Comment by Jtarii
2 months ago
The creation is the actually enjoyable part.
Taking a helicopter to the top of Everest is not as rewarding as climbing the mountain.
You are completely discrediting the joy humans derive from actually -doing- the work, and not just, telling someone else to do the work.
There is a reason artists hate AI, its because they enjoy the actual act of painting, like mathematicians enjoy the act of proving theorems and programmers enjoy the act of typing lines of text into a file on their computer.
We are intentionally deleting all of the enjoyable high agency jobs and replacing them with "model babysitting".
Jobs are not generally meant to be enjoyable (although that is a benefit if so), they are meant to get work done. It's funny seeing office workers here on HN have this sort of opinion and contrasting that with blue collar workers, ask a miner or house builder how fun their job is.
> ask a miner or house builder how fun their job is
The average person on a residential job site I've talked to has looked and sounded like they're having as much fun as the average software dev. And none of them have said stuff like "people on my team have confided that they cry every night because the higher-level management keeps screaming about the project not being done" like I've heard at from folks, say, certain big social media places...
That's because Software as a job has become a joyless death march to poop out casino flavored adware for 99% of the industry? Go launch the Temu app and imagine being on the team that builds it.
I could imagine a desperate person with a family writing that app. I can't imagine anyone else with light behind their eyes doing it.
This has even been the startup world (even downstream of LLMs!) for some time.
The people in deep morning tend to be the people who have managed to avoid this outcome, or deceive themselves about its inevitability.
Food is not meant to be enjoyable, it's meant to nourish. But by a fortunate coincidence it may also be tasty. Now imagine replacing ice cream, or steak, or fresh berries, or whatever you enjoyed eating, with something like Soylent or Huel with a side of puréed kale. Your nutrition may actually improve, but something would be lost, won't it?
> Food is not meant to be enjoyable, it's meant to nourish. But by a fortunate coincidence it may also be tasty.
Im pretty sure the taste is an evolutionary indicator of nutritional value (we now know how to cheat to make food that tastes really good but isn’t really healthy). But it’s not really an accident that some food tastes good.
2 replies →
Don't many blue collar workers (miners & house builders) do actually take immense pride in their work? There are woodworkers out there whose hobby is also woodworking.
So does that mean we should make work even less enjoyable still?
Then they should take up less of our lives.
> You are completely discrediting the joy humans derive from actually -doing- the work, and not just, telling someone else to do the work.
But humans (or at least some of them) get joy from that too. A lot of people enjoy being supervisors, team leaders, managers, executives - even though that’s largely deciding what to tell other people to do rather than directly doing it yourself
> There is a reason artists hate AI, its because they enjoy the actual act of painting
"AI" never stopped a painter painting.
Just selling.
Some painters can't paint if they can't sell.
This the problem. The need to make money in order to justify your right to survive is the problem.
Painters shouldn’t be mad at AI, they should be mad at the system.
7 replies →
you can’t climb to the moon, you need rockets for that. In the hands of great researchers, AI will accelerate and propel human knowledge far beyond what we could achieve with pencil and paper alone.
> In the hands of great researchers, AI will accelerate and propel human knowledge far beyond what we could achieve with pencil and paper alone.
Who needs researchers when you have great AI.
Soon we will all be Wall-E fat people with AI that's there to do anything we can be bothered to think of.
True, but many of us have grown identifying ourselves with the kind of work we do, the discoveries that follow from our hard work. Even in the case of rockets, we designed the rockets! Here, I've to let the oracle take care of things while I'm robbed of that delight of discovery.
> In the hands of great researchers, AI will accelerate and propel human knowledge far beyond what we could achieve with pencil and paper alone.
Did you ever think that the pursuit of knowledge might be not just producing it but discovering it as a collective human effort? Putting to much mechanization in it kills the joy of it.
> you can’t climb to the moon, you need rockets for that.
We don't live for rockets or the moon, but for ourselves. Anywhere we can go to only at the price of our despair we have no business going to.
I think you replied to the wrong comment.
No, they obviously didn't.
> Taking a helicopter to the top of Everest is not as rewarding as climbing the mountain.
I don't think this is a fair comparison. New tools take you higher. I'll never climb Everest. A good comparison is:
- Climbing your local mountain
- Helicopter to the top of Everest
- Spacecraft to the moon
If a helicopter just saved you a trip up, you'd be right, but it can take you places you wouldn't otherwise go.
I created a new field of mathematics just yesterday, coincidentally. It wasn't a very good field of mathematics, though.
> Taking a helicopter to the top of Everest is not as rewarding as climbing the mountain.
Flying from Atlanta to New York is not as rewarding as walking there. You are right, but if we would be walking everywhere, we would still be stuck somewhere in ancient times.
> Taking a helicopter to the top of Everest is not as rewarding as climbing the mountain.
If you’re on the top of mt. Everest and you need medicine, would you care if it reached you via helicopter or via some guy climbing while having a lot of fun?
This has nothing to do with the content of my comment.
But you can still try to climb Everest even if helicopters are available, and likewise you can still try to do maths even if LLMs can do it quicker.
Absolutely you can, just don't expect to make a living out of it anymore.
"like... programmers enjoy the act of typing lines of text into a file on their computer"
ehm, no!
Yes exactly, that jumps out as a strange thing to say. The enjoyable part of programming is the puzzle, the act of figuring out how to solve the problem elegantly and well.
Although I can't speak for artists, surely the joy of painting is in the creation of a piece of art they can be proud of?
Enjoyment in work is generally about taking pride in the end result, not in the repetitive mechanical part.
Not exactly, no. What is "the problem" - is there really only one problem? - and where does the creativity go? This depends on what you're doing and how you're going about it. Maybe every little mark you make on paper or canvas or a text file is a puzzle, with associated meta-level questions, and the interest is in hundreds of intimately small creative notions, and when it all approaches the end you have mixed feelings because the (very much non-mechanical) process has stopped.
People also take joy and pride in model building and model babysitting too.
You wanted to say: Removing the last bit of joy, anything humane from creating.
Funny thing about diffusion systems: they can't paint.
You're not talking about the joy of painting, because no machine is here to take that away. That still exists, it is still joyful. Likewise, exploring mathematics for oneself will still exist. It will still be joyful and surprising.
What you are discounting is what the article actually admitted with all the job talk. What you're saying here as well: "if we structure society around compensated labor and machines are better at the labor than my high status job is about to be farmed out to a machine."
Firstly, yes. Welcome to the proletariat? Secondly, maybe this isn't a reasonable principle to organize society around. Maybe if the only jobs left are "one of the 95 ultra wealthy tastemakeres" or "spiritually destitute model babysitter" then we should consider an alternative organizational strategy.
This is not to say I'm yearning for neo-Stalin to unmake the data center. I'm yearning for a world closer to one where labor for survival is a historical lesson.
> You are completely discrediting the joy humans derive from actually -doing- the work
This sort of intellectually dishonest ad hominem is so tiresome. They did no such thing.
> There is a reason artists hate AI, its because they enjoy the actual act of painting
AI hasn't stopped anyone from painting.