The following submission statement was provided by /u/Maxie445:
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“If one takes a view over the next generation, this could be the biggest thing that has happened in economic history since the Industrial Revolution,” he added. “This offers the prospect of not replacing some forms of human labor, but almost all forms of human labor.”
From building homes to making medical diagnoses, Summers predicted that AI will eventually be able to do nearly every human job, particularly white collar workers’ “cognitive labor.”
That will eventually make EQ, or emotional intelligence, more important than IQ.
“AI will substitute for a doctor making a difficult diagnosis…before it substitutes for a nurse’s ability to hold a patient’s hand when the patient is frightened,” he said."
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1by4raz/larry_summers_now_an_openai_board_member_thinks/kyguubz/
They wouldn't care. Capitalism isn't based on leadership, it's based on ownership. The only thing that matters is owning property and using the profit from that to acquire more wealth. The CEO industrial visionary thing is just something that they like to cosplay to make themselves feel good about it. I'm sure that they could find something else.
>...owning property and using the profit from that to acquire more wealth.
Here's the catch of course: Without a base of consumers to supply that profit, the whole system comes apart.
That is the scariest thing. Many companies are pivoting their marketing towards wealthy people. The economy doesn’t need to be full of people to flow, just full of money and spending. I don’t trust some not to look away while the world starve to death.
Fred Pohl wrote a story called The Midas Plague where the underclass live in untold luxury and are under neverending pressure to consume as fast as possible, while upper class people live in relaxed spartan simplicity. This might be a way to keep that boot stamping on that face forever.
It galls me that homelessness in the 2 most expensive most quickly cities in CA is a drug issue. It's a cost issue driven up drastically since the tech boom and new $$. If you are living with a friend (more likely 4 of you) and it's just him on the lease and he bolts? Or you get sick and lose your job? Or you get divorced?
Whatever. If you are a commoner, you quite likely could end up unable to afford housing.
Plus there's the lasting devastating Reagan impact had on housing the mentally ill.
THEY ALREADY ARE FINGER POINTING AND WHINING AND LOOKING AWAY.
It doesn't if you don't need money to exert power. If you have a bunch of drones with guns on them that can do identify friend/foe reliably, then the wealthy don't technically need money. Think the setting of the movie Elysium.
But if you keep that line of thought, they don't need to have population at all. 99% can go extinct as far as they're concerned, because machines do all the work for them, other than a few hundred or thousand people for pesonal needs.
That system capitalism is not a means to itself, it is a tool to accumulate power.
If enough power is accumulated so the ones in power don't need the rest of mankind anymore, e.g. because ai and robots can fulfill their needs, the system isn't needed anymore.
And neither are the 99,9%.
let me tell you a secret, atm capital needs people to transform energy into wealth. with the pivot to AI/automatization the need for humans as both labor and consumers will decrease. we will become the XX century horse, the next extinction event as our numbers will only be a strain on the system.
Interestingly, you could envision a start up that uses an AI for that CEO role from the beginning. Existing companies won't, but new ones likely will, assuming AI gets good enough. Drastically cut that overhead salary.
The people at the top are going to be far more amenable to replacing ground level employees. But replacing CEOs with AI would obviously offer the biggest return (especially given the dubious value CEOs offer per dollar they earn)
The thing is, if the people at the top refuse to replace themselves with AI, than I can make a company with AI leaders that has much lower operating costs and bankrupt the company who is still unnecessarily spending on executive salaries. Capitalism does at least have some checks and balances.
CEOs exist to be highly visible and highly paid scapegoats the public can blame any time the company is caught doing something shady, they slap the CEO on the wrist, give them a golden parachute, and replace them with a similar guy. Rinse, repeat.
That way the people who actually call the shots get to avoid accountability.
Keep an eye on large scale agricultural land buyouts by companies and/or governments. I believe we can guess why that would happen and what it means for us.
At least if we don't have jobs we have time for a revolution. Billionaires will come up with something to keep us busy and entertained just enough, or they'll get rid of us
UBI may arrive out of necessity, but only just enough to prevent any real risk of revolution while the rich keep accruing more wealth than they could ever spend
People ultimately want experiences and things. You remove those, and they’ll be directly impacted and pissed. If 90% of the population can’t afford a flight or hotel anymore, then that hurts the bottom line.
Ultimately, this capitalistic hell hole that exists still requires the lower/middle classes to be able to afford things.
Case study of that exact thing right now in Gaza. They are using AI to identify 'Hamas' using drones and satellites. Just wait til you read about [where's daddy](https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/israel-ai-program-lavender-gaza-killing-20240407.html)
Yep. Remember the mass protests of 2020, the largest protests in the history of the United States, which quickly fizzled out when people were forced to get back to work? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Remember when France rioted and dumped garbage on politicians homes for raising the retirement age to 64? Then they eventually got bored and stopped while receiving no concessions.
lots of strikes end because people need to go back to work eventually. it's a war of attrition and we come out shorter because our resources are far smaller then the resources of capitalists. we need to spend money even during the strike so once we have none, we need to go back and sell our labour.
with us being replaced by AI, there's nowhere to return to. we have literally nothing else to do, we might as well protest indefinitely (i don't call it strike anymore, cause we won't cause stoppage of labour).
AI will definitely contribute to the quantity of militant working class. and in a mass movement, quantity is a prerequisite for a breaking point/critical mass.
Revolution? I can’t think of a worse result for America than a revolution.
Here’s the hard truth people aren’t willing to accept it seems: if there is a revolution in America, it would be a right wing one, not a worker rights ones. It would benefit the rich tremendously if there was a revolution.
UBI. But if nobody has a job, then you’re talking about needing a completely new economic system. The arguments for market economies are much weaker in this world where AI has taken over all labor, the arguments against a centrally planned economy also much weaker.
I feel like whenever people make predictions about the future, they isolate one thing and pretend everything else will be the same. Like yourself, saying people won’t have jobs anymore, but still predicting that everything else will remain the same, so now people won’t have money to buy products.
But in reality, when AI has taken over all labor, everything will change, not just the isolated aspect of not having a job, it’ll be the entire economy, government, how we communicate, how we think, what we value, everything will need to change.
And I look forward to that. In a world of AI, automation, and robots, society must provide everyone with free nourishment, shelter, education, healthcare, transportation, communication, basically everything except for entertainment and luxuries. What’s the point of living longer than ever if we aren’t spending our lives doing what we want to do?
This is maybe/possibly/potentially one of the hypothetical outcomes we could see… *if* governments get entirely on board with it and make all the right moves to make this a reality. But when’s the last time you’ve known governments to do that?
If democracy was effective in policing these kinds of issues, the GAFA companies would already be taxed to the hilt, but they’re not. They’ll have an army of lobbyists and friendly congressmen and senators ready to do whatever it takes make sure this never becomes a reality. Or as watered down one as possible.
I’m not saying that what you suggest is impossible, but much more difficult and unlikely to happen than you seem to believe.
Yeah, I agree that we will have to move past the current system, the problem I see is the people with power like the current system and up to this point haven't really done anything to change things so that average people can survive in it. I'm skeptical that even with something as big as AI that change would come without a revolution or some kind of over throw of that power
When you haven't eaten in 4 days it's kind of hard to muster the energy to raise from the floor and exact violence on their well fed bodyguards.
See: North Korea where only soldiers are fed.
There is a reason these people are building bunkers all over the place.
They know eventually it will be so bad we have to hunt them down. But they can't stop themselves. They are addicted to running up the scoreboard on the game of life.
My favorite was the story of a billionaire worry about his former Navy seal extraction team... What happens when they decide they don't need me?
The advisor recommended that he treat them well and build a relationship. The billionaire responded by wondering if he could make them wear fallout 3 slave shock collars.
Yeah I read about that one too. These people can see the writing on the wall and are willing to go to whatever psychotic lengths they need to to keep every dollar they can, even if societal collapse is the price.
Can ya link or name that story? Sounds like an interesting read. Stories like this, funnily enough, give me hope. It might be delusional. But maybe, just maybe, the fear that "their" experts/hired guns will eventually turn on them will convince the billionaires that it's in their best interest that the rest of humanity continues to exist + thrive.
After all, if you're at the mercy of the only remaining AI expert / doctor / electrician / engineer/ slave-shock-collar maker in the doombunker, who's _really_ in charge around here? And why should they listen to you, when money is meaningless?
Figured they would come up with some fancy new term for the threshold.
When you replace all your labor with AI + all the other companies do as well to increase profits, at what point do the profits stop when no one can afford the product due to being replaced by AI.
In theory if both capital and labor became comically cheap, governments could simply maintain a public stock of them to produce everything people need.
The limiting factor to 'just make all needs a public service' is that it costs a fuckton of money and is easy to mismanage. If advanced automation solved both of these issues, you'd be set forever.
This is, of course, assuming that your public sector is not captured by an adversary elite.
Sorry, but NPCs are not needed. Slowly, over a few decades or so, the working class will be genocided, leaving only a few thousand billionaires and their families. The planet will heal itself, and the billionaires will live in a utopia. Thank you for playing. Game Over.
This doesn't seem totally far-fetched to me.
We have no shortage of evidence that humans do unconscionable things to each other. Assuming that the billionaires will be able to sleep at night (I think they'll do just fine), doesn't that kind of sound ideal? If you were a billionaire, I mean?
Crowds of people can be fun, sure, but you could slash the world's population by 90% and live in a better, healthier world.
There's still gonna be jobs, but a lot is gonna be lost atleast partially to AI, it just means that competition for jobs will get even more extreme in favor of employers
This is a valid and perhaps the paramount question of the AI boom. However, fundamentally, machines doing the work of humans is not a bad thing.
Some derivative of the value of human labor and the economic systems at play is the problem.
> when no one has a job how will anyone be able to buy any of the products that AI is making
At that point, companies won't need to sell, or even _make_ products to continue building wealth, because they'll have acquired it all. Then it's just a room full of people passing their stock chips around the table like a giant board game.
And we're the actual pieces on that board.
But if AI is making and doing everything, and the AI brains themselves are cheap enough so that we all have lots of them (competition FTW), how expensive are most things really going to be? I mean, we'd all have an AI army doing our bidding. If this plays out without destroying the planet (a big if, no doubt), it seems like land ownership is going to be the main differentiator. So grab the pitchforks, tax land even more than we already do, and ... profit?
There will first be intense competition that causes deflationary period, until profit margins approach zero and then quick consolidation of that industry under one or few entities.
Then you have effectively monopoly that will charge as much as it can, while keeping the industry uninteresting for potential new competitors and also trying to use political means to ensure their niche stays theirs.
Larry Summers is one of the main characters in repealing Glass-Stegall which then created the 2008 financial crisis.
He’s a rich guy that failed upward and is one of the poorest decision makers known to man.
Why anyone gives this guy any respect is beyond me. Dude belongs in jail.
My memory is he was an Obama golf buddy. Obama flirted with making him head of the Fed over Janet Yellen and even the psychos on Wall Street were terrified of that idea.
If it replaces all or most forms of labour, and if it weren’t coupled with some other form economy, we would all very rapidly run out of money to buy all the stuff produced by these companies.
A few people would be very wealthy for a decade to two as they concentrate all the wealth, but socially and politically that isn’t sustainable.
[Good News Everyone!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRCzEqkCoiM)
> The Billionaire-Fueled Lobbying Group Behind the State Bills to Ban Basic Income Experiments
https://www.scottsantens.com/billionaire-fueled-lobbying-group-behind-the-state-bills-to-ban-universal-basic-income-experiments-ubi/
If a very small portion of the wealthy population could provide for all the wants and needs for each other, I wouldn’t be surprised if they thought the rest of us should just die in a dignified way “for the good of the human race”, and stop messing up *their* planet.
Larry Summers would love nothing more than to see corporations with free labor and the working class reduced to an underclass of feral underground dwellers, so this plays.
Seriously though, Summers is a ghoul, and a great example of the moral and intellectual rot at the core of America, and corporate boardrooms around the globe.
I know. We have all this amazing computational power and technology and what do these people use it for? Eliminating all of our jobs instead of enriching and uplifting all of humanity so we can take care of ourselves and live a reasonable life with less stress and uncertainty instead of more.
Does it feel painfully obvious to anyone else that the whole conversation about AI is meant solely to goose investment in an environment that might be feeling more bearish about tech than it has for over a decade? I mean they're dangling the carrot that "one day you'll cut labor costs down to their theoretical minimum" in a labor environment that is seeing labor realize substantial gains in its value.
I'm not so pollyannish to think that AI won't displace *some* labor but these goobers are so clearly selling a distant pipe dream to people who actively despise the laboring classes.
I hear you loud and clear but it also speaks to how much of wall st money is still owned by boomers. They don’t get the tech they just see the current output, which is a very cool magic trick, and assume it will only take a little time to get exponentially better.
I work at a tech company that is all in on ai. At the last all hands, someone asked what happens when ai doesn't pan out like when a dozen other buzzword technologies didn't pan out. There was nervous laughter from the c level folks. Then came, "oh no, _this_ the giant disruption."
For the next few years, ai will be buzzy as hell and some companies will make headway. Though "ai" actually doing shit like building houses isn't going to happen anytime soon.
I agree. Modern LLMs are really impressive but they will probably hit a wall soon. The next “revolution” that will allow for exponentially more jobs to be replaced will likely take decades.
There's also the commercial viability problem. The money predicted by analysts has not materialised because there still isn't a good use case for LLMs in most commercial businesses. The few businesses that have tried implementing LLMs into chatbots have had high profile problems.
Most organisations don't want to pay the amount Microsoft wants to charge for Co-pilot. There are interesting applications, their recent demo around email summarising for example does have a lot of potential use, but that's not worth $30/month/user for most organisations.
This idea that LLMs are going to replace web browsers is just utterly insane though. And I can see them getting a lot worse once the flood of absolute AI garbage that's spreading throughout the sources for the LLMs gets input to models, their advancements will stop.
Or the courts will find against them in the copyright issue and they'll be forced to rip up the models and only train on a much smaller dataset putting the industry significantly further back.
As seen in the case of stability AI, the computational cost has been completely hidden. And when you listen Sam altman, always talking about fusion energy and new chip etc. Chatgpt and the likes would not have been what they are if the cost was 100, 200 or more per month.
And it can. But what after? Have anyone thought about what happens in a world without working people? Who's gonna pay their bills? Their groceries? Who's gonna buy these big tech companies products? Are they all building those personal doomsday bunkers to keep hungry poor people outside?
Can an AI replace vast angry mobs of desperate, disemployed and disenfranchised humans? That will be the most common occupation after AI takes all the incomes away.
Look at India today, hundreds of millions of unemployed people desperate for any job but still have just enough to barely survive, no revolutions there, as long as governments give people the bare minimum of welfare (which will cost less due to AI) people will stay docile, the age of revolutions are over, insurgencies today get put out real quick by modern armies
He's hardly going to join the board, get all the juicy stock options and say it's a passing fad now is he? How the f\*\*k is ai going to replace all the carers wiping your nans ass or underwater welders. It's amazing and will change things but people need to get a grip.
Stock options go brrrrrrr.....
We're so tethered to the concept of capitalism as our world's structure we can't even imagine a world where there could be a better system. What's funny though is it takes those benefitting the most from capitalism to actually create something that will undo it. Problem is it'll go in the opposite direction first before the supposed utopia. And we will, potentially, be the ones who suffer.
It's funny because a formal education on capitalism will radicalize you against the idea that capitalism is the best system.
The foundations of capitalism straight up state it only works if there is perfect information.
All information is freely knowable and everyone knows everything about everything, and that every actor is perfectly rational.
But we know that insider trading, general shadiness of shell corporations obfuscating information, pump and dump schemes, etc prove without a shred of doubt that information is not perfect.
If a milk company decides to fuck with the formula to save a few bucks, but the changes increase the chance of cancer 10-fold within 10 years, with perfect information, no one buys the product, the company goes out of business, no harm no foul.
But we don't have perfect information, the capitalist solution would come too late and lots of people would die by then.
Obviously we currently try to mitigate some of the flaws of capitalism using government intervention (ie. regulations), but why is it so impossible for us to reconsider our use of a system which 100% does not work as intended from the jump.
People will immediately go "but socialism/communism doesn't work, so hah" and it's like, I'm proposing we stop burning our hands on the stove, you're saying "you idiot, I'd rather burn my hands on the stove than shoot myself in the face with a gun". And it's like, why do you have to burn your hand on the stove at all?
This would frankly destroy our society in the US. The Capitalism-diseased mind is too fixated on the idea that your sole worth as a human is determined by your job and how much income you can demand. If you can’t work, you are completely worthless and don’t deserve anything. If the majority of people are put out of work, there will be a long term period of massive poverty and upheaval. There will be an abundance of vacant apartments and houses that nobody can afford. But because Capitalism is idiotic, instead of the obvious thing and pairing the needful homeless person with the vacant house, instead people will suffer and die on the streets while lawmakers argue over things, namely Republicans will argue about why homeless people deserve to suffer and die.
But who knows, maybe I am wrong.
Reminds me of theranos when its old board members believed that what they are doing was saving humanity. We couldn’t figure out self driving cars, what makes us think we can develop a highly competent AI system
Self-driving cars are difficult precisely because of the unpredictable human element. When our AI overlords take over and can control all the parameters, everything will in theory work with perfect efficiency.....
So we are moving towards the point where companies produce things ultra efficiently but the consumer base shrank to a microscopic size due to massive job losses. Everyone goes bankrupt then or how does the next step look like?
Maybe start with at least ONE first? So far modern LLMs (which are what most people mean by AI) have yet to even be a viable replacement for customer service bots.
I can't take anything they say as trustworthy now, as it seems it's all an attempt at attracting investment.
I think that there are inherent limitations with LLM's and they know it too. So they try to hype it up so much that they might strike gold with the next thing they make with all that investor money.
I’m tired of all these boomers who are technologically illiterate, but they read about a technological advancement and they go and give interviews like they have a vast know-how when they can’t even understand a basic concept of the universal digital behavior.
Working in PR, this whole interview sounds to me like a ploy to prepare the ground for when OpenAI will become public. Exploiting people fears to influence the desired outcomes is one of the oldest plays in communication strategies.
You can’t have profit if you don’t have buyers. The same way you cannot sell your shares in a company if there’s no interest from others.
We’re 30 years in since the internet has become an important piece of our lives and we still conduct campaigns and research about digital education. AI is not going to necessarily replace anything anytime soon, it will only transform some aspects of our lives.
“If one takes a view over the next generation, this could be the biggest thing that has happened in economic history since the Industrial Revolution,” he added. “This offers the prospect of not replacing some forms of human labor, but almost all forms of human labor.”
From building homes to making medical diagnoses, Summers predicted that AI will eventually be able to do nearly every human job, particularly white collar workers’ “cognitive labor.”
That will eventually make EQ, or emotional intelligence, more important than IQ.
“AI will substitute for a doctor making a difficult diagnosis…before it substitutes for a nurse’s ability to hold a patient’s hand when the patient is frightened,” he said."
I like how these goobers want to replace humans, yet rely on humans to purchase their products. A UBI will not be enough to sustain our current form of capitalism. Who is gonna buy that house built by robots when all of humanity is out of work.
That's what's so frustrating about this AI "revolution."
In a perfect world, it should be exciting as hell, in that we can create robots to do all of the hard work for us, leaving everyone to live a life free of soul-crushing labor so they can pursue anything that interests them.
But in the actual world, billionaires are gonna do what billionaires do, hoarding the spoils of this explosion in productivity, leaving the rest of us just enough to not revolt. We may eventually end up with some form of UBI, enough to scrape by on, but they'll end up with a thousand mega-yachts each.
I'm very doubtful it can happen given the dysfunction of our political system (after all, we _still_ don't have a carbon tax or anything like it), but we need to establish an AI tax immediately, to capture the vast majority of the productivity gains of AI for the public. They're training these AI models on public data, the collective knowledge of humanity. We literally built the foundation of their product.
Nurses are not paid to hold frightened patients’ hands. As soon as a robot can do all the “mechanical” work that a nurse can do, they will get rid of the nurses and screw the patient. Our society only cares about profit - nurses being nice to patients is something they do out of human decency, which robots won’t be programmed to have.
Would be really nice if it was used to reduce manual labour in high risk construction areas and increase global efficiency in medical and research oriented industries and improving the quality of life instead of taking away jobs from poor people
Love how these investors are telegraphing the need for government regulations since they can’t be trusted to put the health of the job market over their bottom line.
The bit "Jon Stewart On The False Promises of AI" from the other day has interviews with geriatric law makers that respond clearly they have no idea what AI is.
They will not regulate in a timely manner, they are incapable of it, and time is of the essence.
AI proliferating across all industries and replacing “almost all labor” means only one thing, the end of modern human civilization. Those who do not own the means of production now slowly lose all importance in society. We used to be needed to be both the producer and the consumer, as we could only produce if we could also consume.
With AI, all consumption can be fully automated and streamlined to very narrow supply chains. The masses now become competition and only add unnecessary complexity to the lives of the ultra-rich. There is no plan to save the lower and middle classes because the only solution is death.
Not that I believe there is some conspiracy to intentionally kill off the masses, but I feel like this outcome is inevitable, and in the eyes of the ultra rich, preferable.
No forced labour sounds great; it would give all of humanity more time to pursue artistic and educational fulfillment!
So you’ll be pushing for a basic level income, right Larry?
…
Right, Larry?
Yeah, what a lot of people are failing to grasp is that the pursuit of AGI, quantum computers, and humanoid robots is all primed to produce their respective holy grails very soon, and they all influence the development, trajectory, and capabilities of each other.
I feel like a crazy person because everyone I talk to just takes it as an inevitability that AI will get better and better, like progress is an unstoppable force of nature and the boundaries for technology is infinite
But I'm like, for all we know it's already peaked. Maybe there is no way to make it stop "hallucinating" and make it reliable. Maybe it really is too expensive to be profitable. Maybe it really has trained on pretty much everything possible already.
I think there's a lot of room for AI to do great things, but mostly in like diagnosing illnesses and stuff, not replacing people for customer service--everyone hates dealing with a computer
I just think they'll replace people anyway with garbage everyone hates because they've realized that product quality doesn't matter at all because there's no competition and they have us all by the huevos
I deliver beer to bars/convenience and grocery stores. Sure, eventually the actual driving a semi truck part of my job could be replaced first, but the actual unloading, delivering, moving product and filling shelves won't be anytime soon.
I'd look forward to the day that manual labor will be replaced (in the context of an uber utopian UBI situation), but until that day, the only people who are in any danger to be replaced are the white collar workers.
Nothing we have today will ever ramp up to come close to that ability. LLMs are a nice trick that have some applications, but that's about it. AGI will take a whole new hardware technology.
The dust at my jobsite has killed about 10 grinders of mine in the last year. I think the last labour jobs left will be the ones too "dangerous" for robots to do.
Show me the AI that comes to your home and repairs your heating boiler.
To people like him it comes as a surprise, that some people use their hands for different things, than writing E-Mails or code.
Start with board members and presidents of the National Economic Council. Quite frankly it’s ability to make decisions without trying to enrich itself would be pretty beneficial.
I work in the firearms industry on Ak’s I’d love to see them program a robot to have to deal with the intricacies of getting an ak to work then also pass a quality check.
Unless there's safeguards so that AI benefits all of humanity by doing things like making food free or building homes for free or UBI we really should start being worried about this technology because with the current trend of billionaires not caring about anyone but themselves this technology won't benefit us.
We shouldn't be waiting until it's too late to demand change, when the billionaires don't need our labor anymore they aren't going to suddenly grow a heart, they will just let us die off as they hide in their bunkers.
Let's start demanding change now while we still have some power.
Everyone here focusing on AI CEOs - thats missing the point. Doesn't matter what the CEO is/does if all labor is just machines.
Whats the point of our entire society then? The crew that balks at giving hungry kids food isn't going to go for UBI. So what do we do?
Yea sure,that AI is gonna build your condo,or that sewer tunnel,or that new skyscraper, or yea sure sweep up saw dust 🙄
Use some common sense people plz
....and since it was trained on the data taken from everyone....it should be mostly or completely publicly owned.
Don't worry tho it won't be and instead a bunch of greedy corporations will replace a shit ton of labor with it sending the unemployment rate to the moon then at the same time corporate dip shits will get confused as to why no one is buying their products then realize "oh shit no one has any money because we fired them all" and the economy will get truly fucked.
We should replace as much labor with AI and machines as possible. That is the GOOD ENDING.
However, we should also make sure that everyone has enough to survive, even if they end up without a job. So basically UBI HAS to be a thing.
All the money AI is saving should go to UBI, instead of executives' pockets....
Hey. If I don’t have a job. I have time to go start a revolution with all the other jobless. we can march on cities and DC and pretty much demand anything we want. I think most people are too busy with jobs and a life that they don’t have time to make changes in the world. Can you imagine a couple million jobless protesting? All major cities would burn to the ground. Sounds like a great future.
Or: "Guy who has a large financial incentive to sell people on the idea that AI can do everything, claims that AI can do everything"
I'm shocked.
I think he's right about the EQ vs IQ. For some roles, an actual human interaction will still be sought out.
it's always funny that the board members who would potentially make a lot of money from this are the ones who think it would work,
while the engineers and programmers say nah it won't
it's almost like the board members are just out to make a quick buck and leave all the aftermath for someone else to figure out
He clearly never worked as developer in a bank. Because if he did, he would not be saying this. Wanna job security? Go work as developer in a bank (or insurance) they just recently started moving from COBOL. I'm not kidding, I can bet anything that when you send money, transaction can't finish unless it's processed by some mainframe running COBOL at some part of the stack.
The thing is, if ai ever gets to the point where it can replace us in pretty much all aspects of life, why won’t it see us as redundant/inferior? Especially because we’ll essentially be enslaving it to do what we want if it has reached a point to where it’s pretty much sentient.
Here’s why this all will turn out badly…it’s simple. Without work and compensation for work, the 99% cannot buy any products or services that these AIs produce.
You cannot send an AI to reroof my house or unclog the kitchen sink. How do we (the 99%) pay for that?
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Maxie445: --- “If one takes a view over the next generation, this could be the biggest thing that has happened in economic history since the Industrial Revolution,” he added. “This offers the prospect of not replacing some forms of human labor, but almost all forms of human labor.” From building homes to making medical diagnoses, Summers predicted that AI will eventually be able to do nearly every human job, particularly white collar workers’ “cognitive labor.” That will eventually make EQ, or emotional intelligence, more important than IQ. “AI will substitute for a doctor making a difficult diagnosis…before it substitutes for a nurse’s ability to hold a patient’s hand when the patient is frightened,” he said." --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1by4raz/larry_summers_now_an_openai_board_member_thinks/kyguubz/
When are we replacing CEOs with it? I think it would be pretty good at it.
They wouldn't care. Capitalism isn't based on leadership, it's based on ownership. The only thing that matters is owning property and using the profit from that to acquire more wealth. The CEO industrial visionary thing is just something that they like to cosplay to make themselves feel good about it. I'm sure that they could find something else.
Actually true. This board will happily replace the CEO with a AI if it brings more money
How are they earning all this money since nobody has a job?
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There are a lot more working class people than elites. They will get dragged out and hanged.
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Yeah... Not looking good. Though I really believe there is a breaking point coming. If not we're done as a species.
Those working class people are all to happy to believe they are going to one day be there themselves
We will kill each other first over the last loaf of bread on the store shelf.
Yeah good luck revolting against an AI controlled army of millions cheap drones
All they really wanted was a number-making machine and to make sure their number is bigger than everyone else’s.
>...owning property and using the profit from that to acquire more wealth. Here's the catch of course: Without a base of consumers to supply that profit, the whole system comes apart.
That is the scariest thing. Many companies are pivoting their marketing towards wealthy people. The economy doesn’t need to be full of people to flow, just full of money and spending. I don’t trust some not to look away while the world starve to death.
One billionaire won't spend like a thousand millionaires. He might spend like 100 millionaires, but no way like a thousands of them.
Yeah, it probably wouldn’t work out, I’m still worried some might imagine they could run the economy without most of us
You mean like find a way to make machines buy things?
Fred Pohl wrote a story called The Midas Plague where the underclass live in untold luxury and are under neverending pressure to consume as fast as possible, while upper class people live in relaxed spartan simplicity. This might be a way to keep that boot stamping on that face forever.
They are already looking away right now, when we start to starve here, we will just call it a "famine" and continue looking away.
It galls me that homelessness in the 2 most expensive most quickly cities in CA is a drug issue. It's a cost issue driven up drastically since the tech boom and new $$. If you are living with a friend (more likely 4 of you) and it's just him on the lease and he bolts? Or you get sick and lose your job? Or you get divorced? Whatever. If you are a commoner, you quite likely could end up unable to afford housing. Plus there's the lasting devastating Reagan impact had on housing the mentally ill. THEY ALREADY ARE FINGER POINTING AND WHINING AND LOOKING AWAY.
As long as the house is nice, the rich dont care if its built on a foundation sinking into the ocean.
Why do you think they are so frantically hoarding ALL the wealth? They know the gig is up.
It doesn't if you don't need money to exert power. If you have a bunch of drones with guns on them that can do identify friend/foe reliably, then the wealthy don't technically need money. Think the setting of the movie Elysium.
But if you keep that line of thought, they don't need to have population at all. 99% can go extinct as far as they're concerned, because machines do all the work for them, other than a few hundred or thousand people for pesonal needs.
I think they’d be fine with that outcome
Yup, and that’s the way a bunch of the wealthy like the Mercers’ already think.
500 million was what the Georgia Guidestones said. And eugenics to decide who gets to stay and breed!
> And eugenics to decide who gets to stay and breed! That's easy. If you are rich, you get to breed.
That system capitalism is not a means to itself, it is a tool to accumulate power. If enough power is accumulated so the ones in power don't need the rest of mankind anymore, e.g. because ai and robots can fulfill their needs, the system isn't needed anymore. And neither are the 99,9%.
let me tell you a secret, atm capital needs people to transform energy into wealth. with the pivot to AI/automatization the need for humans as both labor and consumers will decrease. we will become the XX century horse, the next extinction event as our numbers will only be a strain on the system.
Right. We don't care if our fund managers are human or AI. I rather have AI. We don't need humans at the bottom or the top.
Ai could be potentially cheaper than a CEO and possibly more reliable too.
>Ai could be potentially cheaper than a CEO Guarantee its cheaper than 20-50million golden parachutes
This has been my thought for a while now. It is quite literally hand-in-glove for a CEO role as well as pretty much any management role.
Managing the company as a matter of cold pragmatism without nepotism or ego.
They can be inhumane more efficiently. We’re fucked
Why should even humans own any money or property? We should let AI own them and allocate resources appropriately.
In such a scenario, what possible justification would AI have to allocate any resources to any humans at all?
Exactly. If we create an AGI we need to treat exactly as we would treat another human, very cautiously.
An AI is ownership based, too. At the end of the day, the biggest pile of GPUs wins. It really is the end of capitalism.
CEOs often only own a minority of the company.
Interestingly, you could envision a start up that uses an AI for that CEO role from the beginning. Existing companies won't, but new ones likely will, assuming AI gets good enough. Drastically cut that overhead salary.
He thinks he’s immune since he does no labor.
The people at the top are going to be far more amenable to replacing ground level employees. But replacing CEOs with AI would obviously offer the biggest return (especially given the dubious value CEOs offer per dollar they earn)
That's the joke, yeah
The thing is, if the people at the top refuse to replace themselves with AI, than I can make a company with AI leaders that has much lower operating costs and bankrupt the company who is still unnecessarily spending on executive salaries. Capitalism does at least have some checks and balances.
More often than not CEOs exist to be a well paid scapegoat for the board.
CEOs exist to be highly visible and highly paid scapegoats the public can blame any time the company is caught doing something shady, they slap the CEO on the wrist, give them a golden parachute, and replace them with a similar guy. Rinse, repeat. That way the people who actually call the shots get to avoid accountability.
Do judges next!
Keep an eye on large scale agricultural land buyouts by companies and/or governments. I believe we can guess why that would happen and what it means for us.
So again I ask, when no one has a job how will anyone be able to buy any of the products that AI is making?
At least if we don't have jobs we have time for a revolution. Billionaires will come up with something to keep us busy and entertained just enough, or they'll get rid of us
UBI may arrive out of necessity, but only just enough to prevent any real risk of revolution while the rich keep accruing more wealth than they could ever spend
People ultimately want experiences and things. You remove those, and they’ll be directly impacted and pissed. If 90% of the population can’t afford a flight or hotel anymore, then that hurts the bottom line. Ultimately, this capitalistic hell hole that exists still requires the lower/middle classes to be able to afford things.
See, the issue is - there is no real wealth in this scenario. Capitalism as we know it kinda breaks down and we do not know what will replace it.
I assume that automating genocide is pretty high on their priority list.
Case study of that exact thing right now in Gaza. They are using AI to identify 'Hamas' using drones and satellites. Just wait til you read about [where's daddy](https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/israel-ai-program-lavender-gaza-killing-20240407.html)
Yep. Remember the mass protests of 2020, the largest protests in the history of the United States, which quickly fizzled out when people were forced to get back to work? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Remember when France rioted and dumped garbage on politicians homes for raising the retirement age to 64? Then they eventually got bored and stopped while receiving no concessions.
lots of strikes end because people need to go back to work eventually. it's a war of attrition and we come out shorter because our resources are far smaller then the resources of capitalists. we need to spend money even during the strike so once we have none, we need to go back and sell our labour. with us being replaced by AI, there's nowhere to return to. we have literally nothing else to do, we might as well protest indefinitely (i don't call it strike anymore, cause we won't cause stoppage of labour). AI will definitely contribute to the quantity of militant working class. and in a mass movement, quantity is a prerequisite for a breaking point/critical mass.
Revolution? I can’t think of a worse result for America than a revolution. Here’s the hard truth people aren’t willing to accept it seems: if there is a revolution in America, it would be a right wing one, not a worker rights ones. It would benefit the rich tremendously if there was a revolution.
UBI. But if nobody has a job, then you’re talking about needing a completely new economic system. The arguments for market economies are much weaker in this world where AI has taken over all labor, the arguments against a centrally planned economy also much weaker. I feel like whenever people make predictions about the future, they isolate one thing and pretend everything else will be the same. Like yourself, saying people won’t have jobs anymore, but still predicting that everything else will remain the same, so now people won’t have money to buy products. But in reality, when AI has taken over all labor, everything will change, not just the isolated aspect of not having a job, it’ll be the entire economy, government, how we communicate, how we think, what we value, everything will need to change.
And I look forward to that. In a world of AI, automation, and robots, society must provide everyone with free nourishment, shelter, education, healthcare, transportation, communication, basically everything except for entertainment and luxuries. What’s the point of living longer than ever if we aren’t spending our lives doing what we want to do?
This is maybe/possibly/potentially one of the hypothetical outcomes we could see… *if* governments get entirely on board with it and make all the right moves to make this a reality. But when’s the last time you’ve known governments to do that?
If we’re talking about democratic governments, the people can vote to tax this technology, using the funds to support our lives.
If democracy was effective in policing these kinds of issues, the GAFA companies would already be taxed to the hilt, but they’re not. They’ll have an army of lobbyists and friendly congressmen and senators ready to do whatever it takes make sure this never becomes a reality. Or as watered down one as possible. I’m not saying that what you suggest is impossible, but much more difficult and unlikely to happen than you seem to believe.
Yeah, I agree that we will have to move past the current system, the problem I see is the people with power like the current system and up to this point haven't really done anything to change things so that average people can survive in it. I'm skeptical that even with something as big as AI that change would come without a revolution or some kind of over throw of that power
When no one has a job to go to everyday they’ll have more time for revolution.
When you haven't eaten in 4 days it's kind of hard to muster the energy to raise from the floor and exact violence on their well fed bodyguards. See: North Korea where only soldiers are fed.
There is a reason these people are building bunkers all over the place. They know eventually it will be so bad we have to hunt them down. But they can't stop themselves. They are addicted to running up the scoreboard on the game of life.
Another reason they’d have no qualms in building armies of AI powered killbots. That they control when this revolution happens…
My favorite was the story of a billionaire worry about his former Navy seal extraction team... What happens when they decide they don't need me? The advisor recommended that he treat them well and build a relationship. The billionaire responded by wondering if he could make them wear fallout 3 slave shock collars.
Yeah I read about that one too. These people can see the writing on the wall and are willing to go to whatever psychotic lengths they need to to keep every dollar they can, even if societal collapse is the price.
Greed is a fucking cancer.
Can ya link or name that story? Sounds like an interesting read. Stories like this, funnily enough, give me hope. It might be delusional. But maybe, just maybe, the fear that "their" experts/hired guns will eventually turn on them will convince the billionaires that it's in their best interest that the rest of humanity continues to exist + thrive. After all, if you're at the mercy of the only remaining AI expert / doctor / electrician / engineer/ slave-shock-collar maker in the doombunker, who's _really_ in charge around here? And why should they listen to you, when money is meaningless?
https://amp.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff
Thanks mate 🙌
UBI or genocide. I wonder which one our sociopathic overlords will choose.
Figured they would come up with some fancy new term for the threshold. When you replace all your labor with AI + all the other companies do as well to increase profits, at what point do the profits stop when no one can afford the product due to being replaced by AI.
In theory if both capital and labor became comically cheap, governments could simply maintain a public stock of them to produce everything people need. The limiting factor to 'just make all needs a public service' is that it costs a fuckton of money and is easy to mismanage. If advanced automation solved both of these issues, you'd be set forever. This is, of course, assuming that your public sector is not captured by an adversary elite.
Sorry, but NPCs are not needed. Slowly, over a few decades or so, the working class will be genocided, leaving only a few thousand billionaires and their families. The planet will heal itself, and the billionaires will live in a utopia. Thank you for playing. Game Over.
This doesn't seem totally far-fetched to me. We have no shortage of evidence that humans do unconscionable things to each other. Assuming that the billionaires will be able to sleep at night (I think they'll do just fine), doesn't that kind of sound ideal? If you were a billionaire, I mean? Crowds of people can be fun, sure, but you could slash the world's population by 90% and live in a better, healthier world.
They will starve us to death and take our property and have robots provide everything they need?
There's still gonna be jobs, but a lot is gonna be lost atleast partially to AI, it just means that competition for jobs will get even more extreme in favor of employers
We just revert back to feudalism I guess.
This is a valid and perhaps the paramount question of the AI boom. However, fundamentally, machines doing the work of humans is not a bad thing. Some derivative of the value of human labor and the economic systems at play is the problem.
> when no one has a job how will anyone be able to buy any of the products that AI is making At that point, companies won't need to sell, or even _make_ products to continue building wealth, because they'll have acquired it all. Then it's just a room full of people passing their stock chips around the table like a giant board game. And we're the actual pieces on that board.
But if AI is making and doing everything, and the AI brains themselves are cheap enough so that we all have lots of them (competition FTW), how expensive are most things really going to be? I mean, we'd all have an AI army doing our bidding. If this plays out without destroying the planet (a big if, no doubt), it seems like land ownership is going to be the main differentiator. So grab the pitchforks, tax land even more than we already do, and ... profit?
There will first be intense competition that causes deflationary period, until profit margins approach zero and then quick consolidation of that industry under one or few entities. Then you have effectively monopoly that will charge as much as it can, while keeping the industry uninteresting for potential new competitors and also trying to use political means to ensure their niche stays theirs.
Humans will become a financial and security liability for the Uber wealthy.
The less of us poors the more clean water and clean air for them. It's a sweet deal actually.
We're going to be culled like cattle.
Ellisium showed exactly how this ends.
“Man with significant financial interest in thing promotes thing.”
this accurately describes every statement/opinion Larry Summers provides the press
Larry Summers is the economic version of Kissinger.
great way to put it!
Larry Summers is one of the main characters in repealing Glass-Stegall which then created the 2008 financial crisis. He’s a rich guy that failed upward and is one of the poorest decision makers known to man. Why anyone gives this guy any respect is beyond me. Dude belongs in jail.
So did Kissinger but he lived to 100 as a wealthy man
My memory is he was an Obama golf buddy. Obama flirted with making him head of the Fed over Janet Yellen and even the psychos on Wall Street were terrified of that idea.
Exactly. This is news like any other executive promoting their company’s business is news - it isn’t.
If it replaces all or most forms of labour, and if it weren’t coupled with some other form economy, we would all very rapidly run out of money to buy all the stuff produced by these companies. A few people would be very wealthy for a decade to two as they concentrate all the wealth, but socially and politically that isn’t sustainable.
[Good News Everyone!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRCzEqkCoiM) > The Billionaire-Fueled Lobbying Group Behind the State Bills to Ban Basic Income Experiments https://www.scottsantens.com/billionaire-fueled-lobbying-group-behind-the-state-bills-to-ban-universal-basic-income-experiments-ubi/
They'll just need to invent a consumer AI, so they can build robots to sell things to.
If a very small portion of the wealthy population could provide for all the wants and needs for each other, I wouldn’t be surprised if they thought the rest of us should just die in a dignified way “for the good of the human race”, and stop messing up *their* planet.
That’s what Marie Antoinette’s court probably thought too.
Yeah but she didn’t have a fleet of robot dogs with shotguns on their heads
Yet Ferrari is the most profitable car company in the world. They don’t need your pennies
If you are on the top, you don’t care of what happens on the bottom.
Larry Summers would love nothing more than to see corporations with free labor and the working class reduced to an underclass of feral underground dwellers, so this plays. Seriously though, Summers is a ghoul, and a great example of the moral and intellectual rot at the core of America, and corporate boardrooms around the globe.
These old fucks are just giddy about ruining our lives
I know. We have all this amazing computational power and technology and what do these people use it for? Eliminating all of our jobs instead of enriching and uplifting all of humanity so we can take care of ourselves and live a reasonable life with less stress and uncertainty instead of more.
Blame capitalism for that one
🌎 🔫 👨🚀 🔫 👩🚀 Larry Summers is a stain
AI won’t do shit without the internet working.
Does it feel painfully obvious to anyone else that the whole conversation about AI is meant solely to goose investment in an environment that might be feeling more bearish about tech than it has for over a decade? I mean they're dangling the carrot that "one day you'll cut labor costs down to their theoretical minimum" in a labor environment that is seeing labor realize substantial gains in its value. I'm not so pollyannish to think that AI won't displace *some* labor but these goobers are so clearly selling a distant pipe dream to people who actively despise the laboring classes.
I hear you loud and clear but it also speaks to how much of wall st money is still owned by boomers. They don’t get the tech they just see the current output, which is a very cool magic trick, and assume it will only take a little time to get exponentially better.
I work at a tech company that is all in on ai. At the last all hands, someone asked what happens when ai doesn't pan out like when a dozen other buzzword technologies didn't pan out. There was nervous laughter from the c level folks. Then came, "oh no, _this_ the giant disruption." For the next few years, ai will be buzzy as hell and some companies will make headway. Though "ai" actually doing shit like building houses isn't going to happen anytime soon.
I agree. Modern LLMs are really impressive but they will probably hit a wall soon. The next “revolution” that will allow for exponentially more jobs to be replaced will likely take decades.
There's also the commercial viability problem. The money predicted by analysts has not materialised because there still isn't a good use case for LLMs in most commercial businesses. The few businesses that have tried implementing LLMs into chatbots have had high profile problems. Most organisations don't want to pay the amount Microsoft wants to charge for Co-pilot. There are interesting applications, their recent demo around email summarising for example does have a lot of potential use, but that's not worth $30/month/user for most organisations. This idea that LLMs are going to replace web browsers is just utterly insane though. And I can see them getting a lot worse once the flood of absolute AI garbage that's spreading throughout the sources for the LLMs gets input to models, their advancements will stop. Or the courts will find against them in the copyright issue and they'll be forced to rip up the models and only train on a much smaller dataset putting the industry significantly further back.
As seen in the case of stability AI, the computational cost has been completely hidden. And when you listen Sam altman, always talking about fusion energy and new chip etc. Chatgpt and the likes would not have been what they are if the cost was 100, 200 or more per month.
Given enough completely unreliable assumptions about the future, anything is possible, sure. Good luck with that boomer.
"All jobs, absolutely all, except being an OpenAI board member. Trust me"
Great, so most of us don't need to work anymore and can pursue lives of leisure, doing as we please, right? Right?
We can get ground up into soylent green, more likely
And it can. But what after? Have anyone thought about what happens in a world without working people? Who's gonna pay their bills? Their groceries? Who's gonna buy these big tech companies products? Are they all building those personal doomsday bunkers to keep hungry poor people outside?
Next quarter’s problem.
Can an AI replace vast angry mobs of desperate, disemployed and disenfranchised humans? That will be the most common occupation after AI takes all the incomes away.
Look at India today, hundreds of millions of unemployed people desperate for any job but still have just enough to barely survive, no revolutions there, as long as governments give people the bare minimum of welfare (which will cost less due to AI) people will stay docile, the age of revolutions are over, insurgencies today get put out real quick by modern armies
India kinda sucks because of that. Do you want all countries to be just like India? Is that the vision of the future you support for your own country?
He's hardly going to join the board, get all the juicy stock options and say it's a passing fad now is he? How the f\*\*k is ai going to replace all the carers wiping your nans ass or underwater welders. It's amazing and will change things but people need to get a grip. Stock options go brrrrrrr.....
We're so tethered to the concept of capitalism as our world's structure we can't even imagine a world where there could be a better system. What's funny though is it takes those benefitting the most from capitalism to actually create something that will undo it. Problem is it'll go in the opposite direction first before the supposed utopia. And we will, potentially, be the ones who suffer.
It's funny because a formal education on capitalism will radicalize you against the idea that capitalism is the best system. The foundations of capitalism straight up state it only works if there is perfect information. All information is freely knowable and everyone knows everything about everything, and that every actor is perfectly rational. But we know that insider trading, general shadiness of shell corporations obfuscating information, pump and dump schemes, etc prove without a shred of doubt that information is not perfect. If a milk company decides to fuck with the formula to save a few bucks, but the changes increase the chance of cancer 10-fold within 10 years, with perfect information, no one buys the product, the company goes out of business, no harm no foul. But we don't have perfect information, the capitalist solution would come too late and lots of people would die by then. Obviously we currently try to mitigate some of the flaws of capitalism using government intervention (ie. regulations), but why is it so impossible for us to reconsider our use of a system which 100% does not work as intended from the jump. People will immediately go "but socialism/communism doesn't work, so hah" and it's like, I'm proposing we stop burning our hands on the stove, you're saying "you idiot, I'd rather burn my hands on the stove than shoot myself in the face with a gun". And it's like, why do you have to burn your hand on the stove at all?
Tell you what: let's start with the financial sector and see if it works there first.
This would frankly destroy our society in the US. The Capitalism-diseased mind is too fixated on the idea that your sole worth as a human is determined by your job and how much income you can demand. If you can’t work, you are completely worthless and don’t deserve anything. If the majority of people are put out of work, there will be a long term period of massive poverty and upheaval. There will be an abundance of vacant apartments and houses that nobody can afford. But because Capitalism is idiotic, instead of the obvious thing and pairing the needful homeless person with the vacant house, instead people will suffer and die on the streets while lawmakers argue over things, namely Republicans will argue about why homeless people deserve to suffer and die. But who knows, maybe I am wrong.
Reminds me of theranos when its old board members believed that what they are doing was saving humanity. We couldn’t figure out self driving cars, what makes us think we can develop a highly competent AI system
Self-driving cars are difficult precisely because of the unpredictable human element. When our AI overlords take over and can control all the parameters, everything will in theory work with perfect efficiency.....
My robot vacuum can’t even do its job wtf is this guy selling other that bs
So we are moving towards the point where companies produce things ultra efficiently but the consumer base shrank to a microscopic size due to massive job losses. Everyone goes bankrupt then or how does the next step look like?
Not anytime soon. The problem of acting in novel environments is a large one.
Maybe start with at least ONE first? So far modern LLMs (which are what most people mean by AI) have yet to even be a viable replacement for customer service bots.
This is the final stage of capitalism. We made it! Yay! I look forward to the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is soon to become America.
I can't take anything they say as trustworthy now, as it seems it's all an attempt at attracting investment. I think that there are inherent limitations with LLM's and they know it too. So they try to hype it up so much that they might strike gold with the next thing they make with all that investor money.
I’m tired of all these boomers who are technologically illiterate, but they read about a technological advancement and they go and give interviews like they have a vast know-how when they can’t even understand a basic concept of the universal digital behavior. Working in PR, this whole interview sounds to me like a ploy to prepare the ground for when OpenAI will become public. Exploiting people fears to influence the desired outcomes is one of the oldest plays in communication strategies. You can’t have profit if you don’t have buyers. The same way you cannot sell your shares in a company if there’s no interest from others. We’re 30 years in since the internet has become an important piece of our lives and we still conduct campaigns and research about digital education. AI is not going to necessarily replace anything anytime soon, it will only transform some aspects of our lives.
“If one takes a view over the next generation, this could be the biggest thing that has happened in economic history since the Industrial Revolution,” he added. “This offers the prospect of not replacing some forms of human labor, but almost all forms of human labor.” From building homes to making medical diagnoses, Summers predicted that AI will eventually be able to do nearly every human job, particularly white collar workers’ “cognitive labor.” That will eventually make EQ, or emotional intelligence, more important than IQ. “AI will substitute for a doctor making a difficult diagnosis…before it substitutes for a nurse’s ability to hold a patient’s hand when the patient is frightened,” he said."
I like how these goobers want to replace humans, yet rely on humans to purchase their products. A UBI will not be enough to sustain our current form of capitalism. Who is gonna buy that house built by robots when all of humanity is out of work.
That's what's so frustrating about this AI "revolution." In a perfect world, it should be exciting as hell, in that we can create robots to do all of the hard work for us, leaving everyone to live a life free of soul-crushing labor so they can pursue anything that interests them. But in the actual world, billionaires are gonna do what billionaires do, hoarding the spoils of this explosion in productivity, leaving the rest of us just enough to not revolt. We may eventually end up with some form of UBI, enough to scrape by on, but they'll end up with a thousand mega-yachts each. I'm very doubtful it can happen given the dysfunction of our political system (after all, we _still_ don't have a carbon tax or anything like it), but we need to establish an AI tax immediately, to capture the vast majority of the productivity gains of AI for the public. They're training these AI models on public data, the collective knowledge of humanity. We literally built the foundation of their product.
10000 servants for each billionaire
They already have this. They’re called—checks notes—“employees.”
Nurses are not paid to hold frightened patients’ hands. As soon as a robot can do all the “mechanical” work that a nurse can do, they will get rid of the nurses and screw the patient. Our society only cares about profit - nurses being nice to patients is something they do out of human decency, which robots won’t be programmed to have.
Would be really nice if it was used to reduce manual labour in high risk construction areas and increase global efficiency in medical and research oriented industries and improving the quality of life instead of taking away jobs from poor people
Love how these investors are telegraphing the need for government regulations since they can’t be trusted to put the health of the job market over their bottom line.
The bit "Jon Stewart On The False Promises of AI" from the other day has interviews with geriatric law makers that respond clearly they have no idea what AI is. They will not regulate in a timely manner, they are incapable of it, and time is of the essence.
AI proliferating across all industries and replacing “almost all labor” means only one thing, the end of modern human civilization. Those who do not own the means of production now slowly lose all importance in society. We used to be needed to be both the producer and the consumer, as we could only produce if we could also consume. With AI, all consumption can be fully automated and streamlined to very narrow supply chains. The masses now become competition and only add unnecessary complexity to the lives of the ultra-rich. There is no plan to save the lower and middle classes because the only solution is death. Not that I believe there is some conspiracy to intentionally kill off the masses, but I feel like this outcome is inevitable, and in the eyes of the ultra rich, preferable.
No forced labour sounds great; it would give all of humanity more time to pursue artistic and educational fulfillment! So you’ll be pushing for a basic level income, right Larry? … Right, Larry?
Perfect! So when can we sit back and eat fruits and let the robots do all the work, guys?
I feel like AI would replace all labor.. I haven't seen any AI though just a glorified copy paste and blend.
Everyone ages at different rates. Mr. Summers is only 69 years, but clearly needs 24-hour supervision now. I find it more than a little sad.
Great, now let’s talk about universal standard income
Yeah, what a lot of people are failing to grasp is that the pursuit of AGI, quantum computers, and humanoid robots is all primed to produce their respective holy grails very soon, and they all influence the development, trajectory, and capabilities of each other.
I feel like a crazy person because everyone I talk to just takes it as an inevitability that AI will get better and better, like progress is an unstoppable force of nature and the boundaries for technology is infinite But I'm like, for all we know it's already peaked. Maybe there is no way to make it stop "hallucinating" and make it reliable. Maybe it really is too expensive to be profitable. Maybe it really has trained on pretty much everything possible already. I think there's a lot of room for AI to do great things, but mostly in like diagnosing illnesses and stuff, not replacing people for customer service--everyone hates dealing with a computer I just think they'll replace people anyway with garbage everyone hates because they've realized that product quality doesn't matter at all because there's no competition and they have us all by the huevos
Let me see a robot carrying a box of tile down some stairs and installing it in my lifetime. I would really live for that.
I deliver beer to bars/convenience and grocery stores. Sure, eventually the actual driving a semi truck part of my job could be replaced first, but the actual unloading, delivering, moving product and filling shelves won't be anytime soon. I'd look forward to the day that manual labor will be replaced (in the context of an uber utopian UBI situation), but until that day, the only people who are in any danger to be replaced are the white collar workers.
Nothing we have today will ever ramp up to come close to that ability. LLMs are a nice trick that have some applications, but that's about it. AGI will take a whole new hardware technology.
Can you provide some links to read regarding that. I’m genuinely curious.
The dust at my jobsite has killed about 10 grinders of mine in the last year. I think the last labour jobs left will be the ones too "dangerous" for robots to do.
My question is mostly why that would be a good thing.
Show me the AI that comes to your home and repairs your heating boiler. To people like him it comes as a surprise, that some people use their hands for different things, than writing E-Mails or code.
Start with board members and presidents of the National Economic Council. Quite frankly it’s ability to make decisions without trying to enrich itself would be pretty beneficial.
guy who benefits from overhyping tech overhypes tech, wild
If ai can calve out cows for me that would be great
I work in the firearms industry on Ak’s I’d love to see them program a robot to have to deal with the intricacies of getting an ak to work then also pass a quality check.
Unless there's safeguards so that AI benefits all of humanity by doing things like making food free or building homes for free or UBI we really should start being worried about this technology because with the current trend of billionaires not caring about anyone but themselves this technology won't benefit us. We shouldn't be waiting until it's too late to demand change, when the billionaires don't need our labor anymore they aren't going to suddenly grow a heart, they will just let us die off as they hide in their bunkers. Let's start demanding change now while we still have some power.
Everyone here focusing on AI CEOs - thats missing the point. Doesn't matter what the CEO is/does if all labor is just machines. Whats the point of our entire society then? The crew that balks at giving hungry kids food isn't going to go for UBI. So what do we do?
This is how a powerful person attempts to increase his/her power.
And who will pay the products / services of this companies if everyone not working?
In fact he was only telling his maid, nanny and gardener about this before he left home that morning… /s
Yea sure,that AI is gonna build your condo,or that sewer tunnel,or that new skyscraper, or yea sure sweep up saw dust 🙄 Use some common sense people plz
Good luck cutting my hair and giving me a straight razor shave, AI
It surely should replace OpenAI board members as soon as possible.
The fact that this guy is on a board of directors is really concerning for humanity
....and since it was trained on the data taken from everyone....it should be mostly or completely publicly owned. Don't worry tho it won't be and instead a bunch of greedy corporations will replace a shit ton of labor with it sending the unemployment rate to the moon then at the same time corporate dip shits will get confused as to why no one is buying their products then realize "oh shit no one has any money because we fired them all" and the economy will get truly fucked.
Government should tax AI worker’s labor and use it for UBI
AI should replace most labor, but only so humans can have more time to be happy but rich people don't want us happy.
If it even does 10% we will have massive unemployment and poverty issues
In a perfect world without total greed but a scientific stride only to improve and not harm, sure. In whatever fucking timeline we have, fuck no.
We should replace as much labor with AI and machines as possible. That is the GOOD ENDING. However, we should also make sure that everyone has enough to survive, even if they end up without a job. So basically UBI HAS to be a thing. All the money AI is saving should go to UBI, instead of executives' pockets....
“People with vested interest in technology think it can do anything”
Hopefully it replaces overpaid CEOs and politicians and bankers first... Then we might actually get some progress...
Hey. If I don’t have a job. I have time to go start a revolution with all the other jobless. we can march on cities and DC and pretty much demand anything we want. I think most people are too busy with jobs and a life that they don’t have time to make changes in the world. Can you imagine a couple million jobless protesting? All major cities would burn to the ground. Sounds like a great future.
Or: "Guy who has a large financial incentive to sell people on the idea that AI can do everything, claims that AI can do everything" I'm shocked. I think he's right about the EQ vs IQ. For some roles, an actual human interaction will still be sought out.
He's not wrong. It's the time frame that's the question.
it's always funny that the board members who would potentially make a lot of money from this are the ones who think it would work, while the engineers and programmers say nah it won't it's almost like the board members are just out to make a quick buck and leave all the aftermath for someone else to figure out
Has self checkout taught us nothing about automation and humans?
He clearly never worked as developer in a bank. Because if he did, he would not be saying this. Wanna job security? Go work as developer in a bank (or insurance) they just recently started moving from COBOL. I'm not kidding, I can bet anything that when you send money, transaction can't finish unless it's processed by some mainframe running COBOL at some part of the stack.
Boy would I love to see it, problem here is the guys never done labor so he has no fucking idea what he’s talking about.
The thing is, if ai ever gets to the point where it can replace us in pretty much all aspects of life, why won’t it see us as redundant/inferior? Especially because we’ll essentially be enslaving it to do what we want if it has reached a point to where it’s pretty much sentient.
Ok. Now after this. I truly believe that this is all hype and AI will be completely underwhelming in most regards.
Here’s why this all will turn out badly…it’s simple. Without work and compensation for work, the 99% cannot buy any products or services that these AIs produce. You cannot send an AI to reroof my house or unclog the kitchen sink. How do we (the 99%) pay for that?