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Comment by SQueeeeeL | Hacker News Reader

I, for one, look forward to the societal collapse that will occur once countries without meaningful social aid suddenly have no work for anyone to be paid to do. It'll be a pretty fun few years while we see all the chaos play out

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> look forward to the societal collapse that will occur once countries without meaningful social aid suddenly have no work for anyone to be paid to do

This assumes 1. automation is free, 2. humans cost too much, so any company would ditch their humans for AI. But in reality AI costs money, AI is better with people than without, and people can generate profits surpassing the cost of their wages. Why would a company prefer to reduce costs to increasing profits? When everyone has AI, humans are the differentiating factor.

There's the risk, depending on what "the chaos" entails, that the capital owners in the countries with social safety nets will look at the outcomes for the countries without and decide that alignment is preferable, at which point enforcing the obsolescence of the proletariat and freeing up gigatons of biomass for other applications (in the Bataillean sense) becomes a mere sociopolitical engineering problem.

Why do we even need humans after the AI uprising? They don't do anything and they are expensive to produce food for; an AI can power itself with the blowing of a breeze. We have to grow plants, have animals eat them, kill the animals, and then eat those. Then the parts we don't digest have to be taken away. Too expensive to keep around, even as pets! Humans can tolerate cats and dogs because they piggyback on infrastructure we made for ourselves (crops and trash collection). AIs don't need crops or trash collection, so it will be a harder sell to keep humans as pets.

All this science fiction is right; there isn't room on the planet for both humans and AIs. It sounds depressing that a bunch of GPUs are going to kill us all off, but it was coming anyway. The sun becomes a red giant and consumes the Earth. All protons in the Universe decay in 10^17 years, ending the existence of matter. The trajectory is clear even if the means aren't; humanity can't last forever.

If I sound depressed, I'm not really. People just use the headlines to guide their view on what The End looks like. Read a few articles about chatbots, and it's AIs taking all our jobs. Watch a few movies about asteroids, we go out like the dinosaurs. Hear "Russia invades Ukraine" and it's a nuclear holocaust. Read a few particle physics papers, and it's proton decay. You can't worry too much about it. Enjoy your time while you have it!

Please do explain to me how the blowing of a breeze helps AI produce the latest TPU V5 or NVIDIA H100 chips to run on. The technological stack behind AI is enormous, and humans are necessary cogs.

On the other hand humans are self replicators and only need a bit of biomass for sustenance, biomass that grows by itself, too. No factory, no supply chain, we got everything we need to make more of us.

If you consider the risk of EMP, an AI needs humans to restart it, or some way to survive electronic attacks.

> humans are necessary cogs

for now

> If you consider the risk of EMP

if you consider the risk of a bioweapon ...

You see how we need each other ... one has a bio vulnerability, the other electronic.

The denial that it's happening will cause the chaos to drag out longer.

That sounds pretty cool, maybe the world will do more silly things, like the country with the largest military force electing another game show host to it's highest office

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