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I refused to train the AI that could replace me

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Re: I refused to train the AI that could replace me

#61

Post by palmotea »

jojobas wrote: post #34
eru wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake That phrase was born as a straw man.

The argument against "they can do something else with their lives" is not a strawman though. In a hypothetical end state where the people who own fully-automated production of everything, and need maybe few millions employed to support and guard that production, the "freed" people are not going to do something better with their lives.

> In a hypothetical end state where the people who own fully-automated production of everything, and need maybe few millions employed to support and guard that production, the "freed" people are not going to do something better with their lives.

AI will bring about a post-scarcity society, just not for you, worker.

Re: I refused to train the AI that could replace me

#62

Post by fleventynine »

dgellow wrote: post #50
fleventynine wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think society has enough power to control what billionaires spend their money on. The promise of AI is such an attractive nuisance for power seekers that trying to crack down on it will just force it underground, where it will be developed with even less care and oversight than it is now. Our institutions aren't even able to control what dirt-poor pirates do on hardware they own. How in the heck are they goin…

> trying to crack down on it will just force it underground, where it will be developed with even less care and oversight than it is now. With way less access to infrastructure, hardware, capital, people. That’s literally what we need, it should be constrained by having way less resources

Having fewer resources such as security engineers will not lead to better outcomes. A skeleton team with gigawatts of compute in some middle east bunker is MORE likely to unleash something poorly aligned.

Re: I refused to train the AI that could replace me

#64

Post by xyst »

People wouldn't care if (or could) AI replaced them if we had decent public support. But the billionaires and their lobbyists, politicians, and propaganda have convinced us that "government bad, private good". All of this so they could pay less taxes, buy super yachts, "feel superior", and other wasteful rich asshole shit.

Re: I refused to train the AI that could replace me

#65

Post by vintermann »

eru wrote: post #15

People have objected to training their replacements since forever. Younger people, foreigners, now machines. What else is new? I don't think you are under any moral or ethical obligation to train your replacement. But I don't think the decision makes much of a difference one way or another in the grand scheme of things. > You may ask: Why would anyone agree to train an AI model in the very skills they took years to a…

They could, but will they get the chance to?

My most commercially valuable skills - software wrangling, figuring out what went wrong, explaining how to do things in software - are rapidly getting obsoleted by agents. But I'm not too sad about it, because honestly? I hated a lot of that work. Endless frustration with finding out what went wrong, sometimes in an architecture you argued strongly against, etc. Watching the AI agent "thinking" scroll by and seeing it get "frustrated" instead of me, is honestly a relief. But what is it going to do for my career, middle-term?

I have a few years of head start on most people on using many forms of AI, but who knows what's that going to be worth?

Re: I refused to train the AI that could replace me

#66

Post by thewhitetulip »

xyst wrote: post #64

People wouldn't care if (or could) AI replaced them if we had decent public support. But the billionaires and their lobbyists, politicians, and propaganda have convinced us that "government bad, private good". All of this so they could pay less taxes, buy super yachts, "feel superior", and other wasteful rich asshole shit.

> Govt bad private good

Except Private gets a lot of govt handouts... But somehow socialism for general public is wrong. Socialism for billionaires and corps is capitalist!

Re: I refused to train the AI that could replace me

#67

Post by amriksohata »

People said this when self checkouts came to supermarkets, "i refuse to use them so that people stay in employment" within a few years most are self checkout and very few lanes left for staff to supervise on normal checkouts (mostly for elderly or disabled). Both remained but the weight went towards more people going through self checkouts (even if the other lanes take more space);

My point is that people can resist training it, but someone else will.

Re: I refused to train the AI that could replace me

#68

Post by dgellow »

fleventynine wrote: post #62
dgellow wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> trying to crack down on it will just force it underground, where it will be developed with even less care and oversight than it is now. With way less access to infrastructure, hardware, capital, people. That’s literally what we need, it should be constrained by having way less resources

Having fewer resources such as security engineers will not lead to better outcomes. A skeleton team with gigawatts of compute in some middle east bunker is MORE likely to unleash something poorly aligned.

Gigawatt of power doesn’t come from nowhere. You cannot have that much power consumption without being visible to regulators (of course that assumes a government that isn’t as corrupt as the US).

You can create bioweapons today, from a small lab. Doesn’t mean we allow it

Re: I refused to train the AI that could replace me

#69

Post by 63stack »

eru wrote: post #29
thin_carapace wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to attack your good faith in humanity, so I will ask another way - if a system was reliant on workers, what reason would there be for those workers to exist , after their work became automated?

Workers are humans. Humans don't need any system's permission or reasoning to exist. If you've ever been laid off or fired, you might have noticed that you don't cease to exist when your contract ends.

Most people's existence are very strongly tied to their job. Not being able to pay basic utilities and food just the first examples.

Obviously, nobody is going to blip out of existence when their layoff notice is signed, everyone knows this and nobody claimed that. If you stepped down from your philosophical post humanist highchair a bit, you would realize that.

Re: I refused to train the AI that could replace me

#70

Post by ketzu »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #21

Hasn’t that always been the case? Companies have replaced their labour with cheaper alternatives from the other part of the world for decades. Now the only difference is that they replace you with a machine instead of a human.

> Now the only difference is that they replace *you*

(emphasis mine)

I think the main difference is that more influential people and beneficiaries of the current age are the ones feeling threatened.

I can't imagine people bringing up automating trash sorting as a problem (at least that's how I read the articles side note about workers wearing smartphone to record themselves sorting trash) if the same system wouldn't also threaten software engineers and artists.

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