[fuzzfactor]

>What If A.I. Doesn't Get Better Than This?

What if it does?

There's a certain type of fear . . .

  "It's the fear . . . they're gonna take my job away . . . "

  It's the fear . . . I'll be working here the rest of my days . . . "

-- David Fahl

Same fear, different day.

[AtlasBarfed]

Wow did you encapsulate millenia of management-labor disputes by saying don't worry be happy?

Let's play the same game with totalitarianism!

It's the fear they are watching everything

It's the fear nobody is watching at all

Oh wow, I totally understand the threat of totalitarianism from that.

And I bring up totalitarianism quite in particular, because aside from vastly empowering the elites in the war against labor, AI vastly empowers the elites for totalitarian monitoring and control.

[fuzzfactor]

>Wow did you encapsulate millenia of management-labor disputes by saying don't worry be happy?

Nope, sorry to disappoint.

That would be quite an accomplishment though, but I can't take credit for any progress in that direction no matter how far others have gone :)

Not trying to hurt any feelings.

I probably should have kept it simple and not included the sample of vastly pre-AI lyrics from Fahl.

Just trying to emphasize that the fear of AI getting better, is very similar to the fear of it not getting better.

Like a number of other unrelated things. Which are nothing new at all.

I guess more often I've got to expect the unexpected with such a short comment, when I don't even try to explain very effectively, that some are going to read between the lines in some of the most unrelated ways I can not always anticipate.

If I may ask, what made you such a fan of totalitarianism anyway, I know it's more popular than ever but is that all there is?

[piskov]

Because every s-curve looks like an exponent for those in the start.

I mean look at the first plane, then first air-jets: it’s understandable to assume we would travel the galaxy in something like 2050.

Meanwhile planes are basically the same last 60 years.

LLMs are great but I firmly believe that in 2100 all is basically the same as in 2020: no free energy (fusion), no AGI.

[II2II]

> I mean look at the first plane, then first air-jets: it’s understandable to assume we would travel the galaxy in something like 2050.

To someone who did not understand what flight is, perhaps. For anyone who understood the laws of physics, no. A similar thing can be said of Moore's Law. The main difference is we likely exceeded the rational expectations derived from Moore's Law (though that was based more on computer performance, rather than the actual expression of Moore's Law in terms of transistor count) while the more rational expectations of flight (routine supersonic, perhaps even suborbital) are still flights of fancy. But that is more a product of cost than technical ability. Simply put, we figured out how to make semiconductors extraordinarily inexpensive. Flight is still expensive.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Nature abhors an exponential. They all seem to either turn out to be sigmoid or collapse entirely.

[IAmGraydon]

Well...everything has a limit, so yes every example of exponential growth gets capped somewhere and becomes a sigmoid. Viral spread, population growth, radioactive decay, tree branching, etc. are all exponential until they hit their limit. Otherwise each process would quickly proceed to infinity. That doesn't really tell us much about where the ceiling is for LLMs, however.

[marviio]

OTOH: First flight: 1903. Moon landing: 1969. Humanity went from ”Look, we’re 3 meters off the ground!” to “We just parked on the Moon” in barely a lifetime. 66 years.

[CagedCoder]

And how much further have we gotten past the moon since then?

This isn't an OTOH, it's just another example of looking at the exponential part of the S-curve.

[Yossarrian22]

And has gone no further in almost 60 years

[olddustytrail]

> Because every s-curve looks like an exponent for those in the start.

No, it looks like an exponential all the way to the top of the curve. And the natural reaction when you consider it an s-curve is to think you're near the top. Unfortunately near the top looks exactly the same as near the bottom, so you might consider that you're nowhere near the top and that there's no reason you should be.

Then you go on to speculate about tech that didn't exist 3 years ago and extrapolate 75 years in the future.

No one has any idea what we'll have in 10 years time never mind 75. Even linearly, it's like someone from 1950 trying to guess about 2025.

[lenerdenator]

Nah, I'm not afraid of working here the rest of my days. Consistent paycheck, benefits, challenging-but-rewarding work.

If you provide people with that they typically shut up and stay out of the way. Everyone should be more afraid of the former than the latter.

[izzydata]

There is no plan in place at all for the outcome of most work becoming redundant. At least in the US I highly doubt we will be capable of implementing some system such as UBI for the benefit of all citizens so everyone can take advantage of most work being automated. Everyone will be left to pick up scraps and barely survive.

But I am extremely skeptical that current "AI" will be capable of eliminating so much of the modern workforce any time soon if ever. I can see it becoming a common place tool, maybe it already has, but not as a human replacement.

[disgruntledphd2]

> There is no plan in place at all for the outcome of most work becoming redundant. At least in the US I highly doubt we will be capable of implementing some system such as UBI for the benefit of all citizens so everyone can take advantage of most work being automated. Everyone will be left to pick up scraps and barely survive.

If 80% of US citizens lose their jobs, I assure you that there will be a political response. It might not be one you (or I) like, but it will happen and it will be a big deal.

[lenerdenator]

> If 80% of US citizens lose their jobs, I assure you that there will be a political response. It might not be one you (or I) like, but it will happen and it will be a big deal.

In societies where 80% of people are not able to draw an income and there are more firearms than there are people allowed to own them, that political response is revolution.

[disgruntledphd2]

That is also what I would expect, regardless of firearm laws. Like look at how many people are fans of populists right now. Then 10x that if basically everyone is unemployed.

It's gonna be a wild ride.

That being said, I'm not convinced LLM based workflows will be transformative, at least over the short term (3-5 years). It took a long time for the whole of society to end up on the Internet and I'd expect around the same speed for AI/LLM approaches (even in the best case scenario).