Freedom is not “doing anything you want”. It’s “not having to do the things you don’t want to do”.
AI may automate a white colar subset of those, but modern day society has for the longest time used wives, young people, immigrants from countries with bad currency devaluation, etc, to fill the gap above. The article talks about status and attention as the ultimate goal, but that may be a male-only perspective. Or even a him-like-perspective. The reality is humans chase many ladders since brains have may proclivities. For more than half of the population (wives and the poor) the goal may be freedom or time to do more.
I don’t think my concern is that AI is going to make everything too awesome for people to cope. The fact that I can now DoorDash lunch doesn’t really matter when I can’t afford a place to live or healthcare.
Also, as the article points out, this is all mostly theoretical as we're pretty far from utopia. Just ask the private chauffeur for your burrito next time he comes by.
Beautiful piece, with a great closer (not reproduced here, you should go with it).
I do wonder if our society would be better if we had more honourifics and formality. China has instituted social media rules based on qualifications. Many indigenous societies have forms of secret and sacred knowledge.
I think too many people are concerned with the abuse of these sorts of social systems when we already live in a system of value that is rife with abuse.
> I do wonder if our society would be better if we had more honourifics and formality. China has instituted social media rules based on qualifications. Many indigenous societies have forms of secret and sacred knowledge.
In the US we administer a test at age 16 that determines lifetime "qualifications" and access to "secret and sacred knowledge". How much further is there to even go on that front? Back to inherited nobility?
It started off really interesting, but I had to stop once the "AI could lead to post-scarcity" bit came.
Sorry, no offence, but I wish that this was the "problem" with AI.
The "Problem" is actually that it turns known tractable problems into non-reproducible problems.
Giving the illusion of giving the right answer is significantly more dangerous than giving an obvious wrong answer. So we're not going to AI ourselves into post-scarcity, whitecollar work will just sleepwalk into even further absurdity. (because, the fact is, humans also suffer from this issue; the worst among us give the appearance of competence and fuck it up massively).
AI consumes resources like a motherfucker, to maybe replace white-collar work, but the bluecollar stuff isn't going anywhere. It's a harder problem so people (companies) avoid it the same way that they avoid writing native GUIs. Much more convenient to just focus on pretty things and in the digital realm, but farming? agriculture? textiles and everything that society actually relies upon?
AI isn't coming for those jobs, because it's harder and has more definite outcomes. You can't trick people into believing that a pig has been slaughtered, carved and cooked properly.
It's comparatively easy to trick people into thinking that the man behind the curtain is a wizard, however.
The 1700s called, regular mechinization already came for that.
And non-LLM AI has been moving into more blue collar stuff for years already, now with LLM logic they are becoming far more capable too.
You must be thinking of the more blue collar service industry, which may not go anywhere, but the time it takes to train, and the number of people that will go into it will ensure earning a living is difficult.
He never says "AI could lead to post-scarcity" in the entire piece. In fact, he says:
> Before making this argument, I want to defend the topic. Utopia is not around the corner; these issues don't have any practical urgency. But I agree with Bostrom that thinking about utopia “can serve as kind of philosophical particle accelerator, in which extreme conditions are created that allow us to study the elementary constituents of our values.” Reflecting on utopia might tell us something interesting about human nature more generally.
The entire idea of post-scarcity doesn't withstand the slightest scrutiny. Even if unlimited energy and matter could be summoned by magic, one would be limited by space and the speed of light, and by the threat of black hole formation if too much matter and energy is crammed into too small a region of space. In addition, one's time would be limited by the impending heat death.
> Giving the illusion of giving the right answer is significantly more dangerous than giving an obvious wrong answer.
Oh man sometimes I'm like "actually what I just said is wrong"... I have to remind myself to slow down/think over everything before saying something is done.
> There is a running joke in the U.S. version of The Office where Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson), who is “Assistant to the Regional Manager” keeps insisting that he is “Assistant Regional Manager”, which sounds a bit better. When he is officially promoted to the title he prefers, he is delighted
As with so many of them, the joke is more subtly, brilliantly, and originally from The Office; not The Office (US).
> But I think this won’t be a problem with a post-scarcity world. So many of the difficulties we face in life stem from our interactions with other people, and these won’t go away even with infinite material resources. So long as we remain human, we can never be fully satisfied. On the bright side, our lives will continue to have meaning in a post-scarcity world. We might be miserable, but we won’t be bored.
Freedom is not “doing anything you want”. It’s “not having to do the things you don’t want to do”.
AI may automate a white colar subset of those, but modern day society has for the longest time used wives, young people, immigrants from countries with bad currency devaluation, etc, to fill the gap above. The article talks about status and attention as the ultimate goal, but that may be a male-only perspective. Or even a him-like-perspective. The reality is humans chase many ladders since brains have may proclivities. For more than half of the population (wives and the poor) the goal may be freedom or time to do more.
I don’t think my concern is that AI is going to make everything too awesome for people to cope. The fact that I can now DoorDash lunch doesn’t really matter when I can’t afford a place to live or healthcare.
Also, as the article points out, this is all mostly theoretical as we're pretty far from utopia. Just ask the private chauffeur for your burrito next time he comes by.
Beautiful piece, with a great closer (not reproduced here, you should go with it).
I do wonder if our society would be better if we had more honourifics and formality. China has instituted social media rules based on qualifications. Many indigenous societies have forms of secret and sacred knowledge.
I think too many people are concerned with the abuse of these sorts of social systems when we already live in a system of value that is rife with abuse.
> I do wonder if our society would be better if we had more honourifics and formality. China has instituted social media rules based on qualifications. Many indigenous societies have forms of secret and sacred knowledge.
In the US we administer a test at age 16 that determines lifetime "qualifications" and access to "secret and sacred knowledge". How much further is there to even go on that front? Back to inherited nobility?
What test?
It started off really interesting, but I had to stop once the "AI could lead to post-scarcity" bit came.
Sorry, no offence, but I wish that this was the "problem" with AI.
The "Problem" is actually that it turns known tractable problems into non-reproducible problems.
Giving the illusion of giving the right answer is significantly more dangerous than giving an obvious wrong answer. So we're not going to AI ourselves into post-scarcity, whitecollar work will just sleepwalk into even further absurdity. (because, the fact is, humans also suffer from this issue; the worst among us give the appearance of competence and fuck it up massively).
AI consumes resources like a motherfucker, to maybe replace white-collar work, but the bluecollar stuff isn't going anywhere. It's a harder problem so people (companies) avoid it the same way that they avoid writing native GUIs. Much more convenient to just focus on pretty things and in the digital realm, but farming? agriculture? textiles and everything that society actually relies upon?
AI isn't coming for those jobs, because it's harder and has more definite outcomes. You can't trick people into believing that a pig has been slaughtered, carved and cooked properly.
It's comparatively easy to trick people into thinking that the man behind the curtain is a wizard, however.
>bluecollar stuff isn't going anywhere.
The 1700s called, regular mechinization already came for that.
And non-LLM AI has been moving into more blue collar stuff for years already, now with LLM logic they are becoming far more capable too.
You must be thinking of the more blue collar service industry, which may not go anywhere, but the time it takes to train, and the number of people that will go into it will ensure earning a living is difficult.
He never says "AI could lead to post-scarcity" in the entire piece. In fact, he says:
> Before making this argument, I want to defend the topic. Utopia is not around the corner; these issues don't have any practical urgency. But I agree with Bostrom that thinking about utopia “can serve as kind of philosophical particle accelerator, in which extreme conditions are created that allow us to study the elementary constituents of our values.” Reflecting on utopia might tell us something interesting about human nature more generally.
The entire idea of post-scarcity doesn't withstand the slightest scrutiny. Even if unlimited energy and matter could be summoned by magic, one would be limited by space and the speed of light, and by the threat of black hole formation if too much matter and energy is crammed into too small a region of space. In addition, one's time would be limited by the impending heat death.
> Giving the illusion of giving the right answer is significantly more dangerous than giving an obvious wrong answer.
Oh man sometimes I'm like "actually what I just said is wrong"... I have to remind myself to slow down/think over everything before saying something is done.
> There is a running joke in the U.S. version of The Office where Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson), who is “Assistant to the Regional Manager” keeps insisting that he is “Assistant Regional Manager”, which sounds a bit better. When he is officially promoted to the title he prefers, he is delighted
As with so many of them, the joke is more subtly, brilliantly, and originally from The Office; not The Office (US).
I'll be the uncultured swine who points out that "The Office (US)" was a better show. Ricky Gervais agrees.*
*In that the US show made him rich.
Ha, I get it, great Angela impression.
Peoples' takes on life can be so weird. The problems arent AI or any other tech, its human. This book seems like a waste of paper.
I think the author shares your view exactly:
> But I think this won’t be a problem with a post-scarcity world. So many of the difficulties we face in life stem from our interactions with other people, and these won’t go away even with infinite material resources. So long as we remain human, we can never be fully satisfied. On the bright side, our lives will continue to have meaning in a post-scarcity world. We might be miserable, but we won’t be bored.