HN Reader

So the problem isn't robots, it's the structure of how we humans rely on jobs for income. I don't necessarily feel like it's the AI company's problem to fix either.

This is what government is for, and not to stifle innovation by banning AI but by preparing society to move forward.

The leader bios are particularly priceless. "While working for 12 years as the Director of HR for a multinational, Faith realized that firing people gave her an almost-spiritual high. Out of the office, Faith coaches a little league softball team and looks after her sick mother - obligations she looks forward to being free of!"

Here's a starter example: any company whose main business is training AI models needs must give up 10% of their company to a fund whose charter is long-term establishing basic care (food, water, electricity, whatever) for citizens.

I'm sure people will come at me with "well this will incentivize X instead!" in which case I'd like to hear if there are better thought out proposals.

Sure we will have the robot wrangler engineers, scientists, teachers, nurses, etc. But typically we have social unrest past like 8% unemployment. What happens when double digits of people have no jobs and all the time on their hands? Well “eat the rich” might become very literal and no amount of protection against that can really be bought. Ultimately, the only option is either a Dune-style elimination of all AI (very unlikely) or we will have to decouple “living wage income” from “job”. If you think about it, the idea that you must have a job in order to make money is more of an implementation detail. If robots produce so much value that it is actively not even viable for humans to work, the only real logical solution is to distribute the profits from the labor of the robots in a way that isn’t by hourly rate times hours worked. In fact one possible way to do this is to tax the value produced by AI and then funnel that to a universal basic income program. Everyone by default is an artist. If you want to be a nurse or teacher or scientist or engineer you can. Otherwise just produce art at your leisure while the robots work the fields and cook your meals.

I understand the spirit of this, but most of this alarmism is misguided in my view.

I'm especially disgusted with Sam Altman and Darius Amodei, who for a long time were hyping up the "fear" they felt for their own creations. Of course, they weren't doing this to slow down or approach things in a more responsible way, they were talking like that because they knew creating fear would bring in more investment and more publicity. Even when they called for "regulation", it was generally misleading and mostly to help them create a barrier to entry in the industry.

I think now that the consensus among the experts is that AGI is probably a while off (like a decade), we have a new danger now. When we do start to get systems we should actually worry about, we're going to a have a major boy-who-cried-wolf problem. It's going to be hard to get these things under proper control when people start to have the feeling of "yeah we heard this all before"

However, in the US, the labor-force participation rate is 60%. There are a LOT of adults out there who don't work now. While I do think people find value in work, I would guess that number is less than 50% (potentially much lower). Which makes me think that 30% or fewer of adults are deriving significant value from their work.

On the one hand, something that effects 30% is pretty massive. But it feels less apocolyptic/overwhelming than it may seem.

AI & robots will generate wealth at unprecedented scale. In the future, you won't have a job nor have any money, but you will be fabulously wealthy!

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

"To be or not to be? ... Not a whit, we defy augury; there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come the readiness is all. Since no man knows aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be." -- Hamlet

In the end it will be our humility that will redeem us as it has always been, have some faith the robots are not going to be that bad.

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if (Steal) { then Lie; then Cloud; then Money; } else { Fail; then Die; }

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> "Stupid. Smelly. Squishy."

> "While working for 12 years as the Director of HR for a multinational, Faith realized that firing people gave her an almost-spiritual high."

I love the marketing here. Top notch shit posting.

But besides that, no idea what this company does and it just comes off like another wannabe Roy Lee styled "be controversial and build an audience before you even have a product" type company.

That being said, still a good case study of shock marketing. It made it to the top link on HN after all.

Edit: its satire, I got got :(

There is an intersection of certain industries and a particular demographic where adapting/retraining will be either very difficult or impossible.

Case in point:

- car factory town in Michigan

- factory shuts down

- nursing school opens in the town

- they open a hospital

- everyone thinks "Great! We can hire nurses from the school for the hospital"

- hospital says "Yeah, but we want experienced nurses, not recent graduates"

- people also say "So the factory workers can go to nursing school and get jobs somewhere else!"

- nursing school says "Uhm, people with 30 years of working on an assembly line are not necessarily the type of folks who make good nurses..."

Eventually, the town will adapt and market forces will balance out. But what about those folks who made rational decisions about their career path and that path suddenly gets wiped away?

> in the industrial revolution of the 19th century what Humanity basically learned to produce was all kinds of stuff like textiles and shoes and weapons and vehicles and this was enough for very few countries that underwent the revolution fast enough to subjugate everybody else

what we're talking about now is like a Second Industrial Revolution but the product this time will not be textiles or machines or vehicles or even weapons the product this time will be humans themselves.

we are basically learning to produce bodies and Minds bodies and minds are going .... the two main products of the next wave of all these changes and if there is a gap between those that know to produce bodies and minds and those that do not then this is far greater than anything we saw before in history and this time if you're not part of the Revolution fast enough then you probably become extinct

once you know how to produce bodies and brains and Minds so cheap labor in Africa or South Asia wherever it simply counts for nothing

again I think the biggest question ... maybe in economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people

I don't think we have an economic model to for that, my best guess which is , just a guess, is that food will not be a problem uh with that kind of Technology you will be able to produce food for to feed everybody the problem is more important ... what to do with them and how will they find some sense of meaning in life when they are basically meaningless worthless

my best guess at present is a combination of drugs and computer games

https://youtu.be/QkYWwWAXgKI

Finally a company that's out to do some good in the world.

I definitely think AI companies marketing claims deserve mockery...but this isn't even good/interesting/smart satire??

It feels like we've fully completed the transition to Reddit here, with its emotional and contradictory high school political zeal (being both progressive and anti-progress at the same time) dominating the narrative.

Something about upvote-based communities is not holding up well in the current climate.

If humans have regressed enough intellectually where they are praising this as "Brilliant social commentary" then we absolutely SHOULD be replaced by AI.

This has been nothing but a test-run for openly fascistic tech hoes to flex their disdain for everyone who isn't them or in their dumb club.

Comrades, we can now automate a neo KGB and auto garbage-collect contra-revolutionaries in mass with soviet efficiency!

Instead of facing the new reality, some people start to talk about the bubbles, AI being sloppy, etc. Which is not generally true; mostly it's the users' psychological projection of their own traits and the resulting fear-induced smear campaigns.

The phenomenon is well described in psychology books. Seminal works of Carl Jung worth a ton nowadays.

It just screams fried serotonin-circuits to me. I don't like it. I looked at the site for 2-3 seconds and I want nothing to do with these guys.

Do I think we should stop this type of competitive behaviour fueled by kids and investors both microdosed on meth? No. I just wouldn't do business with them, they don't look like trustworthy brand to me.

Edit: They got me with the joke, being in this field there are people that do actually talk like that, both startups and established executives alike. I.e. Artisan ads in billboards saying STOP HIRING HUMANS and another new york company I think pushing newspaper ads for complete replacement. Also if you're up with the latest engineering in agentic scaffolding work this type of thing is no joke.

At the bottom of this page, there is a form you can fill out. This website says they will contact your local representative on your behalf. (And forward you any reply.)

Here's the auto-generated message:

I am a constituent living in [state] with urgent concerns about the lack of guardrails surrounding advanced AI technologies. It is imperative that we act decisively to establish strong protections that safeguard families, communities, and our children from potential harms associated with these rapidly evolving systems.

As companies continue to release increasingly powerful AI systems without meaningful oversight, we cannot rely on them to police themselves, especially when the stakes are so high. While AI has the potential to do remarkable things, it also poses significant risks, including the manipulation of children, the development of bioweapons, the creation of deepfakes, and the threat of widespread unemployment.

I urge you to enact strong federal guardrails for advanced AI that protect families, communities, and children. Additionally, please do not preempt or block states from adopting strong AI protections that may be necessary for their residents.

Thank you for your time.

[name]

New York

[0] https://ethical-ai.eu

1. Rationalists/EA's who moderately-strongly believe AI scaling will lead to ASI in the near future and the end of all life (Yud, Scott Alexander)

2. Populist climate-alarmists who hate AI for a combination of water use, copyright infringement, and decimation of the human creative spirit

3. Tech "nothingburgerists" who are convinced that most if not all AI companies are big scams that will fail, LLM's are light-years from "true' intelligence and that it's all a big slop hype cycle that will crumble within months to years. (overrepresented on this site)

Each group has a collection of "truthiness-anchors" that they use to defend their position against all criticism. They are all partially valid, in a way, but take their positions to the extreme to the point they are often unwilling to accept any nuance. As a result, conversations often lead nowhere because people defend their position to a quasi-religious degree rather than as a viewpoint predicated on pieces of evidence that may shift or be disproven over time.

Regarding the satire in OP, many people will see it as just a funny, unlikely outcome of AI, others will see it as a sobering vision into a very likely future. Both sides may "get" the point, but will fail to agree at least in public, lest they risk losing a sort of status in their alignment with their sanity-preserving viewpoint.

I just logged onto github and saw a "My open pull requests button".

Instead of taking me to a page which quickly queried a database, it opened a conversation with copilot which then slowly thought about how to work out my open pull requests.

I closed the window before it had an answer.

Why are we replacing actual engineering with expensive guesswork?

You might say: "but you'll need money!". Why would I need money? The robots can provide my every need. And if I need money for some land or resource or something, I would have my robots work until my need was satisfied, I wouldn't continue having them work forever.

And even if robots did take all of the jobs, they would have to work for free. Because humans would have no jobs, and thus no money with which to pay them. So either mankind enjoys free services from robots that demand no compensation, or we get to keep our jobs.

So I really don't get the existential worry here. Yes, at a smaller scale some jobs might be automated, forcing people to retrain or work more menial jobs. But all of humanity being replaced? It doesn't make sense.

Another way to think about it is that if all of the jobs were replaced by AI, us leftover jobless humans would create a new economy just trying to grow food and make clothes and build houses and take care of our needs. The robot masters would just split away and have their own economy. Which is the same as them not existing.

Do you know what a robot costs? "But humans are expensive", no they aren't, not once they need to compete, you can get them to do manual labor at medium mental complexity for 3 thousand calories (+ some Vitamins) a day!

Humans are here to do the jobs that robots do not want to do.