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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   29633 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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Yeah, but that's not what everybody is getting hyped up / scared to death about. Everybody's talking about how this is infinitely scalable and how this means doom / utopia.

I think that will LLM and the battery tech improvement we observe - eliminating manual labor in 20 years is real possibility. That is both doom and utopia for big parts of the world.

I still think most white collar stuff will go first, but certainly with LLMs applied to robotics it’s clear now that blue collar labor won’t be far behind.

At some point, maybe, but why waste GPUs on manual labor, when naked monkeys can dig for cobalt for a mere 2-3K calories of Uncle Klaus' Bugs?

Yeah obviously in parts of the world where labor is $1 a day it’ll take much longer. But at the same time there could be a textiles effect (where indigenous textiles industries in Africa were totally destroyed by cheap donated clothing made in Bangladesh for the West) where they can get donated machines from Bill Gates or second hand stuff that lets them eliminate labor all the same.

Labor prices are perfectly able to adapt to the current market situation, so I don't see why the developed world should be exempt. It's also not about absolute prices, but about the relative marginal costs/profits of investing resources into building a manual labor performing robot vs. putting those same resources into expanding SkyNet.

Ok, so now we're back to the thing I originally complained about: vaguely mystical predictions of a massive social revolution. Is it possible at all to talk about specifics?

Another pet peeve of mine is, if people are going to predict massive revolutions reshaping our societies, can they at least do it right? The current state of AI, and the law of comparative advantage, clearly implies replacing intellectual, not manual labor.

Yes. With enough investment - I will have a robot that will be good enough cleaning lady, housekeeper and gardener. That will be also able to do some basic house/electric maintenance stuff. I was joking couple of years ago that the Qatari definition of hard labor is the act of pointing the bangladeshi what to move and where. Also nurses and whatnot.

It will start as simple things - better roombas, tile laying and painting machines etc etc. Even the blue collar work will be augmented. Eventually we will get to good enough universal laborer.

Judging by the way other household appliances adoption was done - it will become extremely affordable in just a couple of years. In the west - I don't care about the rest of the world - it will only make migration problems sharper and worse - since the people coming are literally worthless except as organ donors or sex work. It will also deprive the developing world of chances to develop - the only thing they will have worth anything - their natural resources.

If you are on the right side of the divide it will be utopian. If you are on the wrong - dystopia.

Yes. With enough investment - I will have a robot that will be good enough cleaning lady, housekeeper and gardener.

And what is it that you will be making your income from?

Donating organs and/or sex work?

Developing and selling robots and real estate.

And why would whoever is paying you to sell real estate / develop robots do that, and buy a robot to do the housework, when they could buy an AI to do it for them, and hire you to do their house work?

Because this is technology not hamanism. There will be journey to the end we are discussing. Those products will need humans to assist and develop them. There will be a window of opportunity for people that are smart and sociopathic enough to profit and procure thr things that will bring good life in the post labor scarcity world. I will do my best to be one of them.

The authoritarian governments will be big buyers of all kind of LLM solutions.

Because this is technology not hamanism. There will be journey to the end we are discussing. Those products will need humans to assist and develop them.

Well, it is precisely the journey that I think is under-analyzed, and I think there's a lot of magical thinking around it, at the moment. I already invoked comparative advantage, but really it's just basic accounting, it's the highly paid labor that you want to automate away, not the low-paid menial jobs. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but it was the skilled craftsmen that were the big losers of the Industrial Revolution, not the low-wage workers. This is also what I see when I extrapolate the current state of AI. Maybe there's going to be some surprise that changes the trajectory, but what, specifically, could change the trajectory in that particular way?

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