Comment by RobertoG
10 hours ago
The price of oil at the price of water (ecology apart) should be a good thing.
Automation should be, obviously, a good thing, because more is produced with less labor. What it says of ourselves and our politics that so many people (me included) are afraid of it?
In a sane world, we would realize that, in a post-work world, the owner of the robots have all the power, so the robots should be owned in common. The solution is political.
Throughout history Empires have bet their entire futures on the predictions of seers, magicians and done so with enthusiasm. When political leaders think their court magicians can give them an edge, they'll throw the baby out with the bathwater to take advantage of it. It seems to me that the Machine Learning engineers and AI companies are the court magicians of our time.
I certainly don't have much faith in the current political structures, they're uneducated on most subjects they're in charge of and taking the magicians at their word, the magicians have just gotten smarter and don't call it magic anymore.
I would actually call it magic though, just actually real. Imagine explaining to political strategists from 100 years ago, the ability to influence politicians remotely, while they sit in a room by themselves a la dictating what target politicians see on their phones and feed them content to steer them in a certain directions.. Its almost like a synthetic remote viewing.. And if that doesn't work, you also have buckets of cash :|
There is no such thing that you can always keep adding more of and have it automatically be effective.
I tend to automate too much because it's fun, but if I'm being objective in many cases it has been more work than doing the stuff manually. Because of laziness I tend to way overestimate how much time and effort it would took to do something manually if I just rolled my sleeved and simply did it.
Whether automating something actually produces more with less labor depends on nuance of each specific case, it's definitely not a given. People tend to be very biased when judging the actual productivity. E.g. is someone who quickly closes tickets but causes disproportionate amount of production issues, money losing bugs or review work on others really that productive in the end?
What do we “need” more of? Here in France we need more doctors, more nurseries, more teachers… I don’t see AI helping much there in short to middle term (with teachers all research points to AI making it massively worse even)
Globally I think we need better access to quality nutrition and more affordable medicine. Generally cheaper energy.
Isn’t the end game that all the displaced SWEs give up their cushy, flexible job and get retrained as nurses?
Wait, my job is not cushy. I think hard all day long, I endure levels of frustration that would cripple most, and I do it because I have no choice, I must build the thing I see or be tormented by its possibility. Cushy? Right.
3 replies →
While I agree, I am not hopeful. The incentive alignment has us careening towards Elysium rather than Star Trek.