131–140 of 195 posts
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> but if everyone can do everything without any effort, it is no longer valuable. And how is this a bad thing? Would it be good for oxygen to be valuable, or water? What's with this fetishistic obsession with "value"? What's bad about living in a world where nothing holds any value whatsoever?
Not everyone is a nihilist
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> but if everyone can do everything without any effort, it is no longer valuable. And how is this a bad thing? Would it be good for oxygen to be valuable, or water? What's with this fetishistic obsession with "value"? What's bad about living in a world where nothing holds any value whatsoever?
Nestle lawyers argue that yes, water should be valuable.
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The only way to solve inequality created by concentration of AI superpowers will be extreme violence, and I'm tired of pretending that's not the case.
You say that like inequality is a problem. If so, there's a really easy way to solve it: nuke the planet back to the stone age. Personally, I'd rather have inequality if it means everyone can live a peaceful life. Let the rich have their yachts or whatever. I don't see why the increased productivity provided by AI won't make things better, given that all of the ills of the world are caused by scarcity: that is, insuf…
Thank God a large majority of people with ironclad convictions don't think like you.
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AI is to many professions like the Knitting machines were to textile workers (where the word Luddite originated[0], people who opposed automation). Some "value" will be lost, but other will be generated. People WILL lose their jobs as what they did can either be done by AI directly or an AI Agent can write a script/program to do some or all what they did. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
They were not opposing automation. They were opposing loss of jobs, wages, dignity in work and all that. And they turned out to be completely right. AI is just the next attack from capitalism in a long line of attacks aimed at workers. And this time its coming for every single worker, given that the explicit purpose is to create AI that can replace every single person.
Barring massive violence against anyone even thinking about automating something, is there anything the could've done realistically?
We're at the same point with AI now, a bit worse really. People are using AI for _everything_ since it's practically free to shove it at any problem and get "meh" results.
Then they do the math whether "meh" basically for free is better than "decent to good" for a liveable wage.
With knitting machines there was an actual monetary and time cost to getting them running so the adoption was slower.
AI adoption is moving at crazy speeds with no regard for anything. Some of the uses will stick and people will lose jobs, some will be scaled back because "meh" quality isn't sustainable practice.
Boycotting products and companies that use AI in a stupid "meh" way will work eventually, but for some fields it's here to stay because it's just better. Programming is one of them, there's no going back to "stupid" Intellisense or plain tab complete when even a local AI model powered system can pre-fill whole functions with 80-100% accuracy in seconds.
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We focus on colonisation of Universe and becoming a Kardashev Type III civilisation. Literally that.
We're just missing around 9001 steps between the devaluation of labor and the space exploration, which according to current understanding of physics is pure fantasy because all concepts of faster then light travel are purely "what-if" daydreams
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The moral comes from the grassroots as power corrupts. As long as we wait for a godlike leader for rescue the end result is same as with Stalin, Hitler, Trump, Thiel, Epstein, Musk, ... The godlikeness can come though in many forms, political (Trump), propaganda (Musk/Zuck7Thiel) or via extortion material and money like Epstein. A good litmus test for a decision maker is the universal ethical principle mentioned in t…
Power reveals rather than corrupt: it's easy to act moral when there are consequences (real or imagined) when you don't, but you see someone's true self when they know they could get away with it. For example, this is why the way someone treats service workers is a good indicator of someone's character.
> “I own the compute infrastructure” or “I owned the company that bought the AI systems early”, on the other hand, is just being in the right place at the right time. It’s not about your talents, effort, or contribution. It’s pure capital ownership divorced from any human quality. The article is not about AI, it's about this stage of capitalism. Unlike the author, I would argue that it is very much in line with the c…
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They were not opposing automation. They were opposing loss of jobs, wages, dignity in work and all that. And they turned out to be completely right. AI is just the next attack from capitalism in a long line of attacks aimed at workers. And this time its coming for every single worker, given that the explicit purpose is to create AI that can replace every single person.
You think anything they did could've put the automation genie back in the bottle? Barring massive violence against anyone even thinking about automating something, is there anything the could've done realistically? We're at the same point with AI now, a bit worse really. People are using AI for _everything_ since it's practically free to shove it at any problem and get "meh" results. Then they do the math whether "me…
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I fixed a bunch of nitpicky PR comments just by saying "PR 69 has some comments, fix the issues" to Claude. It opened the PR automatically, took the comments and applied the fixes (renaming a few things, simple refactoring and added a few unit tests). Effort from me: maybe 5 minutes going through the PR comments and deciding they were super simple monkey work and 10 seconds typing instructions for Claude. Then maybe…
> maybe 5 minutes going through the PR comments and deciding they were super simple monkey work There’s an old joke about a mechanic banging a hammer on a car and charging $1000 for it. Man us engineers severely undervalue each other’s worth huh. One thing all this AI hype has taught me is I’ve started to be very conscious of what my value is. It’s a hard habit to break.
I kinda enjoy it, I can focus more on planning, thinking, networking and solving actual problems rather than typing 1000 lines of unit tests by hand and then doing a stupid copy-paste mistake somewhere when I try to speed things up and spend 2 hours debugging it. (True story)
I feel a lot less pride in my creative work knowing it can be done much too easily with modern AI. It makes me less eager to create which is quite unfortunate. I haven’t felt to bad about my creative works being fed into training models. Taken by itself, my creations are minuscule. But it’s very apparent when I look at AI as a whole, having taken from everyone in aggregate. I feel that.