<story><title>Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history? It’s complicated</title><url>https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/will-ais-take-all-our-jobs-and-end-human-history-or-not-well-its-complicated/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mLuby</author><text>&amp;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.&lt;p&gt;That tigers are stronger than wolves doesn&amp;#x27;t prevent wolves from killing you.&lt;p&gt;Wolfram makes that class of error repeatedly. Another example: what prevents a system of ethics from being both Godel-incomplete&amp;#x2F;inconsistent and at the same time encompassing everything in the realm of human experience?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; For the first time in history, it’s become realistic to truly automate intellectual tasks. The leverage this provides is completely unprecedented.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;t touch on &lt;i&gt;which&lt;/i&gt; humans wield that leverage, naively assuming it&amp;#x27;ll be all of us in a cozy democracy.&lt;p&gt;The author is too used to thinking from first principles and hasn&amp;#x27;t studied enough human history to understand how leverage gets abused.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>slowmovintarget</author><text>The worst part of this is we haven&amp;#x27;t produced intelligence. We&amp;#x27;ve produced very good autocomplete. There&amp;#x27;s no motivating force governing what it spits out, or what inputs it takes in, short of the people prompting or training it.&lt;p&gt;That means it can only do as it&amp;#x27;s told, and not what is meant by what it&amp;#x27;s told, and that class of errors, when executed with high efficiency and sophistication, makes all sorts of bad things happen.</text></comment>
<story><title>Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history? It’s complicated</title><url>https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/will-ais-take-all-our-jobs-and-end-human-history-or-not-well-its-complicated/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mLuby</author><text>&amp;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.&lt;p&gt;That tigers are stronger than wolves doesn&amp;#x27;t prevent wolves from killing you.&lt;p&gt;Wolfram makes that class of error repeatedly. Another example: what prevents a system of ethics from being both Godel-incomplete&amp;#x2F;inconsistent and at the same time encompassing everything in the realm of human experience?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; For the first time in history, it’s become realistic to truly automate intellectual tasks. The leverage this provides is completely unprecedented.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;t touch on &lt;i&gt;which&lt;/i&gt; humans wield that leverage, naively assuming it&amp;#x27;ll be all of us in a cozy democracy.&lt;p&gt;The author is too used to thinking from first principles and hasn&amp;#x27;t studied enough human history to understand how leverage gets abused.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ly3xqhl8g9</author><text>15,687 words in that article and none of them are &lt;i&gt;wisdom&lt;/i&gt; or &lt;i&gt;metaphysics&lt;/i&gt;. As long as we won&amp;#x27;t have a change in our metaphysics (assigning value and deriving meaning from &amp;#x27;having a job&amp;#x27; and so on), and we still proud ourselves in being &amp;quot;jobs creators&amp;quot; [1], it&amp;#x27;s all for nothing, i.e., more shareholder value.&lt;p&gt;Because of our current metaphysics, instead of living in a world in which we just can&amp;#x27;t wait and go full throttle towards a future in which AIs take all the jobs, we fear and dread even the minor but very plausible day in which narrow AI will do the &lt;i&gt;trivial&lt;/i&gt; task of driving autonomously all the vehicles on all the roads, because that would imply that 200+ millions of jobs will disappear as if they never were.&lt;p&gt;[1] &amp;quot;Last May, Samsung outlined a plan to pour more than $350 billion into its businesses and create tens of thousands of new jobs through 2026&amp;quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;edition.cnn.com&amp;#x2F;2023&amp;#x2F;03&amp;#x2F;15&amp;#x2F;tech&amp;#x2F;korea-chips-investment-hnk-intl&amp;#x2F;index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;edition.cnn.com&amp;#x2F;2023&amp;#x2F;03&amp;#x2F;15&amp;#x2F;tech&amp;#x2F;korea-chips-investme...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>