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The AI backlash is only getting started

economist.com

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Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#231

Post by yunwal »

dofm wrote: post #116
yunwal wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is not cutting my hair anytime soon. AI is not making my meals anytime soon. It's not organizing events, or doing anything in the real world. It's not doing my open heart surgery. Robots are still doing this in 2026 https://www.news.com.au/sport/carnage-at-start-of-robot-mara... We might have to get off the computer, and we might have to rethink how we organize the world economically, but there is still work to be…

> AI is not cutting my hair anytime soon. This is an absolutely bizarre pitch for labour replacement for the very obvious reason that the rate at which the world's hair grows is not going to increase and nor are we going to suddenly discover a great need for new high maintenance hair styles to increase the work available. There are clearly at a first approximation enough barbers and hairdressers already to cut the wo…

Ok, are there enough doctors? seems really weird that you left out the other jobs I mentioned

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#232

Post by dofm »

yunwal wrote: post #230
dofm wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally Sam and Dario's.

Ok, the 2 CEOs want investors to believe their technology is all-powerful. Is that assessment worth anything?

I wasn't saying it is or isn't.

But it unambiguously is who is leading the promise to replace labour; it is whose bullshit is provoking the backlash.

It is whose variously-confident definition of near-term AGI involves completely eliminating a large enough shar of jobs that Altman thinks he has to talk about UBI and fund pilot studies so he doesn't lose all his cool California friends.

It is who has set the tone for the entire punditsphere and everyone who emulates them.

Their definition is the one the media and governments have swallowed; they need the fear so they get regulatory capture.

I will tell you that I think though: I think Sam Altman should be nowhere near the power and proximity to power that he has, band I think Dario Amodei would be better off tucked away in a research unit where the only person who has to listen to him tolkien bollocks is his immediate boss.

I think they are manipulating truly grotesque amounts of fear that are in many ways worse than the fear we felt in the COVID pandemic, and I think they are doing it for money and power.

But I also think people have listened and the message has not got through to tech people that they aren't good people and they are fucking weird.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#233

Post by rurp »

adrians1 wrote: post #76

Remember the debate about how nuclear was stopped in the 70s because of NIMBYism? We are now wondering "how could people then be so stupid and shortsighted?". Well, there you go, here's history repeating before our eyes.

Not at all. The risks and rewards of nuclear power were extremely well know back then, and any objective analysis showed that we should build more of it.

AI is completely different. The risks are not well understood, but are plausibly catastrophic along multiple dimensions. The potential upside is also not well understood.

I remember the optimism of the early internet, when it seemed like it was going to be this incredibly free and liberating realm for everyone to learn and express themselves freely. But now nearly all of that has been reduced or destroyed by the greed of powerful people. The exact same people who are set to control super powerful AI.

Do you really think someone like Elon, who gleefully destroys lives for fun, is going to willingly cede immense amounts of power just to improve the lives of a bunch of normies he'll never meet?! That completely flies in the face of how he and his contemporaries have acted their entire lives, so count me as a little skeptical.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#234

Post by WarmWash »

sph wrote: post #168
WarmWash wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Who did not see this coming? The general vibe of the internet at least for the last 20 years has been "Work sucks, play is fun, give whatever technology minimizes my need to work and maximizes my wealth and free time" All these same guys have also talked about the need for UBI, so they basically have been promising the dream of the liberal internet: No work, free money, do whatever you want in your life. The viabili…

Are vibecoders working less? I don't think so. I've seen people with a dozen Claude windows open, and I'd rather go dig mud than working like that. There is no universe where you can call that programming despite the end product still being source code. The people that have won are not the lazy ones. It's the preppy work-hard-not-smart guys high on ADHD medication that feel like gods having a dozen machines spew out…

We are likely still in the the early days of AI. We're playing with computers circa 1975 talking about how it will impact humanity.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#235

Post by dofm »

yunwal wrote: post #231
dofm wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is not cutting my hair anytime soon. This is an absolutely bizarre pitch for labour replacement for the very obvious reason that the rate at which the world's hair grows is not going to increase and nor are we going to suddenly discover a great need for new high maintenance hair styles to increase the work available. There are clearly at a first approximation enough barbers and hairdressers already to cut the wo…

Ok, are there enough doctors? seems really weird that you left out the other jobs I mentioned

They are all actually quite a lot like the barbers/hairdressers thing! We're more or less getting along with who we have.

Essentially every single medical school in the USA is vastly oversubscribed with qualified applicants, as far as I am aware. And most specialist residencies are too.

But you know you can't just become a doctor, right? You don't just lose your job and become a doctor, or a trained nurse the next day. That is a ten, twelve year lead time thing for doctors, two or three for a nurse, and it favours the young. People who lose their jobs mid career essentially never become doctors. Some do become nurses, but it still favours the young.

Plus, even if there is a shortage beyond that, and in general pratice there is, we don't need hundreds of millions more doctors around the world, I suspect, but that is how many jobs AI threatens to displace according to the FUD. We maybe need a few tens of millions more nurses.

And if you expand the healthcare and training system to train up and employ more people — where does the money for that come from?

People who simultaneously go along with the idea AGI will eliminate large swathes of human labour but somehow magically think everyone will find a new job so there is no retail and service demand collapse or tax revenue collapse are everywhere, serving up the tractor analogy, which is where we started in this thread. It's horseshit.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#236

Post by watwut »

monocasa wrote: post #223
watwut wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women were working fields and were working with farm animals too. They did not done work that required physical strength unless they had no choice, but that does not mean they did not "worked fields". Second, work being split by gender does not matter here. Women are, by definition, people too. And weaving, sewing, candles crafting were all literal necessity. A weaving woman would sell or exchange results of her work…

The point is that the data we have is on men's work. No one said that women were bored SAHM hobbies. Just that pointing out extra tasks that need to be done in addition to the record we have of men working 150 days a year doesn't make much sense when that additional work wasn't done by men.

And I am saying that going by available historical records, you are plain wrong.The additional work was done by men too. Conversely to women worked fields", we have plenty of records of men doing work outside of fields.

We have records of both.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#237

Post by monocasa »

watwut wrote: post #236
monocasa wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that the data we have is on men's work. No one said that women were bored SAHM hobbies. Just that pointing out extra tasks that need to be done in addition to the record we have of men working 150 days a year doesn't make much sense when that additional work wasn't done by men.

And I am saying that going by available historical records, you are plain wrong.The additional work was done by men too. Conversely to women worked fields", we have plenty of records of men doing work outside of fields. We have records of both.

Weaving was very much women's work. There are some exceptions that prove the rule, but society's labor expectations were extremely delineated along gender boundaries for adults in the middle ages. There's so many linguistic examples of this persisting to today. Another example being "spinster", ie. that an unmarried adult woman was expected to spend her time spinning thread.

And we don't have nearly the same amount of detail in women's work. That's why even today it's referred to as invisible labor.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#238

Post by tern »

rescripting wrote: post #216
tern wrote: post #107

Sadly, I think this is true, and it's starting to seem like my own personal political imperative is to remind people that AI can be insanely personally empowering. Many people around me are just missing the boat, or don't care, but many are also able to finally accomplish all kinds of things they've been barred from in the past. LLMs are best seen, I think, as an imagination amplifier. If you're in the mindset of fin…

This is the exact same sentiment I felt at the dawn of the Internet. I felt it was going to empower individuals, tear down borders and barriers, and bring humanity together. Instead we ended up with an ad fueled dopamine/outrage slot machine. We're seeing the same thing happen with AI on a condensed timeframe. Yes, its useful. Yes, it lowers barriers and amplifies what individuals can do, just like the early internet…

I don't completely disagree, but that's not the entire story, and the efforts of those who fought for good outcomes matter profoundly.

For instance, we do in fact have global, effectively ad-free, E2E encrypted messaging. A lot of people put in a lot of work on many fronts to design that, prioritize it, and deliver it at world-scale (mostly) legally.

The fact that the ad model became completely dominant is a real tragedy, but I think the deeper mistake with that idea was that "connecting people" is more complicated than it seems and has had many unforeseen consequences.

As a Western well-to-do person, to the extent I can tune out the slot machine, the dream actually has come true in many ways. I have friends and colleagues all over the world, travel is easier, coordination is easier, and politically my voice matters in ways it never would have in the past.

I was reading mailing lists from the early 2000s the other day and it was wild to remember a time when you literally had no idea what was happening in other parts of the world—when nearly all information was mediated through centralized authorities. People were sharing 'suppressed' reports on grass-roots political action other countries with a sense of self-importance that would be cringe today.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#239

Post by vitorfblima »

627467 wrote: post #222
vitorfblima wrote: post #19

The untold promise of IA is to replace labor. That's probably the only reason why some people are willing to spend trillions of dollars in pursuing this technology. Mere tools would never justify this kind of investment. It's no surprise that people are getting angry, even though many are using AI in their everyday life.

> untold promise of IA is to replace labor Untold? AI going for (insert your favorite) jobs has been on headlines, conferences, substacks, etc non-stop before chatgpt was able to consistently reply twice without hallucinating

That's part of it, sure, but the starting narrative has always been to make people more productive.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#240

Post by vitorfblima »

baron816 wrote: post #191
customguy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's just the thing, productivity is so much higher than, say, 50 years ago, while the average worker has less of a perspective (to own a home, start a family, etc. anything stable to work towards essentially). The profits mostly don't go towards the now more productive workers and ensuring their rights and well-being and a habitable world to live in, do they.

My view is that AI's productive power will allow more individuals to be independent from powerful corporations, and that will significantly weaken those corporations. It's been really challenging to start companies because you need to go hire and manage a lot of people to handle lots of very different tasks. But it's becoming easier and easier everyday because AI is able to do a lot of that work. As more people start…

That "freedom" has a cost, a very high one (in the form of tokens), and that money is going to powerful corporations anyways.
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