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Comment by Sol- | Hacker News Reader

Given that learning will probably soon not be required anymore to live a successful life (AIs will do everything better than you), I guess such learning-as-a-hobby apps will be the remaining niche to entertain the humans on basic income.

I wonder how many people will actually make use of it, though, and how many are instead content with being wireheaded by the various AI-based content apps that will appear, full with virtual partners (see Replika etc.).

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Learning is absolutely going to be required, we are just going to need to spend more time learning patterns and motifs rather than lots of facts. Learning facts and trivia was already devalued by everyone having a hyper-encyclopedia in their pockets, this will just extend that. Knowledge of patterns and motifs in domains of information will let you work together with the machines in a way that an untrained person will not be able to match.

I admire your optimism if you think that a human in the loop will add any value. Other than for humoring/entertaining the human, of course, which is what I meant with learning-as-a-hobby.

Also, I'm not educator or very knowledgeable about the theory of learning, but I can imagine that "learning facts and trivia" is to some extent a necessity for exercising our brains when we are young. Of course, learning patterns and theories is the end goal, but some rote learning may be necessary on the way.

Humans are very efficient computers for many types of tasks. Humans also have a large body of multi-modal data with detailed annotations inferred by observation of other people's responses passed through our mirror circuitry that is unavailable to the AI, so they can sometimes provide relevant guidance even if they aren't better at the whole task. Finally, human neural networks are chaotic, so they can potentially find better global maximums in some cases than a model, which might end up trapped in a local minimum due to its inability to entertain sufficiently unlikely hypotheticals.

My job is fighting IT crime. Right now this means reverse-engineering malware, tracking criminal groups in various graph databases, and writing Python scripts. Maybe in 20 years I will reverse-engineer AI models (using AI tools), discuss criminal groups with ChatGPT, and prompt-engineer utilities. But I don't see my (broadly understood) job becoming obsolete as long as people are capable of crime and software exists.

"Learning facts and trivia was already devalued by everyone having a hyper-encyclopedia in their pockets, this will just extend that."

I hope you don't end up having surgery done by a doctor who has to check a "hyper- encyclopedia" in his pocket because learning facts is supposedly obsolete...

As opposed to the doctor who has glassed with a HUD that is guiding him through the surgery, or a robot that the surgeon is guiding in VR?

I don't know why comments like this take for granted "basic income" as like this inevitability. We currently let people all around the world die on the streets for not participating well enough in the economy. Why would this moment in history be any different? You think just because you get paid a lot right now, the guys in charge will make sure you are ok in the future? That is not really how this whole capitalism thing works unfortunately.. No amount of technology will save us from waged labor in itself, its simply the character of our labor which will change.

What you want is communism, and buddy, I'm with you!

Oh yeah, the basic income thing I just threw in there because I think even in the best case where the disempowered and soon-to-be unemployed workers will be cared for, humanity will be reduced to AI-governed content consumers without much agency left (cf "The Machine Stops").

That said, I agree that it's more likely that the almost all of the returns of this AI-based rationalization will flow towards the wealthy, as usual.

I am not even that optimistic about it. What would be the incentive to keep humans entertained in a world run by AI? Why would they keep billions of us around? I won't make any sense economically.

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