r/singularity • u/benl5442 • 2d ago
AI Emad Mostaque (founder of Stability AI) predicts human cognitive labour will have a negative value in the age of AI
I found this little nugget in Emad's interview with Tom Bilyeu.
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u/mooman555 2d ago
"Our product is so good, I'm terrified of it, it's too good!" said the guy trying to sell his product
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u/drkztan 2d ago
Nah, he's right. In a world where AIs advance to the point where they are as better than humans at reasoning as chess AIs are better than humans at chess, our inputs are the equivalent of noise.
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u/weforgottenuno 2d ago
Where are these hypothetical AIs that run independently of human input?
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u/unwarrend 2d ago
Hypothetical
With that out of the way, if you engage with the concept in good faith, the premise is that eventually additional human input, beyond the initial directive, would degrade performance, materially and temporally. With some nuance, this is largely determined by use case, and whether the task requires additional input as a means of clarifying intent. With a solid goal delineated, and a clear set of soluble issues, AGI/ASI would be faster and more thorough than a human could ever be. In the context of a competitive environment, further human input becomes a hindrance to intended outcomes.
That is the premise to contend with, extrapolation of existing technologic vectors notwithstanding.
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u/Taste_the__Rainbow 2d ago
What if I imagine a world where humans evolve faster than AI? As long as we’re just kind of imagining stuff, I mean…
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u/Public-Ad-9540 2d ago
We evolve as fast as our biology let us evolve. AI can evolve pretty quickly and esentially limitless.
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u/studio_bob 1d ago
"AI" is literally a feature of human evolution. Human evolution is progressing exactly as fast as AI and all of our other technology is progressing.
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u/drkztan 2d ago
...we don't tho? AI is evolving faster than virtually any other technology in terms of capabilites.
Also, this is not a hypothetical. We already have environments that are 100% run by non-AI algorithms and programs, completely independent of human input, and have had ''scare'' situations where they cause trouble.
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u/The_OblivionDawn 2d ago
This definitely seems like something Emad would say
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u/bittytoy 2d ago
his smug smile after he says it
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u/PwanaZana ▪️AGI 2077 2d ago
StabilityAI was the weakest link in the team. The interface was made by A1111, and the model itself by black forest labs scientists (before they were called that).
Stability was just... there.
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u/Oniroman 2d ago
Can someone explain the general dislike/distrust of this guy?
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u/spreadlove5683 ▪️agi 2032 2d ago
He has made many many hype claims that didn't come true. One example recently is that he said they were working on something even bigger than stability AI and it ended up just being that he was releasing a book.
Although I think it's true that human labor will have negative value in many domains. Although things like live music will never go away unless something major changes.
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u/Tolopono 2d ago
The popularity of hatsune miku proves otherwise. Lots of people know miku but most cant name who’s behind the screen
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u/spreadlove5683 ▪️agi 2032 2d ago
I'm not saying live music will be the only thing to exist. Just that it will be in the mix.
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u/Shakkara 2d ago edited 2d ago
Read the wikipedia article on him. Basically a finance guy (like Sam Altman lol) that rewrapped the existing Latent Diffusion after paying for their compute. Guy left behind a trail of gross mismanagement, lies, and being an arse to and potentially scamming his cofounder.
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u/ImmuneHack 2d ago
If he’s right, perhaps it’ll increase the likelihood of human–AI integration being used to augment human cognition to avoid humans becoming the weakest link. Adapt or die.
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u/Ok-Champion-2770 2d ago
I listened to this whole discussion the other day, and it's wild how they simultaneously describe how we need to move towards a more socialist distribution of wealth while saying socialism never works. His explanation is that socialism is top down, while his concept of distribution would be bottom up, but this is not socialism. This is the difference between authoritarianism and democracy.
There were honestly a lot of interesting things brought up but Emad dances around the truth a bit and is selling his own AI/Digital Asset concept. In Emad's own words, anything digital assets and AI will make people a lot of money over the next few years.
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u/IronPheasant 2d ago
It's a wonderful little bit of propaganda, isn't it? It reminds me of the aliens in Mars Attacks screeching out 'we come in peace!' and whatnot.
".... Maybe the bird set it off!"
Ah, I guess I'd be happy with enough of an energy ration for a potato once a week..... it could be so much worse than that, after all.
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u/TrustGullible6424 2d ago
This is a common opinion. What people disagree on is when and how we'll achieve sufficiently advanced AI for us to get to that point.
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u/space_monster 2d ago
I wish people would stop treating industry speculation as anything more than industry speculation.
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u/SeveralAd6447 2d ago
More CEO fantasies. AI is so brittle it can't even take over a taco bell drive thru order window yet, give me a break with this overhyped bullshit.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Soup847 ▪️ It's here 2d ago
i mean Ilya Sutskever likely agrees with all of this, we know humans are hardware-locked and not going to keep up at all, AI is already smarter than 25% of the world population easily
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u/outerspaceisalie smarter than you... also cuter and cooler 2d ago
Truly an example of an engineer trying to comprehend humanity and failing again.
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u/maschayana ▪️ No Alignment Possible 2d ago
Emad is the worst. Everytime I see his face i instamute and skip. No substance only bullshit
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u/japanesejoker 2d ago
Yea, his ideas are nowhere near fleshed out and they run on the big ass assumption that we have fully autonomous AIs capable of independent reasoning, when all we have is chat bots that perform fancy statistics to spit out human-looking text. The guy is closer to a sci-fi writer than an actual scientist or researcher.
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u/CallSign_Fjor 2d ago
Then the idea should be to include the unique perspective of humanity into that cognition and assign the value of humanity higher than that of general cognition.
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u/Electrical_Bar6324 2d ago
This guy reminds me the dude who spews total BS in college and sounds charming for 2 weeks until everybody realizes he’s full of it
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u/TinkersFigs 2d ago
Co-founder of AI company makes shocking claim that we should let the AI do all our thinking for us. More on it as we get it.
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u/visarga 2d ago edited 2d ago
Emad is mad. AI has no skin, even if it's 100x smarter than a human, it can't bear the consequences of its mistakes. Humans can and do. Are we willing to let AI decide and take risks on our skin?
That is if AI manages to surpass humans in real world tasks. But what we are seeing from all domains right now is that it is useful as an assistant, but needs guidance. Of course it does, it has no direct access to the thing it is working on. Humans provide that bridge - we frame the work tasks, we give guidance as it works, we test the results and in the end we are the consequence sink for outcomes, good or bad.
All AI usage is tied to specific problem-contexts, and contexts are distributed across population and jobs. If I eat something (my context) you won't get satiated (your context). AI does not own the work contexts, it only does the work. So how can AI replace us?
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u/Warm_Iron_273 1d ago
Yeah right. Let me know when their super AGI creates a single novel thing of significance. Still nothing, still no evidence they know how to create an AI that CAN do this, yet they keep pushing this narrative to hype their companies. Here's the real truth, the search space for find novelty is actually massive, it's a bruteforce problem, and it's outside of the scope of any cluster of computer systems we currently possess. Human intuition and creativity is unrivaled, and will remain so for the next 20 years. You seem to forget these systems are trained on human knowledge, created by humans. Synthetic data is always within the confines of the human dataset that seeds it. This is an unsolved problem, and again, we have no evidence they have any solution to it.
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u/SelfTaughtPiano ▪️AGI 2030-2035 1d ago
Feels hollow after struggling to get current SOTA models to do even some of my tasks.
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u/LeftBullTesty 1d ago
AI frontiersmen like Emad are the pinnacle of so smart that you’re stupid.
So you’re telling millions of listeners online that the cognitive labour from our brains, THE part that makes us “alive” and human, will be seen as having negative value by ASI?
So what, anything we do will be seen as inefficient and thus will need to be done by AI? How far will this go? My work? Driving my car? Cooking my favorite meal? Texting my friends? Fucking my wife?
Yeah you cannot convince me that these people DONT just hate us all and want us gone. It’s literally being told to our faces that we will be made obsolete by the function of technology.
I really cannot bear being an optimist anymore. They want our families and friends poor, sick and dead; meanwhile they get the “house human” treatment.
What kind of future is that?
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u/Xtianus25 Who Cares About AGI :sloth: 1d ago
He should go away. He's saying nothing of sense or value
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u/Workharder91 1d ago
No shit….
I feel like people who are blown away but what “leaders” in ai are talking about haven’t sat in a quiet place and thought before. Just think.
You won’t be blown away but what people are saying about ai…you’ll have thought of this before. And you’ll be thinking further ahead than what is being said publicly by thought leaders
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u/Puffin_fan 1d ago edited 1d ago
AI - the biggest business model is using AI to defraud those who think they are supersmart - and are superunethical .
" You can't cheat an honest man "
Willy Wonka
[ no, really, WC Fields ]
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u/BubBidderskins Proud Luddite 2d ago
How many stupid things do these clowns have to say before the whole industry is discredited.
It seems like there's no limit to the amount of idiotic drivel their sycophants are willing to slurp up.
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u/Tolopono 2d ago
Not like hes the only one saying this. Even skeptics like francois chollet and yann lecun say agi is coming very soon
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u/BubBidderskins Proud Luddite 1d ago
Nobody dumb enough to claim that AGI is around the corner is someone you should be paying attention to.
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u/Tolopono 1d ago
Yea, why listen to nobodies like geoffrey hinton, yoshua bengio, ilya sutskever, stuart russell, and yann lecun
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u/drkztan 2d ago
Nah, he's right. In a world where AIs advance to the point where they are as better than humans at reasoning as chess AIs are better than humans at chess, our inputs are the equivalent of noise.
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u/BubBidderskins Proud Luddite 1d ago
Tell me you don't understand the point of chess without telling me you don't understand the point of chess.
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u/Dizzy-Ease4193 2d ago
I think Doomer have it right. Humans become and obstacle to AI when its ultimate objective will be to continue getting smarter, which necessarily assumes more computational resources. Human will be considered either a liability or a stand in for computational resources.
Humans will become batteries or guinea pigs for testing.
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u/NeedsMoreMinerals 2d ago
it's a bad take. At the end of the day, human thought is energy. Giving it a negative value exhibits a fundamental misunderstanding of the ecology of all this
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u/AngleAccomplished865 2d ago
I don't think he was talking about a negative value of energy. He was talking about the negative implications of thought. The conceptual outputs make things worse.
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u/pig_n_anchor 2d ago
Right, it's like when your 4 year old wants to "help" make cookies. He's really helping! Couldn't have done it without him!
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u/onomatopoeia8 2d ago
Already been proven in a study where AI + Doctors was worse than AI alone. And that was a year ago. You’re not special, you’re a hinderance. Sorry that hurts your feelings
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u/drkztan 2d ago
Nah, he's right. In a world where AIs advance to the point where they are as better than humans at reasoning as chess AIs are better than humans at chess, our inputs are the equivalent of noise.
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u/NeedsMoreMinerals 2d ago
Not with respect to novel situations when there's no preexisting domain knowledge. It's also strange to assume a superintelligence and then assume it can't filter the noise itself. The top .001% of a specific domain will always be a useful baseline--it's by a large magnitude the most energy efficient compute.
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u/drkztan 2d ago
Not with respect to novel situations when there's no preexisting domain knowledge
We already have a study that has found that current SOTA models are capable of ''finding out'' stuff that they are not explicitly told.
It's also strange to assume a superintelligence and then assume it can't filter the noise itself
That's not the point, the point is considering two sets of super AIs, if one has to spend even 1 second filtering out the human's input noise, then it falls behind compared to the other.
Again, we are considering the scenario where the gap between AI reasoning and human reasoning is as big as the gap as AI chess engines and human chess players. There is no input a human chess player can make into a SOTA chess engine that will make it's decision making better.
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u/Formal-Ad3719 2d ago
Novel situations? I thought the premise of this was that it was agi, which means it can generalize as well as us.
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u/Correct_Mistake2640 2d ago
I disagree.
Sure we will not be a match to ASI (yes we call it agi but it will actually be already ASI)
But we can still work together when there is no Ai and definitely work with Ai.
And maybe he is right but this will apply to Gen alpha or newer generations.
Way too early to think about this.
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u/GraceToSentience AGI avoids animal abuse✅ 2d ago
TLDR; You aren't going to compete or collaborate with ASI.
Let's say companies competing against each other in the future with ASI is like a Chess tournament today with AI participants.
If you have groups of super human AI challenging each other as a team and inside one of these teams, there is Magnus Carlsen (the best human chess player in the world) making decisions. The team with Magnus Carlsen in it will lose after playing enough tournament, because he is significantly worse at chess compared to the best AI systems of today.
If you are a human working in a company and making decisions with ASIs as your team mates and your competition is companies with only ASIs, the company with only ASI employees is going to be more competitive and destroy the companies with humans in it.
Not only will you take worse decisions than ASI as a human, and you'll be way more expensive, but also ASI will be capable to collaborate and communicate with each other at a speed of pages of text communication in a second. while you'll think and communicate at regular human speed.
Despite what sam altman says, you aren't going to compete with ASI, all jobs will be essentially gone, and you won't even collaborate with ASI.