171–180 of 572 posts
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In the US at least, the imperative should be to create policy and systems that don't make healthcare completely unavailable for millions of people in the first place. AI and robots don't mean anything without access.
I'm imaging a world where everyone has health care and no one has to work. Would the world still be filled with turmoil and conflict?
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> By replacing labour with robots and not compensating them, you're sending a clear message that you don't respect people and the value that they bring. I see many problems with this statement: - Is a new robot-only company fairer than firing humans at an old company? - Should we as a society forego the benefits of automation, because it makes some people unemployed? - Should there be a robot tax? What is a robot? Is…
> Should an enterprise created for profit consider other values than profit? Yes! Very much yes! Adam Smith himself noted that a capitalist enterprise, if not run according to good values (which to him meant Christian values, but it need not be that for everyone), would be a horrible thing. That hasn't really changed since. A business needs to have some values behind it other than pure profit-seeking, or else it beco…
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
-- John Adams
There's plenty of rhetoric about whether technology advancements will be a good thing or not. But I think that distracts from the core message, that the most important matter is not whether we use technology, but how we treat our fellow humans. By replacing labour with robots and not compensating them, you're sending a clear message that you don't respect people and the value that they bring. We have a mandate for us…
> By replacing labour with robots and not compensating them, you're sending a clear message that you don't respect people and the value that they bring. This just sounds like rent-seeking. People should get paid, because they once upon a time had a job. Now machines do the job better and for cheaper, therefore you deserve to be paid for it? How about the compensation is the improved products or better prices for all…
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> Should we as a society forego the benefits of automation, because it makes some people unemployed? Yes. AI generates sameness on a good day, and comical gibberish on a bad day, that will never change because, AI isn't human. Sameness will drive customers to look for human made stuff, gibberish will drive them away.
We should apply the same rule to all improvements. Can you imagine how many people we could employ if we banned all tools for digging and required everyone to dig by hand? We could literally create hundreds of millions of jobs!
Do we measure software engineers in terms of their lines of code per day? I feel that this is basically what you and others are doing when you compare writing or illustration to digging holes. You're seriously misunderstanding the economy of these fields. Productivity has almost nothing to do with the market for art or writing. What matters is the quality of a work (very hard to measure and deeply ingrained in our psyche) and the attention a work receives (Software engineers should be more familiar with this. It is the "algorithm" people love to disparage). We had more than enough productivity already in these spaces. Does giving people a content firehose actually do anything to these markets? Have you read any books written using AI? Do you know and follow any AI artists? Is anyone besides Nvidia and OpenAI making money here?
I understand the appeal of the models, and as a software engineer I've gotten at least some use out of them. But even in that space I have to wonder if producing more code is a net positive. There's a lot of drawbacks to producing more code. There's more chances to write bugs, more you have to document and maintain, and you're potentially overlooking simpler and more elegant solutions.
I guess all I'm trying to say is when you say this is just a hole digger, you're glossing over a lot of nuance.
It's telling that this anti-automation and anti-AI movement is finally reaching its crescendo now that creative and white collar jobs are under threat. These same people writing books about the evils of AI sat back over the last few decades as countless factory jobs, farm jobs, retail jobs and even "lower class" intellectual jobs (like bookkeepers, travel agents and telephone operators) were automated away. "It's jus…
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What about as consumers then? Without workers who's going to buy anything? We have some serious logistics to figure out if we automate the majority of jobs away, and yet somehow all these companies are expecting people to still be able to buy their products.
100 oligarchs can own everything and trade among each other to fulfill their megaprojects. Does a pharaoh care who built his pyramid? Or spaceship? The workers will still be needed to laugh at their suffering. Unless robots get better than humans even at that.
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We should apply the same rule to all improvements. Can you imagine how many people we could employ if we banned all tools for digging and required everyone to dig by hand? We could literally create hundreds of millions of jobs!
My worry exactly! Ideally we should need no jobs, and machines should do all the work.
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Reality is that it didn't cost any jobs. Everyone just moved up to making things more complex than what Wix can do. I don't feel my life is any worse off having moved from building static marketing pages to complex web apps.
It definitely reduced the amount and complexity of work there is to do. So, in a static market, it reduced the number of workers. It's hard to see in tech which is an expanding market.
So viewing it in such a contrived way is just not useful. If anything, the more automation we get, the more demand for tech workers there is because it's able to deliver increasingly more value.
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> Should we as a society forego the benefits of automation, because it makes some people unemployed? Yes. AI generates sameness on a good day, and comical gibberish on a bad day, that will never change because, AI isn't human. Sameness will drive customers to look for human made stuff, gibberish will drive them away.
It's going to be funny when all these AI companies realize that hurting people who make things also hurts their models in the long run.
unless the AI models surpass a certain critical point, with which new and original works could be generated without using original human derived works.
aka, an AGI.
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Given what the "top" of society looks like currently, the Luddites were correct to be skeptical of technology, and accusations of "Luddite" at the slightest hint of not being 100% on board with the latest fad technology make this discussion seem in bad faith. Most techies I know do not have a skeptical eye for technology, even though IMO they should. This shit is being used to spy on and manipulate us with the data t…
luddites were not skeptical of technology, or even against it. They were against the way in which factory owners used technology to illegally displace them (as workers) and to falsely advertise the resulting textiles (selling low quality goods while claiming they were of higher quality) in order to undercut them and put them out of business.
Therefore, if a machine surpasses this threshold, they will win marketshare.