[fsndz]

I get the excitement, but folks, this is a model that excels only in things like software engineering/math. They basically used reinforcement learning to train the model to better remember which pattern to use to solve specific problems. This in no way generalises to open ended tasks in a way that makes human in the loop unnecessary. This basically makes assistants better (as soon as they figure out how to make it cheaper), but I wouldn't blindly trust the output of o3. Sam Altman is still wrong: https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-sam-altman-is-wrong

[robwwilliams]

In your blog you say:

> deep learning doesn't allow models to generalize properly to out-of-distribution data—and that is precisely what we need to build artificial general intelligence.

I think even (or especially) people like Altman accept this as a fact. I do. Hassabis has been saying this for years.

The foundational models are just a foundation. Now start building the AGI superstructure.

And this is also where most of the still human intellectual energy is now.

[dartos]

You lost me at the end there.

These statistical models don’t generalize well to out of distribution data. If you accept that as a fact, then you must accept that these statistical models are not the path to AGI.

[girvo]

Quite. And if it was right, those businesses deploying it and replacing humans need humans with jobs and money to pay for their products and services…

[fakedang]

It will just keep bleeding the middle class on and on, till the point where either everyone is rich, homeless or a plumber or other such licensed worker. And then there will be such a glut in the latter (shrinking) market, that everyone in that group also becomes either rich or homeless.

[palmfacehn]

Productivity gains increase the standard of living for everyone. Products and services become cheaper. Leisure time increases. Scarce labor resources can be applied in other areas.

I fail to see the difference between AI-employment-doom and other flavors of Luddism.

[bayindirh]

It also fuels the income inequality with a fatter pipe in every iteration. You get richer as you move up in the supply chain, period. Companies vertically integrate to drive costs down in the long run.

As AI gets more prevalent, it'll drive the cost down for the companies supplying these services, so the former employees of said companies will be paid lower, or not at all.

So, tell me, how paying fewer people less money will drive their standard of living upwards? I can understand the leisure time. Because, when you don't have a job, all day is leisure time. But you'll need money for that, so will these companies fund the masses via government to provide Universal Basic Income, so these people can both live a borderline miserable life while funding these companies to suck these people more and more?

[CamperBob2]

It also fuels the income inequality with a fatter pipe in every iteration

Who cares? A rising tide lifts all boats. The wealthy people I know all have one thing in common: they focused more on their own bank accounts than on other people's.

So, tell me, how paying fewer people less money will drive their standard of living upwards?

Money is how we allocate limited resources. It will become less important as resources become less limited, less necessary, or (hopefully) both.

[danans]

> Money is how we allocate limited resources. It will become less important as resources become less limited, less necessary, or (hopefully) both.

Money is also how we exert power and leverage over others. As inequality increases, it enables the ever wealthier minority to exert power and therefore control over the majority.

[pishpash]

Why would "resources" become less limited or necessary just because there's some AGI controlled by a few people? You're assuming a lot here.

Separately, is it "rising tide lifts all boats" or "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" that drives the common person's progress? You seem confused which metaphor to apply while handwaving the discussion away.

[bayindirh]

> Who cares? A rising tide lifts all boats.

Apparently people who are not wealthy enough to buy a boat and afraid of drowning care about this a lot. Also, for whom the tide rises? Not for the data workers which label data for these systems for peanuts, or people who lose jobs because they can be replaced with AI, or Amazon drivers which are auto-fired by their in-car HAL9000 units which label behavior the way they see fit.

> The wealthy people I know all have one thing in common: they focused more on their own bank accounts than on other people's.

So, the amount of money they have is much more important than everything else. That's greed, not wealth, but OK. I'm not feeling like dying on the hill of greedy people today.

> Money is how we allocate limited resources.

...and the wealthy people (you or I or others know) are accumulating amounts of it which they can't make good use of personally, I will argue.

> It will become less important as resources become less limited, less necessary, or (hopefully) both.

How will we make resources less limited? Recycling? Reducing population? Creating out of thin air?

Or, how will they become less necessary? Did we invent materials which are more durable and cheaper to produce, and do we start to sell it to people for less? I don't think so.

See, this is not a developing country problem. It's a developed country problem. Stellantis is selling inferior products for more money, while reducing workforce , closing factories, replacing metal parts with plastics, and CEO is taking $40MM as a bonus [0], and now he's apparently resigned after all that shenanigans.

So, no. Nobody is making things cheaper for people. Everybody is after the money to rise their own tides.

So, you're delusional. Nobody is thinking about your bank account that's true. This is why resources won't be less limited or less necessary. Because all the surplus is accumulating at people who are focused on their own bank accounts more than anything else.

[michaelmrose]

Why wouldn't the people at the top siphon off literally 100% of the benefit whilst the people displaced bear 100% of the cost?

[Yoric]

Just to clarify: the Luddites were being automated out of a job.

From what I understand of history, while industrial revolutions have generally increased living standards and employment in the long term, they have also caused massive unemployment/starvation in the short term. In the case of textile, I seem to recall that it took ~40 years for employment to return to its previous level.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm far from certain that I can survive 40 years without a job.

[seabass-labrax]

In addition, although the Luddite uprisings were themselves crushed, the political elite were not blind to the circumstances that led to them, and did eventually bring in the legislation that introduced modern workers rights, legalized unions and sowed the seeds of the modern secular welfare state in Britain. That is a pattern that appears throughout history and especially in Britain, where the government cannot be seen to yield to violent protest but quietly does so anyway.

[litam]

And among the few who found a job back, most of the time it was some coal mining job, to feed the machines who replaced them... Maybe the future of (some of) nowadays' office workers is to feed (train) the models replacing them?

[SideQuark]

I cannot find a place industrial revolutions caused massive starvation. Care to provide one?

The other things you state are not even close.

First, lowered employment for X years does not imply one cannot get a job in X years - that's simply fear mongering. Unemployment over that period seems to have fluctuated very little, and massive external economic issues were causes (wars with Napoleon, the US, changing international fortunes), not Luddites.

Next, there was inflation and unemployment during the TWO years surrounding the Luddites, in 1810-1812 (starting right before the Luddite movement) due to wars with Napoleon and the US [1]. Somehow attributing this to tech increases or Luddites is numerology of the worst sort.

If you look at academic literature about the economy of the era, such as [2] (read on scihub if you must), you'll find there was incredible population growth, and that wages grew even faster. While many academics at the at the time thought all this automation would displace workers, those academics were forced to admit they were wrong. There's plenty of literature on this. Simply dig through Google scholar.

As to starvation in this case, I can find no "massive starvation". [3] forExample points out that "Among the industrial and mining families, around 18 per cent of writers recollected having experienced hunger. In the agricultural families this figure was more than twice as large — 42 per cent".

So yes there was hunger, as there always had been, but it quickly reduced due to the industrial revolution and benefited those working in industry more quickly than those not in industry.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#:~:text=The%20movement....

[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2599511

[3] https://academic.oup.com/past/article/239/1/71/4794719

[Yoric]

Thanks for your response.

My bad for "massive starvation", that's clearly a mistake, I meant to write something along the lines of "massive unemployment – and sometimes starvation". Sadly, too late to amend.

Now, I'll admit that I don't have my statistics at hand. I quoted them from memory from, if I recall correctly, _Good Economics for Hard Times_. I'm nearly certain about the ~40 years, but it's entirely possible that I confused several parts of the industrial revolution. I'll double-check when I have an opportunity.

[DAGdug]

Leisure time hasn’t increased in the last 100 years except for the lower income class which doesn’t have steady employment. But yes, I see your point that the homeless person who might have had a home if he had a (now automated) factory job should surely feel good about having a phone that only the ultra rich had 40 years ago.

[ethbr1]

It's not worth tossing away in sarcasm.

The availability of cheaply priced smartphones and cellular data plans has absolutely made being homeless suck less.

As you noted though, a home would probably be a preferable alternative.

[danans]

> As you noted though, a home would probably be a preferable alternative.

The problem is that the preferable option (housing) won't happen because unlike a smartphone, it requires that land be effectively distributed more broadly (through building housing) in areas where people desire to live. Look at the uproar by the VC guys in Menlo Park when the government tried to pursue greater housing density in their wealthy hamlet.

It also requires infrastructure investment which, while it has returns for society at large, doesn't have good returns for investors. Only government makes those kinds of investments.

Better to build a wall around the desirable places, hire a few poorer-than-you folks as security guards, and give the other people outside your wall ... cheap smartphones to sate themselves.

[runarberg]

I think the backlash to this post can summarized as such:

Perhaps there is a theory in which productivity gains increase the standard of living for everyone, however that is not the lived reality for most people of the working classes.

If productivity gains are indeed increasing the standards of living to everyone, it certainly does not increase evenly, and the standard of living increases for the working poor are at best marginal, while the standard of living increases for the already richest of the rich are astronomical.

[Jensson]

> and the standard of living increases for the working poor are at best marginal

Not if you count the global poor, the global poors standard of living has increased tremendously the past 30 years.

[runarberg]

Has it really? I’ve seen a lot of people claiming this since Hans Rosling’s famous TED talks, but I’ve never actually seen any data that backs this up. Particularly since Hans Rosling’s talk was 15 years ago, but the number always remains “past 30 years”.

Off course any graph can choose to show which ever stat is convenient for the message, that doesn’t necessarily reflect the lived reality of the individual members of the global poor. And as I recall it most standard of living improvements for the global poor came in the decades after decolonization in the 1960s-1990s where infrastructure was being built that actually served people’s need as opposed for resource extraction in the decades past. If Hans Rosling said in 2007 that the standard of living has improved tremendously in the past 30 years, he would be correct, but not for the reason you gave.

The story of decolonization was that the correct infrastructure, such as hospitals, water lines, sewage, garbage disposal plants, roads, harbors, airports, schools, etc. that improved the standard of living not productivity gains. And case in point, the colonial period saw a tremendous growth in productivity in the colonies. But the standard of living in the colonies quite often saw the opposite. That is because the infrastructure only served to extract resources and exploitation of the colonized.

[dartos]

> Productivity gains increase the standard of living for everyone

This just isn’t true, necessarily. Productivity has gone up in the US since the 80s, but wages have not. Costs have, though.

What increases standards of living for everyone is social programs like public health and education. Affordable housing and adult-education and job hunting programs.

Not the rate at which money is gathered by corporations.

[EarthAmbassador]

Utter nonsense. Productivity gains of the last 40 years have been captured by shareholders and top elites. Working class wages have been flat all of that time despite that gain.

In 2012, Musk was worth $2 billion. He’s now worth 223 times that yet the minimum wage has barely budged in the last 12 years as productivity rises.

[palmfacehn]

>>Productivity gains increase the standard of living for everyone.

>Productivity gains of the last 40 years have been captured by shareholders and top elites. Working class wages have been flat...

Wages do not determine the standard of living. The products and services purchased with wages determine the standard of living. "Top elites" in 1984 could already afford cellular phones, such as the Motorola DynaTAC:

>A full charge took roughly 10 hours, and it offered 30 minutes of talk time. It also offered an LED display for dialing or recall of one of 30 phone numbers. It was priced at US$3,995 in 1984, its commercial release year, equivalent to $11,716 in 2023.

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

Unfortunately, touch screen phones with gigabytes of ram were not available for the masses 40 years ago.

[DAGdug]

What a patently absurd POV! A phone doesn’t compensate for the inability to solve for basic needs - housing, healthy food, healthcare. Or being unable to invest in skill development for themselves or their offspring, save for retirement.

[antihipocrat]

Loans for phones are very common in the developing world.

Rather than a luxury, they've become an expensive interest bearing necessity for billions of human beings.

[kelseyfrog]

Please do this but with college education, medical, and childcare costs, otherwise it's just cherry picking.

[szundi]

Never happened with neither big technology advancement

[bayindirh]

Wealth has bled from landlords to warlords and now bleeding to techlords.

Warlords are still rich, but both money and war is flowing towards tech. You can get a piece from that pie if you're doing questionable things (adtech, targeting, data collection, brokering, etc.), but if you're a run of the mill, normal person, your circumstances are getting harder and harder, because you're slowly squeezed out of the system like a toothpaste.

[nyokodo]

> you're slowly squeezed out of the system like a toothpaste.

AI could theoretically solve production but not consumption. If AI blows away every comparative advantage that normal humans have then consumption will collapse and there won’t be any rich humans.