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I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

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

#611

Post by mike_hearn »

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #129
pkdpic wrote: post #128

This is a tragic disappointment a lot of (if not most (if not an overwhelming majority (if not literally all))) artists experience at some point early or late in their professional careers. I taught art for a long time and I would always try to frame this inevitable experience as an important moment of growth. When you have to form a deeper relationship to your creative work and think strategically about how you want…

What's an analogy in the software world to this sort of tragic disappointment? Going from building fun videogame side projects to having to crank out dozens of over-engineered B2B SaaS microservices, for the sake of job security, for yet another sales workflow optimization tool?

There's been a bunch of similar transitions, perhaps less massive. You see the echos of them occasionally when you read people getting upset about the poor performance/resource usage of modern software. A hacker was once someone who could write assembly and packed an entire graphical operating system into 4mb of RAM. Nowadays a hacker is someone who knows what useEffect does in a ReactJS UI. The people who loved the metal, who loved knowing what every byte of their program did, they are mostly relegated now to hobby programming. Or maybe some embedded work but that's not particularly well paying. SerenityOS is a love letter to this era of development.

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

#612

Post by philwelch »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #564
philwelch wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take one look at the demographics of developed countries, the reality is that we absolutely need to replace the majority of human labor in order to maintain any sustainable material standard of living. Old age entitlements are a ticking time bomb, with fewer workers in each generation to support the growing share of longer and longer lived retirees. You want social unrest, take a look at France, which is on fi…

Firstly, we are talking in this thread about intellectual, not physical labour. There's no AI or robot forthcoming that will replace (already brutally underpaid) personal support workers or nurses in nursing homes. Instead it's the higher paying or more satisfying intellectual, artisan, and creative work done by those senior's children that are on the chopping block. Secondly, even if jobs are automated to support th…

> Firstly, we are talking in this thread about intellectual, not physical labour. There's no AI or robot forthcoming that will replace (already brutally underpaid) personal support workers or nurses in nursing homes. Instead it's the higher paying or more satisfying intellectual, artisan, and creative work done by those senior's children that are on the chopping block.

Cool, then we can free up a lot of those workers to do other work.

And it’s not just a matter of nurses and the like. Retirees need food, energy, goods and services just like everyone else; it’s just that they no longer participate in the process of producing those goods and services. Plus, a ton of health care is knowledge work too.

> And in the past a lucky few reskilled towards more intellectual, creative, or informational-managerial jobs. Turns out those will be easier to automate than we thought.

Which is good. Half of the population has an IQ under 100, and there are just as many people with an IQ below 80 as there are above 120. Which means most people can’t reskill to knowledge work. However, the use of AI will allow these people to reskill to productive work just as POS systems allowed people to work as cashiers without the ability to do arithmetic.

The only actual problem you’ve identified is a threat to the egos of knowledge workers whose sense of self-worth lies in their self-perception of having above average intelligence, or perhaps in not having to do any sort of physical labor. Just like the myth of John Henry, we’re going to feel compelled to eulogize the email jobs. Our grandchildren probably won’t pine for the days of open offices and daily standups though.

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

#613

Post by revelio »

zokier wrote: post #381
jatins wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a world where AI makes most of the things/services, wouldn't everything be so cheap that most people can afford it on something like UBI?

In theory yes, in practice that'd require some way to channel the profits from the tech back to society, which has proven tough nut to crack. Notoriously Keynes predicted 15 hour workweeks due the productivity improvements of 20th century. Well, the improvements happened but work weeks didn't get shorter

They got shorter in practice. Especially post-lockdowns lots of people are phoning it in to well paid jobs whilst working from home with Netflix on, taking long lunches, playing with the kids and then doing unchallenging work like meetings with other people who are also phoning it in. Yes they "work" 40 hours a week in theory but this sort of work would have seemed completely alien to someone in Keynes' era.

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

#614

Post by bitwize »

IX-103 wrote: post #576
bennysonething wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have free markets and businesses, doesn't sound like a socialist system to me.

You're thinking of Communism. Socialism doesn't imply government ownership and control of the economy.

Neither does communism. Communism implies ownership and control of the economy by the people at large, but the presence of a state is, supposedly, a transitional phase.

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

#615

Post by anigbrowl »

orbital-decay wrote: post #181
anigbrowl wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally had to do this at least three times in 25 years [...] So to me it's pretty normal Very relatable, but it seems unwise to just consider it normal. If you find yourself having to retool 3 times within 25 months, you'll be well on the way to burning out.

25 years, not months; it wasn't that hard. It wasn't just retooling though - aerospace engineering to SE in gamedev, to the management in the unrelated creative area, to ML.

Yes, I know you said 25 years. I was trying to point out that with the accelerating technological capabilities, you could find that need to retool happening faster and faster.

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

#616

Post by Izkata »

teg4n_ wrote: post #44
Johnny555 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And his work isn’t even much better: >I am angry. My 3D colleague is completely fine with it. He promps all day, shows and gets praise. The thing is, we both were not at the same level, quality-wise. My work was always a tad better, in shape and texture, rendering No company is going to spend 5X more time on work that is a “tad” better.

You misunderstand. They were comparing their quality with their coworker’s before AI started to be used.

You missed the part right above it:

> However its hard to see, results are better than my work.

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

#617

Post by quonn »

tlocke wrote: post #311
jerojero wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. I think in the future we will be living pretty similarly but instead of just doing the work manually we'll be using AI to be more efficient. Just like what the original post on reddit was referring to. He was not fired or anything, his bosses just told him "now you need to do 10 times the work you were doing before because you got the AI". Although in the past it was okay for him to do 1/10th of the…

> Of course, I would love to live in the world that you dream of, I'm pretty sure that's what post-scarcity communism looks like. I just don't really see any indicators in terms of public policy or business attitude that indicates that will be the case. That's true, but let me give an example of something I've experienced in my own lifetime. In about 1996 I heard about Open Source software and after wrestling with th…

But as an utopia it failed. There was a time when you could „live“ inside the open source idea or community like in a house. That was around 2002 plus minus 4 years. Open Source later succeeded but it doesn‘t feel like that anymore.

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

#618

Post by quonn »

flippinburgers wrote: post #557
quonn wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People today are thinking of ChatGPT as making it easier to build websites, software and such, but real the power of AI is that it makes all of that obsolete. Why bother browsing the Web when ChatGPT can just give you what you are looking for in whatever format you desire, without ever touching a website? I don‘t think it will play out like this. Companies currently build systems to make the data robust/structured,…

There is nothing stopping companies from offering AI oriented apis. If they no longer have to develop a frontend but just have a "here is our logo" etc endpoint, then... goodbye react! Goodbye FE developers! And at that point AI will probably be developing the very endpoints that it consumes. Honestly it doesn't sound crazy to me.

For frontend - yeah, maybe. Or maybe the frontend becomes much more fancy. I‘ve built complex frontends that took a year or two but could imagine it all in weeks. I would also like to be able to build it in weeks.

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

#619

Post by anonyfox »

revelio wrote: post #603
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…

>> so _everyone_ has as access to basic goods and services for free, like education/health/transport/… Access? UK tries this. High taxes and high borrowing to fund a large public sector. Result: - People can't reliably see dentists or get doctor's appointments because the nationalized health system can't manage capacity properly. - People can't reliably move around the country because the public sector transport work…

This is a forced imageproblem try to get privatizations look better than state run, by defunding public sectors and claiming all kinds of weird stuff upto straight lies some people want to believe.

Don’t buy into that propaganda, look at the US how privatization ends up: still lots of tax money, additionally people can’t afford stuff, and a few assholes getting insanely rich in the process by siphoning money out of the society.

Try to ensure appropriate money is used to make the NHS effective again, including wages that allows people to live where they work (Most communist shortages came from being cutoff from international trades with wealthy countries, and having to start from ruins or nothing at all btw. These are different problems, and you might learn in the process why capitalism is going to end soon. :-)

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

#620

Post by gaganyaan »

ben_w wrote: post #506
chimprich wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would being the pet of an AI-run civilisation be so bad though? Iain M Banks's Culture novels explore basically this concept, and his vision of utopia is quite appealing.

Is Jernau Morat Gurgeh the Player of Games, or a mere pawn moved by Minds beyond his comprehension? The Culture appeals to me, but there are literary critics who find even The Culture, let alone the grander environment beyond it, to be dystopian. And I definitely don't want to wake up dead with my mind in one of Joiler Veppers' simulations.

He's definitely a pawn. But I'd sign up for being kept around as a pawn/pet/whatever in an instant if it meant living in the Culture.
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