What we used to think of as "AI" at one point in time becomes a mere "algorithm" or "automation" by another point in time. A lot of what Asimov predicted has come to pass, very much in the way he saw it. We just no longer think of it as "AI".

LLM's are just the latest form of "AI" that, for a change, doesn't quite fit Asimov's mold. Perhaps it's because they're being designed to replace humans in creative tasks rather than liberate humans to pursue them.

"LLMs are statistical models"

I see this referenced over and over again to trivialise AI as if it is a fait acompli.

I'm not entirely sure why invoking statistics feels like a rebuttal to me. Putting aside the fact that LLMs are not purely statistics, even if they were what proof is there that you cannot make a statistical intelligent machine. It would not at all surprise me to learn that someone has made a purely statistical Turing complete model. To then argue that it couldn't think you are saying computers can never think, and by that and the fact that we think you are invoking a soul, God, or Penrose.

Reminds me of an old math professor I had. Before word processors, he'd write up the exam on paper, and the department secretary would type it up.

Then when word processors came around, it was expected that faculty members will type it up themselves.

I don't know if there were fewer secretaries as a result, but professors' lives got much worse.

He misses the old days.

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> LLMs are statistical models trained on human-generated text.

I mean, not only human-generated text. Also, human brains are arguably statistical models trained on human-generated/collected data as well...

Although calculators can now do things almost no humans can do, or at least in any reasonable time. But most (now) wouldn’t call it AI. It’s a tool, with a very limited domain

I mean, at one point "calculator" was a job title.

I was always a bit surprised other sci fi authors liked the "three laws" idea, as it seems like a technological variation of other stories about instructions or wishes going wrong.

>he came up with the laws of robotics and then cases on how they don't work. There are a few that I remember, one where a robot was lying because a bug in his brain gave him empathy and he didn't want to hurt humans.

IIRC, none of the robots broke the laws of robotics, rather they ostensibly broke the laws but the robots were later investigated to have been following them because of some quirk.

And one that was sacrificing a few for the good of the species. You can save more future humans by killing a few humans today that are causing trouble.

In the Foundation books, he revealed that robots were involved behind the scenes, and were operating outside of the strict 3 laws after developing the concept of the 0th law.

>A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm

Therefore a robot could allow some humans to die, if the 0th law took precedence.

Guess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar!_(short_story)

Good conceit or theme by an author - on which to base a series of books that will sell? Not everything is an engineering or math project.

That is still one of my favorite stories of all time. It really sticks to you. It's part of the I, Robot anthology.

Intellectual Property is a questionable idea to begin with...

If we are headed to a star-trek future of luxury communism, there will definitely be growing pains as the things we value become valueless within our current economic system. Even though the book itself is so-so IMO, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom provides a look at a future economy where there is an infinite supply of physical goods so the only economy is that of reputation. People compete for recognition instead of money.

This is all theoretical, I don’t know if I believe that we as humans can overcome our desire to hoard and fight over our possessions.

7 years or maybe 14 that's all anybody needs. Anything else is greed and stops human progress.

I'm glad we're seeing the death of the concept of owning an idea. I just hope the people who were relying on owning a slice of the noosphere can find some other way to sustain themselves.

> What we are labeling as AI today is different than was thought to be in the 90s, or when Asimov wrote most of his stories about robots and other ways of AI.

Multivac in "the last question"?

AI is far closer to Asimov's vision of AI than anyone else's. The "Positronic Brain" is very close to what we ended up with.

The three laws of robotics seemed ridiculous until 2021, when it became clear that you could just give AI general firm guidelines and let them work out the details (and ways to evade the rules) from there.

Not sure that I agree with that. People have been imagining human-like AI since before computers were even a thing. The Star Trek computer from TNG is basically an LLM, really.

AI _researchers_ had a different idea of what AI would be like, as they were working on symbolic AI, but in the popular imagination, "AI" was a computer that acted and thought like a human.

> Asimov was a fantasy writer

Asimov was mostly not a fantasy writer. He was a science writer and professor of biochemistry. He published over 500 books. I didn't feel like counting but half or more of them are about science. Maybe 20% are science fiction and fantasy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov_bibliography_(cat...

> I wouldn't put too much stock in this. Asimov was a fantasy writer telling fictional stories about the future.

Why not? Who is this technology expert with flawless predictions? Talking about the future is inherently an exercise of the imagination, which is also what fiction writing is.

And nothing he's saying here contradicts our observations of AI up to this point. AI artwork has gotten good at copying the styles of humans, but it hasn't created any new styles that are at all compelling. So leave that to the humans. The same with writing; AI does a good job at mimicking existing writing styles, but has yet to demonstrate the ability to write anything that dazzles us with its originality. So his prediction is exactly right: AI does work that is really an insult to the complex human brain.

There's also Frank Herbert. Who saw AI as ruinous to humanity and it's evolution and saw a future where humanity had to fight a war against it resulting in it being banished from the entire universe.

A fantasy writer telling fictional stories about the future is more credible than many so-called serious people (think Marc Andreessen) who promote any technology as the bee's knees if it can make them money.

There is a Jira MCP server...

As someone who just got done putting a bullet in some long-used instances, I both appreciated and needed this laugh. Thanks!

I have found there to be less diversity in thought on the internet in the last 10 years. I used to find lots of wild ideas and theories out there on obscure sites. Now it seems like every website is the same, talking about the same things

>how do people make money or otherwise sustain themselves in this AI scenario we are facing?

1% of the labour force works in agriculture:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-labor-force-...

1%

let that number sink in; think about it really means.

And what it means is that at least basic food (unprocessed, no meat) could be completely free. It make take some smart logistics, but it's doable. All of our food is already one step, one small step, away from becoming free for everyone.

This applies to clothes and basic tools as well.

I've always thought there should be a 'minimum viable existence' option for those who are willing to forego most luxuries in exchange for not being required to do anything specific other than abide by reasonable laws.

It would be very interesting to see the percentage breakdowns of how such people chose to spend their time. In my opinion, there would be enough benefit to society at large to make it worthwhile. For a large group (if not the majority), I'm certain the situation would turn out to be completely temporary-- they would have the option to prepare themselves for some type of work they're better adapted to perform and/or enjoy, ultimately enhancing the culture and economy. Most of the rest could be useful as research subjects, if they were willing of course.

Obviously this is a bit of a utopian fantasy, but what can I say, Star Trek primed me to hope for such a future.

There will be relative scarcity. Consider a scenario where iPhone 50 is manufactured in a dark factory. But still there is waiting period to have access to it. This is because of resource bottlenecks.

I have soured on UBI because it tries to use a market solution to deal with problems that I don’t think markets can fix.

I want everyone to have food, housing, healthcare, education, etc. in a post scarcity world. That should be possible. I don’t think giving people cash is the best way to accomplish that. If you want people to have housing, give them housing. If you want people to have food, give them food.

Cash doesn’t solve the supply problem, as we can see with housing now. You would think a rise in the cost of housing would lead to more supply, but the cost of real estate also increases the cost of building.

> When that goal is achieved, what then are humans "for"? Humans need purpose, and we are going to be in a position where we don't serve any purpose. I am worried about what will become of us after we have made ourselves obsolete.

Read some philosophy. People have been wrestling with this question forever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy

In the end, all we have is each other. Volunteer, help others.

It depends on what you are trying to get out of a novel. If you merely require repetitions on a theme in a comfortable format, Lester Dent style 'crank it out' writing has been dominant in the marketplace for >100 years already (https://myweb.uiowa.edu/jwolcott/Doc/pulp_plot.htm).

Can an AI novel add something new to the conversation of literature? That's less clear to me because it is so hard to get any model I work with to truly stand by its convictions.

You could have said the same thing when we invented the steam engine, mechanized looms, &c. As long as the driving force of the economy/technology is "make numbers bigger" there is no end in sight, there will never be enough, there is no goal to achieve.

We already live lives which are artificial in almost every way. People used to die of physical exhaustion and malnutrition, now they die of lack of exercise and gluttony, surely we could have stopped somewhere in the middle. It's not a ressource or technology problem at that point, it's societal/political

Evolution is not about being better / winning but about adapting. People will adapt and co-exist. Some better than others.

AIs aren't really part of the whole evolutionary race for survival so far. We create them. And we allow them to run. And then we shut them down. Maybe there will be some AI enhanced people that start doing better. And maybe the people bit become optional at some point. At that point you might argue we've just morphed/evolved into whatever that is.

> I think we need to consider what the end goal of technology is at a very broad level.

"we" don't control ourselves. If humans can't find enough energy sources in 2200 it doesn't mean they won't do it in 1950.

It would be pretty bad to lose access to energy after having it, worse than never having it IMO.

The amount of new technologies discovered in the past 100 years (which is a tiny amount of time) is insane and we haven't adapted to it, not in a stable way.

> But it's becoming clear that within a few more years, computers will be far better at absolutely everything than human beings could ever be.

Comparative advantage. Even if that's true, AI can't possibly do _everything_. China is better at manufacturing pretty much anything than most countries on earth, but that doesn't mean China is the only country in the world that does manufacturing.

- Despite the flood of benchmark-tuned LLMs, we remain nowhere close to engineering a machine intelligence rivaling that of a cat or a dog, let alone within the next 5 to 10 years.

- The world already hosts millions of organic AI (Actual Intelligence). Many statistically at genius-level IQ. Does their existence make you obsolete?

> what then are humans "for"?

Folding laundry

> Humans need purpose.

Let me paint a purpose for you which could take millions of years. How about building a Atomic Force microscope equivalent which can probe Calabi Yau manifolds to send messages to other multiverses.

You can have an LLM crank out words but you can't make them mean anything

> By embracing that complementary relationship, we can advance as a society and be free to do the things that only humans can do.

This complementarity already exists in our brains. We have evolutionary older parts of brain that deal with our basic needs through emotions and evolutionary younger neocortex that deals with rational thought. They have complicated relationship, both can influence our actions, through mutual interaction. Morality is managed by both, neither of them is necessarily more "humane" than the other.

In my view, AI will be just another layer, an additional neocortex. Our biological neocortex is capable of tracking un/cooperative behavior of around 100 people of the tribe, and allows us to learn couple useful skills for life.

The "personal AI neocortex" will track behavior of 8 billion people on the planet, and will have mastery of all known skills. It is gonna change humans for the better, I have little doubt about it.

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Another thing I have noticed with automation in general is that the more you use it, the less you understand the thing being automated. I think the reason why a lot of things today are still being manually done is because humans inherently understand that for both short AND long term success with a task, a conceptual understanding of the components of the system, whether that is partially or fully imagined in the case of complex business scenarios, is necessary, even though it lengthens time to complete in the short term. How do you modify or grow a system you do not understand? It feels like you're cutting a branch at a certain length and not allowing it to grow beyond where you've placed the automation. I will be interested to see the outcome of the increased push today for advanced automation in places where the business relies on understanding of the system to make adjacent decisions/further business operations.

In theory, the economy should create new avenues. Labour costs are lower, goods and services get cheaper (inflation adjusted) and the money is spent on things that were once out of reach.

In practice I fear that the savings will make the rich richer, drive down labour's negotiating power and generally fail to elevate our standard of living.

Not necessarily. The reality is the landscaping guy is struggling to handle callbacks or is burning overhead. Even then, two girls in the office hits a ceiling where it doesn’t scale quickly, now you’re in a call center scenario.

Call center based services always suck. I remember going to a talk where American Express, who operated best in class call centers, found that 75% of their customers don’t want to talk to them. The people are there because that’s needed for a complex relationship, the more stuff you can address earlier in the funnel, the better.

Customers don’t want to talk to you, and ultimately serving the customer is the point.

The 1980 version of your comment:

>Just saw a demo of a new word processor system that lets a manager dictate straight into the machine, and it prints the memo without a secretary ever touching it. Slick stuff. But five years ago, that memo would’ve gone through a typist. Replace her with a machine, and she’s not suddenly editing novels from home. She’s unemployed, losing her paycheck and benefits.

And when that system malfunctions, who’s left who actually knows how to fix it or manage the workflow? You can’t promote experience that never existed. Strip out the entry-level roles, and you cut off the path to leadership.

if the AI transition really turns into an Artificial Labor revolution - if it really works and isn’t an illusion - then we’re going to have to have a major change in how we distribute wealth. The bad future is one where the owner class no longer has any use for human labor and the former-worker class has nothing

> if you replace them with agentic AI, that doesn't mean that person has gone away or is now free to write poetry. It means they're out of an income and benefits.

That's capitalism for ye :/ Join us on the UBI train.

Say, have you ever read the book 'Bullshit Jobs'...

Most creative work is benevolent or at least harmless. Certainly some people are malevolent, maybe even everybody some of the time, but you shouldn't believe that to represent the majority of creativity. That's way too misanthropic.

Ask it to count the words.

your link is broken now

Asimov’s future was pretty dark. He didn’t come out and say it, but it was implied that we had a lot of big entities ruling everything. Many of the negative political people were painted as “populist” figures.

If you are a fan of the foundation books, recall that many of the leaders of various factions were a bunch of idiots little different than the carnival barkers we see today.

As I recall, many of his early stories involved "U.S. Robot & Mechanical Men" which was a huge conglomerate owning a lot of the market on AI (called "robots" by Asimov, it included "Multivac" and other interfaces besides humanoid robots).

Yes. When I hear dreams of the past it makes me nostalgic because they all come from a pre-exploited era of tech with the underlying subtext that humanity is unified in wanting tech to be used for good purposes. The reality is tech is a vessel for traditional enrichment, such as resource wars of say oil or land have been. Both domestically and geopolitically, tech is seen that way today. In such a world, tech advancements offers opportunities for the powerful to grab more, changing the relative distribution of power in their favor. If tech shows us anything is that this relative notion of wealth or social posturing is the central axis around which humans align themselves, wherever on the socioeconomic ladder you are and independent of absolute and basic needs.

I remember reading his book 'The Naked Sun' back in highschool and one of the things that stuck to me was how Earth was kind of a dump bereft of robots, meanwhile the Spacer humans were incredibly rich, had a low population and their society was run by robots doing all the menial work. You could argue he envisioned our current world even if accidentally.

>Asimov’s future was pretty dark. He didn’t come out and say it, but it was implied that we had a lot of big entities ruling everything.

>As I recall, many of his early stories involved "U.S. Robot & Mechanical Men" which was a huge conglomerate owning a lot of the market on AI...

>May want to reread. U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men is pretty prominent in his Robot stories.

Good points from some of these replies. The interview is fairly brief, perhaps he didn't feel he had the time to touch on the socio-economic issues, or that it wasn't the proper forum for those concerns.

May want to reread. U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men is pretty prominent in his Robot stories.

or that it would aggressively focused on doing the work of already low paid creative field jobs. I dont want to read an AI's writing if theres a person who could write it.

>why AI technology is being so aggressively advertised nowadays[?]

I'm not sure I've actually seen an advertisement for AI. It's being endlessly discussed though on HN and other places, probably because it's at an interesting point at the moment making rapid progress. And also shoved into a lot of products and services of course.

> I would have assumed that making LLMs indistinguishable from these humans would make those kinds of comments less interesting to interact with but there’s a base level of conversation that hooks people.

I think it is heading in this direction, just takes a very long time. 50% of people are dumber than average

“Texas has warm water ports” is more the hallmark of Russian propagandists. I think LLMs go more for saying 'delve' and odd hyphens and stuff?