171–180 of 185 posts
> They want to replace workers A simple question none of the ai-doomsayers can answer... who buys anything when nobody has a job cos robots do everything?
the answer to every question: Agents, of course! With GPU-collaterized credit or some other idiocy.
> They want to replace workers A simple question none of the ai-doomsayers can answer... who buys anything when nobody has a job cos robots do everything?
The true AI doomsayers believe in some sort of technological singularity, which means a point after which things become so strange that the world is radically transformed. Things like "jobs" and "careers" are so integral to society that we can't really imagine what society would be like in a world where people don't have any clear purpose. That's why you won't get a definitive answer. The whole idea of a singularity…
Do people have clear purpose now? We have a lot of examples of people who don't have to work like the British landed gentry of times past. Maybe we'll be Bertie Woosters with AI Jeeves?
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The true AI doomsayers believe in some sort of technological singularity, which means a point after which things become so strange that the world is radically transformed. Things like "jobs" and "careers" are so integral to society that we can't really imagine what society would be like in a world where people don't have any clear purpose. That's why you won't get a definitive answer. The whole idea of a singularity…
I believe that AI will continue to progress. I believe that we’re going to see a fast takeoff. That said, some people are now discussing a “societal singularity” wherein society breaks before the actual emergence of AGI. I believe this is the trajectory we are on. The question is what happens to the unemployed. Democracies will not tolerate mass permanent unemployment, as we’ve seen over and over again. UBI is a scam…
Like there was kind of an A B test of capitalism vs socialism in Germany but East Germany got less prosperity and so they had to build walls with machine guns to stop people escaping the socialist side. But if AI was providing abundance in the east that might not have been needed? Like in the future if you have two societies, one dysfunctional capitalism where Musk and Altman have everything and the other a kind of AI socialism where everyone has abundance of most things, people may voluntarily choose the later.
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I don't know. A nationwide (global?) promise of UBI that just evaporates is likely to bring on a French Revolution kind of moment.
The difference between then and now is that the have nots don’t have much leverage. At least during the French Revolution, they had strength in numbers. The people who control the capital are building autonomous armament to protect themselves against both foreign and domestic enemies. If you sell labour for money, you should be worried.
Rich people can build all the fortified bunkers they want, but they still need to get their food, water, and air from somewhere. It would be very easy to cut them off or smoke them out.
(I'm not advocating for violence in any way, I'm just pointing out that nobody's invincible, no matter how obscenely wealthy they are).
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It's bizarre that some of the doomsayers are AI stakeholders. It's like they don't realize that most people don't have net worth in the 7-8 figures. I console myself with the fact that without a functioning economy, AI will implode since capital will dry up. Then all of the investment in data centers, R&D, etc. will never be recovered. Then we'll be back to rational thinking? Maybe?
Yeah, but it doesn’t implode all at once - it’s not distributed evenly. Something like over half of the US consumption is done by the top 10%, or something insane like that. This leads me to believe that a lot more people will eat shit, before enough feel real pain.
Also, data centers, chips, and energy require massive working-class supply chains, and enterprise AI revenue depends on customers whose own revenue depends on regular consumers.
> They want to replace workers A simple question none of the ai-doomsayers can answer... who buys anything when nobody has a job cos robots do everything?
Nobody can answer that? There are jobs AI can't easily come for... not always nice ones, but either too physically fiddly or too cheap to bother automating. But jobs go "extinct" all the time. My ancestors going back generations were sugarhouse labourers. That job's gone, but the lineage isn't: we just do different things now. The pattern seems pretty consistent: raise the floor (dishwashers, CNC machines, laundry),…
Same will happen with the jobs AI takes
> Shoes are the classic example. Automation made them cheaper and accessible to everyone
Like you said, cobblers just do different things now
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Not comforting at all, in fact I would find it aggravating. Yet to imply that means this is somehow a cold and callous take is what I take an issue with because it ignores the vast majority on the other side of the fence, and the economic windfall and quality of life improvement for the majority. The last thing you want to be is like Europe or any other country that is regulating their way out of the loop. You think…
I didn't imply anything. I just called out the emotional reality. There are a lot of externalized pain in the world today, and little recourse to addressing it. You can try telling people that they are naive and need to look at the big picture, but you might not see much success at getting your point across.
> They want to replace workers A simple question none of the ai-doomsayers can answer... who buys anything when nobody has a job cos robots do everything?
Take any econ 101 course, and you'll realize that this isn't a factor in the capitalist system. Capitalism is simply concerned with maximizing profit, and in this case, returning shareholder value. It's just simply not in the purview of the system to think about what happens when you completely get rid of your labor force. Envisioned another way, the future of labor might look the way it did for laborers over 100 yea…
Youre hysterical
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Finite means not free. Who will pay?
If your magic robot is magic enough you own anything you want. You pay with the oldest currency in the world. Might.
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I saw a talk by Brian Merchant ( https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/ ) a while back where he talked a lot about the Luddites and their revolts against automation. He's definitely not a fan of AI, but it was very interesting to hear the comparisons of AI resistance now to Luddite resistance to automation in the 1800's. There was unfortunately no Q&A in the lecture, as probably the one question I would have asked him wa…
There's one important difference: Automation worked and was affordable. Whether slop generation by LLMs is a useful instance of automation and how any productivity achieved stacks up against real , non-subsidized costs is currently a matter of (highly propagandized) opinion at best.
Steam engines weren't affordable to the average person when they were invented. Same as ai
And like steam, AI does some types of work quicker and easier than was previously possible.
Ai produces slop no doubt, but at the very minimum I can safely say it's here to stay for agentic coding, and I suspect it's the same for quite a few other industries as well. I won't lose my job to an AI agent, but I will lose to it to a human using an AI agent. That's technology,deal with it