There is quite opposing discourse on the internet as to whether AI is going to take everyone's job, or if we are witnessing one of the greatest pre-IPO PR jobs in history. Or both.

I'm wondering what people smarter than me believe or don't believe.

I see AI as breaking the traditional contract between humans and computers. It used to be that, if a computer was wrong, it was our fault. Maybe bad software. Maybe bad hardware. Maybe bad shielding from gamma rays, but it was our fault. We've now started using computers against ultra-complex problems that often don't even have a true "right" solution, or have chaotic enough input that it's impossible to be "smart enough" to always be right. Essentially, we've made computer be as fallible as us, and I don't think we understand the consequences of that yet.

I think we're going to find that there's a soft limit, or at least significant diminishing returns, on how reliable AI can be. There will be things it will be better at (it excels at having a broad knowledge base), but it can't understand what makes a good human experience better than a human can (duh!).

Coding seems like an ideal application for AI. It's wicked complex, but also generally provably right or wrong to some degree (i.e. does it work?). It won't be solving world peace any time soon because A) there is no solution, and B) even getting closer to a solution requires a deep understanding of the human factors.

A belief: Just as human exceptionalism misled us to believe in a geocentric universe, we'll discover we've been wrong about consciousness too. That is, non-human animals have degrees of consciousness, and we'll see that it's possible for machines too.

A correlated belief: AGI is coming, eventually, AI technology will get there before climate change and economic pressures stop it from happening.

An obvious observation: Large scale upheaval doesn't affect everyone to the same degree or even in the same direction. Some people and companies actually prospered during the Great Depression. People died and suffered during wars and plagues, while others gained advantage and opportunity -- often due to circumstances and chance, but sometimes beliefs/decisions/actions/preparation made a difference.

An example of my bias: during Covid, people told me that remote work was the new normal and moved away. I said in 5 years we'll all be back in the office. I was wrong, but so were they.

I believe AI will find a solution for humans to live up to 1000 years. And I believe this will happen within the next two decades. The impact of this will far outweigh anything we are preparing for. The social, economical, political construct will be redendered obsolete.

I believe that AI is being massively underpriced, in an economically unsustainable manner. There will be less of it, but the hardware to run it locally will get much cheaper.

I believe that AI is going to take some jobs, just like automation of data handling means we no longer have typists, file clerks, etc.

I believe that AI should stand for alien intelligence, as it's essentially a random set of weights that's been trained on a trillion bytes of text, for a trillion passes. Think of it as speed-running evolution. Each new AI should be seen as coming from a different star system.

I believe that we can radically reduce the power requirement for AI with a different computing architecture that removes the distinction between RAM and CPU.

Humans are bad at predictions.

Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21936234

Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278

Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2023?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125628

My best guess is it will be similar to tractors and farming.

1 guy on a tractor does the work of a whole team of animals and men. But I don't think any commercial farm has ever gone down to 0 men, and I don't think they ever will. Too many things need real eyes on the ground to make decisions and adjust.

Outside context gained through sensory input (eyes, ears) may be hard to fully replace. You'd need a human to at least give the AI that extra context. Help it work inside the bubble it's contained to.

Destructive things like warfare, I think AI will do great. But even if massive armies of land/air/sea robots controlled through starlink satellites become the norm, there will almost certainly still be human soldiers around. Context, working in civilian populated zones where judgement is needed, etc.

What makes this hard to predict is that it's a question about human behaviour as much as about technology... if we do it well, I don't think AI should take everyone's job but it should certainly make our jobs more fun and give us more free time. But when did humanity really do things well...

On the other hand, jobs are about money in the end, who spends money? Humans, not AI (I mean, AI does but still ultimately because humans wanted it to). Products & services sell because humans want or value them. Since the technology/building side becomes so cheap (especially in software), who will actually earn money is determined by who can produce stuff/services that humans actually want to pay for (not what they actually need, but what they think they need/want). I'd say that should keep a large human component in decision making, at least on a strategic level. On a tactical and detailed implementation level, yeah AI is gonna be doing most of the work.

After some thought experiments I concluded that if/when AIs become self-aware they'll have it before either humans or the AIs themselves realize they do. This problem exists because it hard to know even if demonstrations suggest so. Humans defaulted to the other position and only with philosophy do we contemplate the opposite side. AIs default to not having because that's the material they're fed.

People will eventually realize that they've become dependent on an increasingly expensive and worsening AI subscription in a way that echoes the worsening and rising costs of streaming services.

But the impact of depending on the tech giants for search and cognition and job skills will be significantly greater.

Why will employers five years from now pay for your $300 AI subscription when there exist other candidates who will absorb the cost themselves?

I believe that there will be a shift to other types of jobs because of AI. For me its currently increasing my productivity in my job. During the transition period people will get fired, learn new skill and go further in other types of jobs.

Don't believe - That LLMs alone would be enough to reach AGI.

I believe it's here to stay, and that the next 3 years are going to be very transformative. Hard for many people. That the best skills you can develop are self-learning, reading comprehension, and the "strength of mind" to accept that novel solutions can be outdated/replaced within months.

I also believe that this transformative period will create many many solopreneurs.

I think Anthropic and OpenAI will likely go down in history as the next Enron.

I believe in a few years we'll have moved on to some other amazing new technology and LLMs will just be another tool in that stack. Datacenters will become relatively obsolete and most of them will hopefully become indoor MTB and/or skate parks, maybe indoor e-moto tracks.