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Comment by gosub100

6 hours ago

so the jobs have to be lost _first_ , then we can ban it?

Job loss is a horrible reason to ban something. Think about our history if we always did that. We would all be stuck working on farms today, because we didn’t want to allow tractors or other machinery because it would take away farming jobs.

Instead of banning tech to save jobs, pass laws that make sure tech prices in externalities (tax carbon emissions), and find other ways to assist people who lose jobs (UBI, good social safety nets, etc).

Don’t stifle progress just because it makes us have to work less.

  • Right - fix the economy instead. Why should increasing efficiency cause people to have less resources - that makes no sense.

    • Because there are people who live off rent (in a broad sense of this world), and there are people who live off selling their ability to work. Increased efficiency and productivity may or may not benefit the second kind of people, depending on whether they can sell their labour to be used for something else.

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    • Banning AI does increase efficiency. It makes it more efficient for a working class family to afford to survive. What perverted definition of the word were you considering?

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  • > Job loss is a horrible reason to ban something. Think about our history if we always did that.

    The US has continually set up protectionist policies to preserve a local workforce. Automotive manufacturers, the shipbuilding industry, etc.

If the idea was that laws must be motivated by a negative occurrence rather than preemptive, then that'd follow yeah (if counting job loss as a reason to ban something, which I think is questionable). But note akersten is saying that it's normal for laws to be preemptive in both cases.

Just like when musicians were on strike and the radio people decided to play a recording over the air (gasp! a record!) rather than live performances.

A nice ban on playing recorded music would have saved those jobs.

  • Bad example. You are agreeing that copyright is owned by the people whose work an AI agent is trained on. Sure, come take a class of jobs, and then pay them in perpetuity to license the exposition of their work. For 75 years after the authors death, just like current copyright.