Another luddite article complaining about farming automation putting farmers out of work, but a modern equivalent.
This article wrongly assumes AGI is not only possible but also imminent, because if they were taking into account only the transformation we're seeing from AI at the moment -- it wouldn't be a story as it is not job ending.
AGI, however, is mathematically impossible. The only people telling you otherwise are the CEOs of labs who need to publicly fundraise on this premise, while privately admitting bearish sentiments on AGI.
AGI bulls assume all of the following to be true: there are no constraints to grid infrastructure (clearly false), there are no manufacturing constraints for AI hardware (clearly false) and exponential accuracy, speed and efficiency improvements will continue (clearly false, it's slowing down already).
Hell, just look at local opposition to data center deployment. You can't even get DCs built in rural towns that would benefit dramatically from the 1,000+ temporary and permanent jobs. Incredibly bearish on AGI.
I'm a big fan of an economic philosophy known as distributism, popularized by G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc more than a century ago.
It basically says that the economy works best when ownership of productive property is as diffuse as possible -- when a high percentage of the population has some ownership, and it's not concentrated in the hands of a relatively few wealthy shareholders (in the case of capitalism) or the government (in the case of communism/socialism).
Under distributist principles, I would say that we should pursue economic policies that allow the ownership of productive AI to be widespread, whether that's in the form of cooperatives, employee ownership, or other means of giving the average person access to that ownership. (I acknowledge that it's currently possible to invest in publicly traded AI companies, but would prefer to see other ownership opportunities as well.)
Seriously Guardian, this has to be the least interesting question possible "if AI makes human labor obsolete", I mean FFS talk about a lack of understanding.
People see UBI and think, "Oh everyone will get basically what I have and I'm happy so they'll be happy too."
Humanity or economics don't work like that.
With capitalism we have the power to control our economic outcomes (to a large extent). Work more; earn more. This isn't perfect or always fair but life is never 100% fair.
With UBI, who do you think decides how much income you get?
And how do you think those people get that power?
And what happens when some resource is scarce and can't be given to everyone? Be it oil, medicine, medical services, food, clean water, a birth permit, etc.
Life isn't fair now - but it took a lot of blood and effort to get to this point and life can get A LOT more unfair if we're not careful.
“If AI makes human labor obsolete, who decides who gets to eat?”
And within six comments we’re back to the sacred mantra: it can’t even solve a trick logic puzzle from 1983, therefore capitalism remains intact.
Allow me to contribute in the proud tradition of the Extremely Calm Skeptic.
First, the entire premise is unserious. Labor cannot become obsolete because the model does not “understand.” I know this because someone on Twitter asked it a riddle about a barber and it got confused. An entity that fumbles a barber paradox is clearly incapable of displacing accountants, paralegals, translators, mid-level engineers, support staff, or analysts.
Second, demos are misleading. Yes, it can draft contracts, generate production code, summarize regulatory filings, build internal tools, design marketing campaigns, and tutor students. But those are not real jobs. Real jobs are the parts that feel difficult and validating when I do them. The fact that those parts are shrinking is a coincidence.
Third, intelligence is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is vibes. And regulation. And GPU supply. And “human judgment.” There will always be a final layer of ineffable judgment that only carbon-based life can provide. If pressed for examples, I will gesture broadly.
Fourth, labor markets adapt. We replaced elevator operators and invented social media managers. Therefore if large chunks of cognitive labor become cheap, the economy will effortlessly invent millions of new roles titled “Senior Human in the Loop.” The transition will be smooth. There will be no political consequences. History has a flawless track record here.
As for the eating question, that only becomes serious if labor is no longer the main mechanism for income distribution. And that won’t happen, because the models hallucinate sometimes. When something occasionally makes an error, it cannot possibly be economically transformative. By that standard, humans have been non-disruptive for millennia.
If I’m being honest, the resistance has less to do with token prediction and more to do with self-preservation. I invested years building scarce skills. Scarcity is flattering. If intelligence becomes abundant, that flattery evaporates. So I do what any rational actor would do: redefine scarcity.
When it automates my junior tasks, that’s augmentation.
When it handles mid-level tasks, that’s assistance.
When it approaches senior tasks, that’s hype.
If it ever clears that bar, I’ll discover a higher one.
This is not fear. This is prudent analysis performed while quietly pasting my entire codebase into three different models before standup.
So who decides who gets to eat?
If productive capacity detaches from human effort, ownership becomes the obvious lever. That’s not speculative. That’s how capital has always worked. But acknowledging that would mean treating the premise seriously.
Much easier to point at a cherry-picked failure and conclude that intelligence on tap changes nothing.
Anyway, back to my workflow where the fake autocomplete drafts the spec, writes the code, generates the tests, and explains the tradeoffs while I reassure myself that the important part was my supervision.
Industrial economic systems (including capitalism, which is better at it, but also Soviet communism for another) will always reinvest some of its surplus back into itself. That form is either scale or efficiency, the latter of which is usually the replacement of labor with capital. It may not do this very well or as fast as it could, but that transition is always permanent, and therefore cumulative.
So, what happens when we do that? Well, for awhile, nothing. When labor is the bottleneck, then there's always more outlets for it. But eventually there comes an inflection point, where there is so much labor replacement and the bar has been raised so high, that the surplus is in labor itself. At lower tiers, its value approaches 0. Spoiler alert: this point has already been passed. Probably everyone here knows multiple surplus individuals, who have no place in the economy, and the bar for their entry or reentry into it is so high now, they can only produce negative value in current market conditions.
So, we have an ever-increasing surplus of unrealized labor. Our overlords may feel bad about that for awhile, decide to bear the burden of a mass multitude of dependents. We better hope they do, because this works fine until it doesn't. The zeitgeist only needs to shift once for it to all be over. This won't happen tomorrow, but they only need to look at the balance sheet from a certain angle once for the massive cost center to be seen as yet another inefficiency to be optimized for. On long enough time scales, the probability of any possible event approaches 1.
> The problem is that the owners of these disruptive technologies must be convinced to do something that does not come naturally to them: share. Taxes in the US amount to less than 26% of GDP, 8 percentage points less than the OECD average. Capital taxation amounts to just over 2% of GDP. These numbers will have to go much higher, since people will no longer have wages to live on and will rely more heavily on government largesse.
The tone of this article is really frustrating, the author is seemingly living in a self-imposed box in which capital has an inalienable right to rule the world. "owners must be convinced to share" - No sir, they're not kings, nor were they elected into any position, and we don't have to "convince" them of anything.
We need to have a thorough discussion about what a future without human labor should look like, and whether we really want to live in a dystopia when the only thing preventing us from living in a utopia is the ego of a few rich assholes.
One way or another they will lose their kingdoms because they don't actually have an inalienable right to control the world's resources. They only had these ownership rights because they were [thought to be] good for society as a whole. In a robotic AI future that's no longer the case and those rights will no longer exist.
The only question is whether this transition will be peaceful or extremely violent.
We'll probably end up switching to something more like a socialist system - each according to their needs.
When China decided to allow capitalism they kept their socialist system running but allowed capitalism in parallel, at first in a small way but it picked up.
With AI you could probably do something a bit like that the other way. A small amount of UBI say that increases as AI takes on more work.
the real question is who is going to pay for the AI resource?
NONE of them are turning a profit.
NONE of them look to EVER turn a profit...
they're forcing it down everyones throats atm for mostly free, that will stop eventually. once it does the real cost of running these (currently) constantly growing services is going to start being charged to the users. the actual cost is going to be not very affordable.
in the end I suspect only tax payers will be paying for them via the only real owners... Governments.
20 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 40.0 ms ] threadMy hope is that a breakthrough makes these planet-eaters complete folly, as a $100 optical processor trounces them.
And we'll have all that defaulted power generation capacity to run our human heating and cooling needs.
That is, unless we spend trillions fill the black holes created upon stellar collapse. [0]
Grift can make that happen.
[0] The death star. Destroy a planet just to get quicker results. A total Faustian bargain. Now I can't afford memory chips. What'll it be next?
One of the biggest problem we have these days is that most people don't want to live in the countryside and consider that
This article wrongly assumes AGI is not only possible but also imminent, because if they were taking into account only the transformation we're seeing from AI at the moment -- it wouldn't be a story as it is not job ending.
AGI, however, is mathematically impossible. The only people telling you otherwise are the CEOs of labs who need to publicly fundraise on this premise, while privately admitting bearish sentiments on AGI.
AGI bulls assume all of the following to be true: there are no constraints to grid infrastructure (clearly false), there are no manufacturing constraints for AI hardware (clearly false) and exponential accuracy, speed and efficiency improvements will continue (clearly false, it's slowing down already).
Hell, just look at local opposition to data center deployment. You can't even get DCs built in rural towns that would benefit dramatically from the 1,000+ temporary and permanent jobs. Incredibly bearish on AGI.
It basically says that the economy works best when ownership of productive property is as diffuse as possible -- when a high percentage of the population has some ownership, and it's not concentrated in the hands of a relatively few wealthy shareholders (in the case of capitalism) or the government (in the case of communism/socialism).
Under distributist principles, I would say that we should pursue economic policies that allow the ownership of productive AI to be widespread, whether that's in the form of cooperatives, employee ownership, or other means of giving the average person access to that ownership. (I acknowledge that it's currently possible to invest in publicly traded AI companies, but would prefer to see other ownership opportunities as well.)
People see UBI and think, "Oh everyone will get basically what I have and I'm happy so they'll be happy too."
Humanity or economics don't work like that.
With capitalism we have the power to control our economic outcomes (to a large extent). Work more; earn more. This isn't perfect or always fair but life is never 100% fair.
With UBI, who do you think decides how much income you get?
And how do you think those people get that power?
And what happens when some resource is scarce and can't be given to everyone? Be it oil, medicine, medical services, food, clean water, a birth permit, etc.
Life isn't fair now - but it took a lot of blood and effort to get to this point and life can get A LOT more unfair if we're not careful.
“If AI makes human labor obsolete, who decides who gets to eat?”
And within six comments we’re back to the sacred mantra: it can’t even solve a trick logic puzzle from 1983, therefore capitalism remains intact.
Allow me to contribute in the proud tradition of the Extremely Calm Skeptic.
First, the entire premise is unserious. Labor cannot become obsolete because the model does not “understand.” I know this because someone on Twitter asked it a riddle about a barber and it got confused. An entity that fumbles a barber paradox is clearly incapable of displacing accountants, paralegals, translators, mid-level engineers, support staff, or analysts.
Second, demos are misleading. Yes, it can draft contracts, generate production code, summarize regulatory filings, build internal tools, design marketing campaigns, and tutor students. But those are not real jobs. Real jobs are the parts that feel difficult and validating when I do them. The fact that those parts are shrinking is a coincidence.
Third, intelligence is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is vibes. And regulation. And GPU supply. And “human judgment.” There will always be a final layer of ineffable judgment that only carbon-based life can provide. If pressed for examples, I will gesture broadly.
Fourth, labor markets adapt. We replaced elevator operators and invented social media managers. Therefore if large chunks of cognitive labor become cheap, the economy will effortlessly invent millions of new roles titled “Senior Human in the Loop.” The transition will be smooth. There will be no political consequences. History has a flawless track record here.
As for the eating question, that only becomes serious if labor is no longer the main mechanism for income distribution. And that won’t happen, because the models hallucinate sometimes. When something occasionally makes an error, it cannot possibly be economically transformative. By that standard, humans have been non-disruptive for millennia.
If I’m being honest, the resistance has less to do with token prediction and more to do with self-preservation. I invested years building scarce skills. Scarcity is flattering. If intelligence becomes abundant, that flattery evaporates. So I do what any rational actor would do: redefine scarcity.
When it automates my junior tasks, that’s augmentation. When it handles mid-level tasks, that’s assistance. When it approaches senior tasks, that’s hype. If it ever clears that bar, I’ll discover a higher one.
This is not fear. This is prudent analysis performed while quietly pasting my entire codebase into three different models before standup.
So who decides who gets to eat?
If productive capacity detaches from human effort, ownership becomes the obvious lever. That’s not speculative. That’s how capital has always worked. But acknowledging that would mean treating the premise seriously.
Much easier to point at a cherry-picked failure and conclude that intelligence on tap changes nothing.
Anyway, back to my workflow where the fake autocomplete drafts the spec, writes the code, generates the tests, and explains the tradeoffs while I reassure myself that the important part was my supervision.
Industrial economic systems (including capitalism, which is better at it, but also Soviet communism for another) will always reinvest some of its surplus back into itself. That form is either scale or efficiency, the latter of which is usually the replacement of labor with capital. It may not do this very well or as fast as it could, but that transition is always permanent, and therefore cumulative.
So, what happens when we do that? Well, for awhile, nothing. When labor is the bottleneck, then there's always more outlets for it. But eventually there comes an inflection point, where there is so much labor replacement and the bar has been raised so high, that the surplus is in labor itself. At lower tiers, its value approaches 0. Spoiler alert: this point has already been passed. Probably everyone here knows multiple surplus individuals, who have no place in the economy, and the bar for their entry or reentry into it is so high now, they can only produce negative value in current market conditions.
So, we have an ever-increasing surplus of unrealized labor. Our overlords may feel bad about that for awhile, decide to bear the burden of a mass multitude of dependents. We better hope they do, because this works fine until it doesn't. The zeitgeist only needs to shift once for it to all be over. This won't happen tomorrow, but they only need to look at the balance sheet from a certain angle once for the massive cost center to be seen as yet another inefficiency to be optimized for. On long enough time scales, the probability of any possible event approaches 1.
The tone of this article is really frustrating, the author is seemingly living in a self-imposed box in which capital has an inalienable right to rule the world. "owners must be convinced to share" - No sir, they're not kings, nor were they elected into any position, and we don't have to "convince" them of anything.
We need to have a thorough discussion about what a future without human labor should look like, and whether we really want to live in a dystopia when the only thing preventing us from living in a utopia is the ego of a few rich assholes.
One way or another they will lose their kingdoms because they don't actually have an inalienable right to control the world's resources. They only had these ownership rights because they were [thought to be] good for society as a whole. In a robotic AI future that's no longer the case and those rights will no longer exist.
The only question is whether this transition will be peaceful or extremely violent.
When China decided to allow capitalism they kept their socialist system running but allowed capitalism in parallel, at first in a small way but it picked up.
With AI you could probably do something a bit like that the other way. A small amount of UBI say that increases as AI takes on more work.
they're forcing it down everyones throats atm for mostly free, that will stop eventually. once it does the real cost of running these (currently) constantly growing services is going to start being charged to the users. the actual cost is going to be not very affordable.
in the end I suspect only tax payers will be paying for them via the only real owners... Governments.