If we play our cards right, AI could free people up for more valuable pursuits, and the pace of human information production would increase by orders of magnitude
It won't roll like that. AI will empower people to be more productive but won't free people up because it makes mistakes, can't help itself, and cannot function autonomously. There is no LLM application that is safe for autonomous usage today. How can we go from 0 to 1? I don't see a path. Self driving cars still can't reach L5 to completely remove the need for driver.
But maybe this is a blessing in disguise. It will make AI more like a new ability of humans than of the companies. Companies need people to unlock AI efficiencies. And AI tends to become open sourced so everyone has access to the same. AI is not a moat for companies and human ability to hand-held it is tied to individuals. That would make the transition easier. Solving that last 1% accuracy might encounter exponential friction and last for a while.
Functioning autonomously is not the level needed to free up people.
If your department gets a bunch of entry-level hires or interns, that frees up people in your organization even if they make mistakes, require supervision and can't function autonomously. Similarly, if an AI system can do half of a particular job under human supervision, it can free up (or make redundant) half of the people doing that job.
Yeah, it's not that I think we'll get all the way there, it's a utopia. My expectation is that within 30 years we reduce the work week by a day or two for most people, compensate for our education system's decline, and avoid energy and food crises, and nothing else fundamentally changes
I can’t see us going from Microsoft and Open AI stealing everyone’s work and selling it without attribution or respect for GPL (for example ) to technological utopia anytime soon.
Especially given the average prognosis of technological progress north of a certain point is dystopia. It's like that thing where you ask everyone how many jellybeans there are in the jar and when you average the guesses the average guess is accurate. Except in this case on a societal level you average the guesses and they come out as "dystopia" but the underlying distribution contains plenty of wildly inaccurate guesses of "eutopia".
Why? Eg in the latter half of the 20th century the US integrated women into the workforce (almost doubling the population eligible for participation in the labourforce), without violence or uproar.
There was also remarkably little uproar nor violence when the Czech Republic escaped the Iron Curtain and embraced capitalism.
What you're responding to doesn't propose the abolition of obligatory work or private capital, it proposes a decrease in labor hours commensurate with, or conservative in comparison to, an expected increase in productivity
Gains from increases in productivity in the last hundred years[0] seem to be spread between more consumption, shorter working hours[1].
Some people expected that most gains would go towards decreased working hours instead of the spread we have actually seen. Not sure there's much significance behind that?
[0] Or any span of time you might want to pick.
[1] And bigger bureaucratic overheads, but you can count that either as a weird form of consumption or as just productivity not having increased quite as fast.
Erm not causing mass unemployment by stealing data? Also people go freely where there's pay. Seems like there aren't many opportunities and there will fewer.
So hopefully we play our cards right, by extracting benefits from AI that overcompensate for the negative impacts like mass unemployment and democratization of intellectual property. If the spoils are distributed in such a way that people's standard of living is maintained or improved, people have more liesure time, which the social sciences have shown will not mean people will just stop working--they'll work less, but with higher productivity on things promising a greater benefit to family, community, and society.
Forgive me if I'm misreading, but I'm having trouble with your line of reasoning. Your first reply to me scarequoting "captive" strongly implies an argument that the imperative to seek employment for survival is not a limiting factor on how people spend their time, and therefore that my suggestion that giving people more choice over how they apply their talents could be a good thing is irrelevant; but your child reply implies a concern that AI taking over some human labor will cause mass unemployment and explicitly states choice is declining.
I'm advocating that, since the genie is out of the bottle, AI could be used to free people from toil, just as other labor innovations like machinery and the 40-hour work week have done. Why the dismissive snark? In the abstract, do we not want the same thing?
Unfortunately real life doesn't work the way you describe. People won't be "free" to enjoy more "leisure" time, by "democratizing" the results of their work. Instead, all of this stolen data, will be used to "free" them from jobs and to consolidate corporate control. Say bye to microbusinesses, to freelancers, to indie developers. You know, those people that have been truly free. Similarly, office workers will be "free" to lose the jobs that they chose to perform, and will have nowhere else to go but unemployment lines. All thanks to "democratizing" ip by stealing data.
> All thanks to "democratizing" ip by stealing data.
That horse is already dead. Large models can learn everything, there's nothing that can be done to stop them from learning. It's too easy for them to do it. We can't hold any meaningful IP when models can generate 100 variations only different enough to pass the test. IP is dead. But on its corpse there will grow a new world of applications. We all got new skills, depends on us if we use them or not.
Sure. In before people used to say that currency is dead because crypto currency has replaced money already, and already people are using them, and already [insert marketing statement]. I see they now moved on to ai.
I agree! I actually wrote a blogpost about this recently[0], but the TLDR is that ownership is nothing without enforcement, and it has become increasingly difficult to enforce ownership of intellectual property in the modern world — first digital files, then the sharing of those digital files over the Internet, and now generative models that allow people to create high-quality ripoffs of any IP for zero marginal cost. The sheer volume will just be too much to contend with, because you can't sue everyone. In my view, this is a good thing and a long time coming!
As a technology ai can indeed free people in a productive manner. But it would appear that we started on the wrong footing. Power will be consolidated in the hands of a few at a scale we haven't seen yet. It all depends tho on whether we can regulate how data is collected, at least at the basic level of not infringing copyright.
