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Interview with gwern

(www.dwarkeshpatel.com)
308 points synthmeat | 3 comments | 14 Nov 24 08:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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camillomiller ◴[14 Nov 24 10:17 UTC] No.42134738[source]▶
I really don’t understand why we give credit to this pile of wishful thinking about the AI corporation with just one visionary at the top.

First: actual visionary CEOs are a niche of a niche. Second: that is not how most companies work. The existence of the workforce is as important as what the company produces Third: who will buy or rent those services or products in a society where the most common economy driver (salaried work) is suddenly wiped out?

I am really bothered by these systematic thinkers whose main assumption is that the system can just be changed and morphed willy nilly as if you could completely disregard all of the societal implications.

We are surrounded by “thinkers” who are actually just glorified siloed-thinking engineers high on their own supply.

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whiplash451 ◴[14 Nov 24 10:22 UTC] No.42134777[source]▶
Someone probably said the exact same thing when the first cars appeared.

Where is the data showing that more jobs get destroyed than created by technological disruption?

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1. grues-dinner ◴[14 Nov 24 11:44 UTC] No.42135276[source]▶
Car and motor vehicles in general get you to work and help you do your work. They don't do the work. I guess that's the difference in thinking.

I'm not sure that it's acrually correct: I don't think we'll actually see "AI" actually replace work in general as a concept. Unless it can quite literally do everything and anything, there will always be something that people can do to auction their time and/or health to acquire some token of social value. It might taken generations to settle out who is the farrier who had their industry annihilated and who is the programmer who had it created. But as long as there's scarcity and ambition in the world, there'll be something there, whether it's "good work" or demeaning toil under the bootheel of a fabulously wealthy cadre of AI mill owners. And there will be scarcity as long as there's a speed of light.

Even if I'm wrong and there isn't, that's why it's called the singularity. There's no way to "see" across such an event in order to make predictions. We could equally all be in permanent infinite bliss, be tortured playthings of a mad God, extinct, or transmuted into virtually immortal energy beings or anything in between.

You might as well ask the dinosaurs whether they thought the ultimate result of the meteor would be pumpkin spice latte or an ASML machine for all the sense it makes.

Anyone claiming to be worrying over what happens after a hypothetical singularity is either engaging in intellectual self-gratification, posing or selling something somehow.

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2. robertlagrant ◴[14 Nov 24 11:52 UTC] No.42135335[source]▶
Compilers also do the work. As do tractors. That doesn't mean there's no work left to do.
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3. grues-dinner ◴[14 Nov 24 16:23 UTC] No.42137764[source]▶
They don't do the work, they help you do the work. The work isn't compiling or ploughing, it's writing software and farming, respectively. Both of which are actually just means to the ends of providing some service that someone will pay "human life tokens" for.

AI maximalists are talking about breaking that pattern and having AI literally do the job and provide the service, cutting out the need for workers entirely. Services being provided entirely autonomously and calories being generated without human input in the two analogies.

I'm not convinced by that at all: if services can be fully automated, who are you going to sell ERP or accounting software to, say? What are people going to use as barter for those calories if their time and bodies are worthless?

But I can see why that is a saleable concept to those who consider the idea of needing to pay workers to be a cruel injustice. Though even if it works at all, which, as I said, I dont believe, the actual follow-on consequences of such a shift are impossible to make any sensible inferences about.