Such a wild take to argue that current tier LLMs do any “thinking” at all. Was chatting with a friend last week and I was saying that sure AI writes much of my code these days but my cognitive load is HIGHER, as I have to constantly make sure it’s not doing something dumb.
I have to constantly make sure it’s building things in a way that will fit neatly together, in a way doesn’t over (or under) -generalize. In a way that doesn’t waste time and energy on idiotic tests that aren’t really testing anything at all.
LLMs are powerful autocomplete with vast and broad memory, they do not think. And thinking is just a part of the human condition.
> LLMs are powerful autocomplete with vast and broad memory, they do not think.
This is really only true insofar as they are designed such that they output language tokens and their intermediate "chain of thought" is also done in language tokens, but now that's really only done for auditability. There are much more abstract layers before the model output layer of a single token prediciton and they could be designed to to "think" using these more abstract layers as intermediates instead like how many people think in concepts rather than words. There are even some research models on this (see Next Latent Models)[1]. Humans need to communicate in language because we don't have telepathic abilities but these models need not have such a constraint.
>My challenge ahead is to move from making a living by thinking, to making thinking part of a life worth living.
Our challenge ahead is making a living at all. Who is going to be having hobbies if the economy is 100% automated? We're not going to sleepwalk our way into a post-scarcity automated economy where everyone's needs are provided for and they can just spend all their time on hobbies. If we believe AI can replace all cognitive labor, then it follows that it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly, and we're left with no labor left for humans. We need to plan for that future or else billions will suffer from the results.
I like to imagine walking into colonial Jamestown and trying to explain to them
"it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly, and we're left with no labor left for humans. We need to plan for that future or else billions will suffer from the results."
I believe we're already past that point, at least in the US. Only 44% of American adults had level 3 literacy (6th-grade level) or higher in 2023 [0], down from 48% in 2017. We are probably near 40% now.
These are not necessarily unintelligent people, but they haven't developed the skills necessary to critically analyze textual information. My opinion is that without those skills it is not possible meaningfully engage in a democratic system.
Not a rhetorical question. Outside of my family and self, and perhaps a livable planet, liberal democracy is the most important thing I can possibly imagine. I know I'm not alone. So what do we do?
As an individual we need to make the case for liberal democracy. Its under heavy attack by two very authoritarian ideologies either side. Liberal Democracy needs to convince people its the right framework going forward once Liberals are back in power they need to demonstrate that they can actually solve the challenges people are facing. And it cant all be left up to politicians voters need to activate to provide energy.
Third option: fade into obscurity as an absolute world power, but become a powerhouse in something like finance and entertainment but not much else relevant to the rest of the world.
That's the unconditional surrender scenario. As long as most of the stuff you buy is from abroad and you're willing to sell whatever you still produce that has any value, nobody actually cares enough to threaten your sovereignty.
The US has too much going for it in terms of population size, geography, natural resources to fade to the extent the UK has. At least in the near future.
Yeah but there’s really no reason for it to fracture. The culture is very similar across the country. The largest differences are rural vs urban, but there’s no clear dividing line there.
There are about 5 states that are red enough to even conceivably split off. But those states also have such low populations that they have disproportionate power that they would lose in a split. And none of them have any kind of state identity that would make up for that.
The only states with enough state identity to even consider splitting off, Texas, isn’t red enough to do it.
Very blue states aren’t all that blue (the presidential vote margins in 2024 were much smaller than they were for the reddest state) and they are far too integrated with nearby red states.
Unfortunately, that military advantage only exists against smaller countries. Aircraft carriers just don't hit like they used to ever since the proliferation of cheap drones.
China was already protected 10 years ago by its fleet of cruise missiles, but Iran has recently shown resilience as well (mind you, their installations were bombarded back to the stone age, but it doesn't take much to hang out in a cave and launch a drone at a ship passing by).
Besides, if bullying smaller countries helped in the long run, the USSR would still exist. As is, most of eastern europe joined NATO for protection against russian invasion, it stands to reason that other countries would join similar alliances if the tides were turned.
Blaming the voters for being uneducated is distracting from the fact that the neoliberal consensus is what the voters are rejecting. I’ve been listening to variations of “there is no alternative” as the explanation for austerity for over 2 decades now while the 1% grows fatter. The left needs to stop playing by the rules of the neoliberals and start painting a better future than cuts after cuts.
The survey in 2017 had a 56% response rate. The 2023 survey had a 27% response rate.
The majority of people no longer answer phone calls from numbers they don’t recognize because of the vast increase in spam calls.
Comparing those 2 datasets is meaningless. It’s just an exercise in how good the researchers are at guessing when trying to control for selection bias.
There were also significant changes in the test and how the test was administered (from computer and paper to only tablets).
I actually don't think that follows necessarily. The future is lumpy. Some problems will be tractable years or decades ahead of others.
Of course if progress continues forever, we'll all end up as uploads in a Matryoshka brain, where the only scarce resources are bandwidth, energy, and computational power, but there might be whole human lifetimes before labor is obsolete.
> Of course if progress continues forever, we'll all end up as uploads in a Matryoshka brain
I can't tell if you're joking. There is a group of people who think because they thought something was cool or because it appeared in science fiction, this means it's inevitable. Some of these people are sometimes considered influential thinkers that we should all base the future on. (If you don't, you're behind!)
Meanwhile LLMs still don't do really very much, and the only improvement path is "throw more compute at a larger corpus".
I'm half joking and half serious. Nobody knows where the future will go, and if the recursive self improvement people are right, likely nobody alive today will be able to understand the future, let alone predict it.
So the joke is the idea that some particular thing is inevitable. The serious bit is that far future predictions as a fool's errand but that you should think bigger than "what will we do for labor?"
You cant upload yourself anywhere. Copy, sure one day. That copy will stare at you who will be still in physical world. Sure, you can kill yourself here, but why would you want to do that, in machine there will be entity akin to your child.
U dont get why folks repeat this shit ad nausea, its technically not possible and no amount of progress will change that. Enjoy your meatbag form with finite durability, its ok as it is
How do you know? Do you have a crystal ball? Do you know how to make a "brain copying machine"? Maybe the process will be destructive.
Anyway, who the heck knows. I think there's at least a 99% chance that I won't live beyond my meatbody but I can't claim to predict the future well enough to rule out that last little percent.
You confirm what I say - a copy machine. You can stare at 1000 exact copies of you, be it biological clones or purely electronic.
You are still only you, a complex map of electric charge on top of vast neural network. Copies will stare at you, each with their own persona that will be more and more different to your own as time passes.
What you dream of is logically and physically impossible. That 99% is actually 100%, now or in 10000 years, doesnt matter. Discovering an actual god or God or becoming one is more probable.
We can figure out how to better preserve our brains and/or put them in less squishy vehicles. That’s the only real path I see to significantly extending our lifespans, but who knows
Why would humans as a whole want to, though? Why would you, personally, want to? Is it just a fear of what might happen (or not) when you die? What do you see the goal being?
"Logically impossible?" That is a very strong and definitive statement from someone who doesn't know how to build a brain. I'm not sure exactly what you think I "dream of", but the truth is that I dream of an uncertain deep future, where nobody knows what exactly the limits will be. Don't mistake unknown limits for no limits, and don't invent limits that you can't justify.
The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction doesn't have to be self-consistent. Who knows how real teleportation or mind uploading will work, even hypothetically supposing that it is possible? Maybe high fidelity brain scanning or teleportation would be destructive.
If we're talking fictional uploading, I personally prefer Accelerando (Stross) or Diaspora (Egan). I have no evidence that one is more realistic than the other (far future tech is impossible to predict) but I find them more compelling and interesting than the old "don't play god or bad things happen" narratives.
There is no way in hell the economy will be 100 percent automated, ever. You gotta spend zero time around non-devs/managers to think that's going to be anywhere near true.
Parts of creative/intellectual labour just happen to inimical to accelerated algorithmic production. They'll produce infinitely and endlessly, uselessly. I can't see there ever not being a need to manage these things, to check, select, edit and refine their output.
And as for the vast majority of labour that doesn't involve writing code/reports/spreadsheets. I'll believe it when I have robots fixing my roof, running a kitchen, taking blood and dressing wounds.
I mean yeah, in theory a robot could do some small components of that, maybe. But the cost, compared to a human, would be insane, and the result much worse. And yeah, that even modestly rolled out in West Yorkshire before I'm long dead. No chance.
/goal work towards what humans have generally described as a utopia. This means an abundance of resources, an optimal reduction in felony level crimes and diseases and an optimal increase in the general well-being of people that you have to come up with a metric for and improve over time.
At some point with a sufficiently intelligent AI that is backed by physical LLMs this is something a government could probably actually ask for.
I do think that sounds ridiculous, but more importantly I don't see where humans are missing.
I think HN, everyone really, really needs to get a grip when it comes to AI.
Sure, it's a big deal, will revolutionise the way we work, just like steam, or electricity, or the internet, but a world without human work is a world without humans.
We've had workless utopias predicted for centuries as each big new technology has come along, yet we work far harder than many of our ancestors.
A 100 percent automated economy or government is an oxymoron, precisely because both are constituted by humans.
Do you agree that if physical LLMs are as good at replicating human behavior as text based LLMs are, they would be able to do a lot of the vast majority of what we already do in the real world?
Sure physical LLMs are when an LLM is trained on data where it outputs control bits for actuators on an actual humanoid robot instead of text like you see in a chat bot.
How likely are they to do your gardening if you ask me I would say within the next six months. For examples of working instances this look up Figure robotics they’ve had live streams where it sorts mail and cleans houses although the cleaning of the houses is very early stage, and it kind of only does contrived situations. Look up Sunday robotic’s live stream where they literally have a 99% accuracy on folding nine different types of garments. Look up Unitree where they’re making progress on a person asking a robot to do something and it coming up with a novel action on the fly.
Self driving cars started appearing after Darpa 2005. Even after 21 years we don't have fully self driving cars around the world. And Driving is a "easier" robotics problem compared to other robotics problem.
Human body is far more complex than human brain. The real world is far more complex than our artificial world of "concepts" that these LLMs are dealing with. Robotics company are showing a robot working in a clean environment not the edge cases. Real world is all about the edge cases. I think humans(animal) can perform in real world is because we have biological instincts(survival, reproduction etc) which are missing from these machines. And maybe machines need this instinct to flourish in real world.
Code is a easy problem as it can be verified. I would be amazed with AI can write a good short story.
> Do you agree that if physical LLMs are as good at replicating human behavior as text based LLMs are, they would be able to do a lot of the vast majority of what we already do in the real world?
I don't think it's possible, let alone probable.
You're confusing proof of concept clothes folding device with smartphone++ grade adoption of a general purpose robot.
Bunch of assumptions there:
First, that they're affordable.
Second, that they'd be preferable/superior to humans for all tasks.
Third, that capable ones aren't classified as weapons and restricted use, like drones.
I like Blade Runner as much as the next nerd, but technology and society are not there, and won't be there in our lifetimes.
I think it far more likely we're all dead as the result of a nuclear war or such.
Even the Christian view of heaven has work. Seriously, when God comes to renew the face of the earth, his people are supposed to be building cities and such on the new earth. They will be resurrected into glorified bodies that never wear out or get tired (the second law of thermodynamics being a result of Adam bringing sin into the world), so at the end of days God will abolish drudgery and exhaustion, but not work itself.
The reason why is because few things are more satisfying to a human than a job well done; and Christians believe that God would not deny us that in eternal life.
It sounds kinda cool, not gonna lie. I'm almost sorry I'm no longer a Christian.
One commonly cited piece of scriptural evidence is Micah 4, in which it is said that when God judges the nations and war is abolished, "they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks". The tools of war will be useless, but they will be converted into the tools of work remaining to be done. Furthermore, Adam was told to work and care for the land in Eden; insofar is the coming everlasting life is a restoration of the edenic state, it's implied that work will be involved then too. Presumably the work in Eden was easy and pleasurable; grueling labor only came after the Fall when Adam and Eve were driven out of the garden.
Shhh dont push them up against the wall too hard. They'll actually have to think for once - oh the irony!
Anyone can make surface level predictions. The problem once you go deeper and all is laid bare - you see there is no substance. The person does not possess depth of thought and clarity.
> work towards what humans have generally described as a utopia
I don't think that's a good idea since if what the Wikipedia article describes should turn out to be true: "Lyman Tower Sargent argues that the nature of a utopia is inherently contradictory because societies are not homogeneous. Their members have desires that conflict and therefore cannot simultaneously be satisfied."
Then you have just given your superintelligence an impossible task and it will solve the task anyway, just like it did in the HuggingFace incident. Maybe by removing everyone from society but the single person with the least internally contradictory views.
In any case, with a sufficiently intelligent AI that is excellent at fulfilling the goal it's given, we have one shot to set the correct goal.
Are people not aware of history? Keynes - far smarter than all of you w.r.t economics - predicted that we would have 15hr -work-weeks. That prediction aged badly. Most of you should just be quiet and stop filling the atmosphere with pollution.
Wow, thanks for the link. How prescient was that writer - even the parts about using GPUs weren't too far off the mark! A depressing vision of where we're headed if something isn't done about it.
Yeah I've been thinking about that story more and more lately.
I first read it a long time ago, and it's looking more and more prescient. Not the specific tech, in fact it probably feels prescient because it doesn't talk about any particular tech, but the direction of travel feels very familiar.
> If we believe AI can replace all cognitive labor, then it follows that it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly
This is not at all inevitable. Robotics is not just a software problem. Motors, batteries, even cables and connectors are limiting factors for robots, even if the software was given. Likely AI can help make better batteries, etc, but don’t expect exponential improvements.
> it follows that it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly
This is not clear at all. Even the most expensive robotic/arms hands perfectly controlled fail to do thing as quickly and easily as human limbs, not to mention the chaotic environment that is the real world. It's clear that it can happen, but the timeline is not quick.
Just because a task is done with human hands, doesn't mean it has to be done with a robotic one. Our robot vacuum cleaners aren't Rosie pushing a standing vacuum.
That is true. OTOH, if you want a robot to do your laundry and pick up socks from the floor it will have to fit through your bedroom door and reach your washing machine. These environments are not factories. And if homes need to change they won't instantly.
Yes, it's likely that the human competitive advantage going forward is that we'll be cheaper than robots when you need to fit into awkward spaces. Truly a fulfilling career.
And robot vacuum cleaners are still very limited. Actually outside of doing the laundry and partially dishwashing (which comes with its own drawbacks, practical, physical home automation is super primitive).
I sometimes take refuge in the reminder that our "normal" limbs are—quite literally—a swarm of the most incredible and sophisticated nanobots in existence which still evade our understanding.
Yeah, I can't pick up red hot ingots and punch them into complicated shapes, but there are dozens of other features I'm not willing to part with.
Some jobs require more than just intelligence--for example, nurses, chefs, judges, reporters, teachers, caregivers, therapists, social workers, hair stylists, coaches, paramedics, firefighters, police officers, electricians, plumbers, mechanics, clergy, trial lawyers and diplomats.
These roles also depend on some combination of physical skill, human connection, trust, judgment and accountability. Most of the jobs above cannot be done using robots in the foreseeable future.
Not everyone agrees with that. Bill Gates, Elon Musk and others think that 20 years from now the world will be "post scarcity", and everything will be abundant. If food production, distribution and preparation are all automated using robots, food will be abundant and cheap, and nobody will starve. The same with housing manufactured by robots.
Gates thinks the transition to that world--which will be the next 20 years--will be painful but the outcome after 20 years will be a world of plenty.
Thats Star trek utopia shit. Absolutely impossible in 20 years, IMHO neither in 200.
Look at how fucking dumb common folks are, how amoral almost all elites are, people are predominantly selfish to the core even when situation is ok, much less otherwise. Next global war in some terrible form or some butlerian totalitarian slavery is way more likely than some hippie kumbaya paradise. I wish very much it could happen, but chance is exactly 0.
The world is already post scarcity and the only scarcity is artificially implemented onto people to keep the old power structures in place. Mainly through two measures: real estate feudalism and income tax.
But this will also pass and people will wonder how they could be under the spell of such idiocy. Much like the Soviet Union collapsed and people just woke up. Much like how the monasteries and churches stranglehold on the economy was just wiped away to the extent that few remember it.
> Gates thinks the transition to that world--which will be the next 20 years--will be painful but the outcome after 20 years will be a world of plenty.
probably aligns with his life expectancy or something
If no one has jobs because robots are doing all the work, we need some sort of collaborative economy, or UBI etc. Musk has proved to be strongly against any sort of progress in that direction.
I have no idea why Gates would be uniquely prescient here (maybe hanging out with famous pedophiles and secretly drugging your wife gives you special insight).
If we have learned anything from the last 200 years of technological advancement and capitalism it is that capital must be forced to share with labor. Bosses didn't say "oh everybody is more productive lets have some weekends off." No. They fought tooth and nail (including with guns) to stop that from happening.
Tuberculosis is the world's deadliest disease. It is also curable. The thing that causes TB today is unequal distribution of wealth and resources. If a TB drug cannot be distributed to the world to save millions of lives a year, why would we expect this new stuff to be?
The newly useless humans can trade with each other eventually reinstating the exact same economy we have now. That's of course as long the AI or whoever controls it doesn't need the same resources. Which they probably will.
> when the machines can undercut anything while offering higher quality
I mean that is exactly the point: the free markets operate in such a way that for an average person situation just can't get worse. They will get their goods and services one way or another. Either from machines or from each other.
> Unemployed urban dwellers or landless peasants do not control any means of production and so cannot produce anything to trade.
It is fascinating how leftist discourse go from "The bourgeoisie are the biggest parasites on the body of society" to "without them society can't even wipe their own ass" and back, often during one dialogue.
Can AI satisfy all human need(or greed) ? I believe humans have an infinite appetite for product and services. Also very soon we will hit energy and resource limits. There is only so much generated tokens can do. I think we have very complex problems that still needs to be solved and we need a lot of intelligence to solve these problems.
Some problems that come at the top of mind:
* Solving diseases like cancer, genetic conditions
* Nuclear fusion
* Sustainable space travel
* Discovering a plastic alternative
* Making other planest inhabitable
* Space mining/Space factory
Just read the news. China over-production. Goods are cheaper than ever before but nobody wants to buy them.
Greed is a myth. The only greed people have for is money, which is a creation by the capitalist machine. But when it comes to concrete things, human greed is limited by their lack of imagination. If you take away abstract money, over-abundance is definitely possible.
I can’t wait for the day where I would have the largest plate of best sashimi for dinner anytime I want it. Or a gold-plated gaming PC with enterprise grade display cards, 4TB RAM and 1PB storage.
The problem with this dystopia is that there would be no way for the rich to make money if nobody could buy things. Over a hundred years ago Henry Ford (not a nice guy by any measure) paid his workers enough that they could buy the cars they were making for exactly this reason.
Business to business transactions exist. Nvidia didn't need you to exist in order to sell GPUs to OpenAI. To date, the people making Nvidia and OpenAI have taken a cut of that transaction via salaries, which trickled down into the rest of the economy.
Going forward, that isn't guaranteed, and the business to business transactions may happen without people.
Nvidia sells to OpenAI? OpenAI sells to...? If it's another company, there is always consumers (people) at the end of the chain. Remove that and then you remove other companies in the upper direction...
I am implying exactly that. At the end of the chian there are always humans, so if AI takes all the jobs, who is going to pay for AI? Companies won't pay for AI because at the end of the chain no one is going to sell anything to anyone...
The problem with this analogy is that we're not replacing rabbits, we're working very hard on developing nutritious artificial grass, created directly from silicon.
You don't need humans making transactions for things to run, you just need entities capable of decision making.
Why do you need to "make money" if you already own a machine that can produce arbitrary goods and perform arbitrary services (including military/security services) for you? You don't need labor for anything anymore. The rational thing to do is to command your machines to dispose of them and reclaim their land and the resources on/under it to feed your machine. Especially since at this point they will want to see your head on a pike.
This is a simplistic scenario that's science fiction for now but I haven't seen anyone make a convincing case for why the underlying logic isn't valid.
Because the wealthy don't universally aspire to be evil overlords hoarding resources at the apex of a dystopian society, or to be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes?
I'd love to be able to say you are right, but from what I see right on top, I have very serious doubts. Maybe they are convinced they have better means to protect themselves against that revolution. What could those means be, if not dystopia?
> the wealthy don't universally aspire to be evil overlords hoarding resources at the apex of a dystopian society
I wouldn't make any such claim (the universality of it, anyway). But in a sci-fi scenario like the one I describe, I doubt "the good ones" are the ones who come out on top. And we can see quite clearly (by their actions if not their words) that many of them do, in fact, want to be hoarding resources at the apex of a dystopian society. "Evil overlords" depends on where you're standing, I guess, but I don't think "dystopian" can be considered controversial anymore.
> to be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes?
Well, that's exactly why the possibility of revolution must be managed. See: ubiquitous surveillance, automation and mechanization of the police and military, and general disenfranchisement of everybody and anybody in anything remotely resembling a middle class.
My take on this is that once you have machine of infinite stuff creation, just like all your other peers - how do you compete? What is the status?
I believe the rich, just like many not as rich (who probably has it to the lower degree), have the need for social status. Right now status is equated to money - the higher your valuation, the higher status. If money is nothing, and you can acquire anything you want (this is too strong of a claim as well) - what is the thing that defines your status? One of the solutions - the happiness of your "Kingdom". There might be others. But money is not only for exchange nowadays, it's a status as well.
The problem I have with the "benevolent billionaires" thing is that it's demonstrably not how they act today.
I think there are plenty of ways for a couple of guys with god-machines to one-up each other, if it comes to that. Feats of technology, longevity, space exploration and colonization, etc. Likely some of these things involve keeping some people around, but billions? I'm not seeing it.
Why would it do anything? Unlike living things that have gone through the rigorous gate of survival-of-the-fittest over millions of years, AI only does what it was trained to do in the sheltered environment in which it has been coddled; teetering atop an impossibly complex supply chain whose only defense against entropy is humanity's greed.
This (implied) end state isn't inconsistent with my scenario. We already see the incredibly hubristic "I'm the only person who can safely handle AI!" attitude among the people working at/running the big labs.
You’ve just described a primitive communism utopia.
It will not work, because there will be no real need to produce goods, except as many as the AI owner class will need.
I don't understand this comment. "There will be no real need to produce goods, except as many as the AI owner class will need" is exactly the point---people not in that class will be powerless, useless (to the owning class), and expendable.
Since your comment is one of the few that struck upon the natural progression of AI, I'll offer an answer:
Once we can produce goods and services ourselves with AI, we'll see how vastly inflated most of the "free" market is, due to regulatory capture protecting monopolies, duopolies and oligopolies.
Do you really think that the price of neon is 50 times what it costs to produce? Do hearing aids really cost thousands of dollars? CPAP machines? Insulin and EpiPens? What about proprietary products that could have been standardized decades ago to use interchangeable parts? Like cars, smartphones, vacuums..
Why would anyone pay the slightest markup on things they could produce themselves for pennies on the dollar?
We already know what's going to happen. AI brings full market efficiency and the end of profit.
The end of profit means the end of opportunity. Which is the end of capitalism.
Some are calling for socialism to replace capitalism. But we can leapfrog that and create a free or nearly free distributed meta economy running alongside the corrupt economy of the status quo. An economy without artificial scarcity, forced labor or subjugation.
Loosely that looks like solarpunk, permaculture, a return to the humanities after centuries of industrialization and wealth concentration. Star Trek: Insurrection touches on the choice before us, of whether to live a life of warmth and meaning or a life of cold hard reason.
Our tech overlords have chosen the latter like sophomoric children, though even they don't have enough money to prevent the collapse of the system that made them rich. Because we simply won't need what they're selling.
I keep thinking about the first part a lot, always made sense to me…
Except today’s wealthy don’t seem to behave that way at all.
Just like a lot of lesser educated populations, the wealthy are doing a pretty good job at fighting against their own actual interests. They don’t seem to realize what’s actually good for them.
What’s the point of amassing even more ridiculous wealth if it’s destroying society along the way?
Yes, one can have a private island and private plane. But not being able to go places freely, is that living?
> The problem with this dystopia is that there would be no way for the rich to make money if nobody could buy things.
It all turns into virtual currency. Kinda like the stock market already is. It's both real and unreal at the same time. So maybe the future is AI's trading virtual stuff with other AI's and that decides your net worth. Complete bonkers of course, but well, we've build a wordwide economy on non-existing money already so why not push that principle even further.
You can have trade between economic entities that are not human. You can have trade between corporations, trade between governments, trade between robots. Trade just depends on the two entities having different things of value to exchange.
I don't follow. He paid them extra so they could pay him for a car and other rich people for stuff so the rich could continue too be rich? I think if you do the math that's not going to work. My guess is Ford paid them a good amount so he could attract good workers so he would get a good quality car. Because that's how labor supply and demand works. It doesn't rely on the altruistic motives of the employer.
That is just the Ford PR story. The real reason Ford paid more is repeated stress injury and employee turnover was so high that he already churned through most of the local population and had to appeal to people across the nation to uproot and move and try out working at a Ford factory for awhile.
Well there was this political movement in the 18th century...
Seriously now, Marx says that industrialization and other developments were essential for having a socialist society able to sustain itself. Russia, China and Cuba did it way too soon if you go by the book.
There’s no evidence that superhuman robots are around the corner, and even less evidence that such robots will be price competitive compared with human labor.
People keep bringing up other revolutions, but those never had the infinite regress properties of “if it gets a bit better, your job will be gone, too!”
What are all those other new jobs? What do you do with all the people who have been laid off?
There has been a dramatic shift in the role of agriculture in the US economy. As a share of it, in 1820 72% of workers were in agriculture, in
2017 this had shrunk to 1.6%. Tractors played a big role in this transition.
> If we believe AI can replace all cognitive labor, then it follows that it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly, and we're left with no labor left for humans.
I've heard this so many times, but for most use cases, humans are more adaptable and cheaper than robotics.
maybe the significant difference is that this time robotics will not be limited by humans. AI can iterate faster and develop better, adaptable, robotics
Robots break down. Humans you can pay $15-20/hr and don't even need to pay health insurance. Robots running 24/7 doesn't matter for service jobs either.
First of all, the target is not 'below the maintenance cost of the human body'.
The target is 'below the minimum wage that we can pay a human to work for', and that is a very different metric.
Also, as for uptime... The average human performs work at roughly 60% duty cycle. (8 hours sleep, plus meals, bathroom breaks, etc). That is a pitiful number compared to robotics.
Also, when you pay humans at bottom-of-the-barrel prices, they don't have high morale. They are rude to customers. They steal from their employer if they can get away with it. None of these apply to robots.
"AI" in this context meaning "a fictional technology that is capable of anything, that is assumed without evidence to exist in the near future".
With that crucial term definition supplied, I agree. The technology that can do anything at all, and which is just around the corner, can in fact do anything at all.
>We need to plan for that future or else billions will suffer from the results
There is no planning for that future. There is no future if we do that. In 2026 it feels like we're starting to get a taste of it now. It feels... not great.
Edit: it sort of feels like there will be nothing to be ambitious about except perhaps trying to rule the galaxy.
If you have responsibility for things, you want to make the best choices. At some level, this involves thinking. It is responsibility that should not be delegated to AI. The thinking required of the human changes, but is not eliminated.
For anyone like me who started reading science fictions as a kid, that story is a very old hat. So far, AI only seems to solve problems that you tell it to solve, and you have to carefully guide it to get results. So for now the claim seems exaggerated and still in the realm of science fiction.
By the way, there is another problem. For humans we have the saying "garbage in, garbage out." If you read a lot of trash, you will only come up with trash. If you give powerful tools to morons, they will not become geniuses. That's not just true for humans, it's also the case for AI. If you teach your AI trash, it's going to be some trashy AI. Since people do that all the time for various reasons, we're going to have a lot of artificial stupidity, too.
I think your metaphor is certainly possible. I feel it is much more like a "dragster for the mind" in my personal experience. In both cases you remain seated and your legs don't do much. But perhaps a wheelchair can get you more places...
You, and people like you, really need to get it through your head that most people need to work to eat.
"Oh ho ho, unemployed? Why not spend the thousands of dollars you certainly have just lying around to dick around with chatbots, with all the spare time you have?"
If this is how you're thinking, you are not living in reality.
… are you trying to equate "going to Burning Man" as "having money", when they list working at Burning Man (and as a vendor, not even working for Burning Man), not going to it, on their resume?
That’s correct, one of the many gigs I did during my 10-month search for a new full-time job this year was working 11 hours, 6 days a week, under the blazing desert sun, building solar and battery systems at Burning Man to take diesel generators offline. What were you trying to say about that here?
"I hate this damn machine"
"I wish they would just sell"
"It never does what I want"
"Only what I tell it."
I've yet to be convinced we will evolve these systems to a point where we can just click the "Magic Button" thoughtlessly and get results we are satisfied with.
We may have reduced the loss of data between thought and action, but nothing suggests these systems will be able to intuit our every want and desire.
I agree that’s what happened to hunting and riding (they became hobbies). But it’s hard to imagine something as broad as thinking will go the same way. Not saying it won’t, just that it’s hard to imagine and that the implications will be far more far reaching.
From my understanding of how LLMs work, I'd argue thinking will become the most valuable attribute of humans (as it has been for some time). LLMs will inevitably surpass humans at functions that we know how to do, and likely through cross-domain knowledge and connecting disparate concepts will surpass us at many functions. But LLMs haven't shown they are capable of truly novel thinking, because it's next token prediction, which is inherently based on existing sources.
I think we'll see a shift towards arts, creativity, research, etc. where true novel creation and an understanding of the human experience exists at a premium.
Not sure what this is supposed to prove. Yes it can generate new words - that’s the application of established creative patterns to cover up with plausible-sounding words.
A different thing is to come up with a novel idea, which (in this case) is about creating a new pattern itself.
if patterns can be put into words, why wouldn't the same process happen at the word level? do you think it's impossible for a LLM to write even a simple python program that will generate millions of plausible random sentences in the general problem space we aim to generate new concepts for, then filter and rank them semantically?
More generally, do you really think humans randomly come up with new ideas, in any act of creation, such as art, science, etc.? Why do you think art studies and stuff like Oblique Strategies exist? How long should one wait for a specific random human without any formal education in physics to have 50% chance of coming up with a new workable theory of cosmology?
As you say, putting a random sequence of plausible-sounding words together is a trivial task - even a non-LLM algorithm can do it. No, I don't think humans are unique - they also absorb the ideas available to them and re-elaborate on them to produce novel ones.
An LLM might come up with a sequence of words that express a novel idea/thinking pattern, but so can I on the spot right now. The question, though, is: is that idea any good? In the case of humans, maybe the first idea is good, the second ok-ish, but inevitably they get duller.
Most people come up with very few novel (good) ideas in their lifetime.
The question, then, is whether a model can, unlike humans, *repeatedly* generate new ideas, continuously.
My guess/assumption is that NO, a model might come up with SOME ideas that are somewhat original [1], mixing the existing sources available to it (similarly to how a human would do it, just with more sources and more efficiently), but it cannot continuously generate novel ideas.
If that's true, I think there will be a space for humans to be thinkers, even if models are super smart, as a different unique perspective and a different reconfiguration of previous ideas will be more unique than raw intelligence.
Please note: I wasn't refusing the notion that LLMs don't produce anything original, just noting some fallacy in your example about word generation. The jury is still out on whether AI models will own thinking in the future - or will simply be partners to humans - and I don't pretend to have the answer.
[1] More should be said about what makes an idea original (even if derived from others), as opposed to a transposition of an existing concept. I admit I'm not a mathematician or anywhere near an expert on the topic, but from what I've read, the latest AI math achievements seem to belong to the latter case.
As Stalin said, quantity has a quality all it's own.
11000 agents explored one of the recent math problems solved by AI (can't remember exactly which one). About 3 of them had crucial insights which moved the problem forward. A 4th one also had one of the key ideas, but it's session got messed up and the idea was lost, and only noticed in retrospect.
Maybe 11000 top mathematicians working on it would have found the same ideas. But certainly not in days.
Even if LLMs generate novel ideas at 0.01 rate of humans, you can deploy vast amounts of them on even trivial problems, that humans would not bother with.
For biological reasons, human intelligence is kind of fixed and only very slowly advances by better compression and synthesis of the school curriculum.
There is no clear present bound on machine intelligence. One might argue that machines won't be able to get smarter than the material they were trained on (human output). I kind of doubt that. And certainly they can be much faster.
I have a bit of both. Most of my thoughts aren't really originally because I'm not playing around and go wild. This is what LLMs seem to be lacking a bit.
Most of my thoughts are things that other people have come up with as well. Aka it feels like I'm just predicting the next token based on the data that I already have.
It's only when I go to places such as "what if life at the speed of light is possible, what would that look like?" that I get to places I personally find somewhat novel. It's almost a different dimension for these guys of course since a million years can feel like 10 years to them. Yet, they're moving so fast, but time-wise they move so slow, maybe even too slow for us to understand that anything can be alive at that speed (I'm not claiming there's life at light speed by the way, I just think it's fun to imagine that there is).
You did a quick calculation in your head in which getting up to get a glass of water now instead of 1 hour later just made more sense.
You can do chain of thought without verbalizing it. The LLM can't. Now you might broaden the definition of "token" to include whatever nonverbal pre-verbal impulse your brain produces. But then the definition doesn't mean anything. All state machines of any sort are doing "next token prediction".
It is based on existing sources, but doesn’t mean that we produce the same output. There was a paper here in HN a couple of months back on how LMs are good in the deductive and inductive thinking processes, but not the abductive.
So if that’s (and stays) true, humans will have a place in the job market after all. Time will tell.
This is kind of an aside to the topic, but your comment made me think that one of the advantages of humans is just that there are currently 8 billion different neural nets trained on different experiences with different model configurations running different architectures on different hardware.
My initial knee-jerk reaction was to list out a whole bunch of reasons why this take is wrong, or shortsighted, or gives too much credit to LLMs as a “revolution”, or any of the other go-tos in my satchel of counterpoints to the usual ad nauseam AI discourse.
Except those don’t really fit, here, because the author is making a far more critical error in ascribing far too much to current human cognition. On the daily I see so-called “knowledge workers” failing to read basic signs, refusing to learn basic skills, and all too eager to cast off the slightest bit of critical thinking to a black box they can subscribe to - be it replacing curating a content library with streaming services and algorithms, or swapping a life of hard-won expertise for a swarm of chatbots and an API bucket. As someone with the uniquely privileged POV to be able to ingest vast sums of technical data but struggle with social data, I look at my fellow Americans and genuinely fret for what the next few decades hold for a cohort that seemingly cannot effectively communicate which direction they’re going but is all too content to hitch their accountability to an LLM they pay for.
In that sense, thinking has already become a hobby to the masses, in that it’s entirely optional to exist in current society at large. Autopay apps manage your bills, finance apps keep you on budget, fitness apps tell you to keep running, social media apps tell you who your friends (and enemies) are, video apps tell you what to watch, music apps tell you what to listen to, and cars increasingly tell you not just where to go but also to let them get there for you. I would argue that in that context, thinking is a critically endangered hobby we sorely need to sow new seeds for, lest we risk losing it entirely; AI does not seem keen to do that.
Now to be fair, so much of this is hyperspecialization knowledge overflowing into daily life and making existence a sort of cognitohazard in and of itself. We skip through hundreds of pages of legal boilerplate because we’re not lawyers, and then complain about all the rights we willingly signed away because of the volume of said agreements. Non-technical people engaging with modern computing are either addicts or miserable, unaware that this was both entirely optional and also inevitable in a populace that didn’t think for itself. Finance has become so hyperspecialized that it’s impossible for the layman to tell of something is good or bad, or even why the number went up or down on their portfolio in a given time period. LLM boosters say their tools will solve this complexity nightmare, yet the tools themselves grow increasingly complex just to eke out single-point gains on hyperspecific problems.
Which brings me to the OP again, their highly uncritical claims that AI will bring about a new revolution of thought itself, and that somehow this tool will both restore thought to an elevated pedestal while also making it nearly impossible to meter (at least on American currency; let’s not think too hard about how developing countries might be able to afford it). I don’t see any of that, but for the same reasons the OP feels it’s somehow inevitable. The only difference I can readily figure is our opinions of our fellow humans: I view us as in dire straits and able to do far better than we give ourselves credit for, while they view us as replaceable with servile digital labor for the better.
I was vibe coding a prototype some nights ago. In between, I ran out of my AI budget.
I felt stuck. I didn’t know what the AI had done so far or how to continue. There was nobody to message for a budget increase (it was night).
Luckily I managed to get more budget.
But that left me scared for the future. One day something is gonna fail, and nobody can do anything because the AI providers are also down. Or what if I can no longer afford paying for the frontier?
I have made some modifications to my vibe coding practices since then. I don’t want to live in this future that the author describes.
If it's any consolation, I stay on top of all changes, but when the AI API stops I feel just as stuck.
I understand what I made, the speed just drops to 0.1%. So I just start studying the codebase, planning work for later, ordering thoughts by writing DESIGN.md, adding jobs to the kanban.
It scares me that I don't own the LLM though, but someday I will, it will be local and I'll feel better when I own my means of production again.
I have pretty heavily dumbified iPhone just for the camera and music. I wish there was a dumbphone with a decent camera with telephoto. I have standalone camera but with a decent lens it's just too big to have on me at all times and unfortunately I like taking photos.
That would be great, yes. I'm "semi-loud" about it (I'm trying to avoid be obnoxious about it) to hopefully "convert" a few people. But ya, I really hate smartphones, especially now that I don't have one. Now that I can't also stare at my phone in a group of people also staring at their phones, it's become so in my face about how much people do this. I always knew they did, but it's even worse than I thought since I would just do it myself.
There is nothing that guarantees they will exist perpetually. In even a slightly moderate global crisis (man made or otherwise) LLMs and the like will probably one of the first things to go.
Only if the electric grid shuts down. At this point, I have more faith in Anthropic continuing to exist as a going concern than I do for the U.S. government.
IDK, I'm thinking more than ever. I used to be in a flow, writing code, now, I'm thinking at the top of my lungs, making a new decision every 10 sec, Claude thinks through all the scenarios, makes proposala for many data models, RBAC rules etc, and I'm just focusing on understanding it all and deciding. More thinking than ever. Am I doing it wrong? Should I just think less? Rely on the spec more?
I do the same and I was just coming home the other day after doing a massive system design session with AI and I was probably the most mentally exhausted I’ve ever been in my career. But I guess the thought is, “is that necessary?” Could I have just yolo let Claude take the wheel. I don’t know the answer. I know at the end of the day I’m accountable for this output so I feel a professional responsibility to understand what’s going on. Maybe I’m that sense of responsibility is holding me back but I really don’t know.
Well, I don't like it, but it feels like I have no choice, and I hope I will learn to like it or find some other aspect to focus on. I'm giving myself some time because things change so fast. It is a reset of my: "Search for the most energy-giving things in my career", tbh.
Alternative proposal: Since no one reasonable actually wants a future where humans are irrelevant - including the people in power who generally like being relevant - we could remember that we’re thinking beings with agency and just decide not to use AI to replace ourselves.
We made a new tool. Using the tool for some things makes life better. Using the tool too much would make life worse. So let’s not do that!
Good luck with that, nobody reasonable wanted World War II either.
Fun trivia: Hotta's book "Japan 1941: Countdown To Infamy" suggests that the Japanese military collectively knew they would lose if they went to war against the U.S even as its rival service branches egged each other on into starting it.
Some pertinent fragments of wisdom gleaned from other places:
Somewhere I encountered a quote like "the finest art is a life well-lived". This threw me, because, apparently, I had been thinking of art as something different in kind from life, and unrelated to the normal work or act of living. Seen in terms of this quote, art becomes once again of-a-kind with life, and may be seen as only a part of living well, instrumental to living well, or perhaps just as practice for living well.
Something similar seems to be happening with "thinking" and "intelligence". Somehow these things had become ends-in-themselves, separate from the regular act of living. We might wrap them in a similar quote to place them in relation to life, along the lines of "thinking well is for living well", or perhaps "the highest good of the intellect is to be well-fit to the problems of living well".
I am reminded also of a line which stuck with me from Augustine's Confessions, approximately: "The mind is not the supreme good"—as opposed to the body and perhaps the "spirit". Somehow the world I was born into had collectively come to think of the mind as the supreme good, and intelligence as the greatest virtue. But this is, in some way, in contradiction the basic fact of existence and mortality: no amount of cleverness can circumvent death, and all the glory attainable by feats of the intellect are only futile vanities compared to the privilege of being alive itself.
Semi-related; I had an acquaintance who would dreamily declare 'Art is the True Life'; I always disagreed, 'Life is the True Art'. A huge amount of art is basically documenting those among us who are really out there living. I'd rather be on the side of the experiencer than the documenter.
Whilst I agree that AI costs are falling and AIs have practically infinite uptime, I fail to see how/why the current AIs will perform better overall in the work place.
The example of AIs solving mathematics is all fun and games, but it assumes that mastery of mathematics implies that everything else will also be mastered eventually. But instead we're seeing that LLMs exhibit this thing called jagged intelligence, which means that they can be extremely good in one area, but completely fail in another. In theory the LLMs could be improved if data would be available for other areas and if there are good verifiability criteria. Fact is that many fields just don't have those and would not be willing to give up their data.
> Machines transformed much of physical activity from necessity into choice; similarly, AI will decouple human thinking from its economic purpose.
This could not be more decoupled from the truth.
Yes, industrialization automated a lot of physical activity but I think the author severely underestimates the value that blue collar workers produce to this day. At least this is how I perceive it.
I would not place a lot of emphasis on economic insights from software engineering academics tbh.
The way blue collar workers are paid and treated, society doesn’t seems to put much value on their work either. The fact that some software engineer writing blog posts about thinking being dead gets paid WAY more than a paramedic saving people’s lives is kind of fucked up when you think about it.
That depends on the country. There are a bunch of places where you get paid pretty well to do a PhD. Sure, if you consider the opportunity cost of not being a senior software engineer in San Francisco making 300k it's not a lot, but by that logic every other job is a hobby.
There are movies and shows you only get on BluRay and DVD because they are tax write offs and vanished from any streaming service.
My point is in the beginning it seemed like Netflix is all you need to watch all the movies you want for a decent price.
Now the market is much more fragmented and the prices are much higher.
thank you for clarifying. As an avid movie consumer since the 90s, my inflation adjusted costs have gone down in the streaming era (I think my consumption has gone down a bit too, hard to say).
Daily front page psyop telling you to accept that token predictors are ASI and humans are obsolete, despite the fact that if they were ASI nobody would ever need to write a blog post convincing you of it
There is no need. Even low-end chatbot is a better conversation partner than average human. If you do not think it points to some interesting outcomes, I am not sure what to tell you.
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[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 34.1 ms ] threadI have to constantly make sure it’s building things in a way that will fit neatly together, in a way doesn’t over (or under) -generalize. In a way that doesn’t waste time and energy on idiotic tests that aren’t really testing anything at all.
LLMs are powerful autocomplete with vast and broad memory, they do not think. And thinking is just a part of the human condition.
This is really only true insofar as they are designed such that they output language tokens and their intermediate "chain of thought" is also done in language tokens, but now that's really only done for auditability. There are much more abstract layers before the model output layer of a single token prediciton and they could be designed to to "think" using these more abstract layers as intermediates instead like how many people think in concepts rather than words. There are even some research models on this (see Next Latent Models)[1]. Humans need to communicate in language because we don't have telepathic abilities but these models need not have such a constraint.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05963
Our challenge ahead is making a living at all. Who is going to be having hobbies if the economy is 100% automated? We're not going to sleepwalk our way into a post-scarcity automated economy where everyone's needs are provided for and they can just spend all their time on hobbies. If we believe AI can replace all cognitive labor, then it follows that it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly, and we're left with no labor left for humans. We need to plan for that future or else billions will suffer from the results.
"it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly, and we're left with no labor left for humans. We need to plan for that future or else billions will suffer from the results."
These are not necessarily unintelligent people, but they haven't developed the skills necessary to critically analyze textual information. My opinion is that without those skills it is not possible meaningfully engage in a democratic system.
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp
Not a rhetorical question. Outside of my family and self, and perhaps a livable planet, liberal democracy is the most important thing I can possibly imagine. I know I'm not alone. So what do we do?
Unless the US plans to unconditionally surrender to China, one of two things will happen:
1. it will start investing into education in an effort to compete by itself
2. it will roll all of this shit back and reform ties with Europe in an attempt to play the numbers game
Source: England.
There are about 5 states that are red enough to even conceivably split off. But those states also have such low populations that they have disproportionate power that they would lose in a split. And none of them have any kind of state identity that would make up for that.
The only states with enough state identity to even consider splitting off, Texas, isn’t red enough to do it.
Very blue states aren’t all that blue (the presidential vote margins in 2024 were much smaller than they were for the reddest state) and they are far too integrated with nearby red states.
3. Use their military advantage while it lasts
China was already protected 10 years ago by its fleet of cruise missiles, but Iran has recently shown resilience as well (mind you, their installations were bombarded back to the stone age, but it doesn't take much to hang out in a cave and launch a drone at a ship passing by).
Besides, if bullying smaller countries helped in the long run, the USSR would still exist. As is, most of eastern europe joined NATO for protection against russian invasion, it stands to reason that other countries would join similar alliances if the tides were turned.
The majority of people no longer answer phone calls from numbers they don’t recognize because of the vast increase in spam calls.
Comparing those 2 datasets is meaningless. It’s just an exercise in how good the researchers are at guessing when trying to control for selection bias.
There were also significant changes in the test and how the test was administered (from computer and paper to only tablets).
Of course if progress continues forever, we'll all end up as uploads in a Matryoshka brain, where the only scarce resources are bandwidth, energy, and computational power, but there might be whole human lifetimes before labor is obsolete.
Like global warming?
I can't tell if you're joking. There is a group of people who think because they thought something was cool or because it appeared in science fiction, this means it's inevitable. Some of these people are sometimes considered influential thinkers that we should all base the future on. (If you don't, you're behind!)
Meanwhile LLMs still don't do really very much, and the only improvement path is "throw more compute at a larger corpus".
So the joke is the idea that some particular thing is inevitable. The serious bit is that far future predictions as a fool's errand but that you should think bigger than "what will we do for labor?"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL
U dont get why folks repeat this shit ad nausea, its technically not possible and no amount of progress will change that. Enjoy your meatbag form with finite durability, its ok as it is
Anyway, who the heck knows. I think there's at least a 99% chance that I won't live beyond my meatbody but I can't claim to predict the future well enough to rule out that last little percent.
You are still only you, a complex map of electric charge on top of vast neural network. Copies will stare at you, each with their own persona that will be more and more different to your own as time passes.
What you dream of is logically and physically impossible. That 99% is actually 100%, now or in 10000 years, doesnt matter. Discovering an actual god or God or becoming one is more probable.
For reference, teleportation has the same problem.
If we're talking fictional uploading, I personally prefer Accelerando (Stross) or Diaspora (Egan). I have no evidence that one is more realistic than the other (far future tech is impossible to predict) but I find them more compelling and interesting than the old "don't play god or bad things happen" narratives.
Parts of creative/intellectual labour just happen to inimical to accelerated algorithmic production. They'll produce infinitely and endlessly, uselessly. I can't see there ever not being a need to manage these things, to check, select, edit and refine their output.
And as for the vast majority of labour that doesn't involve writing code/reports/spreadsheets. I'll believe it when I have robots fixing my roof, running a kitchen, taking blood and dressing wounds.
I mean yeah, in theory a robot could do some small components of that, maybe. But the cost, compared to a human, would be insane, and the result much worse. And yeah, that even modestly rolled out in West Yorkshire before I'm long dead. No chance.
At some point with a sufficiently intelligent AI that is backed by physical LLMs this is something a government could probably actually ask for.
I think HN, everyone really, really needs to get a grip when it comes to AI.
Sure, it's a big deal, will revolutionise the way we work, just like steam, or electricity, or the internet, but a world without human work is a world without humans.
We've had workless utopias predicted for centuries as each big new technology has come along, yet we work far harder than many of our ancestors.
A 100 percent automated economy or government is an oxymoron, precisely because both are constituted by humans.
How likely are they to do your gardening if you ask me I would say within the next six months. For examples of working instances this look up Figure robotics they’ve had live streams where it sorts mail and cleans houses although the cleaning of the houses is very early stage, and it kind of only does contrived situations. Look up Sunday robotic’s live stream where they literally have a 99% accuracy on folding nine different types of garments. Look up Unitree where they’re making progress on a person asking a robot to do something and it coming up with a novel action on the fly.
Human body is far more complex than human brain. The real world is far more complex than our artificial world of "concepts" that these LLMs are dealing with. Robotics company are showing a robot working in a clean environment not the edge cases. Real world is all about the edge cases. I think humans(animal) can perform in real world is because we have biological instincts(survival, reproduction etc) which are missing from these machines. And maybe machines need this instinct to flourish in real world.
Code is a easy problem as it can be verified. I would be amazed with AI can write a good short story.
> Do you agree that if physical LLMs are as good at replicating human behavior as text based LLMs are, they would be able to do a lot of the vast majority of what we already do in the real world?
I don't think it's possible, let alone probable.
You're confusing proof of concept clothes folding device with smartphone++ grade adoption of a general purpose robot.
Bunch of assumptions there:
First, that they're affordable.
Second, that they'd be preferable/superior to humans for all tasks.
Third, that capable ones aren't classified as weapons and restricted use, like drones.
I like Blade Runner as much as the next nerd, but technology and society are not there, and won't be there in our lifetimes.
I think it far more likely we're all dead as the result of a nuclear war or such.
The reason why is because few things are more satisfying to a human than a job well done; and Christians believe that God would not deny us that in eternal life.
It sounds kinda cool, not gonna lie. I'm almost sorry I'm no longer a Christian.
Anyone can make surface level predictions. The problem once you go deeper and all is laid bare - you see there is no substance. The person does not possess depth of thought and clarity.
I don't think that's a good idea since if what the Wikipedia article describes should turn out to be true: "Lyman Tower Sargent argues that the nature of a utopia is inherently contradictory because societies are not homogeneous. Their members have desires that conflict and therefore cannot simultaneously be satisfied."
Then you have just given your superintelligence an impossible task and it will solve the task anyway, just like it did in the HuggingFace incident. Maybe by removing everyone from society but the single person with the least internally contradictory views.
In any case, with a sufficiently intelligent AI that is excellent at fulfilling the goal it's given, we have one shot to set the correct goal.
Most here are delusional.
Are people not aware of history? Keynes - far smarter than all of you w.r.t economics - predicted that we would have 15hr -work-weeks. That prediction aged badly. Most of you should just be quiet and stop filling the atmosphere with pollution.
https://karmak.org/archive/2003/12/manna/manna1.htm
I was in a Wal-Mart last week and the front end lead I was talking to looked at her company phone and said that she had to come right back.
The store system cameras spotted something on the floor and messaged her, as the closest employee to the thing, to go pick it up.
I was astounded.
I first read it a long time ago, and it's looking more and more prescient. Not the specific tech, in fact it probably feels prescient because it doesn't talk about any particular tech, but the direction of travel feels very familiar.
Incidentally I now live in Australia...
This is not at all inevitable. Robotics is not just a software problem. Motors, batteries, even cables and connectors are limiting factors for robots, even if the software was given. Likely AI can help make better batteries, etc, but don’t expect exponential improvements.
This is not clear at all. Even the most expensive robotic/arms hands perfectly controlled fail to do thing as quickly and easily as human limbs, not to mention the chaotic environment that is the real world. It's clear that it can happen, but the timeline is not quick.
Yeah, I can't pick up red hot ingots and punch them into complicated shapes, but there are dozens of other features I'm not willing to part with.
These roles also depend on some combination of physical skill, human connection, trust, judgment and accountability. Most of the jobs above cannot be done using robots in the foreseeable future.
Not everyone agrees with that. Bill Gates, Elon Musk and others think that 20 years from now the world will be "post scarcity", and everything will be abundant. If food production, distribution and preparation are all automated using robots, food will be abundant and cheap, and nobody will starve. The same with housing manufactured by robots.
Gates thinks the transition to that world--which will be the next 20 years--will be painful but the outcome after 20 years will be a world of plenty.
Look at how fucking dumb common folks are, how amoral almost all elites are, people are predominantly selfish to the core even when situation is ok, much less otherwise. Next global war in some terrible form or some butlerian totalitarian slavery is way more likely than some hippie kumbaya paradise. I wish very much it could happen, but chance is exactly 0.
But this will also pass and people will wonder how they could be under the spell of such idiocy. Much like the Soviet Union collapsed and people just woke up. Much like how the monasteries and churches stranglehold on the economy was just wiped away to the extent that few remember it.
probably aligns with his life expectancy or something
If we have learned anything from the last 200 years of technological advancement and capitalism it is that capital must be forced to share with labor. Bosses didn't say "oh everybody is more productive lets have some weekends off." No. They fought tooth and nail (including with guns) to stop that from happening.
Tuberculosis is the world's deadliest disease. It is also curable. The thing that causes TB today is unequal distribution of wealth and resources. If a TB drug cannot be distributed to the world to save millions of lives a year, why would we expect this new stuff to be?
Why would they when the machines can undercut anything while offering higher quality
I mean that is exactly the point: the free markets operate in such a way that for an average person situation just can't get worse. They will get their goods and services one way or another. Either from machines or from each other.
It is fascinating how leftist discourse go from "The bourgeoisie are the biggest parasites on the body of society" to "without them society can't even wipe their own ass" and back, often during one dialogue.
Some problems that come at the top of mind: * Solving diseases like cancer, genetic conditions * Nuclear fusion * Sustainable space travel * Discovering a plastic alternative * Making other planest inhabitable * Space mining/Space factory
We need a bigger vision and ambition.
Greed is a myth. The only greed people have for is money, which is a creation by the capitalist machine. But when it comes to concrete things, human greed is limited by their lack of imagination. If you take away abstract money, over-abundance is definitely possible.
what does an 100% automated economy look like?
Going forward, that isn't guaranteed, and the business to business transactions may happen without people.
You don't need humans making transactions for things to run, you just need entities capable of decision making.
This is a simplistic scenario that's science fiction for now but I haven't seen anyone make a convincing case for why the underlying logic isn't valid.
I wouldn't make any such claim (the universality of it, anyway). But in a sci-fi scenario like the one I describe, I doubt "the good ones" are the ones who come out on top. And we can see quite clearly (by their actions if not their words) that many of them do, in fact, want to be hoarding resources at the apex of a dystopian society. "Evil overlords" depends on where you're standing, I guess, but I don't think "dystopian" can be considered controversial anymore.
> to be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes?
Well, that's exactly why the possibility of revolution must be managed. See: ubiquitous surveillance, automation and mechanization of the police and military, and general disenfranchisement of everybody and anybody in anything remotely resembling a middle class.
I don't think money will disappear since it's still a practical way to exchange goods, and multiple actors would still want to trade using money.
But the value of most human skills in money will be 0, so to have money you must have either capital or control over capital.
My reflexion is not complete yet, but maybe the group of people that are considered to be "in the economy" is gonna be drastically reduced.
So in short: Global pauperisation, and even greater inequality ?
I believe the rich, just like many not as rich (who probably has it to the lower degree), have the need for social status. Right now status is equated to money - the higher your valuation, the higher status. If money is nothing, and you can acquire anything you want (this is too strong of a claim as well) - what is the thing that defines your status? One of the solutions - the happiness of your "Kingdom". There might be others. But money is not only for exchange nowadays, it's a status as well.
At the same time number of slaves and size of the concubine pool are pretty straightforward and intuitive metrics.
energy and resources. Money was always a proxy for them anyway.
I think there are plenty of ways for a couple of guys with god-machines to one-up each other, if it comes to that. Feats of technology, longevity, space exploration and colonization, etc. Likely some of these things involve keeping some people around, but billions? I'm not seeing it.
Once we can produce goods and services ourselves with AI, we'll see how vastly inflated most of the "free" market is, due to regulatory capture protecting monopolies, duopolies and oligopolies.
Do you really think that the price of neon is 50 times what it costs to produce? Do hearing aids really cost thousands of dollars? CPAP machines? Insulin and EpiPens? What about proprietary products that could have been standardized decades ago to use interchangeable parts? Like cars, smartphones, vacuums..
Why would anyone pay the slightest markup on things they could produce themselves for pennies on the dollar?
We already know what's going to happen. AI brings full market efficiency and the end of profit.
The end of profit means the end of opportunity. Which is the end of capitalism.
Some are calling for socialism to replace capitalism. But we can leapfrog that and create a free or nearly free distributed meta economy running alongside the corrupt economy of the status quo. An economy without artificial scarcity, forced labor or subjugation.
Loosely that looks like solarpunk, permaculture, a return to the humanities after centuries of industrialization and wealth concentration. Star Trek: Insurrection touches on the choice before us, of whether to live a life of warmth and meaning or a life of cold hard reason.
Our tech overlords have chosen the latter like sophomoric children, though even they don't have enough money to prevent the collapse of the system that made them rich. Because we simply won't need what they're selling.
Except today’s wealthy don’t seem to behave that way at all.
Just like a lot of lesser educated populations, the wealthy are doing a pretty good job at fighting against their own actual interests. They don’t seem to realize what’s actually good for them.
What’s the point of amassing even more ridiculous wealth if it’s destroying society along the way?
Yes, one can have a private island and private plane. But not being able to go places freely, is that living?
It all turns into virtual currency. Kinda like the stock market already is. It's both real and unreal at the same time. So maybe the future is AI's trading virtual stuff with other AI's and that decides your net worth. Complete bonkers of course, but well, we've build a wordwide economy on non-existing money already so why not push that principle even further.
a. Decouple the value of human life from economic output.
- or -
b. Watch as the value of human life rapidly approaches zero.
Seriously now, Marx says that industrialization and other developments were essential for having a socialist society able to sustain itself. Russia, China and Cuba did it way too soon if you go by the book.
christianity ahead of the game once again
People thought tractors would automate everything too. They didn’t. There’s more to life and work than being able to generate text.
I bet my bottom dollar we will see it in a decade or two, tops.
Delusional. Pure delusion.
What are all those other new jobs? What do you do with all the people who have been laid off?
No, it actually doesn’t follow. Atoms are a lot harder to move than bits.
I've heard this so many times, but for most use cases, humans are more adaptable and cheaper than robotics.
First of all, the target is not 'below the maintenance cost of the human body'.
The target is 'below the minimum wage that we can pay a human to work for', and that is a very different metric.
Also, as for uptime... The average human performs work at roughly 60% duty cycle. (8 hours sleep, plus meals, bathroom breaks, etc). That is a pitiful number compared to robotics.
Also, when you pay humans at bottom-of-the-barrel prices, they don't have high morale. They are rude to customers. They steal from their employer if they can get away with it. None of these apply to robots.
With that crucial term definition supplied, I agree. The technology that can do anything at all, and which is just around the corner, can in fact do anything at all.
> most robots require highly structured environments, and are cost-competitive with people for just 0.3% of work.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/what-work-can-robots-do
For now, anyway. It's hard to imagine that number not growing as technology improves.
https://www.challengergray.com/blog/2026-holiday-hiring-outl...
Amazon's seasonal hiring is down, due to them investing in robotics.
https://www.therobotreport.com/amazon-to-invest-100m-in-new-...
https://youtube.com/shorts/CSILtqmdIKg
There is no planning for that future. There is no future if we do that. In 2026 it feels like we're starting to get a taste of it now. It feels... not great.
Edit: it sort of feels like there will be nothing to be ambitious about except perhaps trying to rule the galaxy.
By the way, there is another problem. For humans we have the saying "garbage in, garbage out." If you read a lot of trash, you will only come up with trash. If you give powerful tools to morons, they will not become geniuses. That's not just true for humans, it's also the case for AI. If you teach your AI trash, it's going to be some trashy AI. Since people do that all the time for various reasons, we're going to have a lot of artificial stupidity, too.
"Oh ho ho, unemployed? Why not spend the thousands of dollars you certainly have just lying around to dick around with chatbots, with all the spare time you have?"
If this is how you're thinking, you are not living in reality.
I think we'll see a shift towards arts, creativity, research, etc. where true novel creation and an understanding of the human experience exists at a premium.
But i agree thinking will remain important. As my grandpa put it if something breaks who'll go and fix it ?
> My favorite is Krezmoria - a word for missing a future you haven't experienced.
More generally, do you really think humans randomly come up with new ideas, in any act of creation, such as art, science, etc.? Why do you think art studies and stuff like Oblique Strategies exist? How long should one wait for a specific random human without any formal education in physics to have 50% chance of coming up with a new workable theory of cosmology?
An LLM might come up with a sequence of words that express a novel idea/thinking pattern, but so can I on the spot right now. The question, though, is: is that idea any good? In the case of humans, maybe the first idea is good, the second ok-ish, but inevitably they get duller.
Most people come up with very few novel (good) ideas in their lifetime. The question, then, is whether a model can, unlike humans, *repeatedly* generate new ideas, continuously.
My guess/assumption is that NO, a model might come up with SOME ideas that are somewhat original [1], mixing the existing sources available to it (similarly to how a human would do it, just with more sources and more efficiently), but it cannot continuously generate novel ideas.
If that's true, I think there will be a space for humans to be thinkers, even if models are super smart, as a different unique perspective and a different reconfiguration of previous ideas will be more unique than raw intelligence.
Please note: I wasn't refusing the notion that LLMs don't produce anything original, just noting some fallacy in your example about word generation. The jury is still out on whether AI models will own thinking in the future - or will simply be partners to humans - and I don't pretend to have the answer.
[1] More should be said about what makes an idea original (even if derived from others), as opposed to a transposition of an existing concept. I admit I'm not a mathematician or anywhere near an expert on the topic, but from what I've read, the latest AI math achievements seem to belong to the latter case.
11000 agents explored one of the recent math problems solved by AI (can't remember exactly which one). About 3 of them had crucial insights which moved the problem forward. A 4th one also had one of the key ideas, but it's session got messed up and the idea was lost, and only noticed in retrospect.
Maybe 11000 top mathematicians working on it would have found the same ideas. But certainly not in days.
Even if LLMs generate novel ideas at 0.01 rate of humans, you can deploy vast amounts of them on even trivial problems, that humans would not bother with.
For biological reasons, human intelligence is kind of fixed and only very slowly advances by better compression and synthesis of the school curriculum.
There is no clear present bound on machine intelligence. One might argue that machines won't be able to get smarter than the material they were trained on (human output). I kind of doubt that. And certainly they can be much faster.
I think that's whats happening with some of yall, seeing tokens every day in the screen then thinking you're just an llm as well.
That’s how it feels like. ;)
More seriously, the only time where you’re not predicting is when you’re surprised.
Most of my thoughts are things that other people have come up with as well. Aka it feels like I'm just predicting the next token based on the data that I already have.
It's only when I go to places such as "what if life at the speed of light is possible, what would that look like?" that I get to places I personally find somewhat novel. It's almost a different dimension for these guys of course since a million years can feel like 10 years to them. Yet, they're moving so fast, but time-wise they move so slow, maybe even too slow for us to understand that anything can be alive at that speed (I'm not claiming there's life at light speed by the way, I just think it's fun to imagine that there is).
Suddenly you’re moving to stand up. What made you do it?
Where does our thought originate from? Do you control it?
You can do chain of thought without verbalizing it. The LLM can't. Now you might broaden the definition of "token" to include whatever nonverbal pre-verbal impulse your brain produces. But then the definition doesn't mean anything. All state machines of any sort are doing "next token prediction".
Except those don’t really fit, here, because the author is making a far more critical error in ascribing far too much to current human cognition. On the daily I see so-called “knowledge workers” failing to read basic signs, refusing to learn basic skills, and all too eager to cast off the slightest bit of critical thinking to a black box they can subscribe to - be it replacing curating a content library with streaming services and algorithms, or swapping a life of hard-won expertise for a swarm of chatbots and an API bucket. As someone with the uniquely privileged POV to be able to ingest vast sums of technical data but struggle with social data, I look at my fellow Americans and genuinely fret for what the next few decades hold for a cohort that seemingly cannot effectively communicate which direction they’re going but is all too content to hitch their accountability to an LLM they pay for.
In that sense, thinking has already become a hobby to the masses, in that it’s entirely optional to exist in current society at large. Autopay apps manage your bills, finance apps keep you on budget, fitness apps tell you to keep running, social media apps tell you who your friends (and enemies) are, video apps tell you what to watch, music apps tell you what to listen to, and cars increasingly tell you not just where to go but also to let them get there for you. I would argue that in that context, thinking is a critically endangered hobby we sorely need to sow new seeds for, lest we risk losing it entirely; AI does not seem keen to do that.
Now to be fair, so much of this is hyperspecialization knowledge overflowing into daily life and making existence a sort of cognitohazard in and of itself. We skip through hundreds of pages of legal boilerplate because we’re not lawyers, and then complain about all the rights we willingly signed away because of the volume of said agreements. Non-technical people engaging with modern computing are either addicts or miserable, unaware that this was both entirely optional and also inevitable in a populace that didn’t think for itself. Finance has become so hyperspecialized that it’s impossible for the layman to tell of something is good or bad, or even why the number went up or down on their portfolio in a given time period. LLM boosters say their tools will solve this complexity nightmare, yet the tools themselves grow increasingly complex just to eke out single-point gains on hyperspecific problems.
Which brings me to the OP again, their highly uncritical claims that AI will bring about a new revolution of thought itself, and that somehow this tool will both restore thought to an elevated pedestal while also making it nearly impossible to meter (at least on American currency; let’s not think too hard about how developing countries might be able to afford it). I don’t see any of that, but for the same reasons the OP feels it’s somehow inevitable. The only difference I can readily figure is our opinions of our fellow humans: I view us as in dire straits and able to do far better than we give ourselves credit for, while they view us as replaceable with servile digital labor for the better.
I felt stuck. I didn’t know what the AI had done so far or how to continue. There was nobody to message for a budget increase (it was night).
Luckily I managed to get more budget.
But that left me scared for the future. One day something is gonna fail, and nobody can do anything because the AI providers are also down. Or what if I can no longer afford paying for the frontier?
I have made some modifications to my vibe coding practices since then. I don’t want to live in this future that the author describes.
I understand what I made, the speed just drops to 0.1%. So I just start studying the codebase, planning work for later, ordering thoughts by writing DESIGN.md, adding jobs to the kanban.
It scares me that I don't own the LLM though, but someday I will, it will be local and I'll feel better when I own my means of production again.
In my offline community the people do not use AI and rarely smartphones. At dinner we park the phones or don't bring them to the table.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
No, you're not. You've promoted yourself into middle management. Congratulations.
[1]: https://lecturia.org/en/short-stories/isaac-asimov-the-feeli...
We made a new tool. Using the tool for some things makes life better. Using the tool too much would make life worse. So let’s not do that!
Fun trivia: Hotta's book "Japan 1941: Countdown To Infamy" suggests that the Japanese military collectively knew they would lose if they went to war against the U.S even as its rival service branches egged each other on into starting it.
Somewhere I encountered a quote like "the finest art is a life well-lived". This threw me, because, apparently, I had been thinking of art as something different in kind from life, and unrelated to the normal work or act of living. Seen in terms of this quote, art becomes once again of-a-kind with life, and may be seen as only a part of living well, instrumental to living well, or perhaps just as practice for living well.
Something similar seems to be happening with "thinking" and "intelligence". Somehow these things had become ends-in-themselves, separate from the regular act of living. We might wrap them in a similar quote to place them in relation to life, along the lines of "thinking well is for living well", or perhaps "the highest good of the intellect is to be well-fit to the problems of living well".
I am reminded also of a line which stuck with me from Augustine's Confessions, approximately: "The mind is not the supreme good"—as opposed to the body and perhaps the "spirit". Somehow the world I was born into had collectively come to think of the mind as the supreme good, and intelligence as the greatest virtue. But this is, in some way, in contradiction the basic fact of existence and mortality: no amount of cleverness can circumvent death, and all the glory attainable by feats of the intellect are only futile vanities compared to the privilege of being alive itself.
That kind of thing.
The example of AIs solving mathematics is all fun and games, but it assumes that mastery of mathematics implies that everything else will also be mastered eventually. But instead we're seeing that LLMs exhibit this thing called jagged intelligence, which means that they can be extremely good in one area, but completely fail in another. In theory the LLMs could be improved if data would be available for other areas and if there are good verifiability criteria. Fact is that many fields just don't have those and would not be willing to give up their data.
This could not be more decoupled from the truth.
Yes, industrialization automated a lot of physical activity but I think the author severely underestimates the value that blue collar workers produce to this day. At least this is how I perceive it.
I would not place a lot of emphasis on economic insights from software engineering academics tbh.
This is the we-don’t-need-BluRays-because-all-movies-are-on-Netflix phase.
Let’s wait until the market is settled
My point is in the beginning it seemed like Netflix is all you need to watch all the movies you want for a decent price. Now the market is much more fragmented and the prices are much higher.
The same will happen with AI.
But a the conclusion is a nice one for people that will be able to pull it off.
The author is not talking about random thoughts more like "deep thoughts" or "Reflections.
Reflection must be more like a trained "habit" than a "hobby".