Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Replacement.ai

replacement.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 725 posts

Re: Replacement.ai

#531

Post by KaiserPro »

kwar13 wrote: post #502
KaiserPro wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now it's barely 2%. Ever wondered why? Mechanisation But did you ever wonder what happened to the displaced workers? I'm not an expert on the agricultural changes in the USA, but in the UK, huge amount of tumult can be directly attributed to agricultural changes.

The displaced workers went on to do other things. In the last 100 years for those very workers who "lost" their jobs to mechanization the overall standard of life for ALL american no matter how you measure it it better. There's fewer people living in poverty, people live longer lives, better infrastructure, and no widespread famine in the US I am aware of.

Go and actually look at the outcomes of the people that lived through the great depression or the many many bank runs that preceded it.

(or anything to do with the displacement of peasant to the towns)

How many of those works displaced survived the winter? You know they lost their homes as well right? Those dustbowlers, how were their life chances?

Sure new jobs were created, and the mechanisation boom that stared in the 40s and lasted through to the 70s was _brilliant_

But thats not going to happen again with AI, where are the jobs going to come from, much less decent paying ones.

Re: Replacement.ai

#532

Post by EasyMark »

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…

But the only government that could "fairly" operate such a government would be a rational AI with a limited set of rules meant to maximize human wellness. Humans will always fail at such a government as we have seen in the past. Greed always overwhelms good intentions in the long run

Re: Replacement.ai

#533

Post by lwhi »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #372
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.

That is what I wrote if I wasn't clear. Thanks for putting it in clear words I suppose I 100% agree. I mean that was what I was trying to convey I guess if I didn't get side tracked thinking about govt regulation but yeah I agree completely. It's sort of self sabotage but hey one thing I have come to know about humans is that judging them for things is gonna push them even further into us vs them, we need to know the…

> [..] we need to know the reasons behind why people feel so easy to conform to llm's.

I think it's ultimately down to risk, and wanting to feel secure. There's little risk in confiding to something you turn off, reset and compartmentalise.

Re: Replacement.ai

#534

Post by swat535 »

igor47 wrote: post #259
warent wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equating “business” to “profound human intimacy” might be one of the most HackerNews comments of all time

Jobs aren't just business. Humans derive a lot of meaning from being useful and valued.

> Jobs aren't just business. Humans derive a lot of meaning from being useful and valued.

No one is feeling useful or valued working a double shift at Walmart in order to put food on the table.

Feeling useful and valued can come from other means such as caring for the elderly and doing volunteer work.

Majority of people work to simply survive because without it, they would end up homeless and hungry.

Re: Replacement.ai

#535

Post by great_wubwub »

onraglanroad wrote: post #303
great_wubwub wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where you live, but employee contracts in the US are very rare in tech. Unions, execs, and rock stars - that's about it. The rest of us are at-will and disposable. Worker protections in the US are limited to "the machine can't eat more than two of your fingers per day" and "you can't work people more than 168 hours in a week".

> employee contracts in the US are very rare in tech Is that true? I've never had a job where I didn't sign a contract (in the UK and for multinationals including American companies). I wouldn't start without a contract. And I'm not in any rockstar position. It's bog standard for employees.

> It's bog standard for employees...in the UK and for multinationals including American companies

^^^ that's the thing. Contracts are by country, not by company ownership.

I worked for an F100 multinational US-based company for many years. My coworkers in the EU (including the UK at the time) got contracts. A buddy who was a bona fide rock star in the US got one. I know VPs got them.

I got nothing, as did the vast, vast majority of my US-based friends. And while I'm not a rock star, I'm pretty well known within my niche and am not a bottom-feeder. It really is as bleak as you might fear.

Re: Replacement.ai

#536

Post by EasyMark »

rpcope1 wrote: post #511
YZF wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've replaced human jobs in the past not just made them more efficient. Horses (and all the jobs to do with them) were completely displaced by cars. Those jobs aren't more efficient, they're gone. Similar with many other jobs during the industrial revolution. This is not a zero sum game. For an economy to exist we need consumers. For consumers to exist we need people to have jobs and be paid. So the equilibrium is t…

> This is not a zero sum game. For an economy to exist we need consumers. I think that's really unimaginative and not thinking about it right. If you control the basic resources and own the tools needed to convert those into whatever you want, why does the "economy" even matter? If you can get anything you want without needing anything from the other 95% of people, having "consumers" in the sense you're thinking does…

I think your percentage might be off by a decimal, make it 0.5% and broligarchs. Maybe that's why they've gone crazy with spending trillions in the AI bubble, trying to position themselves as far up the chain as possible. 99.5% of humans will be wasted resource sinks to them and seen as "unnecessary"

Re: Replacement.ai

#538

Post by ellenhp »

beeflet wrote: post #325
warent wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right and validating the point. A specific part of GP’s comment keeps getting overlooked: So the problem isn't robots, it's the structure of how we humans rely on jobs for income. Humans being forced to trade time for survival, money, and the enrichment of the elite, is a bug. We are socially conditioned to believe it’s a feature and the purpose. Nobody is saying robots should replace human connection and expr…

It is not a bug, it is a law of nature. The world has limited resources, time and labor being one of them. The technology proposes a source of labor for the elites so abundant that they will not need to trade their wealth with the eaters. However much resources you consume, it will be too much to buy for your labor. You will be priced out of existence.

You're off base here for what may be a rather subtle reason. While I am not a marxist, I do think that the purchasing behavior of the wealthy makes much more sense when you think about things in terms of the labor theory of value.

The evidence for this is all around us. As automation of manufacturing has brought former luxuries into reach for middle-class families, those with means move on to consuming items that require more and more labor to produce. "Handmade" scented soaps. "Artisanal" cheeses. Nobody with money wants their wedding invitation to arrive at a destination with machine-canceled postage. It's tacky. Too automated, too efficient. In fact, I bet the ultra-wealthy don't even use postal mail for delivering their invitations, because it's not labor-intensive enough to be tasteful. Private couriers are probably the move. You can see this pattern over and over again once you know what to look for.

There will always be a demand for human labor, because value is a human construction. That said, the rate at which the economy will change because of AI (if the True Believers are to be believed) is probably too fast for most workers to adapt, so you may not be entirely wrong in your conclusion depending on how thing shake out, but the way you got there is bogus imo.

Re: Replacement.ai

#539

Post by ycombigators »

Ghexor wrote: post #519
klipt wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see female sexrobots as a symptom, a manifestation of the male gaze. I've heard personal histories of being courted and finding the guy was out for sexual gratification and didn't much care for her life-perspective. A justified anger there, I think, at a culture that perpetuates and celebrates this form of relating. Insecurity, I suspect, befalls more prominently the indoctrinated women that are catering to male ex…

Women are as much biological sex robots as men. We've all see tinder data. Connection is just a proxy for whatever 'protect my offspring' is in base pairs.

Re: Replacement.ai

#540

Post by nearbuy »

Flere-Imsaho wrote: post #454
scotty79 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Nineteen Eighty-Four captures the political zeitgeist of when it was written (~1949) and the following years better than it captures that of 1984. This was the era of the cold war and McCarthyism. Describing the present often seems surprisingly prescient to later generations.
Post reply on HN