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Comment by dexwiz

1 year ago

This is my concern with AI in general. Cost, both real and monetary. Right now Microsoft and VCs are dumping money into AI operation to help with growth and adoption. What happens when AI's business focus moves from cost to grow to cost to serve? Will all these business who integrated in AI suddenly be saddled with huge bills? What if your product depends on AI, and suddenly is not profitable to operate? Anecdotally I have already seen people pull back AI features, because it turned out to be too expensive to serve in the long run.

I already pay for a GPT subscription, and its reliability is one of the worst of any product I pay for. The novelty keeps me paying, but I can't imagine building a business on it.

They will charge the salary of the worker they are replacing with an EC2 style AI simulacrum.

Employers will save health, logistics, HR, etc.

Governments will have to pay for unemployment

Just the same as always - privatize the gains

  • In other words, if the people providing the AI demand the same money as the workers it replaces, it doesn't seem like society actually benefits.

    • > if the people providing the AI demand the same money as the workers it replaces, it doesn't seem like society actually benefits

      Those people no longer have jobs. That sounds bad, but consider they can now do something else. (Ad infinitum this is obviously a problem. But the history of technological development provides cause for optimism in the long run.)

      22 replies →

    • It can help if there are simply not enough workers available and it's used to boost productivity of the existing workers.

      through in most cases it probably will still not work/help society

      I.e. from what I heard public defendants in the US are notoriously overworked, if an AI could help them auto prepare all the simple straight forward cases they could do a better job. But then this is also a good example for why it probably still will not work out well. As no one will pay for that tool or they will pay for it but then expect so many more cases to be handled that it might get worse instead of better.

    • Indeed it doesn't, and likely it won't. But they'll start off subsidizing it to get the employers hooked. It's always the same pattern.