[FloorEgg]

It won't be one large one, it will be thousands of little ones.

Every time this happens throughout history (and I mean going all the way back way past industrial revolution, to dawn of agriculture, to the earliest documented history, to the mitochondria, to the earliest stars exploding...) the result of a better way to get work done is more complexity and more diversity in work done (processes for increasing entropy).

The author said not to confuse laws of nature with observations of history, and I take issue with the implication. My perspective is grounded deep in physics, chemistry, biology and anthropology and after spending 10 years fretting over what AI would do to our civilization this decade I am not worried about labor displacement.

What I am worried about is power struggles and brainwashing.

[breuleux]

Note that several of your historical examples didn’t involve humans, and presumably most future occurrences of better work enablers won’t involve humans either. The contention isn’t whether there will be an increase in diversity and amount of work done, it’s whether any of it will be done by us. Which would only be the case insofar that there exists categories of work we do better than AI at that juncture.

[FloorEgg]

> Which would only be the case insofar that there exists categories of work we do better than AI at that juncture.

I'm pretty sure this is incomplete.

It's more like whether people find the work rewarding enough to be worth doing.

In some cases it can be rewarding for reasons other than money. Even when the primary reward is money, there could be a lot of demand for human work that is worse than AI when the AI is significantly more expensive. Some customers may just prefer the human do it for any number of reasons.

It's very possible we can have a rich prosperous economy and culture with lots of AI and people working together. It's just not clear how we get there, and its not popular to take the idea seriously right now. Fear propagates faster and easier than inspiration, at least in this cultural climate.

We're less likely to get what we want if we don't aim for it.

[breuleux]

The point is more that you can well imagine a future where AI is both better and cheaper than humans at basically all types of work, leading to a situation where we would be entirely unable to fight back in the eventuality that machine owners, or the machines themselves, were to repurpose the resources used for our sustenance to other ends. And this would still fit in the universe-old pattern you've observed.

To put it bluntly, if the economic value of human labour drops to zero, or below the value of human sustenance, it is plausible that the consequence of that, from the cold perspective of cosmic logic, would be the extinction of humans. That's not to say there isn't any way to keep the genie in the bottle and create a utopia for ourselves (I very much doubt it), but that would be against the grain of nature. Call me a pessimist, but if we ever get outperformed in our own niche, our days are numbered.

[FloorEgg]

Our views definitely intersect.

On a long enough time scale my opinion is "of course humanity will go extinct", but the interesting and very speculative answers are in exactly how and when. It's highly plausible to me that humanity goes extinct via evolution into something else, and on a long enough time scale that you and I won't have any clue within our lifetimes.

Where I think we still differ is the "outperformed in our niche". Our biology is ridiculously optimized. Like 6-7 orders of magnitude more energy efficient than current day AI/computation stack. It's plausible that AI can never outperform us at what we do best because we are already at the limit. I believe biological brains are around 3-4 orders of magnitude less energy efficient than the theoretical physical limit, but the ~99.9% of energy that's not being used for straight computation is allocated to redundancy and resiliency.

So overall my point is if you zoom out far enough yes humanity may get erased by way of evolutionary pressures, but on the timescale of our lifetimes we don't need to worry about that, and on the timescale of our careers we don't need to worry about an AI driven unemployment apocalypse.

What we do need to worry about now is AI being used in media to manipulate people into doing what's not in their best interest.

[breuleux]

> Our biology is ridiculously optimized. Like 6-7 orders of magnitude more energy efficient than current day AI/computation stack. It's plausible that AI can never outperform us at what we do best because we are already at the limit.

I do tend to agree with you on that, but with lesser confidence. It doesn't necessarily matter whether they outperform us at "what we do best" if they perform well at doing things that we didn't evolve to deal with. For example, we drove many animal species to extinction, not because we were better than them at anything they were good at, but because we were a novel threat outside their adaptive range. AI could very well do to us what we did to these animals, by acting aggressively enough in a direction that challenges our capacity for adaptation. Basically we have to both perform in our niche, and maintain the relevance of the niche itself in the face of whatever completely unforeseen BS these new technologies may bring about.

[jiggawatts]

Communism, or more accurately, mechanised collective farming practices in the early 1900s in Russia resulted in revolutions and world wars. When tens of millions of inefficient farmers were replaced by tractors needing only a fraction of the labour force the excess population was disposed of.

Sorry, bad phrasing!

They were put to work in new roles enabled by technological advancements: wielding mass manufactured rifles and operating artillery.

This has played out over and over throughout history whenever a large fraction of the population suddenly becomes surplus to requirements.

They never get to enjoy utopia. They are expended in warfare or low value forced labour until the labour pool once again matches the requirements.

[oblio]

You don't even need to look at the Soviets. Life for the average person in Britain became worse between 1760 until about 1920. That meant about 3 generations of people were lost.

I'm super happy about this idilic AI future my great grandchildren will enjoy...