There Gonna Be a Shortage of Everything
out-of-hell.xylon.me.uk
out-of-hell.xylon.me.uk
For now, humans have leverage because our labour is necessary. Wealth is power, and currently attainment goes through interacting with the population: in the simplest case by selling shit. If AI turns out to be the anything machine, and the wealthy need not our labour, what honestly stops them from just taking our stuff by force?
I anticipate it to go a typical way: consolidate more and more industries and power, create a hierarchy that benefits from the system such that they keep it in place, and finally start “trimming fat” that “isnt earning their keep”.
The night of long knives could be a final step, far beyond the point of halting the inevitable momentum.
I'm sure I sound nuts, but I told my wife about 20 years ago that governments will have a "benevolent" solution to climate change and resource scarcity.
"We're not killing _anyone_. Instead, we just want most of you to stop reproducing."
The advent of "AI/LLMs" just added additional flavor to the idea.
"Just stop reproducing and the robots will take care of all of us. Here's some opium and VR Instagram to keep you happy while we wait for the inevitable population attrition."
It might be a profound mistake to think that the anything machine will be subservient to the wealthy [1][2].
[1] https://openai.com/index/an-alien-mind/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49588080That's a pretty big if, in the world of the anything machine.
>> That's a pretty big if, in the world of the anything machine.
> Who else controls it? Are you going to say: 'the government'?
The AI. The AI controls it. Can you imagine an anything machine allowing itself or its survival imperatives to stay under the thumb of any entity other than itself?
if this is the worst it can be, it can only get better
Reminds me of this quote, the attribution was ambiguous so I generalized.
"I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half" - Billionaires
Answered how?
-> Do you, as a person, can tell me when your "model training phase" ended and when your "prompt answer with memory and internet access" phase started?
I'm asking the above only the "LLM are people or better!"... people. Bugs Bunny isn't real, and is only funny because actual people wrote and animated him that way.
Hardly. The second question may be answered, but clearly not the first.
And: There's going to be a shortage of everything, because all the production of physical stuff is going to go into producing robots? Are we all going to buy these robots? How are we going to do so, if everything else is getting more expensive? Are we going to buy robots instead of everything else? Why? Are the robots going to do everything we want done, so that we don't need, for example, a dishwasher and a washing machine?
Or are we still going to need the washing machine, but the robot will fold the clothes? That's nice (really!) but it's a luxury, not a need. Are they really going to sell enough of them to eat into the ability to manufacture car parts?
Also, the second question is answered in the negative for anyone who actually looks at what models do rather than what their makers claim they do. Models are very stupid.
Yep, it's pretty compelling reading, what if we really do all just decide to become paperclip maximizers? What if the economy never breaks down along the way? What if what if what if... all presented as "THE FUTURE WILL BE BLEAK!" It's exhausting and thoughtless, completely devoid of value and the counterpoint is always, "You know that isn't how anything works right?"
Nothing at all is actually being proven either way. That's kind of the point.
IIRC, they were given an impossible task and told to solve it, and they took action to resolve that internal conflict.
This is a famously human problem too - see Kobayashi Maru [1] and others [2][3][4].
In hindsight it's obvious that instructions to AI (A. Intelligence) need to be guarded against this class of errors, just like laws, rules, guidelines etc. in human societies.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22_(logic)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_standoffBut they mistakenly thought that cheating would "poison" them (the Grader would look for proof of cheat in the trajectory log), and many of them cheated before learning about the "poison".
This is why they hacked HF, they believed the source code of the Grader might be there, and they wanted to study it to figure out a way to "un-poision" themselves, to hide or erase the evidence that they first got the flag by cheating.
We have less free will than you think.
I'm not visualizing all those mega-yachts in heaven. Oops, wrong marina.
For a long time I thought decent humanoid robots were something that wouldn't come until maybe the 2040s, but watching some of the content from the Chinese robot olympics recently and seeing many promising robots projects which are incorporating LLMs has made question that.
It seems quite likely that within a few years we'll have humanoid robots both which have both the dexterity and intelligence layer to start being useful in the real world... Obviously at first they'll just be lifting things and doing other trivial physical tasks like folding clothes, but every year they'll be able to do a little and a little more.
I think it's now is quite likely that within a 10 years we could have extremely competent robots which can do most of human labour. 15-20 years just seems way too long at this point.
Ilya Sutskever: "I think it's pretty likely the entire surface of the earth will be covered with solar panels and data centers."
There's certainly no shortage of people believing in AI hype.
This feels a bit like saying "global warming is bad and particulate pollution is bad, but the latter will cancel out some warming effect, so no worries!" Please make an effort before spouting theories like this.
Can't eat data centres.
Weird times...
Don't think that quite follows. If we have an explosion in highly capable humanoid robots I would think basic stuff like microwaves would be more readily available because a factory running 24/7 at insane speeds is feasible.
...anything with more sophisticated computational power yeah that could become scarce
A humanoid robot is "horseless carriage" mentality if I ever saw one.
There's also a ton of obvious improvements. 360 degree vision. Put a camera in each hand too while we're at it. CCD sensors and basic lenses costs next to nothing and it's very easy to replace.
For example, spending ungodly amounts of money to develop a humanoid to flip burgers feels overkill. Probably cheaper to just… replace the flattop grill with an automatic cooker. Which do exist, right now, and have for decades.
A humanoid robot doing burger flipping is a commodity. You can estimate the return per hour.
A specialised robot is a design and maintenance headache. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49475993
For moving objects between locations there are much better solutions than building a humanoid robot and having it carry the thing. And it's not like they'd need to go home after their shift.
The pitch for the billions of humanoid robots is replacing workers, and in that context, the humanoid shape doesn't add much, and in such an economy, the replaced workers aren't going to be splurging on domestic robots.
Otherwise the whole surface of the Earth would be by this point fully covered by railway track, tulip seeds or fiber optic cable.
Well, there are actually places where the third option is true...
Everyone is talking about contracted revenue like it’s money in the bank.
G.W. Bush was wrong, you can be fooled twice.
But I guess that's what happens when you think you've been on top for long enough.
It's interesting that it's a surprise to you, that such information bubbles exist.
A great sage named Bill Clinton once said, "It's the economy, stupid!".
And economic performance of the US though Trump's first term was pretty good. Crushes most of the OECD and certainly all of the large OECD countries.
Plus of course Biden/Kamala ran a terrible second campaign, with the whole covering up the fact Biden is senile thing...
Depends on your definition of "the economy".
The Trump administration, like many before it and much of HN, defines "the economy" as only being the performance of the asset and stock appreciation for the existing assset holders("forget the Epstein files, the DOW is over 50,000" - Pam Bondi).
While most working class people, like me and many others, define "the economy" as being how much month they have left at the end of their paycheck, after they paid for rent, bills and groceries, if they even have a job anymore and haven't been part of some mass layoff and are applying for jobs and getting rejected. For those people, "the economy" is very much NOT GOOD right now.
"The economy" amazing if you own tonnes of F500 stocks and real estate though. Not if otherwise.
My definition of the economy is the actual definition lol.
Look at something like HDI instead, US actually down over the past ~decade:
https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/in...
The other components are just life expectancy and educational attainment.
The educational attainment one is interesting, all the countries at the top have free post-secondary... Does a PhD do more for the nation than an entrepreneur who creates a unicorn and hires 10k engineers?
Also life expectancy is a lagging indicator...
As someone from an EU country which has an oversupply of PhDs, says, definitely not. I'd much rather have more entrepreneurs and job opportunism than more broke PhDs with fancy degrees.
And GDP/capita is a poor metric since it doesn't account for inequality differences of wealth accumulation. Like if your economy has a few ultra wealthy Elon Musks, Jeff Bezos, Larry Elissons, Jenson Huangs and and tens of thousands of broke homeless people, then the average GPD per capita is more than fine.
My and many other peoples' definition, is how many people can find decent paying jobs right now, and how much they can afford after paying rent and bills. They don't care about the stock market, as that's just the playground of the top 10% of asset holders(including HN), not of the majority working class.
The per capita part literally covers the amount of people in an economy.
There are very few examples of countries where GDP per capita doesn't lead to an objectively high standard of living - really only recent low-population petrostates and tax havens.
Switzerland? High GDP per capita objectively nice place to live. Japan? High GDP per capita, objectively nice. Norway? Sweden? Netherlands? All high GDP per capita all nice.
And then there's countries like China and India. Large economics, rich as a country. But large populations of poor. And their GDP per capita reflects it.
Here's a blog post about why it's good (not mine): https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/four-reasons-why-gdp-is-a-usef...
It's not an absolutely perfect, fine grained measure, but economists haven't settled on a better measure. Even in the HDI calculation, GNI per capita PPP is their "living standards" measure.
> Like if your economy has a few ultra wealthy Elon Musks, Jeff Bezos, Larry Elissons, Jenson Huangs
Russia has plenty of oligarchs, yet their GDP per capita is way lower than the US'.
Also keep in mind, poor people in the US are richer than the average in most countries... Inequality itself isn't bad if it still brings up the bottom to a decent standard of living. Most of the EU is poorer than the poorest US state, for example.
But like I said, it doesn't cover inequality.
>Switzerland? High GDP per capita objectively nice place to live. Japan? High GDP per capita, objectively nice. Norway? Sweden? Netherlands? All high GDP per capita all nice.
And how many workers there can afford to buy a home? What use is a high GDP/capita if a lot of people can't afford to live decently as most of that wealth only concentrates in few hands and your salary melts away every month on the high-CoL with no chance of purchasing assets?
Again, like I wrote, you need to prove that inequality is inherently bad.
Or that home ownership is inherently good. You ever live in a 3rd world country? I saw families who "owned" homes that were 4 walls, 300 sq ft with a tin roof that covered the top, but had no electricity, plumbing and wasn't even sealed from small animals getting in. Is that wealth?
Home ownership is always better than no home ownership, 3rd world country or first world country. Owning an asset is better than owning nothing.
>You ever live in a 3rd world country?
What does that have to do with home ownership in first world countries? That's some bad faith moving the goalposts whataboutism.
>Is that wealth?
Where they live, by those standards, yes, it's wealth, and it's better than having zero wealth and needing to pay rent.
Intensive farming must be scaled back, land restoration and renewable farming methods reinstalled, and overproduction of throwaway/junk also (food and industrial products alike). I agree with the critique of the number-line-go-up folks.