Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R&D
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12 Comments
techpineapple
Does anyone else find techno-optimism really depressing? I guess one for the more common reason that it’s displacing humanity with technology, but the second reason is just you can’t get excited about a hype that is unlikely to manifest.
It feels very ungrounded from tangible benefits to society.
AndrewKemendo
This is exactly correct technically and perfectly on the existing “paved path” of technology determinism.
My company is actively in the process of demonstrating the “Learning machine” which is a Weiner style cybernetic system of systems
It’s unquestionable at this point that machines will displace all human labor where labor efficiency is the key factor for investment/use. Start with transfer learning from existing human machine interfaces and then expand to onpolicy with human feedback to SARSA.
The only remaining question is the persistent one “who benefits”
Almost nobody is working on what to do after
getnormality
This article lost all credibility with me here:
> …this means that only 20% of labor productivity growth in the US since 1988 has been driven by R&D spending! Capital deepening accounts for around half of labor productivity growth in this period…
This is like saying that Jeff Dean's net worth is attributable not to his programming skills, but to the capital deepening of his bank account. The authors are working with concepts at a level of abstraction where they've lost contact with what they're saying.
mooreds
If you haven't read this classic about technology deployment from 2015, it's worth a read.
https://reactionwheel.net/2015/10/the-deployment-age.html
Feels like we're still in the exploration phase of GenAI, but ML seems like it is in the deployment phase.
klooney
A lot of the people writing are in the US, which mostly does R&D and services- broad automation of production is likely to be invisible here.
mirekrusin
So they are arguing which one will get more benefits first – r&d or general automation? What is the point in arguing around it?
Disconnect between progress being done (ie. alphafold) and trying to infer answer from some historic stats on r&d investment, ratios, their past estimated impact etc. is… just weird.
It's also funny that the whole ai itself together with constant breakthroughs is r&d.
godelski
This is a bit silly. It is equivalent to saying "most food will come from tractors, not land." There is some truth to this, but you really can't have one without the other. The whole system is interconnected.
The problem with all these jabs at R&D and science is not recognizing that R&D and science produce the very foundations that lead to the ability to do production in the first place. I'm certainly not saying we should dump all our money into R&D, but I do find it weird that others talk as if the ground you stand on doesn't matter. You literally cannot stand without it. The truth is that you need both. I suspect why we shy away from R&D is for 2 big reasons.
First, it has a lot of failure. The hardest thing about doing research is being able to stick with it when 90% of what you do doesn't work. It's fucking hard. But of course it is. If it was easy it would have already been done. So returns on the work can take a lot of time and the visibility of the failure is emotionally draining to those without enough resilience.
Second, we do not accurately capture nor ascribe the value nor of research. People who create ground breaking scientific revolutions that create the capacity for trillion dollar markets never end up with 1% of the result of their work. You don't see Tim Berners-Lee being a billionaire, nor Linus Torvald. You didn't see it in Einstein and cases like Turing are quite common through history. Certainly this is an alignment issue as we as a society should be encouraging such pursuits as their benefits vastly outweigh anything that has been done by Apple or Google. Not to diminish their achievements, they have both done fantastic and incredible things, but do they not sit on the foundations created by Turing, Burners-Lee, Hopper, and others. Or look even today, the work done by LeCun, Sutskever, Karpathy, Fei-Fei Li, Hinton, and yes, even Schmidhuber has created more than a few dozen multi-billion dollar enterprises. Yet as far as I am aware, not a single one of them is a billionaire. I do not believe (I could be TOTALLY wrong) their combined net worth is a billion. Even if it was, that would be a far cry from what many of the mogul we see today. Do we really think Zuckerberg has created more value than these people? Certainly this is entirely dependent upon your definition of value and I think most of use could agree that it would be incredibly naive to believe this exclusively means the money in their pockets. If you really do believe that, I will say that you're part of a problem. Money is a proxy, sometimes we need to stop and think "a proxy for what?"
akomtu
If we discovered a civilization of moderately smart pandas living on a remote planet and dropped the AI technology onto them, what would happen to their civilization? And what's our motivation?
callamdelaney
Obviously?
The US pays $12,000,000,000,000~ in salaries per year the TAM of automation is, assuming that 10% of work can be automated, $1.2 trillion dollars.
bashfulpup
Very typical SV argument that R&D is "complex" and everything else is "simple".
Would it blow your mind if I told you 10yrs ago that we'd have AI that can do math/code better than 99% of humans but ordering a hotdog on doordash would be cutting edge and barely doable?
I don't disagree that "common" tasks are more valuable. I only argue that the argument these are easily automatable is a viewpoint based on ignorance. RPA has been around for over a decade and is not used in many tasks. AI is largely the same, until we get massive unrestriced access to the data for it we will not automate it.
Brysonbw
This is an interesting take and I think it could possibly be true (at this moment in time). Likewise, only time will tell…
stego-tech
It's the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions all over again. Broad automation of labor will not result in societal uplift, but Capital uplift, absent worker action to enforce equal distribution of gains (like how Unions brought us the 40hr work week and the end of Child Labor w/ the Industrial Revolution). Worse yet, the irrationality of these techbro arguments shows their complete lack of long-term thinking or systems analysis.
They cite "societal disruption" through the wholesale (or significant) replacement of labor via AI, but then shrug off the problem as one for government to solve – governments they own, control, and/or influence. Yet if we take them at their word and they get rid of labor – who the heck do they expect to buy their stuff, and with what income? Capital's plan is very much (Eliminate Labor) + (Continued Sales of Products) = (We Keep All The Money), and I'd like to believe the HN community at the very least can see how that math does not work.
Capital would have to concede to a complete rework of civilization away from consumption and towards a higher goal, but that would entail tearing down the power and wealth structures they benefit from now with no guarantee of a brighter future tomorrow. Plowing ahead with AI while prohibiting any attempts at systemic revolution isn't just irresponsible, it's insane, and I'm tired of having pretend it's not for the sake of a stock price somewhere.
Present systems are incompatible with an AI-dominated future, full stop.