Comment by lucas_the_human
3 days ago
This is just so negative. How will it destroy your life?
There are so many great and useful things it can and will do to improve humanity.
3 days ago
This is just so negative. How will it destroy your life?
There are so many great and useful things it can and will do to improve humanity.
It will only do so if the benefits of the technology is made available to all and we will see alternatives to make an income.
Based on the past 40 years track record it seems unlikely that we will see any form of redistribution before it is existential.
That is definitely grounds for being pessimistic.
It's the economic model we live under, not technology by itself, that's the problem IMHO.
Every tech gets exploited to make some richer folks more rich. Nothing new. Since the rich-ladder *is* the power-ladder under cap'ism.
In the west "we" forgot how unions and strong labor parties gave us weekends, sick leave, holidays, etc. Now we pay the price.
> In the west "we" forgot how unions and strong labor parties gave us weekends, sick leave, holidays, etc. Now we pay the price.
Unions have power for one reason alone: the powerful need to keep the labour force on-board.
When the powerful do not need to care about labour, this happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
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We are likely seeing the end of labor as a power class.
I think of it in roughly 3 eras:
pre industrialization, individual labor contribution had quite a lot of power.
Industrialization, labor sees commoditization and unions make sure that power is kept across individual workers.
Post industrialization (ground zero was like GFC, being accelerated by AI). We need to figure out new structures than labor to distribute resources and power - and that is going to hurt.
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Unions only work because their members have leverage because the wealthy still need their labour. Unions will do absolutely nothing against full replacement by AI.
> Based on the past 40 years track record it seems unlikely that we will see any form of redistribution before it is existential.
Literally every income decile is getting richer. Don't tell me you got fooled by that fake graph showing productivity/income disconnect?
Not rich enough compared to the individual productivity gains.
Don't tell me you have been fooled by the Chicago school of economics that has told you that relative wealth is indifferent as long as you can get a cheaper television.
6 replies →
> How will it destroy your life?
By taking away my ability to earn a living.
> There are so many great and useful things it can and will do to improve humanity.
What great things and why would I get access to those things?
> By taking away my ability to earn a living.
But this is an economy / capitalism problem, not an AI problem? AI isn't at fault that you can't get a job, your boss is for replacing you with AI.
That's like saying we should ban cars because millions of people who would upkeep horses for others to use just lost their jobs.
You're essentially making your life purposely harder because you want uninterrupted money. Perhaps look at the issues of the system that does this?
> What great things...
Aside from the medical AI stuff (detecting breast cancer, etc) that's mostly covered, AI can be helpful if you have to do a boring task that you don't want to do yourself. This is pretty much what every technology does - your phone is created so you don't have to run home and use the landline to make a phone call - it's making an already existing task easier.
>...and why would I get access to those things?
Why not? Seriously, why not? It's a bit like asking why should I get access to a car instead of keeping my horse around. You can keep your horse or car. Nobody's pressuring you to replace your horse with a car.
> your phone is created so you don't have to run home and use the landline to make a phone call - it's making an already existing task easier.
There are externalities. In my experience it was way easier to call people in the 90s. People answered and if not their faimily members did.
It was impossible to ghost phone calls until the early 2000s with presentation screens.
Nowadays people hardly answer unknown numbers or might ignore inconvinient calls.
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You're speaking to a member of a cult, my friend, so don't step in with both feet.
It's pretty naive to think that tools like this are not going to be exploited by American corporations to extract money from people and as an excuse for layoffs
Both things can be true at the same time:
1. tools like this are going to be exploited by corporations to extract money from people.
2. tools like this will provide great benefits for the average person.
We are currently exploited by corporations, arguably more than in the past, and yet we have the highest standard of living in history. In large part due to technological progress.
They were built by the same companies doing the exploitation. They didn't invest billions of dollars without any kind of goal what they are building this for.
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> There are so many great and useful things it can and will do to improve humanity.
Caveat: Only if it also produces shareholder value
It will do great and useful things for holders of significant capital. The majority will be in bread lines.
> How will it destroy your life?
for me?
if it will stay on track for few more months or years, it will be able to do my work and I will have serious trouble to be employed
"destroy your life" may be overstating things but it is definitely not a welcome change
Much of the history of industrial automation has had a dichotomy between the benefit to the general economy (good) vs. the people working in specific industries that were automated (bad); only a subset of goods see total demand rise as a result of efficiency improvements.
AI is automating a lot of things at the same time. Not evenly, there are faster- and slower-automated things. But this does suggest that instead of e.g. society as a whole doing better from all the fabric coming out of the power looms, by a large enough margin to stomp on the weavers who lost their profession, that we may face something more like the entire initial economic displacement from the first industrial revolution (including the period where weavers were replaced), everything from farms finding they no longer needed so many hands through the luddites getting the death penalty to (roughly) the invention of Communism concurrently with the Irish Potato famine, and as part of this those now-bulging cities having to invent new sanitation solutions because their "slop" problem was more literal and gave the population cholera and typhoid.
My expectation a decade ago was that software development would be the last thing to be automated, because we'd need software developers to write AI. Today, while I don't know how far most fields are from automation*, we definitely have AI capable enough at coding to write more AI.
* a decade ago I also thought self-driving cars were basically already sorted; what a pity that the software in the Paint It Black video was not as good as depicted