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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

#221

Post by cortesoft »

Aurornis wrote: post #203
cortesoft wrote: post #44

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…

> The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income Every call for UBI should be qualified with two estimates: 1) How much money you think UBI will pay out 2) How much money you think the tax will generate Creating a UBI program with AI taxes sounds like a clean solution to something until you do any math. If we estimate today’s AI revenues across all the big prov…

This is based on the assumption that AI is going to take all our jobs. If this is true, than as more jobs are absorbed by AI the revenue would increase.

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

#222

Post by lioeters »

lpcvoid wrote: post #110
keybored wrote: post #65

Weird to have these threads and then fifteen minutes later there will be a 350+ comment, 500+ votes thread about some 200 USD/month AI subscription service which is now the I Have Seen The Light moment and My Beautiful Side Projects Are Finally Materializing. This is creative destruction in a whole new sense. Just chugging through genuine (or human) creativity, then training on human prompting, then finally ascending…

Vibecoders are by now completely dependent on their subscriptions. Their skills are in the process of deterioration, they have no other choice. It's like heroin.

Their thinking skills are atrophying in front of our eyes in a matter of months, years. "You better get on the good stuff or you'll left behind!"

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

#223

Post by threethirtytwo »

Tyrubias wrote: post #41

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…

[flagged]

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

#224

Post by JumpCrisscross »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #147
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> concern I hear the most (which I don't think is common among the general public) is the existential risk one Altman and friends' "stop us before we shoot grandma" PR tour in 2023 and '24 is largely the cause of this AI backlash. If you tell everyone you're building something that will kill us all, you will scare up investors. But you'll also turn the public against you. In truth, we have zero evidence of the alignm…

The "alignment problem" as traditionally understood assumed a different path to AI development, where the best AIs wouldn't primarily operate on a substrate of human language. If AI becomes powerful enough to make human employment non-viable without being post-scarcity enough to make permanent unemployment viable, that's going to be an existential problem, and it seems no less likely today than it did in 2023.

> If AI becomes powerful enough to make human employment non-viable without being post-scarcity enough to make permanent unemployment viable, that's going to be an existential problem

That's massively moving the goalposts on what counts as "an existential problem." The original framing was not economic dislocation but actual existence, i.e. existential. This new framing is a retreat to a way-of-life argument.

And I'm still calling baloney! The "AI will kill us all" argument backfired on Altman et al, so now we have an "it'll take over all the jobs" pitch. But it's all smoke and mirrors for investors. We have no good reason to expect current AI methods will lead to an AGI that can not only do most human labour, but do so economically competitively.

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

#225

Post by krapp »

ares623 wrote: post #186
nickvec wrote: post #142

"Naturally, violence is never an answer, nor is it a politically effective tactic." I am not condoning violence, but claiming it is not a politically effective tactic is disingenuous. I get that columnists are trying to cover their asses, but still.

Violence is only allowed in one direction.

It's only allowed in one direction, but it's effective in many.

Violence is the reason slavery ended in the US. Violence brought us civil rights laws. Gay rights. Women's rights. Labor laws. Environmental protection laws.

Every right granted by default to white Christian gentlemen at the founding of this great nation had to be taken in blood by everyone else. That's just how America is. It cannot be trusted to live up to its own standards except at gunpoint.

When, where and how violence is justifiable is a different question, of course. But the premise that "Naturally, violence is never an answer, nor is it a politically effective tactic" is simply false. If violence were politically ineffective, authoritarian states wouldn't use so much of it.

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

#226

Post by [deleted] »

lpcvoid wrote: post #110
keybored wrote: post #65

Weird to have these threads and then fifteen minutes later there will be a 350+ comment, 500+ votes thread about some 200 USD/month AI subscription service which is now the I Have Seen The Light moment and My Beautiful Side Projects Are Finally Materializing. This is creative destruction in a whole new sense. Just chugging through genuine (or human) creativity, then training on human prompting, then finally ascending…

Vibecoders are by now completely dependent on their subscriptions. Their skills are in the process of deterioration, they have no other choice. It's like heroin.

[deleted]

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

#227

Post by JumpCrisscross »

AshleyGrant wrote: post #151
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $12k a year is plenty. You’ve just been raised above your natural standard I get where you're coming from. But this is politically unworkable, and for good reason. If AI increases productivity, that means more wealth, which means living standards should go up.

> $12k a year is plenty. You’ve just been raised above your natural standard > I get where you're coming from. You do? Have you priced out health insurance lately? I have. Insurance on HealthCare.gov for my partner and I would be $1700/month for what amounts to catastrophic coverage. It had around a $20k deductible and covered nothing other than an annual physical prior to hitting the deductible. With $2k/month to wo…

Their numbers are wrong. But their fundamental argument, I believe, is degrowth. That we are living beyond our means and need to lower our expectations of living standards to live sustainability. It's a philosophically-appealing argument. It's also wrong, unless you're comfortable with the inevitable violence and likely population destruction that would need to ensue from an honest degrowth agenda.

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

#228

Post by happytoexplain »

SJMG wrote: post #54

I think the truth is in fact asymmetric on this front. People, esp. many SWEs, like generating with AI, or more telling, wouldn't want to give it up in their work. On the other hand, people generally hate consuming the product of gen AI. Consumer experience = mostly negative Producer experience = mostly positive

I disagree. The producer experience is mostly positively impacted in a very visible way: Output. Saying their personal experience has been mostly positive, on average across all of them, is probably wrong.

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

#229

Post by [deleted] »

happytoexplain wrote: post #106
guzfip wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This is one of the most horrifying comments I've ever read on this website. It's practically a dare to engage in civil war or violent revolution. People fundamentally experience life as relative - as changes. You can't "deprogram" intrinsic human nature. You can just wait 80 years for everybody who's not used to the new hell to die.

[deleted]

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

#230

Post by Aurornis »

cortesoft wrote: post #221
Aurornis wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income Every call for UBI should be qualified with two estimates: 1) How much money you think UBI will pay out 2) How much money you think the tax will generate Creating a UBI program with AI taxes sounds like a clean solution to something until you do any math. If we estimate today’s AI revenues across all the big prov…

This is based on the assumption that AI is going to take all our jobs. If this is true, than as more jobs are absorbed by AI the revenue would increase.

You’re assuming that this AI will be in the same taxable jurisdiction as the people whose jobs were replaced.

The work that is most replaceable by AI is work that is mostly digital. That work most easily moves to another country.

When the work is replaced by AI you can relocate it to another country much more easily than when you have to relocate workers.

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