[massysett]

Not at all, I fully appreciate that these inventions transformed life. I’m skeptical because so much of the breathless AI chatter claims AI will eclipse all these inventions. It is the breathless AI commentators, not I, who have lost all perspective on the magnitude and sweep of history.

[K0balt]

It’s not AI per se, but rather ai enabled robotics that can change the world in ways that are different in kind, not just degrees, to earlier changes.

No other change has had the potential to generate value for capital without delivering any value whatsoever to the broader world.

Intelligent robotic agents enable an abandonment of traditional economic structures to build empires that are purely extractive and only deliver value to themselves.

They need not manufacture products for sale, and they will not need money. Automated general purpose labor is power, in the same way that commanding the mongol hordes was power. They didn’t need to have customers or the endorsement of governments to project and multiply that power.

Of course commanding robotic hordes is the steelman of this argument, but the fact that a steelman even exists for this argument, and the unique case that it requests and requires actually zero external or internal cooperation from people makes it fundamentally distinct in character.

Humans will always have some kind of economic system, but it very well may become separate from -and competing for resources with- industrial society, in which humans may become a vanishing minority.

[jodrellblank]

You think an artificial intelligence would have less impact on the world than the steam engine?

The AI commentators are not saying that ELIZA will change the world, they’re saying that one of the big companies is moments away from an AGI. Sam Altman called a recent ChatGPT model a “PhD level expert”; wouldn’t infinite PhDs for $20/month or $200/month be transformative?

That is, your objection isn’t the usual “LLMs aren’t going to be AGI”, you’re saying “even if they do, it won’t be a big deal”?

[nancyminusone]

>You think an artificial intelligence would have less impact on the world than the steam engine?

Not op, but yes, 100%. Steam backs nearly all development of technology of the last 150+ years. Where do you think the power come from to make things? More than half of the world's power *still* runs on steam, as will many of the systems running AI.

If steam power never existed, not only would you not exist but there's a good chance the country you live in wouldn't either. If you don't believe the effect is large, go to the farthest uncontacted place on earth and take out a CO2 meter.

[jodrellblank]

> "If you don't believe the effect is large"

It's not that I "don't believe the effect is large", but the changes from pre-intelligence planet Earth to post-intelligence planet Earth are larger because they include the invention of steam, and literally everything else too: language, writing, irrigation, cities, trade, numbers, currency, mathematics, chemistry, engineering, nations, governments, supply chains, steam, etc.

An AGI that can solve the problems we think are solvable, but we can't solve, would be huge. Any sci-fi idea that isn't ruled out by the laws of physics, but that we haven't got the brains to solve, any breakthrough that we think should be there but we haven't found, any problem that requires too much time to learn, or too many parts to hold in one human mind, any coordination that is too big for one team, any funding problem, any scarcity problem, any disease or illness problem, any long timeframe problem, are all on the table as possibilities.

[Cthulhu_]

There's potential there (with the pocket-PhDs), the question is whether it'll actually make a measurable difference in the long run. I mean I'm sure it will make a difference, the question is whether it's what they say it will be, and whether it'll be financially viable. At the current burn rate of the AI companies, it isn't - before long the first ones will have to give up. They won't die, they'll be subsumed into their competitors.

Anyway, the challenge is making a difference. Current-day LLMs can, for example, generate stories and books; one tweet said "this can generate 1000 screenplays a day". Which sounds impressive by the numbers, but books, screenplays, etc were never about volume.

Same with PhDs - is there a shortage of them? Does adding potentially infinite PhDs (whatever they are) to a project make it better, or does it just make... more?

This is the main difference with the industrial revolution - it, for example, introduced machines that turned 10 people jobs into 1 person jobs. I don't think LLMs will do something like that, it'll just output 10 people's worth of Stuff that will need some use.

I don't think anyone ever asked for 1000 screenplays a day, or infinite PhD's for $20. But then, nobody asked for a riderless carriage yet here we are.

[Windchaser]

> Same with PhDs - is there a shortage of them? Does adding potentially infinite PhDs (whatever they are) to a project make it better, or does it just make... more?

Yes, there is still a large demand for people with analytical thinking, a deep knowledge base, and good problem-solving skills. This demand shows up broadly across STEM fields, and it's a major reason that these fields pay relatively high.

Even just thinking of R&D, there is an immense amount of work left to be done in basic science. Research is throttled partly by a lack of cheap graduate lab labor. (If that physical + mental labor became much cheaper, the costs of research would shift - what does it take to get reagants? What does it take to build more lab space, and provide water and light? Etc.)

The present issue is that current AI does not really offer the same capabilities as a good grad student or PhD. Not just physically, as in, we don't have good robotics yet, but mentally. LLMs do not exhibit good judgment or problem-solving skills, like a good PhD does. And they don't exhibit continual learning.

No clue on when these will change, but yes, a cheap AI with solid problem-solving skills and good judgment would absolutely upend our economy.

[jodrellblank]

> "I don't think LLMs will do something like that, it'll just output 10 people's worth of Stuff that will need some use."

This is why I said "isn’t the usual “LLMs aren’t going to be AGI”", but you still went straight for "LLMs aren't AGI", which was not in question.

AGI is what OpenAI says they are going for. That's the goal of all this trillion dollar investment, not to output 1000 screenplays a day, but to takeover the world, basically. What would infinite PhDs discover if they could hold all of Arxive in their 'heads' at once and see patterns in every experiment that's ever been done? What could they engineer and manufacture if they could 'concentrate' on millions of steps of a manufacturing process at once without getting fatigued or bored? What ideas could they test if they could be PhD level in a dozen subjects all at once?

[ineedasername]

A PhD generating knowledge has a cumulative effect that an equivalent intelligence generating prose purely for entertainment does not. And a whole bunch of that work isn’t really about novel insights, it’s about filling in gaps and doing knowledge work that assists people who are capable of having those insights. AI doing this enables them, also making it possible for more people to do the same.

[estimator7292]

An actual artificial intelligence? Yes, total paradigm shift. Not even a shift, we'd launch the old paradigm into the sun.

LLMs and modern day """AI"""? Don't kid yourself.