Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/will-ais-take-all-our-jobs-and-end-human-history-or-not-well-its-complicated/

by lukakopajtic • 6 months ago

95 168 6 months ago

writings.stephenwolfram.com

reactordev• 6 months ago

(2023)

saberience• 6 months ago

ChatGPT, please summarise this long essay by Stephen Wolfram into a couple of pithy sentences:

TLDR: AI won’t “end work” so much as endlessly move the goalposts, because the universe itself is too computationally messy to automate completely. The real risk isn’t mass unemployment—it’s that we’ll have infinite machine intelligence and still argue about what’s worth doing.

ori_b3• 6 months ago

Why would we argue if the machine is better at knowing what's worth doing? Why wouldn't we ask the machine to decide, and then do it?

evilantnie• 6 months ago

There are infinite things worth doing, a machines ability to actually know what's worth doing in any given scenario is likely on par with a human's. What's "Worth doing" is subjective, everything comes down to situational context. Machines cannot escape the same ambiguity as humans. If context is constant, then I would assume overlapping performance on a pretty standard distribution between humans and machines.

Machines lower the marginal cost of performing a cognitive task for humans, it can be extremely useful and high leverage to off load certain decisions to machines. I think it's reasonable to ask a machine to decide when machine context is higher and outcome is de-risked.

Human leverage of AGI comes down to good judgement, but that too is not uniformly applied.

c22• 6 months ago

Why would we let a machine decide what's worth doing? In what way could its decisions be better? Better for who?

autokad• 6 months ago

back in 2023 when this article was written, you'd get downvoted into oblivion on hacker news for using AI to summarize a very long article/post.

tim33311• 6 months ago

I suspect that slop is fake! I don't think ChatGPT would have said "endlessly move the goal posts".

dzdt• 6 months ago

(2023)

eloisant• 6 months ago

AI is evolving so fast, and you post an article from 2023?

AlexandrB3• 6 months ago

What a weird complaint given that the post is trying to address the general question, not whether ChatGPT 3.5.0.1 or whatever replaces humans today.

tony_cannistra• 6 months ago

Not much of a historian, I see.

alexjray• 6 months ago

Even if they automate all our current jobs uniquely human experiences will always be valuable to us and will always have demand.

wincy• 6 months ago

Sounds like it’s time to become a Michelin Star chef. Or a plumber.

scottyah• 6 months ago

Seems like entertainers/influencers are doing the best.

sramam• 6 months ago

What fraction of the remaining population would be able to pay for these services?

b1122• 6 months ago

For AI, yes.

For AGI? Do you care about uniquely ant experience? Bacteria?

Why would AGI care? Which now runs the planet?

IncreasePosts• 6 months ago

Considering the lengths many people go to help preserve nature and natural areas, yes, I would sayany people care about the uniquely ant experience.

AlexandrB3• 6 months ago

I think it's academic because I suspect we're much further from AGI than anyone thinks. We're especially far from AGI that can act in physical space without human "robots" to carry out its commands.

lifetimerubyist• 6 months ago

Do you care about uniquely ant experience? Bacteria?

Ethology? Biology? We have entire fields of science to these things so obviously we care to some extent.

Mordisquitos2• 6 months ago

Why would AGI choose to run the planet?

danaris3• 6 months ago

...Well, why would aliens care, when they take over the planet? Or the Tuatha De Danan come back and decide we've all been very wicked? Because right now, those are just about as likely as AGI taking over.

sodapopcan• 6 months ago

For those not living terminally online, yes.

falcor843• 6 months ago

There's a bit of a circular argument here - even if we human always assign intrinsic value to ourselves and our kin, I don't see a clear argument that human capabilities will have external value to the economy at large.

AlexandrB3• 6 months ago

"The economy" is humans spending money on stuff and services. So if humands always assign intrinsic value to ourselves and our kin...

BurningFrog2• 6 months ago

"The economy" is entirely driven by human needs.

If you "unwind" all the complexities in modern supply chains, there are always human people paying for something they want at the leaf nodes.

Take the food and clothing industries as obvious examples. In some AI singularity scenario where all humans are unemployed and dirt poor, does all the food and clothing produced by the automated factories just end up in big piles because we naked and starving people can't afford to buy them?

gdilla• 6 months ago

sex with humans - still hard to replicate. for now. sex workers should charge by the second since techbros are so used to that model now.

ramesh31• 6 months ago

Even if they automate all our current jobs uniquely human experiences will always be valuable to us and will always have demand.

I call this the Quark principle. On DS9, there are matter replicators that can perfectly recreate any possible drink imaginable instantly. And yet, the people of the station still gather at Quark's and pay him money to pour and mix their drinks from physical bottles. As long as we are human, some things will never go away no matter how advanced the technology becomes.

TheOtherHobbes• 6 months ago

In Star Trek lore replicated food/drink is always one down on taste/texture from the real thing.

guluarte• 6 months ago

More food chains keep opening up even when there is plenty of food available. The pie just gets bigger. Every tech shift was supposed to "end work" and yet here we are, busy with jobs that didn't exist 20 years ago.

The real issue isn't jobs dying. It's who gets the money from all this and whether new needs show up fast enough to give people something to do. With software we don't really know the limit yet, unlike food where your stomach tells you when to stop.

nemomarx• 6 months ago

In the long run transitions like this work out and new jobs show up, but the people who had the old jobs don't always make the jump or keep equivalent pay.

Could be it shakes out in a generation or two, of course.

mips_avatar8• 6 months ago

Outside of America people aren't really stressed about AI. Like you go to Vietnam or Vienna they mostly just think that they will have a good life with AI. It's uniquely American to believe that your life will end when AI takes your job.

The problem isn't the AI it's that your access to basic rights is intermediated by a corporate job. American's need to decenter their self worth from their jobs. Like when I quit Microsoft I literally thought I was dying, but that's all an illusion from the corporations.

testfrequency• 6 months ago

I would argue this says more about how Americans view and treat life as their work instead of treating the world as their life.

briantakita• 6 months ago

It's part of the messianic end-times fervor that has been with America since the beginning...which is useful for imperial management...As it provides a constant source of existential judgement and dread...that religious/quasi-religious administrators can exploit.

pelasaco8• 6 months ago

Vienna? lol

tomjakubowski• 6 months ago

An art school in Vienna recently admitted an "AI student" as a publicity stunt.

https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/04/02/this-ai-successfull...

shevy-java2• 6 months ago

I think you do have a point here, but I should like to point out that, since you mentioned Vienna, barely anyone here sees AI being tightly integrated into anything. Sure, smartphone users may use it; and exams at universities may say "don't use AI", so people use it - but for most everyday stuff it is really barely noticeable here. This is why I also disagree with "they will have a good life with AI", because it assumes that AI plays a huge role here, which it really does not.

The AI hype is definitely much bigger in the USA - on that part we concur.

mips_avatar8• 6 months ago

Yeah but even if you believe the hype, if you're in a functioning country you don't think that your ability to house your family wrests on AI being worse at excel than you.

ewuhic2• 6 months ago

I am from Vienna, and this is completely false. Likewise, my friends from many countries, incl. Vietnam, also share the sentiment you describe as "American". Your point has no standing.

mips_avatar8• 6 months ago

Ok well I didn't meet everyone in Vienna or Vietnam, but those I did meet hadn't been laid off in the name of AI (yesterday three of my friends were laid off from Amazon). And if you're laid off in Vienna you still have access to healthcare, and there's a functioning safety net, and just generally a sense that you're not alone in this. In the united states my apartment has a homeless man living beneath it and every night you hear him either screaming because he doesn't have access to drugs or laughing because he does. There's a not so subtle attitude that maybe people like that deserve to die. So yes maybe people in Vienna don't like AI, but you are wrong that they fear it in the way Americans do.

motbus3• 6 months ago

Same, and I ain't in any of those locations.

The thing is that there will be less work, but that certainly is not looking like universal income. It is more like rich people will get rid of those who they don't need with some sort of "let's kill parasites" or "cutting weed" because the world is in danger of poor people destroying it. In certain ways, they are already trying to tell that to people so nobody notices that no single person should have a trillion or even a billion of money

Avicebron• 6 months ago

It's because most people are already teetering on the edge. The difference between working in software vs anywhere else in the US is that the average atlassianer or similar is spending 3 months 4 times a year writing js from beach resorts up and down Europe while keeping a condo in new york. The rest can't afford to own a home or dental insurance. So when people are threatening those people who barely have anything as it is they get heated.

alexjplant• 6 months ago

For a while my job was part of my identity in the way you describe not because "lol hypercapitalist American" but because I like computers and computers also pay the bills. I was writing software and doing technical stuff from a young age because I enjoyed it. I fell into doing it professionally because it was an obvious path. It didn't help that when you do this older people like it because they can use you as free/cheap labor which an impressionable kid might mistake for actual praise. It turns out I like other stuff too but it's hard to talk to people socially about obscure New Wave bands and continental philosophy and 90s neo-noir films whereas computers and gizmos and apps are a common frame of reference.

I guarantee you that these people exist in other countries too. Not everybody is a tech bro strawman.

advael2• 6 months ago

To "decenter [one's] self worth from [one's] job" would presumably require the fact that one's "access to basic rights is intermediated by a corporate job", no? This is a policy problem that needs to be solved by collective action, not a mindset problem that can be solved by personal growth

mips_avatar8• 6 months ago

No you have to decenter yourself from your pay to achieve it. People accept things like cutting of medicaid because they see their job success as a moral success. There's a lot you can do to start being the good in the world that doesn't require Washington's permission.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 6 months ago

It's uniquely American to believe that your life will end when AI takes your job.

It's probably because it's uniquely American for a sizable chunk of the workforce to have cushy jobs that appear ripe for the picking.

AI is not going to immediately replace food service work, manual labor, farming, hospitality, etc.

But it might replace quite high-paid software jobs, finance jobs, legal jobs, etc. One, if AI is good at anything it's things at least tangential to this. Two, these have costs high enough that off-setting is at least worth trying.

My suspicion is that ultimately it will lead to more of these types of jobs, though it could easily come with a huge reduction - and the jobs aren't guaranteed to be in the same countries.

You could create 3x as many of these jobs, and still end up with -25% of them in the US. Who knows.

mips_avatar8• 6 months ago

The tech jobs were cushy because the tech companies bribed ambitious people to keep them from starting their own companies. Like it wasn't about hiring them because you needed them it was to keep them from competing against you. Like this was always a deal with the devil, but the idea that Microsoft has more of a right to the monopoly it has over OS operating systems than their employees have access to their healthcare is wrong. Like I think a lot of people are waking up to the idea that the promises their companies made to them were like the promises the devil made in that theirs fine print and they sold the company more than they realized.

Additionally all the startups offering to automate whitecollar work are going to run into a problem when they realize the jobs never needed to be done.

danaris3• 6 months ago

It's probably because it's uniquely American for a sizable chunk of the workforce to have cushy jobs that appear ripe for the picking.

What an arrogant statement.

Lots of people outside America have cushy jobs.

What's much more likely to be uniquely American is that if you lose your job there's nothing there to help you.

_ea1k• 6 months ago

A big part of it is insurance. Family coverage can easily cost $15-20k per year in the US. Avoiding the need to pay for this out of pocket drives a lot of people into less than optimal job dependence.

mips_avatar8• 6 months ago

That and housing, and inflation during covid. Like there's this idea that you don't really deserve anything in the United States.

raincole2• 6 months ago

your access to basic rights is intermediated by a corporate job

Lmao. America has worse social welfare than most developed countries, but it's still a heaven compared to most of the world. What you can find in food bank is a feast for billions of people on this planet.

American people are stressed about AI because American people are expensive. Like hella expensive. So the incentive to replace American workers is very strong.

hshdhdhj4444• 6 months ago

This is fantasy land.

Yeah, a rural farmer who’s never exposed to AI except when it made it possible for her to communicate with someone visiting the farm who dint speak the same languages isn’t worried about AI.

But policy makers, technologists, economists, the elite abs other educated people aware of more than the basics of AI are all concerned about its impacts.

defrost• 6 months ago

Or, local to where I am, rural farmers using AI bots to hint them on capital machine repairs (their gear runs into the millions), summarise ANOVA trials on grain crop samples, reinforce their personal conspiracy theories and biases, and answer a huge run of everyday queries.

Some can see the benefits. Some (with overlap) can see the downsides (wrong answers and enforcing bad traits).

But policy makers, technologists, economists, the elite a[nd] other educated people ..

also overlap with rural farmers.

I think a problem here is your image of what a rural farmer is.

A good many here are multi millionaires, in assets at least, have children in elite private schools, have family members in local, state, and federal government who started out farming, went to university, have careers that may include farming on the side, and retire to farming.

Next you'll be saying grandmothers can't code weather modelling and prediction software on Cyber 205's or something equally daft.

treenode• 6 months ago

This isn't true. People in India are worried about AI quite a bit.

skywhopper• 6 months ago

I admit I am suspicious of the claim that you know what all Americans, Austrians, or Vietnamese think about anything.

BirAdam• 6 months ago

If all jobs were taken by AI in a short time span, the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs. This is an unlikely scenario. Not all things will be made/run by AIs in a short time. It is far more likely that specific jobs in specific industries will be taken by AI, and AI will slowly take the labor market. This will drive down prices on products, services, and labor. Once human labor's price is low, and once many product prices are low, the overall employment level of humans will rise. The effect of AI then is actually just deflationary pressure on all prices over time.

The really scary part is what happens to all of the newly unemployed people between the falling prices part and the rising employment part. My guess is, governments and markets won't move quickly enough and unrest is what happens.

kelseyfrog3• 6 months ago

Except the services that are intractably human: educators, judges, lawyers, social workers, personal trainers, childcare workers.

Those will suffer the Baumol effect and their prices will rise to extraordinary levels.

p1esk• 6 months ago

The best educator I’ve ever had is ChatGPT.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 6 months ago

One would assume - if this were to happen - that supply and demand would bring prices back down, as everyone would rush to those fields.

oops2• 6 months ago

I imagine personal trainers and childcare workers would see a drop in demand and perhaps also an increase in supply if a bunch of people suddenly lost their jobs to AI.

ben_w3• 6 months ago

There's already examples of lawyers offloading work to ChatGPT even though they weren't allowed to. Also educators (and students), though if all other work is automated, what's there to educate for, and how would the prospective students pay?

Social work, childcare, for now I agree:

My expectation is that general purpose humanoid robots, being smaller than cars and needing to do a strict superset of what is needed to drive a car, happen at least a decade after self driving cars lose all of the steering wheels, and the geofences, and any remote safety drivers. And that's even with expected algorithmic improvements, if we don't get algorithmic improvements then hardware improvements alone will force this to be at least 18 years' between that level of FSD and androids.

danaris3• 6 months ago

The big tech AI barons absolutely claim that their LLMs can replace educators, judges, lawyers, and personal trainers. I've seen some vague claims about childcare robots, but for whatever reasons anything that's not pure software appears to be currently outside their field of vision. They're unlikely to make any claims about social workers because there's not enough money in it.

No; the services that seem most intractably human, at least given the current state of things, are very much those in personal care roles—nurses, elder care workers, similar sorts of on-the-ground, in-person medical/emotional care—and trades, like plumbing, construction, electrical work, handcrafts, etc.

Until we start seeing high-quality general-purpose robots (whether they're humanoid or not), those seem likely to be the jobs safest from direct attempts to replace them with LLMs. That doesn't mean they'll be safe from the overall economic fallout, of course, nor that the attempts to replace knowledge work of all types will actually succeed in a meaningful way.

raincole2• 6 months ago

There are millions of jobs that can be fully automated with 20th century technology but are still done by humans today because 1) third world labor is just too cheap 2) unions and other job protection policies.

Therefore the scenario where 'all jobs being replaced in a short time span' is simply impossible.

ben_w3• 6 months ago

Sometimes that delays it.

But when the tech is good enough and cheap enough then the picketing unions find their only barganing chip, that of witholding their labor, has become a toothless threat: no matter how long and hard a person of the profession "computer"* refuses to work for me for daring to have an unauthorised "electronic brain"**, the absense of that labour will not cause me any loss.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

** https://archive.org/details/electronicbrainh00cook/mode/1up

brewdad• 6 months ago

We are already at a point where the richest 10% of Americans represent half of total consumer spending. A lot of companies would fail but plenty of them would survive just fine if we assume AI won't take literally ALL of the jobs.

As for the civil unrest, I see Minneapolis as a bit of a dry run of what it would take to remove large numbers of presumably poor minorities along with anyone else who objects. The job is clearly more than the leadership expected but it still seems within the realm of possibility given the fact the minority party leaders are barely saying no to those in power.

AnotherGoodName• 6 months ago

Also just to be clear on the outcome of what you said: Humans will be cheaper than AI in order to compete.

AI uses 10litres of water and 10kwh of power per day to digg a hole? You'd better do it for less human!

I'm not sure on the human needs costs vs the AI costs and what lifestyle it would allow me. I'm sure as shit not having kids in such a world. I suspect it's ghetto like meager living while competing against machines optimised to do a job.

tim33311• 6 months ago

In the UK 10litres of water and 10kwh of power cost about £2.50. Hiring someone to dig holes probably runs 50x that.

ASalazarMX2• 6 months ago

If machines did all the repetitive, labor intensive, productive work, including building more machines, the natural consequence would be a very disruptive rethinking of economics. Post-scarcity is only a disaster if money exists. People would still work, but as a hobby, not as a way of survival.

Think of it as if in a few generations, everyone had the motivations of a rich junior, for better or worse.

IMO, this is a natural consequence of the industrial revolution, and the information revolution. We started to automate physical labor, then we started to automate mental labor. We're still very far form it, but we're going to automate whole humans (or better) eventually.

Edit: I think I replied to the wrong comment, feel free to ignore this.

myrmidon6• 6 months ago

"Disruptive rethinking of economics" is a very optimistic way to put this IMO.

The big problem I see is that there is little incentive for "owners" (of datacenters/factories/etc) to share anything with such hobbyist laborers, because hobbyist labor has little to no value to them.

All the past waves of automation provided a lot of entirely new job opportunities AND increased overall demand (by factory workers siphoning off some of the gained wealth and spending it themselves). AI does neither.

pelasaco8• 6 months ago

those are just "wishful thinking" or "Noble lies" that we are used to in the post-truth world. Until now, only creative jobs are going away. Music, Arts, Software development.. Construction Work, Garbage Collector etc, are much safer than expected after the "Robot Revolution"

lm28469• 6 months ago

If machines did all the repetitive, labor intensive, productive work, including building more machines, the natural consequence would be a very disruptive rethinking of economics. Post-scarcity is only a disaster if money exists. People would still work, but as a hobby, not as a way of survival.

That's what they told us during the industrial revolution. And also what they told us during the last automation rush of the 70s/80s

It's a political problem, not a technological one, and it's been that way for at least 100 years.

Veedrac• 6 months ago

the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs

What do you think money is...?

Money is a way to indirectly trade labour and goods. If a job is automated, that labour doesn't disappear into the aether, it's still in the tradable pot of total goods and services. You cannot empty a pot by filling it. A world where a company though automation has made there nobody else to productively sell to is a world where _by definition_ they own all the output that they could otherwise have traded for.

mannanj3• 6 months ago

If all jobs were taken by AI in a short time span, the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs

I think The companies would go out of business if the government did not subsidize them as a matter of public or national security interest. Do you think that would not be the case? It doesn't take much for a company with money to lobby for this and for the power of marketing and mainstream media to make the public perceive this as the right decision - in fact a study of our history would reveal this as the more likely scenario so as a company racing to render the labor market obsolete its in their interest to disrupt it to capture any amount of it.

ef2efe3• 6 months ago

The end game is nationalisation lmao. How people cant see this is mad...

It wouldnt be the first time in history a govt has taken into their hands an organisation that is deemed too powerful.

ericmcer• 6 months ago

We might just keep making more jobs and coming up with more busy work to keep people grinding away for 40 hours a week.

If you look at 1940, women were ~24% of the workforce. Now in 2025 they are ~48%. The numbers are probably similar with immigrant workers having increased greatly in the last 80 years.

If you view AI workers as just more labor flooding the workforce it might have a similar affect. If we flooded the 1940s economy with 10s of millions of qualified women and immigrant laborers people would have viewed it as devastating to the economy, but introduced gradually over time we arrive at a point now where we fear what would happen if they went away.

morkalork• 6 months ago

That example doesn't hold up once you expand your view to other countries. Where are all these jobs that magically materialize in labour surplus economies like Brazil or Bangladesh?

cyanydeez• 6 months ago

I think you arn't paying attention: AS long as there's 1 seller and 1 buyer, Capitalism will happily burn the rest of the population.

Sure there's some other limits on social cohesion, but the idea that we can't squeeze upward and leave a bunch of poor people destitute is optimistic.

It's also how you ensure no one thinks: Hey, maybe capitalism isn't an optimal distribution of social good.

shevy-java2• 6 months ago

This was written in 2023 though.

recrush• 6 months ago

We should enjoy using up our quota instead of working ourselves to the bone.

empath75• 6 months ago

“Computers can never show creativity or originality”. But—perhaps disappointingly—that’s surprisingly easy to get, and indeed just a bit of randomness “seeding” a computation can often do a pretty good job,

---

This is, I think, not what people mean when they say "creative" or "original".

Creativity is not simply writing something nobody has written before, as he said, that would be trivial and doesn't even require a computer, you could just shuffle a deck of cards and write out the full sequence and chances are no other person in history has written down that sequence before.

And I think Borges made a reasonable argument that simply writing down the text of Don Quixote verbatim could be a creative act.

Creativity is about _intentionally_ expressing a _point of view_ under some constraints.

When people say LLMs can't be creative, what I think mostly they are getting at is that they lack intentionality and/or a distinct point of view. (i do not have a strong opinion about whether they do or if it's impossible for them to have them)

myrmidon6• 6 months ago

A big short-term risk that I see is that AI is going to cripple wealth redistribution mechanisms that we currently rely on.

Most willing persons have access to income by providing labor right now. If the value of that labor diminishes because AI can do most of it for cheaper/free, that is a big problem because wealth/class barriers become insurmountable and the american dream basically dies completely.

Automation in the past suffered much less from this because only a subset of jobs was affected by it, and it still relied on human labor to build, maintain and operate the machines, unlike AI.

I'm curious if AI is gonna spawn comparable "workers rights" movements like in the past, but I would expect inequality to increase a lot until some solution is found.

tim33311• 6 months ago

It'll probably go kinda socialist. From AI according to its ability to each according to his need.

direwolf202• 6 months ago

What incentive do politicians have to make that happen, when they could more easily blame immigrants and transgender people?

ChrisArchitect• 6 months ago

(2023)

Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177257

pelasaco8• 6 months ago

A country automates everything and builds paradise on Earth — and the next day, a neighboring country invades it. People are still people. Even with all the AI in the world, two rockets hitting the power plants and we´re back to the Stone Age. I hope the people making decisions for us have thought through all these scenarios and risks.

tim33311• 6 months ago

People certainly think about defence and invasions. AI millitary drones are already a thing in Ukraine https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2026/01/02/ukrain...

Also rockets hitting the power plants there is not ususual.

pelasaco8• 6 months ago

well in general it still is unusual, because it is considered "against the human rights". It will become more common and accepted, if everything is connected with AI. Then the primary goal in one invasion will be turn off the AI and therefore turn off the lights.

yodon• 6 months ago

I read it. He used many words. Did he say anything?

dang• 6 months ago

Discussed at the time (of the article):

Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history? It’s complicated - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177257 - March 2023 (172 comments)

gizajob• 6 months ago

Not.

HPsquared• 6 months ago

AI will Jevons Paradox human labour.

Tasks that aren't currently feasible, will become feasible.

That's if AI ends up being as productive as they say it will be

CrzyLngPwd• 6 months ago

Take all jobs? Yes.

End human history? No.

tsoukase• 6 months ago

If an LLM hallucinates in 1% of occasions and gives subpar output in 5%, this kills his effectiveness to replace anyone. Imagine a support guy on the other side of the phone to speak gibberish 10 times a day. Now, imagine a doctor. These will never lose their jobs.

Bratmon• 6 months ago

Imagine a support guy on the other side of the phone to speak gibberish 10 times a day.

A massive improvement?

simianwords5• 6 months ago

but llm's dont speak gibberish 10 times a day even now. from my usage, chatgpt has not said one obviously strange thing since o3 came out.

HEmanZ2• 6 months ago

What are you working on that they are so knowledgeable?Even the best models absolutely make stuff up, even to this day. I literally spend all day every day working with them (all latest ChatGPT models) and it’s still 10-15% BS.

I had ChatGPT 5.2 thinking straight up make up an api after I pasted the full api spec to it earlier today. And built its whole response around a public api that did not exist. And Claude cli with sonnet 4.5 made up the craziest reason why my curl command wasn’t working (that curl itself was bugged, not the obvious it can’t resolve the dn it tried to use) and almost went down a path of installing a bunch of garbage tools.

These are not ready to be unsupervised. Yet.

in-silico• 6 months ago

The models don't need to be perfect. They only need to be as reliable as humans.

Emergency department doctors misdiagnose about 5% of patients [1], so replacing them with an LLM that hallucinates on 1% of cases would actually be a significant improvement.

1: https://effectivehealthcare.ahrq.gov/products/diagnostic-err...

einrealist• 6 months ago

Unless the economy crashes and I die to the consequences, there are so many pre-AI hard-cover books to read.....

HNisCIS• 6 months ago

Lets assume auto-complete does continue to progress at a rate that threatens most knowledge worker jobs and then we manage to automate the rest by using it.

There is a particular mental disorder where people will horde wealth at absolutely all costs, personal or societal, until everyone else is dead (see NZ bunkers). We commonly see this as "the billionaire class".

IF things go in that direction we need to be ready to depose all of these billionaires. I mean that quite seriously.

IF this future comes, there is a very quickly closing window where preventing them from killing all of us for their own gain is possible. After a point, surveillance and their control over state violence will be so complete that it's impossible to do anything about it.

fmlpp• 6 months ago

I think you are being severely oblivious about the amount of labor that's done every our on this world of us.

dyauspitr• 6 months ago

End human history? There might be some pain for a few decades but then eventually there will be some sort of utopia.

anilgulecha• 6 months ago

The essay is direction-less. For someone looking at a cogent take, I think the recent post by Anthropic's CEO is one such: https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technol.... I'm still processing it, but it's put across logically, albeit biased viewpoint.

victorbjorklund• 6 months ago

There is a simple fact that means we won’t have zero jobs in the future. Human wants is endless. At no point will humans say ”that is enough we don’t need more” so will always have the incentive to use both capital and people.

Is certain jobs gonna be replaced? Probably.

Let’s say we make substantial advances in robotics and it makes sense to replace all the staff in McDonalds with machines? Yea, then those jobs are probably gone. But does it mean people won’t pay for an authentic restaurant experience? No, they might still wanna pay to eat food from a chef etc.

tim33311• 6 months ago

Also people like working to an extent even if it's non economic stuff like working on their golf swing or catching all the Pokemon.

direwolf202• 6 months ago

Jobs do not occur because of wants. They occur at the intersection of wants and economic possibilities. Economic possibilities might go to zero.

assimpleaspossi• 6 months ago

The most relevant thing about this thought is that we humans can always pull the plug.

tim33311• 6 months ago

I think the main conclusion that over the past half century, the ways people (at least in the US) spend their time have remained rather stable.

I suspect that will continue in spite of AI. Human nature doesn't change much.

ricardorivaldo• 6 months ago

what most otimist people don't undestant is that AI is a capitalist dream, work without proletariat, everything automated to serve the rulling class, but anyway, we can always eat the rich.

Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

Related Stories