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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

> killing most jobs

I can think of a dozen jobs off the top of my head that aren’t even remotely at risk due to LLM-style AI. And if your reply is, it’s only a matter of time until humanoid robots replace all human jobs, you’re very divorced from reality. In hundreds of years, maybe. Not in your lifetime.

This tech will already have a massive effect on society, purely from being able to generate text and software code at will. What is the constant need to exaggerate this into a Sci-fi story?

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Also if that many people were put out of a job, to the level that their basic needs were no longer met, there would be mass unrest/revolution and all of the robot production and data centers would be burned to the ground. See: French Revolution, Russian Revolution, etc.

And it would almost certainly happen before it got to the point of "they have enough robots to stop the masses". And probably we'd hit 3.5% rule[1] non-violent government regulation of AI before any of that.

The real risk of AI to me is that we're too heavily invested in it and when the bubble pops it could take a lot of institutions with it. And governments are not in a great position to bail economies out again.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%2525_rule

You live in a sci-fi world, we are that sci-fi story. Nothing we're talking about is outside the world of scientific possibility.

One thing you are really missing is a small amount of job displacement is going to create a huge deflationary amount in wages. At the end of the day you don't need that many plumbers and electricians. There was a reason a lot of people moved to office and tech jobs starting in the 80s. Trades were a dead end at the time. And the same thing will happen again as labor shifts.

This is making the same mistake: looking at where AI is now and not at the rate of progress it’s made. If you have a thinking machine that is more capable than every human on Earth and thinks 100x faster, how long do you think it will take for it to design humanoid robots.

I don’t think designing is very difficult. It’s actually having the resources and economic capacity to make millions of them, enough to “replace all jobs.”

It’s also a fallacy to assume that current progress implies future progress at the same rate. This is very basic technological history.

Again, a sci-fi fantasy for at least the next century.

> It’s actually having the resources and economic capacity to make millions of them, enough to “replace all jobs.”

Like that newfangled invention called the automobile. We could never produce millions of them to substantially replace all other means of transportation.

EDIT: Joking aside, I think that when humanoid robots get good enough (I'm predicting 5-10 years), there will an insatiable demand for them in every possible residential and commercial application. If we have as many cars and portable supercomputers (i.e., cellphones) as we have people, why is it hard to imagine producing as many robots as we have people?

Humanoid robots that perform human actions to the level of a human are orders of magnitude more complex than carriages with engines attached.

And there’s also the economics of it all. They won’t replace people if people are cheaper.

But I don’t disagree that eventually it’ll happen. Just that this has little to do with LLMs.

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