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Comment by dangerwill | Hacker News Reader

If you apply this thinking to Nuclear weapons it becomes nonsensical, which tells us that a tool that can only be oriented to do harm will only be used to do harm. The question then is if LLMs or AI more broadly will even potentially help the general public and there is no reason to think so. The goal of these tools is to be able to continue running the economy while employing far fewer people. These tools are oriented by their very nature to replace human labor, which in the context of our economic system has a direct and unbreakable relationship to a reduction in the well being of the humans it replaces.

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> a tool that can only be oriented to do harm

Nuclear technology can be used for non-harmful things. Even nuclear bombs can be used for non-harmful things--see, for example, the Orion project.

> These tools are oriented by their very nature to replace human labor

So is a plow. So is a factory. So is a car. So is a computer. ("Computer" used to be a description of a job done by humans.) The whole point of technology is to reduce the amount of human drudge work that is required to create wealth.

> in the context of our economic system has a direct and unbreakable relationship to a reduction in the well being of the humans it replaces

All of the technologies I listed above increased the well being of humans, including those they replaced. If we're anxious that that might not happen under "our economic system", we need to look at what has changed from then to now.

In a free market, the natural response to the emergence of a technology that reduces the need for human labor in a particular area is for humans to shift to other occupations. That is what happened in response to the emergence of all of the technologies I listed above.

If that does not happen, it is because the market is not free, and the most likely reason for that is government regulation, and the most likely reason for the government regulation is regulatory capture, i.e., some rich people bought regulations that favored them from the government, in order to protect themselves from free market competition.

1. You've fallen for the lump of labor fallacy. A 100x productivity boost ≠ 100x fewer jobs, anymore than a 100x boost = static jobs with 100x more projects. Reality is far more complicated, and viewing labor as some static lump, zero-sum game will lead you astray.

2. Your outlook on the societal impact of technology is contradicted by reality. The historical result of better tech always meant increased jobs and well-being. Today is the best time in human history to be alive by virtually every metric.

3. AI has been such a massive boon to humanity and your everyday existence for years that questioning its public utility is frankly bewildering.

1. This gets trotted out constantly but this is not some known constant about how capitalist economies work. Just because we have more jobs now than we did pre-digital revolution does not mean all technologies have that effect on the jobs market (or even that the digital revolution had that effect). A tool that is aimed to entirely replace humans across many/most/all industries is quite different than previous technological advancements.

2. This is outdated, life is NOT better now than at any other time. Life expectancy is going down in the US, there is vastly more economic inequality now than there was in the 60s, people broadly report much worse job satisfaction than they did in previous generations. The only metric you can really point to about now being better than the 90s is absolute poverty going down. Which is great, but those advancements are actually quite shallow on a per-person basis and are matched by declines in relative wealth for the middle 80% of people.

3. ??? What kind of AI are you talking about? LLMs have only been interesting to the public for about a year now

> A tool that is aimed to entirely replace humans across many/most/all industries

This is a vastly overinflated claim about AI.

Is that not the goal? Since it turned out that creative disciplines were the first to get hit by AI (previously having been thought of to be more resilient to it than office drudgery) where are humans going to be safe from replacement? As editors of AI output? Manual labor jobs that are physically difficult to automate? It's a shrinking pie from every angle I have seen

> there is vastly more economic inequality now than there was in the 60s

Increased inequality doesn't imply the absolute level of welfare of anyone has decreased, I don't think you should include it in your list. If my life is 2x better than in the 60s, the fact that there are people out there with 100x better lives doesn't mean my life is worse.

Nuclear bombs can be used for space ship propulsion, geology or mining.

Notably nuclear bombs are not actually used for any of these as this is either sci-fi or insane

Nuclear weapons are a tool to keep peace via MAD (mutual assured destruction)

It's most likely the main reason there's no direct world wars between super powers.

Yup. The creation of these weapons necessitates their use. The whole arms race dynamic.

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