Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

If the AI is at human level then it can do all human jobs. Given that humans require a minimum income to survive, if the total per hour cost of AI is below this level then all jobs will be taken by AI (why employ an expensive human when you can get a cheaper AI). This is what happened to human computers (people, mostly women, who performed mathematical calculations) in the 1950s when electronic computers became cheaper and faster per calculation. All those jobs ceased to exist.

There are some caveats here. The cost of AI labor needs to be below that of the human minimum. Given there is no effective limit to how much AI labor you can create, the likely result is the cost of capital will fall to near zero making AI labor near free. No human will be able to compete against this except in providing personal services to the owners of capital in fluff jobs.

The more interesting thing is that with the cost of capital and labour at near zero we should get massive deflation to the point that it will be very cheap to provide all people with a very high basic income that will make the need for employment unnecessary. This would be a great world to live in, but it would have a profound effect on the society unlike anything since the rise of agriculture.

"If the AI is at human level then it can do all human jobs."

I don't see how that follows. How does a computer program do manual labor?

By having access to a robot.

Actually most manual labor is done by machines controlled to a greater or less extent by a human brain. AI just removes the human brain out of the production loop.

So we're going to need robots to replace all the humans. I'm not sure how that fits in the zero marginal cost narrative.

I'm not sure I really understand the economics either.

Is AI going to be free? Who are the owners of capital going to sell their production to if people have no income? What are people who don't own machines going to do? Curl up in a ball and let themselves starve to death?

It is not that we need to replace all the humans, but that the owners of capital and land will be able to replace all the humans.

The best way to think about production is that everything produced is a combination of four things: labor, capital (past production), energy, and matter (land and raw materials). If you have labor that can be used to build itself (AI) then you can expand labour and capital to a very large number. You can also build new sources of energy very cheaply so the only limiting resource is matter. If you have the energy, capital and labor you can recycle most raw materials very cheaply. This leaves land as the only factor in production that does not scale.

What would all this mean in practice. Physical objects and services would become very cheap to make (effectively free) and all wealth would be tied to the ownership of land. Given the state owns most land, it should be very cheap for the state to provide all the material objects and services that any citizen needs. Unless the state actively wants to stave to death its citizens then there is not need for anyone to go hungry - if the state does want to stave to death people it does not need AI.

I think what you're saying makes some amount of sense, but I still feel there's a lot of handwaving and hidden assumptions around the way such a system gets bootstrapped.

If you have links to more detailed ressources on that topic, I'd be interested in reading them.

The way the system gets bootstrapped is humans create the first human level AI. The definition of a human level AI is it is able to do all the activities a human can do and so it can also make human level AIs too.

Once you have one human level AI you can make more replacing each human in the production of the human level AI - you basically start at the end point and working backwards replacing each job performed by a human with an AI. Once you get to the final job you will have a production system that can build AIs without any human labor. The system can make as many extra AI’s as wanted without any human labor - it is detached from the human labor market.

Unfortunately I don’t have any links discussing this. I think not too many people dwell on human level AI’s because the expectation is with AI’s if they can get to human level they will not stay at human level. Once you have AI’s that can make AI’s then they can make better AI’s until they far surpass human level. Understanding what these AI’s will be like is impossible for us.

> Once you have one human level AI you can make more replacing each human in the production of the human level AI - you basically start at the end point and working backwards replacing each job performed by a human with an AI.

Again, I don't see how that follows. Once you know how to build something, you can do it again. Of course. But what if building a functioning AI that can replace a human costs $100 bn?

Certainly it's not going to be economically viable to replace tasks that do not produce high ROI, even if you assume AIs are paired with indestructible robot bodies made out of unobtainium that are as versatile as the human body (have we even built one of those ever?).

I'm familiar with the idea that AIs could make better AIs and lead to some intelligence singularity, etc. Again, I think there's a lot of handwaving behind those ideas. We have no idea what the complexity of building more complex intelligence is, or what it even means.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com