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Notes -
Zvi wrote a ton about it here, part of their AI series
Why worry about the bottom 30% of humanity's unemployment for the next 10 years, if (it is argued) all of humanity will be disempowered within the next 100?
A simple egotistic answer is that I'll probably be alive in 10 years and dead in 100 (which does include the assumption that meaningful life extension for existing humans is so hard that by the time the AGI figures out to solve it, it's not clear it will have any reason to).
It’s harder for me to scoff at the robot rapture after seeing the way these GPT-4 instance can be scaffolded to make a more general purpose system.
As you say, even if we don’t get anymore fundamental breakthroughs on the LLM scaling side, I’m convinced the ecosystem of tools and connecting LLM instances together will easily get us to AGI.
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That only applies if you believe the robot rapture is coming, to put it as dismissively as possible.
We KNOW that even shitty spruced of diffusion ai's will un-employ a decent chunk of the populace within the next X decades, regardless of what the maximally optimistic pessimists will tell you we don't know that AGI is ever coming at all (although I think it probably is).
I mean, society-wide unemployment is just less of a problem if it only lasts a few years. If not a rapture, a 'robot total transformation of society' is inching towards being the null hypothesis. When AI is just 'can recognize cats', it definitely takes intellectual work to get to 'robot rapture'. When AI is taking 30% of jobs, is the other 70% really that much of a leap? We went from "can play Pong" to "can beat many humans at standardized tests" in a few decades. What happens a few more decades later?
Ah, Ok.
im talking about the
ai is impossible==>ai can categorize cats prooly ==>Ai can write boilerplate just enough to destroy wagie jobs ()WE ARE HERE() ==> Ai can sort cats well, and therfore instantly eliminates like 80% of all necessary human non physical labor ==> We invent AGI ==> ????? ==> everything is bad forever
sequence, not everyone being unemployed by a hypereffiecent cat sorter, which seems possible in the short medium term and fairly inevitable in the medium long term.
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