| ▲ | oceanplexian 15 hours ago |
| Yeah, who am I going to trust, a few thousand years of history, or yet another blogger claiming that no, this time is different, a populist uprising would definitely not fail the 800th time because computers or something and we will all be pets for the AI overlord? I don’t follow this train of logic. AI will go no differently than the Industrial Revolution. Some people will profit immensely, and society as a whole will benefit but it might be a bumpy road getting there. But if it did go wrong for some reason, Feudalism is more plausible than the other scenarios presented. |
|
| ▲ | zetalyrae 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Like the fact that supposedly the wealthy won’t survive the AI-pocolypse because the people will outnumber them and rise up or something. This is literally the opposite of what the article says. |
|
| ▲ | GeoAtreides 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > AI will go no differently than the Industrial Revolution. the children will rejoice, they were yearning for the mines after all. and being maimed by mechanical looms and being burned alive in sweatshops[1] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi... |
| |
|
| ▲ | sixtyj 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This. Once people become desperate enough, it will all fall apart. Money is a social construct, universally recognized, and the longer it exists, the more likely it is to continue existing. So far, many people haven’t even tried AI in any form other than chatbots. Agent-based applications are in the single digits compared to chatbot usage. Not much will change in this regard, because most people lack algorithmic or logical thinking (Hacker News is an echo chamber), so after the coming turbulent years, there will be a natural stabilization in AI usage. By the way, can you imagine what Earth would look like if AI physically wiped us out—8.3 billion people over the course of a few months or years? How much biological material would that be? |
| |
| ▲ | piva00 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > How much biological material would that be? Much less than bacteria and other micro-organisms that are dying all the time :) humans are ~0.01% of Earth's biomass, bacteria are about 15% and they have quite short lifespans in comparison. | |
| ▲ | conorcleary 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | HN is an encho chamber shaped like a cheese grater |
|
|
| ▲ | Nevermark 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > AI will go no differently than the Industrial Revolution. So it is different this time is it? "We" are different? Unlike the 99.9% of species that went extinct, and continue to go extinct, we can't be supplanted? Obsoleted? Out competed? [0] A few thousand years at the top of the food chain, and suddenly that few thousand years is "what can never change". Technological change already drives machine cognitive progress forward faster than any human who has ever lived. That factor alone makes competence/capability obsolescence unavoidable, outside of technological collapse. This is an unprecedented rate of real-time change, outside of instant disasters like volcanic eruptions or comet impacts, in direct competition with human capabilities. SciFi has been broadcasting the potential and risk of AI for a couple centuries. This is a spectacular moment in the universe's history, assuming we don't blow ourselves up. Not just another day for humankind. There must be a word for the inability to see the import of change. It seems to be a common disability. This seems to be a real effect: The faster things go, the less sensitive we are to the rate of change. Precisely because we can't imagine what the world will be like in a decade, our horizon shrinks, and we treat short intervals as if they were long intervals. Anything that isn't instant feels like it is barely moving. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction |
| |
| ▲ | keiferski 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sci-fi is science fiction. Fiction. LLMs are a useful technology. They have no relation to AI terminator bots other than being called the same name out of marketing and laziness. | | |
| ▲ | Nevermark 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Sci-fi is science fiction. Fiction. Yes, that is what "fi" means. Fiction often introduces and explores ideas about the future. Ideas. > LLMs are a useful technology. They have no relation to AI terminator bots Technology that can communicate with human language. Also relevant, other SOTA models operating in other modalities. The important thing if you reference SciFi, are the major ideas that stand on their own merits. Whereas, specific characters, such as terminators, are usually not predictive. You are actually underlining my point. The disconnect a lot of people are struggling with is real. | | |
| ▲ | keiferski 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | People aren't struggling with a disconnect, they just aren't buying into the hand-waving hype. Not everyone is convinced that LLMs are somehow going to lead to the extinction of humanity. So far, you've done very little argumentation here, so I remain pretty unconvinced. The actual dangers from LLMs are many, but deal more with humanity's using them and neglecting to think for themselves, relying on them to make decisions, and so on – not some fantastical nonsense from reading too many sci-fi books. | | |
| ▲ | Nevermark 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | You keep saying LLMs. But models across many modalities are rapidly improving, evolving and merging. Not sure what you mean by "hand waving" or "fantastical nonsense". Maybe just address points I actually make. 1. Machines with greater cognitive ability than us, potentially much greater, would be an economic challenge for human beings. With no clear answer as to how humans could manage that challenge. 2. Machines are getting more capable, year-to-year, faster than any human can or ever will improve. With no signs of slowing, or any areas where they are failing to improve. 3. None of this is new. Computing capabilities have compounded steadily since the first transistors less than a century ago. Human's biologically driven cognition, in contrast, has not improved. 4. Machine capabilities are now regularly passing us in new areas, and rapidly approaching the general threshold noted above. Explain your perspective, I am genuinely interested. For instance, what cognitive capability do you have, that you believe machines won't exceed within 5 years. | | |
| ▲ | keiferski 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | 1. Possibly, but not necessarily. Many jobs are not dependent on intelligence, and more intelligence isn't going to make much of a difference. Huge portions of the economy have absolutely nothing to do with intelligence and AI bots won't make a difference. For rote, white-collar style work, yes, it's already making a huge impact. But that is certainly not extendable to all human work, even all white collar work. 2-4. True, but this doesn't mean that things will exponentially increase indefinitely. I use LLMs constantly and find the idea absurd that they're approaching human-level intelligence. They make basic, common mistakes that any average person would never make. There may be simply structural reasons why the progress you (and sci-fi novels) imagine is not possible. My critique is more like: 1. You cannot just assume exponential growth will continue forever. 2. Current LLMs are powerful but in no way does this indicate that it's just a matter of time until we have AGI - itself a pretty vague marketing term. 3. The main reason, which is: human beings are reactive. You can already see in the market that openly using AI is becoming a market disadvantage in many sectors. No one wants to read a blog written by ChatGPT, and slop-coded SaaS apps aren't actually that competitive with serious companies run by professionals. As AI stuff supposedly "replaces" human work, that human work will adjust and become more creative. This process has already kind of happened with writing – initially it was assumed that copywriters would all lose their jobs. But it turns out that AI-speak is predictable and easily discovered, and the choice of what to write in the first place is actually far more important. Companies are still hiring writers, with the added caveat that knowing when and how to use AI is a new skill they have to learn. Adding to this is the fact that many human solutions to things are the result of being alive, being embedded in reality. Unlikely for this (a robot being so lifelike and embodied as to replicate human experience, a la Blade Runner) to happen in the next century or two. If your response to all of this is, "well sci-fi novels predict that humanoid robots will be better at humans than everything" then that isn't a serious opinion, I'm sorry. I find it far more likely that a "cyborg" role outcompetes any AI-only one, now and in the future. | | |
| ▲ | username135 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I tend to agree with most of your points. LLMs/GPTs are quite awesome at what they can do but they still need a guided hand. This will likely be ironed out some iteration down the road. Blue collar work, I would argue, will be more impacted proportionally greater. Once robots (humanoid and otherwise) replace factory, manufacturing, and farming work at scale (something we are just embarking on), where do the workers go? Some will likely be needed as subject matter experts in their fields to tend to the machine workers (maybe), but the rest will need to enter the service economy, retrain, or hope there is a welfare scheme in place to support them. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | Gud 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Strawman and ad hominem(“another blogger”). Sometimes, genius comes from the least expected places. I don’t believe the blog poster promotes a “popular uprising”, I only skimmed the article. The blog poster anyway don’t understand that the “overclass” in their understanding is wrong. The “c-level” are obviously much richer than the “underclass”(=the labour commodity), but they are not necessarily capital owners. |
| |
| ▲ | varjag 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you reduce a class to <10k people in the world the word loses its meaning. |
|
|
| ▲ | N_Lens 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Do you usually comment rants unrelated to the post in question? |
| |
