Posted by ianand 3 hours ago
> My inability to produce food is economically almost irrelevant. What matters is that I can consume it, enjoy it, develop tastes for it, and devote my energies to other things.
What the author misses is that what mattered more was that people could now produce more things. People were free from manual labour to perform intellectual labour. But what do people do to produce things when intellectual labour is automated? And with emboddied AI, skilled manual labour too?
You need to produce things to be able to reap the fruits of economic progress. Thats what most working people did after the agricultural revolution. What will we produce in a post AI world? And if only the people who own AI will be able to produce things, then why would they give us any power or leverage in the economy?
Nailed it! It’s a too powerful resource to be privately held.
It's concerning because there is already way too much 'intelligence' in this society and most of it is used to propagate falsehoods, irrationality and to manipulate others in counter-productive ways. I hope AI educates people and doesn't merely steer them down deeper into their echo-chambers. That said, I also really hope that AI doesn't just bring everyone into alignment and agreement about ideas which aren't true. There are significant threats with both extremes.
They do what AI can't do, entrepreneurialism, because AI doesn't have property rights. Like back to the 1800s when most Americans were self-employed, not working for large corporations, because corporate cog-in-the-machine work can be done better by AI. With AI it's far easier to run your own business than at any time in history.
They were mainly wage employees and factory workers by the end of that century due to industrialization. And "AI" is the industrialization of intellectual work.
But let me play the devil's advocate and argue the point: who will the business sell to, if most people are not in a position with wealth to spare to buy from your business?
Clearly a relevant and replicable analogy to AI making entrepreneurship easier /s
Your version of 1800s North America is a myth.
When the people were were freed from farm labour, due to farm automation, people could find another economic activity which required the other capacity of humans - intelligence.
The transition from muscle-power work to mind-work was meaningful, as both muscle and mind were attributes of humans, creating demand for humans having mind power instead of muscle power.
But the continuation of that transition breaks down. Muscle power -> Mind power -> ???
Those 3 questions marks at the end are what's scaring people, and what is threatening the stability of the transition from mind work. If both muscle power and mond power are not things of value, how would the humanity progress to create value? Who buys it? Why do they buy it? Who hires whom? Why?
I guess their point is that, for example-- instead of requiring heaps of study and a genius mind to learn to how to reverse engineer complex things over the course of years, their intelligence can go to something that... AI can't do yet?
But I am sure people had the same question marks back then, for what's comes next
Current AI is never going to do better than us in every category, it can only do better in us in categories where it's possible to generate an infinite amount of verifiable synthetic data (math and programming). AI is still just as bad at sales, marketing, writing and anything involving human subjective appeal as it was a year ago. And it's fundamentally handicapped in being unable to acquire new domain knowledge that doesn't fit in a few hundred thousand tokens of context.
All of these have objective metrics (units sold, clicks, likes, etc) and are thus verifiable in principle.
Even if this turns out to be true, I don't think it will necessarily matter.
So much money was already burned, by so powerful people in incestuous relationship with governments, that I don't think this is an important point anymore.
AI is not a ”fair” resource. Normal people cannot compete. We can rent capacity of the ones owning the data centres. But we will never have access to the best models. Never be able to afford outbound data centres. We can at any moment lose access to the resource. And the ones controlling the resource will be in control of everything. And it will be privately held. Fantastic.
Well, look at that. An essay about the benefits of slave trade and colonialism, while making no mention of slave labor or oppressed people.