Maybe a better framing would be the economic perspective from Hanson’s growth paper: “is AI a complement or is it a substitute?” Does AI assist a human worker (or a human organization), making them more productive, functioning as simply a kind of tool (or ‘capital’) which multiplies their labor; or does it replace that human worker/organization? When it’s the former, it may indeed take a very long time; but the latter can happen instantly.
No one can force a freelance artist to learn to use Photoshop or how to best use some snazzy new feature, and artists will be learning the ins-and-outs of their new technologies and workflows for many decades to come and slowly becoming more productive thanks to their complementing by digital illustration tools. Whereas on the other hand, their employers can replace them potentially in minutes after the next big Midjourney upgrade.*
More historically, in colonization, a group of settlers may simply arrive literally overnight in their wagons and set up a new town (eg. a gold rush boomtown), and begin replacing the local indigenous peoples, without any sort of centuries-long gradual ‘+2% local per capita GDP growth per year until convergence’ using only the original local indigenous people’s descendants.
* A personal example: when I wanted more fancy dropcaps for Gwern.net, I was contacting human artists and trying to figure out how much it would cost and what the workflow was, and how many thousands of dollars & months of back-and-forth a good dropcap set might cost, and if I would have to settle for instead something like 1 custom dropcap per essay. When Midjourney became reasonably adequate at v5 & DALL-E at 3, I didn’t spend decades working with artists to integrate AI into their workflow and complement their labor… I substituted AI for artists: stopped my attempt to use them that night, and never looked back. When I made 10 dropcaps for this year’s Halloween theme (the ‘purple cats’ got particularly good feedback because they’re adorable), this is something I could never do with humans because it would be colossally expensive and also enormously time-consuming to do all that just for a special holiday mode which is visible a few hours out of the year. At this point, I’m not sure how many artists or font designers I would want to use even if they were free, because it means I don’t have to deal with folks like Dave or have one of my projects delayed or killed by artists, or the hassle of all the paperwork and payments, and I get other benefits like extremely rapid iteration & exploration of hundreds of possibilities without wearing out their patience etc.
IMO, a lot of basic cruxes for differing views on the impact of AI in the 21st century ultimately depend on the question “Can AI be a substitute for the majority of economically relevant tasks a human does, and then become a substitute for any new industry?”
If the answer is yes, a lot of the more radical worldviews become on the table. If the answer is no, then I’d probably agree with a lot of the more moderate views on AI impacts.
Indeed, I’d argue AI as substitute for basically all human tasks that are relevant to the economy should replace the AGI notion often flown around, since it’s more clear and provides less opportunities for motte and balieys and other bad arguments often thrown around.
Maybe a better framing would be the economic perspective from Hanson’s growth paper: “is AI a complement or is it a substitute?” Does AI assist a human worker (or a human organization), making them more productive, functioning as simply a kind of tool (or ‘capital’) which multiplies their labor; or does it replace that human worker/organization? When it’s the former, it may indeed take a very long time; but the latter can happen instantly.
No one can force a freelance artist to learn to use Photoshop or how to best use some snazzy new feature, and artists will be learning the ins-and-outs of their new technologies and workflows for many decades to come and slowly becoming more productive thanks to their complementing by digital illustration tools. Whereas on the other hand, their employers can replace them potentially in minutes after the next big Midjourney upgrade.*
More historically, in colonization, a group of settlers may simply arrive literally overnight in their wagons and set up a new town (eg. a gold rush boomtown), and begin replacing the local indigenous peoples, without any sort of centuries-long gradual ‘+2% local per capita GDP growth per year until convergence’ using only the original local indigenous people’s descendants.
* A personal example: when I wanted more fancy dropcaps for Gwern.net, I was contacting human artists and trying to figure out how much it would cost and what the workflow was, and how many thousands of dollars & months of back-and-forth a good dropcap set might cost, and if I would have to settle for instead something like 1 custom dropcap per essay. When Midjourney became reasonably adequate at v5 & DALL-E at 3, I didn’t spend decades working with artists to integrate AI into their workflow and complement their labor… I substituted AI for artists: stopped my attempt to use them that night, and never looked back. When I made 10 dropcaps for this year’s Halloween theme (the ‘purple cats’ got particularly good feedback because they’re adorable), this is something I could never do with humans because it would be colossally expensive and also enormously time-consuming to do all that just for a special holiday mode which is visible a few hours out of the year. At this point, I’m not sure how many artists or font designers I would want to use even if they were free, because it means I don’t have to deal with folks like Dave or have one of my projects delayed or killed by artists, or the hassle of all the paperwork and payments, and I get other benefits like extremely rapid iteration & exploration of hundreds of possibilities without wearing out their patience etc.
IMO, a lot of basic cruxes for differing views on the impact of AI in the 21st century ultimately depend on the question “Can AI be a substitute for the majority of economically relevant tasks a human does, and then become a substitute for any new industry?”
If the answer is yes, a lot of the more radical worldviews become on the table. If the answer is no, then I’d probably agree with a lot of the more moderate views on AI impacts.
Indeed, I’d argue AI as substitute for basically all human tasks that are relevant to the economy should replace the AGI notion often flown around, since it’s more clear and provides less opportunities for motte and balieys and other bad arguments often thrown around.