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AI and the Automation of Work

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Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#181

Post by barrkel »

digitalengineer wrote: post #113
raincole wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very good example to understand how "AI evangelists" think. Anyone with even slightest common senes would immediately understands why it's a bad idea, but AI evangelists just can't.

It's also very... American to not think mention the absurdity of machine guns at airports, even in the hands of humans. Even if lethal force is required, would you want a security person (not a trained policeman) to "start blasting" and spraying bullets with a machine-gun?

I have seen assault rifles in the hands of police reasonably frequently in airports across Europe.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#182

Post by sanderjd »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #41

I am pretty concerned about AGI. I love computer science and programming. I would love to get into research after I finish my Masters in a couple of years. I think it's fair to say that _some day_ we will achieve AGI. It might not be in 10 years, or 1000, but eventually we'll get there. When we do have AGI, what would that mean for someone like me? Would there be any reason to have programmers (or similar) at all? Wo…

The thing that makes me more optimistic about this specific question is chess. Chess has been, from a human perspective, fully solved by AI. But it has never been more popular. Why? I find it both hard to explain and kind of intuitive. Even though we can't beat computers anymore, we can still learn from them, but remain human, and so human play remains its own unique thing, but infused with insights from the super human computer players. And on net, human chess is now just better.

I think science and math could be the same, which is really exciting! That is, maybe humans would be learning from what the super-human computers are doing, but using that to do different, more human, things.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#183

Post by sanderjd »

jiggawatts wrote: post #180
Shorel wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of research if some new student can do it better than me, right now? What's the point of playing chess if Magnus Carlsen will beat me every time we play? This seems a bit absurd, but it's something I have feared since I learned I am not the best at everything.

There's only one Magnus Carlsen. Now ask yourself what's the point of playing chess if every chessplayer except you is a copy of Magnus Carlsen.

But that's just it: there are as we speak an infinite number of chess "players" who are better than Magnus Carlsen. And chess has never been more popular.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#184

Post by dahwolf »

We lack a socio-economic system where common people truly benefit from automation.

We fear automation because it may replace our jobs. No worries, we'll make up some new bullshit jobs. Or maybe you can keep your job, and we raise the expectation of your output. It's all "running to stand still", not to mention sustaining yourself becoming ever more complicated and stressful.

I wish we could escape this "job for job's sake" and to always output more in perpetuity. At what point do we have enough stuff and can start utilizing automation to improve people's lives, for example with less work hours, more economic security? This is an area in which zero progress is made in decades, if not negative progress.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#185

Post by keiferski »

spi wrote: post #176
keiferski wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, my experience is that most hype comes from people that don't actually work in the jobs they claim will be replaced. Writers, for example. While generative AI does make writing some things more efficient, it almost always has a bland, generic style that is immediately recognizable. The only jobs it will be replacing are ones that didn't require much effort in the first place.

Isn't that almost always the case, and in truth the beauty of automation? Replacing simple, repetitive tasks that, if you have to do that, you say "I wish I had a machine doing this for me"? Of course, that might impact the number of available jobs and it's something that need to be taken under control. But, if talking about writers, while AI won't realistically replace imaginative authors and investigative journalis…

ChatGPT will definitely be used for rote tasks that are currently fulfilled by low-end writers, but realistically could already be automated by a competent programmer. Stuff like generic product descriptions or content farm product reviews. But I don't see it actually replacing flesh-and-blood writers that have a viewpoint anytime soon.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#186

Post by spaceman_2020 »

jayant_kaushik wrote: post #90
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The combination of ChatGPT and Phind helped me, a noob with 8 months of coding knowledge, build an app with real paying users and revenue. I would have never accomplished this on my own, and now I have a working prototype to find co-founders and possible investors.

Would you mind sharing the app link? Curious to see what you made with the help of AI.

Unfortunately that would mean doxxing myself. But its largely a somewhat complex CRUD app with a user dashboard. The stac is nextjs, tailwind, and nodejs, express on the backend.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#187

Post by sanderjd »

MicropenisMike wrote: post #143
Barrin92 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chess engines overtook human chess players more than a decade or two ago and human chess is thriving. Activities don't become less rewarding for you simply because someone else is better at it, even if that's a machine. A robotic arm can probably lift more than I do, doesn't take my enjoyment from working out away. And people enjoy the human aspect and narrative in any activity in its own right. And that's the worst…

Chess is a leisure activity, not work, you cannot compare the impact of automation of the two. Also, chess engines did kill chess. Chess used to be a spectacle on the national stage, from 2000 up until Queen's Gambit and the following streamer boom, chess was largely dead. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Chess&hl...

I'm extremely skeptical of the claim that engines killed mainstream interest in chess. The trend seems to only go back to 2004, which is not long enough.

My sense growing up in the 90s was that chess was a niche thing for nerds. I think it seems somewhat more mainstream now than it was then, while remaining fundamentally a niche thing for nerds :) But it seems very clear to me that it never underwent the broad collapse that I remember being broadly predicted after Kasparov vs Deep Blue.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#188

Post by sanderjd »

calderwoodra wrote: post #35

> But if it becomes cheaper to use a machine to make, say, a pair of shoes, then the shoes are cheaper, more people can buy shoes and they have more money to spend on other things besides, and we discover new things we need or want, and new jobs. This sounds really similar to trickle down economics.

I think this is a straightforward circle to square: technological advances do indeed "trickle down", but the financial benefit from them doesn't, necessarily.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#190

Post by sanderjd »

calderwoodra wrote: post #59
msla wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because what he described actually works. Clothing used to be hugely expensive: https://www.bookandsword.com/2017/12/09/how-much-did-a-shirt... > So the shirts of humble servants at Henry VIII’s court cost between 3 and 10 days’ income. That would be similar to someone who earns 10 dollars or Euros an hour spending 240 to 800 dollars or Euros on an item today. (Of course, in the 15th and 16th century, people spen…

I agree with you that innovation "works". But whether it's through innovation or tax cuts, the result is that the business has more capital to work with. So I'm really wondering why tax cuts don't work.

Because of businesses vs individuals. Tax cuts for businesses are indeed generally beneficial (in my opinion; I know this is not an uncontroversial objective truth or anything) for this reason, but there is a far more tenuous connection between wealthy individuals having more cash and technological progress. The issue is that the lines between businesses and individuals for the purposes of taxation are fiendishly hazy.
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