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Do expect your kids to have jobs if we build machines that can do everything better and cheaper than humans?
Are jobs good in themselves?
Either these machines are going to be so great that there is no use human labor can be put to that satisfies human wants (which sounds utopian to me) or there will still be productive uses of human labor to satisfy human wants (i.e. jobs).
You're a survival machine, your sense of purpose comes from overcoming obstacles impending your survival. Maybe the machines will just take over and provide a stimulating environment of constant low-level warfare which is what we evolved for.
Who knows, it's possible. Maybe you're going to be turned into biodiesel, or reengineered into a better pet. Unknowable.
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The important thing is for our civilization to have an incentive to keep us around. Once we're superfluous, we'll be in a very precarious position in the long run.
Is being stuck in an old folks' home utopian?
For some (many? most?) people likely yes. The thing that is bad about being in an old folks home, today, is the "old" part. If I were free to spend my time however I wished at my current age, that would be pretty great!
And yet my experience with old people is that they fight tooth and nail not to be dropped at a home, and the ones there lament not being able to stay at their real homes or with family.
Preferable to dying in a street, but not what I'd call 'utopian'.
OK, but in a world where robots do all useful work there's no reason you couldn't be at home with your family! I took the point about the old folks home to be a concern about a kind of listlessness or malaise with lacking something productive to fill ones days with.
The biggest problem with current care homes isn't loneliness, listlessness or malaise. It's that the care home has almost no incentive to care about the wellbeing of its residents, especially those without vigorous younger relatives to advocate for them, and therefore generally ends up mistreating them for convenience.
The residents aren't paying, or if they are, it's usually their legal guardian using the funds on their behalf (people active enough to manage their own banking are generally active enough not to go into a home). The residents don't have the physical vitality to cause problems if nobody gets round to feeding them for a few hours. The residents can't leave.
One of my relatives was put into a rehab clinic for physical recovery after an injury at the age of 90+. When we went to visit him, we discovered him shivering in a frigid room. He hadn't been fed for a day, because nobody had got round to it. And if we hadn't visited, who would have known?
There are many, many ways for a rather overstretched institution to abuse people for profit or convenience without causing them enough damage for outsiders to notice, especially if they're frail and expected to die soon anyway. Presumably these places are inspected, but there are lots of ways to get vulnerable people to smile for the inspectors when you have them at your mercy for the rest of the time. It doesn't even require active malice, just neglect.
People are naturally concerned that the position of the non-robot-owners in a world where robots do all the jobs (and enforce public order) will be comparable.
If our robots do not take care of us as well as we would like then we are back in the case that there is productive work for human labor. If there is a gap between how we want our lives to be and what robots can provide why aren't we filling that gap (partially or totally) with human labor like we are today?
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Fair. Maybe a better analogy would be: You and your whole family are in an old folks home, and the country and all jobs are now being run by immigrants from another, very different, country. You fear that one day (or gradually through taxation) they'll take away your stuff and if they do, there'll clearly be nothing you can do about it.
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Precisely this. Does civilization serve man, or does man serve civilization?
The phrase "Disneyland with no children" comes to mind.
Civilization came into existence because it enhanced group survival.
It's pretty ironic that it's probably also going to end it. Once the deep state is efficient machines and not inefficient apparatchiks, things might get pretty funny.
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Being useful and free to withdraw your services is leverage. Having no leverage is bad in itself.
What is it you are envisioning needing this leverage to do?
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I so enormously doubt "everything better and cheaper". But some things sure.
Machine looms and mechanized agriculture have put almost everyone out of their jobs. A large majority of people used to work in agriculture or cloth making. It was a black hole for labor and human effort.
And yet now clothing and food are extremely cheap and I have a job. Not a job growing food or working a loom. But a job.
If AI does some things better and cheaper then great news, prices are going to get cheaper. That's a good thing. I hope things that are very expensive to me are very cheap for future generations. Like clothing for us vs pre-industral revolution.
Surely there could be a point where technology advances enough that computers do everything better, no?
Currently, computers are better at chess than humans. Still, nobody wants to watch the computer world championship and many people want to watch the human world championship. In some jobs it's not just about being better. Maybe more such jobs will exist in the future?
Yes, because Deep Blue is never going to open with Bongcloud.
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That’s like at most 1% of jobs.
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Sure. And at that point we are discussing hypothetical scifi futures. Like in Accelerando when the Hello Kitty artificial intelligence explains to newly created people that things like monster trucks are free and they can have as many as they want.
But I'm not very concerned about all human labor being made irrelevant soon. Maybe some portion of it. And that won't be very conformable for some people. Like English clothing makers when machine looms were first made. A hard time, but society did not collapse or suffer permanent unemployment. They only had to slaughter a small number of people to stop them from destroying clothing factories. And clothes are now a tiny fraction of the cost. I'd say a clear net good. I'm hoping when HR drones are replaced with software we can figure out how to deal with them more peacefully than British soldiers dealt with Luddites. I have been told that Excel put most accountants out of business and we navigated that without bloodshed and social upheaval.
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This is the midwit argument.
A better argument is that AI will create an even more extreme power law distributions of return to human capital and cognitive performance. You'll see software firms that used to need 100s of developers to work on various pieces of the codebase turn into 10 elite engineers plus their own hand-crafted code LLM. That same firm used to have 100+ sales people to cover various territories, now it just has a single LLM on 24/7 that can answer all the questions of prospects and only turns them over to an elite sales team of 10 when they get to a qualified position.
All of a sudden, we're at 30%+ unemployment because the marginal utility of the bottom 30% of cognitive performers is literally negative. It's not that they can't do anything, it's that whenever anyone thinks of something for them to do, there's an LLM on the way already.
I think we're actually starting to see this already. Anec-data-lly, I'm hearing that junior devs are having a really hard time getting jobs because a lot of what they used to do really is 90% handled by an LLM. Senior devs, especially those that can architect out whole systems, are just fine.
The AI doom scenario isn't paperclips or co-opted nukes, it's an economic shock to an already fragile political system that crashes the whole thing and we decide to start killing each other. To be clear, I still think that that scenario is very, very unlikely, but "killer robot overlords" is 100% Sci-Fi.
Are there really swarms of "junior devs" out there writing code so menial that their whole job can be replaced by an LLM? This is just totally discordant with my experience. Back when I started they threw an active codebase at me and expected me to start making effective changes to a living system from the get. Sure, it wasn't "architecting whole systems", but there is no way you could type the description of the first intern project I built years ago into an LLM and get anything resembling the final product out.
These systems that claim to write code just aren't there. Type in simple code questions and you get decent answers, sure. They perform well on the kind of thing that appears in homework problems, probably because they're training on homework problems. But the moment I took it slightly off the beaten path, I asked it how to do some slightly more advanced database queries in a database I wasn't familar with, the thing just spat out a huge amount of plausible but totally incorrect information. I actually believed it and was pretty confused later that day when the code I wrote based on the LLM's guidance just totally did not work. So I am incredulous that there is really any person doing a job out there which could be replaced by this type of program.
The junior devs graduating college over the past 5 years are drastically less capable than before. There are fully diploma'ed CS majors who do not understand basic data structures. Yes, this is a problem.
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Yes, or close to it. Used to be stack overflow was full of them trying to get real devs to do their work for them.
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Thanks for the kind words.
Yes, that is one possibility (ie the tech advances enough that it kills some but not all jobs so those at the top become Uber rich and those at the bottom UBI). Of course that ignores the possibility that the situation you describe is a mid point; not the end.
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Surely this is the worst argument against AI? Shouldn't we burn the backhoes and go back to digging ditches by hand to ensure employment opportunities for our children?
This is a reasonable argument, but there's a big different between having robots that can do something things for us (like digging ditches) while humans can still do other things better, versus having everything being done better by machines. In the current world, you get growth by investing in both humans and machines. In the latter world, you get the most growth by putting all your resources into machines and the factories that make them.
What growth is there without consumers (i.e. people)?
You just need at least 1 consumer, right? Maybe the future is just one person who owns the entire Earth or perhaps even the universe, the sole producer and customer that dictates what is and isn't by his control of all the AI-powered robots. Well, I imagine even if someone had amassed the power to accomplish this, they would find such an existence rather lonely.
This, I think, points to the one job that AI and robots can't ever replace humans in, which is providing a relationship with a human who was born the old fashioned (i.e. current) way and grew up in a human society similar to the human customer did. I've said it before, but it could be that the world's oldest profession could also become the world's final profession.
But also, if we're positing ASI, it's quite possible that the AI could develop technology to manipulate the brain circuitry of the one remaining human to genuinely believe that he is living in a community of real humans like himself. I believe this kind of thing is often referred to as a "Lotus-Eater Machine," after some part of the Odyssey. If this gets accomplished, then perhaps all of humanity going down to just one person might be in our future.
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