By completely eliminating the need for a human workforce, therefore rendering a majority of humanity obsolete, therefore lots of social inequality, therefore lots of starvation, poverty and death.

When billionaires say "think about the trillions of people that will benefit from AI" and some notion of living in a post scarcity world, they are talking about _their_ descendants, not yours.

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SR2Z 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

If we're all broke/starving/being exterminated, who will the rich sell to?

Nobody wants to be king of the ashes. The future is going to be the same as now, just with a little less menial work.

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dag100 3 days ago | parent [-]

> If we're all broke/starving/being exterminated, who will the rich sell to?

Themselves. The economy is a big cycle where money changes hands to drive production i.e. things getting made. AI will simultaneously greatly increase production (especially once humanoid robots are as dexterous as humans) and make the humans whose jobs it will do economically irrelevant.

So the rich will buy and sell very nice things to each other while the rest of us get left out in the cold because we simply cannot compete with the robots. And because they will capture and control all resources (either by law or by force) we won't be able to create a functioning parallel economy either.

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SR2Z 3 days ago | parent [-]

> So the rich will buy and sell very nice things to each other while the rest of us get left out in the cold because we simply cannot compete with the robots. And because they will capture and control all resources (either by law or by force) we won't be able to create a functioning parallel economy either.

Here's another framing for you: at this point _there are no longer rich and poor people_. There are fewer people, but we knew that was going to happen as a consequence of declining birthrates. The elderly are taken care of despite an otherwise unsustainable dependency ratio, because robots can manage the actual business of survival. In that world everyone is a member of the nobility by the virtue of being _human_. There are a few holdouts - mostly religious nuts and other cults - but by and large everyone who is willing to accept the machine's gifts has their every material need catered to.

There is no world where legions of filthy rich AI barons lord it over the technologically illiterate peasants, though. How could there be, when literally anyone can plop down $20 and get access to a frontier model? When open weight models trail _at most_ a year behind the closed ones and compute continues to proliferate?

One of the few things we have figured out about AI is that productivity gains are mostly captured by the people using the tools, not the person paying for the model. In other words, using an LLM is a skill and there is still no substitute for the human driving it.

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dag100 3 days ago | parent [-]

> How could there be, when literally anyone can plop down $20 and get access to a frontier model?

For now. And that too at a massively discounted rate to drive adoption.

> When open weight models trail _at most_ a year behind the closed ones and compute continues to proliferate?

Open-weight models require computing power to run. Consumer hardware prices are rising because of AI build-out, so much so that companies that used to serve ordinary consumer markets are switching to serve only datacenters. Megacompute does indeed continue to proliferate.

> One of the few things we have figured out about AI is that productivity gains are mostly captured by the people using the tools, not the person paying for the model. In other words, using an LLM is a skill and there is still no substitute for the human driving it.

Will this be the case in 20 years? Agentic workflows have come as far as they have in about two years of existence. Do you really need the problem between chair and keyboard will be needed after another 10? And do you really think that in 20 years time that we will all be paid to prompt increasingly advanced and independent LLMs?

> everyone who is willing to accept the machine's gifts has their every material need catered to

The way automation is going, knowledge work will be automated first before any physical production processes are. A lot of people will lose their livelihoods before goods in particular become "the machine's gifts". What do you think happens then? Will the capital owners who have captured this reduction in costs reduce prices proportionally? Or will they keep the gains for themselves? Do you think governments around the world will tax the upper class to the point of being able to give everyone their current livelihoods through government benefits?

You are pretty much just describing some sort of fantasy automated communism. Not to mention, in your world, gatekeeping the machines would instantly become the most profitable venture possible.

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SR2Z 2 days ago | parent [-]

> Not to mention, in your world, gatekeeping the machines would instantly become the most profitable venture possible.

Yes, it would! That's why frontier labs don't open-source their models :)

The point is that the technology is already too democratized for anyone to hold onto it. Google had chatbot LLMs in 2019 and tried to keep them under wraps, how many years did that buy them?

> Do you really need the problem between chair and keyboard will be needed after another 10? And do you really think that in 20 years time that we will all be paid to prompt increasingly advanced and independent LLMs?

I think that things are going to get so much cheaper that we'll still be paid more than enough.

> The way automation is going, knowledge work will be automated first before any physical production processes are.

So far, LLMs are great and all, but they only really "fill in the blanks." That's a fundamental limitation of the entire concept of modelling in general; you cannot generalize to out-of-distribution inputs. The bottleneck is going to end up being human beings no matter which way you slice it. Because the bottleneck will be people, more and more of them will be hired, even though each individual is incredibly productive. This is also called Jevon's paradox, when making a resource less expensive leads to overall market growing.

> You are pretty much just describing some sort of fantasy automated communism.

If you went back a thousand years ago and told someone carrying a bucket full of water that one day pipes would run across the civilized world and water would literally be free basically everywhere, they might react the same way. If VLA-driven robots start reducing manufacturing prices, is it so unreasonable to slowly expect more and more things to go that direction?

	▲	dag100 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> The point is that the technology is already too democratized for anyone to hold onto it. Google had chatbot LLMs in 2019 and tried to keep them under wraps, how many years did that buy them? They were hardly the only ones in the space. OpenAI has been around since 2015. GPT-3 was released in 2020 and ChatGPT in 2022. Not to mention, I wouldn't call something produced by a handful of megacorporations worldwide particularly democratized. In fact, Google's transparency is what allowed it to be democratized, because it published its findings about transformers publicly. > So far, LLMs are great and all, but they only really "fill in the blanks." That's a fundamental limitation of the entire concept of modelling in general; you cannot generalize to out-of-distribution inputs. The bottleneck is going to end up being human beings no matter which way you slice it. This is a laughably naïve take especially when LLMs have a) been trained on quite literally all the data the world can provide and b) are being trained more and more using reinforcement learning techniques - which don't rely on data at all and instead on producing emergent behaviour from a set of ground rules. With every new release their agentic capabilities improve and they become more independent, requiring only the impetus to get going. > This is also called the Jevons paradox, when making a resource less expensive leads to overall market growing. Oh yes, there will definitely be more software. That is guaranteed. What is not guaranteed is how many humans will be involved in making it. Just as more coal is being mined than ever but fewer people are involved in it. Efficiencies in coal mining aren't what made the average coal miner's working conditions or income better, regulations are. > If you went back a thousand years ago and told someone carrying a bucket full of water that one day pipes would run across the civilized world and water would literally be free basically everywhere If you told a Roman this, they would not be as surprised as you would think as aqueducts already existed back then. They would be more surprised that the common man had the ability to vote in most countries. I doubt it will stay that way with improvements in AI, at least not without a great reduction in population.

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skybrian 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is dystopian speculation. You don't have to believe every science fiction scenario someone famous talks about.

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dag100 5 days ago | parent [-]

It's hardly speculative when it is effectively what happened just after the Industrial Revolution, but with more power ceded to capital. In many ways, it's already happening.

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skybrian 4 days ago | parent [-]

No, that was not "effectively what happened" in the Industrial Revolution. That was an enormous change, but it didn't "completely eliminate the need for a human workforce." That's just hype.

	▲	dag100 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Fine, it is not effectively what happened then. It is worse. At least workers are required to run factories (even though working conditions were ridiculously horrible back then). With AI, in maybe 20 years, 95% of all white-collar workers will be economically irrelevant. You won't need accountants, or programmers, or designers. And we can't all become lawyers and surgeons, or tradesmen. The Industrial Revolution indeed did not completely eliminate the need for a human workforce. The AI Revolution will.