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I think it's only natural to think of AI as the enemy no? Sure theoretically it means better healthcare, scientific improvement. However what nobody has really
by gwoolhurme 3y ago
I think it's only natural to think of AI as the enemy no? Sure theoretically it means better healthcare, scientific improvement. However what nobody has really answered well is what happens to the artists, writers, programmers, scientists, maybe even doctors and lawyers. As we become potentially obsolete what happens to us. Saying that you can do art as a hobby or programming as a hobby really isn't an answer people want to hear. If you want people to not see AI as an enemy then perhaps you should have that discussion. Just to give an anecdotal sob story, my mother passed away from cancer and if AI means a solution to cancer that is amazing, that no other person has to go through the anguish my mother and family had to go through would be amazing. That still doesn't change the point that what will millions of people do in this new industrial revolution? I've said in other threads that my visa is a working visa, if (when?) AI takes my job without that permanent residence what do I do? I don't have anything that ties me to my home country anymore. For me I can only see AI as a future enemy who can do a lot of good...
- williamcotton 3y agoHowever what nobody has really answered well is what happens to the artists So does the world currently only listen to singer-songwriters on acoustic guitar at small local venues? The humanity in the consumption of art has been subject to mass commodification for centuries at this point. This process is driven by money and not love. Technology has nothing to do with it.
- hackyhacky 3y agoYou're technically correct, but missing the point: When technology destroys menial jobs, it's progress. When technology destroys white-color jobs, it's a threat. </irony>
- chucksmash 3y agoWhen technology destroys work people don't like to do, it's progress. When technology destroys work people like to do, it's _______.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> When technology destroys work people like to do, it's _______. Liberating. I remember enjoying laying out sheet music. Doesn't mean I scorn my iPad.
- hackyhacky 3y agoDid you lose your livelihood because your iPad made composing easier? If not, then technology didn't destroy your work.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Did you lose your livelihood because your iPad made composing easier Page flippers sure did. (I'm not a professional musician.)
- hackyhacky 3y ago> When technology destroys work people don't like to do, it's progress. The Luddites would beg to differ. People don't work because they like it, they work because they need to. "Work" that doesn't support your livelihood is correctly referred to as "play." The interesting thing is how society differently reacts when different classes of people lose their work due to progress.
- gwoolhurme 3y agoI dont think I have ever said this though. Telling truck drivers to learn to code was disgusting and horrible. There HAS to be a better solution to these things that society can come up with. I don't have those answers, but jesus christ look at the shit show below my original comment. I am not saying pause research, stop AI, or do anything like that. I welcome the eradication of certain medical issues. I just want to know what society will do? To be frank I have said in other threads as well... if I lose my visa and job my only solution I've thought of as of yet is suicide.
- Taywee 3y agoWe've had big advancements before that allow people to do more with less, but this is a staggering leap. The jump from "you need to get a whole bunch of people together to practice and play music together" to "one person can make skilled music in their bedroom" isn't even comparable to "Hey AI, make me a reggaeton darkwave album performed by Kurt Cobain and Tiny Tim". We're not talking just more art here, or some people losing jobs who then have to retrain. We're talking with possibly very near advancements, entire industries completely emptying, with hundreds of millions of people who now have nothing to do and nowhere to retrain to. Other advancements have caused job losses and opened many more. I'm not understanding where all the potential displacements from AI are supposed to go, or how we're going to balance an economy when you need an order of magnitude fewer employees than ever to pump out more content than anybody could hope to consume.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> but this is a staggering leap More than industrialization? Come on. It's staggering because it's impacting us.
- DougN7 3y agoIndustrialization was slow - it took many decades to happen, so people could adapt. I don’t see us having that luxury of time.
- zugi 3y agoAI is slow, it's been coming since the 1980s and still has decades to go.
- Taywee 3y agoAbsolutely more. This takes very hard and challenging work and turns it into nearly nothing. This reduces decades of skilled labor and education into an algorithm. I'm not undervaluing industrialization, but the improvement in productivity wasn't on the same scale. We're talking reducing weeks of work to seconds in some cases, and that's not even being optimistic with what improvements we might still see in the coming years.
- spacephysics 3y agoI think we can look at history and see how revolutionary technologies changed the landscape of society. No one knows really the magnitude of AI, but if we take the two extremes, AI takes all our jobs, and AI is just some stats that has no real utility, we’ll probably land somewhere in the middle. Personally, I’m trying to learn these technologies to augment my current work. I’m treating it like going from using Notepad to program Java, over to a full fledged IDE. Not a perfect analogy, I know. Given its inevitability, I think it’s logical to try and use it to our advantage as workers. If it ends up taking our jobs anyways, at least we tried. If it doesn’t take our jobs outright, then we’ll still be behind those that use the AI products as tools that augment their productivity, leading to a game of catch-up. Even with the 6 month hiatus proposed, AI versions will still be released by those that refuse to follow the agreement. We’re in an AI arms race against the likes of other world super powers. And the morality of some are quite questionable (not that US’ morality is perfect by any means)
- RubyRidgeRandy 3y agoI firmly believe that once ai is in a position to replace programmers and other white collar workers, it's more of "we're all fucked" moment. Society would have to so radically change once we reach even that infantile level of post-scarcity, when a large portion of society that loses their jobs, that we have to have serious discussions about what life is supposed to be about and what our places in society are. when there is no more desire to be quenched, when there are no jobs to do, when we have solved all disease, what do we do? Man has been defined so much by his suffering and toil, that when we take it away we are in an environment that we are not prepared for in any kind of sense.
- EMIRELADERO 3y agoWhat would your reply be to the following comment? (Not pasting it directly since it's frowned upon here) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34378139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34378139
- yinser 3y agoA train is approaching on the tracks, on one track you create free energy, solve diseases, create a new dawn for human ingenuity and also some white collar jobs are removed, others are created. On the other track we continue to toil in the dirt.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoThe answer to this entirely depends on who it is gets to hop on board the “free energy, solves diseases” train. If the tracks continue on the current American path of widening inequality and declining lifespans, I’m sure plenty of people would be happy to see the whole thing derail.
- yinser 3y agoAmerican innovation, and innovation of all countries flows through the world. Reactor designs, fiber optic cable, the internet, wikipedia. These are a few examples of the old world. The new world will feature new achievements that will unlock more prosperity.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoRestating my point: prosperity for whom? The answer for the past 50 years has certainly not been “everyone” or even “most people” in wealthy countries like America.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> prosperity for whom? The answer for the past 50 years has certainly not been “everyone” or even “most people” in wealthy countries like America. The poorest state in America, Mississippi, is richer than most of the world [1][2]. (No. 19, between the U.K. and New Zealand.) The post-war era experienced the largest and most broad-based increase in material prosperity in human history. Our poorest Americans saw real economic gains rivaling multi-generational ones for Rome's richest. If there is something that will kill us, it's ahistorical nihilism. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_GDP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> what happens to the artists, writers, programmers, scientists, maybe even doctors and lawyers They find better things. Maybe agitating for a different economic system. Some countries will fail horribly at this. In any case, LLMs aren't coming for most writers or coders or scientists or medical researchers. They will help with our credentialing fetish.
- JenrHywy 3y agoAh yes - what the world really need is less artists and more activists.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> what the world really need is less artists and more activists That's not all they can do. And the line between artistry and activism is blurry at best. But yet, if your art can be replicated by Stability, it's no longer novel.
- nullsense 3y ago>They find better things Better things that an AI can't do. To clarify.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- intrasight 3y ago> maybe even doctors and lawyers I don't think any profession that requires a license is at risk. Software engineers resisted a licensing regiment for decades and now the profession will pay a price.
- anonzzzies 3y agoThey are at risk; the ones that use AI will remove the ones that don’t in the end. The average lawyer does very little already; last week I had some papers that I needed to be checked legally; gpt4 found some issues that the expensive lawyer overlooked. Not big issues but issues. And this document was not in English either. It explained the issues in English, it provided a lot of text which the lawyer did not. But they did spend (assuming they didn’t lie) 3 hours and some minutes on them; if they can do this with AI in 15-30 minutes, which they can (it is enough time to recognise if it’s hallucinating), then they can put 3-4 lawyers out of a job by lowering prices. And that’s just using gpt as tool, not as the primary driver; just to speed up the work. I don’t think it would destroy jobs for anything high profile (including programmers), but the grunts is a different story. If the secretary or, for instance, nurse, can feed through info and the ‘head’ lawyer/doctor of the practice only has to sign off on the result, the license is not an issue. Not there yet, but can’t see this as avoidable anymore.
- intrasight 3y agoI agree and disagree. Law firms make money, like any professional services firm, by billing hours. Fewer billable hours means less income for the partners. So while it's the low hanging fruit technically, it will resist as long as possible. It will be clients saying no to paying $250-$500 an hour for work that AI could do better and for free that will force the issue. I foresee more legal work moving in-house. Medicine is a different beast. There's an acute shortage and a different incentive model (not run as partnerships). Big hospital/medical/insurance firms will invest most heavily in AI.
- yinser 3y agoIf AI enables a 12 year old in India to write the code of a 2019 software developer then that is a positive for the earth. If someone is upset that they're losing their lunch to their skillset that earned them an outrageous salary then might I suggest they, and I, learn to augment your productivity with the skills or take up something with better permanence like drywall or plumbing.
- stemlord 3y agoHundreds of millions of people cant suddenly become tradespeople and society turns out okay. There aren't that many homeowners with kitchen and bathroom projects to keep them all employed, and there would be far less such clients after the fact. I'm also not entirely convinced that more software is by default a net positive for humanity, let alone "the earth"
- gwoolhurme 3y agoThe other comment said it best. Let's say programming is going way. Do you think there is suddenly a need for hundreds of millions of trade workers? The economy will support that...? Have you thought this through?
- welshwelsh 3y agoThis comes off as incredibly passive. You are in control of how you use and adapt to AI. >if AI takes my job AI is not going to take anyone's job. People using AI will take jobs from people who don't use AI. >What happens to the doctors That's completely up to them. Some will use AI to research new treatments, to assist with their daily workload, or even to treat patients. Some doctors will stick their head in the sand and refuse to work with the new technology. They might lose their jobs if they can't compete with AI-assisted doctors, and it will be entirely their fault.
- Riverheart 3y ago“AI is not going to take anyone's job. People using AI will take jobs from people who don't use AI.” An incredible distinction on the level of “guns don’t kill people, people with guns kill people”. The difference is practically meaningless. By your logic, if everybody uses AI then no one loses their job but that’s not how productivity gains work is it?
- tshaddox 3y ago> People using AI will take jobs from people who don't use AI. Not really sure what point you’re making though. This almost makes it sounds like you want the reader to conclude that it’s going to be a one-for-one trade, but the whole concern is that it won’t be. If your manager uses AI to replace the job of you and 9 other people on your team, I think it’s a bit silly to say “don’t worry, AI didn’t take your job, a person using AI just took the jobs of 10 people not using AI.”
- anonzzzies 3y ago> AI is not going to take anyone's job. People using AI will take jobs from people who don't use AI. If your boss fires you because your colleague uses AI sooner or better than you, sure, AI didn’t take your job, but what’s the distinction? If you are in a team of 10 translators and 9 get fired overnight, I would say AI took their jobs. Which is happening. Also, this is probably shortsighted; when going forward, it will be possible for a manager/hr to chuck a resume and typical tasks into an AI and ask it if it can do it or they should hire a human. Now the AI will lie it can do it, but a lot of work goes into making that better and the execution of the provided tasks for the job will show if it’s lying.
- matchagaucho 3y agoWhen AI Chess started kicking my @ss, I assumed that human competitive Chess was over. Quite the opposite happened. We appreciate human-vs-human Chess even more because Stockfish, and other AIs, demonstrated there are more challenging lines and strategies to pursue.
- gwoolhurme 3y agoThat is fine when it comes to competition. How does a graphic artist or programmer compete?
- charlieyu1 3y agoThe best ones will stay. People are still buying hand made items because they are unique and of better quality than those mass produced. I know a few graphical artists, they would tell you that half of their pay is for dealing with annoying customers, and I can't see AI is going to make the clients happy.
- matchagaucho 3y agoI'm also seeing a lot of Graphic/3D Artists incorporating AI prompts into their craft. Generative AI is just one-step in the overall process.