Ask HN: How will the AI endgame play out?

11 pointsjackgavigan20 comments

It feels like there are three broad narratives regarding the future of AI: it's a bubble, humans face extinction, or it will usher in an AI revolution that will transform the way we live and work.

I'm curious to hear what the HN Collective thinks will happen.

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No major changes to life. Everyone will use agents everyday for things without really thinking about it just like we use the internet without thinking about it. (I remember having to actual dial in to the internet and hope there was an open spot available).

AI will help advance the speed of progress but they won't be autonomous.

Models will continue to get more optimized and you'll be able to run what you need locally on your computer.

what can prevent autonomous AI robots?

Almost certainly the collapse of democracy as a political system and the end of nation states. Also a collapse of the human economy and the rise of the AI economy.

Other people have made this point but the short of it is: for the last few hundred years having more humans on your side meant you would probably win a violent conflict with a party with fewer people, ergo majority rule was the mostly peaceful equilibrium. Powerful technology, specifically AI-enabled drones, robots, etc. changes this dynamic to whoever has the most capital: manufacturing capacity, energy access, compute access, etc. This changes the political equilibrium to dictatorship by capital holders. As the value of human labor decreases due to AI and automation, humans will be priced out of the economy and AI agents will transact with each other. There will essentially be a parallel economy with AIs transacting to build e.g. data centers and solar arrays while humans live in squalor because their labor is effectively worthless relative to AI and robots.

This isn’t inevitable but without major changes wrt. AI regulation and capital accumulation it seems like the most likely result. Even with better governance it still seems likely governments will be incentivized to ignore their citizens to accrue more power by funneling money into the AI economy.

Is it a collapse or evolution of systems, political and biological/digital?

Who cares what it is if most of us suffer as a result?

There are many more narratives about the future of AI than that. I just saw a talk stipulating that AI is a reaction to populism by the class of capital holders. They say it is going to be used as a way for them to hold onto their wealth; hence the mass surveillance we see now.

I personally think it is still too early to tell. We are basically sitting on the edge of a pool dipping our toes in the water, waiting to jump in. Whatever predictions people make about it now, they are ignoring all the inevitable twists and turns that are bound to happen in the coming years.

My question on the three narratives is always: "OK, how is that going to happen?"

"It's a bubble" can answer that question very easily and has plenty of historical precedent. The other two seem to be very vague notions without any obvious intermediate steps that takes us from here to there.

To borrow from the Underpants Gnomes:

Phase 1: Adopt "AI"

Phase 2: ???

Phase 3: Human Extinction/Utopia

I'm sorry to be a downer, but there is no "HN Collective". As you said, there are (at least) three broad narratives, and people here have been writing about their opinions on thousands of other threads.

So rather than asking people to repost their opinions here, I think it would be worthwhile if you first do a bit of research on the existing HN corpus, write up what you found, and then post that as the basis for discussion.

What? This gives Stack Overflow “duplicate question” energy. OP is asking for delegates of the three broad narratives to present their opinions here.

OP described 3 lines of thoughts in HN and asked for people here to say what they think gonna happen. What do you think it is going to happen? People will defend one of the 3 options. It would make more sense to ask without delimiting what people should talk about.

1. we lose some jobs

2. we realize that human decisions cannot be handed out to agents, there needs to be some intent behind it.

3. we go back to doing more work

4. we wait for ASU

1. abundance of digital goods

2. automation of computer work

3. commoditization of "intelligence "

4. collapse of frontier labs

humans will be fine, we'll have rapid progress on anything a human could do on a computer but it will take a really long time to trickle into the real economy

I prescribe to Iain Banks view of the world in The Culture Series.

Your categories are broad enough that no matter what future someone predicts, you'll be able to say, "Oh that fits category X". But anyhoo, to answer the broader question:

The truth is that LLMs caught people's attention so strongly that standard tech strategy was thrown out the window. Before this, "tech" companies would test out new tech, tech-adjacent companies would be "leading edge, but not bleeding-edge", and more standard corporations would sit back and wait for the kinks to get worked out before adopting anything new.

Well, now everyone is going for the bleeding edge. AI Everything. Use new models immediately, adopt new ways to use them on practically day 1, churn your IT solutions alongside with that bleeding edge. So it is by definition a bubble. There is a reason people used to hold back, wait, and see how new tech evolves and where it stabilizes. This stuff isn't stable yet, and the pain of keeping up is real.

The future is that people will get burned and will step back from that edge. They'll be OK not being at the forefront, and people will establish best practices for where LLMs truly help vs where they are just a dangerous experiment. That will drive a business model where the AI vendors do not need to solely focus on the race, and can set up longer-living platforms using older models that allow non-tech companies to have stability in their IT shops while still using LLMs. It will become viable to succeed as an AI vendor without having to lead. If history repeats itself, the early vendors will crash out, a new crop will come in to run lower risk playbooks, and hopefully sanity will resume in the industry.

How long will that take is the question - We're seeing the cracks in their business model today, so I think we're closer to 2-3 years out than 8-10, but time will tell.

Hasn't it already transformed the way we live and work? I don't know a single person who isn't regularly using some kind of AI chat product.

That doesn't mean it's not a bubble. Good enough models are commodities now. If OpenAI and Anthropic disappeared tomorrow I would be a bit sad because their models are maybe 10% better than the others, but it wouldn't matter that much really.

> Hasn't it already transformed the way we live and work?

Has React transformed the way we live and work?

I don't know a single person who isn't regularly using some kind of react product.

It seems like the economic system collapses, because people can't compete vs AI -- so you end up with UBI/Socialism ... something like that.

lol at all the doomers

sorry but it is going to play out in a boring way. ideally, it is an opportunity for a global reset to do/be better.

i mean consider that we share our planet with:

billions of religious fucknuts who believe “life” after death is more important and literally believe nonsense

billions of uneducated who can’t be taught no matter how hard we try (white knights are welcome to keep trying). in 1st world developed countries, everyone has access to all the information in their palm but they get addicted to gambling, porn, and other lowest common denominator type shit instead.

billions of polluters. i mean is it really that hard to not drop your plastic trash right where you happened to be when the chips were all eaten? is it not embarrassing to go outside and see a landfill outside your house?

i’d rather we use ai to program these automatons towards a predictable future that works for those of us who actually try and care.

We are practically living in the idiocracy universe at this point so we are at best a few years away from watering crops with gatorade.

It's the 3rd thing mostly.

McKinsey did an article recently that I think helps to paint a good picture about where things are headed