I don’t agree with nearly anything you said here. I think we’re looking at path one for the most part, augmentation, not replacement. It doesn’t matter what business believes one whit. It matters entirely what the reality supports. Otherwise the morons who fired their arts team have to spend the time and money to build a new one once their competition rubs their face in their mistake.
Richard Stallman is a bit out there, to put it gently.
AGI will happen no matter what we do. I think is unavoidable. I don’t think any amount of caution or regulation will prevent it, it will just happen in another country. But it’s still worth trying when it makes sense. It’s too early right now. There may well be no room for humans in such a world, nobody knows yet, but I also don’t think we can escape our fate. It may be that all biological intelligent life that builds technological civilization also inevitably makes themselves obsolete through that same innovation.
Focusing on AI as the thing to fix for people losing jobs is just stupid. The thing to fix is the unjust society with no safety net that you guys have created in the USA. Start there. Start today.
Because change is upon us and will not stop. We turn the wheel and the wheel turns us.
>Richard Stallman is a bit out there, to put it gently.
You're not wrong, but HN lionizes this guy so much that the few things he got right are worth leveraging for rhetorical effect.
>Focusing on AI as the thing to fix for people losing jobs is just stupid. The thing to fix is the unjust society with no safety net that you guys have created in the USA.
The USA absolutely does need a working social safety net, but other countries are not guaranteed to be better. The original article was talking about China, so I must mention that China's welfare program is arguably worse. For example, they don't have internal freedom of movement. In China, when you lose your job, you have to go back to the town you were born in.
But regardless of that, I think you missed why I was talking about transfers of wealth. The problem is that if we restrict AI to a technological priesthood of a few companies, the size or strength of the safety net won't matter. AI companies will be big enough to do to the world economy what Samsung did to South Korea. Tax the robots to give welfare to the structurally unemployed? Sure, that's fine, until OpenAI gets tired of paying confiscatory taxes on GPT-12 and starts overthrowing governments[0].
The underlying problem is economic centralization. Countries that get all their revenue from one thing (e.g. petrochemicals and fossil fuels) either turn into dictatorships or are overthrown by them. This is because economic enfranchisement - i.e. having a large labor force that is paid and educated well - is a backstop for democracy and against dictatorship. Currently, the ownership model that Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI are pursuing is extremely centralized, with everyone just calling into their servers and paying them in order to make the magic happen. The model weights are trade secret, and increasingly so is the training methodology and model architecture. These are not benevolent companies creating the future, these are dictators that haven't realized the extent of their power yet.
Sure, yes, artists won't be replaced long term. But they will have new bosses, worse than the old ones: the companies that own the AI they need to operate effectively. Sort of like how every artist needs to pay a troll toll to Adobe, or to Amazon, or to Apple today. Modern tech companies operate as quasi-governments, without any of the democratic accountability or constitutional protections that actual governments can provide. I see no reason why AI - general, superintelligent, or otherwise - will be any different. It'll just be worse. Unless we have distributed ownership of the underlying software and models to ensure that structural unemployment does not turn into economic disenfranchisement.
Richard Stallman is a bit out there, to put it gently.
AGI will happen no matter what we do. I think is unavoidable. I don’t think any amount of caution or regulation will prevent it, it will just happen in another country. But it’s still worth trying when it makes sense. It’s too early right now. There may well be no room for humans in such a world, nobody knows yet, but I also don’t think we can escape our fate. It may be that all biological intelligent life that builds technological civilization also inevitably makes themselves obsolete through that same innovation.
Focusing on AI as the thing to fix for people losing jobs is just stupid. The thing to fix is the unjust society with no safety net that you guys have created in the USA. Start there. Start today.
Because change is upon us and will not stop. We turn the wheel and the wheel turns us.