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rayiner 14 hours ago [-]
But this is a good thing for egalitarians. It offsets one of the most unfair aspects of the knowledge economy: that some people get to have much more fulfilling and remunerative careers than average people because they were lucky enough to be born smart.
PorciiVorbesc 13 hours ago [-]
It's actually the opposite. People who are "born smart", will leverage AI to get more knowledgeable even faster, use it to learn new things faster, use it to churn through data to find patterns and opportunities, and use it to do labor for them, so they can make even more money than those not born smart, who will just use AI to ask it what's 3x3 and if the earth is flat.
toasty228 11 hours ago [-]
Inequalities have been growing for a while now, either we have less and less smart people, or it just does not work like you think it works, probably because your take is super naive and barely scratches the surface of first order effects while ignoring everything else
PorciiVorbesc 10 hours ago [-]
>Inequalities have been growing for a while now
I never said it hasn't.
>either we have less and less smart people, or it just does not work like you think it works
How do you think I think it works?
All I said was that AI will increase inequality as smart people will use it as an amplifier of their skills and intelect to get wealthier. The rampant inequality we already had before AI is mostly due to government fiscal policies revolving around endless currency inflation increasing assets prices of asset holders while devaluing wages and savings of the working class, but this is a entirely different topic I didn't cover because I was only talking about what smart people will do with AI to get wealthier, the same way how home computers and the internet allowed smart people to become wealthier 20+ years ago. You then spinning this into some accusations I never said without a an argument to back it up, feels in bad faith and breaking HN rules.
Also, even smart people can also become/remain poor because it takes more than just raw intellect to get wealthy, even with AI, but in general, smart people are orders of magnitude more likely to become financially successful than dumb people, fact.
> probably because your take is super naive and barely scratches the surface of first order effects while ignoring everything else
Please, explain what you think my take and what I'm ignoring. Because i feel like you missed my point entirely and are going on tangents parallel mostly unrelated to what I said. Or do you enjoy throwing accusations in disagreement without a counter argument to back up your PoV?
ramesh31 7 hours ago [-]
You seem to think "being smart" will matter in a society which doesn't need the labor output of "smart people". You'll be lumped in with all the rest. Nothing will matter but who controls the capital now.
PorciiVorbesc 5 hours ago [-]
>You seem to think "being smart" will matter in a society which doesn't need the labor output of "smart people". You'll be lumped in with all the rest.
And you seem to think "being smart" just means being another replaceable college-educated white-collar corporate drone dependent on someone giving you the job you want, while mine and the general accepted definition of a "smart" person is one that can make their desired outcome happen regardless of circumstances, education and place of employment, and hence avoid being "lumped in with all the rest" because they always find a way out of any difficult situation to come out on top, both personally and financially.
Like a friend of mine without even a highschool degree became a tree surgeon and his business is making enough money now that rivals the rates of tech and finance bros in London. That's what being smart is. You adapt and find lucrative opportunities on the market.
> Nothing will matter but who controls the capital now.
When was this ever NOT the case? Without inherited generational wealth you're at the mercy of the capital/asset owning class to make a living.
bluefirebrand 4 hours ago [-]
> Like a friend of mine without even a highschool degree became a tree surgeon and his business is making enough money now that rivals the rates of tech and finance bros in London
Intelligent or "smarts" is not measured by how successful you are or how much money you make.
Also great for your friend, but no one would hire him to do that if machines could do it for them
> When was this ever NOT the case? Without inherited generational wealth you're at the mercy of the capital/asset owning class to make a living.
What are you talking about? The capital class always relied on the professional class just as much. A wealthy person who owns a machine shop relies on machinists to make money. :/
narnarpapadaddy 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but what if we are at the point we don’t need machinists any more?
The rich get richer, even if you’re enriched solely with an above-average intelligence. The bar for break even just moved up. If the US thought 13 million unemployed/underemployed people was problem, just wait until it’s 30 million. They could afford a 10% drag on the economy, who wants to bet they can double it to 20%?
kelseyfrog 13 hours ago [-]
It's actually the opposite and more complicated than that. AI-developed nootropics and germline editing will saturate human intelligence across individuals.
PorciiVorbesc 12 hours ago [-]
If only popping pills were the easy hack to people getting smarter.
That's like saying drinking coffee will make people go faster.
kelseyfrog 5 hours ago [-]
It's like saying anabolic steroids increase performance.
kunai 10 hours ago [-]
I really would like to know what kind of drugs they place in the Bay Area water supply that produce comments like this.
eli_gottlieb 2 hours ago [-]
If you find out, please let me know, because I feel like the filter in my pitcher isn't getting all of them.
whattheheckheck 12 hours ago [-]
And distribution and will to take bioenhancements is equal across all intelligences?
kelseyfrog 12 hours ago [-]
That is the null hypothesis, yes. Do you have evidence otherwise?
the_real_cher 12 hours ago [-]
A good portion of people hate A.I. and won't even use it...they won't use a computer program to enhance their intellience, much less taking a pill...
kelseyfrog 11 hours ago [-]
This is an inference, not evidence. It doesn't meet my epistemic standard necessary to reject the null hypothesis.
OrderlyTiamat 8 hours ago [-]
Good for you. But you introduced this statement:
> AI-developed nootropics and germline editing will saturate human intelligence across individuals.
This is a forum, not a Bayesian-updating machine. So common courtesy is for you to take up the burden of proof for your own statements. Why do you think this is the null?
TheCoelacanth 4 hours ago [-]
Not at all. It destroys the only aspects of the economy that don't simply hand everything to the people who were lucky enough to be born wealthy.
rayiner 3 hours ago [-]
Very little of the economy belongs to people who were "born wealthy." Most rich people these days come from upper middle class, cognitive elite families or small business owners, not generational wealth.
The most important number is that 50% of consumer spending is attributable to the top 10%. That's Google engineers driving up the price of everything from housing, to cars, to Disney World tickets. The income levels of this group has grown several times faster since 1970 than the median income. That directly hurts the middle class, which is out-competed for the same scarce resources.
TheCoelacanth 3 hours ago [-]
You just claimed that AI will eliminate the cognitive elite.
All that leaves is born wealthy and small business owners. The small business owners aren't going to last long if their only potential customers are the generationally wealthy and the working class.
lux-lux-lux 1 hours ago [-]
“Very little of the economy belongs to people who are ‘born wealthy.’ They’re actually just born into wealthy, connected families.”
eli_gottlieb 8 hours ago [-]
You mean, it proletarianizes yet another stratum of skilled laborer.
rayiner 8 hours ago [-]
Yes. People’s unhappiness about the economic trajectory since the 1970s is due principally to the growing divergence between skilled knowledge workers and everyone else. Normal people can’t afford a house in the middle class neighborhood where I grew up because it’s been overtaken by Google engineers, not “billionaires.”
eli_gottlieb 5 hours ago [-]
So you support a leveling-down measure?
copemaxxxing 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
kooi 2 hours ago [-]
The effect if LLMs is not linear. It's metaphorically x^2.
Smart people will be more effective. Average people will remain average. Dumb people will become dependent on it.
atoav 53 minutes ago [-]
How dependent you are and how much value you get out of it are not linked as a metric. You can be smart and get a ton of value out of it, yet still be entirely dependent on it. Just like a sporty person can be dependent on a car since running a marathon to work each day is illusionary.
I believe all people will become dependent on it. And then the rent will be jacked up. Everything else wouldn't fit with the dominant capitalist incentive to always maximize extraction and suffering.
the_real_cher 12 hours ago [-]
It seems to me that historically there was a high water mark for what people were able to accomplish on their own and all people, dumb to smart, fell somewhere at or below that high water mark.
My opinion is that our current generation of A.I. will just raise the high water mark for what's possible.
Until we have AGI, ASI, or Recursively improving AI....A.I. in it's current form is a tool that adds a constant to some peoples intelligence and an exponent to other peoples intelligence...and many people of all intelligences refuse to use it.
watwut 12 hours ago [-]
It was not meritocracy. And the thing that cane for whatever merit based advantages were was not AI, but capture of politics by moneyed interests.
K shaped economy is not result of AI.
vannevar 8 hours ago [-]
AI may be coming for meritocracy, but capital got there first.
I never said it hasn't.
>either we have less and less smart people, or it just does not work like you think it works
How do you think I think it works?
All I said was that AI will increase inequality as smart people will use it as an amplifier of their skills and intelect to get wealthier. The rampant inequality we already had before AI is mostly due to government fiscal policies revolving around endless currency inflation increasing assets prices of asset holders while devaluing wages and savings of the working class, but this is a entirely different topic I didn't cover because I was only talking about what smart people will do with AI to get wealthier, the same way how home computers and the internet allowed smart people to become wealthier 20+ years ago. You then spinning this into some accusations I never said without a an argument to back it up, feels in bad faith and breaking HN rules.
Also, even smart people can also become/remain poor because it takes more than just raw intellect to get wealthy, even with AI, but in general, smart people are orders of magnitude more likely to become financially successful than dumb people, fact.
> probably because your take is super naive and barely scratches the surface of first order effects while ignoring everything else
Please, explain what you think my take and what I'm ignoring. Because i feel like you missed my point entirely and are going on tangents parallel mostly unrelated to what I said. Or do you enjoy throwing accusations in disagreement without a counter argument to back up your PoV?
And you seem to think "being smart" just means being another replaceable college-educated white-collar corporate drone dependent on someone giving you the job you want, while mine and the general accepted definition of a "smart" person is one that can make their desired outcome happen regardless of circumstances, education and place of employment, and hence avoid being "lumped in with all the rest" because they always find a way out of any difficult situation to come out on top, both personally and financially.
Like a friend of mine without even a highschool degree became a tree surgeon and his business is making enough money now that rivals the rates of tech and finance bros in London. That's what being smart is. You adapt and find lucrative opportunities on the market.
> Nothing will matter but who controls the capital now.
When was this ever NOT the case? Without inherited generational wealth you're at the mercy of the capital/asset owning class to make a living.
Intelligent or "smarts" is not measured by how successful you are or how much money you make.
Also great for your friend, but no one would hire him to do that if machines could do it for them
> When was this ever NOT the case? Without inherited generational wealth you're at the mercy of the capital/asset owning class to make a living.
What are you talking about? The capital class always relied on the professional class just as much. A wealthy person who owns a machine shop relies on machinists to make money. :/
The rich get richer, even if you’re enriched solely with an above-average intelligence. The bar for break even just moved up. If the US thought 13 million unemployed/underemployed people was problem, just wait until it’s 30 million. They could afford a 10% drag on the economy, who wants to bet they can double it to 20%?
That's like saying drinking coffee will make people go faster.
> AI-developed nootropics and germline editing will saturate human intelligence across individuals.
This is a forum, not a Bayesian-updating machine. So common courtesy is for you to take up the burden of proof for your own statements. Why do you think this is the null?
The most important number is that 50% of consumer spending is attributable to the top 10%. That's Google engineers driving up the price of everything from housing, to cars, to Disney World tickets. The income levels of this group has grown several times faster since 1970 than the median income. That directly hurts the middle class, which is out-competed for the same scarce resources.
All that leaves is born wealthy and small business owners. The small business owners aren't going to last long if their only potential customers are the generationally wealthy and the working class.
Smart people will be more effective. Average people will remain average. Dumb people will become dependent on it.
I believe all people will become dependent on it. And then the rent will be jacked up. Everything else wouldn't fit with the dominant capitalist incentive to always maximize extraction and suffering.
My opinion is that our current generation of A.I. will just raise the high water mark for what's possible.
Until we have AGI, ASI, or Recursively improving AI....A.I. in it's current form is a tool that adds a constant to some peoples intelligence and an exponent to other peoples intelligence...and many people of all intelligences refuse to use it.
K shaped economy is not result of AI.