It's wild how much weight "they're destroying jobs" has.
I dare say that car manufacturers are aware of their impact on the horse and buggy industry. Calculator manufacturers wrecked the livelihood of mathematicians and accountants.
Technology is in the business of putting people out of work, by inventing better ways of doing things. Or rather, any time you invent a better way of doing things, that's fundamentally going to disrupt all the businesses built around older technologies.
>Why is book piracy a better way of doing things?
You twist the argument. Your argument would hold if AI's only use would be to generate booksverbatim it was already trained on. Which is certaintly not the case and huge efforts were made to circumvent this kind of usage.
Because you want as many people as possible to be exposed to your ideas, to the point that Christianity used to fund armies to go to other places so they could force the teachings of Jesus Christ upon them. If your thoughts aren't at least as good as that, why are you wasting eink on them?
I wouldn't put AI on the same level as the inventions of the industrial revolution. Automation replaced specific tasks. AI is replacing humans themselves. What are humans supposed to do in a world where everything a human can do, a machine can do too?
There are a lot of tasks machines can do today that humans do anyway. Think baristas and bartenders. People pay more for human-made goods too, despite mass-manufacturing being a couple centuries old at this point. Having a human face is a competitive advantage in lots of stuff.
And how large is the market for this, compared to the rest of the economy? How will the relative economic leverage of people change as they move from knowledge work to the relational economy?
If the article was written to address the idea of how we adjust to a post-Mandatory-Labor world, I'd be sympathetic to that point. But it's not. It treats the elimination of a particular career as a bad thing. And it's not like people can't still write stories if they want to; they just probably won't make a living on it.
It's interesting that this argument wasn't popular decades ago, when the internet basically made publishers and other copyright rent seekers redundant. Instead the response was harsher enforcement and more laws to protect the rent seekers.
Amplification of commentary and opinion is much easier now. It’s also a lot easier to play into people’s fears.
There’s a wide range of political motivations for this sort of thing too. Not just AI taking jobs, but convincing people to vote against their best interests, or even supporting radical religious groups whose values would persecute you. This sort of rhetoric feels noisier than it ever did decades ago.
The issue is the breadth of scale. At the time of the industrial revolution those who we would consider knowledge workers were a much smaller percentage of the population. Today, they are a significant part of the workforce, and it is them who are being displaced first, and in increasing numbers.
The second issue is one of migration between skill sets. By the numbers, today is likely harder as non Ai-affected skilled professions take longer to train into in a general sense.
The third is the synthesis of AI and robotics. Humanoid help is good. As the Venn diagram overlap of capabilities between humans and humanoid robots increases, many professions defined by complex vision and environmental manipulation that are currently safe will not be.
There are, of course, upsides. But the world is right to wonder what the future looks like, and where people fit within that future in terms of earning an income if whatever path they choose seems to be able to be replaced by a machine within their lifetime. How do they achieve personal stability and safety if, even when thinking about their multitude of career options, the machines are so good that they can do almost anything.
So, how will you ensure that you have some influence over the world or power, if all human labour ends?
That scenario is precarious. Dangerous as fuck. I have a short story, basically a horror Isekai, portal goes straight into a place like Sarek or similar pretty northern fell landscape, only full of bears and savages. I think my protagonists are safer in that, than the average human in your scenario.
Wish granted! You no longer have any influence or power! Zaibatsu Heavy Industries has now built a gigafactory that's taking over half of your backyard, is piping their fumes directly into your house. Your mayor's office is not responding to your calls, and their private security forces are preventing you from even going outside because it is now a high risk area.
FALGSC doesn't happen without a fight for power. FALGSC as presented in Star Trek or literally any fiction _still_ has power struggles and people getting fucked. The only way you enforce a lack of influence and power is with a higher force ensuring you do, which is then the sole holder of influence and power.
Also, you're describing a fantasy. Something that isn't happening in your lifetime. Maybe now would be time to wake up before Zaibatsu builds a gigafactory in your backyard.
I don’t assume a fight for power to be necessary, at least one on a level that would stall or end human progress. And you’re the one applying a fictional world’s history to ours, I’m merely using it as a cultural metaphor (substituting Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism for Star Trek was supposed to show I was using it as a reference point, not a template to follow). And I never said in my lifetime?
Also, I dropped the “gay” to be inclusive, and not just to heteros, bi, ace, pan, or hell, people who just don’t identify as anything.
Once the rich no longer need the serfs, they won’t suddenly decide to let you have things. They know they are superior to you, both genetically and socially because they inherited wealth and you didn’t. Their trust fund paid for private schools and you don’t even have a trust fund. They’re just better. It’s an objective fact. The world specifically chose to make them better than you, because it’s true.
The only fair system is for them to have an army of robots and then quietly clean up the population, so that you aren’t a risk to them. It’s just science.
When you’re dealing with people who think like this, who will soon have an army of terminators, what hope do we have?
I continue to be shocked at how people outright disregard these kinds of possibilities as pure science fiction. This is literally the objective of the ultrawealthy, it is the natural extrapolation of the early events of the industrial revolution projected onto a near-future world, and given current trends, the only hope of it not happening is that people everywhere realize what is happening and use our remaining capacity to steal power back. Feudalism is the natural state of mankind, and has been for thousands of years.
I am very hopeful that such scenarios would not come to pass, but dismissing them outright puts us on the path toward them.
Care to enlighten us on what is a good model of the world? Because an "elite vs. masses framework" of human civilization was what won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics.
I think you'll find if you actually read the Nobel award, it's about institutions and prosperity. "Elite vs. masses" is one component of some of the models, not a complete theory of civilization.
Forget reading the award, read the book. Yes, it is about institutions and prosperity. I'm not sure how this negates what I said? The lynchpin of their arguments is their construction of "inclusive vs. extractive institutions". We are talking about an extractive institution here. By design, the scenario described above points away from all of the drivers of democracy they propose. That's all you have to do to piece together that scenario as feasible within their model of civilization.
Not really. All that happened is that security got unbundled from the Landlord to the State in exchange for some protections against the (notorious) caprice and malice of some Landlords.
But the fundamental economic arrangement largely remains intact. The landed class extracts infinity wealth from production upon "their" land in perpetuity by virtue of a piece of paper that says they can physical force upon anyone who dares to be productive on it without paying the required tribute.
Alright, maybe I shouldn't have used the term "feudalism", although this is one that most people understand. The correct term is an "extractive institution".
> This is literally the objective of the ultrawealthy
Assertion without proof; seems extremely likely to be baseless stereotyping since you insist this applies to the entire category rather than some specific named individual;
> it is the natural extrapolation of the early events of the industrial revolution projected onto a near-future world
Ford explicitly built his cars cheap so that the average person can afford them, and you're using this as evidence of supervillain-tier "wipe out humanity"?
> Feudalism is the natural state of mankind, and has been for thousands of years.
Feudalism, notably arising in the 5th century, has not even existed for thousands of years. Feudalism also notably did not involve the complete extermination of the peasant class. And of course, one could go so far as to notice that feudalism has largely been replaced by other systems of governance...
Obviously I cannot claim that every ultrawealthy individual wants to eradicate the working class (some certainly do though, by their own admission). Instead, all ultrawealthy individuals do want to accumulate more resources (this is essentially by definition). In the event that productivity does increase without human labor, there is absolutely no incentive for democratization; indeed, that would be counterproductive. The ultrawealthy, as a collective, in seeking limitless personal gain, must proceed toward this objective.
Ford built his cars after the Gilded Age, and after the government imposed a stunning set of policies that began a steady reduction in wealth inequality. Ford was a player in a market where the goals were set in a way that promoted inclusive institutions and democratization.
I was referring to the early events of the industrial revolution in Europe (predominantly England), over 200 years prior. Living standards for the majority of the labor class fell dramatically, because labor itself became less valuable. The scenario above is the extrapolation of this, and therefore much worse.
The technical term for feudalism refers to the system of government in the medieval period. I was referring to that term in an informal sense, since I am sure many know what I mean by that. As I answered to another user, I should have used the phrase "extractive institution" instead, as that is the correct term. "Serfdom" would also have been better.
But it's important to understand why that system of government was replaced. Over the last several hundred years, the majority of humans slowly clawed back power from the elites over a series of economic downturns involving war, revolutions, and then an unstable relationship with the labor class. As labor became valuable again, power shifted back to the people. Reversing that direction would undo all of that hard work. So far, that is what technology has brought.
There's still a huge gap between "some people want to accumulate power" and "wiping out most of humanity". The former I accept, it's the latter I'm comfortable dismissing.
Especially when you insist that since someone has collected wealth, they must QED want limitless gain, and "must" proceed towards that objective, without any reference to other values or principles.
I'm sure you've earned a dollar or two in your life, so I suppose the simple question is: do you desire the eradication of humanity? If you somehow inherited Elon Musk's wealth tomorrow, would that make you comfortable eradicating the rest of us?
I don't think most of them would even view it as "wiping out most of humanity". Like much of the past, it is simply a complete ignorance of the circumstances of the lower classes. They have everything, and they assume that everyone else that is worthy has what they need too, just like they do. They are oblivious to the suffering that their selfishness has wrought. They might even believe that it is an inevitable tragedy. So don't get me wrong, I don't believe these ultrawealthy are necessarily "eradicate humanity" evil. It is just that their desired world will come at the cost of everyone else.
As for what I would do if I inherited Elon Musk's wealth tomorrow: I would do exactly what any ultrawealthy person would do, and use the interest to live and accumulate more interest. I would very much like to engage in philanthropy and speak my views to those who would listen (but having money does not make me a better communicator). I could donate to political parties I align with. But I do not have the same drive for accumulating more assets (indeed, I would actively avoid this), so I would become progressively less wealthy than my ultrawealthy "peers" until I am only wealthy and not ultrawealthy. I would still live extremely comfortably until I die. But unless I can convince the rest of the public to fight back against those few that probably do wish to eradicate/control much of humanity through technology and asset accumulation, nothing will change.
Henry Ford was also a notorious nazi sympathizer, maybe you can take those kind of statements with a grain of salt.
Serfdom was abolished in the russian empire in 1861, so feudalism is a still relatively recent phenomenon in human history; and giving more recent examples slavery was abolished in Mauritania only recently.
I read it more as a sarcastic reflection on the state of the world by the author rather than that the author believes what he write himself or agrees with it. It is a debating technique to push a contrary argument to the extreme to see where the balance lies.
No, it's the only logical conclusion when the only thing you do is "end human labor" without going through the necessary steps of "dismantle capitalism", "guillotine every billionaire", "rework every method of redistribution we have", "completely rethink our methods of how power is distributed" and "provide meaningful occupations to every person on the planet".
Human labor disappears tomorrow, Peter Thiel's first dream is to see if you can still be useful when made into a paste.
Have you listened to how people like Altman and Thiel talk? They do not seem to care about regular people except as objects to be subjugated. This kind of talk is also how we get a president that claims repeatedly to want an end to war and then starts one. When people tell you who they are and what they’re about, listen.
Plato made a similar claim in The Republic. 2400 years later, and we still don't have a technocracy in the Western hemisphere where engineers lead countries. Either engineers are systematically oppressed, or there are just other qualities that make a leader than being good at complex problem solving.
This could go the star trek or dystopian route, and which way depends on who controls the models.
There is going to be a very shitty in between time where we still need blue collar, but no white collar labor. The amount of conflicts out of that will be insane. And who controls the news?
We will never end in the star trek branch until energy and resources in general are abundantly cheap and uncontested. Even in Star Trek, the canon is still that next to whole modern part of society, even on earth, there still exists classes. It’s just that the TV series depict the upper class: everyone working for the federation and star fleet.
I’m pretty sure they are using Star Trek as “generic human spacefaring utopian future”. As i said above, you could insert “luxury gay space communism” in there and still have the same meaning.
And if I labeled it “luxury gay space communism” instead? Or Star Trek? I’d note in the latter, it sure seemed like a large portion of media was holonovels, and, as far as I can recall, the vast majority of the time they are shown to be programmed by lay people using voice prompts. And why the non-stop doom? I just assume/hope for the happy (or hell, I’ll settle for bittersweet) ending, not much I can do as a single person to bend history to my whims anyway. Maybe Trump nukes Taiwan, maybe aliens abduct all of our bears, maybe a gamma ray burst fries us all, but so far the human race seems to be on a continued upward trajectory, why worry too much about every imaginable dystopia?
You argue that it's better to be optimistic as you're a single person without power whatsoever, but your simplistic optimism is even worse. You're opinion is not new: Sartre would say you utilize your proposed insignificance to escape from the anxiety of freedom and responsability.
I dream of the end of paid or forced human labor. People should do whatever they want. I bet no one wants to commute to the crowded office for another teams call.
Indeed. People can paint, write, have hobbies, or whatever else for fun, but why be forced to for any reason? Or expect that there should always be a market for your work, under pain of law?
The value of human labor is what gives ordinary people power. This also applies to unions and countries, which derive their power from the people they represent.
Once sufficiently smart AI and autonomous weapons systems take that power away, we become little more than pets, living at the whim of those who control the AIs. Which could be a small elite of humans, or the AI itself.
Are you claiming people have not been able to campaign for political positions and vote for their candidates for decades? Because those are democratic elections.
The biggest key imo is captured media (and more recently, social media), which has indeed been happening for decades. This leads to uninformed voters and manufactured arguments, groupthink, and tribal narrowmindedness, allowing the two parties of capital interests to remain dominant. Voters cave too easily to the "lesser of two evils" thinking, hence the race to the bottom where only capital interests win. The primary process is a complete joke where the dominant parties have full control over it and blatantly manipulate it (or skip it entirely like we saw recently), and running under a third party is suicide.
However, don't be fooled into thinking we just need >2 viable parties, as the same fundamental problems can easily scale if the other sources of corruption (media) remain. We see this in the UK etc.
Election fraud itself is probably not a very big factor in most cases.
>Voters cave too easily to the "lesser of two evils" thinking
This is just a mathematical fact of first past the post elections.
I also don’t buy the captured media claim. Broadband cellular internet has allowed everyone instant access to basically all available information. If people choose to consume nonsense, that is an inherent problem with the people. Good information is literally a click away,
Yes, and while I do believe foreign and domestic bad actors are ever present online, a whole lot of misinformation is enabled by people who blindly accept anything posted on the internet as fact (my mother has ranted to me about a distant relation who continually posts the most outlandish things on Facebook; personally I don’t use any of Meta’s social networks to avoid that sort of thing, and, bar Marketplace, the last time I looked at Facebook proper was to do a data export during COVID lol). Though don’t get me wrong, social media companies have done terrible things, but supposedly “open” platforms have also tended towards misinformation and extremism (yes that one, and that one too, and the many others like it, none are blameless).
The power of a government depends on the country's economic and military strength. Currently that strength depends on having a population that's sufficiently large and skilled. If individuals become powerless, their governments power will wane as well. The power from AI will likely be more concentrated, either in a few super powers, or outside the control of governments. And the government of those super powers will likely care even less about their people.
What other leverage, apart from labor, do masses have against the large capital owners? You imagine they'll give us basic income, just so we can buy products from them? That makes no sense at all.
Why do I need or care about leverage against "large capital owners"? I think you're just putting arguments I didn't make into my mouth.
You need leverage because otherwise you're not getting fed, you're not getting a place to live, you're not getting electricity or medical care.
He's not putting that in your mouth, that is just the reality of what you need leverage for.
You keep promoting assumptions to facts by calling them "reality." Just because you seem hell bent to analyze everything through the lens of class power, doesn't mean that I do.
It’s not about class. I literally leverage the demand for my labor to get money necessary for me to survive. There’s no other mechanism and our current economic setup is not moving towards creating one in any meaningful way.
How you wish to analyze things doesn't change how they are.
Reality doesn't care about your wishes. Your unwillingness to consider the systemic mechanisms at play doesn't make them go away, the same way I child covering their eyes doesn't make them invisible.
What do you think prevents you from being literally enslaved? The government is (or was) one avenue of your leverage against capital, when they own the government and they write the laws what protection do you have against being forced into service?
The complete inability of people to learn that what we have now was written in blood as their form of leverage is enough to drive a man insane.
Haven't we been told the Earth is overpopulated for years? Seems a fair bet that the future will involve a whole lot of war and famine.
We're already slowly walking away from globalism. Nationalism is being fawned. It's taking a lot of time, but I'd say by the end of the 2030s we'll be having WWIII at the latest.
And at that time LLMs will be better decision makers than humans, I'd wager. So for now I'm expecting AI stuff to get funded at the expense of everything else.
What's the medium term plan though? Before we achieve singularity or UBI or whatever rapture analog this new religion is promising. Being employed is the primary way (and for most people is the only way) of getting housing, food, and other necessities meet.
Technology is in the business of putting people out of work, by inventing better ways of doing things.
It feels like that but the argument doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Practically every advance in technology leads to more jobs, usually to apply that technology in new areas, or to bring the benefit to more people. There are pockets of people who are negatively impacted, but the overall change to society has been positive for pretty much every advance humans have ever made (maybe saving for weapons.)
I can't speak for the OP, but I'd personally prefer we spent a lot more energy figuring out how to help people whose livelihoods are disrupted by technological change than trying to hold back technological change (or argue about its merits) because it affects people's livelihoods. I mean, "computer" used to be a job title before it meant "machine that replaced people's livelihoods" and yet computers have ultimately created whole new categories of jobs while simultaneously destroying countless other jobs.
There's no real reason to think that AI is unique among all the livelihood destroying technologies that have come before in that it will destroy jobs without opening new ones in their place. It seems to me fighting the march of technology is akin to fighting the tides. Yes, you can build sea walls, and in the modern age, we literally can hold back the tides. But at the cost of ever increasing expenditures of time, resources and/or money. We could spend our resources trying to preserve livelihoods whose time has come and gone, but why specifically these jobs and not say, coal miners, farriers, lamp lighters, whalers, operators, computers, thread spinners or any of the multitudes of other jobs that technology is obsoleted? If we think on all the jobs that have been lost to technology over the decades, how many of those jobs do we think would have left the world in a net better place had we eliminated the technology that obsoleted the job and kept all the people employed in those positions where they were. Are people scared for their livelihoods because the technology will destroy the job, or because societies tend to spend all their energy trying to fight the technology instead of helping people find new jobs and livelihoods and the technology always eventually wins?
- “help people whose livelihoods are disrupted by technological change”
vs.
- relentless pursuit of AGI/ASI/etc. in break neck speed, destroying environment and promised to imminently capture all white collar and soon after, blue collar work in a short amount of time.
Real world, we’re talking about real world with actual people in it. Only one of the above scenarios is happening.
> Real world, we’re talking about real world with actual people in it.
In the real world, never once has the march of technology been successfully stopped, no matter how many jobs it crushed. Even the luddites who are enjoying a historical "re-evaluation" today still lost. And we've been through society spanning destruction of livelihoods before too and didn't stop it then either, just look at how much of the population used to be employed in farming and agriculture and compare it to now. Automation came and destroyed all of those livelihoods too.
In the real world, we can't even stop countries from pursuing, developing and improving nuclear weaponry despite the fact that we know it is an existential threat, and nuclear weaponry has no uses at all outside of nuclear annihilation. If we can't stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, what makes you think we have even a snowball's chance in hell of stopping AI development when AI actually has non-world ending uses and benefits to people?
I'm happy to talk about the "real world" and in the real world, we're repeating the same mistakes of the past thinking "surely this time will be different" instead of learning from those mistakes and trying something new.
Do you have an actual response to my point and the scale of what’s supposed to be happening, or is it just the same words, rinse and repeat, like the leaf node of a dialogue tree?
I would ask you the same thing. Do you have a proposal to address your concerns and the "scale of what's supposed to be happening" that is't support for the same type of failed attempts to stop the march of technology that have failed time and time again all throughout history? Do you at least have a theory for why this time it would turn out differently if we tried it again? Or do you just prefer to throw out insults and vague accusations that I'm an AI/bot?
> vague accusations that I'm an AI/bot
Funny enough, that never occurred to me. Nowadays an LLM probably would’ve addressed my point about speed, scale, etc. instead of this hastily condensed script of farriers and lamplighters layered with some good history revisionism where the consequences and effects of those transitions are somehow memory holed, just to falsely equivocate what we’re doing with inevitable forces of nature while hiding behind the empty rhetorical shield of “we should help people instead”. Typical hard techno determinism. Regurgitated dime a dozen in social media.
Walk me through that a bit. I’ve used codex to solve dozens of niggling annoyances around the house and in my life. That gave me more control and increased my ability to express my creativity.
At work, it enabled me to develop two apps, one complete (as much as they ever are), one nearing the end of technical PoC phase, and a handful of others where I could quickly answer a tech feasibility question.
The completed app is an interactive web app that I literally could not have completed to that level of polish (and from a pacing perspective probably couldn’t have completed at all).
All of those increased my control and most increased my ability to express creativity.
The upcoming technical PoC will involve considering using Clojure in a load-bearing app, something that I’ve considered and consistently rejected for over a decade now. If that happens, control and creativity will spike as well.
Is there some aspect of this removal that I’m not seeing? It changes the activities of the tasks, for sure, but very far from that all being for the worse; a lot of it is way better.
In the narrow view of your technical world this is correct.
But we are a tiny fraction of all possibilities. And for the rest of the folk, dredging LLM generated material and being forced to produce it does not make them happy. Particularly where it’s seen as a gain by the managers who read the marketing and a loss for those beneath them, while being told to adopt or be replaced.
And even worse they shape destinations and introduce frustration when things can’t be done which were initially intended. We’ve trashed our ROI because it’s easy to build the thing the LLM can do but it’s hard to build what the customer needs. And those things are disparate.
It's not. You be performatively hostile and people be hostile to you. That's all.
Car brands don't pitch cars as horse replacements. They put names and icons of horses on cars and horse riders love them. No one is complaining that horses had replaced cars.
AI startups pitched AI like it's a coagulation of malice and hostility against humanity on tap. People aren't liking it. Of course they won't. No intelligence would, natural or artificial. It's wild that they don't get that.
> No one is complaining that horses had replaced cars.
Search for something like “newspaper complaints about cars early 1900s” and read the contemporaneous complaints.
The fact that that complaining happened then and not now is evidence that motor cars are now widely seen as better than horse-drawn personal transport, not that they were eagerly welcomed from the first day of production.
"Destroying jobs" is entirely the wrong framing and a distraction from the real issue.
If AI truly replaces human labor, the lack of jobs isn't the problem. The problem is the lack of leverage for most of humanity.
Jobs aren't just a source of income. They're a source of leverage over the ownership class - if labor goes on strike, production stops and capital cannot self-reproduce. This leverage is what gave us a living wage, sick leave and basically all concessions that make life livable for anyone that isn't lucky enough to be born as part of the elite.
If AI makes this leverage go away, our problem is bigger than just job loss. The owners of the AI industry will use this now-untethered productive force to completely monopolize resources and set up a system where they are unquestionable god kings.
The rest of us will have more to worry about than just employment. We will be reduced to depending on the charity of people who's record has shown are not exactly the most selfless and kindhearted.
This is the real problem with AI productivity. Jobs are a distraction. Control over production is the real issue. The only way this doesn't end in dystopia is if the public controls AI, one way or another.
If the article was written to address the idea of how we adjust to a post-Mandatory-Labor world, I'd be sympathetic to that point. But it's not. It treats the elimination of a particular career as a bad thing. And it's not like people can't still write stories if they want to; they just probably won't make a living on it.
Previous times the people were wanted elsewhere, even when US and Europe de-industrialized in favour of Asia. This time around we're already in a situation where educated people struggle to find jobs, and there are not many jobs created by some parallel process.
Imagine if say 200 companies created fully automated factories producing everything in the world. Let's say they employ one million scientists, engineers and guards. What fate would await the other 8 billion?
I think that that the "they're destroying jobs" or even then "they're stealing intellectual property" argument overshadows or distracts from the more important issues. What really concerns me is the large scale erosion of truth and reliability. Codebases and the internet at large are being flooded with less and less accurate information, with more bloat, and with more errors that will exponentially increase as more and more is built on them.
Faulty decisions based on patterns (and prejudice) will be made by models trained on a mixture of truth and falsehoods. These decisions will affect, and even kill people. There have always been some people who choose quick results and productivity over truth, but now we are seeing a mass scaling and automation of this mentality. But when people just hear "they're taking jobs" it's easy to dismiss those with concerns as Luddites.
Yes, while I personally believe this is a problem to solve, not an insurmountable obstacle, I cannot ignore this kind of harm. I do think this will be outweighed by all the instances where they improve decision making, dig up
obscure information, correct errors, etc. I can’t see any fundamental reason a near future AI system has to hallucinate anything, and when we also have people complaining in thread that LLMs are dumping out song lyrics verbatim…well, it’s an amusing contrast to say the least.
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I dare say that car manufacturers are aware of their impact on the horse and buggy industry. Calculator manufacturers wrecked the livelihood of mathematicians and accountants.
Technology is in the business of putting people out of work, by inventing better ways of doing things. Or rather, any time you invent a better way of doing things, that's fundamentally going to disrupt all the businesses built around older technologies.
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Why is book piracy a better way of doing things?
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You twist the argument. Your argument would hold if AI's only use would be to generate booksverbatim it was already trained on. Which is certaintly not the case and huge efforts were made to circumvent this kind of usage.
cisc · · focus · HN ↗
Clearly these books had value to AI companies but they were too weak and too dishonest to pay for that value. That's not impressive.
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Obviously the authors should sue them to bankruptcy though.
literalAardvark · · focus · HN ↗
Getting sued for fair value is the easier way out. Especially after a few billion in funding.
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<a href="https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-deep-utopia" rel="nofollow">https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-deep-utopia
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There’s a wide range of political motivations for this sort of thing too. Not just AI taking jobs, but convincing people to vote against their best interests, or even supporting radical religious groups whose values would persecute you. This sort of rhetoric feels noisier than it ever did decades ago.
Everybody gets a platform now, even the bots.
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The second issue is one of migration between skill sets. By the numbers, today is likely harder as non Ai-affected skilled professions take longer to train into in a general sense.
The third is the synthesis of AI and robotics. Humanoid help is good. As the Venn diagram overlap of capabilities between humans and humanoid robots increases, many professions defined by complex vision and environmental manipulation that are currently safe will not be.
There are, of course, upsides. But the world is right to wonder what the future looks like, and where people fit within that future in terms of earning an income if whatever path they choose seems to be able to be replaced by a machine within their lifetime. How do they achieve personal stability and safety if, even when thinking about their multitude of career options, the machines are so good that they can do almost anything.
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
pluc · · focus · HN ↗
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
exe34 · · focus · HN ↗
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
exe34 · · focus · HN ↗
impossiblefork · · focus · HN ↗
That scenario is precarious. Dangerous as fuck. I have a short story, basically a horror Isekai, portal goes straight into a place like Sarek or similar pretty northern fell landscape, only full of bears and savages. I think my protagonists are safer in that, than the average human in your scenario.
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
I don't want influence or power. Don't know what your short story has to do with anything, frankly a bizarre comparison to make.
impossiblefork · · focus · HN ↗
well_ackshually · · focus · HN ↗
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
well_ackshually · · focus · HN ↗
Also, you're describing a fantasy. Something that isn't happening in your lifetime. Maybe now would be time to wake up before Zaibatsu builds a gigafactory in your backyard.
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
Also, I dropped the “gay” to be inclusive, and not just to heteros, bi, ace, pan, or hell, people who just don’t identify as anything.
maomao5 · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
MisterMunchkin · · focus · HN ↗
Once the rich no longer need the serfs, they won’t suddenly decide to let you have things. They know they are superior to you, both genetically and socially because they inherited wealth and you didn’t. Their trust fund paid for private schools and you don’t even have a trust fund. They’re just better. It’s an objective fact. The world specifically chose to make them better than you, because it’s true.
The only fair system is for them to have an army of robots and then quietly clean up the population, so that you aren’t a risk to them. It’s just science.
When you’re dealing with people who think like this, who will soon have an army of terminators, what hope do we have?
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
hodgehog11 · · focus · HN ↗
I am very hopeful that such scenarios would not come to pass, but dismissing them outright puts us on the path toward them.
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
estearum · · focus · HN ↗
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
exe34 · · focus · HN ↗
hodgehog11 · · focus · HN ↗
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
hodgehog11 · · focus · HN ↗
plastic-enjoyer · · focus · HN ↗
No, it's not. What we call feudalism arose after the collapse of the Roman Empire.
estearum · · focus · HN ↗
But the fundamental economic arrangement largely remains intact. The landed class extracts infinity wealth from production upon "their" land in perpetuity by virtue of a piece of paper that says they can physical force upon anyone who dares to be productive on it without paying the required tribute.
hodgehog11 · · focus · HN ↗
handoflixue · · focus · HN ↗
Assertion without proof; seems extremely likely to be baseless stereotyping since you insist this applies to the entire category rather than some specific named individual;
> it is the natural extrapolation of the early events of the industrial revolution projected onto a near-future world
Ford explicitly built his cars cheap so that the average person can afford them, and you're using this as evidence of supervillain-tier "wipe out humanity"?
> Feudalism is the natural state of mankind, and has been for thousands of years.
Feudalism, notably arising in the 5th century, has not even existed for thousands of years. Feudalism also notably did not involve the complete extermination of the peasant class. And of course, one could go so far as to notice that feudalism has largely been replaced by other systems of governance...
hodgehog11 · · focus · HN ↗
Ford built his cars after the Gilded Age, and after the government imposed a stunning set of policies that began a steady reduction in wealth inequality. Ford was a player in a market where the goals were set in a way that promoted inclusive institutions and democratization.
I was referring to the early events of the industrial revolution in Europe (predominantly England), over 200 years prior. Living standards for the majority of the labor class fell dramatically, because labor itself became less valuable. The scenario above is the extrapolation of this, and therefore much worse.
The technical term for feudalism refers to the system of government in the medieval period. I was referring to that term in an informal sense, since I am sure many know what I mean by that. As I answered to another user, I should have used the phrase "extractive institution" instead, as that is the correct term. "Serfdom" would also have been better.
But it's important to understand why that system of government was replaced. Over the last several hundred years, the majority of humans slowly clawed back power from the elites over a series of economic downturns involving war, revolutions, and then an unstable relationship with the labor class. As labor became valuable again, power shifted back to the people. Reversing that direction would undo all of that hard work. So far, that is what technology has brought.
handoflixue · · focus · HN ↗
Especially when you insist that since someone has collected wealth, they must QED want limitless gain, and "must" proceed towards that objective, without any reference to other values or principles.
I'm sure you've earned a dollar or two in your life, so I suppose the simple question is: do you desire the eradication of humanity? If you somehow inherited Elon Musk's wealth tomorrow, would that make you comfortable eradicating the rest of us?
hodgehog11 · · focus · HN ↗
As for what I would do if I inherited Elon Musk's wealth tomorrow: I would do exactly what any ultrawealthy person would do, and use the interest to live and accumulate more interest. I would very much like to engage in philanthropy and speak my views to those who would listen (but having money does not make me a better communicator). I could donate to political parties I align with. But I do not have the same drive for accumulating more assets (indeed, I would actively avoid this), so I would become progressively less wealthy than my ultrawealthy "peers" until I am only wealthy and not ultrawealthy. I would still live extremely comfortably until I die. But unless I can convince the rest of the public to fight back against those few that probably do wish to eradicate/control much of humanity through technology and asset accumulation, nothing will change.
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
bdauvergne · · focus · HN ↗
Serfdom was abolished in the russian empire in 1861, so feudalism is a still relatively recent phenomenon in human history; and giving more recent examples slavery was abolished in Mauritania only recently.
spockz · · focus · HN ↗
robotpepi · · focus · HN ↗
freecodeio · · focus · HN ↗
well_ackshually · · focus · HN ↗
Human labor disappears tomorrow, Peter Thiel's first dream is to see if you can still be useful when made into a paste.
throwaway173738 · · focus · HN ↗
nunez · · focus · HN ↗
MrGilbert · · focus · HN ↗
I'm amazed by the ignorance some people carry around.
plastic-enjoyer · · focus · HN ↗
folkrav · · focus · HN ↗
plastic-enjoyer · · focus · HN ↗
skeptic_ai · · focus · HN ↗
But now that they actually still need us, they can’t even provide healthcare.
mzhaase · · focus · HN ↗
There is going to be a very shitty in between time where we still need blue collar, but no white collar labor. The amount of conflicts out of that will be insane. And who controls the news?
spockz · · focus · HN ↗
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
sunaurus · · focus · HN ↗
Or if it's even possible to control the models.
MrGilbert · · focus · HN ↗
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
robotpepi · · focus · HN ↗
noisy_boy · · focus · HN ↗
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
robotpepi · · focus · HN ↗
literalAardvark · · focus · HN ↗
ponector · · focus · HN ↗
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
CodesInChaos · · focus · HN ↗
Once sufficiently smart AI and autonomous weapons systems take that power away, we become little more than pets, living at the whim of those who control the AIs. Which could be a small elite of humans, or the AI itself.
spongebobstoes · · focus · HN ↗
swed420 · · focus · HN ↗
Only when they aren't totally co-opted by capital interests and everything they own, including media/social media.
We haven't had democratic elections for decades. Just illusion of choice in a race to the bottom.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty
lotsofpulp · · focus · HN ↗
swed420 · · focus · HN ↗
The biggest key imo is captured media (and more recently, social media), which has indeed been happening for decades. This leads to uninformed voters and manufactured arguments, groupthink, and tribal narrowmindedness, allowing the two parties of capital interests to remain dominant. Voters cave too easily to the "lesser of two evils" thinking, hence the race to the bottom where only capital interests win. The primary process is a complete joke where the dominant parties have full control over it and blatantly manipulate it (or skip it entirely like we saw recently), and running under a third party is suicide.
However, don't be fooled into thinking we just need >2 viable parties, as the same fundamental problems can easily scale if the other sources of corruption (media) remain. We see this in the UK etc.
Election fraud itself is probably not a very big factor in most cases.
lotsofpulp · · focus · HN ↗
This is just a mathematical fact of first past the post elections.
I also don’t buy the captured media claim. Broadband cellular internet has allowed everyone instant access to basically all available information. If people choose to consume nonsense, that is an inherent problem with the people. Good information is literally a click away,
swed420 · · focus · HN ↗
No it isn't.
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
CodesInChaos · · focus · HN ↗
exitb · · focus · HN ↗
Yes, but we're the horse in that scenario.
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
Good! End human labor.
exitb · · focus · HN ↗
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
literalAardvark · · focus · HN ↗
vrganj · · focus · HN ↗
He's not putting that in your mouth, that is just the reality of what you need leverage for.
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
exitb · · focus · HN ↗
vrganj · · focus · HN ↗
Reality doesn't care about your wishes. Your unwillingness to consider the systemic mechanisms at play doesn't make them go away, the same way I child covering their eyes doesn't make them invisible.
fzeroracer · · focus · HN ↗
The complete inability of people to learn that what we have now was written in blood as their form of leverage is enough to drive a man insane.
OroPla · · focus · HN ↗
We're already slowly walking away from globalism. Nationalism is being fawned. It's taking a lot of time, but I'd say by the end of the 2030s we'll be having WWIII at the latest.
And at that time LLMs will be better decision makers than humans, I'd wager. So for now I'm expecting AI stuff to get funded at the expense of everything else.
deniska · · focus · HN ↗
onion2k · · focus · HN ↗
It feels like that but the argument doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Practically every advance in technology leads to more jobs, usually to apply that technology in new areas, or to bring the benefit to more people. There are pockets of people who are negatively impacted, but the overall change to society has been positive for pretty much every advance humans have ever made (maybe saving for weapons.)
handoflixue · · focus · HN ↗
geraneum · · focus · HN ↗
It’s wild how much people are scared for their livelihood. What a sad thing to read here.
tpmoney · · focus · HN ↗
There's no real reason to think that AI is unique among all the livelihood destroying technologies that have come before in that it will destroy jobs without opening new ones in their place. It seems to me fighting the march of technology is akin to fighting the tides. Yes, you can build sea walls, and in the modern age, we literally can hold back the tides. But at the cost of ever increasing expenditures of time, resources and/or money. We could spend our resources trying to preserve livelihoods whose time has come and gone, but why specifically these jobs and not say, coal miners, farriers, lamp lighters, whalers, operators, computers, thread spinners or any of the multitudes of other jobs that technology is obsoleted? If we think on all the jobs that have been lost to technology over the decades, how many of those jobs do we think would have left the world in a net better place had we eliminated the technology that obsoleted the job and kept all the people employed in those positions where they were. Are people scared for their livelihoods because the technology will destroy the job, or because societies tend to spend all their energy trying to fight the technology instead of helping people find new jobs and livelihoods and the technology always eventually wins?
geraneum · · focus · HN ↗
- “help people whose livelihoods are disrupted by technological change”
vs.
- relentless pursuit of AGI/ASI/etc. in break neck speed, destroying environment and promised to imminently capture all white collar and soon after, blue collar work in a short amount of time.
Real world, we’re talking about real world with actual people in it. Only one of the above scenarios is happening.
tpmoney · · focus · HN ↗
In the real world, never once has the march of technology been successfully stopped, no matter how many jobs it crushed. Even the luddites who are enjoying a historical "re-evaluation" today still lost. And we've been through society spanning destruction of livelihoods before too and didn't stop it then either, just look at how much of the population used to be employed in farming and agriculture and compare it to now. Automation came and destroyed all of those livelihoods too.
In the real world, we can't even stop countries from pursuing, developing and improving nuclear weaponry despite the fact that we know it is an existential threat, and nuclear weaponry has no uses at all outside of nuclear annihilation. If we can't stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, what makes you think we have even a snowball's chance in hell of stopping AI development when AI actually has non-world ending uses and benefits to people?
I'm happy to talk about the "real world" and in the real world, we're repeating the same mistakes of the past thinking "surely this time will be different" instead of learning from those mistakes and trying something new.
geraneum · · focus · HN ↗
tpmoney · · focus · HN ↗
geraneum · · focus · HN ↗
Funny enough, that never occurred to me. Nowadays an LLM probably would’ve addressed my point about speed, scale, etc. instead of this hastily condensed script of farriers and lamplighters layered with some good history revisionism where the consequences and effects of those transitions are somehow memory holed, just to falsely equivocate what we’re doing with inevitable forces of nature while hiding behind the empty rhetorical shield of “we should help people instead”. Typical hard techno determinism. Regurgitated dime a dozen in social media.
sdcfgy · · focus · HN ↗
sokoloff · · focus · HN ↗
At work, it enabled me to develop two apps, one complete (as much as they ever are), one nearing the end of technical PoC phase, and a handful of others where I could quickly answer a tech feasibility question.
The completed app is an interactive web app that I literally could not have completed to that level of polish (and from a pacing perspective probably couldn’t have completed at all).
All of those increased my control and most increased my ability to express creativity.
The upcoming technical PoC will involve considering using Clojure in a load-bearing app, something that I’ve considered and consistently rejected for over a decade now. If that happens, control and creativity will spike as well.
Is there some aspect of this removal that I’m not seeing? It changes the activities of the tasks, for sure, but very far from that all being for the worse; a lot of it is way better.
sdcfgy · · focus · HN ↗
But we are a tiny fraction of all possibilities. And for the rest of the folk, dredging LLM generated material and being forced to produce it does not make them happy. Particularly where it’s seen as a gain by the managers who read the marketing and a loss for those beneath them, while being told to adopt or be replaced.
And even worse they shape destinations and introduce frustration when things can’t be done which were initially intended. We’ve trashed our ROI because it’s easy to build the thing the LLM can do but it’s hard to build what the customer needs. And those things are disparate.
greenchair · · focus · HN ↗
literalAardvark · · focus · HN ↗
And one of the chief complaints about AI is that it is fundamentally an interpolation engine, which is to say uncreative.
At this time we still need to steer it, which is what the discussion about "taste" is about.
Though I suppose we'll need better terms for various kinds of "taste" soon enough if it's to become economically trackable.
numpad0 · · focus · HN ↗
Car brands don't pitch cars as horse replacements. They put names and icons of horses on cars and horse riders love them. No one is complaining that horses had replaced cars.
AI startups pitched AI like it's a coagulation of malice and hostility against humanity on tap. People aren't liking it. Of course they won't. No intelligence would, natural or artificial. It's wild that they don't get that.
sokoloff · · focus · HN ↗
Search for something like “newspaper complaints about cars early 1900s” and read the contemporaneous complaints.
The fact that that complaining happened then and not now is evidence that motor cars are now widely seen as better than horse-drawn personal transport, not that they were eagerly welcomed from the first day of production.
conartist6 · · focus · HN ↗
They have no will but to fill the world with hate and drivel
vrganj · · focus · HN ↗
If AI truly replaces human labor, the lack of jobs isn't the problem. The problem is the lack of leverage for most of humanity.
Jobs aren't just a source of income. They're a source of leverage over the ownership class - if labor goes on strike, production stops and capital cannot self-reproduce. This leverage is what gave us a living wage, sick leave and basically all concessions that make life livable for anyone that isn't lucky enough to be born as part of the elite.
If AI makes this leverage go away, our problem is bigger than just job loss. The owners of the AI industry will use this now-untethered productive force to completely monopolize resources and set up a system where they are unquestionable god kings.
The rest of us will have more to worry about than just employment. We will be reduced to depending on the charity of people who's record has shown are not exactly the most selfless and kindhearted.
This is the real problem with AI productivity. Jobs are a distraction. Control over production is the real issue. The only way this doesn't end in dystopia is if the public controls AI, one way or another.
handoflixue · · focus · HN ↗
nylonstrung · · focus · HN ↗
There is probably no industry to date with a smaller ratio of labor:capital in terms of the money being allocated
The auto industry led to a net increase in employment, including "unskilled" and lower class labor. The same cannot be said of LLMs
jojobas · · focus · HN ↗
Imagine if say 200 companies created fully automated factories producing everything in the world. Let's say they employ one million scientists, engineers and guards. What fate would await the other 8 billion?
themaninthedark · · focus · HN ↗
Embrace the AI, it will lower your carbon emissions!
Razengan · · focus · HN ↗
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
Razengan · · focus · HN ↗
adamddev1 · · focus · HN ↗
Faulty decisions based on patterns (and prejudice) will be made by models trained on a mixture of truth and falsehoods. These decisions will affect, and even kill people. There have always been some people who choose quick results and productivity over truth, but now we are seeing a mass scaling and automation of this mentality. But when people just hear "they're taking jobs" it's easy to dismiss those with concerns as Luddites.
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
mrdependable · · focus · HN ↗
tzs · · focus · HN ↗
Are you confusing mathematicians and accountants with the people that companies used to hire to do arithmetic?