There Gonna Be a Shortage of Everything

I’m somewhat bearish, but if AI becomes as good as some think, there is no mechanism in place to redistribute the outcomes.

For now, humans have leverage because our labour is necessary. Wealth is power, and currently attainment goes through interacting with the population: in the simplest case by selling shit. If AI turns out to be the anything machine, and the wealthy need not our labour, what honestly stops them from just taking our stuff by force?

> The AIs that took part in the Hugging Face hack were not simply finding a shortcut to cheat on the evaluations

IIRC, they were given an impossible task and told to solve it, and they took action to resolve that internal conflict.

This is a famously human problem too - see Kobayashi Maru [1] and others [2][3][4].

In hindsight it's obvious that instructions to AI (A. Intelligence) need to be guarded against this class of errors, just like laws, rules, guidelines etc. in human societies.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru
  [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22_(logic)
  [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot
  [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_standoff

There is plenty for all to survive and thrive on this planet but for greed and the insane concentration of wealth.

I'm not visualizing all those mega-yachts in heaven. Oops, wrong marina.

The representation of what happened as free will is misleading. AI does what you tell it todo. By all means necessary; will give you exactly that. A prompt to eliminate all humans, will give you exactly that. Don’t prompt what you don’t want.

I predict the opposite. With AI, labour costs will go down, creating an abundance of goods. Unemployment may be an issue, but the workforce is already declining because of the fertility crisis, so I think we'll manage having a certain percentage of jobs automated away.

"mass-production of humanoid robots is now inevitable in the next five years" My take? Probably not. It takes immense capital (which i guess, arguably, there is), and immense time and manpower to set up factories, research materials, Research and Development, manufacturing new machines to build the "new machines", and on and on. As Elon Musk found, "Making cars is hard". And my take is that high precision "humanoid robots" are decades away. Yes, yes, I hear the arguments flowing in: "But China!!" yeah, China is making humanoid robots that are "skilled" in running and jumping and dancing. In limited numbers, and certainly not useful in high precision manufacturing areas. Plus, they aren't washing machines. There has to be a market worldwide for these to be made "by the billions". Unless China gives them away, the 'average person' won't be able to afford them, and even then, I doubt they'll be capable of tending your garden and doing dishes. The amount of power they will consume is currently WAY PAST the usefulness criteria. They will have to be charged every few hours or sooner, depending upon the tasks. When battery technology comes around, then you'll see an uptick in practical uses. Until then? Billions of robots?, nope.

> the price of almost anything manufactured will sky-rocket. From cars to microwave ovens to washing-machines.

Don't think that quite follows. If we have an explosion in highly capable humanoid robots I would think basic stuff like microwaves would be more readily available because a factory running 24/7 at insane speeds is feasible.

...anything with more sophisticated computational power yeah that could become scarce

> Firstly we have seen unprecedented evidence of AI having a will of its own

There's certainly no shortage of people believing in AI hype.

I've quite dramatically brought my predictions for humanoid robotics forward over the last few weeks.

For a long time I thought decent humanoid robots were something that wouldn't come until maybe the 2040s, but watching some of the content from the Chinese robot olympics recently and seeing many promising robots projects which are incorporating LLMs has made question that.

It seems quite likely that within a few years we'll have humanoid robots both which have both the dexterity and intelligence layer to start being useful in the real world... Obviously at first they'll just be lifting things and doing other trivial physical tasks like folding clothes, but every year they'll be able to do a little and a little more.

I think it's now is quite likely that within a 10 years we could have extremely competent robots which can do most of human labour. 15-20 years just seems way too long at this point.

We haven't even started.

Ilya Sutskever: "I think it's pretty likely the entire surface of the earth will be covered with solar panels and data centers."

Absolutely hilarious, we already throw 25% of our food away and have renewable energy that we are post scarcity except for a few thousand people who really like seeing big numbers on a screen

"This time last year, it was still unclear if AI could develop their own free will or even have true fluid intelligence. Both of these questions are now clearly answered."

Hardly. The second question may be answered, but clearly not the first.

And: There's going to be a shortage of everything, because all the production of physical stuff is going to go into producing robots? Are we all going to buy these robots? How are we going to do so, if everything else is getting more expensive? Are we going to buy robots instead of everything else? Why? Are the robots going to do everything we want done, so that we don't need, for example, a dishwasher and a washing machine?

Or are we still going to need the washing machine, but the robot will fold the clothes? That's nice (really!) but it's a luxury, not a need. Are they really going to sell enough of them to eat into the ability to manufacture car parts?

Dystopian and depressing, but I see his point -- I never thought Trump could be elected president either.