Comment by munificent
9 days ago
> Unless your counter is that whatever humanity is doing that AI is helping is probably stupid and shouldn't be done anyway.
No, my counter is that whatever generative AI is doing is worth doing by humans but not worth doing by machines.
As the joke comic says: We thought technology was going to automate running errands so that we had time to make art, but instead it automates making art while we all have to be gig workers running errands.
> No, my counter is that whatever generative AI is doing is worth doing by humans but not worth doing by machines.
There is no basis to this claim, why is one worth doing by a biological machine but not a silicon one? People cling too highly to biological exceptionalism not understanding that one arose due to certain processes in the world and universe where somewhere else we might have been silicon beings all along. That is to say, people have huge amounts of cognitive dissonance thinking that they are actually simply machines of a biological variety.
> As the joke comic says: We thought technology was going to automate running errands so that we had time to make art, but instead it automates making art while we all have to be gig workers running errands.
Hardware is harder than software. Soon gig workers will be automated by AI too. I have heard this refrain a thousand times but it never ceases to make me think that it's in a specific time and place of the early 21 century. In the 22nd century, given such progress, we might talk of these discussions the same way artists and weavers did in (and of) the early 20th.
> There is no basis to this claim, why is one worth doing by a biological machine but not a silicon one?
You're entitled to your own value system, but in mine, humans are worth infinitely more than computers.
Same in mine. But mine isn’t predicated on the irreplaceability of human labor to derive value from human life. If we automated literally everything and we could all just live off UBI and drink wine and look at the stars all day, humans would still be intrinsically valuable. Or, the ability of a machine to generate art good enough to serve as a fun D&D avatar does not devalue a human doing the same. You may be attaching a… market value… to humans by proxy of their capital output. Very capitalist of you. If you look at things that way, the value of a human life has been trending toward zero and will continue. So I prefer not to hold a belief system that only values humans by the value of their labor. Therefore I am not bothered when we invent a new tool that might compete with human labor.
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