Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history? It’s complicated

&gt; And one possibility might be that AIs could “improve themselves” to produce a single “apex intelligence” that would in a sense dominate everything else. But here we can see computational irreducibility as coming to the rescue. Because it implies that there can never be a “best at everything” computational system. It’s a core result of the emerging field of metabiology: that whatever “achievement” you specify, there’ll always be a computational system somewhere out there in the computational universe that will exceed it.<p>That tigers are stronger than wolves doesn&#x27;t prevent wolves from killing you.<p>Wolfram makes that class of error repeatedly. Another example: what prevents a system of ethics from being both Godel-incomplete&#x2F;inconsistent and at the same time encompassing everything in the realm of human experience?<p>&gt; For the first time in history, it’s become realistic to truly automate intellectual tasks. The leverage this provides is completely unprecedented.<p>The essay also mentions how humans are still the best at manual labor, and how government can work with humans directing the AI as it runs things every more efficiently. It doesn&#x27;t touch on <i>which</i> humans wield that leverage, naively assuming it&#x27;ll be all of us in a cozy democracy.<p>The author is too used to thinking from first principles and hasn&#x27;t studied enough human history to understand how leverage gets abused.

&gt; And one possibility might be that AIs could “improve themselves” to produce a single “apex intelligence” that would in a sense dominate everything else.<p>I worry about the opposite, at least in the early phase of AI.<p>There will be many AI instances&#x2F;variants in many hands, and they will be used in different ways. Companies will have their own for commercial needs, countries will have them for economy, defense purposes etc. Established countries will approach them conservatively, using them in an advisory role, rather than giving them direct access.<p>&quot;Rogue&quot; countries (think North Korea, Iran, maybe Russia) which are more accepting of risk might give their AIs a much more direct role, including building them right into the weapon systems. This can backfire spectacularly, but in some cases may be successful and provide the rogue country with an effective equalizer or perhaps even an edge. An obvious way to equalize this for &quot;non-rogue&quot; countries is to give their own AI more direct access to decision-making. In the end, we might end up with multiple AIs fighting for dominance, with humans on the sidelines.

Just for fun (and meta-analysis) I summarized this very long article using GPT-4:<p>In this blog post, Stephen Wolfram explores the complex issue of AI potentially taking over human jobs and its implications for human history. He argues that AI and automation have already begun changing the way we work, but this doesn&#x27;t necessarily spell disaster. Instead, AI may lead to a new era of human creativity and collaboration.<p>Wolfram discusses three main points:<p>AI will change the job market but not eliminate it entirely. Jobs will shift from routine tasks to more creative, strategic, and collaborative roles. AI can augment human abilities, allowing us to focus on more high-level thinking and problem-solving.<p>Society will need to adapt to these changes, redefining the concept of work and focusing on education that fosters creativity and adaptability. It&#x27;s essential for governments, educators, and employers to come together and create the necessary infrastructure to support this transition.<p>AI will not mark the end of human history, but rather the beginning of a new chapter. As we adapt to these changes, we will redefine our roles in society and collaborate more closely with AI. This will lead to new opportunities and potentially more fulfilling lives for many.<p>In conclusion, Wolfram contends that AI is a powerful tool that can revolutionize the way we work and live. Rather than fearing its potential to displace jobs, we should embrace the opportunities it offers and work together to ensure a successful transition into a new era of human-AI collaboration.

There&#x27;s no question that AI will take jobs in the coming years. It might not be today, or tomorrow, but it&#x27;ll happen gradually over time. People who waive it off as &quot;GPT isn&#x27;t even that good,&quot; fail to realize that it&#x27;s not up to them as workers to decide if the AI is better than them, or even competent for that matter, it&#x27;s the employer&#x27;s decision.<p>Corporations will not care if GPT&#x27;s output is sub-optimal compared to humans, if the output is just decent enough to the point it can be improved by a small focused team of humans, and done faster at a fraction of the cost.<p>Hypothetically: If I can hire 2 people alongside AI to do the same work it would take 10 people, or even 3 people, and have it finished in a fraction of the time it would normally take, why would I hire&#x2F;keep them, ethics? moral values?<p>Corporations primary objective is profit and growth. And while some companies pride themselves on how well they treat employees, or being sustainable, most aren&#x27;t like that, especially in countries like America.<p>In the future, we&#x27;ll see it spread more and more to other job sectors: education, health, finances, retail, marketing... it won&#x27;t just stay confined to tech and content creation, and it&#x27;ll only be limited by it&#x27;s inability to interact with the physical world directly (manual labor,) at least while robotics is in its infancy.<p>I by no means am saying that everyone will lose their jobs, and especially not tomorrow. But there will be a gradual change to both our work life, and our personal (content we consume, how we interact with others, the internet, everything...) over the next few decades.

I think what many smart people do not understand is that AI (even in the weak or non-general sense) is coming for the jobs of <i>smart</i> people first. AI is not coming to take the non-knowledge worker jobs first.<p>Also, I am skeptical that LLMs are going to take anyone&#x27;s job. I think they will make jobs easier. AGI might take people&#x27;s jobs, but we are a long way from that.

GPT et al are piggybacking on human knowledge in a sense, by using the &quot;predict the next word&quot; method of encapsulating intelligence. But this method of learning imposes a ceiling on the level they can reach - that of the material they are able to train with. They can achieve extraordinary breadth of knowledge from the vast corpus of human written text, but in order to exceed human intelligence in &quot;height&quot;, they will need to work directly with nature, as humans do. This, it seems to me, will be where some new ideas will be needed.

&quot;But for computational systems... there’s my Principle of Computational Equivalence—which implies that all these systems are in a sense equivalent in the kinds of computations they can do.&quot; Am I missing this, or is he restating the Church-Turing thesis but taking credit for it himself?<p>I hope not. But Wolfram had been accused of this sort of thing before, see e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;quant-ph&#x2F;0206089" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;quant-ph&#x2F;0206089</a>

In all likelihood it will accelerate the monopolization built into our current system, so some Rockefela is about to emerge, that owns it all. With a private public plaza on which the bots sing him praises and any discussion on change is drowned out by machine generated dissent. So, the situations vectors are already there, just the speed will increase.

or will it prove to be useless at everything... except showing us how many jobs that exist these days are bullshit jobs that can be done just as well by a machine with no understanding... David Graeber would love it as a bullshit job detector

It already has been. Just not yours yet. And you didn&#x27;t care about it. And there&#x27;s no reason for the puppet masters to care about you. Pick your own lithium ore or go extinct. It&#x27;s not too late though. Will you start caring about other people? and the planet perhaps?

&gt; [T]echnology is about taking what’s out there in the world, and harnessing it for human purposes.<p>Technology is indeed about transforming existing nature into utility and producing waste thrown back into nature.<p>Knowing what we know about current terrifying climate and ecological breakdown, it&#x27;s astonishing that Wolfram doesn&#x27;t include it in any way in his visions. Even at the current pace nature regenerates far too slow to withstand this &quot;progress&quot;, let alone in the visions in this article.<p>New technology is a choice to destroy nature for utility. Are we sure that utility is worth it?

In there is a note that Wolfram is working on, or at least thinking about, the big unsolved problem - useful robots. Robot manipulation in unstructured situations is still very poor. But maybe someone will figure out a way to apply newer machine learning techniques to that. Google had a research group working on that, but they haven&#x27;t been heard from in years.<p>The approach of the large language model, where you have a huge training set of general purpose info and a small prompt for the current task, might possibly work.

&gt; And one possibility might be that AIs could “improve themselves” to produce a single “apex intelligence” that would in a sense dominate everything else. ...there can never be a “best at everything” computational system. It’s a core result of the emerging field of metabiology...<p>This is a straightforward implication of algorithmic information theory but I don&#x27;t think it is an accurate representation. I&#x27;m not sure where &quot;metabiology&quot; fits into it. Tractability of approximating optimal (&quot;apex&quot;) intelligence depends on significant specialization in the patterns discernible by induction. As a consequence, every pure AI will be blind to some relatively trivial patterns and relationships in the environment. However, one could use high-order induction to combine differently specialized induction, a bit like a random forest, to create robust resistance to being blind to many trivial patterns. At sufficient scale, the differences between such inductive approximations will be indistinguishable for all practical purposes.<p>That aside, there seems to be subtle conflation between &quot;computation&quot; and &quot;AI&quot; going on here. Are we talking about &quot;best at computation&quot; or &quot;best at AI&quot;? These aren&#x27;t the same thing.

As often with Stephen Wolfram&#x27;s writings, I found the ideas to be too sparsely located in a very long essay so I didn&#x27;t read it whole, but a thought on the question : Machines Vs Human Jobs has always been a question of competitive advantage inside a growing economy. Did some machines become better than humans at doing some physical labour? The human labour gets replaced in that area, but these replaced workers can get other jobs because they&#x27;re still better than machines at thinking, and the economy expands to create new thinking jobs.<p>Nowadays, with AIs becoming better than humans at thinking in many areas, one could think these humans could go work in other thinking areas, or could use their time to care for other humans , but this is not possible : indeed if there&#x27;s no job destruction, only machine work + human work instead of just human work, it means the economy expands. Alas, the economy is constrained by energy input, which reached a peak in 2008 (cf what Jancovici says), so it cannot expand anymore.<p>So to me, having AI alone, or AI-boosted workers, doing the job of 10s of other workers, will destroy jobs, irrecuperably.<p>The real question will then be, how to give all these jobless people both means of living (redistributing wealth) and dignity (a place&#x2F;utility amongst others).

Robert Miles has a useful video discussing some common arguments against being concerned about developments in AI:<p>10 reasons to ignore AI safety: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;9i1WlcCudpU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;9i1WlcCudpU</a><p>I&#x27;ve seen and heard many of these refutes the last few days in response to both Eliezer Yudkowsky&#x27;s disturbing Bankless podcast: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lesswrong.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;Aq82XqYhgqdPdPrBA&#x2F;full-transcript-eliezer-yudkowsky-on-the-bankless-podcast" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lesswrong.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;Aq82XqYhgqdPdPrBA&#x2F;full-trans...</a> and the release of GPT-4.<p>What I like about Mile&#x27;s video is that he explains so of the specific alignment problems in a detail that is easy for me, as a non specialist, to understand. Videos such as:<p>Why Would AI Want to do Bad Things? Instrumental Convergence: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZeecOKBus3Q">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZeecOKBus3Q</a><p>and Mesa-Optimizers and Inner Alignment: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;bJLcIBixGj8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;bJLcIBixGj8</a>

A bigger question for me isn&#x27;t whether AI will take our jobs but whether we&#x27;re actually looking at the next step in human evolution.<p>It&#x27;s fun to ask a GPT to generate images that never existed or passages of text that are compelling.<p>What happens though when this is applied to DNA?<p>Can we rank human DNA by the strengths &#x2F; weaknesses of its creation and then ask it to combine physical strength with human intelligence? Can we then mix in the traits of animals to give these humans superior eyesight or to see colour spectrums outside our current abilities, and to somehow effectively print a new breed of human?<p>Perhaps the threat of AI doesn&#x27;t lie inside a machine, but here in the real world.<p>It&#x27;s crazy to think, but play this out and &quot;AI&quot; may indeed take your job.

How&#x27;s his &quot;I solved physics&quot; from a few years ago going these days?

proposing a new law, looking for a name...<p>&quot;every 18 months the IQ required to destroy humanity goes down by 1&quot;

Wolfram&#x27;s thesis seems to hinge on the fact that current AI systems (for example GPT) have no volition of their own. It seems to be in mankind&#x27;s interest that this remain the case - but there is likely a ceiling beyond which volition of some sort is required (scientific discovery for example). On the other hand, maybe humans can always provide that volition through some kind of prompting. Who knows?

All these GPT articles and comments are going to age so quickly. I finished writing my YA Sci-fi book only a month ago. I already accounted for ChatGPT which appeared during the week I was finishing the novel and put back its release a few months. I&#x27;m almost afraid to write the follow up novel as events are moving quicker than my imagination.

The article is lengthy and has many novel points. It&#x27;s a mix of staking the ground, advertising his work and legacy, and whispering to those that might be able to contribute. The gpt4 summary below and one I tried (after bing refused on copyright grounds) miss or invent many of the points.

The article is lengthy and has many novel angles. It&#x27;s a mix of staking the ground, advertising for his work and legacy, and whispering to those that might be able to contribute. The gpt4 summary below and one I tried (after bing refused on copyright grounds) miss or invent many of the points.

I think it&#x27;s a yes and a no thingy. During the dotcom bubble, we all thought we were going to lose our jobs, however, we later found a way to integrate ourselves into the system. We did the same when TV, camera, and cars were introduced.

We have been just hours away from a general purpose AI (and fusion power, and a large scale quantum computer and flying cars...) for about 20 years now. I only need a job for a few more decades. So I am not too worried.

It will take as many jobs as it will create. But ideally, it will create a compelling argument for things like basic income, improved access to healthcare, and so on - primarily to keep society growing and moving.

I&#x27;ll just become a contractor that does physical work: plumbing, construction, woodworking.<p>Maybe even farming and raising stock. I used to love those freshly laid eggs from that same day.

Well, my take is that ... it will not. Somehow, we human can blend into anything.

15,000 words