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Replacement.ai

replacement.ai

491–500 of 725 posts

Re: Replacement.ai

#491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a brilliant piece of satire. "A Modest Proposal" for the AI age. There's some truth in all satire though. I'm just shocked YC hasn't nuked the link from the front page.

Everyone is way above average here on HN, and will be thinking "The article speaks about every other idiot I work with - my genius is singular; I'm too valuable to my employer and irreplaceable. I'll be the one wrangling the AI that replaces my colleagues, while they figure out welfare"

Oh, dont worry if you were actually going to be replaced by AI American oligarchs wouldnt freak out at the prospect of keeping the retirement age exactly where it is because it would be massively deflationary.

Instead... https://govfacts.org/analysis/how-social-security-and-medica...

Re: Replacement.ai

#492

[flagged]

I'm unsure if the comparison to more standard automation is totally apt (but agree if you rob people of purpose which many get from their jobs, lots and lots of bad shit happens), but what you're poking at is frankly nightmare fuel. Look how much chatbots that are in sycophantic "romantic relationships" absolutely break people (there was some subreddit linked once recently full of these types), and consider what happens when they're actually manifested. I'm sure some lolbert types will be like "but muh freedoms", but that sort of shit is so dangerous and so destructive on the same way brown glass bottles are to Australian jewel beetles, that we damn well better crush any of that and anyone that proposes producing robots like that. They're basically weapons and should be treated as such.

Re: Replacement.ai

#493

I have still not seen, firsthand, someone lose their job to "AI". Parts and pieces, sure. But when the entire Venn diagram of 'this job' is laid out, it requires a cerebellum connection at some point. A vivid picture of someone's job being totally dissolved to AI is missing.

The first electronic computers were referred to as "electronic brains": https://vintagecomputer.net/simon.cfm

"Computer" used to be a job. Not anymore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

What counts as "AI" is a moving target: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

Re: Replacement.ai

#495

Personal belief, but robots coming for your jobs is not a valid argument against robots. If robots can do a job better and/or faster, they should be the ones doing the jobs. Specialization is how we got to the future. So the problem isn't robots, it's the structure of how we humans rely on jobs for income. I don't necessarily feel like it's the AI company's problem to fix either. This is what government is for, and n…

> robots coming for your jobs is not a valid argument against robots. Taking work away from people is practically the definition of technology. We invent things to reduce the effort needed to do things. Eliminating work is a good thing, that’s why inventing things is so popular! What ends up happening is the amount of work remains relatively constant, meaning we get more done for the same amount of effort performed b…

> What ends up happening is the amount of work remains relatively constant

That's a pretty hard bet against AGI becoming general. If the promises of many technologists come to pass, humans remaining in charge of any work (including which work should be done) would be a waste of resources.

Hopefully the AGI will remember to leave food in the cat bowls.

Re: Replacement.ai

#497

You don't need money. What you need is wealth. I am going to leave it to PG to explain the difference [1]: Wealth is not money. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn'…

The world would be a lot better if people looked at near history more often for the political movements that failed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit

(its where the excess profits from mechinisation will be fed back to the citizens so that they don't need to work as much. That failed spectacularly.)

PG's argument is a huge amount of words to miss the point. Money is a tool that reflects power. Wealth derives from power.

> AI & robots will generate wealth at unprecedented scale. In the future, you won't have a job nor have any money,

I would gently tell you that you might want to look at the living conditions of the working class in the early 20th century. You might see planned cities like borneville or what ever the american version is. they were the 1% of working classes. The average housing was shit, horrid shit. If AI takes off and makes say 10% of the population jobless, thats what those people will get, shit.

It wasn't until those dirty socialists got into power in the UK (I don't know about other countries) did we start to see stuff like slum clearances where the dispossessed we actually re-homed. rather than yeeted to somewhere less valuable.

Re: Replacement.ai

#498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always compare it to the age of the industrial revolution. I have no doubt you had stubborn old people saying: "Why would I need a machine to do what I can do just fine by hand??" Those people quickly found themselves at a disadvantage to those who choose not to fight change, but to embrace it and harness technological leaps to improve their productivity and output.

The difference is that in the industrial revolution there was a migration from hard physical labor to cushy information work. Now that information work is being automated, there will be nothing left! This "embrace or die" strategy obviously doesn't work on a societal scale, it is an individual strategy.

> in the industrial revolution there was a migration from hard physical labor to cushy information work.

The industrial revolution started in the early 1800's. It was a migration from hard physical labor outdoors, around the home and in small workshops to hard physical labor in factories.

Re: Replacement.ai

#499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Average hours worked is more or less monotonically decreasing since the start of the industrial revolution, so in the long run we are slowly freeing ourselves. But in the short run, people keep working because a) machines usually are complementary to labour (there are still coal miners today, they are just way more productive) and b) even if some jobs are completely eliminated by machines (ice making, for example), t…

Are average hours worked decreasing because we have more abundance and less need to work, or are they decreasing because the distribution of work is changing? I find it hard to accept your claim because at the start of the industrial revolution there were far fewer women in the formal labor market than there are today.

Well there were also barely any men in the formal labour market. Most people were peasants working their family farm + sharecropping on estates of the landed gentry. But that doesn't mean they weren't working hard - both sexes worked well over 3000 hours per year, to barely scrape by.
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