[vlovich123]

I think you’ve missed the point. Cars replaced horses - it wasn’t cars+horses that won. Computers replaced humans as the best chess players, not computers with human oversight. If successful, the end state is full automation because it’s strictly superhuman and scales way more easily.

[9rx]

> Computers replaced humans as the best chess players, not computers with human oversight.

Oh? I sat down for a game of chess against a computer and it never showed up. I was certain it didn't show up because computers are unable to without human oversight, but tell me why I'm wrong.

[p-e-w]

Apparently human chess grandmasters also need “oversight” from airplanes, because without those, essentially none of them would show up at elite tournaments.

[9rx]

Things like trains, boats, and cars exist. Human chess grandmasters can show up to elite tournaments, and perform while there, without airplanes. Computer chess systems, on the other hand, cannot do anything without human oversight.

[ben_w]

> Things like trains, boats, and cars exist. Human chess grandmasters can show up to elite tournaments, and perform while there, without airplanes.

Those modes of transport are all equivalent to planes for the point being made.

I (not that I'm even as good as "mediocre" at chess) cannot legally get from my current location to the USA without some other human being involved. This is because I'm not an American and would need my entry to be OKed by the humans managing the border.

I also doubt that I would be able to construct a vessel capable of crossing the Atlantic safely, possibly not even a small river. I don't even know enough to enumerate how hard that would be, would need help making a list. Even if knew all that I needed to, it would be much harder to do it from raw materials rather than buying pre-cut timber, steel, cloth (for a sail), etc. Even if I did it that way, I can't generate cloth fibres and wood from by body like plants do. Even if I did extrude and secrete raw materials, plants photosynthesise and I eat, living things don't spontaneously generate these products from their souls.

For arguments like this, consider the AI like you consider treat Stephen Hawking: lack of motor skills aren't relevant to the rest of what they can do.

When AI gets good enough to control the robots needed to automate everything from mining the raw materials all the way up to making more robots to mine the raw materials, then not only are all jobs obsolete, we're also half a human lifetime away from a Dyson swarm.

[9rx]

> Those modes of transport are all equivalent to planes for the point being made.

The point is that even those things require oversight from humans. Everything humans do requires oversight from humans. How you missed it, nobody knows.

Maybe someday we'll have a robot uprising where humans can be exterminated from life and computers can continue to play chess, but that day is not today. Remove the human oversight and those computers will soon turn into lumps of scrap unable to do anything.

Sad state of affairs when not even the HN crowd understands such basic concepts about computing anymore. I guess that's what happens when one comes to tech by way of "Learn to code" movements promising a good job instead of by way of having an interest in technology.

[ben_w]

> Everything humans do requires oversight from humans. How you missed it, nobody knows.

'cause you said:

  Computer chess systems, on the other hand, cannot do anything without human oversight.

The words "on the other hand" draws a contrast, suggesting that the subject of the sentence before it ("chess grandmasters") are different with regard to the task ("show up to elite tournaments"), and thus can manage without the stated limitation ("anything without human oversight").

> Maybe someday we'll have a robot uprising where humans can be exterminated from life and computers can continue to play chess, but that day is not today. Remove the human oversight and those computers will soon turn into lumps of scrap unable to do anything.

OK, and? Nobody's claiming "today" is that day. Even Musk despite his implausible denials regarding Optimus being remote controlled isn't claiming that today is that day.

The message you replied to was this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46201604

The chess-playing example there was an existing example of software beating humans in a specific domain in order to demonstrate that human oversight is not a long-term solution, you can tell by the use of the words "end state", and even then hypothetical (due to "if"), as in:

  If successful, the end state is full automation

There was a period where a chess AI that was in fact playing a game of chess could beat any human opponent, and yet would still lose to the combination of a human-AI team. This era has ended and now the humans just hold back the AI, we don't add anything (beyond switching it on).

Furthermore, there's nothing at all that says that an insufficiently competent AI won't wipe us out:

And as we can already observe, there's clearly nothing stopping real humans from using insufficiently competent AI due to some combination of being lazy and/or the vendors over-promising what can be delivered.

Also, we've been in a situation where the automation we have can trigger WW3 and kill 90% of the human population despite the fact that the very same automation would be imminently destroyed along with it since the peak of the Cold War, with near-misses on both US and USSR systems. Human oversight stopped it, but like I said, we can already observe lazy humans deferring to AI, so how long will that remain true?

And it doesn't even need to be that dramatic; never mind global defence stuff, just correlated risks, all the companies outsourcing all their decisions to the same models, even when the models' creators win a Nobel prize for creating them, is a description of how the Black–Scholes formula and its involvement in the 2008 financial crisis — and sure, didn't kill us all, but this is just an illustration of a failure mode rather than consequences.

[saberience]

What planet are you on? What relevance does this have at all? Computers don't need to go and fly somewhere, they can just be accessed over a network. Also, the location and traveling is irrelevant to the main point, that is, that computers far exceeded our capacity in Chess and Go many years ago and are now so much better we cannot even really understand their moves or why they do them and have no hope to ever compete.

The same will be true of every other intellectual discipline with time. It's already happening with maths and science and coding.

[9rx]

> What planet are you on?

The one where computers don't magically run all by themselves. It's amazing how out of touch HN has become with technology. Thinking that you can throw something up into the cloud, or whatever was imagined, needing no human oversight to operate it... Unfortunately, that's not how things work in this world. "The cloud" isn't heaven, despite religious imagery suggesting otherwise. It requires legions of people to make it work.

This is the outcome of that whole "Learn to code" movement from a number of years ago, I suppose. Everyone thinks they're an expert in everything when they reach the mastery of being able to write a "Hello, World" program in their bedroom.

But do tell us what planet you are on as it sounds wonderful.

[vlovich123]

The amount of people it takes to maintain a server rack is minimal and low cost labor. Most of the money is spent on hardware and paying people to right software for that hardware.

Writing that software is becoming automated and it’s not hard to imagine that buying will as well. So you’re left with the equivalent of a plumber running your data center based on what automated systems flag as issues and other automated systems explain you the troubleshooting to go do. There might be a specialist they fly in for an insane rate (in the shorter term) if none of that works but we’re talking about a drastic reduction in workforce needed, and this is for the data center maintenance which not many companies have anymore since the cloud migration

[fsflover]

Yes, a computer chess system replacing a thousand chess players requires a couple of developers for the oversight.

[9rx]

Computer chess systems don't need developer oversight. They do, however, require oversight from, let's call them, IT people.

[baq]

Humans still play chess and horses are still around as a species.

(Disclaimer: this is me trying to be optimistic in a very grim and depressing situation)

[plufz]

I try to be optimistic as well. But obviously horses are almost exclusively a hobby today. The work horse is gone. I think the problem is political to a part, if we manage to spread the wealth AI can create we are fine. If we let it concentrate power even more it looks very grim.

[skissane]

B2C businesses need consumers. If AIs take all the jobs, then most of the population-minus the small minority who are independently wealthy and can live off their investments-go broke, and can’t afford to buy anything any more. Then all the B2C businesses go broke. Then all the B2B businesses lose all their B2C business customers and go broke. Then the stock market crashes and the independently wealthy lose all their investments and go broke. Then nobody can afford to pay the AI power bills any more, so the AIs get turned off.

And that’s why across-the-board AI-induced job losses aren’t going to happen-nobody wants the economic house of cards to collapse. Corporate leaders aren’t stupid enough to blow everything up because they don’t want to be blown up in the process. And if they actually are stupid enough, politicians will intervene with human protectionism measures like regulations mandating humans in the loop of major business processes.

The horse comparison ultimately doesn’t work because horses don’t vote.

[9rx]

> B2C businesses need consumers

Businesses need consumers when those consumers are necessary to provide something in return (e.g. labor). If I want beef and only have grass, my grass business needs people with cattle wanting my grass so that we can trade grass for beef, certainly. But if technology can provide me beef (and anything else I desire) without involving any other people, I don't need a business anymore. Businesses is just a tool to facilitate trade. No need for trade, no need for business.

[myth_drannon]

Can the process be similar to a sudden collapse of USSR's economic system? The leaders weren't stupid and tried to keep it afloat but with underlying systemic issues everything just cratered.

Can the process be modelled using game theory where the actors are greedy corporate leaders and hungry populace?

[twoodfin]

The USSR’s political system collapsed fairly suddenly. Its economic system had been rotten for decades.

[baq]

This is the optimistic take, too. There are plenty of countries which don’t care about votes, indeed there are dictators that don’t care about their subjects, they only care about outcomes for themselves. The economic argument only works in capitalism and rule of law - and that’s assuming money is worth anything anymore.

[skissane]

The Chinese Communist Party is obsessed with social stability. Do you think they’ll allow AI to take all the jobs, destroying China’s domestic economy in the process? Or will they enact human protectionism regulations? What Would Xi Jinping Do?

[tstrimple]

Look at what China does to protect its citizens against social media. You see China enacting many of the social media protections that many HN enthusiasts demand, yet Sinophobia makes them reframe it as a negative. "Children shouldn't have access to social media, except when China does it then it's bad!"

[ben_w]

> Do you think they’ll allow AI to take all the jobs, destroying China’s domestic economy in the process?

If AI can take all the jobs (IMO at least a decade away for the robotics, and that's a minimum not a best-guess), the economy hasn't been destroyed, it's just doing whatever mega-projects the owners (presumably in this case the Chinese government) want it to do.

That can be all the social stability stuff they want. Which may be anything from "none at all" to whatever the Chinese equivalent is of the American traditional family in a big detached house with a white picket fence, everyone going to the local church every Sunday, people supporting whichever sports teams they prefer, etc.

I don't know Chinese culture at all (well, not beyond OSP and their e.g. retelling of Journey to the West), so I don't know what their equivalents to any of those things would be.

[jacquesm]

The independently wealthy still need the economies of scale provided by a normal society.

[ErroneousBosh]

I am somewhat confident that horses are going to replace cars and tractors pretty soon, possibly within my lifetime and quite likely with my son's.

He's going to learn how to drive (and repair) a tractor but he's also going to learn how to ride a horse.

[ForHackernews]

Unless the state of the art has advanced, it was the case that grandmasters playing with computer assistance ("centaur chess") played better than either computers or humans alone.

[ahf8Aithaex7Nai]

Perhaps you have missed the essential point. Who drives the cars? It's not the horses, is it? And a chess computer is just as unlikely to start a game of chess on its own as a horse is to put on its harness and pull a plow across a field. I'm not entirely sure what impact all this will have on the job market, but your comparisons are flawed.

[Covenant0028]

In the case of horses and cars, you need the same number of people to drive both (exactly one per vehicle). In the case of AI and automation, the entire economic bet is that agents will be able to replace X humans with Y humans. Ideally for employers Y=0, but they'll settle for Y<<X.

People seem to think this discussion is a binary where either agents replace everybody or they don't. It's not that simple. In aggregate, what's more likely to happen (if the promises of AI companies hold good) is large scale job losses and the remaining employees becoming the accountability sinks to bear the blame when the agent makes a mistake. AI doesn't have to replace everybody to cause widespread misery.

[ahf8Aithaex7Nai]

Yes, I understand that it's about saving on labor costs. Depending on how successful this is, it could lead to major changes in the labor market in economies where skilled workers have been doing quite well up to now.

[ErroneousBosh]

> Computers replaced humans as the best chess players

Computers can't play chess.