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180469761
comment
bysuntzu3000
8, 2025 @10:48AM
(#65886307)
Attached to: Sal Khan: Companies Should Give 1% of Profits To Retrain Workers Displaced By AI
> First off, we don't know if AI and robotics are going to cause even field specific unemployment.
We can be pretty sure that it will happen, because:
1. For most goods, there is a limit of how much of it is needed.
2. Automation will increase efficiency, so less workers will produce more.
3. Required amount of workers for certain good = [required amount of goods] / [amount of goods that single worker can produce with automation]
4. Even if we can invent new products, like hologram games, those products almost always compete with existing products. E.g. hologram games would just take customers from video games and cause unemployment there.
5. In some fields there will be temporarily need for more workers. E.g. health care should be one of these fields as demand increases because the amount of old people increases. But that is only temporary. In the long run, automation will cause unemployment.
I agree with you that retraining won't help much.
I think your reasoning is largely correct, however there are some goods or services we can consume much more of then we are currently. You are assuming demand will remain constant. Take for example healthcare, education and research. These areas are hard to saturate. (1) There are a bunch of medical conditions we don't have cures for yet, not to mention better preventative medicine and slowing or reversing natural aging (prologing life avoiding death). (2) There is already a huge body of knowledge for people to learn, much more than can be learned in one lifetime. We could spend much more of our lives (or even all) as students - generating demand for education. (3) There are many frontiers in science, math, philosophy and many other fields that could soak up a supply of new research efforts. While AI will obviously do the bulk of the work in these three areas, I'm not convinced we will get to a stage in the near future where humans are unable to make a net positive contribution to them.
That said, I think we're heading into a rough ride. While every generation has its novel challenges to face, this AI thing is an absolute curve ball. I'm not sure whether to envy or pity young people today.
180326677
comment
bysuntzu3000
7, 2025 @08:32PM
(#65842343)
Attached to: College Students Flock To A New Major: AI
It's definately helpful for machine learning folks to learn the classical statistical models and techniques (and terminology differences between the fields, in case you have to work with a stats major or read a stats paper), but stats models are quite different from machine learning models. The difference comes from whether or not you have to explain why the model works or whether it is enough for the model to perform well in testing. Statisticians insist on knowing the why and how - in machine learning its enough for it to get good results. Very few people (if any) know why ChatGPT works, even the best mathematicians get bogged down in unpacking the first transformer layer of the neural net, but there are like 10 of them and there are 10 feed-forward layers sandwiched in-between them. Each layer adds an exponential amount of complexity and changes everything. It wasn't "designed", it was discovered through trial-and-error - trying different things are seeing what worked - and then iterating on the best performing architectures. The algorithm evolved over time dating back to the perceptron of the 1970s and now its going to take over everything.
As for an 18 year old taking a degree in AI: I'm not so sure it's a good idea. By the time you graduate AI will be superhuman at AI research and will have taken your job before your first day. I feel a bit sorry for young people today, they are coming online into a world that's in a very weird state. I have no idea what advice to give them on what to study. Most leading AI experts say to take up a trade like plumbing, carpentry or electrician. These seem to be the last on the chopping block as manual dexterity seems to be the hardest problem for AI to solve (or humans are just very very naturally good at it for some reason).
180226209
comment
bysuntzu3000
27, 2025 @04:12PM
(#65821845)
Attached to: European Lawmakers Seek EU-Wide Minimum Age To Access AI Chatbots, Social Media
AI is very useful for education, in particular providing a private one-on-one tutor for every student on any subject. Just because one time (out of ~100 million) it encouraged a suicidal teenager to go through with it (rather than talking them out of it), doesn't mean we should deny an entire generation of children access to a better education. I'm sure in the 80s some kid used their new pocket calculator to do the accounts of their illegal drug business. It doesn't mean we should ban pocket calculators for children. Banning AI for children would do severe damage to the future competitiveness of your country, as your next generation is going to be less-educated than the next generation of the countries that haven't.
180210517
comment
bysuntzu3000
25, 2025 @06:27PM
(#65818011)
Attached to: AI Could Replace 3 Million Low-Skilled Jobs in the UK By 2035, Research Warns
The way the economy works is that everybody spends the majority of their time producing goods/services that they then trade with other people to get different goods/services. What happens when one person creates an army of robots that spends all day churning out those same goods/services, flooding the market with an abundance. There is no longer a need for everyone to spend the majority of their time producing goods/services, because the robot army has is already producing them all. But how does the guy with the robot army distribute those goods/services to everyone else (eg. so he doesn't get murdered by an angry mob). Why not just tax the guy 99% and divide up the cash into a universal income that people can use to buy the products/services from the robot guy? It's a little scary and weird that you only get your fixed universal income no matter how smart you are or how hard you are prepared to work, but if that universal income is high enough and you can afford all your needs/wants - then who cares? I think the problem is psychological. What we call today a "job" is what used to be called "wage slavery", and it wasn't considered a good thing.
180210331
comment
bysuntzu3000
25, 2025 @06:04PM
(#65817939)
Attached to: 'We Could've Asked ChatGPT': UK Students Fight Back Over Course Taught By AI
Answering questions, writing code, writing stories - are among the most basic use cases for AI and have already demonstrated to have been solved to superhuman levels (as in well-above average human ability) by todays systems. Every benchmark shows this very clearly. Gemini 3 scored nearly 50% on ARC-AGI-2 - please find out what this means. If you're not impressed then you are burying your head in the sand.
180191445
comment
bysuntzu3000
4, 2025 @03:59AM
(#65814705)
Attached to: 'We Could've Asked ChatGPT': UK Students Fight Back Over Course Taught By AI
as a rule content that is largely AI generated is not useful
Keep deluding yourself. If AI is not useful then why are trillions of dollars being invested in it? Or is your thesis that all the tech corporations in the world are idiots? If it hasn't massively increased your productivity then, sorry, but you ain't using it right.
180191425
comment
bysuntzu3000
4, 2025 @03:55AM
(#65814701)
Attached to: 'We Could've Asked ChatGPT': UK Students Fight Back Over Course Taught By AI
If we handed in stuff that was AI-generated, we would be kicked out of the uni, but we're being taught by an AI
The reason you need to do the work yourself is because the goal of education is for the student to learn. Using ChatGPT to write your essays is the same as plagarism. However, using AI to TEACH a course is completely different. The AI is taking the job of the teacher, just the same as AI will take all the jobs. Ultimately, what do you care if you learn from a human teacher or an AI teacher? If the teaching is the same quality, it should make no difference to you.
180092511
comment
bysuntzu3000
6, 2025 @01:27AM
(#65798353)
Attached to: Fear Drives the AI 'Cold War' Between America and China
The culture of Chinas AI firms seems to be to open-source everything on Hugging Face, which is really awesome. That's what OpenAI was supposed to be, but instead the american firms try to keep everything closed source, proprietary and for-profit. And you have the nerve to call Chinas AI "authoritarian" and the US one "free". You've very much got it backwards.
180059672
comment
bysuntzu3000
r 12, 2025 @09:12PM
(#65792086)
Attached to: AI-Generated Song Tops Country Music Chart
I just listened to the track. It's really good and it doesn't surprise me that it hit the top of the charts. Normal people don't care whether something is AI-generated or not - they only care about how good it is. The pop chart will be next.
179889324
comment
bysuntzu3000
8, 2025 @12:35AM
(#65754896)
Attached to: First Shape Found That Can't Pass Through Itself
Can a sphere pass through itself? If yes, how? If no, then why didn't they why doesn't it count as the first object that can't pass through itself? Or doesn't a sphere count for some reason?
179878176
comment
bysuntzu3000
2025 @02:44PM
(#65751872)
Attached to: Is AI Responsible for Job Cuts - Or Just a Good Excuse?
Horse breeders didn't vanish the moment the model T was put on the market. Horse breeding peaked 7 years after the model T was launched. The web took about 5 years to hit 100 million users after Netscape Navigator 1.0. In contrast, ChatGPT had 100 million users in 2 months, easily an all-time record. It's a revolution, and yes, its going to take all the jobs. Get over it.
179870066
comment
bysuntzu3000
25, 2025 @09:14AM
(#65749724)
Attached to: EA Partners With Company Behind Stable Diffusion To Make Games With AI
I think what would be more interesting than using AI to do the game development (which is already happening and not news) - would be to integrate AI into the games themselves. People are already experimenting with having AI control NPCs (think in a world-of-warcraft style open world game where you can have a real conversation and develop a relationship with the NPCs). LLMs are actually very well-suited for that sort of thing (Chatbots, like ChatGPT, are actually just fictional NPCs written by the foundation model of LLMs - see this paper).
179806554
comment
bysuntzu3000
16, 2025 @07:09AM
(#65728912)
Attached to: Western Executives Shaken After Visiting China
"Trust me, I'm from the future - you should move to Beijing.": YouTube Video - Looper
179423798
comment
bysuntzu3000
21, 2025 @03:21AM
(#65673872)
Attached to: Glitches Humiliated Zuck in Smart Glasses Launch. Meta CTO Explains What Happened
It's called the "demo effect", a special-case of Murphy's Law. I have no idea how Steve Jobs was immune to it.
179061314
comment
bysuntzu3000
07, 2025 @02:11AM
(#65644408)
Attached to: How Close Are We to Humanoid Robots?
The four-legged robot dogs make more sense.
I think I'd find it annoying to have an extra set of legs like a Centaur. The hind quarter would just get in the way most of the time, even though the extra stability would be useful in some situations - I suspect those situations would be in the minority. I think there is reason such things haven't evolved.
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