Hacker News Reader

Comment by visarga | Hacker News Reader

> free people up for more valuable pursuits

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.

View on HN

Functioning autonomously is not the level needed to free up people.

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.

Yeah, it's not that I think we'll get all the way there, it's a utopia. My expectation is that within 30 years we reduce the work week by a day or two for most people, compensate for our education system's decline, and avoid energy and food crises, and nothing else fundamentally changes

Assuming this happens without any violence, which I truly doubt. Huge socioeconomic changes like this always come as a result of violence and uproar.

Why? Eg in the latter half of the 20th century the US integrated women into the workforce (almost doubling the population eligible for participation in the labourforce), without violence or uproar.

There was also remarkably little uproar nor violence when the Czech Republic escaped the Iron Curtain and embraced capitalism.

Integrating women into the workforce is not even close to abolishing private capital and the need to work.

The violence would be between billionaires with infinite automation making infinite money, and common folk with no way to eat.

What you're responding to doesn't propose the abolition of obligatory work or private capital, it proposes a decrease in labor hours commensurate with, or conservative in comparison to, an expected increase in productivity

Yeah sorry about that, but do you think its realistic? I mean productivity has been going high since a long time yet we are still 5 or 6 workweek.

Now that's a reasonable debate we can have!

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.

I can’t see us going from Microsoft and Open AI stealing everyone’s work and selling it without attribution or respect for GPL (for example ) to technological utopia anytime soon.

Especially given the average prognosis of technological progress north of a certain point is dystopia. It's like that thing where you ask everyone how many jellybeans there are in the jar and when you average the guesses the average guess is accurate. Except in this case on a societal level you average the guesses and they come out as "dystopia" but the underlying distribution contains plenty of wildly inaccurate guesses of "eutopia".

> Self driving cars still can't reach L5 to completely remove the need for driver.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com