I for one cannot wait until this bubble bursts.
This has been nothing but a test-run for openly fascistic tech hoes to flex their disdain for everyone who isn't them or in their dumb club.
Replacement.ai
451–460 of 725 posts
Re: Replacement.ai
#452A problem with anti-AI discourse is there are three seperate groups who rarely communicate, and if they do they just talk past each other
1. Rationalists/EA's who moderately-strongly believe AI scaling will lead to ASI in the near future and the end of all life (Yud, Scott Alexander)
2. Populist climate-alarmists who hate AI for a combination of water use, copyright infringement, and decimation of the human creative spirit
3. Tech "nothingburgerists" who are convinced that most if not all AI companies are big scams that will fail, LLM's are light-years from "true' intelligence and that it's all a big slop hype cycle that will crumble within months to years. (overrepresented on this site)
Each group has a collection of "truthiness-anchors" that they use to defend their position against all criticism. They are all partially valid, in a way, but take their positions to the extreme to the point they are often unwilling to accept any nuance. As a result, conversations often lead nowhere because people defend their position to a quasi-religious degree rather than as a viewpoint predicated on pieces of evidence that may shift or be disproven over time.
Regarding the satire in OP, many people will see it as just a funny, unlikely outcome of AI, others will see it as a sobering vision into a very likely future. Both sides may "get" the point, but will fail to agree at least in public, lest they risk losing a sort of status in their alignment with their sanity-preserving viewpoint.
Re: Replacement.ai
#453[flagged]
It's actually an extremely good analogy (but in the opposite way of what you imply), as you don't own your job or your wife. Banning AI for job security is like banning dildos because they make men feel insecure.
It's not limited to men. A lot of feminists are also vocally against the idea of female sex bots because it makes them feel insecure.
Re: Replacement.ai
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
If ML is limited to replacing some tasks that humans do, yes it will be much like any past technological innovation. If we build AGI, we don't have a past comparison for that. Technologies so far have always replaced a subset of what humans currently do, not everything at once.
I love SF, but somehow I don't find it very good foundation for predicting the future. Especially when people focus of one, very narrow theme of SF and claim with certainty that's what's gonna happen.
> I love SF, but somehow I don't find it very good foundation for predicting the future.
Nineteen Eighty-Four would like to have a word with you!
Out of all SF, I would probably want to live in The Culture (Iain M. Banks). In these books, people basically focus on their interests as all their needs are met by The Minds. The Minds (basically AIs) find humans infinity fascinating - I assume because they were designed that way.
Re: Replacement.ai
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
My job is more important than intimacy. Intimacy won't keep me warm, or fed.
If intimacy doesn’t keep you warm you might be doing something wrong.
It's far less effective than the hydrocarbons that heat my house. My point being that I think people on HN like to underestimate how important work is when talking about replacing humans.
It's not "just business", it's my ability to survive.
Re: Replacement.ai
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a difference in scale and potential consequences though What if there were some robot with superhuman persuasion and means of manipulating human urges such that, if it wanted to, it could entrap anyone it wanted to complete subservience? Should we happily acquiesce to the emerging cult-like influence these new entities have on susceptible humans? What if your parents messaged you one day, homeless on the stre…
> superhuman persuasion and means of manipulating human urges such that, if it wanted to, it could entrap anyone it wanted to complete subservience Wow this potential/theoretical danger sounds a lot like the already existent attention economy; we're already manipulated at scale by "superhuman" algorithms designed to hijack our "human urges," create "cult-like" echo chambers, and sell us things 24/7. That future is al…
Which is true. People are scammed by very low-quality schemes (like that French woman who sent 1 million to the scammers who claimed to be Brad Pitt who for some reason needed money for medical procedures).
Humans have generally a natural wariness/mental immune system response to these things however, and for 99% of people the attention economy is far from being able to completely upend their life or send all their money in an agreement made in bad faith by the other party. I don't see why, if some AI were to possess persuasion powers to a superhuman degree, would be able to cause 100x the damage when directed at the right marks.
Re: Replacement.ai
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
We invent machines to free ourselves from labour, yet we’ve built an economy where freedom from labour means losing your livelihood.
> We invent machines to free ourselves from labour That's a very romantic view. The development, production and use of machines to replace labour is driven by employers to produce more efficiently, to gain an edge and make more money.
I would hope that people realize that money in itself is merely digits on a computer and that the real power of this stuff belongs to the people since the AI inherited and learned from us.
I know that's a simplification but we uphold this contract that controls us. The people get to decide how this plays out and as much as I'm hopeful we excel into a world that is more like star trek, that skips over the ugly transition that could succeed or fail to get us there.
But we aren't that far off of a replicator if our AI models become so advanced in an atomic compute world they can rearrange atoms into new forms. It seemed fiction before but within reach of humanity should we not destroy ourselves.
Re: Replacement.ai
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elites unilaterally claiming and reaping the benefits of automation (i.e. consolidation of wealth) is not a law of nature.
It is. It's not something you can wave away with some new political system. Automation results in centralization of power. It transforms labor-intensive work to capital-intensive work and reduces the leverage of the working class. You could have a system that distributes wealth from automation to the newly-unemployed working class, but fundamentally the capital-owners are less dependent on the working class, so the w…
> so the working class will have no leverage to sustain the wealth distribution
As has been seen time and time again throughout history the commoners will only put up with so much and when all else fails and they start suffering a bit too much leverage comes from the end of a barrel.
Re: Replacement.ai
#459Agriculture used to be more than 50% of ALL employment in the USA. Now it's barely 2%. Ever wondered why? I understand the spirit of this, but most of this alarmism is misguided in my view.
There were about 20 million horses in March 1915 in the United States.
Then you stopped needing them, a USDA census in 1959 showed the horse population had dropped to 4.5 million.
Now they're mostly used for riding, and in 2023, there were about 6.65 million horses.
(Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_the_United_States#St...)
There's no law of nature that says "there's always a place for more horses", and anyone who suggested there might be would get laughed at. Well, there's also no law of nature that says "there's always a place for more humans", to butcher a like from CGP Grey a little over a decade ago.
Re: Replacement.ai
#460Can I buy one of these robots for the less than the money I can earn using them for Mechanical Turk?