[gambiting]

>> We're actually on a trajectory for human brains becoming the most expensive option for basically any job.

Unless RTX9000 with 16PB of ram needed to run basic Gemini2077 model costs more than a house, but a brain jar with electrodes is cheaper than that. Then the economic incentives will shift the other way.

[throw310822]

No I don't think so. We can already create LLMs that are highly efficient and infinitely more knowledgeable than any single human being, completely tuned to the task, without ego or distractions, and they are cheap enough that you can run tens of them in parallel for a few hundred dollars per month. They are also way faster than any human being. And we're three/ four years in this. Imagine 50 years from now.

[gambiting]

>>Imagine 50 years from now.

That's the whole point though - I can't, and I don't think anyone can. Right now the LLMs are just getting bigger and bigger, we're bruteforcing the way out of their stupidity by giving them bigger and bigger datasets - unless something fundamental changes soon that tech has an actual dead end. Hence my (joke-ish) prediction that you'll eventually need a 16PB GPU to run a basic gemini model, and such a thing will always be very expensive no matter how much our tech advances(especially since we are already hitting some technical limits). Human brains won't get any more expensive with time - they already contain all the hardware they are ever going to get - but what might get cheaper is the plumbing to make them "run" and interact with other systems.

[throw310822]

Yeah, well, we have a very different view on this- and I know there are two diametrically opposed camps, and I am in the awe-struck one. LLMs are getting bigger and bigger and they're getting much smarter, and all in the space of a few years. They went from making up erratic articles about unicorns to writing complex PRs in codebases of millions of lines of code, solving math olympics level problems, speaking fluently in tens or hundreds of languages and exhibiting a breadth of knowledge than no human being possesses. Considering their size, they are monstrously efficient compared to the human brain. But anyway, this is a matter for a different discussion.

[Lapsa]

"infinitely more knowledgeable" AI knows shit, stop shilling your crap

[ben_w]

We can already grow brain organoids cheaply and easily enough to be a YouTuber's long-running series, so even if biological somehow gets cheaper than silicon, it still isn't going to be a revived complete human brain from someone who died 50 years earlier and probably retired 20 years before that.

I mean, imagine someone who got themselves cryonically preserved in 1976 getting either revived or uploaded today: what job would they be able to get? Almost no office job is the same now as then; manufacturing involves very different tools and a lot of CNC and robotic arms; agriculture is only getting more automated and we've had cow-milking robots for 20-30 years; cars may have changed the least in usage if not safety, performance, and power source; I suppose that leaves gardening… well, except for robot lawnmowers, anyone who can hire a gardener can probably afford a robo-mower?

[gambiting]

It reminds me of this, which talks about this exact scenario:

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

Tldr is that for some very limited tasks it might still be preferable to use a human mind, especially if you can run it at 1000x cognitive speed. Or.....it might not. It's sci-fi at this point.

[ben_w]

It shouldn't remind you of that, my point is there's little economic use for uploads like this: if thinking meat is cheaper than thinking silicon, train some fresh thinking meat with an electrode array or whatever; if thinking silicon is cheaper, train some fresh thinking silicon.

Non-economic use, that's different of course. Digital afterlife and so on, but as a consumer, not a supplier of anything.

[DoctorOetker]

It's the other way around, while initially it will only be available to elites and prisoners (if you are innocently convicted for life, the digitized brain can set the record straight and provide another life, some will take that option, others wont).

As the technology improves, it will be mostly just for the rich and less for prisoners, and as costs fall further there will even be financial pressure for the rest of the population to "go digital": insurance on digitized lifeforms will be much cheaper, replacement robot body parts, replacement electronics, versus expensive healthcare.

Look up the fraction of GDP in developed nations that goes to healthcare and insurance. People will be shamed by the economy as if they are uppity for hanging on to their slow, expensive to feed and maintain meatbag bodies.