Comment by pizzly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pizzly | Hacker News Reader

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The question is how long before machines can exceed humans in every way and how long will it take before legal and cultural restrictions allow this to happen. It still could be a long time away and jobs will probably increase in the short/medium term as AI unlocks more what humans can do at a rate faster than AI can automate away.

But lets consider what that end state could look like when machines exceed humans in everyway, what good are humans?

One possibility which I don't particularly enjoy is humans will be good for status games, art, creativity, story telling, IRL experiences, everything that involves human to human interaction and connection with other humans. If AI can supply everything in abundance than like rare cards there is only so many humans in the planet at any particular time then human's value increases. I really do believe connections with other humans will have a premium. As a nerd who is borderline anti-social, non artistic, creative, etc this does not appeal at all to me and properly to many others who read HN as well. For the majority of other people with some adaption time I think they will be fine. They were fine adapting to hunters and gathers to agricultural society, they were fine adapting to agricultural society to industrial society, they were find adapting from industrial society to information society and they will will be fine adapting from information society to the social/creative economy. Some short term pain but overall most people will accept this reality quite readily. Those born into it will not even know what we talking about.

If a computer wins a chess game it doesn't enjoy winning nearly as much as a human would enjoy losing from another human. And that's just chess. Now extrapolate to everything else.

> Some short term pain but overall most people will accept this reality quite readily. Those born into it will not even know what we talking about.

How do you propose this brave new world of yours will work economically?

I'm not yet even in my 50s, yet when I was young digital work mostly did not exist. Somebody who claimed the future would have people sitting in front of screens typing away being a huge part of the economy would have seemed a bit kooky. To say nothing of there being trillion dollar companies whose primary 'product' is selling ad space on the fledgling internet, an internet that it took forever for 'normies' to even realize existed.

It seems almost a forgone conclusion at this point that LLMs are going to wreck most cognitive work, particularly in the digital domain. And a world where e.g. software creation can be almost entirely automated for very little cost doesn't mean software companies become absurdly wealthy by being able to automate away all their labor - it means it's a world where software's value approaches $0.

And that would broadly apply to all things that LLMs can automate - which is going to be most of the problem-solving digital domain. So as the value of these things decreases, the value of other things will tend to increase. And, outside of entertainment, it seems highly probable that we're looking at a return to the 'real world' being where the value of problem solving will be found.

> It seems almost a forgone conclusion at this point that LLMs are going to wreck most cognitive work, particularly in the digital domain.

And yet, a good chunk of HN is totally in denial about this.

I think that's quite predictable. You're speaking of a scenario here where people did all the things society says you're supposed to do to end up living a very comfortable life, and the outcome is anything but comfortable. That's going to be quite difficult for people to accept, and so many simply will choose not to.

It may not even be a bad decision. It's not completely clear on what timeframe this will all play out, even when it does start playing out on a larger scale there will be some software jobs, and it's not most people have great alternatives so they'd be stressing themselves out over something that they probably can't do much of anything about.

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