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The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

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Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#311

Post by omikun »

troosevelt wrote: post #60
cortesoft wrote: post #44

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't. People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it…

People complain UBI doesn’t make mathematical sense doesn’t realize our current economy doesn’t make mathematical sense either. All this prosperity we in the developed world get comes at the cost of extracting wealth from the rest of the world and all government taking on ever more debt.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#312

Post by JumpCrisscross »

fluoridation wrote: post #239
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> doesn't mean that they don't overwhelmingly produce useless things, or things that are more expensive than they're worth One could say the same thing about all the little art projects a hypothetical society on UBI might busy itself making. The pertinent difference seems to be one about scale and co-ordination. Job guarantees say we work together–through a centralised power–to build big things. Handing everyone cash…

>Job guarantees say we work together–through a centralised power–to build big things. Handing everyone cash leans more towards arts and crafts and consumption. Creating busywork doesn't strike me as a particularly worthwhile endeavor, compared to idleness.

> Creating busywork doesn't strike me as a particularly worthwhile endeavor

Make work isn’t the same as busywork. As another comment mentioned, the Hoover Dam isn’t useless busywork.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#313

Post by WorldMaker »

pydry wrote: post #79
troosevelt wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't. People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it…

Just as hyperloop was designed as a techbro pie in the sky notion to kill high speed rail, basic income as an idea is designed to kill more realistic attempts to shore up welfare, e.g. * A job guarantee like we had during the great depression * Lowering retirement age * Raise minimum wage * Expanding medicare to everyone It's worth remembering that if AI really can do everyone's jobs then it'll be wildly deflationary…

The historic origins of UBI are from political parties that wanted most of those same things, too, especially raising the minimum wage and expanding medicare to everyone.

A strong minimum wage makes UBI more attractive. More people will want jobs in addition to UBI. UBI is also seen as a market force to naturally drive minimum wage up, because UBI offers workers more choices: more opportunities to build a startup or take a sabbatical instead of work 40 hours. The labor market has to compete with that "opportunity cost" in ways it doesn't need to care about today. It would increase liquidity in the labor market and in terms going all the way back to even Adam Smith, make the market more free. Wages would better reflect demand for the work if laborers had more choices at more times in their lives where and how much to work.

Medicare for Everyone and Universal Health Care make UBI simpler. Health risk is always going to be variable and insurance-like risk pooling will always be a good idea for society to defray costs in bad years from surpluses in good ones and defray costs from unhealthy people by considering how many people are kept healthy. UBI could be designed to try cover much of health care, but it is never going to be as efficient as a pooled single payer. If a country already has Universal Health Case, the conversations about UBI get a lot simpler. It is a lot easier to sell it is a flat universal grant. Your health care can be provided by a complex risk pool and smart accountants doing a lot of smart math on your behalf. Your UBI can be just a flat number. Simpler: you can think about how you spend your UBI without having to consider your predicted health outcomes in that period of time. UBI's flat universal value can be set on benchmarks that don't need need complex amortization schedules and risk analysis.

The Canadian Social Credit Party, formed to espouse UBI was one of the keys to building Canada's Universal Health Care and their priority was that first, then UBI. That still seems the best priority order to me.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#314

Post by WorldMaker »

happytoexplain wrote: post #197
Kiro wrote: post #114

> Even within tech and coding, one of the areas where AI is reported to have the most promise, there’s the question of whether the productivity gains reported can be trusted. I wish articles like this would at least acknowledge the massive adoption AI has among programmers. It's not comparable to stuff like helping you write the occasional email, which I presume is the baseline for most people outside tech. Making it…

The impact in software has been very hard to measure. There are so many ups and downs and variables. Adoption in particular is a useless metric. They are forced to adopt even if it's not really helping in their case, or if it does help but using it makes them miserable, like being forced to switch jobs from something you enjoy to something you find boring and tedious. And then there's the "expertise debt" that will h…

Also, this "Legacy Code as a Service" tech debt boom may eventually find creditors that need paying. These models are trained on other people's Legacy Code. No company is letting OpenAI or Anthropic or Meta have access to their best code and smartest experts. It's all just other people's Legacy Code. LLMs are going to force companies towards a lot of mediocre software regression to the mean. How long before companies are scrambling for expertise they laid off or didn't invest in because all their software sucks and no one around knows what it is doing or why? The tech debt bank account is going to get weird in the coming decades.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#315

Post by fluoridation »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #312
fluoridation wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Job guarantees say we work together–through a centralised power–to build big things. Handing everyone cash leans more towards arts and crafts and consumption. Creating busywork doesn't strike me as a particularly worthwhile endeavor, compared to idleness.

> Creating busywork doesn't strike me as a particularly worthwhile endeavor Make work isn’t the same as busywork. As another comment mentioned, the Hoover Dam isn’t useless busywork.

And as I mentioned, the Hoover dam is also not the typical example of the kinds of projects guaranteed job programs generate.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#316

Post by squibonpig »

Legend2440 wrote: post #5

I am very concerned by the rise of political violence in the US, and I especially don't like how much support it gets on social media. Burning down a warehouse or shooting a politician does not make you a hero.

Who cares? What's the point in inaction? I respect someone who does something stupid more than someone who is too afraid to.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#317

Post by hintymad »

I think the top three people who deserve the hate are Amodei, Hinton, and Joshua. They are the pioneers of the field, and they could have been more objective and laid out exactly where AI does well, where AI falls short, and how we can build a bright future. But oh, no! Instead, they keep telling people that AI will get us the doomsday. AI will displace half of jobs yesterday. AI will be so dangerous that only government can control it. AI will be so malicious that we should make sure AI say the right words in the right tone and give the "right" information. So, a fear monger, a commie, and a woke. It's not hard to imagine why that the public would turn against AI.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#318

Post by cindyllm »

squibonpig wrote: post #316
Legend2440 wrote: post #5

I am very concerned by the rise of political violence in the US, and I especially don't like how much support it gets on social media. Burning down a warehouse or shooting a politician does not make you a hero.

Who cares? What's the point in inaction? I respect someone who does something stupid more than someone who is too afraid to.

[dead]

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#319

Post by frm88 »

cortesoft wrote: post #44

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

The fourth aspect to discuss is how do we want to restrict the influence of AI companies on politics? Will we allow the CEOs to implement Thiel's vision of a world run as a company with CEOs at the top via massive monetary influence on political decision making, effectively abolishing democracy? If they really manage to replace 50% of the workforce with AI, their influence over everything from regulation to elections to social security networks as well as foreign policy will be enormous.
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