I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney • Hacker News Board

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#591

Post by ben_w » Sun, Mar 26, 2023, 3:56 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #569

ben_w wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it curious that even here there are people who conflate a robot body with an artificial mind. Sure, you can put the computer running the mind that controls the body into the body itself, and there might even be good reasons to given spotty wifi or mobile data, but you don't have to. Also: why embody them in human form at all? https://www.tesla.com/drive https://www.bostondynamics.com/products/spot https://www.…

> I find it curious that even here there are people who conflate a robot body with an artificial mind. You are trying to read things in my comment that are not there. It's _not_ about destroying the actual machine. It's about drawing a line.

> Well, I can tell you that the first time I see some sufficiently advanced AI walking in the streets between the public, I will grab my baseball bat and smash it to pieces.

Describing an AI walking the streets, or smashing it to pieces, necessarily carries with it the implication that the AI is located within a physical body that moves on legs.

And those words you used are very explicitly about destroying an actual machine.

But if you wish to claim that was merely a linguistic turn of phrase not meant to be taken as an implied literal belief of the location of thought? Ok, but it remains the case that what you propose against a "sufficiently advanced" AI, is somewhere between petty vandalism and a pogrom, depending on questions of if "sufficiently advanced" comes as a package deal with "sentience".

Which is a totally different, and in the latter case much more severe, problem.

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#592

Post by Gordonjcp » Sun, Mar 26, 2023, 3:59 PM UTC

jokethrowaway wrote: post #262

anonyfox wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about striding for one of the core societal values that make many advanced democraties (including the European nordics) so much better/happier than the US? It’s called Equality. Insert strong progressive taxes, especially on wealth, and use it to fund a strong public sector, so _everyone_ has as access to basic goods and services for free, like education/health/transport/… . I think you vastly underestimate how m…

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All that companies do in the US is make money from other people's ideas. It's like a furtive and sneaky version of China.

There is no innovation in the US, nothing that would make me want to get up and go to work in the morning.

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#593

Post by Gordonjcp » Sun, Mar 26, 2023, 4:02 PM UTC

anonyfox wrote: post #320

roenxi wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet if we take a snapshot literally right now: Guido van Rossum - Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Bjarne Stroustrup - professor of Computer Science at Columbia University (City of New York) Linus Torvalds - Nationality American/US since 2010 (should I write GNU/American/US? Someone educate me). Erlang - I don't know anything about Erlang so I've got nothing to say. Nokia - brutally ejected from the market by the…

You are not wrong but also forgot the reasons… Most stuff you cheer here is basically a few tech giants out of Silicon Valley. The science kickstart for all that came from a bunch of scientists (like Von neumann) you got when winning WW2 from europe. In a time when many potential competitors were still rebuilding from ruins. This is over now, europeans tend to no longer go to the us but still produce excellent scient…

> The science kickstart for all that came from a bunch of scientists (like Von neumann) you got when winning WW2 from europe.

Don't forget that the USians would all be speaking Japanese if it wasn't for the technology they "borrowed" from the British.

American "RADAR" was a laughable non-starter until they got shown how to make magnetrons by Randall and Boot.

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#594

Post by ModernMech » Sun, Mar 26, 2023, 4:04 PM UTC

cyrialize wrote: post #473

nec4b wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I remember reading lots of people here in HN saying it would never take the jobs of artists. Well, seems like this argument is aging badly. And yet nobody lost his job. He wasn't fired. He is unhappy because automation equalized the playing field and mediocre artists became good enough with the right tools. The technology enabled him and other artists to be more productive. It feels similar to the best ditch digge…

He's also angry because now his job has completely changed. He enjoyed spending his time making 3D models. Now that expectations have shifted because of these tools he has to use them. He went from making things from scratch to writing prompts instead.

Okay so? Back in the day people trained up for 2D art, and then suddenly not long after 3D graphics came around. Imagine working on Final Fantasy 6, and then being told you now have to do 3D art for Final Fantasy 7.

Amazingly, despite 3D graphics, in the year 2023 there are now more employed 2D pixel artists than there were in the 90s. They are still making new games for the NES!

So while I’m sad for this person’s loss of love for their current job, I’m sure they will be able to find work.

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#595

Post by IX-103 » Sun, Mar 26, 2023, 4:04 PM UTC

Radim wrote: post #505

Radim wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with that sentiment, just a small correction: It's not the rich who will decide; it's the powerful . In the classical sense of "capacity to impose will" – up to and including the capacity to turn off {machines, humans, institutions}. There's a strong correlation between wealth and power, but those groups are not identical. And neither are their staying prospects in the coming years.

On seconds thoughts, interestingly, that difference between "wealth" and "power" also becomes relevant when quantifying your "most" in They can do without MOST of the "we" . Like, how many people do the wealthy/powerful actually need? What level of automation will allow maintaining their lifestyle, including: 1. Biological needs: Food & a sufficiently diverse pool of mates for themselves and their children. 2. A soci…

The true limit is item 2 on your list. Eventually AI can take care of the food production portion of 1 and most of item 3. The fact is that energy and secure storage are much less of a problem for AI and robots than people.

For population replacement, you can get by with a couple thousand people. That's really only about a dozen large tribes. If the tribes are kept suitably insular and antagonistic (with either ritualized external marriage or slave-taking to ensure proper genetic circulation) that society might even be stable. The trick would be keeping the population stable.

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#596

Post by Applejinx » Sun, Mar 26, 2023, 4:07 PM UTC

anonyfox wrote: post #461

jacquesm wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is always the French Revolution option... That's how historically we've dealt with too much inequality. It may well get to that.

About time. I am willing to disgruntle some dozens of billionaires in exchange for massive QoL improvements for the billions of people. Just waiting for enough momentum, will happily join/support.

You'd best have good implementation or they'll be using ChatGPT to aim your guillotines towards their business rivals, further consolidating their power.

This is the challenge. Anything we've got, people like this have tenfold, or a thousandfold, or a millionfold. As long as we're still running on 18th and 19th century societies.

Mind that you're not literally being steered by the billionaires to accomplish their ends, because that has been the history for the last decade or two. The only thing AI brings to the equation is, perhaps, making the process more obvious and providing a toy version of it that anyone can play with.

Before that, we played with the zeitgeist through marketing, big business… and politics. The only difference is that now we can use it to draw pictures or have it talk back to us like it was a person. The billionaires have been 'prompt engineers' for as long as I've been alive.

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#597

Post by vasco » Sun, Mar 26, 2023, 4:14 PM UTC

cthalupa wrote: post #512

vasco wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If performing a job is even just 10% faster, you can fire 1 person out of a team of 10 (or need to hire in the first place). This should be obvious.

You could say this about every efficiency improvement in any field ever. If everything still had to be written in C and we didn't have fancy IDEs and access to a vast ocean of libraries, cheap services doing the work for you and returning results over an API, etc., we would need many many many times over more software devs to have everything software based in the world that we do now. But do you think if none of thes…

Do you think it takes as many people to build whatever software you want today vs in the 80s? I agree more software can be built with the improvements, but per unit of functionality, way less people are needed, or they can do it much faster, which in both cases mean you spend less of your revenue on labor, which means "less jobs".

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#598

Post by coffeebeqn » Sun, Mar 26, 2023, 4:14 PM UTC

RDaneel0livaw wrote: post #94

wsc981 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday I visited an old, but still reasonably healthy man who has been living in Thailand for 40 years now, maybe longer. Reasonably healthy as in: he doesn't need to visit hospital or use medicine, but his power is now waning a bit due to age. A man originally from Switzerland. 88 years old now. When he arrived in Thailand he bought a nice plot of land and made a quite beautiful garden there, with many fruits and…

"Maybe we'd all be happier with just a nice plot of land and some plants to tend to and perhaps some hobbies to keep us busy. And maybe it would keep us healthier (both mentally as well as physically) as well. " And where is the fantasy world where "we all" have enough money for this?

Also you forget that there are 8 billion people who would need some acres of arable land

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#599

Post by vasco » Sun, Mar 26, 2023, 4:15 PM UTC

raincole wrote: post #275

vasco wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If performing a job is even just 10% faster, you can fire 1 person out of a team of 10 (or need to hire in the first place). This should be obvious.

I'm sure most programmers work more than 10% faster with syntax highlighting and autocomplete. But no one says IDE replaced humans' jobs.

Yes they did, what are you thinking would have happened if all we had was assembly? To build any meaningful software you'd need armies of people and it'd take way longer and it wouldn't be as good.

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#600

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Mar 26, 2023, 4:15 PM UTC

kybernetyk wrote: post #90

muyuu wrote: post #52

Some people say there isn't enough empathy to go around for those creatives that are seeing their jobs either endangered or automated to a degree they've become sweatshop janitors with little prospects to be anything else. I wonder if that sort of empathy was so plentiful when the automation was shredding the prospects of farmers, miners, truckers and other blue collar workers? Make no mistake, generative AI is going…

>I wonder if that sort of empathy was so plentiful when the automation was shredding the prospects of farmers, miners, truckers and other blue collar workers? Twitter was full with snarky "just learn to code" comments.

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