Comment by InfinityByTen
9 hours ago
What assumption do you think I make? I'm curious.
I just find it uncertain what lies ahead. I just don't see the sustainability in this. I have degrees in Mechanical Engineering, Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computing. If the "inevitable" is that I do manual labour till we can augment the robots to do that as well, I don't see how me or millions others similar to me have any agency.
Right now, a bunch of stuff is blurted out every month or quarter and people in notable positions are given a chance to "tidy it up". Let's assume that you have even the open weight models at your disposal, the hardware to run any of this in the kind of scale needed, requires capital of Governmental level funding.
Where I see this heading is that there'd be a divide of who controls the resources to produce and who gets delegated to do the menial work. If that's what you mean by my tenous assumption, please do share what you see differently.
It just puts us in the same boat as buggy whip manufacturers and saddlemakers. At least now we know how they truly felt. The rest of society needs to care as much as you cared about saddlemakers before AI. See how that works?
It's fascinating how we start bringing in printing press, saddle makers and weavers into these discussions.
But since you bring that up, to recap, the then colonial powers, systemically invalidated the hand weavers of India (where I happen to be from) with the industrial revolution. What followed was famine, mass deaths and cultural collapse. So yes, I truly realize the catastrophe what a group of resource controlling groups can cause on the ones who don't have the chance to have say in how tech moves forward.
Also saddle makers and weavers weren't like a sizable part of world economy. The effects were "far away from home". The "inevitable" is people in tech, all sorts of knowledge workers and possibly even manual labour.
Jobs being invalidated has been happening for a long while. This is not that discussion.
Your assumption was that someone who believes that this is inevitable is just someone who assumes they'd be in the "have" rather the "have not" category. I agree there may be some correlation, but it is less of a sure thing than thinking AI replacing mathematicians is inevitable, in my opinion.