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0 pointsAgebor6y ago0 comments

Even if we don't, the progress is not going to stop, for example on:

- lowering the price of each chip - you can get that by more automation.

- lowering the cost of energy used by a chip - you can have that by raise of renewable energy generation and its decentralisation (and again, more automation).

The point is that automation caused by AI will start a reinforcing feedback loop where more and more work can be done more cheaply, speeding up automation itself too.

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Barrin926y ago· 2 in thread

>The point is that automation caused by AI will start a reinforcing feedback loop where more and more work can be done more cheaply, speeding up automation itself too.

there isn't much evidence that AI has accelerated the rate of automation, and people have been saying this about information technology for the last 4 decades already. By any account, automation and growth contribution of the technologies are low by historical standards.

The primary mechanism that has kept Moore's law alive up until now is miniaturization of transistors and we're going to run into a wall on that front pretty soon.

K0SM0S6y ago

I will not counterargue your main point because this is indeed a matter of debate from a 'technical' standpoint.

However, in broader economic terms, I think the idea that AI may 'accelerate' the world in general is largely indirect: for instance, by saving time and money in other areas of life (because better tools, cheaper means, infra, etc), people become more able to perform their job. There are obviously diminishing returns to such optimization, as to any natural/economic process.

legulere6y ago

Automation also often means that useful jobs get turned into bullshit jobs, that stay there e.g. for political reasons, sometimes leading even to decreased efficiency.

bigred1006y ago

Yeah. Who knows how fast the growth is gonna be or how it’s gonna look but people are already working on eg communication-avoiding algorithms for matrix or tensor operations to work best in the new regime. I’m not an expert in this area but if you allow me to paraphrase of someone who is, one of the reason algorithms people have employment is that all of these things get redone over and over to exploit advances in hardware.

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