Our challenge ahead is making a living at all. Who is going to be having hobbies if the economy is 100% automated? We're not going to sleepwalk our way into a post-scarcity automated economy where everyone's needs are provided for and they can just spend all their time on hobbies. If we believe AI can replace all cognitive labor, then it follows that it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly, and we're left with no labor left for humans. We need to plan for that future or else billions will suffer from the results.
Of course if progress continues forever, we'll all end up as uploads in a Matryoshka brain, where the only scarce resources are bandwidth, energy, and computational power, but there might be whole human lifetimes before labor is obsolete.
I can't tell if you're joking. There is a group of people who think because they thought something was cool or because it appeared in science fiction, this means it's inevitable. Some of these people are sometimes considered influential thinkers that we should all base the future on. (If you don't, you're behind!)
Meanwhile LLMs still don't do really very much, and the only improvement path is "throw more compute at a larger corpus".
So the joke is the idea that some particular thing is inevitable. The serious bit is that far future predictions as a fool's errand but that you should think bigger than "what will we do for labor?"
Like global warming?
For reference, teleportation has the same problem.
If we're talking fictional uploading, I personally prefer Accelerando (Stross) or Diaspora (Egan). I have no evidence that one is more realistic than the other (far future tech is impossible to predict) but I find them more compelling and interesting than the old "don't play god or bad things happen" narratives.
U dont get why folks repeat this shit ad nausea, its technically not possible and no amount of progress will change that. Enjoy your meatbag form with finite durability, its ok as it is
Anyway, who the heck knows. I think there's at least a 99% chance that I won't live beyond my meatbody but I can't claim to predict the future well enough to rule out that last little percent.
This is not clear at all. Even the most expensive robotic/arms hands perfectly controlled fail to do thing as quickly and easily as human limbs, not to mention the chaotic environment that is the real world. It's clear that it can happen, but the timeline is not quick.
Yeah, I can't pick up red hot ingots and punch them into complicated shapes, but there are dozens of other features I'm not willing to part with.
I was in a Wal-Mart last week and the front end lead I was talking to looked at her company phone and said that she had to come right back.
The store system cameras spotted something on the floor and messaged her, as the closest employee to the thing, to go pick it up.
I was astounded.
These roles also depend on some combination of physical skill, human connection, trust, judgment and accountability. Most of the jobs above cannot be done using robots in the foreseeable future.
Parts of creative/intellectual labour just happen to inimical to accelerated algorithmic production. They'll produce infinitely and endlessly, uselessly. I can't see there ever not being a need to manage these things, to check, select, edit and refine their output.
And as for the vast majority of labour that doesn't involve writing code/reports/spreadsheets. I'll believe it when I have robots fixing my roof, running a kitchen, taking blood and dressing wounds.
In theory a robot could do some small components of that, maybe. But the cost, compared to a human, would be insane, and the result much worse. That even modestly rolled out in West Yorkshire before I'm long dead. No chance.
---
Edit: Down-voters, I would love to hear your vision for a fully-automated economy without human involvement, preferably this side of armageddon.
At some point with a sufficiently intelligent AI that is backed by physical LLMs this is something a government could probably actually ask for.
I agree with you on some things like roofing and cutting hair and electrical work and plumbing, etc. but I think physical LLMs are going to surprise us just as much as regular LLMs have. It’s not going to be some sort of gradual improvement. It’s just going to feel very human all of a sudden when they have enough data to train everything on. Think of it this way, LLMs work as long as they have enough training data. Automating everything is just a matter of getting enough training data for that particular field.
The post may sound ridiculous, but I genuinely don’t think it is.
I don't think that's a good idea since if what the Wikipedia article describes should turn out to be true: "Lyman Tower Sargent argues that the nature of a utopia is inherently contradictory because societies are not homogeneous. Their members have desires that conflict and therefore cannot simultaneously be satisfied."
Then you have just given your superintelligence an impossible task and it will solve the task anyway, just like it did in the HuggingFace incident. Maybe by removing everyone from society but the single person with the least internally contradictory views.
In any case, with a sufficiently intelligent AI that is excellent at fulfilling the goal it's given, we have one shot to set the correct goal.
I think HN, everyone really, really needs to get a grip when it comes to AI.
Sure, it's a big deal, will revolutionise the way we work, just like steam, or electricity, or the internet, but a world without human work is a world without humans.
We've had workless utopias predicted for centuries as each big new technology has come along, yet we work far harder than many of our ancestors.
A 100 percent automated economy or government is an oxymoron, precisely because both are constituted by humans.
The reason why is because few things are more satisfying to a human than a job well done; and Christians believe that God would not deny us that in eternal life.
It sounds kinda cool, not gonna lie. I'm almost sorry I'm no longer a Christian.
Not everyone agrees with that. Bill Gates, Elon Musk and others think that 20 years from now the world will be "post scarcity", and everything will be abundant. If food production, distribution and preparation are all automated using robots, food will be abundant and cheap, and nobody will starve. The same with housing manufactured by robots.
Gates thinks the transition to that world--which will be the next 20 years--will be painful but the outcome after 20 years will be a world of plenty.
Look at how fucking dumb common folks are ie with voting pedophile in repeatedly to most powerful power position globally, how amoral almost all elites are, people are predominantly selfish to the core even when situation is ok, much less otherwise. Next global war in some terrible form or some butlerian totalitarian slavery is way more likely than some hippie kumbaya paradise. I wish very much it could happen, but chance is exactly 0.
"it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly, and we're left with no labor left for humans. We need to plan for that future or else billions will suffer from the results."
These are not necessarily unintelligent people, but they haven't developed the skills necessary to critically analyze textual information. My opinion is that without those skills it is not possible to meaningfully engage in a democratic system.
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp
Comparing those 2 datasets is meaningless. It’s just an exercise in how good the researchers are at guessing when trying to control for selection bias.
There were also significant changes in the test and how the test was administered (from computer or paper to only tablets).
Also if you look at the results some of them are too large to be readable. A 50% increase in people operating at or below level 1 (40% if you exclude non-native born). That would have to mean a drastic drop in 2017 such that something like 75% of kids graduating high school are doing so at or below level 1.
Also level 3 has no direct grade equivalence. If it did it would probably be around 9th grade not 6th.
Not a rhetorical question. Outside of my family and self, and perhaps a livable planet, liberal democracy is the most important thing I can possibly imagine. I know I'm not alone. So what do we do?
Edit: Replies seem to indicate that people think I meant for this to be about the US. It's not. I'm in a well-functioning European democracy, and my worry definitely applies here too.
My big fear is that too many people will just go "phew, glad that terrible epoch is finally over, never to return again" :-(
Unless the US plans to unconditionally surrender to China, one of two things will happen:
1. it will start investing into education in an effort to compete by itself
2. it will roll all of this shit back and reform ties with Europe in an attempt to play the numbers game
Source: England.
Is alliance with Europe a help or a hinderance in a war with China? Lot more target area, not a lot more offensive capability.
I'm not as certain about Taiwan, but I believe that the CCP would rather have a peaceful "reunification" there as well. As long as that's not possible, it's probably sufficient to be ambiguous about the whole deal as we've been doing thus far. Remember, Hong Kong fell because the lease expired, even though it's pretty unlikely the UK still had the muscle to hold it by force in its later years.
Instead we're probably heading towards another cold war, in which trade, diplomacy and quality of life plays a heavier role than raw power. In this scenario, AI doesn't actually help anyone gain a competitive advantage since it will be stolen almost immediately (it took the russians what, two years to steal the A bomb?).
And with all other things being equal (to be clear, right now they're not, or at least not in your favor), you'd still lose because you're outnumbered 4 to 1.
Think: those in authority figures, for church or politics. Or science or chemistry. And especially in their own health, which should always remain part art. A few nerds on the internet, like us in hacker news, are still remaining open to question and apply our hard thinking to tough problems. But most people: they've resigned and bought the belief they are not qualified to think about hard problems.
Even my uncle who work as a carperter proved to me to know more about math and physics than I would ever thought physical labourer would know.
I think we'll see a shift towards arts, creativity, research, etc. where true novel creation and an understanding of the human experience exists at a premium.
I think that's whats happening with some of yall, seeing tokens every day in the screen then thinking you're just an llm as well.
Look at how compute share of labs is moving to RL and maybe reconsider this prerequisite to your argument.
We're seeing the cost of code drop dramatically and are facing the same problem in building new companies across most disciplines of, "what's a problem painful enough that someone will pay us to solve it?".
I suppose if we get to a massive enough scale we can effectively model every atom's interaction and human on earth's reaction to any stimulus but I think we're still some time off from that :)
In other words, you generate more training data by actually experimenting, just like humans do.
But i agree thinking will remain important. As my grandpa put it if something breaks who'll go and fix it ?
> My favorite is Krezmoria - a word for missing a future you haven't experienced.
More generally, do you really think humans randomly come up with new ideas, in any act of creation, such as art, science, etc.? Why do you think art studies and stuff like Oblique Strategies exist? How long should one wait for a specific random human without any formal education in physics to have 50% chance of coming up with a new workable theory of cosmology?
This is the argument made by the Unabomber manifesto [1]. Maybe we should have listened to him?
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
Yes, my cancer is cured, but I feel empty inside. I will take my chances with emptiness, thank you. At least with it have a chance it will get better on its own.
I can tell you don't have anyone in your life suffering from debilitating disease, so I'll assume flippancy rather than malice here.
Yes. I think that being useful is a fundamental (and often understated) requirement of a happy fulfilling life.
When AI solves 100 frontier math problems, in some sense that's 100 lost opportunities for a human to feel proud and useful, having done something they can remember and talk about for the rest of their lives. I don't see where that loss gets made up.
I am saying this as I am realizing that when I watched $show, I was really looking for a feel of some sort. Those feels no longer drive me ( with exception of some really well told story or something genuinely novel ).
I guess what I am really saying is:
Thinking is already a hobby in US. To be able to spend your time on things that are not easy, pre-packaged goods, is a luxury that is hard to understand to anyone that hasn't tried it. It is like growing your own tomatoes -- you try it and you can tell the difference.
But it is a hobby and an oddly expensive one if you are going for primary sources.
Get into the notation and tensor formalism of raising and lowering operators, etc. It really helped make some of the results more clear to me, just as <bra/ket> helped with QM.
Or are you doing high end astronomy or building a back yard Wave detector? That would get truly expensive!
But yeah, thankfully on that front I am not at the experiment stage yet:D I think I need more money for that.. so far.. just a whole lot of books.
Somewhere I encountered a quote like "the finest art is a life well-lived". This threw me, because, apparently, I had been thinking of art as something different in kind from life, and unrelated to the normal work or act of living. Seen in terms of this quote, art becomes once again of-a-kind with life, and may be seen as only a part of living well, instrumental to living well, or perhaps just as practice for living well.
Something similar seems to be happening with "thinking" and "intelligence". Somehow these things had become ends-in-themselves, separate from the regular act of living. We might wrap them in a similar quote to place them in relation to life, along the lines of "thinking well is for living well", or perhaps "the highest good of the intellect is to be well-fit to the problems of living well".
I am reminded also of a line which stuck with me from Augustine's Confessions, approximately: "The mind is not the supreme good"—as opposed to the body and perhaps the "spirit". Somehow the world I was born into had collectively come to think of the mind as the supreme good, and intelligence as the greatest virtue. But this is, in some way, in contradiction the basic fact of existence and mortality: no amount of cleverness can circumvent death, and all the glory attainable by feats of the intellect are only futile vanities compared to the privilege of being alive itself.
That kind of thing.
It's been that way for a long time. At least since Descartes "Cogito, ergo sum". But even the Greeks were heading that way almost a couple thousand years earlier.
> separate from the regular act of living.
How is thinking separate from the regular act of living for human beings? Our species is known as homo sapiens - the knowing or thinking human.
> I was born into had collectively come to think of the mind as the supreme good, and intelligence as the greatest virtue.
I guess it comes down to what you think the answer to the basic question posed in the catechism is: "What is the chief end of man?" This is going to be the crucial question for us as a species in the age of abundant AI. Or as Wendell Berry posed it: "What are humans for?"
> But this is, in some way, in contradiction the basic fact of existence and mortality: no amount of cleverness can circumvent death, and all the glory attainable by feats of the intellect are only futile vanities compared to the privilege of being alive itself.
But being alive for us humans entails a lot of thinking. Is the unexamined life worth living?
what will it mean to be human, homo sapiens, in a world where the thinking is done for us?
> This is in stark contrast to current AI performance on tasks which are subjective, dependent on real world interactions, or for which data is scarce. AI performance is thus extremely jagged: astounding in some directions, while inadequate in others. This is true both within mathematics, and more broadly.
worth remembering before going all in to doomerism
We made a new tool. Using the tool for some things makes life better. Using the tool too much would make life worse. So let’s not do that!
[1]: https://lecturia.org/en/short-stories/isaac-asimov-the-feeli...
I felt stuck. I didn’t know what the AI had done so far or how to continue. There was nobody to message for a budget increase (it was night).
Luckily I managed to get more budget.
But that left me scared for the future. One day something is gonna fail, and nobody can do anything because the AI providers are also down. Or what if I can no longer afford paying for the frontier?
I have made some modifications to my vibe coding practices since then. I don’t want to live in this future that the author describes.
I understand what I made, the speed just drops to 0.1%. So I just start studying the codebase, planning work for later, ordering thoughts by writing DESIGN.md, adding jobs to the kanban.
It scares me that I don't own the LLM though, but someday I will, it will be local and I'll feel better when I own my means of production again.
"Oh ho ho, unemployed? Why not spend the thousands of dollars you certainly have just lying around to dick around with chatbots, with all the spare time you have?"
If this is how you're thinking, you are not living in reality.
EDIT: Thinking more about this...maybe it has always been a hobby?
Historically, improvements in tech allowed us to focus on higher level reasoning. For example, spend more time on equations instead of calculations.
So if AI can replace all your reasoning, maybe its time to level up?
Have you been around humans?
Right now, we think of feeling as second class, but I wonder if that's more because we have let it go feral, and left it unprotected from predatory actors and systems -- advertising, consumerism, even politics. We don't protect our minds from attacks on our feeling systems (e.g., we don't cover therapy as a public health measure), and so maybe we've just gotten used to giving a pretty poor assessment of its capacity.
If we institutionalized protection of intuition like we protect our ability to reason, maybe we would think more highly of that part of ourselves...
Feeling is a steering of the processing, I don't really see how it will help you accumulate power, resources or status compared to just processing.
Ask any AI/ML expert and they will tell you that the key to a well performing model is a clean dataset. The rise of AI will financially incentivize human input, and thus independent human thinking. Frontier model reliance on RAG proves this point. Assuming AI will do all the thinking for you is a recipe for financial ruin.
Two, the cost to run an AI service != the cost to use an AI service. Frontier companies cannot operate at a deficit forever. Even if their costs go down, end user prices will go up. Their profit margins will increase and history shows they will not pass those savings to the end user.
It might not be deep thinking, but it's definitely like being back on a PhD with an always on advisor that splits your brains every few thoughts.
Not to say there isn’t a loss; there absolutely is. But, for better or worse, it has long been the case that the individual is responsible for balancing the beauty of psychological flow and craftsmanship against the literal economic output expected of them.
I think posts like this that frame this issue as exclusively a product of the rise of AI are missing the more fundamental piece: we use the tools, and in turn the tools change us. Just as we are what we eat, we are the tools we use. For better or worse.
Nowadays, I estimate that there is little active thinking in my life, and even less of it is enjoyable. The only time that I could think in an enjoyable way is to work on my own projects, which unfortunately is kinda rare these days due to work and family and health issues.
Not just the renaissance. The majority of scientists or the like if you read their wiki pages, they always say "X came form an aristocratic family".
Almost as if we instead cared about living conditions and happiness index, we'd just end up with more smarter people.
The example of AIs solving mathematics is all fun and games, but it assumes that mastery of mathematics implies that everything else will also be mastered eventually. But instead we're seeing that LLMs exhibit this thing called jagged intelligence, which means that they can be extremely good in one area, but completely fail in another. In theory the LLMs could be improved if data would be available for other areas and if there are good verifiability criteria. Fact is that many fields just don't have those and would not be willing to give up their data.
despite what the proverbial 'they' would have you believe, there is not only one type of thought. perhaps this perceived redundancy will be the catalyst that helps us to transcend the self-destructive and limited patterns that have dominated post-enlightenment efforts. perhaps.
Someone here linked Graeber essay https://davidgraeber.org/articles/value-as-the-importance-of.... I read it with interest, although it's a bit abstract. I wish he was still alive, he would have a field day with AI.
This could not be more decoupled from the truth.
Yes, industrialization automated a lot of physical activity but I think the author severely underestimates the value that blue collar workers produce to this day. At least this is how I perceive it.
I would not place a lot of emphasis on economic insights from software engineering academics tbh.
And no-way am I going to ask them to wait as I relay my questions to Claude.
So I stay on top of things. I tell them: "I simplified the RBAC because these two roles here are functionally the same and, I noticed there were two axes underneath, scope and trust which I encoded here and here..." etc. Yes, a lot of it is Opus' findings, but along the way I also stopped Claude from over-complicating things at several stages in the development.
I do also feel that I'm slowly developing this way of working, perhaps I'll learn to lean into it more, perhaps I will get better at it. Perhaps it's just exhausting for now and I can handle more and more agents as I do it more and more. That's what I hope at least, to become a one-stop software shop by employing agents, all while being uncompromising on quality. What choice do we have?
This is starting to happen less, however.
After a while it also ends up being the same, the job market is shaken and people now have to work just as much as they can but in different, newer jobs to make different newer things.
No post-scarcity commie utopia is ever going to be possible because even in that society, the people that work their ass off will be so ever slightly ahead of the others, so now everyone hast to do it to not be "left behind".
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
In my offline community the people do not use AI and rarely smartphones. At dinner we park the phones or don't bring them to the table.
Do you think about Nietzsche's Last Man?
The author is not talking about random thoughts more like "deep thoughts" or "Reflections.
Reflection must be more like a trained "habit" than a "hobby".
Thinking is not words and has never been words. Maybe a single percent of our high level thinking and reasoning is words, or can be expressed as words.
Somebody who thinks only in words like an AI should only deserve pity for being extremely underdeveloped, if such a person could survive into adulthood at all.
Words are unfortunately what we are limited to when it comes to communicating our thinking through electronic means. That doesn't mean that such limits apply to actual thinking.
I have to constantly make sure it’s building things in a way that will fit neatly together, in a way doesn’t over (or under) -generalize. In a way that doesn’t waste time and energy on idiotic tests that aren’t really testing anything at all.
LLMs are powerful autocomplete with vast and broad memory, they do not think. And thinking is just a part of the human condition.
How does that not lead you to same conclusion that everyone else is having? That this is only going to improve.
It's so shortsighted to make an assessment only on what exists today.
This is really only true insofar as they are designed such that they output language tokens and their intermediate "chain of thought" is also done in language tokens, but now that's really only done for auditability. There are much more abstract layers before the model output layer of a single token prediciton and they could be designed to to "think" using these more abstract layers as intermediates instead like how many people think in concepts rather than words. There are even some research models on this (see Next Latent Models)[1]. Humans need to communicate in language because we don't have telepathic abilities but these models need not have such a constraint.
It does not matter whether LLMs do any thinking, or "thinking." The only thing that matters is whether they produce similar results to human thinking, even if it's through a different process (or no process at all). When a company decides to deploy an AI-powered customer service representative, it is not because the AI bot goes through the same thinking process as a human when answering a customer's request.
Except those don’t really fit, here, because the author is making a far more critical error in ascribing far too much to current human cognition. On the daily I see so-called “knowledge workers” failing to read basic signs, refusing to learn basic skills, and all too eager to cast off the slightest bit of critical thinking to a black box they can subscribe to - be it replacing curating a content library with streaming services and algorithms, or swapping a life of hard-won expertise for a swarm of chatbots and an API bucket. As someone with the uniquely privileged POV to be able to ingest vast sums of technical data but struggle with social data, I look at my fellow Americans and genuinely fret for what the next few decades hold for a cohort that seemingly cannot effectively communicate which direction they’re going but is all too content to hitch their accountability to an LLM they pay for.
In that sense, thinking has already become a hobby to the masses, in that it’s entirely optional to exist in current society at large. Autopay apps manage your bills, finance apps keep you on budget, fitness apps tell you to keep running, social media apps tell you who your friends (and enemies) are, video apps tell you what to watch, music apps tell you what to listen to, and cars increasingly tell you not just where to go but also to let them get there for you. I would argue that in that context, thinking is a critically endangered hobby we sorely need to sow new seeds for, lest we risk losing it entirely; AI does not seem keen to do that.
Now to be fair, so much of this is hyperspecialization knowledge overflowing into daily life and making existence a sort of cognitohazard in and of itself. We skip through hundreds of pages of legal boilerplate because we’re not lawyers, and then complain about all the rights we willingly signed away because of the volume of said agreements. Non-technical people engaging with modern computing are either addicts or miserable, unaware that this was both entirely optional and also inevitable in a populace that didn’t think for itself. Finance has become so hyperspecialized that it’s impossible for the layman to tell of something is good or bad, or even why the number went up or down on their portfolio in a given time period. LLM boosters say their tools will solve this complexity nightmare, yet the tools themselves grow increasingly complex just to eke out single-point gains on hyperspecific problems.
Which brings me to the OP again, their highly uncritical claims that AI will bring about a new revolution of thought itself, and that somehow this tool will both restore thought to an elevated pedestal while also making it nearly impossible to meter (at least on American currency; let’s not think too hard about how developing countries might be able to afford it). I don’t see any of that, but for the same reasons the OP feels it’s somehow inevitable. The only difference I can readily figure is our opinions of our fellow humans: I view us as in dire straits and able to do far better than we give ourselves credit for, while they view us as replaceable with servile digital labor for the better.
But a the conclusion is a nice one for people that will be able to pull it off.
"I hate this damn machine"
"I wish they would just sell"
"It never does what I want"
"Only what I tell it."
By the way, there is another problem. For humans we have the saying "garbage in, garbage out." If you read a lot of trash, you will only come up with trash. If you give powerful tools to morons, they will not become geniuses. That's not just true for humans, it's also the case for AI. If you teach your AI trash, it's going to be some trashy AI. Since people do that all the time for various reasons, we're going to have a lot of artificial stupidity, too.
This is the we-don’t-need-BluRays-because-all-movies-are-on-Netflix phase.
Let’s wait until the market is settled
My point is in the beginning it seemed like Netflix is all you need to watch all the movies you want for a decent price. Now the market is much more fragmented and the prices are much higher.
The same will happen with AI.
Simple example, close to home: the preponderance of proprietary products rather than freer ones, with people then mass complaining when they end up bitten by the downsides. But adopting the freer solutions requires taking it on as a hobby - it's not just a simple choice between A or B, but rather requires self-actualization to implement the freer solution as it pertains to your own life.
So we're really talking about the next step whereby it becomes even easier to just go with the flow of default options. Of course, "the flow" might not be ending up in such a successful place any more (ie no more copious white collar make work jobs in the healthcare denial industry, etc), and that's the real problem.
Thank, you, Diomidis! I'll remember your IOCCC contributions and shall join the AI-Jugend and report to my Untergruppenführer.
(Incidentally, the IOCCC is also suffering from AI psychosis now.)
It's not only ahistorical to fail to consider preferences and politics, but it's also an indictment of the author's ability to judge the quality of a machine output versus that of a competent person. No doubt that like any of the examples above, some displacement of resources and effort will happen. But that doesn't indicate that something as central as "thinking" (lol) will fade into the past.
Banking apps closed 99% of high street banks (here in the UK at least).
Amazon is basically destroying the shopping high streets.
Technology has a way of disrupting what we've been doing for generations. I think the whole AI thing isn't made up - we're going to see rapid change in a very short time frame. Personally I'm trying my hardest to adjust, as I don't want AI to "happen" to me, by learning the skills that I can only predict will be important.
* Some figures may have been pulled out of the air :)
Stats like this get thrown around a lot but it's worth considering that the ABSOLUTE numbers might not actually change that much over time.
With agriculture specifically, we can make some rough estimates that, before mechanization (say, 1760-1800 period), there was maybe 10^9 people on Earth and they were all employed in agriculture. So ~10^9 farm-workers.
As of 2024, FAO estimates of global agricultural workforce put the total at about 892 million; call it ~9x10^8. [1]
So, more precise (but perhaps not much more accurate) to say that mechanization put 10% of farm workers out of a job, not 99%.
Now, it certainly IS true that mechanization allows (or forces, depending on your perspective) 90% of the population of Earth to do something other than farming, which is the real point you were making - Technology DOES have a way of disrupting what we've been doing for generations.
[1] https://www.fao.org/statistics/highlights-archive/highlights...
I don't believe this is true. High street banks are still common. 99% closed means we previously had 100 times as many, which would be absurdly high. It's probably closer to 50% closed.
At least in the US, there are roughly the same number of bank branches today as 20 years ago. And I think you would have to compare to hundreds of years ago to find anything like a 99% decline in farm laborers.
I’d make a similar bet for assembly programmers. People say “no one programs in assembly anymore”, but I’d guess today there are more assembly programmers than when everyone programmed assembly.
A lot of people that I know would strongly prefer to go to some brick and mortar shop. The problem is: most of items that I buy on the internet (e.g. on Amazon) are simply not easily available in a shop in my town (and I am not living in a small town).
For example:
- lots of obscure scientific books that are written in German or even English (I live in Germany)
- similarly: lots of rather niche belletristic books (think into the direction: some obscure novel recommendation on HN) often in various foreign languages
N.B. It is true that an important reason why Amazon became big among early computer enthusiasts in Germany in the 90s is that it was one of the few ways for easily getting computer science textbooks delivered from the USA - though with long delivery times.
- 3D printing supplies (why doesn't there exist a brick an mortar store for this?)
- very niche indie games (they are by now basically all sold on Steam, GOG, Epic Store or itch.io)
- very specific parts for Maker projects
- ...
So, the situation is not that people necessarily want to buy on the internet or specifically Amazon, but rather that there exists barely any way to get what they want in a brick and mortar store in even large cities.
Because it is not cheap or available if its not made in China.
Technology, like AI, is a force multiplier. A lever.
It's not "technology did this or that", humans did using technology.
Selling stuff to people without them understanding the consequences is a technology, too.
It's good to reduce pain, but not to kill everything. At least not in one fatal fell swoop.
Society does indeed evolve over time, but it's only in 8th grade history surveys that it can be presented so simply as you take for granted above.
Yet Ikea, H&M, etc are thriving. COVID was supposed to be the deathknell for brick and mortar retail but I'm fairly sure it's bounced back. Buying a lot of stuff will just always be better in person.
Since you're so certain of this impact "AI" will have, what "skills" do you "predict" are required on the human end of this?
I have to admit that's a rhetorical question to demonstrate the absurdity of your stance. Don't make my eyes roll out of my head by insisting that "AI is indeed an absurd change, but we must acknowledge... (blah blah)" or whatever and double down.
We've had years of these silly takes and we're all fed up with the mass-plagiarism machine. It's not science fiction. It's a big lookup table for sale and wrapped in lies, and no it's not equivalent to other computation by definition. I'm sure you could run some people out of business that way, but not all. When the job is done did we really achieve "AI", or just ruin the economy by taking advantage of the feeble minded?
Any politician has a massive opportunity here to enforce the law. It's only a question if they'll keep pretending to be blinded by the science.
Not Flere-Imsaho:
I think if one made a serious effort, one could easily find a well-founded answer to this question that is based on a solid rational foundation.
The problem rather is: people (often in decision positions, but also employees who fear for their jobs) don't act rationally on AI:
- For example, managers firing good programmers because programmers are to be replaced by AI. By now you can find many reports of companies who try to convince their programmers that they fired "because of AI" to come back.
- Similarly, panicking employees who demand irrational restrictions on AI.
These very non-rational factors and irrational actions are very hard to predict.
What is so irrational about avoiding AI altogether? If the dev gets the same or higher quality work done in the same amount of time without it (oh, yes they can/do) what is the risk?
What kind of sweatshop has such a bottleneck with dev time that they require AI? If the dev is micromanaged to the extent that they are told which tools to use, that's something else already.
Let's meet in the middle and say most devs, regardless of the extremity of their stance on AI, probably at least read Google AI summaries and copy-paste that code from time to time. I've never heard of anyone complaining about that. Brother, let me tell you that's 99% of the productivity boost we're gonna see until this upcoming AI winter is over again. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional.
Zero. Regrets. Outside of the rare errand where I need serious cargo capacity, or visiting family, cars are only for fun now.
As a non-"car person" once agreed with me: "Yep, I hate COMMUTING in a car. But I love DRIVING."
Given how little Americans walk and how much blame their sedentary lifestyle has gotten for obesity and diabetes and so on, i don't think this is a good example.
EDIT: If anything it's something of a counter-example: of an activity that technology has made to a great degree superfluous, and which has to be added to one's lifestyle simply for the purpose of wellness.
Bearing the burden of a civilization-wide illness such as obesity and diabetes is such a cost. But, hey, at least a large amount of the country is designed in a way that mandates commute via cars and makes "adding to one's lifestyle simply for the purpose of wellness" even more inconvenient.
Only once we automate our whole existence away we will start grasping for true satisfaction; once automating away what's left is also automated away, we will truly, and finally, be successful as a species.
Cash is dead in many places. Stores all around me have "cash not accepted" signs.
For many Americans walking is dead. Sad but true. Cities got designed or redesigned to be car first.
Amazon put numerous types of stores out of business. There are entire categories of products that can now only be bought online.
Side note, but here in Australia smaller stores are starting to preference cash again due to high card fees that legally cannot be (directly) passed into the customer.
I think the solution is in education. Do not teach people about the things that are useful right now. Teach people to value the things that make their lives better.
I'm ok with thinking as a hobby. That's doing it because you value it. If there are not enough people doing it, the problem is that they don't value it or don't know how to value it.
what are you gonna do, be an AI bro for 50 years telling me "just one more year bro"?
I'm already 30, I'm not gonna live till 80 reading unbearable ai bro comments.
That's ridiculous.
or even the chance to practice smiling while greeting a stranger
I've saved no end of hours of transport thanks to Zoom and Teams meetings, and hybrid is now a thing (just not for me).
Bricks and mortar stores around here have been empty for years in some cases, and I'm the last person in the office who carries cash.
> Steadily improving cheap quality you get for the most products
Have you proof read what you wrote? With your lack of specificity for the word "thinking", you're casting a rather broad argument; there is a troubling implications between your words.
* Trust what you're told, consume what you're sold; Do as you're bid, do as you're told.
* Don't question the script, don't step out of line; keep your "snowflake thinking" benign.
* The market knows best, so don't second-guess; Our Ford will provide, just consume and say yes.
Fooooord!^[1]
- [1] Brave New World; by Aldous Huxley
yes, but not in a meaningful way
> With your lack of specificity for the word "thinking", you're casting a rather broad argument;
that's intentional— specific = snowflake → broad = cattle. Same goes for craft vs at-scale manufacturing.
Also Ford was right about horses. Who's the horse now? I've been saying it from the horse perspective too for a while https://x.com/clehene/status/1768411925057347822
At the end of the day, your thoughts are important to everyone else but the "market"— you, your mom, etc. But the market doesn't care about your reasoning and hence can be "irrational" longer than you can be "right".
Also note that rational/irrational is a reasoning aspect. Automating it was on Aristotle's mind too.
It made it unnecessary to ride a horse.
> Amazon obsoleted brick and mortar stores
Pretty much did.
> payment cards made cash disappear
Pretty much did in China. A good example how something seems essential for someone is just completely replaceable for the others.