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AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

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Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#331

Post by theonlybutlet »

dukeyukey wrote: post #218
JohnFen wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'll bet that a poor person today has cheaper access to better medicines than a poor person 30 years ago.

Yes, that's progress, lucky for some of us, we no longer live in a world of subsistence (living hand to mouth at the mercy of the world around us). The real question is, are we creating additional value i.e. is the value that we developing/building/creating compounding? (You'll see this in increasing GDP per capita and increased productivity) and what proportion of that are we taking? The amount we are taking for our efforts is deteriorating and inequality is widening, eventually it gets to a point where social mobility is halted and you're back to subsistence.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#332

Post by gavinhoward »

asdfman123 wrote: post #322
gavinhoward wrote: post #13

I completely disagree. I'm building a business, and this business will be based on excellent software and excellent support for that software. I will refuse to use AI. But instead of AI users taking my job, I'm sure that refusing to use AI will become my differentiator as every AI user becomes more and more like each other. You may think that good AI users will not become so bland, but they will. Human laziness will…

Counterpoint: one thing I think AI will be able to do really well early on is refactoring. Code is often ugly because humans just don't have the time to make it look nice. But if I had a good AI tool, I could make my code beautiful. This is hardly the first time humans have invented a tool to make complicated tasks easy. The sweet spot has always been knowing how to use the tools to maximize your productivity, but al…

Countercounterpoint: I doubt that AI will do as well in refactoring as me.

I refactor religiously. I hate code that is subpar, so I'll refactor and refactor. In my current project, I have 180 commits that mention refactoring in the log message, and some of those are huge redesign commits. And I haven't even released it yet!

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#333

Post by redleggedfrog »

fnimick wrote: post #293
ModernMech wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has it? Because when I look at humanity over the ages, I see a select few using technology and violence to exert power and influence over the great many to further their own desires. I don't see that changing in the future anytime soon, especially before AI gets to be the next technology in a long line of technology used to oppress and inflict violence on others.

Aren't you excited to take the human element out of the loop of enforcing property ownership rights? In China, in Tianenmen, they had to bring in forces from the countryside because the city police wouldn't fire on their neighbors. AI won't have any restrictions or morals. An AI-powered law enforcement force would gun down every single person in a city if authorities called for it.

This is the future - maybe not everywhere, and probably not soon, but it is an eventuality. Also, AI will be treated like encryption - it will become a munition, with the same type of restrictions as munitions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...). Governments will keep the best AI for themselves, leaving the goof-nuts ChatGPT type stuff for private citizens.

Then the question becomes did those gun downed humans deserve what they got? And did that massacre result in a greater good? Those are the not-so-pleasant questions the humans will have to ask themselves (probably using AI to help, ironically).

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#334

Post by JohnFen »

Herval_freire wrote: post #330
JohnFen wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given the rate of progress in the past year, the scenario I describe is a possibility that is insane not to consider. Personally speaking, there's no point to me considering that. If what you are projecting turns out to be true, all it means is that there no place for me anymore.

Why? What should affect whether something is considered is it's likelihood of happening. If AI has a 99% chance of replacing you, then you'd rather consider the 1% alternative simply because there's no place for you anymore? If AI will replace you there are steps that can be taken to prevent it from replacing you. This involves things like Resistance or changing what you do into something that can't be as easily repl…

> What should affect whether something is considered is it's likelihood of happening.

Right, which is why I don't spend a lot of time considering a future where "AI content may even be preferable and better than human produces content."

In part because I don't think this is likely at all. But also in part because if it does happen, then there's literally no way to compete with that. My career will be over, and it's unclear that there would be any other careers to switch to.

> If AI will replace you there are steps that can be taken to prevent it from replacing you

I'm having a very hard time seeing what could be done (in the possible future we're talking about).

> changing what you do into something that can't be as easily replaced.

But the possible future we're discussing is one where there isn't anything that I can't be easily replaced at. All that would be left is menial labor.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#335

Post by digging »

danogentili wrote: post #245
Herval_freire wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're failing to account for the trajectory of this technology where AI easily produces content indistinguishable and superior to human content. When such A I content becomes cheap and pervasive then AI will suddenly turn into a mirror to humanity. It will show us that "hand crafted" content is itself part of a bland and mechanical content generation algorithm.

Two things: 1) That is a horribly denigrative view of human creativity, one that simply does not reflect reality. 2) I kind of don't care: creativity always was and always will be about humans wanting to create something, the satisfaction and excitement of writing down a fanfic you've been thinking about for the last 3 weeks, the emotion of bringing your thoughts to life. Even with endless AI-generated content, I wil…

> 1) That is a horribly denigrative view of human creativity, one that simply does not reflect reality.

I disagree with this. Part of the long trajectory of imagining and creating AI is figuring out what makes a human do what it does. Many believe there is no magic spark which cannot be replicated. And if there's no magic spark, then eventually AI can replicate the entire human creative experience. Whether it will or whether we want it to is a different question.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#336

Post by teawrecks »

gavinhoward wrote: post #273
pixl97 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Instead of using a motor vehicle, I will deliver all packages by hand" I mean, yea, in places it would succeed as a boutique business, but you're not building the next Amazon that way either.

Who needs to build the next Amazon? I want a business that feeds my wife and me, with maybe a little extra. I don't need to be rich.

The problem is your plan hinges on you being the one and only company in your neighborhood with the "human touch". But you won't be. You'll be competing with every other human with a family who refuses to use modern technology. Even if it's possible, it's unlikely you'll win that fight. And even if you do, how many others did you have to beat out to make it work?

It's just not a scalable plan. It reminds me of a middle schooler whose plan for their future involves getting famous or winning the lottery.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#337

Post by alentred »

I think it is important for the context to notice that the post is written by a renowned Italian mathematician and a computer scientist, and Italy just banned ChatGPT. I feel that the post is not about the AI (people using AI) taking the jobs, but about whether it is a good idea to blindly ignore the fact.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#338

Post by fnimick »

redleggedfrog wrote: post #333
fnimick wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you excited to take the human element out of the loop of enforcing property ownership rights? In China, in Tianenmen, they had to bring in forces from the countryside because the city police wouldn't fire on their neighbors. AI won't have any restrictions or morals. An AI-powered law enforcement force would gun down every single person in a city if authorities called for it.

This is the future - maybe not everywhere, and probably not soon, but it is an eventuality. Also, AI will be treated like encryption - it will become a munition, with the same type of restrictions as munitions ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th... ). Governments will keep the best AI for themselves, leaving the goof-nuts ChatGPT type stuff for private citizens. Then the question becomes di…

The real question in my mind is, does democracy survive once the top 1% has a complete and unquestioned monopoly on violence and power? I don't think so.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#339

Post by sharemywin »

ajmurmann wrote: post #302
photochemsyn wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, are you looking at the average or the median? Just saying the same thing over and over without data to back it up doesn't count for much. The discrepancy is fairly large - average US 'familial' net worth is $748,000, median is only $122,000 - and the median net worth for non-homeowning families is only $6,000. https://financebuzz.com/us-net-worth-statistics A serious medical condition is also likely to cause b…

Is there a median child mortality or literacy rate? For net-worth, which I never mentioned, your own source shows increases over time of both median and average since 2016. All the distressing situations you describe of course are real, but were they less common in the US in the past? QoL has gone up tremendously over the last fifty years, especially if you look at it globally. Do we need something like UBI to avoid…

UBI? let's just start with reliable food, housing and medical(including mental health). and shore up some kind of retirement funds. then lets talk about cost effective daycare so raising a child doesn't destroy your financial prospects. If there's anything left I'm all about it.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#340

Post by agentultra »

This is a useful distinction, I think, to make: the current hype cycle and headlines are making it sound like we have invented autonomous, intelligent beings with super-human abilities of their own.

"AI," is such a poor, non-descriptive term that it allows charlatans and click-bait to proliferate and scare non-technical, uninformed people. They can bend their claims any way they want.

The people using these technologies under the banner of "AI" definitely want you to believe it's a revolutionary, fundamental, paradigm-shifting technology that will utterly change society: and they're the only ones that can bring it to you.

This isn't a public, social project for the good of society. We're seeing classic capitalist moves to make first-mover advantage to leverage this technology.

Too much of this hype-cycle shares the same characteristics of the crypto-bubble from last year: it's revolutionary and inevitable and will completely change society!

We need to educate people on what these technologies actually are and not let people sell the public on speculation and science-fiction "what ifs."

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