amag

And in Sweden, another "nordic socialist country", there's no tax on property nor inheritance, as well as very low taxes on invested capital. There are about 1.5x more USD-billionaires per capita in Sweden than in the US. I think there's room for some more taxes.

You mean I can't sue society if I die nine years into retirement?

are predicted to get to what 90-95 on average?

That may be true, but will we (who are in our 40's now) have the same quality of life at 90-95 as a now 75-year old will have at 80-85?

Of course there is no guarantee that your 65-75 years will be good, but it's a lot more likely that your 65-75 years will be good than your 75-85 years.

This is truly sad. As a Swede I fear my country may follow suite. The retirement age in Sweden used to be 65 and now it's 67.

Looking at older people around me, most lead a much less active life after 75. So, if we were lucky we used to have some 10 good years of doing whatever we wanted before old age and age-related diseases start affecting us so much we become limited to a much smaller world. But now we have maybe eight years and if we follow Denmark, five years.

I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself. Travel, play golf, cross a continent in a camper or climb a mountain.

Well, people in offices need new shiny phones every year and new Teslas to get to the office after all...

I really wish people would stop talking about MD5 already. It is almost never the answer. On a modern CPU you get HW accelerated SHA-256, it will always be much faster than your best software MD5. If your SHA-256 hash is too long, chop it up, it will still be better than MD5 for the same bit length.

Perhaps the doom isn't so imminent?

Perhaps, or perhaps we don't know what the fall of civilization looks like? I remember watching a talk by Jonathan Blow where he poses that question. Did the Egyptians who built the pyramids realize when their civilization fell or did it just look like business as usual until it suddenly didn't?

Last I used it, even pretty small grammars took forever to build. I had to be very diligent not to let the grammar cpp-file depend on anything else in my codebase.

If you for instance work with software developers, true vulnerability shows at a code review not at a occasional game of soccer or similar. Few software developers identify themselves as great soccer players so it's not a threat to their identity to be perceived as bad at it.

Also consistently forgetting the 15 times larger population.

As I've said countless times in other comments, this is not a shallow job security issue. My post is about how I believe AI will change us as people and society in a much more fundamental way than we may think. In ways we might not have considered. And not all for good.

The bleakness you feel might be due to a poverty of imagination.

Thank you for your diagnosis. It may _also_ be due to the opposite. If you know anything about how the brain works, you'd know that in general more imaginative people are more anxious.

No, I don't think it is simple. In fact I think it is impossible. Just looking at the division in this thread tells me that there will never even be an agreement for taking such a stand much less follow through.

AI does not make stuff like this go away. It actually frees more people to become these imbue-ers of meaning, if they are so inclined.

Yeah, but in that very example I feel the value and narrative behind it is in the memory of the grandfather's toil. When we no longer toil, there will be no horse shoes for our grandchildren to make sculptures of.

Of course it's an absurd argument but my point is that in a fully automated world in abundance we will have 10 billion tourists.

Also I like to differ between performing and creating. For instance playing the piano might still be worthwhile but creating new music will lose its allure as AI will do it for you, faster and better. Saying that it's the same thing as there has always been someone who is better at creating than you, is a flawed argument. With AI there will be an infinite amount of creators that are better than you. Also AI isn't just competition, it's also your ally but the kind who'll say "step aside and I'll fix this for you."

Yeah, but it's only possible because we, the software engineers, make it so. We could as a collective refuse to work on AI but we won't because it's a pretty, shiny, object with far too much lure for us to resist.

No need when I can examine myself to know myself :). While not actively working for it, I'm at least inspired by the FIRE movement. I am also self-employed so I don't see job security as the meaning of life.

Still this whole thread has been illuminating, maybe part of my fear comes from identifying strongly with being creative and making things, and seeing that turned into something automated.

Thanks for this optimistic post and to be clear I don't expect alphacode to put me out of a job. I've seen the hilarious examples where people get ChatGPT to for instance claim that abacus-based computing is faster than GPU-based computing.

We're far from there with AI yet but we're on a trajectory and that's what worries me.

But in the short term I definitely agree with you.

Our society currently affords ample opportunity to "productively" avoid those questions.

I fully agree.

Some people already have answers to those questions, and stand to gain from that toil being removed.

I used to believe that but with the recent improvements in AI, I think it's only true to an extent. Not all personalities are equal. As AI's power in the creative fields increase those fields will more and more become a question of who has the most money to throw at AI processing. Superficially it might seem the same as two-three centuries ago when rich people had famous artists paint them but it's not.

I fear where we're at with AI is the beginning of the end for human creativity. Of course I hope I'm wrong. I hoped I was wrong about my skepticism when I first learned of Facebook in 2007, but as it turned out it has and continues to be a net negative force in our world much bigger than I could imagine.

Thank you for the ad hominem attack. It's always a pleasure to discuss things with people who like to jump to conclusions and assume things about people they don't know anything about.

Personally I prefer not to pass judgement on a person based on the very little knowledge that can be gleamed from a post like this. But maybe, just maybe if you actually read what I have written (in other comments as well) things might clear up for you.

As I stated in other posts, this isn't really a fear about losing my job as much as on losing my will to live...

It isn't? So companies aren't trying to produce things as cheap as possible to increase their margins? And robots that are never sick, takes no vacation, needs no rest and are mostly an upfront investment aren't cheaper than people?

Having cheaper goods thanks to ai will improve our living standards

Well, or at least we will have more cheaply produced goods.

And when there are 10 billion people at the base camp of Mount Everest because they have nothing better to do?

These are all good options of course, still with the lack of creative things, it might not be enough for all people.

The problem is that those people you are talking about already are the first victims of automation. They have to work two jobs because just one doesn't pay enough when a company can automate it cheaper. The road ahead is not nicely paved, a lot more people will suffer before a fully automated abundant world.

So despite your disingenuous reading of my comment it is not "Oh, poor me I will be bored!", it's "Is the goal we're heading for worth the price?" and I don't think it is.

There are ways to fix people needing two jobs to feed their family that isn't spelled "automation" or "AI".

This! Perfectly stated!

I feel many people are just reading the first paragraph of my post and reacting to that, my point is further down in my original post.

Still to reply to your comment:

Sure, in the short term that is true, but I'm thinking long-term consequences... If you would have told me ten years ago where we would be at today with AI development I wouldn't have believed it. Would you? So where will we be in another ten years?

You misinterpret, I'm not worried about my job. I wouldn't mind working less but I'm worried that sooner than we think we will be reduced to pure consumers (we're already pretty far ahead in that respect) and then life will lose its meaning...

But that's my point, when we get where we're heading you won't need a cooking recipe website, an AI will cook much better than you could.

"Ok, great, then I don't have to cook!"

Yeah, but what will you do instead? We will be reduced to pure consumers as anything worthwhile to produce will be produced better and faster by an AI.