price.
I think of it in roughly 3 eras:
pre industrialization, individual labor contribution had quite a lot of power.
Industrialization, labor sees commoditization and unions make sure that power is kept across individual workers.
Post industrialization (ground zero was like GFC, being accelerated by AI). We need to figure out new structures than labor to distribute resources and power - and that is going to hurt.
Pre-industrialisation, most labour was the peasantry, whose main contribution was growing enough crops to keep themselves healthy enough to be a useful bunch of conscripts.
Industrialisation created the conditions where labour became important, because the workers were no longer bound to an employer so if they all walked out and told their friends you were a bad boss, your expensive capital (machinery) went idle.
The third industrial revolution, AKA the Information Age, was when it (gradually, piece-by-piece) started to become possible to do "lights-out manufacturing" or "dark factories", so-named because you (sometimes) don't need lights if you have no human workers. This period also came with globalisation and offshoring, which muddied the waters somewhat.
When some task can be fully automated, the labour working on that task loses its power with the management, e.g. UK print workers lost their relevance to the creation of newspapers in the UK with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wapping_dispute
Lights-out manufacturing is the ultimate form of this, where all the humans are redundant.
Unions have power for one reason alone: the powerful need to keep the labour force on-board.
When the powerful do not need to care about labour, this happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
It has also been protecting politics from capital in various ways; public funding of political parties, strict bans on various forms of political adverts, forced disclosure laws, essentially forcing capital into a single visible chair (NHO), etc.
As I understand it, that fund's returns are about 17%-ish of government spending. This is not sufficient for the powerful to no longer need to care about labour.
I think Saudi Arabia is 77%-ish of government income from oil?
Table 1: https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/2008/170/arti...
(I'm saying government spending here rather than GDP because the point is "the powerful" not "the country").
A useful question for this is "on average, how long will a nation remain like Norway, and not elect someone that undermines democracy?"; this is… also complicated. UK elected Thatcher for various reasons, but it would be fair to say these included "removing power from the Trade Unions", yet the UK now has a politically untouchable "triple lock" on pensions that it can't really afford. It's a democracy, "the powerful" are the voters, pensioners vote more than the rest. A nation whose UBI is done by setting the state pension age to birth and keeps the voting age low may manage this… or some upcoming politician may figure out how to use Grok to win an election like social media became influential last decade (they're clearly already trying), and then we have to deal with the mess that this produces.
Literally every income decile is getting richer. Don't tell me you got fooled by that fake graph showing productivity/income disconnect?
Don't tell me you have been fooled by the Chicago school of economics that has told you that relative wealth is indifferent as long as you can get a cheaper television.
If you think about it, it is clear that what you propose is not sustainable as there is a forced constant push on the spending distribution.
It will fail.
For what exactly, for growth? https://ourworldindata.org/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/qLq-8BTgXU8... here
> large growth but largest in top decile vs no growth, the first one is absolutely 1000x times better
1. tools like this are going to be exploited by corporations to extract money from people.
2. tools like this will provide great benefits for the average person.
We are currently exploited by corporations, arguably more than in the past, and yet we have the highest standard of living in history. In large part due to technological progress.
https://www.iwm.at/publication/iwmpost-article/tech-bros-and...
By taking away my ability to earn a living.
> There are so many great and useful things it can and will do to improve humanity.
What great things and why would I get access to those things?
But this is an economy / capitalism problem, not an AI problem? AI isn't at fault that you can't get a job, your boss is for replacing you with AI.
That's like saying we should ban cars because millions of people who would upkeep horses for others to use just lost their jobs.
You're essentially making your life purposely harder because you want uninterrupted money. Perhaps look at the issues of the system that does this?
> What great things...
Aside from the medical AI stuff (detecting breast cancer, etc) that's mostly covered, AI can be helpful if you have to do a boring task that you don't want to do yourself. This is pretty much what every technology does - your phone is created so you don't have to run home and use the landline to make a phone call - it's making an already existing task easier.
>...and why would I get access to those things?
Why not? Seriously, why not? It's a bit like asking why should I get access to a car instead of keeping my horse around. You can keep your horse or car. Nobody's pressuring you to replace your horse with a car.
There are externalities. In my experience it was way easier to call people in the 90s. People answered and if not their faimily members did.
It was impossible to ghost phone calls until the early 2000s with presentation screens.
Nowadays people hardly answer unknown numbers or might ignore inconvinient calls.
> Nowadays people hardly answer unknown numbers or might ignore inconvinient calls.
So your phone does make calls and it is useful but you don't want to use it nowadays NOT because the technology is useless but because of phone spammers and because phones may have potentially made it easier for phone spammers to exist?
Which, once again, is the exact point I raised with AI. You don't like it NOT because the technology is trash - but because the current capitalist system makes businesses profit less when they have to pay you, so they work hard to use technology to replace you in hopes of paying less.
Which is why I say, this is less an AI problem and more a capitalist one. If there was no benefit to replacing people with technology then people would not be replaced. But currently the current system tries to give you benefits for not having to pay people.
So even if we all fight AI and get it banned it won't solve the underlying problem which will mean that it will repeat with a different thing.
AI is automating a lot of things at the same time. Not evenly, there are faster- and slower-automated things. But this does suggest that instead of e.g. society as a whole doing better from all the fabric coming out of the power looms, by a large enough margin to stomp on the weavers who lost their profession, that we may face something more like the entire initial economic displacement from the first industrial revolution (including the period where weavers were replaced), everything from farms finding they no longer needed so many hands through the luddites getting the death penalty to (roughly) the invention of Communism concurrently with the Irish Potato famine, and as part of this those now-bulging cities having to invent new sanitation solutions because their "slop" problem was more literal and gave the population cholera and typhoid.
My expectation a decade ago was that software development would be the last thing to be automated, because we'd need software developers to write AI. Today, while I don't know how far most fields are from automation*, we definitely have AI capable enough at coding to write more AI.
* a decade ago I also thought self-driving cars were basically already sorted; what a pity that the software in the Paint It Black video was not as good as depicted
for me?
if it will stay on track for few more months or years, it will be able to do my work and I will have serious trouble to be employed
"destroy your life" may be overstating things but it is definitely not a welcome change
Caveat: Only if it also produces shareholder value
It's tricky. On the one hand, it will - in the near future - indeed screw us all pretty badly unless we completely redefine our economies to no longer conflate person's worth with ability to earn money.
On the other hand, LLMs are useful to lesser or greater degree to approximately everyone, in almost everything they do, work or personal, right now.
It's harder to be pessimistic about the very thing that gives you new superpowers every week, directly applicable to whatever your individual needs are, and is available to ~everyone for between free and (for typical westerners) peanuts.
The answer us right there. Most people who work for a living aren't amazed, or not just amazed. Most normal people are afraid, angry, sad etc.
Because it could motivate you to work with others to stop your livelihood from being ruined, especially watching in real time as the evidence they present for their promise becomes ever more promising. Amazement is not exclusive with concern. (Actually, my first though was of a kaiju movie-style tsunami blocking out the sun as it looms over a city. Indeed, I would likely be both amazed and concerned.)
Amazing that this has to be spelt out. Peak hn.
I, for one, am excited to see what the future holds. (side note: I live in a European country with a strong social safety net, I imagine that helps being unafraid)
More practically, society should be reimagined around AI. You're comment presumes an outcome that will be politically determined: you can still fight for the world you want.
Hard truth but true nonetheless. How come we should have it both ways? We removed certain jobs, it’s our turn to have many types of jobs disrupted and have to transition.
Had this colleague argue "there has to be ABI how else are we going to get money". Like ... no thoughts about not needing the middle class would change power dynamics of voters versus the new prospect elite.
Once humans can be robustly replaced by machines, the military-industrial "meta build" will be a state with no humans, no cities, and 100% of all production dedicated to war. Whichever states descend to this new equilibrium fastest will crush the others and then fight over the corpse of the world forever. (Unless, of course, something like the Yudkowsky scenario happens along the way, which is totally possible)
I can't understand why anyone expects things like civil rights, property, the rule of law, nuclear deterrence, democracy, etc to survive when human beings no longer need each other. Why do investors in AI companies expect a payoff once they are no longer needed? Why (and, more importantly, how) does anyone expect a UBI from a government to which they are nothing but a drain on resources and which is in existential competition with other governments with exponentially growing robot armies?
Either the world will come to its senses and shut it all down, or there will be no winners at all.
We will nuke it long before it gets to that point. We don't nuke other countries because they still contain lots of humans. Any AI that actually becomes autonomous and starts to clear a nation state of cities and humans will immediately receive megatons in nukes.
The rest of us will be irrelevant.
Ok yes robot killer dogs from black mirror are terrifying and possible - they’re gonna enrich uranium from gpus and assemble nukes at the local toyota dealer?
what are we talking about
so yes, you think claude’s gonna get a skill any day now to code up some nukes.
Your scenario assumes fully autonomous ASI. That’s just not what LLMs are. So then the discussion is more that ASI is inevitable. That’s much more interesting but very different from the point release of Opus.
And AIs have no will. That’s been my best response on the philosophical end. Without will, they’re bound by humans.
What’s your source on this? When humans have no obligations they usually turn around to be super nice to each other. Humans are social animals and they really really want everyone they know to do well.
The reason we have some nice things in the modern world, flawed though it is, is because for the last few centuries the military-industrial meta has favored countries which let people have some political and economic freedom. In a previous era, the meta was knights and peasants; a country without knights would be conquered, a country without peasants would starve, and a country that did not give the knights power over the peasants would lose a civil war. It doesn't matter what people want; technology will diffuse, someone will play the game to win, and any countries that choose less optimal choices will just be swept away.
in any case, how is one country/power with winning on their mind getting infinite manufacturing and raw resources to construct this robot army?
Are the people in the current US administration, or the tech leadership, or the people in power in Israel or Russia looking particular nice to you or interested in the wellbeing of all humans?
Were the European colonialists nice to the people in Africa or South America or the settlers in North America to the natives?
People are super nice - to their own ingroup. The relationship to everyone else is less friendly, especially if power differences are involved.
„Common wisdom“ dictates that humans are wild animals, and the only thing keeping us from tearing ourselves apart is a thin layer of civilization. This is sometimes called the „veneer theory“.
That theory is wrong.
It’s also very important to powerful people that you believe that the theory is right; because why else would you allow eg. an autocracy to exist?
So, to answer your questions:
> Were the European colonialists nice to the people in Africa or South America or the settlers in North America to the natives?
No, but the natives were nice to the settlers.