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The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

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Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#171

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't. People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it…

Like the post above says that there are multiple issues at play with AI. The same can be said about universal income.

The pay levels are not comparable because you are also recompensed with time. You may choose to spend your time in a number of ways that you find rewarding that also reduce your expenses. Making your own meals, clothes, furniture, beer, wine etc. There are a lot of people who would enjoy doing these things but are too time poor to do so.

Your expenses also reduce by the amount you must spend in order to make yourself available to work. Travel, work clothes, medical certificates when sick. You can spend a lot in order to be paid.

If you want a world with a reasonable distribution of income levels. It stands to reason that those receiving more right now should receive less. Certainly, the absolute wealthiest should reduce the most, but on a global scale, it is hard to defend that those in the top 10% of incomes should retain their position.

The proposal for how much a universal income should pay is a variable to be argued itself. I can certainly see it being argued for at a lower level than ultimately desired since something is better than none.

In a sense the end state of a universal income in an equitable world would be remarkably simple. The income available divided by the world's population,

Those reviving more than their share now may not be happy about it, but I'm not sure they have a right to their larger portion either.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#172

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't. People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it…

> do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't.

Almost definitionally it would. If society is saving a bunch of money on all that saved labor, that extra value is still there, it just needs to be appropriately redistributed

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#173

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

UBI drives inflation. All other effects follow from that.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#174
All this, so people like us can do our jobs just a little bit easier, which wasn't that hard to begin with, and in fact was quite comfortable all things considered, for employers who are promising to lay us off, for productivity gains that aren't even measurable.

Think back on a time where you and a teammate (or teammates) spent hours or days debating back and forth on different technological or architectural options for trade-offs. How much nuance and detail went into those discussion. We used to take pride in our ability to make careful and measured tradeoffs. And yet with this tech all that is thrown out the window.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are? Is your LLM ready to run your organization without further input from you or anyone? Do you realize that "memory" requires eating your hilariously small context window? Have you not had a discussion with Opus where it insists it is correct about something it is objectively wrong about for several turns?

That seems like an unreasonably high standard. I like to think that I have memory, agency, and self awareness, but I'm not ready to run my organization without further input from anyone. > Do you realize that "memory" requires eating your hilariously small context window? I do! LLMs are structured differently than humans, so the component we call "memory" corresponds to what humans call "short-term memory"; practical…

>memory, agency, and self awareness

The LLM only currently has the illusion of these things. Hence the bubble.

I know that you (or anyone) as a human being don't have the illusion of these things.

This is not like the car replacing the horse for transportation. The LLM as-is cannot fundamentally replace the person. They require the agency of a human to take turns at all, and even more so to enact change in the world.

Your LLM does not actively engage in the world because it does not experience anything. It only responds to queries. We can do a lot with that, but it's not intelligence. It can't say oh hey SpicyLemonZest, I was thinking and had an idea the other day. Because it has nothing between each query.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#176
post #144

This was evident everywhere except within the AI industry itself. The rhetoric from many of the industry’s top leaders has been “this technology will eliminate millions of jobs, fundamentally reshape countless other jobs, and automate the use of lethal force, but we’re going to develop it anyways”. Many of the current economic woes, including mass layoffs, have been blamed on AI by the very executives conducting said…

Not to mention, it doesn't actually create the productivity promised at the lower rates promised. The most enthusiastic proponents are middle-management, not actual doers. It's an expensive route to mediocrity, which doesnt offer an edge in a market where everyone is using the same snakeoil.

Unreliable mediocrity, because you simply can never be sure when the damned thing lies/hallucinates unless you double-check everything.

So now you're wrangling an "AI" system and you're doing most of the work you would have had to anyway. ...And when you don't it can get really embarrassing.

https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/elite-wall-street-la...

Not the first time, surely not the last. The problem is that so much money is tied up in this thing, and the moment the music stops the bag holders are going to be utterly doomed.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Needing less offices, less people driving to those offices, less A/C and heating for those offices and less resources building those offices could offset the energy usage of AI.

The people still need to be somewhere, so while commuting could be reduced I am not sure about heating/cooling usage.

[deleted]

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#178

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't. People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it…

If companies are faced with the choice between:

- employ you at 60k/yr

- replace you with a machine that costs a lot of money, and also send you UBI of 60k/yr

It should be obvious the latter is not an option that is ever going to happen.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#180

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't. People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it…

Fair warning: I’m quite ignorant in terms of economics, so this is a naïve way of looking at it.

The question that always pops up for me when it comes to UBI applied to the current capitalist system: even if you did actually come up with the money somehow (which is a pretty huge if as you say), once everyone has X “base money” per month, doesn’t that mean the cost of living (specifically renting) will rise to match this new “base”?

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