Why would I hire Alice to work for 4 days a week when Bob is willing to work for 5 at the same price (assuming both are equally productive, even if AI has made that productivity extremely high)? So long as there is an oversupply of qualified workers, I doubt working hours will change. To do so would require social contract changes like for the standard 40-hour work week.
My expectation is that the social contract will change if most labor can be performed autonomously.
The question for me is whether only software engineering or white-collar work is affected, forcing us into different labor.
If instead most labor is affected, I am confident we will figure out a new social contract. Contrary to what some pessimists seem to believe, I very much doubt the evil elites are working towards a largely unemployed and poor population.
I could imagine that the norm will be two days of work per week, with five days off.
> My expectation is that the social contract will change if most labor can be performed autonomously.
Before the industrial revolution, 80-90% of society worked in the fields, in agriculture. It would have been a quite obvious prediction to say that once machines can do most of that work, people would just have a lot of free time and hardly work anymore. Look how that turned out.
I'd therefore be skeptical of predictions saying we'll all work less. 40 hours a week were a thing 100 years ago when productivity was much lower, and it has not changed since.
A much closer analogy than the pen one is a SAAS company having an EULA. As annoying as EULAs are I don’t think it counts as being malicious or subversive if you are very open and clear with your prospective customers what that EULA contains?
Seconded. I truly consider that podcast a gem of our culture. I know of no comparable resource for generally curious people willing to try and think deeply about things.
The “recursive” part comes from the fact that you have an AI which was developed by an AI (that was developed by an AI (that was developed by an AI (…)))
Sounds like "recursively" walking to the grocery store by putting one foot in front of the other (that put itself in front of the other (that put itself in front of the other (...)))
Less bad, yes. But still bad. There will definitely be demand for the compute, the question is whether it will be enough to keep the value of it at the levels you’d expect if the tenants were in a monopoly/duopoly world. Competition puts downward pressure on margins and that’d translate into pressure on data center leases.
100%. I have sometimes wondered if China is playing the long game with the open weight models trying to tank the margins of the US labs so these profits don’t materialize and the US economy (currently predicated on the net that they will) suffers. I think this is a coherent strategy beyond just “don’t let the US control AI as a strategic asset.”
I think the point is probably to help convince people that the watermarking doesn’t perceptibly impact quality, which is a concern some people have (whether well founded or not).
Yeah, I hated all those Quora users that would just spew out semantically meaningless slop like increasing an important bound for the Riemann hypothesis.
Everyone decides what to think on this issue, then finds out facts to support their idea.
As it stands they are massively useful tools, but for generating usable products they require either A) a lot of expert steering or B) a well defined easily verifiable target and a large compute budget. Most people are using them in mode A with good effect, the progress on math has been done in mode B, which is very promising.
Just a year and a half ago their maximal use was rephrase, summarize, and homework-level tasks.
Five years from now? There be dragons.
"But are they generally intelligent?" What a meaningless question!
Five years ago they were a niche toy for generating plausible text for entertainment. I was using one. It was an amazing party trick. Now they're popular toys thanks to their ability to entertain CEOs, and they can maintain coherence longer thanks to KV caches and more compute, and someone slapped a chat interface on top, but they're fundamentally the same.
Not meaningless because part of the discussion is the issue of anthropomorphizing this tech. When we use language like “intelligent” it carries hints of personhood. People begin sadly treating these things as persons.
We can reap the benefits while clearly telling the consumer this is just a language algorithm.
They need him to continue evangelizing how to get a single individual to burn $87k/month so the corporations who have to actually pay usage pricing will actually make them bank :)
I don’t know that I’d call it that much of an outlier position. Compatibilists, functionalists, and plenty of physicalists in general would deny that qualia exist or that they’re a well-defined notion.
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