Alternatively, we are entering a dark age where the billionaires who control most of the world's capital will no longer need to suffer the indignity of paying wages to humans in order to generate more revenue from information products and all of the data they've hoarded over the past couple of decades.
> the real kicker is that we now have general-purpose thinking machines that can use computers and tackle just about any short digital problem.
We already have those thinking machines. They're called people. Why haven't people solved many of the world's problems already? Largely because the people who can afford to pay them to do so have chosen not to.
I don't see any evidence that the selfishness, avarice, and short-term thinking of the elites will be improved by them being able to replace their employees with a bot army.
Like every previous invention that improves productivity (cf. copiers, steam power, the wheel), this wave of AI is making certain forms of labor redundant, creating or further enriching a class of industrialists, and enabling individuals to become even more productive.
This could create a golden age, or a dark age -- most likely, it will create both. The industrial revolution created Dickensian London, the Luddite rebellion & ensuing massacres, and Blake's "dark satanic mills," but it also gave me my wardrobe of cool $30 band T-shirts and my beloved Amtrak train service.
Now is the time to talk about how we predict incentive structures will cause this technology to be used, and what levers we have at our disposal to tilt it toward "golden age."
Capitalists have openly gloated in public about wanting to replace at least one profession. That was months or years ago. What are people doing in response? Discussing incentive structures?
SC coders paid hundreds of thousands a year are just letting this happen to them. “Nothing to be done about another 15K round of layoffs, onlookers say”
Also, these productivity gains arent used to reduce working time for the same number of people, but instead to reduce the number of people needed to do the same amount of work. Working people get to see the productivity benefits via worsening material conditions.
Coding may be a limited exception, but even then the AI's job is to be basically a dumb (if sometimes knowledgeable) code monkey. You still need to do all the architecture and detailed design work if you want something maintainable at the end of the day.
I mean, I know what you are getting at. I agree with you on the current state of the art. But advancements beyond this point threaten everyone's job. I don't see a moat for 95% of human labor.
There's no reason why you couldn't figure out an AI to assemble "the architecture and detailed design work". I mean I hope it's the case that the state of the art stays like this forever, I'm just not counting on it.
> There's no reason why you couldn't figure out an AI to assemble "the architecture and detailed design work".
I'd like to see that because it would mean that AI's have managed to stay at least somewhat coherent over longer work contexts.
The closest you get to this (AIUI) is with AI's trying to prove complex math theorems, where the proof checking system itself enforces the presence of effective large-scale structure. But that's an outside system keeping the AI on a very tight leash with immediate feedback, and not letting it go off-track.
I see literally zero people doing the equivalent of “breaking the factories” like the luddites attempted
Do you not see the overwhelmingly negative response to AI produced goods and services from the average westerner?
Great, let them try. They'll find out that AI makes the human SC coder more productive not less. Everyone knows that AI has little to nothing to do with the layoffs, it's just a silly excuse to give their investors better optics. Nobody wants to admit that maybe they've overhired a bit after the whole COVID mess.
Even the most pointless bullshit job accomplishes a societal function by transferring wages from a likely wealthy large corporation to a individual worker who has bills to pay.
Eliminating bullshit jobs might be good from an economic efficiency perspective, but people still gotta eat.
At a certain point it’s too late.
AI ghosts can do a lot of things, but they're limited by being non-physical.
> The entire global economy is re-organizing around the scale-up of AI models.
> Software engineering is just the beginning; ...
> Air conditioning currently consumes 10% of global electricity production, while datacenter compute less than 1%. We will have rocks thinking all the time to further the interests of their owners. Every corporation with GPUs to spare will have ambient thinkers constantly re-planning deadlines, reducing tech debt, and trawling for more information that helps the business make its decisions in a dynamic world.
> Militaries will scramble every FLOP they can find to play out wargames, like rollouts in a MCTS search. What will happen when the first decisive war is won not by guns and drones, but by compute and information advantage? Stockpile your thinking tokens, for thinking begets better thinking.
So he is extending this to more than just computer science.
Almost all of their wealth is ultimately derived from people.
The rich get richer by taking a massive cut of the economy, and the economy is basically people providing and paying for services and goods. If all the employees are replaced and can earn no money, there is no economy. Now the elite have two major problems:
a) What do they take a cut of to keep getting richer?
b) How long will they be safe when the resentment eventually boils over? (There's a reason the doomsday bunker industry is booming.)
My hunch is, after a period of turmoil, we'll end up in the usual equilibrium where the rest of the world is kept economically growing just enough to keep (a) us stable enough not to revolt and (b) them getting richer. I don't know what that looks like, could be UBI or something. But we'll figure it out because our incentives are aligned: we all want to stay alive and get richer (for varying definitions of "richer" of course.)
However, I suspect a lot will change quickly, because a ton of things that made up the old world order is going to be upended. Like, you'd need millions in funding to hire a team to launch any major software product; this ultimately kept the power in the hands of those with capital. Now a single person with an AI agent and a cloud platform can do it themselves for pocket change. This pattern will repeat across industries.
The power of capital is being disintermediated, and it's not clear what the repercussions will be.