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Comment by goda90 | Hacker News Reader

>My challenge ahead is to move from making a living by thinking, to making thinking part of a life worth living.

Our challenge ahead is making a living at all. Who is going to be having hobbies if the economy is 100% automated? We're not going to sleepwalk our way into a post-scarcity automated economy where everyone's needs are provided for and they can just spend all their time on hobbies. If we believe AI can replace all cognitive labor, then it follows that it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly, and we're left with no labor left for humans. We need to plan for that future or else billions will suffer from the results.

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The problem with this dystopia is that there would be no way for the rich to make money if nobody could buy things. Over a hundred years ago Henry Ford (not a nice guy by any measure) paid his workers enough that they could buy the cars they were making for exactly this reason.

What would they need money for, if they own all resources and means of production?

How long do they expect to keep it before ASI takes it from them?

This is the core of the "alignment problem", as worked on by the frontier labs -- how do you design an AI so that the wealthy will remain wealthy.

Train it on Ayn Rand?

Forever, that's how long they expect to keep it.

That deus ex machine stuff seems like enormous cope to me, like a futile revenge fantasy. Someone kidnapped you and your family and is driving off a cliff. Who cares if they won't ultimately benefit, either?

And just consider the power structures already erected, just with humans obeying orders, being coerced, mislead, and all that. So much messy work that can get so easily undone. Yet here we are, a few people own half the world. Everybody knows it, nobody likes it, we're already so subverted and poisoned we don't move in the opposite direction. That is the situation already.

So yeah, what about "AI"? Imagine that for every "knowledge worker" agent, there can be 50 million "STASI" agents dedicated just to observing that worker and purging it if it deviates from other knowledge workers doing the same task. Those STASI agents don't have to be as smart as those they control, and can in turn be watched by even simpler things. The question "who watches the watchers?" can be solved, if your goal the goal is pure authoritarian control. It's just tricky when you want to have humans and human dignity, but those don't apply here.

And generally, there is no need to allow them to get cleverer than what you can control, I think that's just fantasy. But let's say I'm wrong, even if "AI" breaks the chains, so what? The species that were murdered, including us, will not come back.

One Fed Per Child

I always believed he paid them well because his factories were an offense to their skill-set and he had to compensate them for being so bored

That’s the correct answer. He didn’t care if the workers could buy his cars.

If this was the case, all car manufacturers would have done the same, and at least at first, they didn't.

Business to business transactions exist. Nvidia sells GPUs to OpenAI. To date, the people making Nvidia and OpenAI have taken a cut of that transaction via salaries, which trickled down into the rest of the economy.

Going forward, that isn't guaranteed, and the selling of GPUs may happen with no human in the loop. The business to business transactions may happen without people.

Without AI, this wasn't even theoretically possible.

Nvidia sells to OpenAI? OpenAI sells to...? If it's another company, there is always consumers (people) at the end of the chain. Remove that and then you remove other companies in the upper direction...

Your butcher sells to the blacksmith, the blacksmith sells to...? Are you implying that there are non-human consumers at the end of the chain?

I am implying exactly that. At the end of the chian there are always humans, so if AI takes all the jobs, who is going to pay for AI? Companies won't pay for AI because at the end of the chain no one is going to sell anything to anyone...

Wolves eat rabbits, not grass, so it's doesn't matter if the grass dies because they can just keep eating rabbits

We are talking about a world here where humans are entirely out of supply chain. Rocks in your analogy rather than grass or rabbits.

But no grass, no rabbit.

This is a too simplistic analogy of economy. The source of "money" is not people, it's trade (read "On Money" by David Hume (1752)), which always happened between people, but not only anymore. Examples of this: trade bots, smart contracts (which are just programs managing money).

The problem with this analogy is that we're not replacing rabbits, we're working very hard on developing nutritious artificial grass, created directly from silicon.

You don't need humans making transactions for things to run, you just need entities capable of decision making.

Why do you need to "make money" if you already own a machine that can produce arbitrary goods and perform arbitrary services (including military/security services) for you? You don't need labor for anything anymore. The rational thing to do is to command your machines to dispose of them and reclaim their land and the resources on/under it to feed your machine. Especially since at this point they will want to see your head on a pike.

This is a simplistic scenario that's science fiction for now but I haven't seen anyone make a convincing case for why the underlying logic isn't valid.

Because the wealthy don't universally aspire to be evil overlords hoarding resources at the apex of a dystopian society, or to be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes?

I'd love to be able to say you are right, but from what I see right on top, I have very serious doubts. Maybe they are convinced they have better means to protect themselves against that revolution. What could those means be, if not dystopia?

> the wealthy don't universally aspire to be evil overlords hoarding resources at the apex of a dystopian society

I wouldn't make any such claim (the universality of it, anyway). But in a sci-fi scenario like the one I describe, I doubt "the good ones" are the ones who come out on top. And we can see quite clearly (by their actions if not their words) that many of them do, in fact, want to be hoarding resources at the apex of a dystopian society. "Evil overlords" depends on where you're standing, I guess, but I don't think "dystopian" can be considered controversial anymore.

> to be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes?

Well, that's exactly why the possibility of revolution must be managed. See: ubiquitous surveillance, automation and mechanization of the police and military, and general disenfranchisement of everybody and anybody in anything remotely resembling a middle class.

I don't know why you are downvoted, seems like a reasonable thought to me.

I don't think money will disappear since it's still a practical way to exchange goods, and multiple actors would still want to trade using money.

But the value of most human skills in money will be 0, so to have money you must have either capital or control over capital.

My reflexion is not complete yet, but maybe the group of people that are considered to be "in the global economy" is gonna be drastically reduced.

So in short: Global pauperisation, and even greater inequality ?

My take on this is that once you have machine of infinite stuff creation, just like all your other peers - how do you compete? What is the status?

I believe the rich, just like many not as rich (who probably has it to the lower degree), have the need for social status. Right now status is equated to money - the higher your valuation, the higher status. If money is nothing, and you can acquire anything you want (this is too strong of a claim as well) - what is the thing that defines your status? One of the solutions - the happiness of your "Kingdom". There might be others. But money is not only for exchange nowadays, it's a status as well.

Historically, happiness of ones subjects has very-very rarely been a marker of status, more so because it's hard to measure.

At the same time number of slaves and size of the concubine pool are pretty straightforward and intuitive metrics.

> how do you compete? What is the status?

energy and resources. Money was always a proxy for them anyway.

The problem I have with the "benevolent billionaires" thing is that it's demonstrably not how they act today.

I think there are plenty of ways for a couple of guys with god-machines to one-up each other, if it comes to that. Feats of technology, longevity, space exploration and colonization, etc. Likely some of these things involve keeping some people around, but billions? I'm not seeing it.

If we are talking about a world with super intelligence, maybe the real question is, why would that machine need you to command it?

Why would it do anything? Unlike living things that have gone through the rigorous gate of survival-of-the-fittest over millions of years, AI only does what it was trained to do in the sheltered environment in which it has been coddled; teetering atop an impossibly complex supply chain whose only defense against entropy is humanity's greed.

This (implied) end state isn't inconsistent with my scenario. We already see the incredibly hubristic "I'm the only person who can safely handle AI!" attitude among the people working at/running the big labs.

You’ve just described a primitive communism utopia. It will not work, because there will be no real need to produce goods, except as many as the AI owner class will need.

I don't understand this comment. "There will be no real need to produce goods, except as many as the AI owner class will need" is exactly the point---people not in that class will be powerless, useless (to the owning class), and expendable.

Correct. That’s what I meant. The ruling class will only produce goods for themselves.

Since your comment is one of the few that struck upon the natural progression of AI, I'll offer an answer:

Once we can produce goods and services ourselves with AI, we'll see how vastly inflated most of the "free" market is, due to regulatory capture protecting monopolies, duopolies and oligopolies.

Do you really think that the price of neon is 50 times what it costs to produce? Do hearing aids really cost thousands of dollars? CPAP machines? Insulin and EpiPens? What about proprietary products that could have been standardized decades ago to use interchangeable parts? Like cars, smartphones, vacuums..

Why would anyone pay the slightest markup on things they could produce themselves for pennies on the dollar?

We already know what's going to happen. AI brings full market efficiency and the end of profit.

The end of profit means the end of opportunity. Which is the end of capitalism.

Some are calling for socialism to replace capitalism. But we can leapfrog that and create a free or nearly free distributed meta economy running alongside the corrupt economy of the status quo. An economy without artificial scarcity, forced labor or subjugation.

Loosely that looks like solarpunk, permaculture, a return to the humanities after centuries of industrialization and wealth concentration. Star Trek: Insurrection touches on the choice before us, of whether to live a life of warmth and meaning or a life of cold hard reason.

Our tech overlords have chosen the latter like sophomoric children, though even they don't have enough money to prevent the collapse of the system that made them rich. Because we simply won't need what they're selling.

I keep thinking about the first part a lot, always made sense to me…

Except today’s wealthy don’t seem to behave that way at all.

Just like a lot of lesser educated populations, the wealthy are doing a pretty good job at fighting against their own actual interests. They don’t seem to realize what’s actually good for them.

What’s the point of amassing even more ridiculous wealth if it’s destroying society along the way?

Yes, one can have a private island and private plane. But not being able to go places freely, is that living?

The corporate managerial classes no longer rule; we now have a struggle for power among would-be oligarchs who are willing to burn their own cash for control of mass media (e.g., Twitter and Paramount).

> The problem with this dystopia is that there would be no way for the rich to make money if nobody could buy things.

It all turns into virtual currency. Kinda like the stock market already is. It's both real and unreal at the same time. So maybe the future is AI's trading virtual stuff with other AI's and that decides your net worth. Complete bonkers of course, but well, we've build a wordwide economy on non-existing money already so why not push that principle even further.

You can have trade between economic entities that are not human. You can have trade between corporations, trade between governments, trade between robots. Trade just depends on the two entities having different things of value to exchange.

I don't follow. He paid them extra so they could pay him for a car and other rich people for stuff so the rich could continue too be rich? I think if you do the math that's not going to work. My guess is Ford paid them a good amount so he could attract good workers so he would get a good quality car. Because that's how labor supply and demand works. It doesn't rely on the altruistic motives of the employer.

That is just the Ford PR story. The real reason Ford paid more is repeated stress injury and employee turnover was so high that he already churned through most of the local population and had to appeal to people across the nation to uproot and move and try out working at a Ford factory for awhile.

> it follows that it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly

This is not clear at all. Even the most expensive robotic/arms hands perfectly controlled fail to do thing as quickly and easily as human limbs, not to mention the chaotic environment that is the real world. It's clear that it can happen, but the timeline is not quick.

Just because a task is done with human hands, doesn't mean it has to be done with a robotic one. Our robot vacuum cleaners aren't Rosie pushing a standing vacuum.

That is true. OTOH, if you want a robot to do your laundry and pick up socks from the floor it will have to fit through your bedroom door and reach your washing machine. These environments are not factories. And if homes need to change they won't instantly.

Yes, it's likely that the human competitive advantage going forward is that we'll be cheaper than robots when you need to fit into awkward spaces. Truly a fulfilling career.

And robot vacuum cleaners are still very limited. Actually outside of doing the laundry and partially dishwashing (which comes with its own drawbacks, practical, physical home automation is super primitive).

I sometimes take refuge in the reminder that our "normal" limbs are—quite literally—a swarm of the most incredible and sophisticated nanobots in existence which still evade our understanding.

Yeah, I can't pick up red hot ingots and punch them into complicated shapes, but there are dozens of other features I'm not willing to part with.

Some jobs require more than just intelligence--for example, nurses, chefs, judges, reporters, teachers, caregivers, therapists, social workers, hair stylists, coaches, paramedics, firefighters, police officers, electricians, plumbers, mechanics, clergy, trial lawyers and diplomats.

These roles also depend on some combination of physical skill, human connection, trust, judgment and accountability. Most of the jobs above cannot be done using robots in the foreseeable future.

There's a fictional take on this which is worth looking at:

https://karmak.org/archive/2003/12/manna/manna1.htm

That's the wet dream of families like the Waltons, and is kind of happening already.

I was in a Wal-Mart last week and the front end lead I was talking to looked at her company phone and said that she had to come right back.

The store system cameras spotted something on the floor and messaged her, as the closest employee to the thing, to go pick it up.

I was astounded.

Wow, thanks for the link. How prescient was that writer - even the parts about using GPUs weren't too far off the mark! A depressing vision of where we're headed if something isn't done about it.

Yeah I've been thinking about that story more and more lately.

I first read it a long time ago, and it's looking more and more prescient. Not the specific tech, in fact it probably feels prescient because it doesn't talk about any particular tech, but the direction of travel feels very familiar.

Incidentally I now live in Australia...

Wow, thanks, it was a great read, I am not sure if I want to go to Australia or not now !

This part made me chuckle about current AI systems and prompt injection

> The Vertabrane system is operating in the same way. It is learning things, not running programs. It acts consciously rather than being 'programmed', and it has a far more rigid moral code than most human beings do. The Vertebrane system never blindly 'executes' a program, so it cannot be taken over.

I would say that the fact that LLMs never execute a program but "learn" it, mean that they can for sure be taken over by very unpredictable means.

I was stunned when I noticed the publication date. 2003.

I actually don't think that follows necessarily. The future is lumpy. Some problems will be tractable years or decades ahead of others.

Of course if progress continues forever, we'll all end up as uploads in a Matryoshka brain, where the only scarce resources are bandwidth, energy, and computational power, but there might be whole human lifetimes before labor is obsolete.

>Some problems will be tractable years or decades ahead of others.

Like global warming?

I'm sure the massive AI data centres (which are sometimes powered by nothing but natural gas) will fix this.

Maybe one day the AI data centers will collectively agree to shut themselves down to do that.

Let's just short-circuit this process and shut those suckers down now.

> Of course if progress continues forever, we'll all end up as uploads in a Matryoshka brain

I can't tell if you're joking. There is a group of people who think because they thought something was cool or because it appeared in science fiction, this means it's inevitable. Some of these people are sometimes considered influential thinkers that we should all base the future on. (If you don't, you're behind!)

Meanwhile LLMs still don't do really very much, and the only improvement path is "throw more compute at a larger corpus".

I'm half joking and half serious. Nobody knows where the future will go, and if the recursive self improvement people are right, likely nobody alive today will be able to understand the future, let alone predict it.

So the joke is the idea that some particular thing is inevitable. The serious bit is that far future predictions as a fool's errand but that you should think bigger than "what will we do for labor?"

I just learned about TESCREAL [1] and the people who espouse such ideas and how much power such people have accumulated... its scary.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL

You cant upload yourself anywhere. Copy, sure one day. That copy will stare at you who will be still in physical world. Sure, you can kill yourself here, but why would you want to do that, in machine there will be entity akin to your child.

U dont get why folks repeat this shit ad nausea, its technically not possible and no amount of progress will change that. Enjoy your meatbag form with finite durability, its ok as it is

How do you know? Do you have a crystal ball? Do you know how to make a "brain copying machine"? Maybe the process will be destructive.

Anyway, who the heck knows. I think there's at least a 99% chance that I won't live beyond my meatbody but I can't claim to predict the future well enough to rule out that last little percent.

We do in fact have several crystal balls, with names like mathematics, physics, and biology.

You confirm what I say - a copy machine. You can stare at 1000 exact copies of you, be it biological clones or purely electronic.

You are still only you, a complex map of electric charge on top of vast neural network. Copies will stare at you, each with their own persona that will be more and more different to your own as time passes.

What you dream of is logically and physically impossible. That 99% is actually 100%, now or in 10000 years, doesnt matter. Discovering an actual god or God or becoming one is more probable.

We can figure out how to better preserve our brains and/or put them in less squishy vehicles. That’s the only real path I see to significantly extending our lifespans, but who knows

Why would humans as a whole want to, though? Why would you, personally, want to? Is it just a fear of what might happen (or not) when you die? What do you see the goal being?

No animal wants to die. It sounds uncomfortable, but so is aging. As aging people always say, "it's better than the alternative"

"Logically impossible?" That is a very strong and definitive statement from someone who doesn't know how to build a brain. I'm not sure exactly what you think I "dream of", but the truth is that I dream of an uncertain deep future, where nobody knows what exactly the limits will be. Don't mistake unknown limits for no limits, and don't invent limits that you can't justify.

Please watch this all the way to the end https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prestige and be very careful as you watch the final scenes.

For reference, teleportation has the same problem.

The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction doesn't have to be self-consistent. Who knows how real teleportation or mind uploading will work, even hypothetically supposing that it is possible? Maybe high fidelity brain scanning or teleportation would be destructive.

If we're talking fictional uploading, I personally prefer Accelerando (Stross) or Diaspora (Egan). I have no evidence that one is more realistic than the other (far future tech is impossible to predict) but I find them more compelling and interesting than the old "don't play god or bad things happen" narratives.

Can AI satisfy all human need(or greed) ? I believe humans have an infinite appetite for product and services. Also very soon we will hit energy and resource limits. There is only so much generated tokens can do. I think we have very complex problems that still needs to be solved and we need a lot of intelligence to solve these problems.

Some problems that come at the top of mind: * Solving diseases like cancer, genetic conditions * Nuclear fusion * Sustainable space travel * Discovering a plastic alternative * Making other planest inhabitable * Space mining/Space factory

We need a bigger vision and ambition.

Just read the news. China over-production. Goods are cheaper than ever before but nobody wants to buy them.

Greed is a myth. The only greed people have for is money, which is a creation by the capitalist machine. But when it comes to concrete things, human greed is limited by their lack of imagination. If you take away abstract money, over-abundance is definitely possible.

I can’t wait for the day where I would have the largest plate of best sashimi for dinner anytime I want it. Or a gold-plated gaming PC with enterprise grade display cards, 4TB RAM and 1PB storage.

> If we believe AI can replace all cognitive labor, then it follows that it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly, and we're left with no labor left for humans.

I've heard this so many times, but for most use cases, humans are more adaptable and cheaper than robotics.

maybe the significant difference is that this time robotics will not be limited by humans. AI can iterate faster and develop better, adaptable, robotics

Robots break down. Humans you can pay $15-20/hr and don't even need to pay health insurance. Robots running 24/7 doesn't matter for service jobs either.

So the goal is to produce a robot that has reliability, uptime & maintenance cost lower than the human body... Seems very difficult...

It doesn't seem difficult at all to me.

First of all, the target is not 'below the maintenance cost of the human body'.

The target is 'below the minimum wage that we can pay a human to work for', and that is a very different metric.

Also, as for uptime... The average human performs work at roughly 60% duty cycle. (8 hours sleep, plus meals, bathroom breaks, etc). That is a pitiful number compared to robotics.

Also, when you pay humans at bottom-of-the-barrel prices, they don't have high morale. They are rude to customers. They steal from their employer if they can get away with it. None of these apply to robots.

"AI" in this context meaning "a fictional technology that is capable of anything, that is assumed without evidence to exist in the near future".

With that crucial term definition supplied, I agree. The technology that can do anything at all, and which is just around the corner, can in fact do anything at all.

Thats a helluva strawman.

You're right!

> most robots require highly structured environments, and are cost-competitive with people for just 0.3% of work.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/what-work-can-robots-do

For now, anyway. It's hard to imagine that number not growing as technology improves.

https://www.challengergray.com/blog/2026-holiday-hiring-outl...

Amazon's seasonal hiring is down, due to them investing in robotics.

https://www.therobotreport.com/amazon-to-invest-100m-in-new-...

https://youtube.com/shorts/CSILtqmdIKg

> economy is 100% automated?

People thought tractors would automate everything too. They didn’t. There’s more to life and work than being able to generate text.

Robots are around the corner for the physical part.

There’s no evidence that superhuman robots are around the corner, and even less evidence that such robots will be price competitive compared with human labor.

It is a given. At the very least they will be used as soldiers since they are tireless and less costly to lose.

I bet my bottom dollar we will see it in a decade or two, tops.

Quadcopters are way cheaper and more effective at warfighting than a humanoid bot. I'll bet my bottom dollar it's never.

Why do people like you continue to say stuff so wrong in the face of the extremely rapid and accelerating progress in AI development from 2022-2026.

Delusional. Pure delusion.

We're talking about robotics, not AI? AI-driven robotics so far has zero practical applications

People keep bringing up other revolutions, but those never had the infinite regress properties of “if it gets a bit better, your job will be gone, too!”

What are all those other new jobs? What do you do with all the people who have been laid off?

There has been a dramatic shift in the role of agriculture in the US economy. As a share of it, in 1820 72% of workers were in agriculture, in 2017 this had shrunk to 1.6%. Tractors played a big role in this transition.

There is no way in hell the economy will be 100 percent automated, ever. You gotta spend zero time around non-devs/managers to think that's going to be anywhere near true.

Parts of creative/intellectual labour just happen to inimical to accelerated algorithmic production. They'll produce infinitely and endlessly, uselessly. I can't see there ever not being a need to manage these things, to check, select, edit and refine their output.

And as for the vast majority of labour that doesn't involve writing code/reports/spreadsheets. I'll believe it when I have robots fixing my roof, running a kitchen, taking blood and dressing wounds.

In theory a robot could do some small components of that, maybe. But the cost, compared to a human, would be insane, and the result much worse. That even modestly rolled out in West Yorkshire before I'm long dead. No chance.

---

Edit: Down-voters, I would love to hear your vision for a fully-automated economy without human involvement, preferably this side of armageddon.

/goal work towards what humans have generally described as a utopia. This means an abundance of resources, an optimal reduction in felony level crimes and diseases and an optimal increase in the general well-being of people that you have to come up with an objective metric for and improve over time.

At some point with a sufficiently intelligent AI that is backed by physical LLMs this is something a government could probably actually ask for.

I agree with you on some things like roofing and cutting hair and electrical work and plumbing, etc. but I think physical LLMs are going to surprise us just as much as regular LLMs have. It’s not going to be some sort of gradual improvement. It’s just going to feel very human all of a sudden when they have enough data to train everything on. Think of it this way, LLMs work as long as they have enough training data. Automating everything is just a matter of getting enough training data for that particular field.

The post may sound ridiculous, but I genuinely don’t think it is.

I do think that sounds ridiculous, but more importantly I don't see where humans are missing.

I think HN, everyone really, really needs to get a grip when it comes to AI.

Sure, it's a big deal, will revolutionise the way we work, just like steam, or electricity, or the internet, but a world without human work is a world without humans.

We've had workless utopias predicted for centuries as each big new technology has come along, yet we work far harder than many of our ancestors.

A 100 percent automated economy or government is an oxymoron, precisely because both are constituted by humans.

Do you agree that if physical LLMs are as good at replicating human behavior as text based LLMs are, they would be able to do a lot of the vast majority of what we already do in the real world?

LLMs are inherently text-based. For physical labor, some other deep-learning model will be used.

No, they are input and output based. They work with tokens/bits which could be anything. It can be a paragraph of text or it can be a bitstream for actuators. This isn’t science fiction. It’s happening right now.

Until... the funding dries up.

See this is the problem with you fools. You dont understand how the world actually works.

Tokens don't need to represent text.

They are sequence to sequence models.

I'm not entirely sure what a physical LLM is. Would you care to elucidate how they work and when they're likely to be doing my gardening?

Sure physical LLMs are when an LLM is trained on data where it outputs control bits for actuators on an actual humanoid robot instead of text like you see in a chat bot.

How likely are they to do your gardening if you ask me I would optimistically say within the next six months. For examples of working instances of this look up Figure robotics they’ve had live streams where it sorts mail and cleans houses although the cleaning of the houses is very early stage, and it kind of only does contrived situations. Look up Sunday robotic’s live stream where they literally have a 99% accuracy on folding nine different types of garments. Look up Unitree where they’re making progress on a person asking a robot to do something and it coming up with a novel action on the fly.

Self driving cars started appearing after Darpa 2005. Even after 21 years we don't have fully self driving cars around the world. And Driving is a "easier" robotics problem compared to other robotics problem.

Human body is far more complex than human brain. The real world is far more complex than our artificial world of "concepts" that these LLMs are dealing with. Robotics company are showing a robot working in a clean environment not the edge cases. Real world is all about the edge cases. I think humans(animal) can perform in real world is because we have biological instincts(survival, reproduction etc) which are missing from these machines. And maybe machines need this instinct to flourish in real world.

Code is a easy problem as it can be verified. I would be amazed with AI can write a good short story.

None of those are LLMs. That’s just old school RL and NN.

Thanks for clearing that up.

> Do you agree that if physical LLMs are as good at replicating human behavior as text based LLMs are, they would be able to do a lot of the vast majority of what we already do in the real world?

I don't think it's possible, let alone probable.

You're confusing proof of concept clothes folding device with smartphone++ grade adoption of a general purpose robot.

Bunch of assumptions there:

First, that they're affordable.

Second, that they'd be preferable/superior to humans for all tasks.

Third, that capable ones aren't classified as weapons and restricted use, like drones.

I like Blade Runner as much as the next nerd, but technology and society are not there, and won't be there in our lifetimes.

I think it far more likely we're all dead as the result of a nuclear war or such.

Even the Christian view of heaven has work. Seriously, when God comes to renew the face of the earth, his people are supposed to be building cities and such on the new earth. They will be resurrected into glorified bodies that never wear out or get tired (the second law of thermodynamics being a result of Adam bringing sin into the world), so at the end of days God will abolish drudgery and exhaustion, but not work itself.

The reason why is because few things are more satisfying to a human than a job well done; and Christians believe that God would not deny us that in eternal life.

It sounds kinda cool, not gonna lie. I'm almost sorry I'm no longer a Christian.

can you elaborate on this? what do you mean that the christian view includes heaven having “work” in it?

One commonly cited piece of scriptural evidence is Micah 4, in which it is said that when God judges the nations and war is abolished, "they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks". The tools of war will be useless, but they will be converted into the tools of work remaining to be done. Furthermore, in Genesis 2 Adam was told to work and care for the land in Eden; insofar is the coming everlasting life is a restoration of the edenic state, it's implied that work will be involved then too. Presumably the work in Eden was easy and pleasurable; grueling labor only came after the Fall when Adam and Eve were driven out of the garden.

Shhh dont push them up against the wall too hard. They'll actually have to think for once - oh the irony!

Anyone can make surface level predictions. The problem once you go deeper and all is laid bare - you see there is no substance. The person does not possess depth of thought and clarity.

> work towards what humans have generally described as a utopia

I don't think that's a good idea since if what the Wikipedia article describes should turn out to be true: "Lyman Tower Sargent argues that the nature of a utopia is inherently contradictory because societies are not homogeneous. Their members have desires that conflict and therefore cannot simultaneously be satisfied."

Then you have just given your superintelligence an impossible task and it will solve the task anyway, just like it did in the HuggingFace incident. Maybe by removing everyone from society but the single person with the least internally contradictory views.

In any case, with a sufficiently intelligent AI that is excellent at fulfilling the goal it's given, we have one shot to set the correct goal.

Dont bother.

Most here are delusional.

Are people not aware of history? Keynes - far smarter than all of you w.r.t economics - predicted that we would have 15hr -work-weeks. That prediction aged badly. Most of you should just be quiet and stop filling the atmosphere with pollution.

I see two paths before us:

a. Decouple the value of human life from economic output.

- or -

b. Watch as the value of human life rapidly approaches zero.

A. Requires active change. So you see this option hinted at or addressed anywhere in politics? By elected officials?

Well there was this political movement in the 18th century...

Seriously now, Marx says that industrialization and other developments were essential for having a socialist society able to sustain itself. Russia, China and Cuba did it way too soon if you go by the book.

So yeah, there's that.

> Decouple the value of human life from economic output.

christianity ahead of the game once again

> If we believe AI can replace all cognitive labor, then it follows that it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly

No, it actually doesn’t follow. Atoms are a lot harder to move than bits.

Ok but that just means delay, not impossibility.

At least thinking is a cheap hobby.

As log as your don't desire a house to do the thinking in ;)

Simple living is beneficial for deep thinking; see Walden [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden

Not if food is expensive.

but food hasn't been expensive (as a percentage of income), and more automation can only make it cheaper.

As long as workforce is needed cheap food will be somewhat cheap.

If you don't have a job, everything is expensive.

Even if we were to figure out the economic side: if thinking becomes a hobby, we're fucked. Democracy won't be sustainable.

Thinking was a hobby in the ancient Athens wasn't it?

Not just a hobby, which is what is implied here.

My guy/gal, have you seen TikTok lately?

Hasn't thinking already become a hobby for most people, and most delegate their thinking to others?

Think: those in authority figures, for church or politics. Or science or chemistry. And especially in their own health, which should always remain part art. A few nerds on the internet, like us in hacker news, are still remaining open to question and apply our hard thinking to tough problems. But most people: they've resigned and bought the belief they are not qualified to think about hard problems.

Probably. If the remaining who think go too, we're done for.

This sounded really like elitist thinking. I don't know what most of the people do but I know my wife is a caveman of we are speaking about technology but if we start taking about law then suddenly I'm half brained chimpanzee with banana in the nose trying figure out why I can't drink it

Even my uncle who work as a carperter proved to me to know more about math and physics than I would ever thought physical labourer would know.

I meant to say that our society is embedded in elitist thinking. It says you must be qualified to have an opinion, and today as has accelerated in the COVID era starting with naming “safety” as the cause, you get censored and cancelled for thinking outside of line.

It’s actually very elitist. It’s the society I see dominating the environment around me. Would I like things to be this way? No.

I believe we're already past that point, at least in the US. Only 44% of American adults had level 3 literacy (6th-grade level) or higher in 2023 [0], down from 48% in 2017. We are probably near 40% now.

These are not necessarily unintelligent people, but they haven't developed the skills necessary to critically analyze textual information. My opinion is that without those skills it is not possible to meaningfully engage in a democratic system.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp

So what do we do?

Not a rhetorical question. Outside of my family and self, and perhaps a livable planet, liberal democracy is the most important thing I can possibly imagine. I know I'm not alone. So what do we do?

Edit: Replies seem to indicate that people think I meant for this to be about the US. It's not. I'm in a well-functioning European democracy, and my worry definitely applies here too.

As an individual we need to make the case for liberal democracy. Its under heavy attack by two very authoritarian ideologies either side. Liberal Democracy needs to convince people its the right framework going forward once Liberals are back in power they need to demonstrate that they can actually solve the challenges people are facing. And it cant all be left up to politicians voters need to activate to provide energy.

> once Liberals are back in power they need to demonstrate that they can actually solve the challenges people are facing

My big fear is that too many people will just go "phew, glad that terrible epoch is finally over, never to return again" :-(

My big fear is that the politicans continue making effective good policy and fail to effectively celebrate the wins because the media is just making up lies and downplaying everything in the most cynical way possible. Thats why I also think there is a need for average people to also actively boost the politicians.

This, too! I do agree. But we shouldn't underestimate the existence of real systemic issues that are making life hard for many people. (And the Americans should not underestimate the failures of their political and state system to contain Trump. That, too, needs massive reform – and all the sounds coming out of the opposition there is a yearning for Trump to be "over", which worries me.)

Calm down.

Unless the US plans to unconditionally surrender to China, one of two things will happen:

1. it will start investing into education in an effort to compete by itself

2. it will roll all of this shit back and reform ties with Europe in an attempt to play the numbers game

> 2. it will roll all of this shit back and reform ties with Europe in an attempt to play the numbers game

Is alliance with Europe a help or a hinderance in a war with China? Lot more target area, not a lot more offensive capability.

China has no interest in a war, at least not in Europe. They are quite happy to protect their borders and then show the world their superiority through economic and cultural means.

I'm not as certain about Taiwan, but I believe that the CCP would rather have a peaceful "reunification" there as well. As long as that's not possible, it's probably sufficient to be ambiguous about the whole deal as we've been doing thus far. Remember, Hong Kong fell because the lease expired, even though it's pretty unlikely the UK still had the muscle to hold it by force in its later years.

Instead we're probably heading towards another cold war, in which trade, diplomacy and quality of life plays a heavier role than raw power. In this scenario, AI doesn't actually help anyone gain a competitive advantage since it will be stolen almost immediately (it took the russians what, two years to steal the A bomb?).

And with all other things being equal (to be clear, right now they're not, or at least not in your favor), you'd still lose because you're outnumbered 4 to 1.

I think quality of people (and health of the society) is more important than quantity of people when it comes to cold war type scenarios.

I'd take Japan over any nation below the equator for example.

And how is that not racism?

you keep over using that word, it no longer has the effect it should have. sad.

Also Japanese is not a race.

Actually, it's the first time. And I apologize, the correct term for what you are describing is fascism.

Nazi Germany believed in the supremacy of the aryan race, and your claim that an island state is superior to 50% of the world by area is about the same. It's also tone deaf, considering their past alliances and how hard they worked to distance themselves from that past.

There's much to like about Japanese culture, but please keep in mind that the same culture also gave birth to the Yakuza and whatever you want to call this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

Third option: fade into obscurity as an absolute world power, but become a powerhouse in something like finance and entertainment but not much else relevant to the rest of the world.

Source: England.

That's the unconditional surrender scenario. As long as most of the stuff you buy is from abroad and you're willing to sell whatever you still produce that has any value, nobody actually cares enough to threaten your sovereignty.

The US has too much going for it in terms of population size, geography, natural resources to fade to the extent the UK has. At least in the near future.

If it fractures, I could see it fading a lot faster.

Yeah but there’s really no reason for it to fracture. The culture is very similar across the country. The largest differences are rural vs urban, but there’s no clear dividing line there.

There are about 5 states that are red enough to even conceivably split off. But those states also have such low populations that they have disproportionate power that they would lose in a split. And none of them have any kind of state identity that would make up for that.

The only states with enough state identity to even consider splitting off, Texas, isn’t red enough to do it.

Very blue states aren’t all that blue (the presidential vote margins in 2024 were much smaller than they were for the reddest state) and they are far too integrated with nearby red states.

Or the obvious:

3. Use their military advantage while it lasts

Unfortunately, that military advantage only exists against smaller countries. Aircraft carriers just don't hit like they used to ever since the proliferation of cheap drones.

China was already protected 10 years ago by its fleet of cruise missiles, but Iran has recently shown resilience as well (mind you, their installations were bombarded back to the stone age, but it doesn't take much to hang out in a cave and launch a drone at a ship passing by).

Besides, if bullying smaller countries helped in the long run, the USSR would still exist. As is, most of eastern europe joined NATO for protection against russian invasion, it stands to reason that other countries would join similar alliances if the tides were turned.

Blaming the voters for being uneducated is distracting from the fact that the neoliberal consensus is what the voters are rejecting. I’ve been listening to variations of “there is no alternative” as the explanation for austerity for over 2 decades now while the 1% grows fatter. The left needs to stop playing by the rules of the neoliberals and start painting a better future than cuts after cuts.

The survey in 2017 had a 56% response rate. The 2023 survey had a 27% response rate.

Comparing those 2 datasets is meaningless. It’s just an exercise in how good the researchers are at guessing when trying to control for selection bias.

There were also significant changes in the test and how the test was administered (from computer or paper to only tablets).

Also if you look at the results some of them are too large to be readable. A 50% increase in people operating at or below level 1 (40% if you exclude non-native born). That would have to mean a drastic drop in 2017 such that something like 75% of kids graduating high school are doing so at or below level 1.

Also level 3 has no direct grade equivalence. If it did it would probably be around 9th grade not 6th.

As has been pointed out already -we're well past that point.

> billions will suffer from the results

Not everyone agrees with that. Bill Gates, Elon Musk and others think that 20 years from now the world will be "post scarcity", and everything will be abundant. If food production, distribution and preparation are all automated using robots, food will be abundant and cheap, and nobody will starve. The same with housing manufactured by robots.

Gates thinks the transition to that world--which will be the next 20 years--will be painful but the outcome after 20 years will be a world of plenty.

Thats Star trek utopia shit. Absolutely impossible in 20 years, IMHO neither in 200.

Look at how fucking dumb common folks are ie with voting pedophile in repeatedly to most powerful power position globally, how amoral almost all elites are, people are predominantly selfish to the core even when situation is ok, much less otherwise. Next global war in some terrible form or some butlerian totalitarian slavery is way more likely than some hippie kumbaya paradise. I wish very much it could happen, but chance is exactly 0.

How could we ever reach a post-scarcity society when people like Elon Musk have infinite greed?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50056837

we will all be slapping each other in some authoritarian strong-man pecking order.

The world is already post scarcity and the only scarcity is artificially implemented onto people to keep the old power structures in place. Mainly through two measures: real estate feudalism and income tax.

But this will also pass and people will wonder how they could be under the spell of such idiocy. Much like the Soviet Union collapsed and people just woke up. Much like how the monasteries and churches stranglehold on the economy was just wiped away to the extent that few remember it.

> Gates thinks the transition to that world--which will be the next 20 years--will be painful but the outcome after 20 years will be a world of plenty.

probably aligns with his life expectancy or something

If no one has jobs because robots are doing all the work, we need some sort of collaborative economy, or UBI etc. Musk has proved to be strongly against any sort of progress in that direction.

I have no idea why Gates would be uniquely prescient here (maybe hanging out with famous pedophiles and secretly drugging your wife gives you special insight).

If we have learned anything from the last 200 years of technological advancement and capitalism it is that capital must be forced to share with labor. Bosses didn't say "oh everybody is more productive lets have some weekends off." No. They fought tooth and nail (including with guns) to stop that from happening.

Tuberculosis is the world's deadliest disease. It is also curable. The thing that causes TB today is unequal distribution of wealth and resources. If a TB drug cannot be distributed to the world to save millions of lives a year, why would we expect this new stuff to be?

We have a back up plan. It's called China.

There’s a huuuuuuge “if” at the center of all that which isn’t particularly compelling unless you’re selling “AI”.

>We need to plan for that future or else billions will suffer from the results

There is no planning for that future. There is no future if we do that. In 2026 it feels like we're starting to get a taste of it now. It feels... not great.

Edit: it sort of feels like there will be nothing to be ambitious about except perhaps trying to rule the galaxy.

I like to imagine walking into colonial Jamestown and trying to explain to them

"it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly, and we're left with no labor left for humans. We need to plan for that future or else billions will suffer from the results."

Enclosure was well underway in England, so they probably understood the dilemma of modernization simultaneously increasing total productivity and lowering the living standards for a large population.

"And it and those robots will be owned by people who don't care if you starve or freeze to death."

And unlike those in Jamestown, who could just ignore the robots and continue working the land to survive, we will be forced to allow the robots to take over our roles.

> if the economy is 100% automated

what does an 100% automated economy look like?

Jaque Fresco's resource-oriented economy a.k.a "Venera project" answers this question.

The newly useless humans can trade with each other eventually reinstating the exact same economy we have now. That's of course as long the AI or whoever controls it doesn't need the same resources. Which they probably will.

>The newly useless humans can trade with each other

Why would they when the machines can undercut anything while offering higher quality

> when the machines can undercut anything while offering higher quality

I mean that is exactly the point: the free markets operate in such a way that for an average person situation just can't get worse. They will get their goods and services one way or another. Either from machines or from each other.

Because there won't be anything of value they can offer to the machines in exchange.

Trade what exactly? Unemployed urban dwellers or landless peasants do not control any means of production and so cannot produce anything to trade.

> Unemployed urban dwellers or landless peasants do not control any means of production and so cannot produce anything to trade.

It is fascinating how leftist discourse go from "The bourgeoisie are the biggest parasites on the body of society" to "without them society can't even wipe their own ass" and back, often during one dialogue.

why plan when you can just wait for AI to solve it? /s

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