If we play our cards right, AI could free people up for more valuable pursuits, and the pace of human information production would increase by orders of magnitude
It won't roll like that. AI will empower people to be more productive but won't free people up because it makes mistakes, can't help itself, and cannot function autonomously. There is no LLM application that is safe for autonomous usage today. How can we go from 0 to 1? I don't see a path. Self driving cars still can't reach L5 to completely remove the need for driver.
But maybe this is a blessing in disguise. It will make AI more like a new ability of humans than of the companies. Companies need people to unlock AI efficiencies. And AI tends to become open sourced so everyone has access to the same. AI is not a moat for companies and human ability to hand-held it is tied to individuals. That would make the transition easier. Solving that last 1% accuracy might encounter exponential friction and last for a while.
There was also remarkably little uproar nor violence when the Czech Republic escaped the Iron Curtain and embraced capitalism.
The violence would be between billionaires with infinite automation making infinite money, and common folk with no way to eat.
Gains from increases in productivity in the last hundred years[0] seem to be spread between more consumption, shorter working hours[1].
Some people expected that most gains would go towards decreased working hours instead of the spread we have actually seen. Not sure there's much significance behind that?
[0] Or any span of time you might want to pick.
[1] And bigger bureaucratic overheads, but you can count that either as a weird form of consumption or as just productivity not having increased quite as fast.
If your department gets a bunch of entry-level hires or interns, that frees up people in your organization even if they make mistakes, require supervision and can't function autonomously. Similarly, if an AI system can do half of a particular job under human supervision, it can free up (or make redundant) half of the people doing that job.
This will probably be (or already has been) solved by large transformer models or their successor architectures.
What was missing was common sense reasoning about what they see. We now have that.
you mean boilerplate and spam right?
As opposed to what? Being "captive" in jobs for paying bills?
What would you suggest as the alternative?
Forgive me if I'm misreading, but I'm having trouble with your line of reasoning. Your first reply to me scarequoting "captive" strongly implies an argument that the imperative to seek employment for survival is not a limiting factor on how people spend their time, and therefore that my suggestion that giving people more choice over how they apply their talents could be a good thing is irrelevant; but your child reply implies a concern that AI taking over some human labor will cause mass unemployment and explicitly states choice is declining.
I'm advocating that, since the genie is out of the bottle, AI could be used to free people from toil, just as other labor innovations like machinery and the 40-hour work week have done. Why the dismissive snark? In the abstract, do we not want the same thing?
That horse is already dead. Large models can learn everything, there's nothing that can be done to stop them from learning. It's too easy for them to do it. We can't hold any meaningful IP when models can generate 100 variations only different enough to pass the test. IP is dead. But on its corpse there will grow a new world of applications. We all got new skills, depends on us if we use them or not.
Literally no one said that, you are being ridiculous
[0] https://blog.kaichristensen.com/p/generative-ai-is-the-final...