alt Hacker NewsSo with the AI is doing more of the work and you need less humans, what are you doing with the extra humans to eliminate their no-longer-productive resource consumption?
Saying “we can do the same work with less resource use” doesn’t mean resource consumption is reduced. You’ve just gone from humans using resources to humans using the same resources and doing less work, plus AI using more resources.
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> So with the AI is doing more of the work and you need less humans, what are you doing with the extra humans to eliminate their no-longer-productive resource consumption?
Soon enough, we won't be able to avoid this question.
You put them to work doing more things than were possible in a month before.
Turn them into biogas to create more energy for DCs.
The thing is, there are many interplaying dynamics here that are impossible to unravel. This is why I called it "napkin math", because figuring out the full ramifications of this change is a pretty large economic problem that nobody has figured out!
For instance, I think operating at this level of productivity is unsustainable (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938038). As discussed in detail by the recent "AI vampire" blog: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46972179 -- most humans are not designed for that level of cognitive intensity.
But even then, the productivity per human will explode, and we will still have the problem of "too many humans." Cynically, if most knowledge workers get laid off, it's good from an environmental perspective because that means much less commuting and pollution! But then they're starving and we will have riots!
This is where I foresee the near-term problems with GenAI: social turmoil rather than resource consumption. I suspect it's not all bad news though. While it's impossible to put numbers on it, it helps to think about the first-order economic principles that are in play:
1. This is hand-wavy, but knowledge work boosts economic growth. If this is massively accelerated, we should be creating surplus value that compensates for a lot of costs.
2. However a huge chunk of knowledge work is busy work which will be automated away. People can try upskilling but the skill gap is already huge an growing quickly and they will lose jobs.
3. The economy is essentially people providing and paying for services and goods. If people lose jobs and cannot earn, they cannot drive the economy and it shrinks.
4. The elite, counter-intuitively enough, do NOT want that because they get richer by taking a massive cut of the economy! (Not to mention life in a doomsday bunker can get pretty dull if starving people start rioting -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46896066)
There are many more dynamics at play of course, but I think an equilibrium will be found purely because everyone is incentivized to find a solution (UBI?) that keeps both the elites and the plebes living long and prospering. I expect some turmoil, but luckily, the severe resource crunch of GPUs gives us time to figure things out.
Resource consumption often goes up. It's a time vs energy tradeoff and it's not free.
Your question is a variant of what do we do with all those humans now that they don't have to walk miles to the well every day because we invented aqueducts? The point is that they didn't want to walk to the well but they had to (and in some places they still have to) and very few people want to work, even now and even us, but they have to.
We will see what happens this time when we won't have to walk to that well.