Ask HN: What will happen if AI tech is mature and people have little work to do?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35327092

by xiaoyu2006 • 3 years ago

5 18 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

PaulHoule2• 3 years ago

Well... People will say that jobs involving physical skills remain but there is a lot of progress in robotics although I quit posting articles about that to HN because they never get a second vote.

wsgeorge2• 3 years ago

I quit posting articles about that to HN because they never get a second vote.

Just because your links don't make the frontpage doesn't mean you should stop sharing. HN is a hard nut to crack to get something to get the attention you think it deserves, but people check out /newest/ quite often, as the frontpage gets stale quickly.

13years3• 3 years ago

Yes, they may be the last to go, but it is just a matter of time theoretically.

The problem is that "having something to do", doesn't stop at jobs. AI is consuming everything including creative spaces. There is going to be a struggle for finding meaning.

wsgeorge2• 3 years ago

Depending on how mature AI will be, people's work will involve telling AIs what they want it to do, rather than doing the work themselves. I wrote about this here [0] because it seems like a logical step after technology improves any level of work.

What I believe this will mean is that there will be a glut of creations, because many more people will be able to build and create stuff by telling AIs what they want.

I'm not sure how this affects the economics of it all.

[0] https://medium.com/sort-of-like-a-tech-diary/ideas-will-be-k...

mindcrime• 3 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35320972

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35319861

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35310891

LinuxBender2• 3 years ago

If by AI you mean the current LLM's using BigData like OpenAI then I doubt this will happen. All iterations of that confidently spew lies, half-truths and highly biased output. Should someone hire that thing to write software or control anything important then I would expect anything it works on to go horribly sideways, especially if the assigned project is complex.

But I could be wrong. If I am wrong then my hope is everyone has enough free time to to watch all the episodes of M.A.S.H. while simultaneously retraining in something else, whatever the next something else may be.

xiaoyu20063• 3 years ago

By AI I mean AGIs, not LLM.

LinuxBender2• 3 years ago

Have any of them successfully completed any complex projects to date that would have required critical thinking on the part of a human? Are we using any software or complex machinery created by AGI's yet? Do we own any products created by them or is everything they do still PoC/experimental at this point? Are any of the AGI prototypes currently being adopted and utilized by retail or industrial sectors?

The reason I ask is that AFAIK everything I have ever used was created either by humans and/or simple robots that have existed for quite some time.

PaulHoule2• 3 years ago

To elaborate @LinuxBender's argument, AGI might be just as far away today as it seemed two years ago.

ChatGPT has a lot in common with

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

in that it hijacks people's perception of others and desire for closure to make people perceive it has a personality when it really doesn't. In particular it seems to have a hypnotic ability that comes out of its "highest probability" approach to text generation and how HFRL trains it to write text that pleases people -- ChatGPT's bullshitting goes right past many people's critical thinking capability and if anything is dangerous about it, it is that.

Those people hypnotized by it inevitability think that adding more parameters and more processing power to it will make it overcome any and all limitations but that's likely to be wrong, instead it will reach some asymptote where you feed it more resources and it only improves marginally. That's the most dangerous place in technology development, it's like Uber putting in $25 billion into subsidizing half priced taxi rides and thinking the next $1 billion will make it a profitable business.

On the other hand if you looked at arXiv instead of blog postings on HN you'd see that people frequently do "zero-shot" prompting, get the same 70% accuracy that the blog posters do, then fine-tune a similar model on a modest sized training set and get 95% accuracy. The way I'd put it is that there are 13 users of transformer models listed here

https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/quicktour

and y'all are obsessed with just one of them. With fine-tuning a model with fewer parameters and a modest amount of training data will thoroughly trash ChatGPT at specific tasks most of the time. The people who download models from huggingface and learn to use them will be putting applications in front of customers while people messing around randomly w/ GPT-N will be forever pushing bubbles around under the rug.

However, that kind of generative model can be a lot more powerful when it is combined with systems that can do the things it can't do. For instance having it "shell out" to Python or Wolfram Alpha. People are perplexed when they give it instructions which it inevitably quits following after a while, but in addition to not having the correct structure to obey programming language like instructions, the instructions will inevitably fall out of the attention window and disappear and it's no wonder it loses track. See

https://jake.mirror.xyz/sPZECVTkrbVq4DerB13Thvqq_XqsDGwTBDD3...

Now, if there was some program surrounding ChatGPT that implemented executive control (what that guy really wants) that would rewrite the prompt, keep the instructions in the window (much shorter because they only concern ChatGPT's area of competence, and move all the things ordinary software does well (scorekeeping) into ordinary software.

We will eventually see things that work like an SAT/SMT solver or theorem prover that is integrated w/ an LLM, much like the way Alpha Go integrates "old AI" heuristic search with a neural network heuristic.

Real advances in the capability of those chatbots will involve approaches that avoid the structural weaknesses of chatbots, not an appeal to Moore's Law. The asymptote of naked chatbots is already in sight I think, but the asymptote of hybrid systems is further away in both time and capability.

abudabi1234• 3 years ago

People could imagine a better world in the future like Arthur C. Clarke if flights in their imagination is their thing to do. There have always been servants and the people they serve. They did their thing. There was a time when a room had six servants, the team leader pointing and the team doing their thing.

The city idea could disappear and everybody gets to live the best version of possible life the technology affords, the inhibitor seems to be old heads in the machinery. We should be so far ahead to where things are because billionaires like Bill G and company don't get it.

13years3• 3 years ago

I expect there is going to be a crisis of finding meaning. As much as we like to rid ourselves of "work", struggle is also a part of human experience in which we find value. Furthermore, AI will not contain itself to only jobs. Its impacts will be broad into society itself and what we do recreationally.

For something that explores these concepts and possibilities much deeper, I've written extensively on this subject at the following - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things

abudabi1234• 3 years ago

To parrot Elon M after I say A.I. is only the beginning to extending consciousness to the stars and understand the Universe, all that is out there we may at this stage only know five percent.

13years3• 3 years ago

I think the issue is that such contemplations are taking a very large leap forward over a moat that we don't know yet how to cross.

The moat being, assuming we could create a "safe" ASI, the transition from where we are now moving forward to that point without essentially destroying ourselves. Even the primitive AI that we have now is looking like it will bring about potential severe issues with verifiable reality and trust. That is likely an untenable existence for stable social order.

xiaoyu20063• 3 years ago

Nice link.

Finding "the meaning of life" is often distracted by the heavy burden put by survival. When we don't have to work there will be a hard time picking up this old philosophical question.

abudabi1234• 3 years ago

Study sample populations of super rich early retirees, or ordinary Fortran/Lisp/Cobol programmer retirees. The meaning of life question is unproductive anti-social navel gazing.

jschveibinz• 3 years ago

Read this and then realize how much work there is yet to do:

http://encyclopedia.uia.org/en

Ask HN: What will happen if AI tech is mature and people have little work to do?

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