But isn't living in a stable society, where everyone can find employment, achieve some form of financial security, and not be ravaged by endless rounds of layoffs, more desirable than having net productive co-workers?
I’ll make sure to pour one out in memory of all the lamplighters, the stable hands, night soil collectors, and coopers that no longer can find employment these days. These arguments were had 150 years ago with the advent of the railroad, with electricity, with factories and textiles, even if you don’t have net productive coworkers, if there’s a more productive way to do things, you’ll go out of business and be supplanted. Short of absolutely tyrannical top down control, which would make everyone as a whole objectively poorer, how would this ever be prevented?
The difference is that back then we were talking a few jobs here and there. Now we are talking about the majority of work being automated, from accountancy to zoo keeping, and very little in the way of new jobs coming in to replace them.
By the way stable hands and night soil collectors are still around. Just a bit harder to find. We used to have a septic tank that had to be emptied by workmen every so often. Pretty much the same.
Whereas a government's responsibility is to ensure peace and prosperity for as many of its citizens as possible. These things will be at odds when increased profits for companies no longer coincides with increased employment.
Yes, believe it or not some of still believe in this and vote accordingly. Aspirational, as it has always been, with the understanding that we will always fall short.
No, not Sweden where 40% of the population have been employed in some way by the Wallenberg family and its corporations in recent times. The other Nordic countries are not as egalitarian as they are presented either.
I don't see how AI can bring about 10%+ annual economic growth, let alone infinite abundance, without somehow crossing the bit-to-atom interface. Without a breakthrough in general-purpose robotics - which feels decades away - agents will just be confined to optimizing B2B SaaS. Human utility is rooted in the physical environment. I find digital abundance incredibly uninspiring.
I'm mostly a fan of AI coding tools, but I think you're basically right about this.
I think we'll see more specialized models for narrow tasks (think AlphaFold for other challenges in drug discovery, for example) as well, but those will feel like individual, costly, high impact discoveries rather than just generic "AI".
Our world is human-shaped and ultimately people who talk of "AGI" secretly mean an artificial human.
I believe that "intelligence", the way the word is actually used by people, really just means "skillful information processing in pursuit of individual human desires".
As such, it will never be "solved" in any other way than to build an artificial human.
No, when you bring in the genetic algorithm (something LLM AI can be adjacent to by the scale of information it deals in) you can go beyond human intelligence. I work with GA coding tools pretty regularly. Instead of prompting it becomes all about devising ingenious fitness functions, while not having to care if they're contradictory.
If superhuman intelligence is solved it'll be in the form of building a more healthy society (or, if you like, a society that can outcompete other societies). We've already seen this sort of thing by accident and we're currently seeing extensive efforts to attack and undermine societies through exploiting human intelligence.
To a genetic algorithm techie that is actually one way to spur the algorithm to making better societies, not worse ones: challenge it harder. I guess we'll see if that translates to life out here in the wild, because the challenge is real.
The troubling thing here is: what is a "better" society? As you said, it's just the one that outcompetes the other societies on the globe. We'd like to believe such a thing is an egalitarian "healthy" liberal society, but it's just as likely to be some form of enslaved/boot stomping on face society. Some think people won't accept this, but given human history I'm pretty sure they will. I think these sorts of societies are more of a local minima, but they only need to grant enough of a short term boost to unseat the other major powers. Once competition is out of the way they'll probably survive as a bloated mess for quite some time. The price of entry is so high they won't have to worry about being unseated by competition unless they really screw the pooch. I think this is the troubling conclusion a lot of people, including those in power, are reaching.
It's worth thinking about, but why hasn't this already happened? Or maybe it already has, and if so, what about AI specifically is it that will make it suddenly much worse?
We've had plenty of examples of all those things, over and over, throughout history. Nothing's really new. Societies that get into faceboot territory run afoul of what's already known (there's apparently a CIA handbook to this effect that's being largely ignored in modern America): assert hard rather than soft power and you generate determined and desperate resistance more than you undermine it. That's being demonstrated in countless places right now.
I'm arguing that the egalatarian 'lift my lamp beside the golden door' society is a cheat code for producing the variety and ferment that makes everybody frustrated and unhappy but producing with wild abandon. As a society this tactic dominates the hell out of would-be ethnostates and dictatorships, which seems to also be a natural tendency of humans. They are interested in not being challenged, in those like them not being challenged. Comfortable for those fortunate individuals, hopelessly suboptimal for the society they're in.
The rallying cry of 'NO New York Cities! Only sundown towns where if you don't look right you are killed and nobody ever knows about it!' might please some people (who have never been anywhere near those evil cities) but it just goes to show that many people have unhealthy wishes that are bad for them and the societies they're in.
> If superhuman intelligence is solved it'll be in the form of building a more healthy society (or, if you like, a society that can outcompete other societies).
Maybe so, but the point I'm trying to make is this needs to look nothing like sci-fi ASI fantasies, or rather, it won't look and feel like that before we get the humanoid AI robots that the GP mentioned.
You can have humans or human institutions using more or less specialized tools that together enable the system to act much more intelligently.
There doesn't need to be a single system that individually behaves like a god - that's a misconception that comes from believing that intelligence is something like a computational soul, where if you just have more of it you'll eventually end up with a demigod.
For me, cafes are essentially libraries; except cafes actually have reasonable opening hours. I can't get work done at home (too many distractions), so I switch up my environment to one where I am forced to work.
Go to any coffee shop in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, and you're bound to see students and tech workers sitting alone, typing away on their laptops. Even in LA, you'll see people editing videos and posting stuff on social media.
I think it's perhaps very American to go to cafes alone, especially if you are going there to get work done. Anecdotally, I had a French tennis partner back in 2022. One time, after our match, we went to a neighborhood cafe to chat and talk about life. He remarked to me how strange and foreign it is that Americans work so hard. He finds it stupid, even off-putting, that people work in cafes, which to him is a place to relax and socialize. He used slightly stronger language than stupid, so I didn't have the heart to tell him I plan to work in a cafe later that day. Maybe it's just a cultural thing.
Being alone in cafes is common and normal in Europe too. So is working there. It's just a nice break from being at home, and often your only option on the road.
I envy that. Any socialization after college needs to be deliberate and planned. Be it a small friend gathering, a scheduled meetup, or some organizational third place like a club, church, concert, etc. Note that all of those are paid experiences (even church, if you argue about being pressured to pay tithes and offerings).
If you're not into bar life, it's not that easy to just have spontaneous conversion here. Any invasion of space is seen as odd at best and threatening at worst. Even for neighbors.
Well there are two forms of writing, each serving a different purpose.
(1) writing to communicate ideas, in which case simpler is almost always better. There's something hypnotic about simple writing (e.g. Paul Graham's essays) where information just flows frictionlessly into your head.
(2) writing as a form of self-expression, in which case flowery and artistic prose is preferred.
Here's a good David Foster Wallace quote in his interview with Bryan Garner:
> "there’s a real difference between writing where you’re communicating to somebody, the same way I’m trying to communicate with you, versus writing that’s almost a well-structured diary entry where the point is [singing] “This is me, this is me!” and it’s going out into the world.
Rich vocabulary allows a lot of meaning to be packed into short, simple structures. The words themselves carry the subtleties. It might take three or four simple words to convey the meaning of one uncommon word.
Yeah, a lot's hiding in the "almost", there. I've said this on this board before, but I have to write a lot of documentation for non-technical users, and the maximally-straightforward stuff doesn't get read, far less remembered. When I mix in some personalization, and a bit of imagination, it gets much better results. The example that most easily springs to mind was something like "if you don't regularly use this system, you can skip the next bit and come back to it when you have to; if you do, then imagine you're a squirrel", and then I named all the variables after nuts, and analogized choices between burying data underground versus storing in a tree. I know typical HN engineers would hate that sort of thing, but you have to know your audience before you can decide what works best.
Even when communicating ideas, there's a simplicity/nuance trade-off to be made.
I could say "Trump's unpredictable, seemingly irrational policy choices have alienated our allies, undermined trust in public institutions, and harmed the US economy"
Or I could "The economy sucks and it's Trump's fault because he's dumb and an asshole"
They both communicate the same broad idea - but which communicates it better? It depends on the audience.
> They both communicate the same broad idea - but which communicates it better? It depends on the audience.
Ugh. They say different things. The first describes the policy mechanisms and impacts. The second says nothing about those things; it describes your emotions.
The biggest communication problem I see now is people, especially on the Internet, including on HN, use the latter for the former purpose and say nothing.
I don't think they communicate the same broad idea at all. Making "unpredictable, seemingly irrational" choices is far from equivalent to being a dumb asshole. Your second version assumes the equivalence, which, hypothetically speaking, could provide a nice cover for purposeful malfeasance, could it not?
Eric Weinstein made a good point about Trump and his use of language:
Trump was much closer to saying “The immigrants are taking your jobs.” Well, to a labor market analyst, that’s not remotely the same thing at all as saying “US employers and political donors are colluding to confiscate your most valuable rights without market-based compensation, while denigrating you as lazy and stupid, and hiding behind a veneer of excellence and xenophilia as they economically undermine your families.” But it’s much easier, isn’t it?
> I’ve never seen a team fail because they chose Ruby. I have seen them fail because they chose complexity. Because they chose indecision. Because they chose “seriousness” over momentum. Ruby just needed to stay out of the way so people could focus on the real work.
I am entirely indifferent to the topic of Ruby, but this sentence really resonated with me. I'll take momentum over premature optimization for scale any day of the week.
> some people communicate in order to exchange facts, and some communicate in order to find connection.
I love this quote. Excellent and very relatable piece.
Social skills can be acquired through practice. But being an introvert, I've specifically picked my profession so that I can focus on ideas over people. Tinkering and solving problems excited me, whereas staying in touch with friends, noticing social dynamics, networking, reading people, being good at remembering everyone's birthday, etc felt tiring to me and was less appealing.
I'm at a place in my career where I'm managing more and doing less. It's a weird transition because I've spend a decade acquiring technical skill, only to discover soft skills are equally if not more important (perhaps increasingly so with AGI) .
Reminds me of that one scene in Equalizer. It's cheesy and I will never admit to liking the movie in real life. But it's one of those scenes that's really stuck with me over the years.
Robert: "I think you can be anything you want to be."
Teri: "Maybe in your World, Robert. Doesn't really happen that way in mine."
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? How come his Bitcoin holdings - now worth more than $100 billion dollars - have remained untouched since 2010? How can any one human resist that kind of temptation? I would be digging landfill sites if I lost my wallet worth $100 billion. The launch of Bitcoin also coincided with the 2008 financial crisis. The first block had the text: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" embedded, etc.
None of the altcoins have this level of myths and legend. You need this kind of supernatural story to start a new fiat, digital gold, religion, and whatever collective fiction you can think of.
I imagine Satoshi Nakamoto has much less name recognition than Bitcoin? A simpler theory is that the first popular cryptocurrency became more and more famous due to a snowball effect, and nothing else is able to catch up.
Apparently the first popular stablecoin can't be beat either, despite its sketchy origins and a lot of bad press.
If beyond a certain point, only fame matters, it's kind of depressing from a technological innovation point of view.
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