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by benterix
316 days ago
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> Rather sooner than later, IMHO the sheer amount of global compute capacity available will be enough to achieve that task. Brute force, basically. Doesn't take much imagination other than looking at how exponential curves work. Only assuming there is something to be found apart from the imagination itself. We can imagine AGI easily but it doesn't mean it exists, and even if it does, that we will discover it. By that logic - we want something and we spent a lot of compute resources on it - the success of a project like SETI would be guaranteed based on funding alone. In other words, there is a huge gap between something that we are sure can be done, but it requires a lot of resources, like a round trip to Mars, and we can even speculate it can be done within 10-20 years (and still be wrong by a couple of decades) on the one hand, and something we just hope to discover based on the amount of GPUs available, without slightest clue of success other than funding and our desire for it to happen. |
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A huge amount of public service and corporate clerkwork is served enough by an AI capable enough of understanding paperwork and applying a well-known set of rules against it. Say, a building permit application - an AI to replace a public service has to be able to actually read a construction plan, cross-reference it with building codes and zoning and check the math (e.g. statics). We're not quite there yet, with an emphasis on the yet - especially, at the moment even AI composition with agents calling specialized AI models can't reliably detect when it doesn't have enough input or knowledge and just hallucinates.
But once this fundamental issue is solved, it's game over for clerkwork - even assuming the pareto principle (aka, the first 80% are easy, only the remaining 20% are tough), that will cut 80% of employees and, with it, the managerial layers above. In the US alone, about 20 million people work in public service. Take 50% of that (to account for jobs that need a physical human, such as security guards, police and whatnot), gives 10 million jobs for clerkwork, take 80% of that and you got 8 million unemployed people, alone in government. There's no way any social safety net can absorb that much of an impact, and as said, that's government alone - the private sector employs about 140 million people, do the calculation for that number and you got 56 million people out of a job.
That is what is scaring me because other than "AI doomers" no one seems to have that issue even on their radar on the Democrat side, and the Republicans want to axe all regulations on AI.
> without slightest clue of success other than funding and our desire for it to happen
The problem is, money is able to brute-force progress. And there is a lot of money floating around in AI these days, enough to actually make progress.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/204535/number-of-governm...