Greed disease / narcissistic tendencies that need constant validation / hunger for power.

Just because some do, doesn’t mean we have to to be happy. A lot of rich people dont work at all and live perfectly happy lives. Besides, some of them “work”, in my opinion it becomes a glorified hobby when you absolutely dont need to do it.

Why do people like Elon Musk still opt to work then?

I am a pragmatist and don’t really have an ideology beyond improving my country

This, right here. Work and 'productive' employment are not the natural condition of humans. People who worry about 'purpose' should be super careful that that isn't their Capitalist brainwashing talking, because in this day and age, with the veritable flooding of Capitalist propaganda through every avenue, including the obvious (advertising, cultural productions) to the least suspicious (seemingly simple interactions with family/friends), there's a high chance anyone who thinks they need work has been thoroughly tricked into loving the fact they're a cog for the profit of a few.

People who say "I would feel bored without work" are great for the Capitalist. They have been conditioned by the system to love work, and that's not good. The ethical question about programming a robot to enjoy being a slave has already been answered by the Capitalists and their answer is "We'll do anything for more money." People today have already been 'programmed' to love their work, and it ain't a pretty thing. It's the root cause of 99% of these posts about how AI is going to make us so bored we kill ourselves or whatever. Yeah, if you've been told by your culture/society that you must work to feel good, then the end of that requirement could feel a little frightening and horrible.

Or it could feel like withdrawal from an extremely nasty drug, and once you get over it you might find you like life without Capitalist-purpose looming over you to be pretty damn good.

Well, my wife and I have been investing our entire lives and have enough to go FIRE I'm our mid 30s with a better yearly payout than the average worker our age.

That being said, do you honestly think that there won't be some sort of UBI when we hit that point? Do you seriously think we won't have a post scarcity society when we have the entire solar systems worth of natural resources and the AI and robots to get it?

I swear listening to the doom and gloom on this sub makes me wonder why a large percentage of its user base hasn't offed themselves yet.

join the /r/circuitkeepers and let's build that future together

How do you envision doing all that if you have no income? What if the only welfare assistance on offer is a daily voucher for 3 meals and a nightly reservation in a local shelter.

... economic implications (and they imediate social consequences)...

Honestly, what we need is something to translate between what an LLM can 'understand' needs to be done and the physical world.

Right now, we can ask an LLM what the process of, say, changing the oil in a car is.

We can also program an industrial robot to do that task, basically blind.

To automate jobs, we need an LLM style understanding of the task, and the steps required, coupled to the ability to take each of those steps and communicate it to a 'body', checking as it goes that the process is following correctly.

So, if an LLM could, say, break the problem into steps, taking into account the situation around it, it could probably do the job.

Imagine typing into Chat GPT a prompt like 'You are programming a robot arm. You need to pick up a glass. Write the code to pick up the glass in front of you. '

Then automatically send that to a camera/arm, and have the image processing describing back 'The arm is to the left of the glass by 2 inches', please program the arm to grab the glass.

'The glass has been knocked over to the left, and is now on its side, 4 inches in front of the hand. please program the arm to grab the glass'

Ultimately it would be more complicated than that, but I think that's the basic idea of what many researchers are working on moving forward.

With a feedback loop of video being able to 'describe' to the LLM what is happening, and the LLM adjusting to meet its task, you could have a very useful android.

There will be a core team of their best lawyers (honors exam lawyers) but the law firms & their consulting contracts will get a direct hit - so some employees of the law department. As of now purpose-trained Davinci reaches an accuracy about 75% the costly consultants had an accuracy about 80% (they actually measured it) ... 5% less accuracy (GPT 3.5) but much less cost. If GPT 4.0 is just a bit better it will change workspace forever. You are right it works better with people but you just need the elite of each department. This bank has like core team of 5 high paid syndicus lawyers and 30 contract lawyers from law firms. They will reduce their core team to 3 and cut the contract. Now interpolate this step to every bank in EU...

This is as much a spiritual question as a practical one, and it’s one I’ve pondered separately from anything to do with this community, but from the perspective of our economic system and the type of meaning that is considered to be meaningful by our society. AI or not, we need a radical re-thinking of our purpose in the universe and what it means to be human, to live a life, and to be happy. I think we will always find the means to give life meaning and purpose and give ourselves fulfilment and that will be a perennial issue for humanity, AI or not.

> Some of the big names in law business will vanish or massively reduce personel in the next years.

So there are two choices here

1. use AI to reduce costs, assuming AI are perfect
2. use AI to increase profits, assuming realistic AIs

You think 1 is more probable. I think people are still necessary to maximise profits. AI works better with people around.

>We don't need a superhuman thinking machine to do 99% of the tasks people want to automate. What we need is a slice of a 70IQ factory worker's brain that can do that one thing over and over again.

We need a better smarter search engine then? Something that can intelligently ingest and present information.

Hear hear! It’s the epitome of privilege when people come up with sci fi stories about how shitty a world without struggle would be. I don’t think anyone who isn’t in like the global top 5% economically could come up with such an absurd concept.

>I gave more than I took.

Human life is inherently selfish. Try to remember how many thousands of animals you fed upon to sustain your life.

as for point 3, most people do not achieve exceptional achievements. in fact for most of human history, people rarely invented or discovered new things, up until the renaissance/industrial revolution.

When ai is that capable we will be getting (but not yet) ready to explore space locally in our system with rockets that can make years of current travel in just months. At that point the natural declining birth rates will mean plenty of old people who don’t want robots helping them will want human care, as well as the importance of mathematics and basic education being less about grades and more about the learning process, we will be teaching more social and emotional education to bolster the lack of care we have been giving each other in this Industrial Age. This is needed for long space travel to be humanely feasible without the crews murdering each other since I doubt we will have cyrosleep down safe enough given the cellular damage that occurs, and the pressures of colonization of mars and Venus which will remain hostile environments for 100s of years until we perfect terraforming, will cause intense emotional and mental strain. Even with Ai, humanity will need each other to remain humane, and unless we want to strip earth to the core we will have limited resources that can be used in space so we are looking at probably 150-200 years before we even begin to colonize outside our solar system without spreading to thin. Of course my assumptions rely on ever changing information so this is just imho.

>But I really do believe we are less than 10 years away until AI outperforms humans also in the "subjective tasks".

By what metric?

> If we want effective automation or make general human tasks faster we certainly do not need AGI.

Agreed. We're very, very, close to this now, and likely very far away from AGI.

> If we want inventions and technology which would be hard for humans to come up with in a reasonable time frame, we do need AGI.

This is where we disagree. I have many contacts at universities, and most of my friends have a PHD and participate in some kind of research.

In their work, they were evaluating Watson (IBMs LLM style AI) years ago, and talking about how it would help them.

Having a PHD necessarily means having tunnel vision. You will do research that makes you the single person on earth that knows about the one cell you study, or the one protein you've been working with.

Right now, the condition of science is that we have all these researchers writing papers to help other scientists have a wider knowledge on things they couldn't possibly dedicate time to.

It's still nowhere near wide enough. PHDs aren't able to easily work outside their field, and the result is that their research needs to go through several levels of simplification before someone can find a use for it, or see how it effects their own research.

A well trained LLM can tear down those walls between different fields. Suddenly, you've got an infinitely patient, infinitely knowledgeable assistant. They can write code for you. You can ask it what effect your protein might have on a new material, without having to become, or know, a material scientist.

Everyone having a 'smart' assistant that can offer an expert level understanding of EVERY FIELD will bridge the gaps between the highly specialized geniuses of our time.

Working with the sort of AI we have now will take us to an entirely new level.

I know some people in a western EU country that train Davinci in order to reduce most of the personel in their legal department of their company and to eliminate contracts with big law firms. Mainly trained on employment law, financial law and EU regulations. The layoff / contract cancel will be between 2023/24. Its a big bank. Saved money from this is gigantic - especially from the big law firms that asked for exorbitant hourly wages in the past. From time to time this bank just offered law firm consultants better contracts because hiring certain people was cheaper than paying the law firms in question. Right now they want to get rid of them through AI. Things move faster behind the curtain than people see... Some of the big names in law business will vanish or massively reduce personel in the next years.

The economic implications of the destruction of capitalism got them spooked.

Yes, I mean more capable also in "subjective tasks" as you call it. I don't think there's anything 'magical' happening in our brains that couldn't be replicated in software and computer hardware. I wrote less than 10 years in the post and understand if people think we are farther away than that. But I really do believe we are less than 10 years away until AI outperforms humans also in the "subjective tasks".

Other than nuclear war or meteor strike I don't think so. There certainly exists the possibility that some major roadblock will arise in the future but, I think it is unlikely.

I respectfully am going with the opinions of those who have studied the effects of fallout and nuclear winter.

Yes we could have a large war without a nuclear exchange. That does not seem likely.

Do you genuinely believe that your built in drives have arisen spontaneously from your intellect? Your sense of fairness has evolved. If you didn’t have it you wouldn’t be able to exist in society and your fitness would be reduced.

Interesting perspective. Sounds somewhat like the argument alexiuss makes here in the thread as well - alexiuss doesn't care if 10 million people, or 1000, or no one reads their books. This sounds foreign to me, if I wrote a book I'd want as many as possible to read it. And certainly a great part of that wish is due to validation, that I want others to see me and think I did something good.

But even if you remove the validation, I'd still want to do something positive for the world even if only I knew I had done it. I foresee myself laying on my deathbed thinking back on my life. Did I make a positive difference? If the answer is only that I completed a difficult game, ran a marathon and learned to juggle then I will be disappointed in myself. If, on the other hand I built something that others can use, or helped someone - whether they know I did it or not - I will feel I contributed to the world and take comfort from it. So what I describe as "Fulfillment of purpose" is different from validation, even if I'll happily admit to also seeking validation.