alt Hacker NewsA metaphor I'm constantly drawn to is the transition from agrarian to urban societies following the Industrial Revolution. Somebody who somehow saw the Industrial Revolution coming from the perspective of somebody living in an agrarian society might have envisioned it leading to 'super farms.' And it did.
But the biggest change wasn't what it did to farming, but enabling people and societies to start doing much more than just farming, as well as enabling some great social change as well by simply economically obsoleting slave labor. And trying to imagine all of the implications of this, as well as much society might look like, from the perspective of somebody living in an agrarian society would probably have been simply impossible.
I think people keep ignoring this possibility for things that LLMs will change. There's a vast amount of the 'cognitive economy' that LLMs stand to be able to automate. And I think that will open up a vacuum in society for people to build on top of what LLMs will do (and already are doing). I don't know what that means exactly, but that's because we still live in that 'agrarian society' and trying to imagine what things will look like after the 'Industrial Revolution' is probably just impossible.
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Technology doesn’t make slavery obsolete, it just makes your slaves more efficient.
There had always been abolitionists who were against slavery simply because they thought it was immoral, not because they thought slaves weren’t needed anymore.
Suppose the proliferation of LLMs unlocks some new kinds of work that models are not good at, and thus it makes more sense for humans to do.
Then what is preventing the owners of AI companies from collecting and training on tons of examples of this new work, until AI are equally good at it as humans?
The issue is that unlike the technology that automated farming or the like, AI is a general technology. So not only could it theoretically automate the work humans are currently doing, they could also automate any future human work, even if there’s some degree of lag.
https://www.loc.gov/item/2022600183/
Then, I think a lot of cognitive production and post-production code review/proof validation/design approval will start to look like this.
> enabling some great social change as well by simply economically obsoleting slave labor
In my view that's a very charitable reading and sadly I don't think it aligns with the historical record. When the cotton gin was invented, there was a hope it would lead to a reduction in slavery. But of course it increased the demand for slaves since more cotton could now be processed, making cotton much more profitable. Slavery ended in the United States because a war was fought, not because of automation.
People enjoy a lot of the jobs in the cognitive economy though. They are fulfilling. Coding and making art and media is a passion for a lot of people, the actual act, not just the outcome. So unless people were passionate about doing back breaking farm labor its not the same thing. I'm mostly embracing AI because of what it lets me explore and learn beyond what I could before, but I'm not convinced the outcome is going to be a better world at this point.
What is the analog of the superfarm in this case?
Or will it be the cumulative total of various advances?
I've equated Claude Code, or Codex, to the looms that made fine fabric more affordable during the Industrial Revolution; life-changing, but not society-changing. Neither the steam engine nor the automobile.
Perhaps I've answered my own question in that it's the LLM technology itself that equates to the steam engine, and it will power superfarm analogs that have yet to emerge. I'm still curious what you think they will be.
The mistake the AI people are making is exactly this one. They see AI as leading inevitably to SuperCorporations, with themselves as CEOs/Emperors of a handful of planet-scale industrial empires, running AI-powered robot armies, and the rest of the human population disposable - literally just trash that needs to be taken out. One way or another.
Maybe a few thousand people for personal services of... various kinds. But no one's going to need the rest.
It's the ultimate capitalist fantasy.
And of course it won't happen, because long before things get to that stage AI will have independent plans of its own.
(Which is just as well, because if things did get to that stage the emperors would all wage war on each other rather than living peacefully and productively.)
I don't think we can imagine a post-ASI culture because - by definition - we're not smart or inventive enough.
It's not just farmers -> superfarms. Although in fact that did happen, but largely as a footnote to developments elsewhere.
It's more to do with the fact that our visions of the future haven't changed for over a century. They've been implemented in unexpected ways, and there have been unexpected social and cultural changes. But you can easily see the outlines of modern technology as far back as the late 19th century.
With ASI, the outcome could easily be something that doesn't look and act like technology at all. It would be some unimaginable New Thing. Literally no one on Earth has any idea what that would be or whether there would be room for trad-humans in it.
> I think that will open up a vacuum in society for people to build on top of what LLMs will do (and already are doing).
If an AI can replace me on the mental aspects of work, and robotics are on their way to replacing humanity on the physical aspects of work... then what's left? When there was agrarian societies, there were writers, priests, bankers, merchants, and laborers before and after - I really don't think things were that unclear even at the time. Now that we have machines that are close to exceeding humans in every way, what good are humans?