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justonepost2 6 hours ago

How do people still conflate “sectoral changes in the labor market” with “humans become zoo animals”? The scale just seems fundamentally different.

BeetleB 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> The scale just seems fundamentally different.

Not at all. I doubt LLMs will result in a 90x drop in the overall labor workforce. The agricultural shift was likely greater than the shift due to LLMs will be.

HEmanZ 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This requires an assumption that humans have some capacity that LLMs/machines can not fundamentally match (or match cheaply, or we’ll make matching it illegal).

That’s fine, but one of those assumptions has to be the case for your statement to be true. If they meet or exceed all productive human capacities at lower cost, are not stopped by regulations or some kind of near insurmountable “exponential cost of intelligence”, then this is completely utterly different than the agriculture shift.

My generals observation about people like you is that you assume “the future form of ai is just a chat bot, like today” and that is just not the case, and it’s not what anyone is worried about. Many of us are “playing” with real agents, grafting together agentic memory systems, kicking around early experimental harnesses, seeing what kind of self learning loops we can hack, perfecting evals, wiring in eyes and ears and a heart-beat to these things. And those of us who are often take a look at the Frankenstein result and go “ya, this could completely replace us with enough iterations”.

We should at least be scared enough to seriously consider the possibility that in the future there is no productive use for human labor, only capital.

BeetleB 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> We should at least be scared enough to seriously consider the possibility that in the future there is no productive use for human labor, only capital.

Oh, as a SW engineer, I assure you I am scared. My profession will be one of the most impacted ones.

My point is that a lot more than 10% of the labor that is done out there involves things that require physical work, and that is a tougher problem to solve than pure reasoning. I'm not saying the changes won't be drastic - just not a 90x drop.

HEmanZ 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Robots?

I agree in some sense, I think the runway on human physical labor is measured in decades. But it’s likely not infinite, and likely not 100 years. I expect my children will at least see “the end” in their lifetimes.

Human physical labor also has a ticking clock, albeit longer than software engineering.

Of course again, this is if we don’t put up or find unknown-unknown walls on machine intelligence. I think there is a pretty high chance we just make sufficient machine intelligence illegal for a very long time, at least until labs can fine-tune models enough to be smart enough to replace humans but dumb/lobotomized enough to not make a bio-weapon.

justonepost2 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So you don’t believe in AGI then?