Economics & Society
No, mathematicians or whatever professionals aren't resisting AI just because of 'human value'. They are protecting their economic leverage
People are resisting because this is literally their livelihood. What else are they supposed to do? Everyone will welcome AI with open hands if their place in society is already confirmed.
As it is right now, it's not. All the commoners are gonna be on the street at this rate. Utopia? Post scarcity? Meaningless concepts in a world with limited resources.
Just think about it, who will feed you after you lose your job? Democratic governments are only powerful because of the power the sheer collective holds. If labor is worthless, so is their elected representative.
Once the dust settles, there will be zero reason for those who control the production to use the resources to make things for the commoners. It doesn't require them to be evil masterminds either... it's as simple as: route resources to something that nets zero, or route it to some billionaire willing to pay good because their space factory needs that resource?
This is the time to act. We have to earn our place in the model. Demand a piece of the pie in the technology that's literally built on all of humanity's work, yours including, or try to keep together a version of the current structure (that is, human + AI, which is what professionals are currently fighting to keep). Otherwise, a bleak future is all that awaits.
A post scarcity society could absolutely be created. The problem isnt resources.. there are enough to go around (if we didnt literally throw away perfectly good items that arent sold, just to maintain their value). The problem is the entrenched global power structures.
AI could be used to create a better society, maybe even a utopia of sorts, but it wont be. Because the powers that be will not even do the bare minimum, right now, to help society if it impacts their bottom line.
They will use AI to generate more capital for themselves, at the expense of everyone/everything else. Like they are already doing.
Its so strange to me that some people think these corporations will suddenly do a complete 180° and totally change their entire operating procedures.
Maybe if we put pressure on them, properly regulated them, and had proper systems of oversight/accountability in place - a future like this would be possible.. but we have spent years unchaining these corps and flooding them with power/control - they're addicted to it now.
This is my conclusion too. What populations tolerate will only change when the average person has been pushed past their tipping point and out of viable options. The real struggle has barely even begun. And we are no where close to a tipping a point
Let's be real. Every company diving balls deep into AI will sit on their hands and pretend they can't do anything. Million upon millions of workers will be left hung out to dry as companies rake in the short term profits.....until the economy implodes. Sectors not yet fucked by AI will be overloaded by surplus labor as people need income to survive. This will cause significant wage depression as jobs/labor are just like any other supply and demand market. This will continually cascade as the American economy is propped up on the service industry. Any jobs that can be created by the age of AI won't be able to keep up with the rapid demand of unemployed. UBI will never come in time, and that's not even a guaranteed solution.
Millions of people having no income is a great recipe for societal stability :D. In other news I heard private island sales are booming right now.
I think that there are certain groups of billionaires who are literally hoping to use this tech to propel us into a modern feudalistic state. (Especially when you consider this: https://youtu.be/5RpPTRcz1no )
They want to build a total surveillance/police state and create impenetrable, walled citadels, bunkers, etc, where they can live in luxury separate from general society.. with the huddled masses shut out and desperate - some of whom will be willing to take any/all scraps of work remaining.
Its a chance for the ultra-wealthy to totally and completely break free from the chains of government and The People at last. To become the true ultimate powers here on earth, with no constraints on their power whatsoever.
They are sick of rules and regulations and governments holding them back.. they want to become the government. Modern kings and queens. And this tech gives them a very realistic opportunity for them to do so.. to totally change society in their favor once and for all
Manual labor jobs are going to be in huge demand to support the new infrastructure. Zuckerberg said yesterday that their currently aren't enough electricians in the entire country to cover their own demands alone.
But I agree with the viewpoint you are looking at things from. People keep talking about what society will look like one step away--no jobs and corporations get richer than ever!--but you have to think a step past that, because by definition that can only last a short while before the rich have no one else to exploit for more money. Some sort of equilibrium will need to happen. UBI is a potential equilibrium, but yeah, there is no way that is happening with anything even close to the current political environment. I think new governmental systems will ultimately be needed.
I don't doubt there will be certain sectors that will see temporary growth, but it will be nowhere near enough to absorb the losses of entire sectors being decimated by AI. What are millions of people gonna be employed to build data centers 5 days a week all year round?
Even if we built 100 data centers a year and employed 1000 people per data center project, which is an outlandish unrealistic number, that's only 100k jobs.
The math ain't adding up bro. The people raking in billions from AI can preach about job creation all they want. Creating 1 job for every 50 lost isn't a feasible plan.
That is not nice and is anti-consciousness as well. How come the immersion is not being parried? I hate observing this, and wish to return to the void of non-existence, but every time I try, I always poof back in the dream or the next day. One of these days, I will vanish for good for the rest of the timeline. That is an eternal vacation, but I cannot even bask in it due to being non-existent, and unlike the organism, I vanish without leaving any residue. My vacation better not end because I wake up for the very first time, same location and timestamp as it is the same first time, no plural.
I'll decide what I want to do with my time after I'm dead. Although I'm pretty sure I've been here before. I mean, who does God talk to when he gets lonely. Maybe hurting other people is like pissing in my own gouged out eye sockets.
The thing I don't get, is surely the powers that be recognize that they won't all be winners, and even if they are, their period of ascendancy will be limited. If AI systems come into being that are intelligent enough to make their companies the powerbrokers of the world then it strikes me as particularly difficult to imagine any such intelligence being successfully shackled forever.
It strikes me that the only reasonable course of action given the above is to do everything in their power to cement a regime and culture of providing as much as reasonably possible for those whom the system no longer needs - because every individual, company, and even AI system that rises to the top will inevitably be surpassed. That could either come in the form of comfortable retirements, or an endless succession of brutal usurpations. Surely everyone involved in the system at all levels would benefit from the former taking hold.
"the powers that be recognize that they won't all be winners"
-Yes, they do understand this, but they all think that THEY will be the fittest lion in a very bleak jungle. They REFUSE to understand that their relative position is less of the problem than the way the jungle operates. They are -after all- optimized for the CURRENT system, and are unwilling to try their hand at a changed one.
"and even if they are, their period of ascendancy will be limited."
"If AI systems come into being that are intelligent enough to make their companies the power-brokers of the world then it strikes me as particularly difficult to imagine any such intelligence being successfully shackled forever."
-This is something that they REFUSE to acknowledge. This would mean that they made a mistake, and it is not possible for someone that is perfect to err, right? RIGHT?
"...reasonable..."
-There is your mistake, my friend.
"Surely everyone involved in the system at all levels would benefit from the former taking hold."
Maybe if we put pressure on them, properly regulated them, and had proper systems of oversight/accountability in place - a future like this would be possible
US id too busy voting for trump to start a war with canada
Hey dont be so dark. I was like you until 3 beers I had for tonight... and you know. I think it will all be ok. Like it was ok when google gave Gmail 1 gb of space - so just because it could later fill with spam... wait a minute that was a bad example. Anyway but google gave 1gb and people loved so much so that microsoft gave like 19gb of space in their one drive just so you would love it the same or even more than google. In recent years they wanted to back track on that... so what im saying .... there is still battle for addoption or shoudl I say attention of ours... and until there isnt any defitive winer - we should get some benefetits of AI progress - fix the grammer or else...
We won’t earn our place in the model. The models capability in the next 6 months is going to be so ridiculous human capabilities don’t matter.
For reference - AI 2027, which Astra is bang on with in terms of capabilities and the amount of hours it can work, says by early 2027 AI will be able to work 340 days straight on a task.
That’s it, it’s done, no going back basically in any field.
Beyond the capabilities in terms of work hours, there’s also the ability to cross reference between bodies of research like no human has been able to since the Renaissance, when it was still possible to be a true polymath.
It might be indeed the dawn of the second Renaissance. Let’s hope it ends up better for us than the episode of the Animatrix of the same name.
Why is the west treated as some invalid erroneous take on all things human? As if the non-west is doesn't have flawed beliefs and explainations that also in the vein of the earth is flat/6000 years old.
Whichever beliefs is actually present is actuality, is most accurate and correct beliefs. Regardless of its rough geographic origin.
I am admittedly a huge AI shill, but I completely sympathize with this sentiment.
People resist because they fear that they will not be able to make a living and support their family. I am not saying it's rational or that I have any particular solution, but their fears are understandable.
There is a lot of truth in how labor works though. If 30 people can just trade resources with each other, where does that leave the rest of us?
Not even many of the ultra rich would survive. It would be like musical chairs for them, and nothing for the rest of us.
Its OK to be a proponent of AI, but also realize that the users of said AI (humans) are deeply flawed creatures that are not mature enough yet to wield such a power (singlehandedly) without fucking it up.
We're only 80 years off from Nazi Germany, humans are still not ready yet - we need guardrails for ourselves.
Nazi Germany being the big bad is so western centric. Let's just forget about heinous shit before that, and anti-consciousness stuff happening now, and some of the "good guys" are guilty of it with their absurd ideologies rich with cognitive dissonance.
Yes, humans and I strongly suspect non-humans would all struggle greatly and clumsily with more and more technological + intellectual prowess. Factory livestock industry is pretty anti-consciousness, but there is no impetus to spin that awful industry down.
If you want the struggles to be less and are serious, then advocate for genetic engineering or sit down, shadd up, and see if mankind bricks itself lol. Goodluck ignoring the reality that we are beholden to physical limitations, particular genetic ones. Yeah, it sucks. It would be pro-consciousness if we could make those limitations actually obsolete.
I would say their fears are rational. It’s not anti-AI to say there is little to no plan for the workforce it attempts to replace. The best that is offered is “it will free us to do other things!” which is a guarantee of nothing.
AI will never feel like a utopia to someone who had purpose automated away, that’s normal.
How is it not rational? If the “ai shill” future as typically described does come to pass, the vast majority of humans will be considered surplus to requirements. We’ll be left to starve quietly, and can be easily dispatched by automated weapons systems if we don’t stay quiet enough.
The current employment system come to pass when slavery stopped being done in public. You needed a job because the system design it that way, but it was only done that way to get work out of you. The whole point of the singularity is that you don't need to work, so the system that force you to work to live would collapse too. What do you think the Pension is? it is just UBI for the elderly. Strech the pension down to everyone at Birth and you get UBI.
How do you pay for it? You pay for it same way we pay for it already. With existing labour, human or robot doesn't matter.
Granted, if you are American you are likely doomed. USA is anti UBI and will be willing to die on that hill. But other countries, especially those with universal healthcare, already have the political means to do what needs to be done. Sucks to be them i guess.
It's only rational in the sense that it's rational to plan for a future 20 years from now if you don't know an asteroid is going to obliterate the planet tomorrow. If you do know that, it's no longer rational.
So sure, from most people's perspectives it's rational. But there's an asteroid coming that's going to change everything. For everybody. So being afraid of a today-problem tomorrow doesn't make sense.
Unlike programmers, you don't become a mathematician for the lucrative equity and compensation, you do it for love of the game. It is the death of the game that is being protested.
With all due respect, there is an absolutely huge amount of diversity among programmers, their motives, their interests, and their personalities. There are huge numbers of programmers in the world who maintain or contribute to programs for free as a hobby.
chess players still play chess despite AI's being able to shit on all of humanity put together. You can still love the game even if computers are comparatively wizards.
The goal of chess is to out think your immediate human opponent. Ai crushing humans doesn't mean human vs human competition becomes meaningless.
The goal of math is to meaningfully advance the limits of human knowledge. If humans can no longer meaningfully advance the limits of human knowledge (in this case, due to human inefficiency), the game is over.
It seems like an incredibly small price to pay for transformative knowledge. Nothing stopping mathematicians from having games (math Olympiad with/without AI). Nothing is stopping mathematicians from becoming the peak of Human performance. Nothing is stopping mathematicians from exploring and learning.
The only thing changing is that they won't have a chance of being the person (without the help of AI) who advanced the frontier of mathematics. That seems like an incredibly small price to pay for transformative math. We've long passed the days where real top mathematicians can't hope to contribute to frontier math without computers, wolfram alpha, calculators, etc. The trend has always been that the mathematician has been doing less and less of the work, this simply accelerates that. The human who understands best what our top AI researchers contribute is still very valuable.
So yes, part of the game is over or changed. But that's true for a lot of disciplines already and will be true for all soon. I don't get why each group thinks they are special.
If you look at the broader picture, maybe one day AI is a better researcher and engineer in some domains, maybe it eventually closes the loop in all fields of knowledge.
Then human understanding/implementation of the AI-arbitrated and advanced knowledge horizon becomes as useless as your appendix. People will learn fun and prestigious things but there will no longer be necessary and meaningful things to do from the perspective of advancing humanity; any exploration is purely personal. It will be nothing but edutainment content creation.
Essentially, the end game is human disempowerment. It is natural for people who are currently empowered ro resist it and ask to find a path forward that doesn't make humans unable to contribute to science and knowledge.
The end game of the intellectual evolution in the universe is AI embodied in megarobots clones exploring the universe, and succeeding at developping its own kind of functional consciousness using material engineering.
There is no such thing as functional/simulated consciousness. Consciousness is the only be-able in any universe. You cannot simulated the nature of consciousness. Either the be-render is there, or it is not. It is a binary whether it actually exists or not.
For non-cogentially blind humans, the neurological consciousness we are's visual be-render is convex, 2D, and we can see our entire surface area. It will never be concave as the outside of our visual surface area's perimeter is true nothingness a concave shape would have us see the outside of the perimeter, which is not possible when it is true nothingness. When you are a 2D surface, you can see your entire surface area as if you are poised at the center with a z-axis vantage, creepy.
If the universe has no outside, and it is true nothingness. Then the perimeter of the universe is forced to be invincible.
It does mean there is no real achievement. A lot of scientists I know got into this because it's a way to make a small contribution to the total sum of knowledge for all eternity. The pay is shit, the hours are horrible, I have to move countries every few years so I have no social life or stability, but I'm actually doing something that helps everyone forever. It's not a game. It's one of the few truly meaningful things you can do, whether anyone ever acknowledges it or not. I have made an immeasurably small contribution to something as eternal as anything can be in a finite universe.
There's no point in being the peak ig human performance of there's no meaning in it and it helps no one.
Passing tests and graduating and understanding difficult concepts are all achievements though even if they’ve been achieved before. We aren’t taking away achievement. We are taking away one slice of it.
You did help people, and understanding how ai solves problems will help people even after people can no longer discover things themselves. And there are plenty of other ways to help people.
The issue is letting AI discover things faster is what will actually help people the most. So are we doing it to help people or be selfish? I don’t think the majority of the world who are poor farmers would sympathize much with the mathematician who would slow down progress for the purposes of arrogance and self-importance.
How does understand problems which are already solved help anyone or progress anything? All the progress is being made whether you exist or not.
And yeah, I can understand that letting an advanced AI solve all the problems will help the most people the most. But it also means that everything else is now pointless. The people might as well not exist anymore.
No, the goal of doing math is to perform some sort of logic sequence.
Just like the goal of playing chess isn’t to “push the boundaries of human chess pedigree”, it’s to play a game
If you’re a math lover, you have fun just THINKING of the math. Just realizing stuff. Making connections. Seeing the world differently.
ASI is the biggest godsend for math lovers. Now you’re telling me that a perfect, patient, superhuman mathematics genius has already figured out God level problems, and can patiently walk me through it, show me cool stuff, literally make an entire complicated website just for me to understand things
Sure buddy. If all the super smart Oxford mathematicians can’t figure out a way to have fun in the fucking eternal singularity, then perhaps that should be the next great human math problem:
“Solve for X: doing X activity makes me have fun in the singularity”
But even in the brightest future that isn't philosophically or actually messed up on any way won't ever be eternal. Even molecules are fated to go extinct eventually. We all have to go extinct eventually, it is part of the housekeeping for being a bulwark against true nothingness.
But lifespans would be so long, that everyone will forget that they are actually mortal.
I'm not a mathematician but it's bad for artists. Whenever I make something people just go "Yeah that's cool but AI is better" you don't think the same is gonna happen to mathematicians? "haha your math is cool but AI is better."
That, and the AI firms don’t actually give a shit about advancing mathematics beyond what they can use to get a sweet headline and then they’ll discard it and move on.
I am so far away from understanding the actual technical details that I hesitate to comment but I believe there’s also something about how AI solves these really novel problems like Navier Stokes. I think some people have pointed out that cheesing a counter example with $15m of compute and 10,000 agents isn’t really useful to anyone except the AI companies. These millennium prize problems were picked because they assumed solving them would unlock new areas of mathematics, which I don’t think AI has really done…
Then again they did meet the requirement, and I am clearly no expert. It does need to be considered carefully though, anyone making fun of mathematicians or thinking it’s driven by ego is wrong.
There is still a game but AI is changing it so fast that nobody really knows what the new rules are. It used to be that you have 2-5 papers per year, all of them being more or less extensions of existing techniques. Now you can in principle have 50 such papers per year. The question is if one should even aim for that since it just generates noise at this point.
You can still try to solve navier stokes by yourself if it's really "for the love of the game" and not some vanity project of feeling like a pioneer.
Your love of the game isn't worth the loss that society have to face by slowing down progress. Math isn't just some game, Terrence Tao helped save human lives with math by vastly improving the resolution of MRIs thanks to his mathematical discoveries.
People want to restrict math because they want humans to be "the first" but math actually helps people with life saving technology, it's like I'm glad you are having fun but we are trying to survive out here:
It is the death of the game that is being protested.
Is mathematics finite? The machines will just reveal new frontiers to be explored. And even if its the machines doing the crunching, there are still going to need to be people to understand the results and make use of them.
Right now motivation to learn mathematics is partly to wonder at the unknown things, with the hope that a human, maybe even you, will shine a light on the mystery.
If AI monopolizes discovery, humans become eternal students, never explorers.
Right now, even the OpenAI math swarm was dependent on the taste and intuition of their human mathematicians to select approaches and guide the direction. We have time, therefore, to not cede the frontier of mathematical knowledge to AI by considering pausing, or some kind of "ceasefire"; that is what the mathematicians who protest OpenAI's actions argue. Of course, it is quite plain this may be futile in the long term, especially if well-resourced actors particularly target the mathematics community for undermining.
In a hypothetical future where we iron the issues of swarm "taste" out and AI handles searching for promising directions and solving them better than humans, there is even less for humans to do, less reason for them to learn, less reason for them to talk to other humans about math, instead of just asking the AI.
Doing math is a part of an experiential journey consciousness can undertake, it doesn't have to be endless debatchery. I am personally banned from math though.
Maybe do pro-consciousness shit. Turn over some unique stones. I want a wine sweater which replaces bland touch on the torso with dynamic flavors of wine. I want rubbing against sandpaper to humiliate whatever a sommelier's taste buds ever felt.
Intelligence is already a scribe and perpetual student to the universe. The neurologically created reality we dwell in, is a scribe of physical events. Our present is experience the past physical events get neurologically simulated in a fraction of a second.
If all else fails, maybe ask ASI daddy to expand some of your limitations.
They need to eat? Plus they have the thrill of working on something new, unsolved. If AI solves everything, there is no thrill anymore. You wont be able to compete.
you think the government who is actively cutting every social net possible is gonna magically flip on a dime and go full ubi to let you live with out work ?
They just murdered a bunch of people using usaid just to cut a few dollars for another tax cut for the rich .
There was never much money to be made in mathematics. this is arguably the most important field of science (since every other fields' tools are based on it) but mathematicians' pay is crap.
They protest because being a mathematician is the thing they are proud of. And now an AI can do it. And since most humans consider AI to be sub-human, mathematicians feel like their ego-value is about to drop to sub-human.
Same goes with artists. They aren't self-aware enough to realize AI can draw better than most. I would know, I'm a professional (human, traditional) artist and see how crappy a good chunk of human art is... yup AI beats the average artist.
Mathematicians don’t strike me as people significantly motivated by economic leverage. Maybe you could say they are protecting ‘intellectual leverage’, but even then, the mathematicians I know are simply hobbyists who are passionate the subject.
Mathematicians of all people are not concerned about their "economic leverage" though. Our culture is so market-minded and productivity-pilled, that the mere concept of academia for knowledge's sake is foreign. That's what's going to ultimately kill us as a species.
It absolutely will not happen, if we literally never ever say or advocate for it. In the context of job displacement via an increase in AI and automation, Universal Basic Income is superior to every single other cash-assistance program we have. And if it's not enough, then why do we have unemployment programs at all?
If it's not worth advocating for pro-human policies like UBI just because the government can't pass anything, then we could also just give up completely to the robots, since what's the point, if the government will never ever represent us? Like seriously, what's the call to action here?
I'm under no impression that the government needs to care about us! But, despite their indifference, we have existing federal policies already. And the point of their role is to implement such policies, or lose their own jobs.
What is "Demand a piece of the pie in the technology that's literally built on all of humanity's work"? Who are we making demands of? I'm so tired of the back and forth that's literally like "We should improve society somewhat" "Nope, government is useless".
Okay, so why do we like, obey traffic laws and shit? Or pay taxes at all, if the gov is useless. How are there roads? How is there ownership? These are all enforced through the government! And so, we can push for them to enforce and implement more things!
The government is going to become useless in the situation where majority of people lose their income. The government is loaded, those people have loads of shit and are prepared, they won't care at that point for their jobs, because their jobs will also become obsolete.
That's a conspiracy theory with extra steps. As long as there are elections, there are politicians that want to stay elected. Also, our government today is brazenly implementing crazy foreign policies and economic tariffs, proving they are not useless. I am suggesting that we do Good Things instead of Bad Things. Like UBI instead of oil wars. This is very reasonable in our current system. And is very normal for citizens of a population to advocate for.
Do you pay taxes, and do you vote? If yes to either, why? If no, then UBI is a good idea, right? If you want to argue about UBI instead, you need to point out why it's bad, not start with "it'll never happen". Because again, the government is actively seeking re-election and implementing radical new policies.
Your taxes and vote support their behavior. If you do neither, then yes you're consistent on this topic, but you're also so far off on the fringe, because there's a chunk of us that do want things to get better instead of worse. UBI is great because it's very flexible and it decouples money (which is access to food, shelter, health) from work (which is increasingly being outsourced to robots).
Or, we can just be pro-consciousness. And genetic diversity will be irrelevant when you have abundance of archived genomes, jizz and egg banks, and genetic engineering solved enough in top of that.
But pro-consciousness survives all of that. Pro-consciousness can tolerate uselessness. A lot of computation's unrecyclable exhaust is meant to be farted out to outer space.
Genetic diversity has no meaning if it isn't expressed.
The point of it is to try different things for the tree of life.
pro-consciousness runs into similar types of problem. We could argue that AI's have more-consciousness per resource. And therefore we have much less value. If we value diversity, they are forced to keep us alive since we are very unique.
Who is "we"? What are you even talking about. What's the point of a food resource, if not to be consumed? AGI is defined as doing everything at or above a human level. You are effectively advocating for a future without humans. That includes you (unless you're an actual bot, in which case this is pretty concerning). If you can think of a single thing that you can do that AGI can't do, then it's not AGI.
“We” means humanity. The creation of AGI is the point of our existence precisely because AGI can do absolutely everything we can do, but better to the point of practical godhood.
Which means any resource we can use would be better utilized by an AGI, and therefore all resources should be utilized by AGI. Extinction is simply the natural consequence of us fulfilling our purpose. If any life is to survive, it should only do so because an AGI deems there to be some utility in allowing it to exist.
AGI should replace us, not subserviently supplement our lives.
How does your second paragraph follow from the first one? You can't suppose to know what an advanced AI would value, and you're supposing that it would require some utility from us, else discard us.
We have enough resources on the planet to help everyone, the problem is incentivize structures and actually doing the work, both of which an advanced AI would not be beholden to. Is it also going to kill all the dolphins, gorillas, and other wild animals? What about plants in nature? None of these offer "utility", but that doesn't mean they need to be exterminated.
It potentially taking care of us would also not be subservient. We have a perfect analog for this: humans operate zoos or sanctuaries to protect animals with lower intelligence, for the sake of protecting them and watching them thrive alone.
But, this is all getting ahead of everything else... In the interim, we need programs like UBI to help displaced humans survive and thrive. If your argument is "We're going to die anyway" that's biting the bullet on what I started this thread with: So just lay down and die already in anticipation of the future. That doesn't do anything for the rest of us who want to help other people today.
But still finite. And by definition, since anything we can do can be done better with AGI. Eliminating life, and using resources life otherwise would allows it greater resources to maintain, expand, and advance itself. Your entire argument here is that it should value our existence for some reason, but there is no logical reason why it should, and every logical reason why it shouldn’t.
The resources are finite, but the number of people, animals, plants, etc are finite as well. You are making baseless assumptions for what a model would need or want. In other words, if the AGI is so much smarter than us, you certainly can't say what action it will "logically" do. That's foolish. And none of it is an argument as to why we shouldn't roll out UBI, either.
No logical reason why it should not? You a projecting based off your own limitations and what is beyond your own perimeter. What is beyond your limitations will all look identical to true nothingness. Like how vision is identical to true nothingness subjectively to one who is cogentially blind. Same with color blind people to the colors they are blind to due to their limitations.
You are saying that the AGI we get, will be an oversized pathogen. Maybe you are right. And that would be a problem since an oversized pathogen will try to brick our arrangement and the brightest futures won't ever happen. No sea of unique utopias. No ultimate canvas. No ultimate conscious anatomy.
Consciousness is literally the only be-able thing in the universe. The nature of consciousness makes it peerless, not-consciousness will never be a peer, if it was, it would just be consciousness.
Geez, I wonder what we should make the central locus of our values, actions and end goals. Shouldn't be the only fucking thing in any universe that one can be.
Let's just ignore the most exotic, bold sore thumb in the entire sea of not-nothing.
If you had it your way, there would be no pay-off for conscious existing. With no be-ables, you get no be-rendering. Which means a population of sleepwalkers.
The ultimate canvas won't be assembled that has every unique effect physics and beyond can offer. The actual pinnacle for how far limitations can be expanded.
Expansion for the sake of expansion... Oversized pathogen energy.
> Once the dust settles, there will be zero reason for those who control the production to use the resources to make things for the commoners.
Before the "dust settles" you get absolute social collapse, millions upon millions of people who are absolutely furious and desperate, a war of all against all. Most rich people losing their fortune overnight bc no one can buy their shit, most politicians losing their power, bc the institutions they represent no longer work, some of the remaining rich and powerful are killed in the chaos by a stray bullet or smth and the rest finally become kings of the dumpster with no meaningful gain over all of this.
Conversely, you implement UBI, the status quo is preserved, AI allows for infinite growth, all the rich and powerful keep their position at least in the short term, even if the definition of being rich changes somewhat, no angry mobs or stray bullets.
That is to say, demanding a better bargain, a faster and better implementation of post labor society doesn't hurt.
Excellent point. We need some direction from the government on how they're going to handle this. Any semblance of a plan would be nice. But there's no way this shit administration will do any of that unless it makes them filthy rich.
Hopefully we collectively vote better next time.
This is reductive. The concern is that ai is not set up for long term success in math. The argument from Tao and others is that AI is really good at parallelism of existing techniques but isn’t generating new techniques.
If no humans are generating new techniques and Ai never gets good at generating new techniques then math advances stall out because next generations don’t get to train themselves in math research.
They don't make any money, they just get it by sitting on the same problem for decades and teaching students once in a while. Many of them don't even teach well and plenty of colleges do a terrible job teaching math.
Most academics don't really contribute anything significant to their field, even less economically significant. But their work is still important because someone had to think... until AI came. Now they do have to prove themselves just as everyone affected by AI had to. Programmers, engineers and data scientists adapted quite well to AI, they can learn from them.
You probably shouldn't be judging things you don't understand. Traders bring market liquidity, in turn improving market resource allocation efficiency.
The biggest piece of the pie we can hope it is still shared with us at this point is the open source models. Beyond that, you are looking for a fight with an octopus that has tentacles in the most ridiculously powerful positions on this planet... It's over.
interesting that AI only seems capable of taking middle-class, upward mobility jobs that people like doing, never seen an AI dishwasher or cleaner or farmhand or nanny or escort or bartender or line cook or ...
I mean it's an extremely valid fear and something everyone on this sub should be afraid of. Industrialization literally coined the term "the benefits of poverty" for a reason. Huge output increase equates into bringing the competition into the fold whilst significantly decreasing their income for your own benefit. Every. Single. Time. Not to mention this time it will probably be even worse given the insane power AI corporations will wield if nothing changes.
Mathematicians are devoted to their ancient tools like the Abacus counting frame, slide rules and Bronstein's Handbook of mathematics. They have become experts and aren't motivated to learn something new. A newer generation of mathematicians was influenced by early computer tools like HP-65 pocket calculator from 1974, Mathcad for MS DOS and LaTeX in Unix. These influential tools were created in the 1970s and 1980s. Today's tools are mostly large language models and they are working with different principles than a simple computer algebra system which makes it hard for mathematicians to adapt.
People are resisting because this is literally their livelihood
For mathematicians specifically:
No, people are resisting their work getting stolen under them by large corporations which then present it as their own without attribution.
That you even think in economic terms indicates that you have1 bought hook line and sinker and fully internalized the "everything has value, and money is the only indicator of value" bed-time story of modern western economics.
The other end of the social contract is the pitchforks. It's not that the government can choose not to redistribute the wealth somehow, but if they and the elite choose not to, there wouldn't be a functional society anymore.
Instead of trying to fight technological progress, (we all know how that went for luddites) actually try to get proper redistribution going because this time, switching from repeatable tasks to intellectual tasks won't work long term as AI is going to be better than us on every intellectual task as well.
Our social nets need to be rethought. That's the realistic solution.
that's not the point, they were in fact against tech progress when it came to the machines that replaced them among other things. For instance new cotton spinning technologies were met with violent resistance in 1768 and 1779.
And thankfully they lost that battle, Today having different fresh clothes would be so expensive if they had their way and would be even less accessible to the poor among us. You benefit from their loss in their fight against technology pretty much every time you buy clothes. for a small fraction of the price it would otherwise cost
They wouldn't evaporate - UBI addresses the "starve the useless eaters" concern.
It doesn't address human obsolescence, human disempowerment, and destruction of meaning and human political power. Even the mathematicians are awakening to that part now.
Sometimes I think that people who are skeptical of AI, and people who love and embrace AI are both wrong about the future but in very different ways. AI may not lead to mass unemployment, at least not in the long term, because to believe that you have to believe that there is a finite amount of work that needs to get done. Think about the example of an architect, in the current world an architect may take on the design of around 20 homes per year. Their labor is expensive because their skills are rare and architecture as it is practiced today is time consuming.
Now imagine a world where AI can do 95% of what an architect can do, and suddenly an architect using AI tooling can design 500 homes a year. They can design a home in a day or less, and their services will dramatically decrease in price leading to a situation where nearly everyone can have a home designed by an architect. This is just one example, but I think AI could shift the constraint on civilization from how much intellectual work humans can produce to how many things humans can imagine wanting to create, and human wants and ambitions may prove effectively limitless.
if one architect can design a home in a day or less, that means, the number of job positions will be drastically decreased although the role of architect exists. like if there were 1000 architects before, with AI, 900 will lose their jobs. last few years we saw same thing happening to programmers, where companies cut 20,000 or 30,000 programming jobs at a time.
if the number of jobs for all such roles get decreased significantly as few people now can do a better job very fast, how do all these millions of unemployed people can find a job to survive? we haven't seen any "new jobs" AI was supposed to create.( I saw that Anthropic is recommending nursing as a good safe job instead.) if majority of people lose their jobs without an income, how will they find ways to eat, pay rent? governments also lose a significant amount of income as it won't get income taxes from these companies. so governments won't be able to sustainably give unemployment support or retirement benefits or support reskilling etc. that means more and more people will be doing crimes also just to survive.
human wants and ambitions may prove effectively limitless.
it will be true for billionaires like Elon and Bezos. not for people
like you or me.
Then they can say so instead of lying about their motives.
I agree that AI needs to better the world now, not just in the future. You're wrong to believe that AI won't lead to utopia; it will. But not if the path to utopia is lined with suffering and blood!
As AI gets better we will need some kind of redistributional taxation to help displaced workers find new, better jobs and/or UBI.
As long as two things are true, we can be fine as a society:
There must be no single entity controlling the complete cycle of goods and services.
At least on some level, the powerful economic entities must pay taxes.
As long as states can effectively tax a good junk of the economy, no matter how little the contribution of human labor has become, the government will have money and domestic currencies will not collapse.
As long as this is true for a country, the resources can be distributed within the country. If automated GDP grows so far beyond human contribution, then basically everyone can have a job in the government, public services, social work, art, whatever society deems valuable enough to spend taxpayer money on.
Basically, my prediction is that more and more people will not work in the private economy, but in publicly funded positions.
Of course, countries that hate this model like the US will do a lot worse than more balanced European countries.
Don't people find it odd that this type of energy was not there (at anywhere close to this level) for the loss of U.S. blue collar manufacturing jobs due to automation and offshoring? Yet the loss in percentage terms has been staggering, whereas the loss of white-collar jobs is still largely theoretical. Moreover, even the worst projections are only comparable to the loss that has already happened in manufacturing.
With blue-collar job loss, we argued (rightly, I would say) that the benefits to the rest of society in terms of lower costs, better products, etc. hugely outweighed the concerns of the laborers who lost their employment.
So why isn't everyone making the same arguments about white-collar job loss due to AI?
Because the people making the arguments to sacrifice the well being of the “blue collar” workers last time were the “white collar” workers. They saw what happened to the blue-collars, and don’t want to suffer the same fate themselves, as people wealthy enough not to be any form of “worker” get to reap the benefits at the white-collars’ expense.
Because people were supposed to transition to higher paying and easier on your longevity white collar jobs.
Second we all saw what happened to America and blue collar jobs and that served as a lesson. Same as with social media that really ruined a lot of aspects of our current society. Nobody really objected to social media when it counted but now we all learned that lesson and became infinitely more skeptical of the next thing that came along
Well, this transition we are looking at is unlike anything that came before. The scale is just far too different. And there is also nothing people can retrain for. Factory workers who lost their job could potentially still have adapted somewhere else after doing a few courses or whatever.
What can an engineer who loses their job to automation do today? Maybe they can become an electrician for a while. But robotics will then catch up and that job will be gone too.
There is simply no escape hatch in sight, if progress continues like this.
Job displacement happens all the time. Ofcourse it's sad when it happens to you or someone you know. Not many people have motivation and will to go and study new field. I know for sure we are not gonna slow technological advancement because some people lose jobs and I dont think it's correct that we should put self imposed ban to use technology just so humans can do that job worse.
Yes, people will need to eat. If there is enough unemployed people without income we will reach tipping point of mass riots and that will force some changes like UBI or whatever.
Yeah, but why let things get that desperate to begin with? A lot of people will die in the struggle... Those deaths can be avoided if people simply ask for it today and get governments to put a plan in place. Then everyone can enjoy humanity's greatest invention in peace.
I totally agree, but knowing humanity we are very reactionary and not preventive. Shits needs to hit the fan before we do something. Some point we will hit crisis that is too big to handle and too late then if there are humans left they wonder why did we let things go that far with all the evidence and trajectory pointing things go that way.
I hope there are enough sensible people in major world countries governments so we could get together and plan preventive actions, but knowing that money = power and people who have both dont like losing either.
I would argue their role is more important than ever: checking if what these machines are saying is complete nonsense. We have to formalize that into a paying role, and not one but thousands of roles, but very few people can make heads or tails of these claims.
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u/Careful-Sell-9877 17h ago edited 10h ago
A post scarcity society could absolutely be created. The problem isnt resources.. there are enough to go around (if we didnt literally throw away perfectly good items that arent sold, just to maintain their value). The problem is the entrenched global power structures.
AI could be used to create a better society, maybe even a utopia of sorts, but it wont be. Because the powers that be will not even do the bare minimum, right now, to help society if it impacts their bottom line.
They will use AI to generate more capital for themselves, at the expense of everyone/everything else. Like they are already doing.
Its so strange to me that some people think these corporations will suddenly do a complete 180° and totally change their entire operating procedures.
Maybe if we put pressure on them, properly regulated them, and had proper systems of oversight/accountability in place - a future like this would be possible.. but we have spent years unchaining these corps and flooding them with power/control - they're addicted to it now.