Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style and/or taking HN threads on generic-indignant tangents? Your account has been doing it repeatedly, and we're trying for something different here.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49045107.

Even for people living of wealth, it is not clear what the outcomes are.

If renters of your apartments can not afford to rent them, housing crashes because your city was a looser (Detroit style withdrawals).

Even for stocks we don't know who the winners are. The market as a whole usually does not respond that well on serious turmoil.

So yeah. We are likely seeing some very rough years.

"I genuinely don't understand why people who have to work for their living are amazed at this." Also said after seeing the printing press, automobile, calculator, etc for the first time

This is just so negative. How will it destroy your life?

There are so many great and useful things it can and will do to improve humanity.

I can be amazed and terrified at the same time.

> I genuinely don't understand why people who have to work for their living are amazed at this.

It's tricky. On the one hand, it will - in the near future - indeed screw us all pretty badly unless we completely redefine our economies to no longer conflate person's worth with ability to earn money.

On the other hand, LLMs are useful to lesser or greater degree to approximately everyone, in almost everything they do, work or personal, right now.

It's harder to be pessimistic about the very thing that gives you new superpowers every week, directly applicable to whatever your individual needs are, and is available to ~everyone for between free and (for typical westerners) peanuts.

>people who have to work for their living are amazed

The answer us right there. Most people who work for a living aren't amazed, or not just amazed. Most normal people are afraid, angry, sad etc.

If my earning ability is harmed by AI, so be it. There's more to life than how much I earn, and opposing the spread of technology to maximize my earnings is bad.

There is no need to be so fatalistic. Sure, AI will upset the apple cart, especially in our little corner, but the economy is built on pricing scarce resources and even if many things become abundant, most other things will remain scarce. There are only so many Manhattan penthouses or Rembrandts (dixit the Economist), so things of value remain, and it will be quite some time before a humanoid can fix the plumbing, so valuable labour will remain as well.

I, for one, am excited to see what the future holds. (side note: I live in a European country with a strong social safety net, I imagine that helps being unafraid)

You can be stupefied and also pessimistic.

More practically, society should be reimagined around AI. You're comment presumes an outcome that will be politically determined: you can still fight for the world you want.

Same feeling entirely.

Even if you live off of your wealth - what happens when customers of those wealth-generating businesses don't have jobs?

it got here by training on everything we wrote down thus far. if we now start giving it all the doomsday scenarios on how it will ruin us, won't it start training on that and create said doomsday outcomes? what if instead we, collectively as a humanity, just wrote about all the positive things we could do with it and skew it in a direction that benefits the more positive side of that equation?...possible?

Its not fair to say this when we have been chanting how "software is eating the world", or how much we love to "disrupt markets", that we won’t create mass unemployments with our technologies but that "people will transition elsewhere like we always saw", etc etc.. It’s our turn to have our jobs disrupted and now we are surprised? Come on. We don’t have to like but we are the last people who should be surprised. It’s our turn to transition and be prompt writers and do product I guess. Until this is disrupted again in a few years.

Hard truth but true nonetheless. How come we should have it both ways? We removed certain jobs, it’s our turn to have many types of jobs disrupted and have to transition.

How will it destroy your life?

> Why should I be amazed at something that promises to destroy my life?

Because it could motivate you to work with others to stop your livelihood from being ruined, especially watching in real time as the evidence they present for their promise becomes ever more promising. Amazement is not exclusive with concern. (Actually, my first though was of a kaiju movie-style tsunami blocking out the sun as it looms over a city. Indeed, I would likely be both amazed and concerned.)

Going on a slight tangent, given how bifurcated the economy is - we are only a couple of meals away from a Butlerian Jihad. It’s hard to see this in our bubble if you don’t actively try to break out of it once in a while.

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Why does it “promise” to destroy your life. Thats absurd hyperbole.

Automation is only good if you're putting blue collar people out of work! White-collar is out of bounds! People should do the work where they add unique value

I already live off my wealth, and I expect AI development to destroy my life.

Once humans can be robustly replaced by machines, the military-industrial "meta build" will be a state with no humans, no cities, and 100% of all production dedicated to war. Whichever states descend to this new equilibrium fastest will crush the others and then fight over the corpse of the world forever. (Unless, of course, something like the Yudkowsky scenario happens along the way, which is totally possible)

I can't understand why anyone expects things like civil rights, property, the rule of law, nuclear deterrence, democracy, etc to survive when human beings no longer need each other. Why do investors in AI companies expect a payoff once they are no longer needed? Why (and, more importantly, how) does anyone expect a UBI from a government to which they are nothing but a drain on resources and which is in existential competition with other governments with exponentially growing robot armies?

Either the world will come to its senses and shut it all down, or there will be no winners at all.