471–480 of 1001 posts
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Why not use AI to automate away the board of directors and the shareholders? It should be entirely possible. We just need an AI capable of generating its own capital, then the investor class can be removed from the loop.
This sounds horrible. You’re basically saying you want everyone to work for companies controlled by AI.
1) Chaudry's article is amazing in its lack of creative thinking. If people like Priya can be ~10 times more productive wielding some AI tools, that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives. Though some people in some companies might be laid off, it doesn't necessarily mean that more people will be laid off than new jobs…
> companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services How exactly is that a good thing? We already consume too much, now we will have 10x as much to consume? Unlikely that demand for "the things" goes up 10x, which means the value will drop.
I'm rapidly losing faith in "a company can provide good products/services". Maybe it's just because I hyperfocus on the software sector, where this seems especially true, but it seems like worse products (those that prey on and value extract from the user) make more money.
Companies seem incentivized to produce worse products, while preying on our worst impulses.
Convenience you become a slave to, not owning anything, streaming everything.
Why make this game good when we can simply make it addictive? (Shout out to Diablo Immoral.)
Why make it healthy when people just want it to be tasty?
Why not remove these features and charge you to get them back?
Why not spy on and datamine our users? They won't care enough to stop us.
Why not plan obsolescence in our products? Every competitor will be forced to follow suit or make less money and be eliminated.
These measures truly make more money, and companies are actively incentivized to pursue them.
It really feels like the "Late Stage Capitalism" memes I've normally mentally discarded. Or the "money is the root of all evil" meme from the Bible. It truly is, it seems like.
When I read "companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services", my mind now turns that into "companies can potentially value extract from you with chintzy spyware 10 times as much as they do now!"... and I think, "Wait, the person phrased that as a good thing."
I feel like I've arrived at a pretty bleak existential outlook. :D
There IS hope, though: government regulation! Special mention to the EU and California and Massachusetts, which empower the people's will with privacy and right-to-repair laws that hold all this in check. I guess if I mask an idyllic application of that onto "companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services", I can sort of feel good about that premise again.
The fact that so many people fear loss of income as a result of better AI is a real indictment of our economic system. A better system that more fairly distributed economic productivity would make people welcome better AI because they could be confident it would make everyone wealthier instead of just a few people rich enough to be Goa'uld.
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> This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure? The extra value has gone to enrich the oligarchs rather than to the people. Maybe that should change.
I think most humans today massively underestimate just how absolutely shitty the life of a medieval peasant was. You would have lived in a one room house without electricity, worked the fields from childhood (if you survived childhood), eaten simple foods without spices, watched your friends die from illness, then maybe get conscripted into a medieval war. If you thought the people at the top had power now boy you'd…
The problem is those oligarchs are using their outsized accumulation to lobby for and purchase a worsening world for their benefit. Sure, things got better for some people for a while. Now they're getting worse from what flows out of the discretionary spending of those oligarchs.
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The words "most" and "many" there are doing some herculean lifting. Look at the kind of people who do not have to work. Do they still work? No. Some sit on a beach and never lift a finger again, some become creatives and some try to recreate their successes again. None work what would be an engaging and productful job at a take-away joint.
That is in fact not true. Plenty of retirees seek out job-like things. I have a couple of examples. A small one is my dad. He was a software developer, but thanks to Y2K consulting, he made bank and retired early. After, he spent half the year in Mexico. One of the friends he made there was a teacher. My dad ended up volunteering in the school. He had a part-time-job-like schedule and did teacher's aide things. He lo…
The fact that so many people fear loss of income as a result of better AI is a real indictment of our economic system. A better system that more fairly distributed economic productivity would make people welcome better AI because they could be confident it would make everyone wealthier instead of just a few people rich enough to be Goa'uld.
The big oversight here is that Priya does not want a job , what Priya wants is an income . The point of life is not working, the point of life is to enjoy it. We should strive to eliminate as many jobs as we possibly can, the less we have to work the better it is. To make this possible we need to find a way to a new system that doesn't directly link labour with income .
> a new system that doesn't directly link labour with income Wish granted. You now have a system where income is only vaguely linked to labor, and a handful of people make insanely more money than anybody else despite doing the same amount of labor (or less). Income is now linked to existing wealth and personal connections much more than it is to labor. A system where income is directly linked to labor would be a ste…
Didn‘t you just describe exactly what we have now?
Funny thing - I've been using ChatGPT as a programming assistant. My experience with it is that the more knowledgeable I am at the domain, the more useful it is. It often generates code that won't compile or won't run correctly, but that sort of goes in the correct direction, enough that I can spot the blunders and refine my questions. Quite often I even learn a few new things when using it to explore libraries and f…
I've had a similar experience (but slightly different). The biggest innovation that ChatGPT has brought to me in my programming/workflow tasks is the comfort and ease in which it creates shell scripts. That's an area that's always been just past my comfort zone ("Create a shell script to solve this problem? Now I have two problems..."). But all of a sudden, I feel like a master at shell scripting! Things that have al…
I've use ChatGPT to confidently produce jq programs, and Bash, and zsh, and ffmpeg scripts, and AppleScript - all tech I've mostly avoided in the past because I hadn't climbed the learning curve far enough to be confident with them.
The fact that so many people fear loss of income as a result of better AI is a real indictment of our economic system. A better system that more fairly distributed economic productivity would make people welcome better AI because they could be confident it would make everyone wealthier instead of just a few people rich enough to be Goa'uld.
The big oversight here is that Priya does not want a job , what Priya wants is an income . The point of life is not working, the point of life is to enjoy it. We should strive to eliminate as many jobs as we possibly can, the less we have to work the better it is. To make this possible we need to find a way to a new system that doesn't directly link labour with income .
For one thing, we could use all our free time however we want, including working to produce still more stuff, or just go hiking.
The real problem is how to distribute the goods and services produced - and there a UBI is probably the right answer.
Machines do all the (necessary) work, UBI ensures that everybody benefits, and humans are left to do as we please.
What's not to love?