Hacker News Reader

Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

Rationalism has spawned many offshoot cults which are genuine and in some cases dangerous cults, but rationalism and Effective Altruism are not themselves cults.

Most people among both ideologies have long believed in the arrival of a machine demigod of sorts, but I kind of am skeptical of the notion that there are any tech people who have not always held similar beliefs in the long run. Like, all the people reading this: you think in a thousand years from now humans are going to be doing most labor? Obviously far, far, far smarter machines will have unimaginably changed things by then, and/or we'll all be gone.

The difference is most people in tech have historically thought it's maybe a century or three away, while the rationalists think it's a decade or two away (and also thought it would be 2020s - 2040s even decades prior to now).

View on HN

> I kind of am skeptical of the notion that there are any tech people who have not always held similar beliefs

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you your totally-not-in-an-insular cult members.

A thousand years is a long time, and the world will be so different that it's hard to make any concrete predictions. But yes, if I had to wager, I'd bet that what humans conceive of as "labor" in 3026 will still be whatever difficult or annoying bits are done by humans.

In 1026 nearly all labor was agricultural labor. If you told a Roman peasant that magical self-driving contraptions could sow and reap the fields, he might wonder what could possibly be left for humans to do in such a world. And yet, here we are, and I still have to update JIRA tickets.

For my myself, I expect AI to prove a more transformative technology than Docker but less transformative than the sewing machine.

You could be right, but short of an eternal Butlerian jihad or other extremely strict global government action that effectively bans most forms of AI forever, I think the probabilities of that are exceedingly low.

What you think won't happen in 1000 years is what I think is almost certainly happening within 40 years. I'd bet everything I own it'll be way, way, way more impactful than the sewing machine within 40 years. I think some bits of physical labor may still exist in 40 years, but almost none, and only when a human really wants to talk to or deal with a human, such as in some medical and therapeutic professions, some art fields, etc. (Again, assuming no universal outlawing of AI.)

Now you're already hedging and narrowing your claims: "almost" none, "some" physical" labor. For someone who claims to be willing to stake his whole bank account, you're not that confident.

Why do you think restaurants with waiters keep opening when the automat has existed since 1895? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quisisana

You are also probably unfamiliar with the history of the sewing machine and its impact on society. As AI has already poisoned search engines, here's an AI slop overview that hits some of the main points: https://sciencepedia.blog/sewing-machine-societal-importance

When money's on the line, everyone hedges.

Yes, I think even in some crazy distant future utopia, humans will still often want to interact with humans for things, and even to pay them for some services. Tasks that include speaking one-on-one and producing works of art will always retain some value to people, even when AIs can one day trivially produce things which most humans find aesthetically superior to anything a human could ever produce alone. People will seek other things out of art beyond aesthetics, like expressions of human emotion.

Humans will enjoy and seek out human contact. This is not surprising. Just, for economy-impacting labor, I think it's almost all going to be machines, with very few humans playing any role. Even an oversight or accountability role. I think there's a 95% chance of it by 2100 and an 85% chance of it by 2066, conditional on no laws that forbid replacing jobs with AI.

I could point out that that as far as economy-impacting labor goes, it's almost all machines already today. At least in the developed world, few people do any kind of work that isn't at least partially mechanized. You don't see it because lawnmowers and spreadsheets are "normal" machines in your mind.

You're making the "this time it's different" case that AI will be categorically different from every other form of labor-saving automation that's come before it. I work with these models every day and I'm not buying it.

The hypothesis is about theoretical future models, not existing public ones. I'm making a prediction based on a pace of improvement that I believe will probably continue unabated and which likely is not going to hit significant bottlenecks for very long.

Well, good luck with that. Consider reading When Prophecy Fails to steel yourself for the possibility that 2036 ends up largely the same as 2026, only with more spam and surveillance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com