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Comment by atriarch | Hacker News Reader

This is a multifaceted problem for sure. As the fruit of leveraging LLM use, from my experience, is held in the hands of experienced, skilled, and gray-haired workers, what hope do young kids today have of BEING in this world?

The economic model since the industrial revolution is approaching it's metamorphosis: robotic servants that can do everything for everyone. Who, in that world, can spend the fiat and for what? I think many humans would prefer going back to picking potatoes out of the ground for a bit of silver than to lose agency to the machine. Everyone else is either bunker prepping or plugging into the matrix.

Will we arrive at the Jetsons? Or Warhammer 40k?

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Well even 40k spent 20k years living like the jetsons... There are no analogs for our future. That's one of the core problems here, you have powerful individuals who identify with and aspire to sci-fi, while living in denial of reality. I would argue someone like Musk is more blue pilled and in the Matrix than they think they are...

> There are no analogs for our future.

WALL-E?

Sure, why not pick idiocracy. You miss the point. People now cannot predict the future, all analogs are simultaneously possible and unlikely. Pick any event we have experienced, 9/11, COVID. Sure, some predictions were close, but nothing like the reality of living through it.

> The economic model since the industrial revolution is approaching its metamorphosis: robotic servants that can do everything for everyone.

Not true at all. If you have a robotic servant that can "do everything" for anywhere close to an affordable amount for even a middle-class person, please post a link and specify what it can do.

There a big gap between a tool that can spew out large amounts of code and something you trust to not screw up your house. Once I can tell a robot to do a simple plumbing task in my house, I'll believe in this metamorphosis you're talking about.

Even if we just have AI that can do every job that can be remote that would be hugely disruptive. I think you're right that plumbing is safe for a bit. Human hands are insanely dexterous

> Even if we just have AI that can do every job that can be remote that would be hugely disruptive.

This will not happen in my lifetime.

It may do some. It may even do a lot. It will certainly augment close to 100% the remote jobs.

AI will never be able to “do every job that is remote”.

Just 5% of the population with no hope, no future, and looking at no survival can be extremely disruptive to a society. Take away all the daydream future job options and only leave the difficult labor that breaks peoples bodies by 40 and the youth could become disruptive to society. You can't add in Mana making sure every minute of those jobs left is productive and every dollar paid in wages gets clawed back from workers. People can't function in modern hyper optimizing of all the impacts on workers but no optimization in housing affordability, food affordability, enjoyment options that benefit the average person instead of all optimizations extracting all the previous slack/dollars in life.

You can't optimize away all the slack (in affordability, in time, in things to be enjoyed, in xyz, in 123). You can't optimize away all the future opportunity. You can't optimize away all the daydreams and hope and expect society to look anything like our current society.

I hope you realize that your comments are those of a “doom and gloom” person. It’s a fairly extreme take on things that makes some pretty wild assumptions about humanity that don’t really seem to hold (e.g., assuming a complete lack of adaptability, while we seem to be actually quite adaptable).

It’s not a credible take.

> You can't optimize away all the daydreams and hope and expect society

Agree. I think only dysfunctional weirdos actually think that’s what AI will do.

> to look anything like our current society

Who says our current society is at its apex? I don’t think it is. I think we have a ton of upside left to explore.

If our society looks like it is now 10-20 years from now, I will feel like we will have failed miserably. I am willing to bet that it will be much better.

Technically you are right, of course. But don't forget that Dario and Sam have already promised us autonomous killer robots. They may not be realistic right now, but together with the administration they're dreaming about them and I think we can safely assume that they will make them a reality as soon as they possibly can. And guess who will be at the receiving end of their life-terminating implements once the feudal AI overlords come to the conclusion they can do without us. Even if it can't really work, it's enough that the people making the decisions believe it can. And the people we're talking about are the world champions of drinking the Kool-Aid.

That’s a weak goalpost, the tech you’re talking about will land soon and then we’ll have to move goalposts again.

> robotic servants that can do everything for everyone.

Why do people keep positing this? The robots get better every year, but they don't get better fast enough to make me think there will be a robot servant doing anything for anyone in my lifetime. As has been the case for the past fifty years or so, they're either hyperspecialized or remote controlled by people, and neither of those spell doom for the economy.

Honest question, did you foresee the last 2 or 3 years happening as fast as they have?

Edit: In terms of AI/LLM's etc..

Indeed. The moment these LLM brains are given access to natural selection and evolution in the hardware space, it's game over.

We don't need to engineer plumbing robots - they will engineer themselves. We will see a silicon Cambrian Explosion. Maybe next year maybe in 500, but it's inevitable with the current economic incentives.

Bold of you to assume that “current economic inventives” will remain around for 500 years, especially given the American-style neo-liberal economy is only like 70 years old.

What if the creation of such robots destroys the economic incentive for doing so?

>The moment these LLM brains are given access to natural selection and evolution in the hardware space

Ok, but that's still sci-fi. We've made a huge advancement in automation of knowledge work, but hardware still has no clear path to what you're describing, or even to anything similar to it.

Honestly everything about the future has been about fifteen years behind schedule (or more!) from what I was expecting in 1999. I was fully expecting affordable lunar tourism for the middle class by now.

I know, right? Where's the space ship in my garage?

I first heard about Elon Musk in my teens when I was reading astronomy magazines and wishing Robert Zubrin was running NASA. Why wasn't Nasa progressing? We stopped going to the moon and made a space truck to ferry satellites and ISS nodules into LEO for $2B a pop and 1/100 odds of fatality. Anyway here comes this SV guy wishing he could put a greenhouse on mars and see if a plant would grow in Martian regolith...

I'm still waiting for that experiment, Mr. Musk.

Don't hold your breath.

Musk was never sincerely planning any kind of sci-fi future, the fact that SpaceX was built with help from Mike Griffin (who was a key player in the 80s 'Star Wars' SDI program) and the fact that Starlink's roadmap is basically reheated leftovers of Brilliant Pebbles[1] really gives the game away. He's just a generic military contractor with (well, used to have) good PR.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles

I'm still waiting for that experiment, Mr. Musk.

Me, too. He's just another Lucy, holding just another football.

Sure, we went from 'writing software is a grueling effort for many people' to 'writing software is a solo effort with a few chatbot subscriptions' but I think that my colleagues in the IT world tend to overestimate the effects LLMs have had on the wider populace. Folks mostly use them as search engines and there hasn't been a qualitative change in their lives.

People keep talking about how we're going to enter some kind of positive feeback loop where the chatbots design better chatbot chassis but so far we've just started generating articles about that prediction at a higher rate. This is typical of the gains from LLMs: not a qualitative improvement, but a quantitative improvement. I'd sooner believe we're about to build a Paperclip Maximizer than a Singularity Machine.

I think most people in tech, in particular SV live in such a huge bubble they are completely out of touch with the common person.

Then they stand there and say 'how come they can't see what I see? Hmm'.

Oh the answer is - inertia! Lets see how long they toe that line for.

> Sure, we went from 'writing software is a grueling effort for many people' to 'writing software is a solo effort with a few chatbot subscriptions'

But we haven't. The only kind of software you produce in the latter scenario is unmaintainable and full of flaws. It's not at all a replacement for a team of experts.

Statistically, all software is unmaintainable and full of flaws. If it weren't, there wouldn't be so many rich software engineers.

You’re largely talking to people paid somewhere along the lines by all the AI equity that’s being raised.

AI has made making a demo easy and sometimes it’s might present more than a quick trip to wikipedia would surface. Edit: also it makes making mistakes in Excel easy(analysis).

Best give up all hopes of a future now.

There is a vast divide between knowledge workers and creatives when it comes to LLMs

The general populace sees mostly the creative’s view. The results are poor and it comes at the expense of ripping off IP and providing bad copies of it.

The pervasive argument right now doesn’t view LLMs as a tool that have more or less eliminated entire segments of knowledge workers, who had already been offshored and are now basically redundant. Every mid level programmer who copied and pasted stack overflow snippets all the way down to support techs are done.

You do realise theres easy push back for this?

Go back to the movies of 30-40 years ago... that's what people envisioned about the future.

Yes, but I believe (perhaps incorrectly) that the is easy push back for most things. My question stands, is this rate of change something that the commenter could foresee. If not; it sands to reason that we should not assume the next leaps would be something that we will naturally foresee.

I disagree that things have improved with any particular rapidity. The LLMs of today are not really much more capable than GPT-3.5 was.

Excellent point, I should have expanded to the previous; 5 years or even better post and pre covid.

A non-trivial percentag of readers of HN have used a robotaxi or own a self driving vehicle. Most of us have asked an AI to write software for us, plan our trips, etc - and importantly perform tasks requiring visual recognition.

These signals seem to validate rather than disprove the direction.

A non-trivial percentage are employed by the makers of said products.

Cui bono?

Have you never been in a Tesla or Waymo or used AI?

Yes.

Then I'm confused about your point.

You can’t fathom why being paid by the companies producing this technology doesn’t skew opinions?

It's a thing kne can observe for itself (did the Tesla drive itself or not) without relying on opinions. That's why I used these examples.

I never disagreed that these companies have done something.

I said you’re never going to get an honest opinion from most of HN because they’re employed by the companies.

How do we know this?

Have you been keeping up with where China already is with robots?

https://x.com/GalbotRobotics/status/2091210523916607613

https://x.com/unitreerobotics/status/2089240553682809175

Or, we can go back to reality and observe that people are not obsolete and all human work was not eradicates

Then we can take down monopolies, tax large corporations, regulate them, empower anti white colar crime agencies again and regulate finance.

That will actually do. Bullshitters and sociopaths are too empowered. That is an issue, and acute one.

I think many humans would prefer going back to picking potatoes out of the ground for a bit of silver than to lose agency to the machine

Translation: I've never picked potatoes for a living

Or keep the current world, just without everything having to be done by an LLM Goldberg machine

Would you say that's a progressive point of view, or a conservative one?

I'm not sure what the ideological term is for someone who doesn't argue for a return to the past or advancement into the future, but for permanent retention of current conditions.

As I said, just remove the LLMs Goldberg machines. That’s it. The rest can continue to evolve and change

No, thanks, I like mine. It runs on a spare machine in my basement and seems benign enough.

This is so closely related to a comment I just made https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49470026 that I am going to just risk and repost it.

> This hit me hard, I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm not sure it's what makes "us human" its what makes humans (us) better than other species. It was intelligence, this was used to create distinction between us and other living beings, different races etc... Now its kind of gone; in some ways. Loss of meaning, purpose, place etc... The one thing we used as a ranking metric is now a commodity, so....? I don't even know how to finish that. So why care, why work...shit just why? Capitalism makes it even worse because we are judged based on what we output, does that even make sense anymore? I think the article is confusing because the "state: is confusing; to me at least.

.... 3 responses ....

> Thats totally fair, and TBH - I am also very concerned for my wellbeing as well; I and many others are not doing so well because, in my case I no longer see this "vapid" state of existence as ephermial. I have been reading more and more; I guess looking ot knowledge as some eort of ends vs a means to an end for once. Camus, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Dostoevsky's underground man etc...

Camus: The universe was always going to stay silent when you demand meaning from it; the answer isn't a better metric, it's to push the rock anyway ("imagine Sisyphus happy").

Dostoevsky [underground man]: Refusing to be a piano key in someone's optimized Crystal Palace

Stokely Carmichael: "Racism is not a question of attitude, it's a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism."

My conclusion: AI didn't take our meaning, It made me realize I have always been looking in the wrong place and thus reacting ignoratly when I felt "denied" this thing I feel entitled to.

Love.

Edit: Love; paradoxically, ive felt both entitled to and unworthy of so I'm not sure WTF to do with that.

To wit: Our love of self is so closely tied to our output and if we have no output do we have value?

Edit: tl;dr - I am not sure I understand the point of anything anymore and many others feel the same way. I do not think this is some "existential crisis" I believe it is a logical conclusion to draw given the evidence presented by the day and age we live in.

You raise a good point. If nothing is special, what's our motivation, our purpose? Maybe our purpose becomes being comfortable with no purpose, and I am surprisingly okay with that. I know that my existence is finite, and the time I spend and what I do with it give it importance. For example, spending my time teaching people how to make telescopes, keep a garden going and growing, and train dogs in field exercises would give it meaning. In the short term, figuring out how to use LLMs to take power away from oligarchs would be a good use of time.

Spending more hours working to make somebody else rich, yeah, no. Let's go through the archway in the forest.

This terrifies me but I suspect you are correct. My abject obsession with not being viewed as less fuels my drive to create, earn, produce. I may have to learn just to be. To sit with myself, and just be OK with being.

> Will we arrive at the Jetsons? Or Warhammer 40k?

Maybe Dune: thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

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