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Comment by bluefirebrand

8 hours ago

Terrible for me because I have to compete with AI for jobs

Like mostly all tech, AI is destined to get cheaper with time. We're still pretty early on and are experiencing a hardware crunch, which will ease eventually.

AI doesn't have workers rights, doesn't burn out, doesn't get sick, can be instantly onboarded, etc. The second we can be fully replaced with AI, we will be. Plan accordingly. I'm pursuing FIRE and considering moving into a trade.

  • I feel like trades will be impacted too. No reason robots can't do much of it cheaper and faster. They're even 3D printing houses.

    • training data for physical tasks like that is much, much harder than just collecting the entire internet. It'll be resistant to AI much longer than knowledge work will be

  • If AI would be that cheap and good, why not open a company and leverage it for yourself?

    • Doing what? Making something with ai: enjoy your 20,000 competitors. Making something without ai: who can buy it?

    • If AI would be that cheap and good, why would they rent it to you? Or even tell you about it?

Ah that makes sense. I'm skeptical that AIs doing things on their own will be competitive with humans using AIs to do things. But I'm not incredibly confident in this and I think it's sensible to think the opposite. But to me, I just think about all the things I can accomplish with the aid of very good, fast, and cheap inference.

  • I think the sad part is that whether it's any good or not, it will be cheaper, and that will be enough even at current performance levels to cut a huge number of jobs. I think people exist in the present moment largely because legal questions about liability are not settled well enough for executives to start the great purge. I believe on some level my continued employment is simply because people in leadership positions would be incredibly unwise to not have a human to blame when things start going wrong. People are expensive insurance policies for the time being. Once there is some legal framework to absolve executives of their own culpability or they figure out a good way to insulate themselves from personal responsibility, then the real "fun" will begin.

  • The problem comes in to how many bullshit jobs we'll have to create to ensure that enough people can still earn a living to ensure that we don't have riots and revolution in the street.

    Companies being profit seeking entities that are actively hostile to social wellbeing would gladly put all of our money in a machine money making loop and leave all but a few humans out.