alt Hacker NewsWe won't "just hang out"
Comments
thoroughly vacuous article that doesn't have a single valid point in it.
I like to think about AGI in terms of the history of transportation.
On a spectrum, walking around carrying things on the far left, and interstellar trade to the right.
Imagine the creation of the wheel and hand cart! Such an advancement! We are really living it!
Few tens of thousands of years later we figure out how to domesticate animals and hook them up to the carts. Amazing!! OMG the efficiency, productivity, and trade that opens up!
Truly, we are living in future now!
Sail ships. Steam engines. Trains. Diesel. Automobiles. Planes.. We still don't even know how to accomplish interstellar travel.
I believe AI has just figured out hooking animals up to the cart.
The people who understood the Culture utopia novels best are, ironically, some of the fiercest opponents of modern AI precisely because this take of “infinite vacation” keeps getting repeated ad nauseam, and they know better.
The Culture still had businesses, they just didn’t have to turn a profit or operate on fixed schedules. They still had soldiers, diplomats, traders, workers, teachers, scientists, researchers.
The difference was that the exchange was on their terms, generally. They wanted to do this, money be damned. So they opened a bar, or taught youth, or explored the universe, or fought to protect the society so dear to them.
The utopia wasn’t because people didn’t have to work anymore; it was a utopia because people didn’t have to work to survive anymore.
That made all the difference.
Oh Ye mighty look upon my unsubstantiated forcasts and tremble, something like that?
This offers far more about the motivations and worldview of the author than it does about the future of our world, and perhaps their inability to reconcile the fact that others experience the world differently than them.
Many of us would love to retire early to pursue hobbies and education as an end in and of themselves.
It's a bit of a lazy take - if we don't work, we don't hang out with other people? Why? Humans are social beings and will hang out for many reasons besides work.
The more interesting question is, if this happens, how will society organize. Would companies subsidize our new bohemian way of life? Why? Would the state need to create incentives for them to focus in the right things? Would there be a need for companies and governments? Would we give up all our autonomy?
"What even is the point of cities in a world without work?"
imwtk.
I like the AI future shown in the dots announcement trailer (https://openai.com/index/introducing-dots/). Cooking, engaging with family, enjoying nature while simultaneously conversing with an unobtrusive AI that facilitates your creative and commercial endeavors. Would that be so terrible?
Sci-fi haș already accounted for this. Star Trek has a post-scarcity economy so they just explore the frontiers of space and engage in creative anachronisms in virtual reality, like Gilbert and Sullivan LARP and baseball. There's a whole bit in The Diamond Age where you see craftsmen meticulously building furniture out of wood by hand, which is then sold at a premium.
You would be dependent on some entity running the hardware and then your instance on that hardware. What if they just shut you off? What happens to senses and emotions?
The Singularity has some holes that I'm not comfortable with.
There are distinctions and comments to be made.
The first is the difference between the practical and the theoretical. Economic activity is generally practical and productive in the sense that we don't do these things for themselves, but for something else. However, an infinite regress of practicality is impossible, because the practical cannot justify itself. It is always for the sake of something else, so you must ultimately arrive at something done for its own sake.
The second is the distinction between the internal and external effects of work. When people talk about AI taking jobs, they focus almost exclusively on the external effects (the actual resulting products and services). They rarely touch on the effect of work on the worker. Properly dignified work[0] directed toward proper ends is an act of love and service that also develops and perfects the worker as a human being.
A third is the distinction between the pathological condition by which a person seeks vacuous simulacra and stimulation and in a manner that causes them to fail to develop socially, and the claim that such stimulation and simulacra can actually replace healthy social relationships. The latter is not true, the former already exists to some extent.
I would also reject "economist" framing of human relationships as such and of human persons.
And finally, the Singularity as bona fide intelligence is nonsense, but one might argue that, at least in principle, some kind of hyper-developed and virtually unbounded instrumentation of computation ("AI") is possible. But AI lacks inherent ends and could not possibly possess its own ends (because it is not a true integral whole and thus lacks immanent causality), and so it would be an instrument of human will. Whose will is the question.
[0] Hence, why I think that while using AI to replace human reason is bad, the reduction of tedious and mind-numbing work is not.
> What even is the point of cities in a world without work
Transportation, silly? Even if I didn't have work, I'd still want to reside in a city, maybe even the same city I am currently in. 10 minutes walking distance to the center. 3 tram-lines in 5-minutes walking distance. A supermarket 400m away. All things I didn't have in the rural area where I grew up.
What even is the point of cities in a world without work?
sex.
> University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless
Errr, not so sure that holds up to scrutiny really. Lots of folks enjoy learning in various forms for its own sake, rather than purely to increase their income level.
> As a teenager I ... went on the IRC chatrooms to get help. And in the process I made friends. ... AI disintermediates everyone, so that we no longer need each other. I still have friends, but I’m running off this pre-AI supply of friends I met through communities of practice.
Maybe learn to connect to other humans in circumstances outside of the professional/technological?
I think this is a very bleak take by someone whose experiences aren't really that in tune with how other humans exist. I can get better beer at the bottle shop, I can get cheaper beer at the bottle shop compared to the cost of all the equipment I need. Why then do I persist in home-brewing?
It's because I find it fulfilling, and I find the understanding and practice of the art satisfying.
you get the same UBI whether you’re illiterate or a PhD.
lol you really think people get PhDs for money?
you clearly do not know many PhDs. mine had a dramatic negative effect on my lifetime interest-adjusted earnings. i'm so glad i did it.
Srsly man join a volleyball club already
There's an (and I'm reluctant to use this word, but I can't find a better one) weird kind of misanthropy in this post. The author seems only capable of connecting to people through shared work and shared large task.
Human beings have lived for tens of thousands of years in communities where the work was "being alive" and the large task was "being human." People in medieval villages had friends and loved ones in spite of being illiterate and only having subsistence skills.
If anything, hyper-specialized labor and the divorcing of geographic proximity from the tasks people undertake have been undermining this traditional modality of living. I would anticipate in the absence of those pressures it might very well come back.
I might agree that it's possible the pressure to form cities goes down, though the author seems guilty of the Singularity thinking of just assuming the super-smart AI magically solves the logistics, transportation, and energy challenges in a way that distributes people... Not impossible, but I think a bit unlikely. If it happens though, there would be advantages... Cities are relative hotbeds of human-transmitted disease, even with modern hygiene and vaccination, and spreading us out a bit could actually make us healthier on average (... maybe. Unless the magic AI doesn't actually solve the logistics issue and non-proximity to a population center implies lack of access to resources or the skilled hands of people the robots haven't replaced yet).
> University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless because there’s no work to do and because growing your human capital doesn’t change your life outcomes
What is this bullshit assumption that keeps coming up? I'm sure some people get an education for the job prospects, but lots and lots and lots do to grow their minds as human persons! In fact, I think a hypothetical world in which there is no earnings pressure (I doubt it's around the corner), more people would broaden their horizons through education, not less!
Can someone help me understand this idea, so popular on HN, that a university education is primarily a mean towards a higher income? It sounds so absurd! Is it an American thing, maybe?
> Work, obviously, is pointless in a world of cheap superhuman intelligence.
Which is true for a lot of the kind of work that was hyped over the last decades - knowledge work. We were told to get university degrees, to invest in education, because that's the only way to make a living bla bla. We did, and now we're getting fucked over by AI as it turns out machines can digest and reinterpret knowledge at far greater scale and speed than any human reasonably can.
Who is going to remain though is exactly the kind of labor that the boomers looked down upon: construction, trades, some segments of care work.
This smacks of sociopathic rage-bait, at best. Mediocre young adult sci-fi premise at worst.
The “practice community” point is the strongest part of this. I’d add that a lot of friendship is also built around shared friction—raising kids, local politics, maintenance, care work—not just work or education. AI may dissolve the old communities, but new ones could form around things AI can’t absorb.
The open-source on-ramp is the part that landed for me. A lot of the people I still talk to started as a bug report or a reply on something small I shipped. If a newcomer can get that same help from a model in a minute, that path is gone and I don't see a clean replacement. I don't fully buy the last section though. People still gather around things that aren't jobs: a climbing gym, a modding server, a church band. Those aren't efficient, which might be why they last. The real question is whether anyone still shows up once staying home is the path of least resistance.
[flagged]
Yet another software developer pretending to be philosopher
I'm a self-employed knowledge worker who recently moved from Silicon Valley to a new town far away. I'm an introvert, so I already had a pretty small group of friends. Shortly after I moved here, I found out about a cribbage meetup a short distance from my house. These are people with whom I have very little in common. They don't like the same movies as I do, and there's certainly not anyone in this group with whom I'm going to be able to have deep discussions about Pale Fire or Infinite Jest. Neither do we talk very much about our accomplishments. Yet we we do find plenty to talk about. We joke around and laugh and have a great time. And I'm pretty sure computers got better at cribbage than humans a long time ago.
I'm always deeply skeptical of the idea that life's meaning is determined by the struggle for survival, and therefore a post-scarcity world will inevitably be an ennui-saturated, meaningless dystopia. It may be hard to imagine what a good life will look like in such a world, but that's a limit of imagination, not an inherent limitation on the possibilities of life in a post-scarcity world.