Comment by KaiserPro
2 days ago
I don't think thats really it.
For me personally I am vaguely indifferent to programmers using LLMs to make more shitty code. My worry is the second and third order effects
For work currently, as an SRE, I'm being asked to maintain and look after slop as if its properly built and instrumented. Our platform has clear rules and conventions, and AI isn't following those.
For the wider world, I fucking hate that image/video generation is evaporating what is "real". For memes sure its great, but for bad actors it gives a brilliant way to say "its AI wasn't me" and then the debate moves away from "did person do bad thing" to "is it wrong to say that things are AI?"
I also worry about the debasement of value of human work. Looking at history, say of the weavers, it didn't work out to well for them when the powered loom came along.
This is the opposite of a loom. With a loom you can very easily see that what it makes is exactly like cloth made by hand, except it's more uniform and faster. There also wasn't this weird drive to drive out the heretics so the AI messiah may dwell among us, this desire to put all eggs in one basket, instead of welcoming competition and a control group.
I would suggest that you are looking at the product, not the effect on the workers.
The powered loom produced more uniform, much cheaper fabric. It wasn't colourful or particularly flamboyant. It took a lot more work to get patterns (its where punch card come from)
But thats not the point. Powered looms meant that cottage industry that employed people close to sources of production (ie cotton/calico in india and wool in england) were thrown out on their arses. The majority lived on rented land/housing. Couldn't pay the rent and were kicked out into the loving arms of the poor laws. Lots of people had to re-train, the rest went begging. Combine that with agricultural reform, meant that Lots of people moved into slums in the towns, where they worked much longer, unsafer hours.
The rest dispersed into the wider world.
> I would suggest that you are looking at the product, not the effect on the workers.
Sure, I was in that comment. What you said is true, too, and given how much of this is driven by greed and not need, I would even say it's more important.
But the effect on the product matters, too, of course. Not just quality and bloat wise, but in a way it's like saying we no longer need to know how to read and write, we all get a butler and just ask them what a text says, or to write letters for us. Because the butler is smarter than any human, and it's so convenient. I'm ironically "with the Catholic Church" (not really, but you know) on this one because I see people/companies who want to be like the Catholic Church in the middle ages, and even without those, how sheer laziness can plunge us into some idiocratic abyss.
> I also worry about the debasement of value of human work. Looking at history, say of the weavers, it didn't work out to well for them when the powered loom came along.
They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option. And the world is better with the power loom. It's scary but we still have to embrace that eventually pretty much all valuable labour will be automated, and by then our society and economy needs to have been restructured for supporting humans providing 0 economic value.
> They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option.
Yes, but then whole swathes of the English countryside (and then the Indian countryside) was plunged into destitution for generations and it took rebellions, massacres and revolutions to get something like comfortable living.
Yeah there was no system in place then to ensure those who were left without means to survive would be able to survive. Shouldn't be the case with the knowledge of that history and all this time we have to actually change things. We quite literally know that it's a matter of only a few years now before the vast amount of knowledge work (at least) is fully automated away; governments should be making changes to make the economic transition more smooth. It'd be highly irresponsible to not do so, and I dread that most will be irresponsible.
4 replies →
It's like climate change: Earth will survive. I and my family won't. Therefore we get wars.
>They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option.
Who is they? The majority of British textile workers experienced destitute conditions following industrialization.
That's one of my two gripes with AI:
1) It's posed to take over knowledge work, and yet our societies have no safety nets for the millions of knowledge workers.
2) It promotes superficial understanding. It sounds so convincing and compresses complex topics into a few messages, leaving users thinking they know more than they actually do.
1) Yes, that's a serious issues that needs to be addressed, but many are too high on the status quo, because freedom and meritocracy and self-determination and all that. Rather watch the world burn than give up the ability to be able to earn and own more than the next person.
2) That's up to users. Those who only want superficial understanding will get that, and those who want deep understanding will question more and ask for citations so they can verify.