Comment by eru
4 hours ago
People have objected to training their replacements since forever. Younger people, foreigners, now machines. What else is new?
I don't think you are under any moral or ethical obligation to train your replacement. But I don't think the decision makes much of a difference one way or another in the grand scheme of things.
> You may ask: Why would anyone agree to train an AI model in the very skills they took years to acquire?
If they could actually do it, I would be all over it! If you can save humanity from having to spend years acquiring these skills and judgements, they can do something else with their lives.
They could, but will they get the chance to?
My most commercially valuable skills - software wrangling, figuring out what went wrong, explaining how to do things in software - are rapidly getting obsoleted by agents. But I'm not too sad about it, because honestly? I hated a lot of that work. Endless frustration with finding out what went wrong, sometimes in an architecture you argued strongly against, etc. Watching the AI agent "thinking" scroll by and seeing it get "frustrated" instead of me, is honestly a relief. But what is it going to do for my career, middle-term?
I have a few years of head start on most people on using many forms of AI, but who knows what's that going to be worth?
My belief is that humans need to struggle through the process of learning to code, learning maths etc. in order to actually build the neural pathways to do the hard things AI can’t do yet. I feel some skills atrophying for me, and I worry even more for the younger people who will never get the chance to think without AI.
Another concern I have is that computers don’t need to be “generally superhuman” to replace 90%+ of office jobs. Computers have always been superhuman at some things, and LLMs have massively jumped the number of tasks that can now be automated to human-level quality or better. I’m not sure it matters if they scale to true AGI.
What are the hard things AI can't do yet, then? Are you sure we shouldn't rather spend time getting better at, say, playing the piano?
Assuming we're allowed to prioritize that in a world where the rich have all the money.
(Looking at the local flow of money, I can't avoid the conclusion that my wages come indirectly mostly from the building of an extreme luxury product for an extremely rich person.)
Just like how the car gave us back so many more hours to spend actually living instead of working. And the washing machine. And the computer. And the Internet.
The washing machine and dishwasher definitely did.
I don't own a car, so I can't comment on that.
There are 4 differences between my home and that of my grandparents from one century ago, which indeed have reduced significantly the time spent with household chores:
1. Washing machine
2. Vacuum cleaner
3. Microwave oven
4. Electric refrigerator (but they had a cold underground cellar, while I no longer have such luxuries)
There are also various modern tools that are not used in the normal day-to-day life, but only when incidents happen, which require repairs, for example an electric drill or reciprocating saw, or a soldering iron, or an electric sewing machine (but my grandparents had a mechanical Singer sewing machine, which did the same job, only with more effort) and sometimes, but not often, I prepare some kind of food for which an electric mixer accelerates enough the preparation to compensate for the time spent with assembling, disassembling and washing the mixer.
While other modern inventions, like computers, are very important to me, none of them has reduced the amount of work that must be done in my home (I never felt the need for an automatic dishwasher, because I never let them accumulate, I wash them instantly after use, even while cooking, because I eat only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients).
They release women from housekeeping... to workplaces.
6 replies →
I don't think cars gave back many hours for the majority of people, they just increased the distance people travel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant
All of these things have been marvelous. The washing machine in particular is such a marvel that almost all Amish use one.
While our time working at home has definitely gone down, our time at work hasn’t though. The point is our employers just expect more, and the benefits of whatever new efficiency is gained, if any, are not passed onto those at the bottom or middle.
4 replies →
> that almost all Amish use one.
There are small pedal powered ones. I am sure you can rig a horse driven washing machine...
I’m not sure about the car. I seem to remember reading that commute time has been remarkably consistent even going back to Roman times. All the car allowed us to do is build homes further away from our workplace.
Increased productivity is nothing to sneeze at even if you work the same amount of hours. The real problem with AI is that the productivity benefits are focused with the owners and not the workers.
> The real problem with AI is that the productivity benefits are focused with the owners and not the workers.
What makes you think so? What evidence do we have one way or another?
2 replies →
>actually living...
Watching TV...Or consuming social media..
Who am I to judge what other people decide to do with their freetime. It's not like lurking on HN is morally superior.
2 replies →
I understand the article's dilemma and I don't want to dismiss the difficulty of the situation.
That said, I'd love to train AI to do my personal projects. While I enjoy coding, it's way too slow. I do my projects for the design journey and the final result. It would be great to get calls from AI for direction and assistance, if needed, while it does all the raw coding work for me.
> they can do something else with their lives.
Let them eat cake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake
That phrase was born as a straw man.
The argument against "they can do something else with their lives" is not a strawman though.
In a hypothetical end state where the people who own fully-automated production of everything, and need maybe few millions employed to support and guard that production, the "freed" people are not going to do something better with their lives.
1 reply →
> I don't think you are under any moral or ethical obligation to train your replacement.
Depending on where you live, there might not even be a legal obligation.
Details likely depend on whatever contract you are signing.
I don't want to attack your good faith in humanity, so I will ask another way - if a system was reliant on workers, what reason would there be for those workers to exist , after their work became automated?
Why do humans need to work to exist?
We just need a new model for existing that isn’t based on labor. We should have started working on these problems in 2016 when it was obvious they were coming, but we elected a regressive twice to help us go backwards instead.
> Why do humans need to work to exist?
What make life worth living? Is it love? Is it beauty? Is it the sense of having agency?
Sadly, we are not smart enough to know until it is taken away.....
1 reply →
Lets first have actual problem instead of trying to stop data center buildout or squatting on data.
Let’s build abundance first and solve inequality later. Instead people are keen to prevent abundance and keep everyone level by keeping everyone poor.
Workers are humans. Humans don't need any system's permission or reasoning to exist.
If you've ever been laid off or fired, you might have noticed that you don't cease to exist when your contract ends.
You may however notice that your existence might be cut short if you don't have access to food, shelter, medical treatments, because "the system" eventually has no incentive to provide for you anymore, because your labor is now worthless to capital.
You do cease to exist once you don't get access to food, water or health care long enough.
Think just a little past the most direct consequence - let me rephrase GP's question: What reason would the ownership class have to provide these necessities to workers when they no longer require their work?
Most people's existence are very strongly tied to their job. Not being able to pay basic utilities and food just the first examples.
Obviously, nobody is going to blip out of existence when their layoff notice is signed, everyone knows this and nobody claimed that. If you stepped down from your philosophical post humanist highchair a bit, you would realize that.
well i brought up the system for a reason, human existence is relative to the system in which humans exist. are there any examples of humans being systematically supported when their class of labor ceased to exist on a widespread scale? if so, did those supportive aspects spontaneously manifest? all in all, would such insights apply to a more widespread scenario, where the affected labor classes are all those involving human computer interaction?
Presumably the stress one endures when their way of life is challenged significantly is life changing. Not that you’d care though, by the sounds of it.
[dead]
> If you can save humanity from having to spend years acquiring these skills and judgements, they can do something else with their lives.
In theory, yes. In practice, no. Not until we replace our entire socioeconomic system. As-is, the only reason most people can extract an existence from capital is capital's dependence on labor.
Break that dependence and the entire thing breaks, capital becomes a self-sustaining flywheel towards feudalism and everyone who currently depends on labor for their survival loses the foundation of their existence.
Only once we fundamentally change ownership structures can we work towards your vision. Until then, it is a false piper to dystopia.