zlacker

I couldn't agree more. I fear the world where 90% of people are irrelevant to the economic output of the world. Our culture takes it as axiomatic that more efficiency is good. But its not clear to me that it is. The principle goal of society should be the betterment of the lives of people. Yes, efficiency has historically been a driver of widespread prosperity, but it's not obvious that there isn't a local maximum past which increased efficiency harms the average person. We may already be on the other side of the critical point. What I don't get is why we're all just blindly barreling forward and allowing trillion dollar companies to engage in an arms race to see how fast they can absorb productive work. The fact that few people are considering what society looks like in a future with widespread AI and whether this is a future we want is baffling.

>>hackin+(OP)
This won’t be the first time. First world already had same situation during industrialisation, when economic no longer required 90% of population growing food. And this transformation still regularly happens in one or another third world country. People worry about such changes too much. When this will happen again it wouldn’t be a walk in a park for many people, but neigher this would be a disaster.

And BTW when people spend less resources to get more goods and services - that’s the definition of prospering society. Of course having some people changing jobs because less manpower is needed to do same amount of work is an inevitable consequence of a progress.

>>iavael+w8
Historically, efficiency increases from technology were driven by innovation from narrow technology or mechanisms that brought a decrease in the costs of transactions. This saw an explosion of the space of viable economic activity and with it new classes of jobs and a widespread growth in prosperity. Productivity and wages largely remained coupled up until recent decades. Modern automation has seen productivity and wages begin to decouple. Decoupling will only accelerate as the use of AI proliferates.

This time is different because AI has the potential to have a similar impact on efficiency across all work. In the past, efficiency gains created totally new spaces of economic activity in which the innovation could not further impact. But AI is a ubiquitous force multiplier, there is no productive human activity that AI can't disrupt. There is no analogous new space of economic activity that humanity as a whole can move to in order to stay relevant to the world's economic activity.

>>hackin+3c
If humans are irrelevant to the world's "economic activity", then that economic activity should be irrelevant to humans.

We should make sure that the technology to eliminate scarcity is evenly distributed so that nobody is left poor in a world of exponentially and automatically increasing riches.

>>reveri+lr
Technology doesn't in itself eliminate scarcity as long as raw materials and natural resources are scarce. In this case, all technology does is allow more efficient control over these resources and their by-products. Everyone having their own pet AGI on their cell phone doesn't materialize food or fresh water.

>>hackin+3c
> This saw an explosion of the space of viable economic activity and with it new classes of jobs and a widespread growth in prosperity.

I don't see any reason why thing must be different this time. Human demands are still infinite, while productivity is still limited (and btw meeting limited productivity with infinite demans is what economic is about). So no increase in productivity will make humans stop wanting more and close opportunities for new markets.

> Modern automation has seen productivity and wages begin to decouple.

Could you provide any sources on this topic? This is a new information for me here.

>>hackin+uz
AGI is still a concept from science fiction. If we talk about modern LLMs (that are indeed impressing) increasing food production is not what they are about. But this doesn't mean that technology doesn't help there. Green revolution for example literally made more food materialize.

>>iavael+BRc
>I don't see any reason why thing must be different this time.

The difference is that AGI isn't a static tool. If some constraint is a limiting factor to economic activity, inventing a tool to eliminate the constraint uncorks new kinds of economic potential and the real economy expands to exploit new opportunities. But such tools historically were narrowly focused and so the new space of economic opportunity is left for human labor to engage with. AGI breaks this trend. Any knowledge work can in principle be captured by AGI. There is nothing "beyond" the function of AGI for human labor en mass to engage productively with.

To be clear, my point in the parent was from extrapolating current trends to a near-term (10-20 years) proto AGI. LLMs as they currently stand certainly won't put 90% of people out of work. But it is severely short-sighted to refuse to consider the trends and where the increasing sophistication of generalist AIs (not necessarily AGI) are taking society.

>Could you provide any sources on this topic? This is a new information for me here.

Graph: https://files.epi.org/charts/img/91494-9265.png

Source: https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-d...