Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lp4v4n 9 days ago
The pessimism in the comments here is entirely the reflection of the times we're living in.

Technology got weaponized against the average citizen.

It has become a synonym for unemployment, enshittification, mass surveillance and social erosion.

If this video appeared in 60's or 70's, people would be in awe imagining the future where robots do everything.

3 comments

This seems more likely than racism, or us exceptionalism as mentioned above.

People are and should be skeptical of this. The natural response would be

a) It will put me out of a job

b) I won't be able to afford it anyway.

Those of us who liked the open web and P2P and hacking on projects all the time are seeing these models as a way to rebuild the internet in a shape that pleases us. To build anything and everything we want. Sans opportunity cost.

And that's the real value - you don't have to burn the candle of your life away to get what you want. You'll have so much more time now that you aren't AST wrangling.

Opportunity cost is vanishing (or at least the cost is multiple orders of magnitude smaller). And that's the most exciting thing that's happened in tech since the internet.

I'll probably be able to make my own phone operating system.

I'll probably be able to decompile N64 games, port them to Rust, combine them, extend them. In a weekend.

I'll probably be able to make my own music management platform while simultaneously working on a few robotics projects.

A find my phone button.

Automate everything.

And that's maybe a month of projects.

> You'll have so much more time now that you aren't AST wrangling.

So much time because you were fired and have nothing to do. Nothing is as good as oodles of quality time worrying about funding your family's needs. It's amazing.

The whole thing feels like that the US collectively isn't feeling confident about itself in the coming creativity-limited world that AI/AGIs supposedly bring, and that it's not happy about that pessimistic rational projections. I don't know exactly why wouldn't it be or why nothing seem to be done about it, though. Both look to be fundamentally solvable problems to me.
Robots will take jobs from massive amount of low income people.

AI will take jobs from a massive amount of avg and high income people.

The disruption ahead is getting pillowed right now due to physical limitations of progress like amount of energy, building DC, doing research, training models (its still takes 1-3 month).

Also a massive buffer will be the boomer going into retirement.

Depending on the speed of all of this, we might get a lot poorer before we get abundance everyerwer

You have no evidence of this.

Also: you can literally make incredible software that would take half a year right now for $200/month. Or free if you run local open weights.

You can do branding, marketing, design. You can create comics and movies and video games.

You can make an AI tool right now and get customers today. You have no idea how wildly popular this segment is. How much people willingly engage with this stuff and want it.

Yet you choose to disengage and complain about a future that hasn't happened.

It's more likely that firms will need to hire more to stay competitive. Or that workers will fire their old jobs and break out on their own.

Something I used to think was impossible: competing with Google, Apple, Stripe. Not anymore. I think you can compete with anyone.

Of course I don't. But its a comment so its my personal current view.

Right now we have massive investment into AI and Compute. So massive, its basically unseen. We are adding more compute than ever before.

This compute can do work and it can do now very arbitrary work. Insurance case work, software development, image generation etc. Everything it can't do today, it will be able to do tomorrow.

Now we as humans are getting steamrolled already. I have a handful of work collegues which are worse than an LLM and I would prefer to have them gone just because its easier for me to explain to an LLM what I want/need instead of doing the same thing with these collegues.

But AI is not stopping, every single day we use AI and we give AI hints like a thumbs up or down or complain to the AI that this is not what I wanted, the AI companies get a signal they can train for. We already today have build the biggest global Reinforcement Loop every. We share it with a handful of companies, but every company gets enough RL signals.

If that AI model has learned something, a billion people can use it. So the investment in teaching an AI model a new trick, is a 1000x cheaper than teaching this trick every human.

You might say "okay but i don't want to use AI" but then someone else comes along and does it.

And AI tokens are not cheap. They are expensive and now work has a money value. If I'm a boss and the AI is 10x faster and 10x chceaper than a human, its very easy what i will do: I will reduce my workforce to optimize for AI usage.

While all of the Soft AI stuff is happening, the robotics are leapfrogging progress. Automatisation in self driving trucks also progresses.

We are now in a timeline of full automatisation.

And my personal assumption is, that this hasn't even really started yet because we are 5-15 years away from the real AI AGI progress.

I don't think people will be able to compete with Google, Apple and co. They already have jumped on AI. Google is market leader. And these companies do have the money for a full AI transition.

Besides that, Google has physical infrastructure around the globe, they have their own undersee internet cables.

But for sure it will disrupt software and plenty of companies one way or the other. And if these companes and we as humans are not acting upon fast, we are gone.

Industry is slow and even if disruption means, that the market will still be there but will look very different, disruption hurts a lot for an economy.

Yep, this is a good read and feels like the correct take.
> Depending on the speed of all of this, we might get a lot poorer before we get abundance everyerwer

not "might", will

and it's a hell of a leap to assume massive abundance will follow -- for someone, perhaps, but not the average person

At some point it will be cheaper to give everyone bread instead of paying for your private military.

But yeah lets see what going to happen.

But there's no feeling of power with giving everyone bread. Billionaires seem to have more than just an addiction to big numbers, maybe seem to want to rule over others.
"the future where robots do everything" and "unemployment" are the same thing
Yes but unemployment where a small cadre of rich elites own the robots and the rest of us are serfs is very different from the public owning and benefiting from the robots in the form of strong social services and UBI.
The Jetsons vs. Elysium.
If everyone is a serf who buys the products that the elites want to sell?
This is a mistake in thinking that labor and sales remain.