[forgetfulness]

We were perhaps a bit too enamored with the idea that it was intellect that made us unique, and thus knowledge workers would be the last to be replaced. Pouring our brains out by the Petabytes for neural networks to pick them up made the economics just work for an AI industrial revolution to start from there.

[mikepurvis]

I feel a bit like this with the whole firestorm around AI artwork as well— it's been a big wakeup call to people who have been creating using technology-assisted workflows for decades, but still felt in their gut that they were bringing something unique to the table and were therefore "safe" from being completely automated away. That hitting the button for magic eraser or magic lasso or magic color correction was someone okay in a way that the AI itself sitting in the driver's seat was not.

Now that's been reduced to pointing out minor flaws that the next generation of AI artists will trivially resolve, and sharing memes beseeching other humans to participate in a boycott.

There's real pain and angst there, and I don't want to be callous about it with a comparison to buggy-whip manufacturers or something. But I wish the participants in these types of discussions were able to zoom out a bit and see that there's a larger societal issue here around automation, and that the real solution is going to be rethinking the basic economics of how we distribute wealth in a time of extraordinary machine-driven productivity— productivity that is no longer just about assembly lines and primary industries, but now also includes an increasing bite out of realms previously classified as "knowledge work".

[forgetfulness]

Hard to tell, other knowledge workers and people in creative industries were already squeezed, designers for instance have had a tough time for a very long time. Will things change, politically, because now marketers and Software developers join those ranks, for instance?

Programming was an outlet, if not a gold rush, for many people as the basic technical skills to create Software with the already sophisticated tooling available today presented an economic opportunity, but if "describe your problem, get crappy app" becomes viable, it may squeeze the market for junior developers.

For as long as it has existed, Software has been subject to the Jevons Paradox [1], and every advancement in making its development cheaper and its supply more abundant has only made it so more activities become powered by Software and Software developers, but it's hard to tell how this will impact the job market, especially if Software was absorbing people who didn't find more opportunities in the broader service sector.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[mikepurvis]

Yeah, well, and even looking to the immediate subject of the article... like, whether your lawyer is going to become a bot in ten years, a huge amount of what used to be part of the legal practice has already been automated away in terms of the research side, nevermind specialized firms that just crank through bog-standard family-law or property-transfer cases by plugging the relevant details into an Excel template.

Basically it's the same story as everywhere else, where technological augmentation has already created a huge squeeze, and now suddenly even the senior people are wondering if the writing is on the wall for them too.

[mdp2021]

No, we were enamored with the idea that intelligence was well distributed between people, as if following Descartes' massive incipit "Good sense must be the best distributed thing in the world, given that nobody seems to be asking for more".

Inability to recognize intelligence is and will be devastating.

[forgetfulness]

> Inability to recognize intelligence is and will be devastating.

It's a pop-culture quote from a movie that was no masterpiece, I know, but "I, Robot" presented in two sentences an argument for having more sober expectations on what machine intelligence could be capable of, and of our own

> Detective Del Spooner: "Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a… canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?"

> Sonny: "Can you?"

We're discrediting the capabilities of current machine learning models for being unable of producing the thoughts that many, many people are unable to either.

Alright, so the models are not at the level that us HN philosopher kings hold ourselves to be, and they won't be Senior Architects of distributed systems or what have you very soon, but what does it say about Average Joe, slightly-above-Average Joe, and their economic prospects? Specially since in the West and much of the developing world, we were taking solace in the idea that a service economy comprised of knowledge workers would provide plenty of opportunities on a political and economic landscape where manufacture was gone, or had never arrived.

[mdp2021]

-- Pseudo Detective Del Spooner: "Can a robot lift that object?"

-- Pseudo Sonny: "Can you?"

-- Pseudo Detective Del Spooner: "Ha-ha. So what the #!@! is a robot doing there, not doing what is required? I cannot, and I do not stand there clueless"

What is being engineered, toys for the satisfaction of some idle decadent sympathy urge? Have cats disappeared from the world?

> We're discrediting

We are shocked that an overly large number of individuals expect stones to bleed, and intelligence to pour out of machines that do not have intelligence coded inside, and that instead have unintelligence - acritical repetition - coded inside.

> what does it say about Average Joe

That he should catch up with his nature, if he shows the critical capacities of a simulacrum that has none.

> not at the level

No, no, no: it is not a matter of quantity but of quality: if you do not implement it or its origin, it will not be there.

> [Asimov]

Asimov is relevant. For example, I remember his idea that the State comes from Agriculture (~10000 BC), in the need to plan irrigation, or that the Abel vs Cain story could be a parallel of the political consequences of lands denied to pastors. Now: those seem to be good ideas, and their production can be an interesting goal. But there is something /before/ "creativity", or "advanced pattern recognition": it is /intelligence/, meaning that Asimov, after having spawned those hypoteses, has /vetted/ them as a required duly activity before confirming them in his set of founded hypotheses. You have to use intelligence, you have to have intelligence, and if you want to do AGI, you have to implement intelligence!!!

[forgetfulness]

And many among the Average Joes will not measure up to this ideal man of science and art. In truth you'll see that I'm not advocating for the rights of as-of-yet non-sapient computer programs, but to think of what this means about people.

If we're setting the bar of personhood or dignity to being exceptional researchers and engineers, it doesn't bode well for the masses that aren't and won't be. Maybe this will result in a society of leisure where everyone can be that! I wouldn't bet on it, there's already more PhDs in the sciences and humanities than society can fit, and humans may just not work that way.

You're already dismissing concerns about the welfare of the merely average, for being unfit when competing with the Machine Learning models we may have in the near future.

[mdp2021]

> You're already dismissing concerns about the welfare of the merely average

This writer individually: no, not literally «dismissing», it is just that I could not grasp precisely your point in this specific area. And I would say, as I wrote just earlier, «Inability to recognize intelligence is and will be devastating»: it already happens that an inability to discriminate ("It takes it to see it") will hide from the sight to some manager the critical risks that the underdeveloped sense of some workers will pose, and such risk will increase when they will have to compete with even riskier and less endowed entities that may be confused for acceptable - since this is what has been showing even here in the past times.

This issue comes from a devaluation of actual intelligence.

> If we're setting the bar of personhood or dignity to being exceptional researchers and engineers

Not really. Look, a few weeks ago this HN member had some heavy exchange with others to which it was said "there is no intelligence if there is no critical thinking", and some arrived to call that position "delirious". Now a rebuttal would have been, "Ask your grandmother". Because there is a "high culture", that of the Professor and the Professional, and "low culture", that of the Teacher and of the Relative, it does not take the former to have good judgement - the latter suffices plentifully, when not polluted.

So, you do not need to have the bar set to «exceptional researchers and engineers» - just a good grandmother. Who could have been an «exceptional researchers and engineer», in case, if life so determined - because "the requirements were there", available.

[forgetfulness]

Invoking the image of the woman that may have been denied opportunities because of her gender in the 1950s is an emotional appeal to convince oneself that inside every human is a latent Leonardo da Vinci.

[ben_w]

> if you do not implement it or its origin, it will not be there.

Who created ours?

And if it's god (which god?), who created theirs?

[mdp2021]

We are talking about engineering things.

If you want to implement it directly, good;

if you want to implement what will spawn it, good;

if you want to implement an "[evolutionary] genetic algorithm" as said spawner - so that the population of the entities in need to find solutions in the solution space will progressively develop a model of said world and a logic that works in it -, good.

If you built a mannequin and wanted to call it a woman... Bad.

[ben_w]

Do genetic algorithms create human intelligence directly, or do they create the capacity for a human brain to develop it?

I genuinely don't know if anyone knows the answer to that.

But I do know the perceptron is a toy model of an organic neuron, and that deep learning is a toy model of larger structures such as a cortical column.

And I do know some AI (not sure about GPT in particular) are trained via genetic algorithms.

You appear to be awfully confident we haven't implemented intelligence, even by the standard stated in your reply.

[wrycoder]

"Learn to code" isn't such valuable advice for the Average Joe anymore, is it?