271–280 of 572 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Hollywood wants to cede its business to other countries...
There is approximately a zero percent chance that AI enables a foreign film market to dethrone Disney any time soon.
Disney’s stock is down about 20%. Netflix up almost the same amount. Why do you think one of these has cheaper access to capital?
People are happy to use tech like wix to build a web page because building web pages is hard. Virtually every designer, artist, writer, and musician, were all very happy to use wix even though it cost the jobs of legions of developers. “Finally I can do what these nerds can do without their help”. I really don’t see the difference.
then you are completely blind. dont see the difference between the printing press and total human obsolescence as well as the insane ramifications of technology explosion that comes with agi
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you seen what people do when they have nothing to do? Be careful what you wish for. ChatGPT notwithstanding, we're a long way from a Star Trek post-scarcity world.
People find things to do.
It seems to be a lot of zealotry, buttery and violence. Learning to be good with all that free time will take work.
This version of the Luddites is the one I was taught in my history classes—in both HS and college my teachers were careful to emphasize that the colloquial usage and the actual movement are only loosely related, and we discussed how the Luddites weren't rejecting technology per se so much as they were acting out of desperation to preserve their way of life. This is certainly something worth learning from today, and a…
Pretty much every take posted under your thread here about luddites is a terrible one. People in this thread don't seem to understand what the more archaic form of "preserve their way of life" actually means. It means not starving to death. Back then there was no social safety net. Once your trade was not needed back then you were likely kicked to the street. There was not retraining to learn some new trade. This is…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you ever seen with your own eyes a farmer working 18 hours a day ? My theory is the 18 hour subsistence farmer story is a myth we tell ourselves that the world we’ve created is better, no questions asked. I live in a part of the world where people do a surprising amount of farming by hand. Very little machines and almost no fertiliser is used. No one, absolutely no one is working 18 hours. Mostly they have busy…
Automations like the automatic loom made clothes cheaper. Automation is responsible for a lot of our current quality of life. Do you really want to go back a 200+ years in QoL?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Distributing the fruits of production equally has been tried several times. The result is everyone becomes equally poor.
Are you sure? Isn't the Scandinavian model essentially "Socialism" by US standards. Last time I checked they were doing quite well compared to literallly everybody else on the planet (excluding other, similar social democracies). The US went like: socialism is bad, let's go for the polar opposite and make the poor poorer and the rich richer. For many that are poor in the US people "being equally poor under socialism"…
> socialism is bad, let's go for the polar opposite and make the poor poorer and the rich richer
The US free market moved scores of millions of dirt poor immigrants into the middle class and beyond.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you sure? Isn't the Scandinavian model essentially "Socialism" by US standards. Last time I checked they were doing quite well compared to literallly everybody else on the planet (excluding other, similar social democracies). The US went like: socialism is bad, let's go for the polar opposite and make the poor poorer and the rich richer. For many that are poor in the US people "being equally poor under socialism"…
Norway sits on an ocean of oil that they use to prop up their economy. > socialism is bad, let's go for the polar opposite and make the poor poorer and the rich richer The US free market moved scores of millions of dirt poor immigrants into the middle class and beyond.
Based on Pew's income band classification, China's middle class has been among the fastest growing in the world, swelling from 39.1 million people (3.1 percent of the population) in 2000 to roughly 707 million (50.8 percent of the population) in 2018.
I'm not going to get into a bunch of debates about AI capabilities, and I don't tend to take an extreme stance one way or another what current AIs are capable of or will be capable of, but this sentence strikes me as very strange. Modern AI systems have pretty significant problems that will likely only be solved through heavy amounts of training and data curation, and maintaining good performance over time will likely require regular insertion of newer data.
The idea that these systems are self-sufficient is fiction, they're not even close to reaching that point and they have serious gaps in capability. Maybe those gaps will get closed -- again, I'm not going to get into a debate about what AI can theoretically do in the future or how fast it will improve, that discussion is a little bit too speculative for my tastes. But while modern LLMs can do a lot of impressive stuff, the idea that we've hit some threshold where we aren't going to need to make further jumps and where those jumps won't require additional data or training or input is just buying into the worst of LLM hype.
What we're seeing is that for many tasks that involve creative output, getting new data to put into LLMs to keep them current and up-to-date is important and is likely to continue to be important. And the typical shortcuts around that data (doing web searches, merging contexts) don't always work as well as retraining does (and also require their own up-to-date inputs). Again, not a commentary on whether LLMs are good at those tasks; just pointing out that AI does very definitively need continuous input for many of the highest-profile tasks people want to use it for. And the areas where it doesn't need that input are probably not in most cases the tasks people are most worried about being automated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's telling that this anti-automation and anti-AI movement is finally reaching its crescendo Is it? I just fail to see how it "reaching its crescendo". Luddites DID destroy machines. Where are the anti-AI people buring data centers down? If anything I will say there is barely any anti-AI movement happening around the world right now. There are millions of vegan people choose to not eat meat as their lifestyles. Do…
Tv and Hollywood writers in one of the most culturally exported countries in the world striked for several months with specific anti AI demands, which were then capitulated to today.
Not really the point, but "struck".
> with specific anti AI demands, which were then capitulated to today.
The AI provisions of the tentative agreement seem to be (1) GenAI can't be directly used by non-covered people to (re)write content in place of union writers, (2) writers can't be forced to use GenAI (but can use it to the extent that the employer allows), and (3) GenAI produced materials given to writers to use must be disclosed as such.
That's...not particularly anti-AI. Its certainly nothing along the lines of the Luddites destroying machines.
Partially its a class difference, partially its a context difference (legally protected labor rights and a government that isn't actively working with employers to suppress strikes help make strikes in general much less violent), but partially its that the even if the rhetoric painted the terms the AMPTP was seeking as an existential threat, the union itself isn't anywhere close to as fundamentally opposed to the tools involved as the Luddites were, only to the particular business methods in which management proposed to incorporate them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is approximately a zero percent chance that AI enables a foreign film market to dethrone Disney any time soon.
> zero percent chance that AI enables a foreign film market to dethrone Disney any time soon Disney’s stock is down about 20%. Netflix up almost the same amount. Why do you think one of these has cheaper access to capital?
And not only are they a US company and not a foreign film market, they're also not even separate from the strikes. Netflix was one of the companies that signed agreements after the writers' strike -- Netflix capitulated to union demands just like Hollywood did.
> Why do you think one of these has cheaper access to capital?
In any case, cheap access to capital or labor also has about a zero percent chance of allowing a foreign film market to dethrone Disney in the domestic film market any time soon.
Disney owns Marvel. And Star Wars. And basically everything else. It doesn't matter if you can make a film more cheaply somewhere else.