If your reference class is “integrating a new technology into the economy”, then you’d expect AI integration to unfold over decades.
…But if your reference class is “integrating a new immigrant human into the economy—a human who is already generally educated, acculturated, entrepreneurial, etc.”, then you’d expect AI integration to unfold over years, months, even weeks. There’s still on-the-job training and so on, for sure, but we expect the immigrant human to take the initiative to figure out for themselves where the opportunities are and how to exploit them.
We don’t have AI that can do the latter yet, and I for one think that we’re still a paradigm-shift away from it. But I do expect the development of such AI to look like “people find a new type of learning algorithm” as opposed to “many many people find many many new algorithms for different niches”. After all, again, think of humans. Evolution did not design farmer-humans, and separately design truck-driver-humans, and separately design architect-humans, etc. Instead, evolution designed one human brain, and damn, look at all the different things that that one algorithm can figure out how to do (over time and in collaboration with many other instantiations of the same algorithm etc.).
How soon can we expect this new paradigm-shifting type of learning algorithm? I don’t know. But paradigm shifts in AI can be frighteningly fast. Like, go back a mere 12 years ago, and the entirety of deep learning was a backwater. See my tweet here for more fun examples.
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.
Worldwide sentiment is pretty against immigration nowadays. Not that it will happen, but imagine if anti-immigration sentiment could be marshalled into a worldwide ban on AI development and deployment. That would be a strange, strange timeline.
Does the median immigrant ‘integrate into the economy’ to any notable extent in months or weeks?
I can easily imagine someone with already a high rank, reputation, merit, etc., in their home country doing so by say immigrating and quickly landing a job at JP Morgan Chase in a managing director position and proceed to actually oversee some important desk within a short timeframe.
But that is the 99.99th+ percentile of immigration.
How does this relate to the degree of integration into an economy?
You can eat just fine in any developed country via picking up odd jobs here and there. But clearly a managing director at JP Morgan overseeing an important desk is at a qualitatively different level.
Okay, I don’t understand what do you mean by “degree of intergration”. If we lived in a world where immigrant could have “high degree of intergration” within months, what would we have observed?
Seconding quetzal_rainbow’s comment. Another way to put it is:
If your reference class is “integrating a new technology into the economy”, then you’d expect AI integration to unfold over decades.
…But if your reference class is “integrating a new immigrant human into the economy—a human who is already generally educated, acculturated, entrepreneurial, etc.”, then you’d expect AI integration to unfold over years, months, even weeks. There’s still on-the-job training and so on, for sure, but we expect the immigrant human to take the initiative to figure out for themselves where the opportunities are and how to exploit them.
We don’t have AI that can do the latter yet, and I for one think that we’re still a paradigm-shift away from it. But I do expect the development of such AI to look like “people find a new type of learning algorithm” as opposed to “many many people find many many new algorithms for different niches”. After all, again, think of humans. Evolution did not design farmer-humans, and separately design truck-driver-humans, and separately design architect-humans, etc. Instead, evolution designed one human brain, and damn, look at all the different things that that one algorithm can figure out how to do (over time and in collaboration with many other instantiations of the same algorithm etc.).
How soon can we expect this new paradigm-shifting type of learning algorithm? I don’t know. But paradigm shifts in AI can be frighteningly fast. Like, go back a mere 12 years ago, and the entirety of deep learning was a backwater. See my tweet here for more fun examples.
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.
Worldwide sentiment is pretty against immigration nowadays. Not that it will happen, but imagine if anti-immigration sentiment could be marshalled into a worldwide ban on AI development and deployment. That would be a strange, strange timeline.
Does the median immigrant ‘integrate into the economy’ to any notable extent in months or weeks?
I can easily imagine someone with already a high rank, reputation, merit, etc., in their home country doing so by say immigrating and quickly landing a job at JP Morgan Chase in a managing director position and proceed to actually oversee some important desk within a short timeframe.
But that is the 99.99th+ percentile of immigration.
Most people need to eat something [citation needed] and it’s hard to eat if you don’t work.
How does this relate to the degree of integration into an economy?
You can eat just fine in any developed country via picking up odd jobs here and there. But clearly a managing director at JP Morgan overseeing an important desk is at a qualitatively different level.
Okay, I don’t understand what do you mean by “degree of intergration”. If we lived in a world where immigrant could have “high degree of intergration” within months, what would we have observed?