Comment by marsten
1 day ago
In the grand scheme it's good to invent things that replace human labor. It frees up people to do more interesting things. The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.
1 day ago
In the grand scheme it's good to invent things that replace human labor. It frees up people to do more interesting things. The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.
> The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.
Yeah, but why does it need to take the fun jobs first, like painting, writing poems, coding, making music, ...
I want the AI to cook, do the dishes, take out the trash, etc.
I'm not sure cooking is a good example as it is fun, and also automated in many ways
Well, because consuming art, reading poems, having code written for you that solves a problem, and listening to music is also fun. Recently I wanted a grand elegy to Britain written as the Empire started failing and set to music in a specific style. I had it playing in the background while fixing some issues with some software.
It truly was joyful to have this available to me. It didn’t have to have mass appeal or need me to pay the right artists the right amounts. I had it in moments.
It’s a wonderful world.
To me the image of a world where everyone does menial work while entertaining themselves with AI-generated "art" doesn't seem fun, it seems extremely depressing and dystopian. I guess we just have different values.
> like painting, writing poems, coding, making music
Citation needed. Do you have an example of someone in the arts losing their job because of AI?
Yes. The entire job markets for game concept art, stock photography, and storyboarding have been decimated and those were the lowest-hanging fruit for diffusion model applications.
>It frees up people to do more interesting things
Like beg on the corners and starve in the street? Trying to figure out how the basics of capitalism where labor is exchanged for money is not going to work well when the only jobs left are side gigs. Something will have to change and a lot of People will fight said change.
We will come up with new jobs, like we have for all of human history. I think even in an abundance utopia people will still work - we need purpose to sustain our existence.
The work will become even more fulfilling however.
Throughout human history that didn’t happen fast enough to avoid an astonishing amount of human misery. Nobody’s worried about the future of work. They’re worried about the people that rely on tech jobs for food, mortgage/rent, cancer treatments, elder care, retirement, et al. Look at what happened to the rust belt, coal country, etc. etc. etc.
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I’ve thought about this myself. Couple of points:
1) It’s not my job to fix all the problems of Capitalism. It’s painful to try to fight the system without collective action. My family and I have to eat too.
2) We have had a solution all along for the particular problem of AI putting devs out of work. It’s called professional licensure, and you can see it in action in engineering and medical fields. Professional Software Engineers would assume a certain amount of liability and responsibility for the software they develop. That’s regardless of whether they develop it with LLM tools or something else.
For example, you let your tools write slop that you ship without even looking? And it goes on to wreak havoc? That’s professional malpractice. Bad engineer.
If we do this then Software Engineers become the responsible humans in the loop of so-called “AI” systems.
It’s not your job to fix capitalism. But it is your job to evaluate if your money making skill comes at too high a price for others.
Say you found a job shooting people in the head for money. Like if you work for ICE or something…
You need to feed your family. Is this job ok? You may decide yes. I decided no. I will find another way to feed my family.
You don’t get to escape consequences because you are a small cog in a large system.
In the bigger picture, automation should free people from labor. But that requires some very greedy people to relax their grip ever so slightly. I imagine they see automation as a way to reduce reliance on labor, and if they don’t need labor, they don’t need people. So let them starve and stop having kids.
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> In the grand scheme it's good to invent things that replace human labor. It frees up people to do more interesting things. The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.
To a point. Then it just frees up people to do nothing.
> The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.
That is in fact the goal. The less labor capital needs, the more money (and power) the capitalists get to keep for themselves.