391–400 of 572 posts
Any country (including the US) that tries to prevent AI from replacing some jobs will find its economy buried by another country that did not.
Conversely, a country that allows AI to replace too many jobs will find itself buried in masses of angry people with little to lose except their devalued lives.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
I've seen this argument be made a lot in the past year, that "Oh these things are just tools and you are an idiot for having a critical view on them". I've been thinking a lot about this and I've come to the conclusion that it's based on a flawed understanding of economics, and of quality generally. Do we measure software engineers in terms of their lines of code per day? I feel that this is basically what you and ot…
Depends very highly on what kind of art we're talking about.
There's the "I get my stuff into galleries" artist. This IMO has an extremely high social component. It's in good part about who you know, how well you can spin your work, how much some rich guy has paid for it in the past, etc.
There's the "I sell commissions on Deviant Art" artist. That's to me a kind of hole digging position already. Certainly you need to produce good work, but what seems to make a good artist in that scope is good work, reliably, fast.
There's the "I illustrate stuff" artist. A more properly commercial version of the above. From my limited experience there's demand to pump out work quickly and as cheaply as possible. Eg, a book may need a cover or a few illustrations, or an ad might need something drawn on it. In many cases the client is basically looking for a hole to fill. The cases where somebody wants to have something truly beautiful that lots of effort went into seem vanishingly rare. There's a reason why corporate styles like "Alegria" exist and are annoyingly common.
There's the "I draw comics" artist. Those need extreme consistency because they're on a tight deadline.
> Do you know and follow any AI artists?
Honestly, I'm beginning to. AI is just a tool like any other. Some people use it to faff about and make random stuff, but I'm starting to notice people using it to produce things that have a coherent plot or tell a story, or at least keep a consistent setting. It's still janky at this point because it's hard to maintain consistency.
Really, there's nothing weird about that. Think about supremely lazy things like Garfield or Ctrl+Alt+Del. They still had a following even when graphically they were supremely lazy. If you can copy/paste body parts to assemble a comic and still get some people interested, no reason why you couldn't do it with AI. Heck, it'd come out looking better at this point.
Any country (including the US) that tries to prevent AI from replacing some jobs will find its economy buried by another country that did not.
There could be a future where the fields that matter the most are heavily impacted and most of the work is automatized, while a flurry of other parts are strictly kept off AI and automatization.
I have in mind the extent to which agriculture requires way fewer people that we'd imagine given its scale and importance, while we have people making money doing funny faces on camera [0].
[0] that's also absolutely needed by the society, but it's not at the same primary level
Here's a random tweet that I believe foreshadows the future: "I hate AI but also I've had the most insightful conversations with it about writing. It has been more honest, helpful and playful in workshopping story ideas than any real human I know. It's like chatting with a room full of actual writers and the value of that can't be ignored." I've seen similar sentiment from a few digital artists. Those who are very an…
I think it's better to think of what jobs will be spared when we have a general problem solver, or a general goal to action mapper. I can't think of a single one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember the mantra of some in the tech field of "no problem - just learn to code" when blue collar jobs in the manufacturing in the US was on the wane as production moved to cheaper locations overseas.
So, can we use "just learn to use promps" for white collar folks and software devs risk loosing their jobs because of AI?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Without capitalism, I could have control over my life. Says who? You think people in China and Russia have more control over their life than those in the west? You've still not offered anything other than wishful thinking. You've not proposed any system to replace capitalism. Ultimately you're just offering destruction, with no vision for rebuilding other than, "I hope it gives me an easier life".
Do you think China and Russia aren't capitalistic in nature? They structure their markets very much like the West, because they end up having to do business with the West at some points. Do you really think there isn't a better system than accepting that some other human out there is going to get more out of your work than you? In nations with extreme abundance, it should be trivial to solve problems of homelessness…
People who are mentally ok and who land on the streets via a series of unfortunate incidends are often back into a house and a job a year later - it's really not that hard in most developed countries.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> hurts their models 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Should we demand that Ford shuts down its assembly lines and instead hires tens of thousands of people to manually machine and assemble all of the parts of the car? If not, why is that labor unimportant, but other labor is vital and supremely valuable? There’s this weird place some of you have ended up, wherein all prior automation is good and fine, but future automation must cease immediately, solely to preserv…
I think the question is what do we do when everything is automated - that’s the main “threat” of AI. People have always been able to find other work when displaced by automation - unpleasant task though. What happens when there are no more “other work” or there aren’t enough remaining jobs to support the population?
Automating the printing press, building the cotton gin, widespread use of combines to harvest wheat (or whatever) - none of these led to mass unemployment. They all created change and churn, for sure, but people will always find new things to do.
I’m always struck by this discussion - should we continue to operate coal mines, and refuse to move off fossil fuel? Those are massive job displacements across, for instance, Appalachia. The common argument is that those people should retrain to new skills. Why is that not the argument for people whose job can be automated?
One of the first groups that will likely lose big to LLMs is lawyers - how hard should we fight to make sure that the law remains incomprehensible and inaccessible in order to preserve those jobs?
Why is anyone’s job a sacred cow?
Sorry, the number of questions read more aggressively than I intend them - I’m earnestly interested in the answers.