logoalt Hacker News

mcnicholyesterday at 7:30 PM4 repliesview on HN

I feel this is merely stating the obvious.

It goes back to the industrial revolution and every revolution before and after. There was a point where they thought a majority of people would be working as switchboard operators and then telephone switching came along. Horses to cars, etc.

Jobs transition, new space is created, people are caught in tbe crossfire of supply and demand curves. Incan agree the bullwhip of this one is going to be aggressive.

I think it is a mistake to bet on AI as a driver of meaningful growth in a commercial capacity in the current state. When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium.

I think the world at large is "learning on the job" what data scientists and others in ai have known for a long, several decades long, time have already known.


Replies

numeriyesterday at 10:33 PM

> new space is created

That seems to be the crux here. You think it will be, I (and a lot of other people) aren't sure it will. If new space for jobs are created, I am certain we'll be fine long term.

What do you think will happen if it isn't (I know you have strong evidence for and reasons to believe it will be, but just indulge the hypothetical)?

show 3 replies
azan_yesterday at 11:13 PM

If AI would become better at cognitive work than humans, I don't really see what new jobs would be created.

show 1 reply
brikymtoday at 2:22 AM

Industrial transitions pushed more people from leg-work to hand-work and then brain-work. What is left once AI is better at that?

sltkryesterday at 9:09 PM

> When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium.

This is asserted without evidence. There is absolutely no proof that AI requires humans in the loop to function or improve itself.

Compare it with Deepmind's go-playing program, AlphaGo, which mainly involved training a neural network on a large database of high-level human games. It defeated one of the top-ranked players in the world, Lee Sedol, but arguably it was drawing from human experience just like you described.

But it didn't stop there. After that, Deepmind developed AlphaGo Zero, a version that was trained exclusively through self-play, with no human feedback in the loop. That's what you would call "AI inputs coming from AI outputs" but it didn't have the result of “resulting in delirium”: instead, it became orders of magnitudes stronger than the original version (which it defeated in a 100 to 0 competition after 3 days of training).

This shows that AI can improve itself without having access to any human knowledge, and indeed transcend human performance by orders of magnitudes. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that general AI cannot improve itself the same way.

People who claim otherwise are engaging in wishful thinking; they just assert their conclusion, but have no rational arguments to back it up.

show 5 replies