Why is uncertainty about the motives of one form of superintelligence terrifying, whilst, at the same time, uncertainty about the motives of another, omnipotent supernatural intelligence comforting? i.e. the “I don’t know God’s plan, but I sleep well knowing He has one” line of reasoning.
AI isn't (for the foreseeable future) a superintelligence, certainly not one with its own motives.
Right now AI exists to do two things:
- sidestepping legal and regulatory inconveniences like copyright (which drives a massive chunk of investment the same way crypto did by sidestepping financial regulations, AirBnB did by sidestepping housing regulations, Uber did by sidestepping passenger transport regulations and it and the various delivery and other "gig work" apps did by sidestepping labor laws)
- drastically reducing the cost of (and drastically lowering the bar in terms of skillset and effort for) churning out large amounts of low to medium quality assets/code, saturating various systems designed to pay for intellectual property (e.g. ad or subscription based music/video streaming apps with revenue sharing programs, but also literally any form of digital contract work at almost any scale of business)
Neither of these are helping people (in general) and in fact they're extremely destructive (or "disruptive" if you want to make it sound positive) to the existing systems society relies on because they became feasible and (thanks to massive private subsidies, aka "investments", by VC firms and extremely creative accounting) very affordable extremely quickly.
What's worse - while it seems extremely likely that most of the AI generated "works" aren't actually considered copyrightable works by law and it's entirely possible that the use of copyright-protected works in training data does in fact not violate copyright, this does not in fact create a "world without copyright" because IP laws continue to exist and continue to apply, they just no longer meaningfully protect creative labor (i.e. anyone whose profession relies on producing works, whether that's an artist or a programmer) because anything they produce can be cheaply mass reproduced while they still have to stay clear of claims of anyone with enough funds to enforce rights against them.
Under the current economic system there are exactly four ways to earn money to buy back a share of society's resources to sustain your own life (let alone that of your dependents, e.g. kids or aging/impaired parents/spouses/family members):
1. Simple labor: you generally get paid based on your output or a very low flat day rate conditional to maintaining a measurable level of performance. This is typically "low-skilled" menial production labor. Much of this has been replaced by automation in factories and offices alike and most of what couldn't be automated has been moved into countries with fewer labor protections and a higher supply of desperate people willing to accept what are often bad working conditions because cost of labor is usually one of the biggest contributor to overall production cost. In "the West", this kind of work is now scarce and even when it's relatively safe it's often exhausting and unrewarding. A traditional example would be a seamstress or factory line worker, a more modern example would be someone working in visual effects overseas or content moderation / AI training. How much money you can make is ultimately limited by the physical limitations of how much output you can produce per waking/working hour. For the entrepreneurial-minded this would also include people selling their home-made goods on sites like etsy.
2. Time-based: this can be anything from a masseuse to a lawyer or technician. Unlike simple labor the only relevant metric here is time spent. Although employment contracts may specify a fixed wage or at least a fixed component, the understanding is still that this fixed amount is conditional to a minimum average amount of billable time provided. Most employment contracts specify an expected number of working hours for various reasons but we're specifically talking about jobs where the output from the worker to the customer is "billable time". Arguably most service work (e.g. barristas, store clerks, waitresses, performers/mascots in amusement parks) also falls into this category because while customers often don't directly pay for access time the understanding is that you are paid to perform a certain role for the duration of the opening hours (i.e. act like a friendly, welcoming host or assistant). How much money you can make is directly tied to how much time you can spend working or justify billing.
3. Assets: you produce or buy works/products and lend/license them for use. This is in part where a lot of the original "gig work" lived (e.g. facilitating "couch surfing" or renting out your spare lawnmower) but also includes many simple rental businesses and arguably also landlords. The limiting factor here is the starting capital required to produce or buy things in the first place. Physical assets often also come with storage and maintenance overhead whereas software licensing often comes with expectations of continuing maintenance updates or improvements. Note that software inherently lives in this category rather than the first because unless you're selling away exclusive rights (such as usually required by the terms of employment contracts for wage labor) you only ever sell licenses, not the software itself.
4. Capital: although I said landlords arguably belong in the previous category, real estate traders/investors definitely belong in this one. The idea here is that you don't need to produce anything, you don't need to spend certain amounts of time, you don't need to produce or buy anything substantial and facilitate its use, you make your money entirely in the abstract. Whether it's margin trading, investing in derivatives or holding company stock until you sell it when the line has gone up far enough. The easiest way to make signficant amounts of money reliably is to start with many orders of magnitude more than what you want to make so that percentile gains are still significant - or that you can make enough risky high-risk high-reward bets for the occasional successful moonshot to offset the losses. Nowadays in many countries retirement funds are tied to the stock market, so in a way most people participate in this in some way but actually earning an "income" this way requires access to significant amounts of capital.
Advances in technology and especially low cost of transport and thus access to cheap labor overseas have significantly drained the ability for most people to earn their living via category 1. While there was a short-lived boom in "DIY retail" that one (alongside much of traditional retail) has largely been drowned out by white label dropshipping thanks to the disinterest from platforms like Amazon which are now flooded by nearly identical copies of the same knock-off doodads you can also find on Temu and Alibaba (respectively at decreasing fractions of the price).
Despite some astroturf campaigns trying to sell you on believing otherwise so they can run away with your money after the next cryptocurrency rugpull, category 4 isn't really a meaningful option for the vast majority of people although it can sometimes be a good way to slowly grow excess wealth (i.e. money you don't currently need and ideally can afford to lose) - but that still narrows it down to a small segment of the overall population.
Category 2 used to be a jumping off point to category 3: you work overtime, save up the extra income to buy or rent a studio or office or equipment or factory, or to be able to afford to take some time off to develop and launch your own asset (or SaaS) - it's how many startups with technical founders started out and it's literally the "American Dream". But hourly wages have mostly stagnated (or even decreased) relative to the rising cost of living (even more so if you include expenses expected to "participate in society", which naturally also often increase with the income bracket of your peer group - or the parents of your kid's peer group if you have kids).
And now AI is coming along and just like cheap white label dropshipping of knock-off goods turned out to be the more successful strategy for taking advantage of the technological innovations believed to make it easier to launch your own physical products (via 3D printing, cheap overseas sourcing of parts, online advertising, etc), AI has turned out to be the more successful strategy for taking advantage of platforms and schemes marketed as making it easier to launch your own digital services - in addition to completely eliminating the market for paid "just good enough" quality digital assets, such as the kind of work found on sites like Fiverr or Upwork, i.e. the kind of work that often provided early experience to professionals not yet qualified or confident enough to take on higher paid work.
PS: All of this is inevitable and perfectly fine. But the same economic system that sustains and demands this development also can not function if all of these jobs and opportunities go away because the attitude towards labor has evolved in such a way that unemployment is at the same time widespread and often impossible to avoid (although it's worth pointing out that a pool of unemployed "reserve labor" is already required for a healthy economy under this system) while also being seen as a personal moral failing that needs to be urgently remediated by the affected individual alone and where any failure to accomplish this compounds on the original sin of being laid off or denied. If society provided free unconditional access to all necessities like housing, food, healthcare and education to everyone, mass elimination of the need for labor might be extremely beneficial. Alas that's not the attitude to humanity currently on the rise so the rise of AI will likely either make a lot of people's lives a lot worse, or it will end with an economic bubble bursting and making most people's lives much worse.
PPS: Another aspect worth mentioning is that the low cost and easy access of mass producing "custom" content using AI has drastically increased the amount of attempted fraud and scams - the technological precedent here would be email compared to paper mail and spam/phishing has been a problem for a long time and never really went away because it's an extremely successful strategy for taking advantage of the technology.
injidup · · focus · HN ↗
hnbad · · focus · HN ↗
Right now AI exists to do two things:
- sidestepping legal and regulatory inconveniences like copyright (which drives a massive chunk of investment the same way crypto did by sidestepping financial regulations, AirBnB did by sidestepping housing regulations, Uber did by sidestepping passenger transport regulations and it and the various delivery and other "gig work" apps did by sidestepping labor laws)
- drastically reducing the cost of (and drastically lowering the bar in terms of skillset and effort for) churning out large amounts of low to medium quality assets/code, saturating various systems designed to pay for intellectual property (e.g. ad or subscription based music/video streaming apps with revenue sharing programs, but also literally any form of digital contract work at almost any scale of business)
Neither of these are helping people (in general) and in fact they're extremely destructive (or "disruptive" if you want to make it sound positive) to the existing systems society relies on because they became feasible and (thanks to massive private subsidies, aka "investments", by VC firms and extremely creative accounting) very affordable extremely quickly.
What's worse - while it seems extremely likely that most of the AI generated "works" aren't actually considered copyrightable works by law and it's entirely possible that the use of copyright-protected works in training data does in fact not violate copyright, this does not in fact create a "world without copyright" because IP laws continue to exist and continue to apply, they just no longer meaningfully protect creative labor (i.e. anyone whose profession relies on producing works, whether that's an artist or a programmer) because anything they produce can be cheaply mass reproduced while they still have to stay clear of claims of anyone with enough funds to enforce rights against them.
Under the current economic system there are exactly four ways to earn money to buy back a share of society's resources to sustain your own life (let alone that of your dependents, e.g. kids or aging/impaired parents/spouses/family members):
1. Simple labor: you generally get paid based on your output or a very low flat day rate conditional to maintaining a measurable level of performance. This is typically "low-skilled" menial production labor. Much of this has been replaced by automation in factories and offices alike and most of what couldn't be automated has been moved into countries with fewer labor protections and a higher supply of desperate people willing to accept what are often bad working conditions because cost of labor is usually one of the biggest contributor to overall production cost. In "the West", this kind of work is now scarce and even when it's relatively safe it's often exhausting and unrewarding. A traditional example would be a seamstress or factory line worker, a more modern example would be someone working in visual effects overseas or content moderation / AI training. How much money you can make is ultimately limited by the physical limitations of how much output you can produce per waking/working hour. For the entrepreneurial-minded this would also include people selling their home-made goods on sites like etsy.
2. Time-based: this can be anything from a masseuse to a lawyer or technician. Unlike simple labor the only relevant metric here is time spent. Although employment contracts may specify a fixed wage or at least a fixed component, the understanding is still that this fixed amount is conditional to a minimum average amount of billable time provided. Most employment contracts specify an expected number of working hours for various reasons but we're specifically talking about jobs where the output from the worker to the customer is "billable time". Arguably most service work (e.g. barristas, store clerks, waitresses, performers/mascots in amusement parks) also falls into this category because while customers often don't directly pay for access time the understanding is that you are paid to perform a certain role for the duration of the opening hours (i.e. act like a friendly, welcoming host or assistant). How much money you can make is directly tied to how much time you can spend working or justify billing.
3. Assets: you produce or buy works/products and lend/license them for use. This is in part where a lot of the original "gig work" lived (e.g. facilitating "couch surfing" or renting out your spare lawnmower) but also includes many simple rental businesses and arguably also landlords. The limiting factor here is the starting capital required to produce or buy things in the first place. Physical assets often also come with storage and maintenance overhead whereas software licensing often comes with expectations of continuing maintenance updates or improvements. Note that software inherently lives in this category rather than the first because unless you're selling away exclusive rights (such as usually required by the terms of employment contracts for wage labor) you only ever sell licenses, not the software itself.
4. Capital: although I said landlords arguably belong in the previous category, real estate traders/investors definitely belong in this one. The idea here is that you don't need to produce anything, you don't need to spend certain amounts of time, you don't need to produce or buy anything substantial and facilitate its use, you make your money entirely in the abstract. Whether it's margin trading, investing in derivatives or holding company stock until you sell it when the line has gone up far enough. The easiest way to make signficant amounts of money reliably is to start with many orders of magnitude more than what you want to make so that percentile gains are still significant - or that you can make enough risky high-risk high-reward bets for the occasional successful moonshot to offset the losses. Nowadays in many countries retirement funds are tied to the stock market, so in a way most people participate in this in some way but actually earning an "income" this way requires access to significant amounts of capital.
Advances in technology and especially low cost of transport and thus access to cheap labor overseas have significantly drained the ability for most people to earn their living via category 1. While there was a short-lived boom in "DIY retail" that one (alongside much of traditional retail) has largely been drowned out by white label dropshipping thanks to the disinterest from platforms like Amazon which are now flooded by nearly identical copies of the same knock-off doodads you can also find on Temu and Alibaba (respectively at decreasing fractions of the price).
Despite some astroturf campaigns trying to sell you on believing otherwise so they can run away with your money after the next cryptocurrency rugpull, category 4 isn't really a meaningful option for the vast majority of people although it can sometimes be a good way to slowly grow excess wealth (i.e. money you don't currently need and ideally can afford to lose) - but that still narrows it down to a small segment of the overall population.
Category 2 used to be a jumping off point to category 3: you work overtime, save up the extra income to buy or rent a studio or office or equipment or factory, or to be able to afford to take some time off to develop and launch your own asset (or SaaS) - it's how many startups with technical founders started out and it's literally the "American Dream". But hourly wages have mostly stagnated (or even decreased) relative to the rising cost of living (even more so if you include expenses expected to "participate in society", which naturally also often increase with the income bracket of your peer group - or the parents of your kid's peer group if you have kids).
And now AI is coming along and just like cheap white label dropshipping of knock-off goods turned out to be the more successful strategy for taking advantage of the technological innovations believed to make it easier to launch your own physical products (via 3D printing, cheap overseas sourcing of parts, online advertising, etc), AI has turned out to be the more successful strategy for taking advantage of platforms and schemes marketed as making it easier to launch your own digital services - in addition to completely eliminating the market for paid "just good enough" quality digital assets, such as the kind of work found on sites like Fiverr or Upwork, i.e. the kind of work that often provided early experience to professionals not yet qualified or confident enough to take on higher paid work.
hnbad · · focus · HN ↗
PPS: Another aspect worth mentioning is that the low cost and easy access of mass producing "custom" content using AI has drastically increased the amount of attempted fraud and scams - the technological precedent here would be email compared to paper mail and spam/phishing has been a problem for a long time and never really went away because it's an extremely successful strategy for taking advantage of the technology.