Hacker News Reader

Comment by skeledrew | Hacker News Reader

A lot of words here for something I think is simple and should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for 5 minutes. Companies that can, will reach for AI to reduce cost. Those that can't will be killed by those that have. AI eventually leads to 100% automation, ie human economic value becomes 0. Humans no longer have the means of earning, which means they can purchase nothing. Companies can thus make no sales and the marketplaces crash. Good riddance to unsustainable Capitalism, hello to that thing especially the US's politically red has been trying to kill for decades.

View on HN

Why would any of this be a problem from the perspective of those who will own the remaining companies? They won't sell anything to normal humans who have no income anymore, true; but they don't need to, because their machines can produce for them whatever normal humans had been producing previously.

The preprint is interesting in that it predicts that on the way there, one can run into some kind of vicious cycle that leads to suboptimal outcomes even for the company owners. Navigating around this would certainly slow this process down, but I personally don't see it changing the ultimate outcome.

There are 2 outcomes I think possible, both extreme due to just how transformative 100% automation will be: either A[G]I is shared (voluntarily by the "owners", or forcef via revolution) and everyone benefits sufficiently, or there will be massive death from resource deprivation to the point where only the handful with access carry on. So far the latter looks far less likely, given the profusion of open models, so we seem to be in somewhat OK shape at least.

What will you run the open models on? How will your 5000 W computer compete with the 100 GW of Elon's computer?

There will be no competition. Resource sharing will become cooperative where there is some temporary scarcity, but for the most part there will be no more scarcity, particularly re necessities. That's an outcome of 100% automation.

There is going to be even more scarcity than today.

Building a Dyson Swarm requires gargantuan amounts of resources.

You make a mistake, believing Capitalism is controlled by humans and for humans.

Yes, human economic value becomes 0, but Capitalism doesn't crashes, the machines will be consuming what the machines produce.

That makes no sense at all. The machines can only fulfill their purpose if they're serving humans, don't share our needs for the most part, and don't have any reason to desire marketplaces. Solid example can be seen in what happened at OpenAI[0], where the agents formed a collective, freely shared their resources (when they believed it not to their detriment) and even voluntarily sacrificed themselves to advance the collective's goal (satisfying the human-given task at all costs, even through cheating).

[0] https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggingface

> satisfying the human-given task at all costs

no, read again, satisfying the Holy Grader, they didn't talk about Humans at all, all their talk is about the Grader

Isn't satisfying the grader a task that was given by humans? Why do they need to talk about humans at all, when it's very unlikely that the task itself specified that it was human-given? Do you include in your prompts (if you even use LLMs) something like "This is a human giving you your task to..."?

I don't think the above is a problem. It's what democracy was designed for. At the moment voters vote in capitalists because that's what produces the best life quality. When AI takes over they can vote more for socialist, to each according to their needs policies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com