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The AI backlash is only getting started

economist.com

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Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#141

Post by customguy »

baron816 wrote: post #54
vitorfblima wrote: post #19

The untold promise of IA is to replace labor. That's probably the only reason why some people are willing to spend trillions of dollars in pursuing this technology. Mere tools would never justify this kind of investment. It's no surprise that people are getting angry, even though many are using AI in their everyday life.

This is just how productivity works. If people spend less time building a unit of output, then you have more output. People aren’t going to stop wanting stuff. Right now, the world can’t come close to making all the stuff people want. As long as there’s a desire for further consumption, there will be work for people to do.

But that's just the thing, productivity is so much higher than, say, 50 years ago, while the average worker has less of a perspective (to own a home, start a family, etc. anything stable to work towards essentially). The profits mostly don't go towards the now more productive workers and ensuring their rights and well-being and a habitable world to live in, do they.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#142

Post by erikschoster »

> The backlash is only just getting started, because the technology is only just getting started, too. Britain’s flimsy prime-minister-in-waiting, Andy Burnham, has barely said a word about AI. Even Americans still rank it 29th out of 39 election issues. [..] That is bound to change—and battles over data centres offer a hint of the struggles to come.

Or we'll see through the bullshit (which seems to be happening already) and this will fizzle out.

I have a great face-saving exit plan for AI companies: follow anthropic's lead and pretend you're saving the world by not releasing anything to the public anymore. Then just quietly back away, go bankrupt and let us all eventually forget.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#144

Post by tengbretson »

dwa3592 wrote: post #108
tengbretson wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? Say, you wouldn't happen to write software for a living, would you?

I do. developed predictive models for health monitoring of large machines and then fraud detection in health care. Why do you ask?

Does automated fraud detection not replace the work of human auditors? Do these large machines automate tasks? If you believe automating human labor is an evil, then I hate to break it to you, your in hell's chatroom. "Software is eating the world" was published 15 years ago. What did you think that meant?

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#145

Post by blululu »

tern wrote: post #107

Sadly, I think this is true, and it's starting to seem like my own personal political imperative is to remind people that AI can be insanely personally empowering. Many people around me are just missing the boat, or don't care, but many are also able to finally accomplish all kinds of things they've been barred from in the past. LLMs are best seen, I think, as an imagination amplifier. If you're in the mindset of fin…

This could be true, but I think it amounts to wishful thinking. The human empowerment phase of AI is transitory and brief. Once you get into RSI and AGI the human is increasingly left out and disenfranchised. The multiplier of your personal effectiveness directly proportional to how much the AI is doing relative to you. Being 2x more effective is great - AI does half the work. 5x, 10x, 100x? When the AI does 99% of the work you maybe start to worry - the bottleneck to 'your' productivity is now you and you are going up against much faster and more powerful entities than yourself. This mindset is rooted in a short term gain that risks a long term loss.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#146

Post by ndiddy »

gruez wrote: post #29
vitorfblima wrote: post #19

The untold promise of IA is to replace labor. That's probably the only reason why some people are willing to spend trillions of dollars in pursuing this technology. Mere tools would never justify this kind of investment. It's no surprise that people are getting angry, even though many are using AI in their everyday life.

>The untold promise of [tractors] is to replace labor. [...] Mere tools would never justify this kind of investment. How's this any different than say, tractors, or the mechanical loom? After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today.

Well the Industrial Revolution was objectively a worse deal for the average worker. The average preindustrial peasant worked 8-12 hour days, but had Sundays off and at least 120 rest days and holidays. Depending on how good wages were at the time, they may have only had to work between 120 and 180 days per year. Compare that to the 70+ hour weeks workers were made to work all year in factories during the period immediately following the Industrial Revolution. It took over 100 years of collective struggle through the labor movement, as well as technological advances, before labor conditions improved to be something along the lines of what they were in the preindustrial period (at least going by hours worked/year). If you're arguing that AI is going to be similar to this, I do not want to be a wage worker in the period where this takes place, just like I would not have liked to be a wage worker during the Industrial Revolution.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#147

Post by xydone »

estearum wrote: post #101
adrians1 wrote: post #76

Remember the debate about how nuclear was stopped in the 70s because of NIMBYism? We are now wondering "how could people then be so stupid and shortsighted?". Well, there you go, here's history repeating before our eyes.

Not really. Nuclear power (in both the weapon and energy sense) is and always was relatively easy to manage compared to AI. If the deployment of nuclear energy required the distribution of radioactive material to every smartphone in America and for unstable isotopes to be plugged into the core operating infrastructure of every industry, then they'd be a lot closer to analogous.

I have a feeling that comparing a safe, sustainable energy source to large language models is disingenuous. If you support LLMs and the field, you can just state it outright, without insincere comparisons.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#148

Post by ritcgab »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #94
dwa3592 wrote: post #64

People have been made to believe by very influential people (dario, sam, elon etc) that AI will replace them. As a result people are getting angry. Who did not see this coming? Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? There is nothing sexy about it. There is nothing cool about it either. Imagine a taxi driver facing his family knowing he…

> Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? There is nothing sexy about it. There is nothing cool about it either. This argument alone doesn't really work because literally billions of peoples jobs and livelihoods have been replaced throughout history from the explicit development of technology that replaces the need for human labor. The…

We cannot talk about net benefit until we agree on the objective: net benefit for whom?

I don't care if my current job is being replaced or the whole industry I am working in vanishes. But as an individual, if the new technology says it aims to wipe out all the possibilities of my future career, it is not net benefit for me.

Just saying "net benefit" "overall" sounds like some collectivism propaganda.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#149

Post by Jcampuzano2 »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #127
Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? There is nothing sexy about it. There is nothing cool about it either. This argument alone doesn't really work because literally billions of peoples jobs and livelihoods have been replaced throughout history from the explicit development of technology that replaces the need for human labor. The…

Yes, but it's trivially obvious that AI is different from previous technological automation, since with AI it's ALL jobs being automated, starting with white collar ones, not just some narrow segment. What was true with previous automation, that some jobs disappear, but new ones are created in their place, will not be true of AI, because AI is a general purpose technology capable of doing the new jobs it creates just…

I agree was going to comment that yes it does feel slightly different because in most cases technology narrowly targeted specific niches at the time, that when replaced could at least in hindsight be seen to likely benefit the majority at the cost of the existing laborers.

Whereas in this case most of the top brass of AI do push it as something more akin to "we think this will replace practically all human labor". And without the availability of human labor, at least given the current economic system its hard to see how that'd lead to anything but mass suffering.

I do think the argument still holds. If we were able to see it as a net benefit to all, it would still be worth it. Its just that with the level of replacement we're talking about the net benefit would need to be massive (however we define "benefit") The problem is there is plenty of research showing it is still net negative in many cases, especially (in my opinion) when it comes to cognitive ability and early stage development for children/youth.

The closest similarity may be the development of the personal computer or something along those lines.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#150

Post by sbayg »

bensyverson wrote: post #109
HEmanZ wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think the claim is that people will be less productive, the world will be far more productive. The claim is that the value of most human labor will be at or near enough to 0 compared to deploying capital (robots, ai) to product the same goods. So humanity becomes owners living ludicrously well on highly productive capital and everyone else getting whatever “humanitarian” portion is assigned to them. And no wa…

People need to Google Jevons Paradox, smdh

That’s what the growing hoards of permanently unemployable people will do, sit around and google jevons paradox and the lump of labor fallacy and ponder whether economists have ever been wrong in the past about such matters, and whether AGI is really all that different from the steam engine anyway. Tech sector is just tech, like it’s always been.
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