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Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

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Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#181

Post by SJMG »

croes wrote: post #118
visarga wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Books also make us less capable at rote memorization. People used to do much more memorization. Search engines taught us to remember the keywords, not the facts. Calculators made us rarely do mental calculations. This is what happens - progress is also regress, you automate on one side and the skill gets atrophied on the other side, or replaced with meta-skills. How many of us know how to use machine code? And we cal…

AI hits different. Books didn’t kill the thinking, AI does. If AI does the writing you can’t find your voice

Agreed. Similarly, people saying their authorship and thought are realized in output selection and post-generation editing are limiting themselves to a much smaller range of expression.

No amount of polish changes a car's frame.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#182

Post by sumanthvepa »

visarga wrote: post #111

AI is used by students, teachers, researchers, software developers, marketers and other categories and the adoption rates are close to 90%. Even if it does not make us more productive we still like using it daily. But when used right, it does make us slightly more productive and I think it justifies its cost. So yes, in the long run it will be viable, we both like using it and it helps us work better. But I think the…

This. Right now the consumer surplus created by improved productivity is being captured by users and to a small extent their employers. But that may not remain the case in future.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#183

Post by pydry »

ACCount37 wrote: post #154
RataNova wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's always going to be a market for things that feel personal, intentional, and imperfect in a way that only human creators can deliver

Like there's market for hand-made, artisanal spoons and forks. Is it a large market though?

It'd be larger if wealth inequality werent so staggeringly high.

The first automated-server restaurants (Horn and hardart) appeared in the 1930s during the depression. They were popular because they were cheap.

Far from being the wave of the future, they went out of business in the 1950s when people started having disposable income.

Part of the reason we accept slop, impersonal service and mass produced crud is not because "demand" is indifferent to it, but because disposable income is so often politically repressed, meaning the market is forced to prioritize price.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#184

Post by jodrellblank »

oblio wrote: post #155
fulafel wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all started going wrong with the printing press.

Scale matters. We're probably producing 100x content than we were making in the 1990s and 1 billion x more than in the 1690s. We have probably greatly increased quality volume since then, but not 100x or 1 billion x.

Grey Goo disaster, but it’s informational rather than physical.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#185

Post by squigz »

iamacyborg wrote: post #175
taurath wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people are making art to get rich and failing, it doesn’t kill artists, who’d be making art anyway, it kills the people trying to earn money from their art. Do we need Quad-A blockbuster Ubisoft/Bethesda/Sony/MS/Nintendo releases for their artistic merit, or their publishers/IP owners needs to make money off of it? Ditto the big4 movie studios. Those don’t really seem to matter very much. The whole idea of tastema…

People are wanting to make a living by making art, not to get rich. I highly recommend reading the book I mentioned as you don’t seem to have a particularly nuanced understanding of the actual struggles at play. Perhaps an analogy you’ll understand is what happens to the value of a developer’s labour when that labour is in many ways replicated by AI and big AI companies actively work to undermine what makes your labo…

Isn't this just a result of technological progress? Technology has displaced entire fields of labor for... well, ever.

I'm not unsympathetic to the problems this introduces to those workers, but I'm really not sure how it could be prevented; we can of course mitigate the issues by providing more social support to those affected by such progress.

In the case of artistic expression becoming more accessible to more people, I have a hard time looking at it as anything but a net positive for society.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#186

Post by smileysteve »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #49
awesome_dude wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IIRC Sam Altman has explicitly said that their plan is to develop AGI and then ask it how to get rich. There are still lots of currently known problems that could be solved with the help of AI that could make a lot of money - what is the weather going to be when I want to fly to in n weeks/months time, currently we can only say "the destination will be in which is typically " What crops yield the best return next s…

The weather thing doesn’t seem… realistic. Have you heard of chaotic systems?

It sounds a lot like a farmer's almanac... Which are reasonably accurate (ignoring chaos) and practically free (passion work)

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#187

Post by andrepd »

oblio wrote: post #149
chii wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ironic if AI actually ended up destroying economic activity that's not destroying economic activity - it's removing a less efficient activity and replace it with a more efficient version. This produces economic surplus. Imagine saying this for someone digging a hole, that if they use a mechanical digger instead of a hand shovel, they'd destroy economic activity since it now cost less to dig that hole!

If AI concentrates economic activity and leads to more natural monopolies (extremely likely), yeah, the lower level activity becomes more efficient but the macro economy becomes less efficient due to lower competition. Software has basically done the same thing, where we do things faster and the fastest thing that happens is accumulation of power and a lower overall quality of life for everyone due to that.

Yeah, indeed. People on this website tend to look at the immediate effects only, but what about the second order, macro effects? It's even more glaring because we've seen this play out already with social media and other tech "innovations" over the past two decades.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#188

Post by ta12653421 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #17

I think the interesting idea with “AI” is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains. I haven’t seen a company convincingly demonstrate that this affects them at all. Lots of fluff but nothing compelling. But I have seen many examples by individuals, including myself. For years I’ve loved poking at video game dev for fun. The main problem has always been art assets. I’m terrible at art an…

Regarding assets, check out Nano Banana:

https://github.com/PicoTrex/Awesome-Nano-Banana-images/blob/...

For you the example of "extract object and create iso model" should be relevant :)

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#189

Post by mattmanser »

HPsquared wrote: post #171

The title is a false dichotomy. It could be a net gain but spread across the whole society if the value added is not concentrated. This is what happens when users gain value which they themselves capture, and the AI companies only get the nominal $20/month or whatever. In those cases it's a net gain for the economy as a whole if valuable work was done at low cost. The inverse of the broken window fallacy.

Like all tech we've had recently, that won't last, it's always bait and switch.

It will not remain cheap as soon as the competition is dead, which is simply a case of who's got the biggest VC supplied war chest.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#190

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

Waterluvian wrote: post #17

I think the interesting idea with “AI” is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains. I haven’t seen a company convincingly demonstrate that this affects them at all. Lots of fluff but nothing compelling. But I have seen many examples by individuals, including myself. For years I’ve loved poking at video game dev for fun. The main problem has always been art assets. I’m terrible at art an…

> "AI" is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains.

If you ask an LLM to generate some imagery, in what way have you entered visual arts?

If you ask an LLM to generate some music, in what way have you entered being a musician?

If you ask an LLM to generate some text, in what way have you entered writing?

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