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AI is different

antirez.com

131–140 of 920 posts

Re: AI is different

#131
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This pisses me off so much. So many engineers are so excited to work on and with these systems, opening 20 prs per day to make their employers happy going “yes boss!” They think their $300k total compensation will give them a seat at the table for what they’re cheering on to come. I say that anyone who needed to go the grocery this week will not be spared by the economic downturn this tech promises. Unless you have y…

Yes. The complete irony in all software engineers enthusiasm for this tech is that, if the boards wishes come true, they are literally helping them eliminate their own jobs. It's like the industrial revolution but worse, because at least the craftsmen weren't also the ones building the factories that would automate them out of work. Marcuse had a term for this "false consciousness"-when the structure of capitalism en…

Or they realize it and they're trying to squeeze the last bit of juice available to them before the party stops. It's not exactly a suboptimal decision to work towards your own job's demise if it's the best paying work available to you and you want to save up as much as possible before any possible disruption. If you quit, someone else steps into the breach and the outcome is all the same. There's very few people actually steering the ship who have any semblance of control; the rest of us are just along for the ride and hoping we don't go down with the ship.

Re: AI is different

#132
post #66
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People just want to feel special pointing a possibility, so in case it happens, they can then point towards their "insight".

I kind of want to put up a wall of fame/shame of these people to be honest. Whether they turn out right or wrong, they undoubtedly cheered on the prospect of millions of people suffering just so they can sound good at the family dinner. I wouldn’t want to work for or with these people.

sorry but prediction and cheering on is different. If there's a tsunami coming, not speaking about it doesn't help the cause.

Re: AI is different

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-driving cars are a political problem, not a technical problem. A functioning government would put everything from automation-friendly signaling standards to battery-swapping facilities into place. We humans used to do that sort of thing, but not anymore, so... bring on the AI. It won't work as well as it might otherwise be able to, but it'll probably kill fewer humans on the road at the end of the day. A low bar…

Self-driving car companies dont want a unfiied signalling platform or other "open for all" infrastructure updates. They want to own self-driving, to lock you into a subscription on their platform. Literally the only open source self driving platform, from trillion to billion to million dollar companies is comma.ai, founded by Geohot. Thats it. Its actually very good, and I bet they would welcome these upgrades, but t…

Ie. a political problem as the grandparent said.

Corporations generally follow a narrow somewhat predictable pattern towards some local maxima of their own value extraction. Since world is not zero sum, it produces value for others too.

Where politics (should) enter the picture is where we somehow can see a more global maxima (for all citizens) and try to drive towards it through some political, hopefully democratic means. (Laws, standards, education, investment, infra etc)

Re: AI is different

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this exactly the goals of open source software? In an ideal open source world, anything and everything is freely available, you can host and set up anything and everything on your own. Software is now free, and all people care about is the hardware and the electricity bills.

This is why I’m not so sure we’re all going to end up in breadlines even if we all lose our jobs, if the systems are that good (tm) then won’t we all just be doing amazing things all the time. We will be tired of winning ?

> won’t we all just be doing amazing things all the time. We will be tired of winning ?

There's a future where we won't be because to do the amazing things (tm), we need resources that are beyond what the average company can muster.

That is to say, what if the large companies becomes so magnificiently efficient and productive that it renders the rest of the small company pointless? What if there's no gaps in the software market anymore because it will be automatically detected and solved by the system?

Re: AI is different

#135
post #24

AI with ability but without responsibility is not enough for dramatic socioeconomic change, I think. For now, the critical unique power of human workers is that you can hold them responsible for things. edit: ability without accountability is the catchier motto :)

i've also made this argument.

would you ever trust safety-critical or money-moving software that was fully written by AI without any professional human (or several) to audit it? the answer today is, "obviously not". i dont know if this will ever change, tbh.

Re: AI is different

#136
> The future may reduce the economic prosperity and push humanity to switch to some different economic system (maybe a better system). Markets don’t want to accept that. [Emphasis added]

What a silly premise. Markets don't care. All markets do is express the collective opinion; in the short term as a voting machine, in the long term as a weighing machine.

Seeing a real uptick of socio-policital prognostication from extremely smart, soaked-in-AI, tech people (like you Salvatore!), casting heavy doom-laden gestures towards the future. You're not even wrong! But this "I see something you all clearly don't" narrative, wafer thin on real analysis, packed with "the feels", coated with what-ifs.. it's sloppy thinking and I hold you to a higher standard antirez.

Re: AI is different

#137
post #7

In every technology wave so far, we've disrupted many existing jobs. However we've also opened up new kinds of jobs. And, because it is easier to retrain humans than build machines for those jobs, we wound up with more and better jobs. This is the first technology wave that doesn't just displace humans, but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can. Right now it can't replace human…

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Re: AI is different

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few months ago I saw one driverless car maybe every three days. Now I see roughly 3-5 every day. I get that it’s taken a long time and a lot of hype that hasn’t panned out. But once the tech works and it’s just about juicing the scale then things shift rapidly. Even if you think “oh that’s the next generation’s problem” if there is a chance you’re wrong, or if you want to be kind to the next generation: now is the…

> I think the most sensible answer would be something like UBI. Having had the experience of living under communist regime prior to 1989 I have zero trust in the state providing support, while I am totally dependent and have no recourse. Instead I would rather rely on my own two hands like my grandparents did. I see a world where we can build anything we want with our own hands and AI automation. Jobs might become op…

I'd argue against the entire perspective of evaluating every policy idea along one-dimensional modernist polemics put forwards as "the least worst solution to all of human economy for all time".

Right now the communists in China are beating us at capitalism. I'm starting to find the entire analytical framework of using these ideologies ("communism", "capitalism") to evaluate _anything_ to be highly suspect, and maybe even one of the west's greatest mistakes in the last century.

> I see a world where we can build anything we want with our own hands and AI automation. Jobs might become optional.

I was a teenager back in the 90s. There was much talk then about the productivity boosts from computers, the internet, automation, and how it would enable people to have so much more free time.

Interesting thing is that the productivity gains happened. But the other side of that equation never really materialized.

Who knows, maybe it'll be different this time.

Re: AI is different

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can What makes you think that? Self driving cars have had untold billions of dollars in reaearch and decades in applied testing, iteration, active monitoring, etc and it still has a very long tail of unaddressed issues. They've been known to ignore police traffic redirections, they've run right through construction barriers, and recently…

A few months ago I saw one driverless car maybe every three days. Now I see roughly 3-5 every day. I get that it’s taken a long time and a lot of hype that hasn’t panned out. But once the tech works and it’s just about juicing the scale then things shift rapidly. Even if you think “oh that’s the next generation’s problem” if there is a chance you’re wrong, or if you want to be kind to the next generation: now is the…

Isn't it the case that companies are always competing and evolving? Unless we see that there's a ceiling to driverless tech that is immediately obvious.

We "made cars work" about 100 years ago, but they have been innovating on that design since then on comfort, efficiency, safety, etc. I doubt the very first version of self driving will have zero ways to improve (although eventually I suppose you would hit a ceiling).

Re: AI is different

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the most sensible answer would be something like UBI. Having had the experience of living under communist regime prior to 1989 I have zero trust in the state providing support, while I am totally dependent and have no recourse. Instead I would rather rely on my own two hands like my grandparents did. I see a world where we can build anything we want with our own hands and AI automation. Jobs might become op…

I'd argue against the entire perspective of evaluating every policy idea along one-dimensional modernist polemics put forwards as "the least worst solution to all of human economy for all time". Right now the communists in China are beating us at capitalism. I'm starting to find the entire analytical framework of using these ideologies ("communism", "capitalism") to evaluate _anything_ to be highly suspect, and maybe…

I’m not certain we don’t have free time, but I’m not sure how to test that. Is it possible that we just feel busier nowadays because we spend more time watching TV? Work hours haven’t dropped precipitously, but maybe people are spending more time in the office just screwing around.
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