Comment by bluefirebrand
10 months ago
> A very vocal group of people are convinced AI is a scheme by the evil capitalists to make you train your own replacement. The discussion gets very emotional very quickly because they feel personally threatened by the possibility that AI is actually useful
I read this like you are framing this as though it is irrational. However, history is littered with examples of capitalists replacing labour with automation and using any productivity gains of new technology to push salaries lower
Of course people who see this playing out again are personally threatened. If you aren't feeling personally threatened, you are either part of the wealthy class or for some reason you think this time will be different somehow
You may be thinking "Even if I lose my job to automation, there will be other work to do like piloting the LLMs", but you should know that the goal is to eventually pay LLM operators peanuts in comparison to what you currently make in whatever role you do
Setting up automation as the enemy is an odd thing for programmers to be doing. I mean, if you’re a programmer and you’re not automating away tasks, both for yourself and other people, what are you even doing?
Also, “this time it’s different” depends on the framing. A cynical programmer who has seen new programming tools hyped too many times would make a different argument: At the beginning of the dot-com era, you could get a job writing HTML pages. That’s been automated away, so you need more skill now. It hasn’t resulting in fewer software-engineering jobs so far.
But that’s not entirely convincing either. Predicting the future is difficult. Sometimes the future is different. Making someone else’s scenario sound foolish won’t actually rule anything out.
> Setting up automation as the enemy is an odd thing for programmers to be doing. I mean, if you’re a programmer and you’re not automating away tasks, both for yourself and other people, what are you even doing?
I'm earning a salary so I can have a nice life
Anything that threatens my ability to earn a salary so I can have a nice life is absolutely my fucking enemy
I have no interest in automating myself out of existence, and I am deeply resentful of the fact that so many people are gleefully trying to do so.
What happens when you use an LLM to generate prompts for an LLM?
>history is littered with examples of capitalists replacing labour with automation and using any productivity gains of new technology to push salaries lower
Nonsense. We make far, far more than people did in the past entirely because of the productivity gains from automation.
The industrial revolution led to the biggest increase in quality of life in history, not in spite of but because it automated 90% of jobs. Without it we'd all still be subsistence farmers.
> Nonsense. We make far, far more than people did in the past entirely because of the productivity gains from automation.
"We" were never subsistence farmers, our ancestors were
I'm talking about real changes that have happened in our actual lifetimes.
In our actual lifetimes we have watched wages stagnate for decades, pur purchasing power is dramatically lower than our parents. In order to afford even remotely close to the same standard of living as our parents had, we have to go into much larger amounts of debt
We have watched jobs move overseas as automation lowered the skill requirements so that anyone could perform them, so we sought the cheapest possible labour to do them
We have watched wealthy countries shift from higher paying production economies into lower paying service economies
We have watched the wealth gap widen as the rich get richer the poor get poorer and the middle class shrinks. Some of the shrinking middle class moved up, but most moved down
The fact is that automation is disruptive, which is great for markets but bad for people who are relying on consistency. Which is most people
> In our actual lifetimes we have watched wages stagnate for decades, pur purchasing power is dramatically lower than our parents.
This graph is going up.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
The reason you believe otherwise is that people on social media think they're only allowed to say untrue negative things about the economy, because if they ever say anything positive it'd be disrespectful to poor people.
> We have watched wealthy countries shift from higher paying production economies into lower paying service economies
Service work is higher paying, which is why factory workers try to get their children educated enough to do it.
> We have watched the wealth gap widen as the rich get richer the poor get poorer and the middle class shrinks. Some of the shrinking middle class moved up, but most moved down
They mostly moved up. But notice this graph is positive for every group.
https://realtimeinequality.org/?id=wealth&wealthend=03012023...
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