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Replacement.ai

replacement.ai

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Re: Replacement.ai

#521

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

bilekas wrote: post #396
allturtles wrote: post #32

This is a brilliant piece of satire. "A Modest Proposal" for the AI age. The leader bios are particularly priceless. "While working for 12 years as the Director of HR for a multinational, Faith realized that firing people gave her an almost-spiritual high. Out of the office, Faith coaches a little league softball team and looks after her sick mother - obligations she looks forward to being free of!"

> This is a brilliant piece of satire. "A Modest Proposal" for the AI age. There's some truth in all satire though. I'm just shocked YC hasn't nuked the link from the front page.

> I'm just shocked YC hasn't nuked the link from the front page.

I'm not. People dump on VCs and YC all the time here and it's frequently on the front page.

Re: Replacement.ai

#523

Post by KaiserPro »

devolving-dev wrote: post #326

I've never really been convinced that robots or AI replacing humans is a real problem. Because why would they do that? If I had an army of super intelligent robots, I would have them waiting on me and fulfilling my every whim. I wouldn't send them off to silicon valley to take all of the programming jobs or something like that. You might say: "but you'll need money!". Why would I need money? The robots can provide my…

Looking at history, specifically the industrial revolution:

The best paid workers were mechanised/outsourced first. For example the weavers used to be a huge political force, literally re-shaping countries. Their long slow & violent decent into obscurity lead to workers rights (see the chartist movement)

Re: Replacement.ai

#524

Post by mlyle »

warent wrote: post #366
mlyle wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > Humans derive a lot of meaning from being useful and valued. Sure, humans relying on jobs for income is a problem with transitions. But people finding purpose in jobs is a problem, too. Right now how we get there is being "forced to' -- and indeed that's a bug. But if we transition to a future where it's pretty hard to find useful work, that's a problem, even if the basic needs for survival are still being met. I…

Thanks for sharing. Absolutely right; people need to feel useful and valued—not to mention, jobs can help us get out of the house and connect with people. Just to be clear, are you saying the only life work that you can find fulfillment in is work that can be perfectly automated and handled by AI? Do you have an example of what you mean?

> Just to be clear, are you saying the only life work that you can find fulfillment in is work that can be perfectly automated and handled by AI?

No. I'm not saying that applies to me, but it may be getting dangerously close to many people. During my career, I've done CS, EE, controls, optics, and now I teach high school.

I do worry about CS in particular, though. If one's happy place is doing computer science, that's getting pretty hard.

LLMs feel to me like a 60th percentile new college grad now (but with some advantages: very cheap, very fast, no social cost to ask to try again or do possibly empty/speculative work). Sure, you can't turn them loose on a really big code base or fail to supervise it, but you can't do that with new graduates, either.

I worry about how 2026's graduates are going to climb the beginning of the skill ladder. And to the extent that tools get better, this problem gets worse.

I also worry about a lot of work that is "easy to automate" but the human in the loop is very valuable. Some faculty use LLMs to write recommendation letters. Many admissions committees now use LLMs to evaluate recommendation letters. There's this interchange that looks like human language replacing a process where a human would at least spend a few minutes thinking about another human's story. The true purpose of the mechanism has been lost, and it's been replaced with something harsh, unfeeling, and arbitrary.

Re: Replacement.ai

#525

Post by skybrian »

throwaway0123_5 wrote: post #174
skybrian wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s one scenario, but there are others. There are lots of open-weight models. Why wouldn’t ownership of AI end up being widely distributed? Mabybe it's more like solar panels than nuclear power plants?

In terms of quality of life, much/most of the value of intelligence is in how it lets you affect the physical world. For most knowledge workers, that takes the form of using intelligence to increase how productively some physical asset can be exploited. The owner of the asset gives some of the money/surplus earned to the knowledge worker, and they can use the money to affect change in the physical world by paying for…

What are the barriers to entry? Seems like there are lots of AI startups out there?

There is a rush to build data centers so it seems that hardware is a bottleneck and maybe that will remain the trend, but another scenario is that it stops abruptly when capacity catches up? I'm wondering why this doesn't this become a race to the bottom?

Re: Replacement.ai

#527

Post by anonym29 »

bofadeez wrote: post #481
anonym29 wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any idea why a bipedal fleshlight makes them insecure? My head jumps to "could it because they fear that without sex, they have no value?" but that sounds so ridiculous to me. All human life matters, has value, and should be treated with kindness, respect, and dignity. I've met plenty of women who add value to the world in a bajillion other ways. Can someone help me understand this one?

[flagged]

I didn't mention being a man, and the key words in that sentence are the ones you omitted.

Re: Replacement.ai

#528

Post by kif »

TechSquidTV wrote: post #86

Personal belief, but robots coming for your jobs is not a valid argument against robots. If robots can do a job better and/or faster, they should be the ones doing the jobs. Specialization is how we got to the future. So the problem isn't robots, it's the structure of how we humans rely on jobs for income. I don't necessarily feel like it's the AI company's problem to fix either. This is what government is for, and n…

In my opinion there is a problem when said robot relies on piracy to learn how to do stuff.

If you are going to use my work without permission to build such a robot, then said robot shouldn’t exist.

On the other hand a jack of all trades robot is very different from all the advancements we have had so far. If the robot can do anything, in the best case scenario we have billions of people with lots of free time. And that doesn’t seem like a great thing to me. Doubt that’s ever gonna happen, but still.

Re: Replacement.ai

#530

Post by lwhi »

majkinetor wrote: post #410
lwhi wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't buy the idea of AI helping with 'X' issue, by becoming a surrogate, because at it's root this is still avoidance. It's not solving the problem, it's diverging away from it.

Diverging away from is one way to solve it since it no longer affects you, no ? You can't remove the context. There are no problems in vacuum.

True, but if you diverge away too much, you end up living in a vacuum.
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