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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

#91

Post by eru »

qsera wrote: post #85
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do humans need to work to exist? We just need a new model for existing that isn’t based on labor. We should have started working on these problems in 2016 when it was obvious they were coming, but we elected a regressive twice to help us go backwards instead.

> Why do humans need to work to exist? What make life worth living? Is it love? Is it beauty? Is it the sense of having agency? Sadly, we are not smart enough to know until it is taken away.....

Look at ye old timey aristocrats or trust fund kids to see that people can and do have meaningful lives even without work.

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

#92

Post by dzhiurgis »

yen223 wrote: post #72
raincole wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They release women from housekeeping... to workplaces.

You should ask a working woman if she'd rather be at home doing dishes and laundry by hand without pay

Only works if breadwinner is relatively rich. If it’s a struggle the home is likely to be unpleasant to struggle in.

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

#93

Post by ninalanyon »

hakimg wrote: post #56
left-struck wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While our time working at home has definitely gone down, our time at work hasn’t though. The point is our employers just expect more, and the benefits of whatever new efficiency is gained, if any, are not passed onto those at the bottom or middle.

Hours spent at work have also gone down over the decades and leisure time has gone up. Even if that stat wasn't true and we all spent the same amount of time working more productively then that would still be good for society at large. This attitude of unwillingness to do anything except for direct personal gain isn't good for the world and isn't good for yourself.

Hours spent working haven't noticeably declined for people in Northern Europe for fifty years. I worked 40 hours a week in the UK in 1978, the usual working week in Norway now is 37.5 hours.

I very much doubt that most people are greatly more productive, if you can even measure that for most jobs, than they were fifty years ago. Most jobs now are office jobs and service jobs. Much of the purported gains in productivity are soaked up in increased communication effort and in shifting ever more tat.

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

#94

Post by adrian_b »

eru wrote: post #28
unleashhale wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like how the car gave us back so many more hours to spend actually living instead of working. And the washing machine. And the computer. And the Internet.

The washing machine and dishwasher definitely did. I don't own a car, so I can't comment on that.

There are 4 differences between my home and that of my grandparents from one century ago, which indeed have reduced significantly the time spent with household chores:

1. Washing machine

2. Vacuum cleaner

3. Microwave oven

4. Electric refrigerator (but they had a cold underground cellar, while I no longer have such luxuries)

There are also various modern tools that are not used in the normal day-to-day life, but only when incidents happen, which require repairs, for example an electric drill or reciprocating saw, or a soldering iron, or an electric sewing machine (but my grandparents had a mechanical Singer sewing machine, which did the same job, only with more effort) and sometimes, but not often, I prepare some kind of food for which an electric mixer accelerates enough the preparation to compensate for the time spent with assembling, disassembling and washing the mixer.

While other modern inventions, like computers, are very important to me, none of them has reduced the amount of work that must be done in my home (I never felt the need for an automatic dishwasher, because I never let them accumulate, I wash them instantly after use, even while cooking, because I eat only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients).

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

#95

Post by MyelinatedT »

vintermann wrote: post #65
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 t…

My belief is that humans need to struggle through the process of learning to code, learning maths etc. in order to actually build the neural pathways to do the hard things AI can’t do yet. I feel some skills atrophying for me, and I worry even more for the younger people who will never get the chance to think without AI.

Another concern I have is that computers don’t need to be “generally superhuman” to replace 90%+ of office jobs. Computers have always been superhuman at some things, and LLMs have massively jumped the number of tasks that can now be automated to human-level quality or better. I’m not sure it matters if they scale to true AGI.

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

#96

Post by dzhiurgis »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #57
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?

Why do humans need to work to exist? We just need a new model for existing that isn’t based on labor. We should have started working on these problems in 2016 when it was obvious they were coming, but we elected a regressive twice to help us go backwards instead.

Lets first have actual problem instead of trying to stop data center buildout or squatting on data.

Let’s build abundance first and solve inequality later. Instead people are keen to prevent abundance and keep everyone level by keeping everyone poor.

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

#97

Post by vintermann »

MyelinatedT wrote: post #95
vintermann wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

My belief is that humans need to struggle through the process of learning to code, learning maths etc. in order to actually build the neural pathways to do the hard things AI can’t do yet. I feel some skills atrophying for me, and I worry even more for the younger people who will never get the chance to think without AI. Another concern I have is that computers don’t need to be “generally superhuman” to replace 90%+…

What are the hard things AI can't do yet, then? Are you sure we shouldn't rather spend time getting better at, say, playing the piano?

Assuming we're allowed to prioritize that in a world where the rich have all the money.

(Looking at the local flow of money, I can't avoid the conclusion that my wages come indirectly mostly from the building of an extreme luxury product for an extremely rich person.)

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

#98

Post by adrian_b »

yen223 wrote: post #72
raincole wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They release women from housekeeping... to workplaces.

You should ask a working woman if she'd rather be at home doing dishes and laundry by hand without pay

Unless the husband was a jerk, he would have understood that this is a division of work, so the spouse who worked at home had actually earned a half of the pay received at the payed job of their husband.

Moreover, in many past societies where the wives were supposed to work at home and only the husbands were expected to do a job for a salary, it was not at all unusual for the wives to handle most of the finances, so they actually handled most of the money earned by the family, even if their husbands were on the payroll.

What was bad in the past, was not what happened in typical cases, but what happened in the worst cases. Because a fair treatment of the wife depended on the goodwill of the husband, not being codified in laws, as it should have been, that enabled a lot of abuses.

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

#99

Post by glimshe »

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…

I understand the article's dilemma and I don't want to dismiss the difficulty of the situation.

That said, I'd love to train AI to do my personal projects. While I enjoy coding, it's way too slow. I do my projects for the design journey and the final result. It would be great to get calls from AI for direction and assistance, if needed, while it does all the raw coding work for me.

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