1) Chaudry's article is amazing in its lack of creative thinking. If people like Priya can be ~10 times more productive wielding some AI tools, that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives. Though some people in some companies might be laid off, it doesn't necessarily mean that more people will be laid off than new jobs are created.
2) Chaudry ignores that you need a human in the loop to check an AI's work. You don't know that an AI's answer is always right. Even if it's perfect in 99% of cases, the answer could be jaw-droppingly destructive in that 1% of cases and make errors that even the dumbest human wouldn't make. Being grossly wrong even a small percentage of the time is far worse than a human making minor errors sometimes, and being slow all of the time.
3) Go and look at some of those historical picture sites to see images of an accounting department in some companies throughout 1900s America. Before computers, you'd see a fascinating image of a gigantic floor of an office building with desks filled with typewriters and calculators and tons of workers just adding things up and trying to store records in a bunch of file cabinets. Desktop Computers and spreadsheets were invented and all of a sudden an accountant could quickly update a few values in a spreadsheet and figure out an answer to a question far faster and more reliably than that entire floor of accountants. Did accounting software make the world worse and destroy jobs even though it made 1 accountant ridiculously more productive than they were in the past?
> that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives.
This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure?
> Though some people in some companies might be laid off, it doesn't necessarily mean that more people will be laid off than new jobs are created.
It doesn't mean the opposite, either.
> 2) Chaudry ignores that you need a human in the loop to check an AI's work. You don't know that an AI's answer is always right. Even if it's perfect in 99% of cases, the answer could be jaw-droppingly destructive in that 1% of cases and make errors that even the dumbest human wouldn't make. Being grossly wrong even a small percentage of the time is far worse than a human making minor errors sometimes, and being slow all of the time.
Companies have shown time and time again that they're willing to make this trade-off.
> Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure?
if you'd like the standard of living of a few centuries ago, you can probably fund that by programming for a couple hours a week. instead you want entertainments, medicines and foods that take correspondingly more effort to produce.
Funnily enough. People without a leg up in the system can't get a property to save their life (and have that standard of living) and the quality of goods decreases while surveillance and authortiarianism increases.
A lot has improved but in the last 20/25 years, the inequality and increasing centralisation has worsened.
And if you don't realize this it probably means your safety net was too cozy for you to notice.
With that said, my comments don't relate to GPT4 which i find interesting and hope that people can be instructed how to make the most of these LLMs for themselves and not just as a tool for a company.
I'm not sure... I get the sense that eggs of the 1800s were likely a byproduct of having chickens, or barter with someone who had chickens. Yes, some effort went into them, where now it's more likely that the effort goes into work which turns into money which turns into eggs.
But, I've made a choice: I'll pay for eggs at the market rather than have chickens, because I don't want to have to deal with chickensitters when we got on a trip. This is the sort of choice that the person you're replying to is talking about.
Eggs from healthy chickens with good diets have more nutritional value and taste better than inbred, locked-in-a-tiny-cage, fed-only-corn, factory-farmed eggs. Visit a rural area and try some eggs from a chicken that's allowed to run around and scratch and eat bugs and seeds, it's not even comparable to thin-shelled pale-yellow-yolked garbage in the grocery store.
Anecdotally I think food tastes way better in general today than it did in the 80s or 90s. Avocados used to be hard and almost flavorless, strawberries were watery and less sweet, restaurants are making much more interesting and complex dishes than I remember ever seeing as a kid, and food in general even just looks better. Go back and watch some old movies with some "fancy" dinners, everything just looks disgusting, like it was all cooked in a microwave or something. The situation looks like it was even worse in the 60s and 70s.
I think the mass shipping of produce has actually gotten better, probably in no small part from logistics software. Is there a chance though that you buy groceries somewhere relatively more expensive than where you (or your parents) bought groceries in the 80s/90s? It’s still very possible to find bland strawberries, it just depends on how much you are (or aren’t) willing to pay.
Not even anecdotal, this is legitimately what occurred. Genetic engineering created better food today than even 30 years ago: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UaxzEztQcyg
but produce really has gotten blander. I've never been a fan of regular Roma tomatoes, and even grocery store heirloom tomatoes mostly just taste sour. but I recently had the opportunity to eat a pizza with heirloom tomatoes from a friend's garden, and it tasted like the second coming of Jesus Christ in my mouth. like, not exaggerating, I was briefly moved to tears by how flavorful it was.
You might want to reword that sentence unless you’re like that nun in Sweden who had some very detailed visions of feast of the circumcision, let’s leave it at that.
Presumably they are referring to the reduction in average quality that came with scale and cost related changes in food production. If you buy (expensive) eggs from a small farm, they objectively taste better than eggs from a cheap or even average grocery store. My impression is that whatever “innovations” produce this difference had not yet been put in place 50 years ago.
now they come in nice little disposable cardboard boxes, and they're available within a mile or two of your home, 365 days a year, probably about 24/7, regardless of season, or any diseases sweeping through the chicken population. it's possible you've never had to smell chicken shit in your entire life. they're sorted by size, graded by the USDA, run through certified facilities with quality control experts doing I don't even know what, but i'd wager a cookie you vote for people who pass food safety laws, so i'm assuming you approve of those QC folks.
if we round up and say a dozen eggs costs $5 right now, and then use CPI to go backwards to 1913, what we're getting would've cost $0.16 then. the first website i found says that a dozen eggs cost $0.37 in 1913. i realize there's some circularity in there with eggs being part of the CPI calculation, sorry.
> This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure?
Not to be that guy, but income inequality in the US has continued to increase [0], so it's not that automation isn't making people richer, it's just that it isn't being distributed fairly. If it were, then perhaps we'd be closer to our two hour work days.
I think the automation of grocery store check-out is a great example of this sort of thing. Grocery store cashiers are busy spending their time worrying about their shifts getting cut in favour of self-checkout while grocery stores are profiteering (esp. in Canada) [1]. A more equitable system would have those profits lining the pockets of the same people who are now on reduced hours. Turns out that, like most people have realised by now, trick-down economics isn't really enough.
And over and over again, we've underestimated and then normalized the capacity of our institutions, made of otherwise decent people, to achieve outcomes that we would call abhorrent if they were carried out by an individual. So the door closes on that opportunity because we fail to act.
If we're ever going to walk through that door, companies need to fear us, because they sure as hell aren't going to share with us out of the goodness of their hearts.
I'm not sure what the right move would be re: Priya. Maybe it's a strike for retraining benefits. Maybe it's a wave of resignation letters that mention her. Maybe it's an act of sabotage. But whatever it is, it has to be an existential threat because that's the only language besides money that our institutions understand.
That might be an option for you and me, but it's not an option for Priya.
And that's a problem for you and me because our system has shown to be very effective at concentrating wealth at the top. Most likely it'll later find a different way to transition us from have to have-not, but even if it doesnt we'll end up retiring into a world mostly populated by people who have more to gain by turning their back on our system than participating in it.
Squabbling over ownership of abstractions is a lose-lose scenario without some degree of solidarity keeping the zero sum games in check.
> This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure?
The extra value has gone to enrich the oligarchs rather than to the people. Maybe that should change.
I think most humans today massively underestimate just how absolutely shitty the life of a medieval peasant was.
You would have lived in a one room house without electricity, worked the fields from childhood (if you survived childhood), eaten simple foods without spices, watched your friends die from illness, then maybe get conscripted into a medieval war.
If you thought the people at the top had power now boy you'd really hate feudalism.
I think a lot of modern society's wealth goes into unexpected places, which is one of the things you see if you try living in places with different national GDPs. I'm in a well off European country right now, and the biggest differences I see compared to the US are things like older cars and worse appliances. The technology is older, and cheaper. Everyone having the latest SUV and pickup truck is actually a HUGE investment in wealth!
If you spend some time in lat am countries with even lower per person GDP you see older, simpler buildings, cheaper clothing, simpler food, etc etc.
If you wanted to live in the united states with a 1950s car, in an old house, with appliances from the 80s and shitty healthcare, you could live pretty cheap as well. The advances in productivity has brought us SOMEWHERE it's just not always obvious where.
People have a profound recency bias. I wonder if it's that people don't study history enough but I'm always amazed at posts like the grandparent's, which talk about oligarchs today discounting the influence of, you know, actual oligarchs, as in those few who legitimately ruled over others.
The system we have today is the single greatest driver of human prosperity the world has ever seen.
Yet there are people who wield the wealth equivalent to a moderately rich country's GDP. A great deal of our collective increased value output is going straight to those individuals.
I think most humans today massively underestimate just how absolutely shitty the life of a medieval peasant was.
You would have lived in a one room house without electricity, worked the fields from childhood (if you survived childhood), eaten simple foods without spices, watched your friends die from illness, then maybe get conscripted into a medieval war.
You don’t have to go to medieval times for that. The first half of the 20th century was like that for a lot of people in what is considered rich counties today.
In the cities many large families (or multiple families) shared a tenement and TB and polio ran rampage. Outside the cities many families lived inn1 or 2 room homes with dirt floors and no plumbing in many cases. This was common in Appalachia and parts of the south into the 1960s.
Millions fled many parts of Europe for these conditions in part because it was better than what was going on over there.
We are all seriously lucky to be alive today with what we have. And although these things are relative there’s no guarantee our societies continue to have such plentiful access to food, comfortable shelter, and basic medicines like antibiotics and vaccinations.
"It could be worse" is and always has been a garbage argument.
The problem is those oligarchs are using their outsized accumulation to lobby for and purchase a worsening world for their benefit. Sure, things got better for some people for a while. Now they're getting worse from what flows out of the discretionary spending of those oligarchs.
Claiming society hasn't massively benefited from productivity increases over the last century is certainly a take.... typical western raised privileged person claiming how terrible everything is.
It's definitely slowing the last couple of decades and in some aspects - reversing.
U.S life expectancy is one measurement confirming this.
Depression / anxiety among teens is higher.
And the last decade was pretty comfortable economically, it's going to get much much harder now.
I don't mean to say that there has been no benefit to the masses. I'm saying there benefits are clearly massively unequally distributed as the 0.1% get an ever increasing share of the wealth.
Is what you could claim if inequality wasn’t a detrimental to quality of life in and of it self, a fact which psychologists and sociologists have pretty well established at this point.
Also ignoring climate change, and how disproportionately it affects those less well off while overwhelmingly caused by the rich. Your quality of life may be better than in the 1950s, but this is going to be reverse really quickly over the next 50 years when we are hitting 2-3 degrees of warming, unless you are part of the 1% that can buy your self out of the crisis.
Sure, you can downplay the effects all you want, but this has been thoroughly studied, and there is a consensus within the scientific community that the negative effects of inequality are real. Disputing it at this point is kind of like disputing climate change.
If all of Bezos, Musk, Buffett, Ellison, and Gates’ wealth were instantly destroyed, inequality would fall quite a bit and yet my life would not be improved in any discernible way.
That is not how this works. Collectively (all else being equal) a lot of lives would indeed improve, or at the very least, the collective perception of the quality of life would improve significantly (in a statistical sense).
What you are saying is the equivalent of stating that today is cold, so climate change must be false.
Their possession of vast wealth is not a negative for me, nor would its destruction benefit me. There’s very few cases where we are competing against each other for goods and services.
If you’re asking whether I’d be better off if you instead seized it and gave me some, of course I would, but it’s important to understand that that improvement comes from being given money, not by the reduction of inequality.
Its been a while since I read the literature, but if I remember correctly, this effect you are describing is usually controlled for. If I remember correctly, it is the inequality it self, that decreases quality of life, and is independent of the increase in wealth among the poorer public.
That is, over a certain baseline, an increase in wealth does not yield significant improvement in quality of life (i.e. diminishing returns). Redistributing the wealth to increase inequality will improve the collective quality of life, not because the general public has more money, but because there is more equality.
Again it is up to you if you don’t believe this, just be aware that your believes are contrary to the scientific consensus.
I’m not sure if you’re inadvertently or intentionally trying to move the goalposts in our conversation.
There’s no doubt that money has a declining marginal utility. That’s as established an economic fact as they come.
There is still a leap from that fact to concluding that reducing inequality by vaporizing the wealth of five well-known billionaires would improve the economic lives of hundreds of millions of people. I believe it would not.
I do agree that if that were true, it would be strong evidence that inequality standing alone is causally negative (rather than merely a lack of redistribution being the actual negative and inequality being merely a correlated outcome, which is what I think is the case).
I’m sure this is not this simple, and I’m sorry if hinted that it was. Just how rich the richest 5 people in the USA are, is really emblematic of the wealth is distributed, you can’t just take away their wealth and leave it at that, you’ll have to shave off the wealth of the right-hand side of the wealth distribution curve such that the 5 richest people aren’t so filthy and unbelievably wealthy as they currently are. This is how things work in the real world, and what social scientists create their models after, and that is what I’ve been assuming you meant. Not a magic scenario in which the five richest people, and only the five richest people have their wealth erased.
Throughout this thread my goalpost has always been that inequality is in and off it self a detriment to the quality of life for most people. This effect has been measured, thoroughly studied, and is real, we shouldn’t be debating about that, because, if you don’t believe it is real, you’re believe runs counter to the scientific consensus and there is nothing I can say to convince you. However you seem to be in disbelief about how it works, so I’m gonna provide a plausible scenario. Note, I am not a social scientist, and surely there are more informed guesses out there, if you have the time, and are so inclined, you can probably find better sources on the web that explains this better.
In an unequal but wealthy society access to basic needs might be available to all. However access to other things which affects your quality of life is distributed. You might have access to education, but of lesser quality than the richest 10%, this gives you lesser access to better jobs, etc. Healthcare has a similar story, and so does recreation. You might have to settle for a badly moved lawn shared by dozens of people, while in another part of town the rich have a giant polo-field which is hardly ever used. In a more equal society, that polo-field may be repurposed to serve more people, access to health care and education is more equal, and the overall quality of life is improved. This is regardless of how much money is in the hands of the lower classes.
Note that this is just me—not a social scientist—guessing how this works, so take it with a pinch of salt. Other people have done quality research into this, and know it better than me. However, it may very well be that the mere fact that you have people that are this rich, really incentivizes the society around them to accommodate them, and their interest, at the cost of accommodating the rest of society.
In all those stories, it is the redistribution of something better to people originally without it that is the agent of change/improvement.
The analog where inequality alone is a problem is if you take the polo field from the wealthy and make it unusable by everyone. That doesn’t make anyone any better off.
People who talk about inequality are almost always actually seeking redistribution but have the sense to realize that arguing “I want what these other people have without working for it” garners much less sympathy than if they frame it as a global inequality.
That's by design. The whole point about making you fight between blue or red in the US and other fake dichotomies around the world, and have you overindex on some specific social/Identity issue is so that you don't realize that the divide is socioeconomic and democracy is mostly a sham because whoever gets in power doesn't have to serve the interests of its voters but those of its lobbyists, and that's exactly what happens.
But hey, that's radical talk,sentiment analysis suggests we should disable this kind of speech and keep our head down, lest we be denied more rights...
There isn't really any non-violence. The common solution to depriving people of their ill-gotten wealth is state coercion under threat of violence. I don't know if that would work in the case of the 0.1%, but we surely can't limit ourselves to non-violent solutions for the ultra wealthy when we have no trouble with violent solutions for the less wealthy.
It's time for the "without violence" to, once again, become of no importance compared to "ill gotten" (plus, with ever expanding definition of "ill"). That's what tends to happen, historically. We'll then get a decade or two of reconciliation and then will again start pretending that we're not murderous primate bastards we are, just like we did for the past 50 years (and even that not nearly universally).
Why should you play with a handicap? The "oligarch" forces you to work with violence. They've already violated the non-aggression principle.
No work? No money. No rent payment? Eviction (with violence). Stealing food? Arrest and imprisonment (with violence). It's violence all the way down. It always was. It's just a question of how it's organized and rhetorically justified.
How do you do it even with violence? How would you seize and “redistribute” Jeff Bezos’s (for example) wealth? It’s mostly in stocks that would start to lose value if you tried to cash them all out at once.
This is a non-issue; the stock will temporarily lose a bit of value through the increase of supply and that's it. Amazon as a company would still intrinsically be valued at hundreds of billions if not 1+ trillion, even if Bezos were to die tomorrow and his will would say that all of his shares should be sold on the market within a day. The fact that you might only end up redistributing $70 billion instead of the $80 billion he was worth when alive doesn't matter, it's still $70 billion being redistributed.
Laws that force Bezos to open up his platforms to competition would likely collapse the share price while not killing the actual value of what was built.
Tax is another.
The problem is getting into a position where you could pass those laws without violence. I'm not sure it is possible to do it democratically in such a corrupted political system. 3rd parties are essentially impossible and oligarchs have a lock on the other 2.
You disable his AWS account and badge and stop inviting him to meetings, likewise for any other hands that that stock falls into. It's not valuable if it doesn't give the holder enough power to make changes happen.
Think one step further. What happens if you do? Doesn't the USSR example teach you anything? You will have a different breed of oligarchs, that's all (yes, there were oligarchs in the USSR, just not in the way you think, money is not everything and oligarchy is not about money).
This is one of the most important questions we should be asking today. I'm not even joking as I think it's a critically important part of fixing society
As dumb as it sounds I genuinely think it's a concerted effort to change people's minds - specifically those people who want to become capital class or otherwise are on the way to the capital class.
If we can 1. Prevent new billionaires from being created and 2. then create structures to allow the capital class to feel like they are important to the process of reducing their own power and democratizing the economy, there might be a chance.
> This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure?
In the “Sad Irons” chapter of Caro’s LBJ biography, he talks about the pre-electrification lives of Texas farmers. In comparison with that, our whole day is leisure.
Similarly: As late as 1900, the poor in Europe were so severely malnourished that growth stunting was common. Look at Our World in Data’s charts of height over time. Or Robert Fogel’s “The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death.”
> This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off.
You are working the same number of hours as before (40 ish) because companies are producing 10x as much goods in the same amount of time. If they produced only the same amount, ie 1x, you'd have your 2 hour work day (or more likely be out of a job). It is because companies are producing more stuff that you have a job at all currently. You are complaining about the very thing you benefit from now.
>You are complaining about the very thing you benefit from now.
It's dubious that anyone except the most wealthy benefits from this. Even though productivity has exploded, wages hasn't followed and the rewards of productivity has gone to a small few. I don't know how anyone can look at wealth inequality today and think most people should be "grateful". It's more likely to me that rest of America will start to look like San Francisco.
Although that's true, it's important to acknowledge that you've shifted the conversation from time, which was the original topic, to merely having things in a world where most people have little flexibility in the amount they work anyway. Even if I hadn't bought that phone, I wouldn't necessarily have any more time to myself.
There are many ways our lives are better. See for example infant mortality. To be born mere sixty or eighty years earlier would mean for me personally to die at three months of age. All my time is extra time if you look at it from this perspective.
I don't think anyone disputes that such metrics are better than before; the issue is staying complacent with what we have in a world where we are seeing yet another wave of potential productivity gains being captured by people who can afford to use it to gain more time. Saying "Things are better than they've ever been, why complain?" feels like the wrong approach.
"Hey, at least I'm not dead." as the answer to "Why haven't we seen meaningful increases in free time for first world workers over the past three decades?" is a real head-scratcher.
I mean that we, as a society, had chosen more goods and higher standard of living instead of free time.
It's not an exclusive choice either. At least in Europe, the amount of free time grows with each generation. 37.5 hours per week, 5 weeks vacation and many bank holidays is a significant change from how much people worked in the fifties.
Yes, we can do better. But both our wealth and our free time are visibly improving.
Who is staying complacent? We don't have increases in free time because work is not zero sum; technology enabled more productive work to be done (human computers versus, well, electronic computers) but we still have a lot more work to do. We haven't even reached type 1 on the Kardashev scale, meaning that we have yet more to do.
AI will similarly increase out productivity but the work will still continue, because humans are an inexhaustible species, we always want to do more and more.
I disagree. Having that phone means I do not have to go to the grocery store, etc. having the TV means I don’t drive to the theater. My very nice smoker means that not only do I not drive 20 miles to the nearest good BBQ, but I get time for myself to cook.
Many of these advances in consumer goods absolutely create more time for relaxation and enjoyment.
I already had those eight hours (after work, before sleeping) to myself, and as much as I appreciate the fact that modern conveniences make it easier to squeeze as much as I can out of that time, the amount is still palty compared to eight or nine hour work days four or five days a week. The issue isn't so much that I can come home and get things done, it's why the vast majority of people think it makes any sense to slave away for eight hours under the watch of someone else because... that way I can buy my own smoker?
I disagree, technological progress and productivity do not seem to be so tightly linked.
If we woke tomorrow and started making all goods to be long-lived, nothing single-use, fixed up the designed-in obsolescence, open-sourced everything, then we'd release people and resources for a great focus on innovation whilst simultaneously cutting production levels.
Because we spend a whole heap of our productivity on making crap, basically separating people from money as effectively as we can fit as little development as we can get away with. Our financial system (UK, I'd say The West is all the same too) is tailored to make rich people richer, everything else is a by-product.
Yes, people would work less (and produce less waste). No, I don't have all the answers on how that would work out. Greed would probably cause it to fail.
>You don’t have a smartphone, don’t use wireless networking and telecom, have no flat screen TV, don’t use the internet, and so on?
Bread and circuses? I mean sure, some things are cheaper, but other things are also much, much more expensive. And maybe it's because I'm older now, but I don't think "flat screen TVs" are a good benchmark for overall wealth (I don't even own a TV).
Yet, things like healthcare, housing, childcare and education have exploded in price despite the gains of "productivity". The former are necessities to live and it's dubious that to argue that I've "gained" from productivity if you have traded the ability for me to own a home with an iPhone. The balance isn't there - and I think you have a political undercurrent of people waking up to this. What good is a flat screen TV, if I can't own a home? Have I really benefitted from productivity gains if the equation is so out of whack? Simple math tells me that while a 50in has gone from $9,000 to $1,000, a "starter home" has gone from $200,000 to $800,000. Telling me I've benefitted in this situation is to take me for a fool.
Don't conflate lack of wage growth to the underlying reasons for those costs exploding. Why have those exploded?
Housing: NIMBYism and lack of ability to build, mainly by strict government zoning and people who petition their local governments to not build more lest it devalue their house.
Healthcare: insurance companies trying to get away with as much as they can, while hospitals try to charge as much as they can, effectively creating a price bidding war with the consumer in the middle.
Childcare: More people working, lower supply of childcare services but demand goes up, thus price goes up.
Education: Government effectively making student debt undischargeable in a bid to get more people to get college degrees but this backfired. Administrator costs for colleges ballooning.
So, even if wages had kept up with productivity, if you don't solve the underlying reasons as to why these costs exploded, you'll have the same issues as before.
Anything the government subsidizes (healthcare, mortgages, education) has exploded in cost because it’s built on a foundation of moral hazard. In essence the policies, which try and mix central economic planning with free markets, are lining the pockets of banks (guaranteeing mortgages), university endowments and admins (giving anyone with a pulse tons of money to learn), and healthcare providers (Medicare and Medicaid demand saturating resources by paying under market for the highest risk people).
I’m not saying socialized or free market approaches are better than one another. But the approach we have taken is the worst of both.
You can’t just insure the sickest demographics - you need a distribution. Either make it universal or let the free market compete for it.
You can’t just give anyone a ton of cash to learn what they want. Either make it free for all or let the free market lend to students based on expected return.
You can’t just guarantee every mortgage which keeps interest rates artificially low. Either build social housing or let the free market set interest rates.
I agree wholeheartedly. The mixture might work in other regulated domains like finance, but for the above, it only hinders true growth and development for the tax payer.
I know that comparing averages is not always correct, but. Median home price around 1975 was $100K (give of take), median family income: $14K. Today the median family income in MA is $75K. The median home price in MA is around $550K. You were saying prices went up and you can't afford a home anymore? Then you couldn't afford it in 1975. Should we go back a couple of centuries? And yet we have TVs, Internet, smartphones etc.
Indeed, commenters here seem to be looking at housing as a fixed good with the same supply without considering that maybe the fact that housing is still expensive is that we aren't building more housing, not necessarily that our wages stagnated.
This is a red herring. The reality is that the benefits from all this productivity are distributed to a few billionaires, rather than everyone.
Imagine how different the world would look if the richest person's net worth was a few million, and wealth was distributed much more evenly. You don't even need to look at productivity for this.
It wouldn't look substantially different. Wealth is not cash, you can't just redistribute it. And even if you could, say, take the top 100 billionaires' wealth (let's say they collectively have 1 trillion USD in assets) and redistributed it, the US tax base itself contributes something on the order of 2 trillion a year. So, great, for one year you increased people's incomes by 33%, increasing inflation as well, mind you. Now the next year everyone who's rich and invests in larger projects would leave to a country that doesn't have wealth redistribution measures, and the US would basically turn into Cuba. We gain a lot more from investment innovation through technology, empirically, than we lose through wealth inequality. The current system we have is the single greatest driver of human prosperity the world has ever seen.
I don't mean the US model of capitalism particularly, I just used its tax base calculation as an example (and either way, doesn't seem like you addressed the situation of what happens when you redistribute funds). I mean the modern system of free trade, regulated markets of supply and demand, comparative advantage, and so on, how most modern countries' economies function today. For example, India after opening up their markets in the 80s (having previously followed the communist Soviet model) has seen massive growth in terms of the wealth of their population.
Inflation occurs when the supply of money flowing in the economy grows. Bezos' wealth for example is tied up into Amazon, it's not liquid. But suddenly if you gave everyone and extra 10k a year from that money? They'll spend it, causing prices to increase. That's inflation. Not to mention converting Amazon stock to cash would cause the price to crater. The way to get around that would be to directly issue the stock to the government or to the people, as some countries do. However, again, people could simply sell the stock to use the money as cash, again causing inflation. Norway and Alaska have a decent model, a sovereign wealth fund that issues dividends to its populace, but again, it can cause inflation.
Oh, I don't disagree that the current system isn't bad, but, as you said, the Nordics have a much better take on it. Basically, aggressively taxing high incomes and having a strong social safety net seems to work very well.
On the other hand, Europe doesn't really have many companies on par with the US, likely because of the pro corporate policies in the US. Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Nike, etc. Many companies that people currently work at are US made and it appears that the ability for people to start businesses is what enables our continued GDP growth such that we can even have a good economy. Compare to something like Italy or Japan whose economies are flat, as well as not having new entrepreneurial growth.
Now one might say that worker comfort matters over companies being made, but at some point, there have to actually be companies to work at in the first place.
We wouldn't have the invention of ChatGPT I would imagine. The pooling of resources to create such a thing probably wouldn't of occurred, or not as soon.
All you’re saying (by implication), besides not discussing numbers (which can show widening gap), is that you believe capital and state are necessary and exclusively capable of a productive and innovative society, that populations are otherwise inherently lazy or impossibly conflicted. I don’t think modern anthro research agrees with this. Catch up on Graeber & Wengrow
> you believe capital and state are necessary and exclusively capable of a productive and innovative society, that populations are otherwise inherently lazy or impossibly conflicted.
Where did the parent say anything like this at all? I believe you're attacking a strawman.
Another commentator calls out all the things we didn't have at all in the past, but our wealth in regard to pre-existing things also has gone up.
In the 50s there were 3 cars/10 Americans. Now it's 9. Homeownership went for 55% to 66%. College degrees 6% -> 38%. We used to spent 20% of income on food. Now it's around 8%. Poverty among 65+ went from 35% to 10%.
We need that many cars because our walkable cities were bulldozed to build highways through them. We need the college degree because jobs don't train you anymore and the few jobs you can get with little/no training were automated away or don't pay enough to live. The cheap food sucks and is killing us.
I'm 100% in on walkable cities, public transit, massive zoning reform etc. But were American cities more walkable in the 50s?
Yes, more jobs today require more knowledge. My grandpa worked in a factory full of boring, repetitive work where he also got to inhale bad fumes every day. I went to college for 6 or 7 years and my employers combined have probably spent less than 10k on training for me. I get to work at a sit/stand desk, get snacks provided, ergonomic equipment and do work that has much more variety than anything my grandpa did. Even if I ignore the astronomical income difference between me and my grandpa, I'd still not trade this for his job.
Was the food actually healthier in the US in the 50s? Did food not come from factory farms? Wonder Bread has been around since the 20s and in the 40s had to have vitamins added. Seems like we already were far away from the serene pastures we all like to imagine food came from. Looking outside the US, famines were incredibly common until quite recently.
We need that many cars because having own home and living in a suburb is an American dream, isn't it? How many people want to live in a high rise building with noisy neighbors? Yes, it is expensive, but living in a cave is pretty cheap, somehow nobody wants it.
I really hate how the wealthy benefit from my washer, dryer, dishwasher, Internet, air conditioning, access to a huge variety of food... When will the wealthy start passing the benefits of progress on to the rest of us?
We've got big problems in our economy and income inequality is certainly one of them, but it's asinine to pretend that most individuals in society have not benefitted from technological progress.
Different time scales. Except the internet these are all things that come in the last 100 years. Clearly average well being has increased in that time frame. Less clear if the last two decades have been advantageous for people in the US. I understand there are solid stats that the median person in the world and the bottom quartile, have improved.
My kids have a vastly more fragile lifestyle then I did right out of college.
It's weird that in the face of growing evidence[1][2], people will still argue that it's "asinine" that a lot of people got the short end of the stick. Imagine we both went fishing and I took 80% of the fish and gave you 20%, when you turned around and asked for 50% if I said "look you were hungry yesterday and you clearly benefitted from 20% of the fish, why are you complaining" I assume you wouldn't just say "ok you're right".
Even your list is out of touch; many of my friends in San Francisco don't have in-unit washer or dryers. Look I don't even think I'm even making a crazy observation; I'm just continuing the trend - as AI gets better and more pervasive it's only natural that wealth will concentrate without some force to redistribute it (either through wages or taxes).
Your fishing example assumes a zero sum economy, when one of the first things you learn in economics classes is that the economy is not zero sum, that comparative advantages enable positive sum outcomes.
A better example is, we go fishing, I catch fish, you chop wood, we build a fire with my wood and eat with your fish. We are both better off than we were before.
The metaphor is not the economy - it's about being told to shut up in the face on inequality. At the end of the day if I can't raise my concerns and negotiating, then I might as well be under a monarchy and we can erase all pretense about this being fair.
Well, we're talking about the economy, which is where you implied the inequality. My point is that you're making it seem to the reader that you're conflating the two things, making it seem like you're implying that the fishing is about the economy.
If you want to talk about shutting up in the face of inequality, pick a better example, or better yet, mention that you're not talking about the economy at all, even though that's the point of discussion here.
>mention that you're not talking about the economy at all, even though that's the point of discussion here.
Are you implying there is no income equality today? I don't understand your contention with my point. It's more just asking me to ignore actual data and be happy with the fact that I can buy a flat screen TV for $200.
It's seems natural that capital accumulates - and with AI this process is only going to get more concentrated; and looking backwards its clear we its only going to get worse.
Income inequality in what? The...economy, right? This is why I was confused, since you say your analogy is not about the economy, yet that's what we're talking about.
Income inequality in the economy is present, yes, but economists are not in agreement whether it's a good or bad thing, and whether redistribution of wealth would even solve it [0]:
> Despite the extensive existing literature on income inequality and economic growth, there remains considerable disagreement on the effect of inequality on economic growth. Existing literatures find either a positive or a negative relationship. In this paper, we attempt to theoretically examine that relationship with a stochastic optimal growth model. We make the disagreement clear within a single model. We conclude (i) that both are possible – that is, higher inequality can retard growth in the early stage of economic development, and can encourage growth in a near steady state, (ii) that income redistribution by high income tax does not always reduce income inequality. Income inequality can be reduced by higher income tax in a near steady state, but it cannot be reduced in the early stage of economic development, and (iii) that two government polices – rapid economic growth and low income inequality – can be achieved by low income tax in the early stage of economic development, but both cannot be achieved simultaneously in a near steady state.
Now if you would like to submit literature on this topic, please do, as simply talking about what seems "natural" or "clear" does not really mean anything.
NIMBYism and lack of housing development, whether by government or by corporations. In countries like Japan where housing is not an investment but a depreciating asset, people can buy homes. Because, well, they build enough.
I mean in the major cities where had been still growing in the post war boom. Even looking back then, housing was still a depreciating asset, not an investment.
This promise had to be fulfilled by those whose salary depends on not doing it (us). Do you really believe that automation is at its peak availability now? I think we diverge from it more and more. Even as a programmer you meet a bunch of barriers to automate yourself or your home, office, etc. Every little thing is complex af. The society that automates everything is coming, I hope, bypassing the heap of nonsense we’ve built.
> > that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives.
> This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure?
Is the promise you're referring to that work will be so valuable that people need only work less than a quarter as much to live a material lifestyle equivalent to CE 1823 or 1923, or that there will be so much work to be done that there's no unemployment to speak of in 2023? Both of those seem to be true...
Why? An AI when told "follow local labor laws" is actually going to do it perfectly. Whereas those boards of executives are very happy not doing it.
A workers co-op owned company headed by an AI decisioning board would be able to maintain constant, real time feedback and coordination with all workers, and would be faster and more maneuverable then human headed companies.
>Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure?
That’s not the fault of automation. As a society we’ve chosen to increase our population and level of consumption instead and automation is simply the engine for it.
Not possible because you don't set the prices or structure for obtaining goods and shelter
It's not like there's unclaimed habitable territory that anyone can just go be subsistence farmers on - someone has laid claim to that land and it's not you
So, no this isn't an option either as you're forced to interact with the rest of the world that demands your input
A few hundred years ago, you would've lived in a shed with 6 people on 10sqm. I'm sure you can get that kind of accommodation today for very little money.
If you want 2023-level housing, you'll need to put in 2023-level work, unfortunately.
It's true for them, too. A rich guy's life in 1800 sucks compared to the average person's life in 2023. There's a reason why there's no rush to emulate the Amish, and they're not even that extreme.
No, it's some intentional decision of a suburban family in Kansas to not go be Amish. That's not how societies work.
And no, life is worse for millions of people around the world than it was in 1800 if for not other reason
This idea that things MUST be better just isn't supported with data. All the "data" about how great the world is is bad statistics - it's looking at averages only, not the distribution.
You can't point to the richest areas and claim "look see how great things are?"
Find the most destitute among us and see how they fare
> And no, life is worse for millions of people around the world than it was in 1800 if for not other reason
Yeah, but not for the same people. Life in 1800 in NYC was worse than life in NYC in 2023 for the average inhabitant. Life in some places on earth today are worse than life in NYC in 1800 was, but that's not the question.
> Find the most destitute among us and see how they fare
Better. They're faring better. The data is in, and they do.
How do you square that rationalization with the fact that you could buy a house on a high school diploma and a factory job back then? :p (With a pension! Everyone had those back then. What even is a pension? I don't know. It's something like "the company keeps paying you when you stop working", I think, but it sounds dope.)
I think if you compare then vs now in absolute terms, you'll find that the house wouldn't be considered adequate today, the insulation was bad, the plumbing questionable and electricity wasn't there (depending on when you compare to, but it needs to be sufficiently far away, few people said in the 80ies that nobody would work by 2020).
Quality today is generally much better and "average" isn't the same. I read a piece one some woman who lived around 200 years ago and she traveled to a city ~100km away, which was a noteworthy biographical event back then. That's a distance some people do daily on their way to work these days. Travel to a different continent? You'd be exceptional if you did so once in your life, today that's available to most people in the West to do once a year (granted, it won't be the luxury version, it'll be like my trip to NYC 25 years ago where we stayed in a hotel that was being renovated, the elevator was out once and we had to climb 12 floors but it was super affordable).
Is this actually true though? Suppose you want to own a house and a car, not to mention be able to send your kids to university. That was affordable 50 years ago, and the only one of those things which has gotten better is the car.
Fifty years ago was still in the post World War 2 economic boom. If you want that again, all you need is another devastating world war that kills tens of millions and wrecks every other economy except that of the United States.
That isn’t just motivated by greed. In a competitive industry, if you take your foot off the gas, a hungrier competitor who is willing to go home at 5pm or 6pm will eat your lunch.
It’s partly a product of capitalism within a nation, but also a product of the basic struggle for wealth and power at the international level. This is a common discussion in my chosen industry; we have well paying jobs and good working conditions, but only because we are (significantly) ahead. Our lead, and by extension the good life, could completely vanish in five to ten years if we stop pushing forward.
> This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure?
The end result of creative destruction is not so we can all work less, it's so things that we value become cheaper, allowing us to reallocate resources to things that are equally or more valuable. It gives rise to new companies and industries that either a) could not work without the new tech, or b) were prohibitively expensive.
The classic example is the fridge. Before it existed there was an entire industry that revolved around transporting blocks of ice. Now imagine all the industries, technological advancements, scientific advancements that would not exist if we didn't have the ability to make a box really really cold, relatively cheaply.
Creative destruction leads to economic growth (increasing the pie), not a society that doesn't have to work 40hours a week.
> Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure?
Others have already commented on the fact that quality of life has generally increased.
I think it's also worth realizing that over the course of a lifetime people today spend a much smaller fraction of their waking hours engaged in work than before.
100 years ago a typical man in a developed country might have started work aged 14 and then stopped working a few years before death if they were lucky to not die before.
Nowadays even someone "uneducated" would start working at 18, while others might start aged 22 or older. And a common expectation is to have a retirement of 15+ years.
So averaging over a lifetime we do work a lot less as a fraction of our lives than in earlier times.
Edit: numbers were plucked from thin air based on my experiences of my own country, but i guess the general point applies to most developed countries
I have a hard time believing that more jobs would be created. Like what a prompt engineer? As far as LLMs go, only companies that can afford the compute seem to be building one from scratch. So I don't think any new ML engineer jobs are going to get created
> This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day
That's the opposite of what GP predicted: that people would be more productive and produce more, not work less.
Programmers are way more productive than the were sixty years ago. We don't have fewer programmers, or part-time programmers, but we do have vastly more and better software.
> Companies have shown time and time again that they're willing to make this trade-off.
Maybe they wouldn't, but then the insurers come. Not all of the 1% of errors from an AI will be disastrous - if it happens to be "jaw-droppingly destructive" rarely enough for the insurance to make sense economically, that AI will be used.
Productivity metrics have gone up dramatically. Surplus from automation goes to owners (or the state). Worker gains are a market - in other words, capital and state organize and aim to minimize those gains as a negotiated cost
>>This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure?
<<
I personally would hate to spend all my time on leisure activities. I would still be working as hard but on my passion projects.
No offense but who wants to spend most of their time on leisure activities. That gets old fast. It is a lot more fun being productive. Maybe I'm just weird.
A person on minimum wage in the USA today can enjoy a higher quality of life than kings of a few hundred years ago. My point being that automation has brought huge benefits to society, even if we are blind to them.
>I would still be working as hard but on my passion projects.
That's called leisure, being able to direct your actions without worry about them paying the bills, leisure.
Of course you could choose to vegetate in front of a screen, but you're also free to walk the hills, create art, create machines, write software or poetry, or whatever.
In this context, "leisure" is used to mean the stuff you do outside of work and chores essentially. If you want to work on a side project, that would fall under leisure time.
> Many people can easily create a similar quality of life to 70 years ago while working 2 hours a day.
Please explain. I think you're underestimating how much things have changed, and are making a lot of assumptions about what you mean by "quality of life .. 70 years ago" and "working 2 hours a day" that would not be obvious (or available) to other people.
Who even wants to work just 2 hours per day. Sounds extremely boring. Work is a great way to exercise your mind and body while simultaneously earning funds to purchase luxuries.
People who claim that modern industrial tech and advancements have not benefited society is arguing that they are not being disproportionately benefited.
Industrial automation did create the 2hr weeks - only that it's the people who paid capital and and invested in their creation that got those 2hr weeks.
But everybody else got the benefit as the general access and availability of many more goods and services than otherwise would've been possible.
But having a lot of easy to access food certainly does. Or what about clean water, or electricity? Or cheap transport? When has there been in the past, before the advent of industrial automation and technology, that people could just travel on a whim somewhere more than a day's walk away?
Just because some symbol of luxury like the iphone is what you think of as "more stuff", doesn't mean it is. "more stuff" is _everything_, and while it does include the iphone, it also includes the cheap phone that makes it possible to communicate almost for free with almost anyone close or far.
The tickle down has been happening for the past 70 years, and the regular people have been benefiting so much that it looks normal now. I would use the analogy of boiling a frog, but somehow this doesn't quite suit.
>The tickle down has been happening for the past 70 years, and the regular people have been benefiting so much that it looks normal now.
This is just not true based on the data. The rich eat well - but food insecurity is still RAMPANT because of greed.
Food is less healthy now than ever and the majority of the population is malnourished - that is to say eating the wrong thing - despite us having enough capacity to produce quality food for everyone.
Food deserts ensure that the poorest people get the worst food.
Because they don't have as much money as other areas so people follow the money with where they provide services
>tend to lack education, including knowledge about healthy foods
This is also true and again structural - see above. Poor areas don't get school funding because school funding is based on county property taxes and thus, do more poorly than rich areas
It literally all boils down to structural inequality
Because they quality is so bad and the prices are so cheap.
Having lived in these areas for most of my life I can tell you it's often only specific low quality chains (Church's, Grannys, Jack in the Box etc...) or these "chicken wing/chinese food" shops that basically just fry up the worst meat and slather it in sugar sauce.
I recall in high school, peers of mine would simply eat a bag of Doritos for lunch - as even the classes like Home-economics were largely just holding cells for teenagers until graduation.
I'm not denying any of these improvements but there is also evidence that walking with this constant distraction and being bombarded by social media / news is bad for mental health and our ability to focus.
Because what would've been my self-sufficient tribe that needed nothing more than food, socialization, and shelter has been obliterated by various, human-made forces, and I now have to try and fill in the void by spending money.
Partly the social void via digital communication, and partly ancillary emotions generated by having something nice that makes my sisyphean pursuit just a little bit easier.
If I was able to live a life where I could see my friends and family, and be a part of a community, without any threat of that way of life being destroyed, I would not be working a job in a first world country.
Nor would I be stuffing my metaphorical and physical face with: entertainment, food, various media like video games, etc. Good company is enough to stay entertained for hours -- and it's free; but past a certain age becomes annoyingly more difficult to find as people get loaded on responsibilities, and time-commitments, and other things they believe are prudent for their "success."
I'm an extreme extrovert. My biggest gripe with capitalism is that it's alienated and killed the souls of all the people around me -- and now I have to spend copious amounts of money just to try and fill that void.
How about moving to Amish county? You always have a choice. Just don't expect to find there a social utopia where "everybody is free and everybody has at least 6 slaves", people are the same everywhere, with iPhones or not.
Yeah it’s like saying that if only we all had 800 hammers we’d all live like kings. Technology does not automatically make life better, only different. Better is a value judgement.
Why is the premise that a "better life" is one where we work fewer hours per week? Surely there are other dimensions on which to measure quality of life. Or maybe you'd prefer to live in Medeival Times? After all, you'd work fewer hours per week! Sure you might die at the age of 35, have your leg gruesomely amputated due to sepsis, or be burned at the stake for suggesting the earth spins around the Sun. But think of all the free time!
> Serfs in medieval Europe had very little free time. They were required to work long hours, usually from sunrise to sunset, and often had to work on Sundays and other holy days as well. Their work consisted of farming tasks such as plowing, planting, harvesting, and tending to livestock. In addition to their agricultural work, serfs were also required to perform labor for their lords, such as building and maintaining structures, repairing roads, and providing military service.
> Plowing and harvesting were backbreaking toil, but the peasant enjoyed anywhere from eight weeks to half the year off. The Church, mindful of how to keep a population from rebelling, enforced frequent mandatory holidays ... In fact, economist Juliet Shor found that during periods of particularly high wages, such as 14th-century England, peasants might put in no more than 150 days a year.
Oh, interesting. Isn't it only off from farming? I thought that's where making roads and dying in wars came in. But it's also true they had to have at least some free time to mate.
People are ditching their phones which to me proves their value isn't universal and probably isn't that great of a benefit to anyone other than business.
Your comment is amazing in its naivete. The first sentence in the post you are replying to already includes awareness of everything you said and more, while nothing in your comment suggests you understood the post at all. Priya doesn't become 10 times more productive, someone else uses the tool to do her job, which no longer exists.
Priya has a university degree in biotechnology. If that doesn't qualify her for something more productive than GPT-level work, there's something fundamentally wrong with the educational system.
She's in her 20s, educated, and lives in a country that, for all its problems, is on a strong growth trend. She's not a 60yo UAW worker in Detroit.
And yes there is something fundamentally wrong with the educational system and has been for decades. Companies doing ground breaking work have their pet colleges for recruiting and outsourcing, the rest just create outdated degrees for mega companies that used to exist. The students aren't great and the education is poor in most places.
> Priya has a university degree in biotechnology. If that doesn't qualify her for something more productive than GPT-level work
Don’t bio and related fields have an over supply? I was under the impression there weren’t enough jobs for people educated in these fields, especially not for “more productive than GPT-level work”.
That cycle has gone on since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Jobs are destroyed, people complain and protest, new jobs are created and the total economic pie and the absolute size of the average person’s slice increases.
A valid question is are there inventions for which this would not be true? I think yes for general AI, but also yes for people who are unable to migrate between a job lost and any of the new jobs created due to lack of education or willingness to reinvent themselves or relocate to where the new jobs are. Innovation can definitely create winners and losers. That’s bad for the losers, but not necessarily for society as a whole. Unless so many losers are created that they rise up and overthrow the system. That’s a real long tail risk if the pace of change sufficiently outpaces our ability to adapt to it.
You're right, but the phrase "people complain" elides a lot and shows a callous lack of empathy. People complain because they lose their jobs, their homes, their standard of living, their future prospects, their ability to feed their families, their relationships, their social status, their healthcare benefits and therefore their healthcare, their mental health, and in some cases their lives (suicide is not unusual for people who lose all of the above). For every Priya who gets a new job as an AI wrangler, there will be many who do not.
How that is handled really comes down to how your society has agreed to establish a social safety net.
In Northern Europe it’s handled quite well. In the U.S. it’s handled with a “callous lack of empathy” as you phrased it.
My point is disruption is the engine of progress, but it also causes temporary pain (that might not be temporary on the scale of human lifetimes.) It’s the wrong reaction to want to stop or slow progress. You can actually prove that through the lens of game theory and the fact that we have multiple human societies. The right thing to do is ensure your society doesn’t leave the losers of that process behind.
Sure, but many of the "progress is inevitable" people are also often the "get your stinking government hands off my hard-earned money" people. Increasing taxation of the beneficiaries of AI technology to provide a safety net for the losers is one way of dealing with it, but I'm not sure it's politically achievable in much of the world in a way that will instill confidence in the people who face the loss of their livelihoods.
"progress is inevitable": It's not actually. Progress is only made if people take the risk and effort to advance progress. That does require rewarding them appropriately for the risk taken. I'm not saying we get that balance exactly right currently, but it is necessary.
In general just taxing the winners (wealthy) period is well tolerated politcally, but it also requires a goverment that's somewhat fiscally responsible and not spending $800B a year on their military instead of social programs. The US hasn't had a fiscally responsible government since Clinton, and the pigeons are currently coming home to roost in the form of inflation and loss of confidence in the US dollar as the reserve currency.
Disruptions in the past have almost always been good for society overall, but there have also always been significant localized negative effects. For example, a farrier may have been thrown out of work and had to switch to unskilled labor, but their sons and daughters were better off.
The issue is that as change comes faster and faster, a higher proportion of people fall into the "disrupted" category.
Then you get a revolution and the whole system is torn down and rebuilt in a different form. That's highly undesirable, and as I mentioned, is a real tail risk to consider.
You are being pedantic. You also came by with a three word troll comment. Why don't you make your argument properly and then I'll spend the effort to address it.
It's important to consider the goals and motivations behind the development of AGI. Who is in control of this technology and how will it be used? The current power structure in our society is not interested in creating a better future for everyone. There is a growing concern that the development of AGI could be driven by the interests of a small group of people with a lot of power and money, rather than being used to create a better future for all people.
In this context, I think it's important to ask "progress towards what?" and to define what we mean by "better". We need to ensure that the development of AGI is done with a goal of benefiting everyone, not just the wealthy and powerful. This requires a shift in our political and economic systems, so that power is more evenly distributed and the needs of all people are taken into account.
I'm not saying that AGI is inherently bad, but we need to be cautious and intentional about its development and use. It's possible that AGI could be used to further entrench the power and control of the wealthy elite, rather than to create a better future for all people. To avoid this, we need to work towards creating a more democratic society where the benefits of technological progress are shared by all.
Ok, I understand your point now, and I agree with it for the most part. AGI really is a singularity. We can't see past it, and nobody knows what a society with AGI would look like, or even if there is room for humans in it. I think not. AGI will likely be our last invention as a species and the next step in natural evolution of life will be intelligent design (initiated by us!) Oh the irony.
So you're right that running full speed towards AGI is incredibly dangerous, and while it might still mean progress for life, it might not be progress for humanity. AGI may be one of the few technologies that are not progress. I'd argue nuclear fission so far has not been progress either, but that story has not yet fully played out. You could also think of other hypothetical and current technologies where the risks far outweigh the rewards. Imagine we find a way to unlock an energy so vast that a small group could unlock it and unleash it and super-heat the entire atmosphere of the planet, killing nearly all life. There's no law of physics that says that's impossible - and once discovered, there's no way to defend against some suicidal nutjobs doing exactly that. That's one of the solutions to the Fermi Paradox.
But AGI also may be our destiny - there may be no way to avoid it. Even if we could agree in the US to stop advancing AI, other countries will not agree, and so it continues anyway and the US just loses control over it. You can replace the US above with any country with the same game theoretic outcome. So game theory involving competing groups may possibly be an unstable system that ends in self destruction. That's another solution to the Fermi Paradox.
Then there's the detail that current LLMs like ChatGPT are not AGI, and probably don't lead there. They're a fancy parlour trick, but not really intelligence. So progress on LLMs may or may not bring us closer to AGI, nobody really knows. Stopping work on it now would halt progress, but only for those groups foolish enough to do so.
I don't yet see a path to being cautious and intentional about its development and use of AI. The genie is out of the bag, and can't be put back in. The same way nuclear fission can't be undone - although that's a bad analogy since it's much easier to control. Maybe we figure out a way to do that in future, but AI development is just the development and spread of information, and that's impossible to control.
What I think we can do, as you mentioned, is modify our societal and economic systems to be more fair and to not leave so many people behind who's skills have been obsoleted.
Also, I don't think you would need a human-like level of consciousness for a general problem solving device i.e. general intelligence. We could end up with a Deus Ex Machina situation where the general problem solving device appears to be human. Even exhibiting heart string pulling capabilities, not to mention cock string pulling capabilities, while still having the end goal being something absurd like going to a specific crosswalk at a Manhattan street and stand like a useless toaster.
That isn't the singularity, but it sure as hell is a general problem solving device i.e. AGI.
I think it's generally useful AI, but not AGI as people discuss the term. AGI would need to be sentient, self-aware. It would need to be alive and intelligent by any definitions of the term. ChatGPT is generally useful, but still very far from alive.
Anything short of that could mean large disruptions and societal changes, sure, but not a threat to humanity. Just technological progress as we know and love.
Don't most companies have a giant backlog of bugs and todo items? if you get a productivity books with AI you can fix all those bugs the users reported and implement the feature your users want, and implement that hard feature you always wanted to add but you did not had the time.
I mean that if an AI can make me more productive then I can tackle those TODOs , I agree you can't just hire a new dev for those tasks because he will need training in our code base,t hat will cause me to waste more time training , explaining , debating stuff. Anm AI could help with boring crap like I could ask it to review my code for potential bugs, maybe write some tests, in future it could refactor some bad code to be more clear , like better variable names, split it in smaller functions, replace deprecated syntax and function with latest stuff.
I think only a company with serious money issue would fire a good developer that you trained for years in your code base instead of letting him to focus on the TODOs/bugs and get things fixed and new features at a faster speed.
And get hired at a place where software development now being cheaper per unit of functionality makes it economically tenable for that firm to have SWEs.
> 2) Chaudry ignores that you need a human in the loop to check an AI's work. You don't know that an AI's answer is always right. Even if it's perfect in 99% of cases, the answer could be jaw-droppingly destructive in that 1% of cases and make errors that even the dumbest human wouldn't make. Being grossly wrong even a small percentage of the time is far worse than a human making minor errors sometimes, and being slow all of the time.
I very much doubt this will be the case and if it were, it's unlikely to be effective. We know people that have to check something that's right 99% of the time but wrong 1% zone out and overlook issues. It's a big part of why self-driving cars can't be a 99% affair and why people die when self-driving cars make bad decisions even though a driver is behind the wheel.
I think where profit can be extracted, companies will rely on good ol' lock-in or hope the cost of changing is too high to warrant a mass exodus from their platform. Everyone has a super computer in their pocket, but instead of improving typing we started adding "Sent from iPhone" as a way to excuse us from having to proofread anything. I can't count how many times I've gotten mass emails with template variables that weren't interpolated. Or emails that reference discussions that never happened. Ostensibly, a human was there to review all of this, but shirked that responsibility because ultimately they can let it waste someone else's time. I see AI turbo-charging that.
I think we're being disingenuous with all of these automated tools and thinking an attentive, caring human will check all that work. It'll be more profitable, whether in terms of a company's capital or an individual's time, to clean our hands and go "whelp, that's AI for ya" when things go wrong.
I appreciate the perspective shared in the article, but I can't help but find it somewhat egocentric. Firstly, it seems to overlook the fact that Priya was already being exploited in a low-paying job. The article describes the long hours and overwork she endures, but it fails to challenge the status quo of her employment situation. This lack of critical analysis may be indicative of a narrow focus on the negative effects of GPT-4.
Secondly, it appears that the author is using Priya's story as a way to gain self-importance in his blog, painting her as a victim of ChatGPT's progress. While it's essential to address the potential job displacement caused by AI advancements, using an individual's plight as a narrative tool seems rather opportunistic. A more balanced discussion of the broader implications of AI on society and the workforce would have been more informative and less self-centered.
I would guess that a higher proportion of HNers have had a chance to work with GPT-4 than the general population has. Most people are still basing their takes about AI either on something like GPT-3, or just what they're hearing in the general media.
The point of the article I that there are a lot more people in jobs like Priya's who won't be able to quickly leverage AI for their own benefit than there are who will. We throw the word "disruptive" around a lot here. But that's exactly what these new AI tools will do to many people's lives. Their lives will be disrupted, and they have little cushion to fall back on.
I believe technical progress is inevitable, but a lot of people suffer on the path forward.
Came here to write this. To expand #2 in a potentially obvious way, the HIL can't be any random person. In most cases, the subtle, destructive errors you're trying to avoid are only going to be caught by a SME with significant experience working without the benefit of three automated assistant.
Much in line with #3, I see GPT as a (IMHO, welcome) return to the days of a secretarial pool. You couldn't rely on a pool secretary to be conduct your business without oversight (because they had many Jr. Executives utilizing their services and weren't deeply engaged in your day-to-day like a dedicated Sr Executive Assistant might be), but they were experts in typing, drafting, and professional correspondence generally. GPT promises more, as it can express some level of subject matter expertise in almost every topic, but I believe that, for the foreseeable future, it will be best utilizable as a productivity enhancing assistant rather than as a full replacement for those with the expertise needed to check its results.
Edit: On the flip side, companies that still have secretarial pools (though I'm only aware of such pools still existing in government agencies, which won't be replaced due to need for secrecy) will probably end up firing a lot of secretaries.
> 1) Chaudry's article is amazing in its lack of creative thinking. If people like Priya can be ~10 times more productive wielding some AI tools, that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives. Though some people in some companies might be laid off, it doesn't necessarily mean that more people will be laid off than new jobs are created.
"Trickle down economics" don't work. Industrialization waves wrecked the lives of many many millions of people over the centuries, while the people owning the factories eventually got richer than aristocracy as they kept the price of the sold goods barely cheap enough to be a bit cheaper than manual production and pocketed the immense difference in production cost.
> 2) Chaudry ignores that you need a human in the loop to check an AI's work. You don't know that an AI's answer is always right. Even if it's perfect in 99% of cases, the answer could be jaw-droppingly destructive in that 1% of cases and make errors that even the dumbest human wouldn't make.
Replace "an AI's work" by "a C-level executive". They can run a company fine in 99% of cases and in 1% of cases run it completely aground with extremely dumb short-sighted decisions (like we're seeing with Twitter, or with Boeing, or Credit Suisse), but no one cares about that and the execs still get their golden parachute. It will be just the same with AI - eventual failure will be priced in.
> Did accounting software make the world worse and destroy jobs even though it made 1 accountant ridiculously more productive than they were in the past?
The switch towards computerization wrecked the Western middle classes. It used to be the case that white collar jobs could feed a whole family comfortably on one income, and automation made it so bad that the majority of our populations has to struggle to make ends meet now, and completely forget about having children because we can't afford large enough homes.
> Trickle down economics" don't work. Industrialization waves wrecked the lives of many many millions of people over the centuries, while the people owning the factories eventually got richer than aristocracy as they kept the price of the sold goods barely cheap enough to be a bit cheaper than manual production and pocketed the immense difference in production cost.
(1) trickle-down economics-style policies aren’t the only way to harness the (presumed) increased productivity of LLMs like chatgpt.
(2) I don’t see how you can argue that standards of living have decreased since the start of the industrial revolution and subsequent technological developments.
Certainly, the question of how to distribute the benefits of wide-spread LLM use is very important, since it could be done well or could be done terribly. But there’s no reason to just assume terrible is the only option.
> (1) trickle-down economics-style policies aren’t the only way to harness the (presumed) increased productivity of LLMs like chatgpt.
There is no reason to believe that the rich classes will act differently than at any time before in human history. To the contrary, union busting laws have eroded the standing that the worker class had even a few decades ago.
> (2) I don’t see how you can argue that standards of living have decreased since the start of the industrial revolution and subsequent technological developments.
Yes, on a societal whole standards of living have risen, but a) millions of people have suffered regardless (e.g. it has been shown that those graduating during the recent economic crises face significant income losses over their lifetimes) and b) other metrics (ownership of assets like houses, financial savings) have gone dow hill at the same time.
As for your point 2), we already have humans in the loop of other humans and this commonly leads to the "why do companies have so many people in them" trope we see posted on HN commonly. I think in that sense you may be underestimating how incredibly stupid people can be too. This said, AI doesn't remove all humans from the loop, but may significantly reduce how many are in said loop.
As someone who has worked at companies buying the databases that come from manually reading papers, the quality of them is hugely variable due to this. Lots of manual errors, missing context, etc.
Plenty of drug activity databases don’t distinguish between assays in solution, cell-based, and in vivo. When these produce hugely different values for inhibition due to metabolism and transport in biological environments.
GPT4 opens the possibilities for the true experts to focus on prompt engineering to extract these details, developing mechanisms to test performance, think deeply on how the data is stored and organized, etc.
This is such a toxic response. You're commenting on someone's blog about how they are sad. Your response is to argue that they're wrong which means that their sadness is invalid.
This. Empathy. People acting like they sound smart when they talk like a USC sophomore who equates logic with truth. As if the human condition were an actuary table. As if triage was a guiding principle of human culture. This kind of thinking slips easily into fascism. Ayn Rand writ large.
Such a lack of nuance. We can pragmatically recognize that pandora's box has been opened and also, at the same time, have an ounce of empathy. We can even like where things are going, understand the negative impact on some, AND still have empathy.
What I see here is emotional immaturity and the arrogance of someone who never learned the value of maturity. Lazy thinking. Self-serving modes of thought that allow you to feel ok with selfishness. Unchecked capitalist ideology. The psychology of greed.
Yeah it will create jobs. And maybe make certain companies more productive.
As many are quick to point history has shown new jobs appear.
But it often take years or decades and causes a lot of individual stress and social unrest.
Hopefully it will be smooth for many people. But I don't think it will take long before chatgpt allows a team of 2 what now a team of 5 developers does.
What job will appear that a machine can't do better. Plumber comes to mind.
It isn't inconceivable however that Boston robotics couldn't hack that if they could connect one of their robots to a general problem solver that takes visual input.
But will you be able to afford this fancy artisanal therapy, yoga, massage coaching? There will be a general intelligence providing this via dirt cheap robots eventually.
> 2) Chaudry ignores that you need a human in the loop to check an AI's work.
Also ignores companies not wanting to pay employees. These AI verifiers will be low paid people, akin to the off-shored social media content checkers who have to sift through digital garbage.
> If people like Priya can be ~10 times more productive wielding some AI tools, that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives.
It’s baffling to imagine that this would be the outcome of widespread use of AI. Ultimately this may be a philosophical question. To what degree do companies enrich the lives of people, vs. just sell then trash they don’t need? Particularly when it comes to the sorts of things that AI can produce: advertising copy, content, which will surely mean “engagement.” Ie, addictive trash.
Yeah but the new graduates are not equipped to enhance their work with AI (independently). The new graduates have already graduated through a curriculum based on self analysis and thought. AI will test their skills and make them obsolete. They are most at risk of structural unemployment.
The advent of the Internet did the same for those who graduated right before 2000. These graduates did not have skills needed to work with the Internet. And often found themselves going back to school to learn a new trade.
So, what are the chances that it is different, this time? If AIs are getting better and better, they might replace more and more jobs. What kind of new jobs are we imagining that cannot be replaced by a "near-intelligent" AI?
If that comes to pass, the only issue for the owning class I see is that they might not have customers in sufficient numbers, that are able to pay.
> that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives.
There are some real problems here. For example can the economy even support 10X production?
Ag -> Industrial -> Information transitions were all supported by a mix of massive expansion in population, mass migration of populations, and globalization of economies
information -> automation transition does not seem to have these 3 things in the same way. Globalism is slowing or reversing into protectionism. Migration is still high but seemingly for different reasons (geopolitical) as people displaced for war, crime, or climate and critical for this discussion population growth as SLOWED way down, and it expected to reserve about 2040.
This means people looking at the historical models for how these tech disruptions played in are very flawed in their "everything will be just fine" handwavium
My prediction is we will see a MASSIVE increase in weath gaps, and extreme decrease in standard of living in most of the industrial world (we are already seeing this in a limited way) leading to more and more political instability
>that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives.
See, that worked through the 20th Century because we, in the West, had effectively unlimited materials and unlimited energy - we just had people dig it out of the ground, easy.
But now we realise that fossil fuels wouldn't last forever, both because of environmental impact and it just plain running out.
Any plan for the future that requires us to produce more in order to get out of a crisis is 100 years too late.
We need to distribute the benefit of the efficiencies, not think we can produce 10 times as much junk because we made things more efficient.
But Capitalists thrive when we create more waste, strip more non-renewables, make more pollution.
Re 2) built in sanity checks aren't too hard; yes we'll keep humans in the loop for high-cost and life critical systems for a few more years.
> companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services
How exactly is that a good thing? We already consume too much, now we will have 10x as much to consume? Unlikely that demand for "the things" goes up 10x, which means the value will drop.
Also, it matters what you consume. I e a lot of work is only necessary to support other workers or ‚bs work‘ like selling ppl things they don’t really need.
I'm rapidly losing faith in "a company can provide good products/services". Maybe it's just because I hyperfocus on the software sector, where this seems especially true, but it seems like worse products (those that prey on and value extract from the user) make more money.
Companies seem incentivized to produce worse products, while preying on our worst impulses.
Convenience you become a slave to, not owning anything, streaming everything.
Why make this game good when we can simply make it addictive? (Shout out to Diablo Immoral.)
Why make it healthy when people just want it to be tasty?
Why not remove these features and charge you to get them back?
Why not spy on and datamine our users? They won't care enough to stop us.
Why not plan obsolescence in our products? Every competitor will be forced to follow suit or make less money and be eliminated.
These measures truly make more money, and companies are actively incentivized to pursue them.
It really feels like the "Late Stage Capitalism" memes I've normally mentally discarded. Or the "money is the root of all evil" meme from the Bible. It truly is, it seems like.
When I read "companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services", my mind now turns that into "companies can potentially value extract from you with chintzy spyware 10 times as much as they do now!"... and I think, "Wait, the person phrased that as a good thing."
I feel like I've arrived at a pretty bleak existential outlook. :D
There IS hope, though: government regulation! Special mention to the EU and California and Massachusetts, which empower the people's will with privacy and right-to-repair laws that hold all this in check. I guess if I mask an idyllic application of that onto "companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services", I can sort of feel good about that premise again.
>that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives
Except this isn't what happens
Assuming that you make a product that people actually want, the company will direct almost all of the proceeds to enrich shareholders and executives (You know, "fIdUcIaRy dUtY")
The products may be good for a few years but eventually get worse and become either wasteful (if they weren't already wasteful) or actively spyware
So no, I don't expect anything positive for most humans to come out of corporate control of AI that allows you to eliminate human jobs.
In what regime of capitalism is a shareholder incentivized to retain expensive employees over equally or more effective machines? History tells is there is no regime that would support that over any time period because the human is now just a "cost" or "wasteful" to the profit margin of the company.
2) Chaudry ignores that you need a human in the loop to check an AI's work. You don't know that an AI's answer is always right. Even if it's perfect in 99% of cases, the answer could be jaw-droppingly destructive in that 1% of cases and make errors that even the dumbest human wouldn't make. Being grossly wrong even a small percentage of the time is far worse than a human making minor errors sometimes, and being slow all of the time.
3) Go and look at some of those historical picture sites to see images of an accounting department in some companies throughout 1900s America. Before computers, you'd see a fascinating image of a gigantic floor of an office building with desks filled with typewriters and calculators and tons of workers just adding things up and trying to store records in a bunch of file cabinets. Desktop Computers and spreadsheets were invented and all of a sudden an accountant could quickly update a few values in a spreadsheet and figure out an answer to a question far faster and more reliably than that entire floor of accountants. Did accounting software make the world worse and destroy jobs even though it made 1 accountant ridiculously more productive than they were in the past?