Most AI automation would automate useless bureucratic (public and private) bullshit jobs, not real productivity.
Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
181–190 of 319 posts
Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
See the neo-feudalism comment below. Land and even vertical farming will be controlled by nobility / corporates in the neo-feudalism era.
so what’s your solution then? you realize corporations are just run by people? but yes they become cold, heartless soul sucking places. yes. make your own company and do something about it then. or STFU.
Not the GP, but I'd rather reform our government to not be exclusively for money grubbing companies and billionaires who put profits over people.
Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
We do, however, have computer assisted plumbers, electricians, and other technicians. With nothing more than YouTube one can fix appliances and cars, or do some DIY home improvement, and the projects that are possible are much more involved than they were in the old days. It's very hard to pick up these skills from a book, but if there's a video to walk through the process - the projects become possible. AI-assisted…
I have four books that I got from my dad - one for construction and repairs, one for electrical, one for plumbing, and one for landscaping. They’re in simple English with excellent illustrations. Using those books, I’ve been able to fix/improve pretty much everything in my house for ten years.
Would love to know what these books are.
Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
The code that AI is good at currently is exactly common tasks. Good luck getting it to write a competitive video card driver for Nvidia hardware or anything else that requires actual creative problem solving that isn’t github boilerplate.
It's only common among trained experts. For most people, even simple code is astonishingly difficult. I personally get more value from AI when coding more complex and novel things. Not fully automated, but English has become the most valuable language for me when coding.
I think this is the blind spot that a lot of tech workers have.
To them, AI is years (decades?) away from being able to produce an Excel clone.
To average people, excel is just a tool to add up columns of numbers. Something AI is readily capable of today.
Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
#185Does anyone else find techno-optimism really depressing? I guess one for the more common reason that it’s displacing humanity with technology, but the second reason is just you can’t get excited about a hype that is unlikely to manifest. It feels very ungrounded from tangible benefits to society.
Replacing human labor with technology is usually a wonderful thing if the gains are generally realized. It means less time spent in 'toil' and more time to pursue one's true interests and desires. The reason it feels depressing is that if recent history is any guide, 0.0001% of the human race will receive almost all the benefit. A tiny number of richer-than-rich will get even richer and everyone else will stay the sa…
Median income in constant dollars in the US was about 60k 40 years ago and now is about 80k. We can buy a lot better stuff with those dollars too.
Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
96 years ago we there was a massive financial crisis and depression that killed a lot of people and is directly related to the (lack of) national policies of the time. USA recovered remarkably well, but only because there was a big pivot away from crony capitalism and towards "socialism" under FDR. Big investments in The People, unions, education, infrastructure. We are going in the former direction right now.
Causal relationships can be hard to discern. Some say that FDR's policies extended the downturn to 10 years whereas recovery from previous downturns was much quicker. (Also, it is not clear to me how any of this is relevant to "The wealth gap growing, and the median person being better off aren't mutually exclusive".)
Of course libertarian ideologues will argue FDR was the Big Bad. They are arguing from ideology, not science.
FDR committed the grave sin of making a lot of rich people slightly less rich, in the short term. Deregulation is the answer to everything, including the problems caused directly by lack of regulation and governance. Hilarious.
Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
#187Does anyone else find techno-optimism really depressing? I guess one for the more common reason that it’s displacing humanity with technology, but the second reason is just you can’t get excited about a hype that is unlikely to manifest. It feels very ungrounded from tangible benefits to society.
Completely agree. I look at all these predictions, good and bad, but then I look at the global temperature and it feels watching someone in complete denial after a terminal cancer diagnoses talking about their plans for the future, a switch in careers, investments etc.
In terms of AI particularly I can only focus on the here and now, and the real world effects that I'm seeing are split between enabling creepy men to produce deepfakes of women they're stalking and enabling bad faith actors with the ability to erode faith in our democratic systems. Om both counts I repeatedly see the "techbros" who develop the tech waving their hands or actively supporting it.
All of the benefits right now like being able to code marginally faster or bounce ideas off of aan LLM feel like playing with firecrackers while watching dangerous men develop guns after we got a hold of gunpowder.
Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
#188Does anyone else find techno-optimism really depressing? I guess one for the more common reason that it’s displacing humanity with technology, but the second reason is just you can’t get excited about a hype that is unlikely to manifest. It feels very ungrounded from tangible benefits to society.
> It feels very ungrounded from tangible benefits to society
Your definition of "society" implies that it means "everyone".
If you circumscribe the definition more narrowly to the owners of wealth/capital, the benefits to them (and the thin managerial class just below them) are pretty clear.
Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Advocate or not, it’s here to stay. And if you’re not adjusting to it, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Last week I did the amount of work that would’ve taken me give or take a month. A significant part of it was writing an API client for a system I needed to use. Pretty run of the mill stuff. Doing this ‘by hand’ just takes time. Go look at the docs, type out your data structures, wire things up for the new call,…
> So this is my thesis now - if you’re a senior who neglects this new tool, you’re going to be out of a job soon-ish. Do you wanna bet?
We’re all already betting one way or another.
Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
#190Does anyone else find techno-optimism really depressing? I guess one for the more common reason that it’s displacing humanity with technology, but the second reason is just you can’t get excited about a hype that is unlikely to manifest. It feels very ungrounded from tangible benefits to society.
Humans will always value human labor, creative destruction is foundational to economic growth and it has been happening since the discovery of fire.
They don't, though, they consistently want the cheaper machine made products rather than the artisinal human made versions. Sure it might align with their "values" but when they see the value difference at the cash register their minds will quickly change. It's already happening with AI designed products.