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>For example, many people reasonably reckon that this new technology will put a lot of white collar workers out of work. That didn't seem to be a problem when

>For example, many people reasonably reckon that this new technology will put a lot of white collar workers out of work. That didn't seem to be a problem when it happened to blue collars. In fact, you could say that it was deliberately legislated.

chefandy 3y ago
I'm not really sure what you're trying to argue here. It was, in fact, a huge problem from a humanitarian perspective and the state of rust belt cities is a shining example of what happens when we ignore these forces. We, as a society, hung those people out to dry and the current batch of workers doesn't even have the meager protections afforded to some factory workers by their union affiliation. If it was deliberately legislated for, that's a really great example of what we should not do in the future.
- srslack 3y ago
  That, if the market deems the value of a white collar to be less than the output of a text predictor, maybe you should "reskill" and "learn to code"? What's wrong with letting the market speak? Since apparently the white collar class celebrates, while chastising and legislating away the jobs of the blue collar class, apparently it's different when the white collar jobs are at risk, and we must not let the market work? Are you ignoring the massive wave of hysteria, including this article, for the last several months? Straight from the 'white collar' class. If the AI is so powerful at whatever bullshit job the white collar worker has, and you want to make white collar workers the glorified elevator attendant, be my guest. But it certainly reveals a glaring hypocrisy, that jobs only matter when they're well-off people's jobs, but fuck the average joe when it comes to their skills and livelihood, they should just "re-skill!"
  - chefandy 3y ago
    > That, if the market deems the value of a white collar to be less than the output of a text predictor, maybe you should "reskill" and "learn to code"? The idea that mid and late career tech, creative, medical, etc. professional will be able to easily "reskill," or that there will be good jobs for them if they manage to, is magical thinking. > What's wrong with letting the market speak? Since apparently the white collar class celebrates, while chastising and legislating away the jobs of the blue collar class, apparently it's different when the white collar jobs are at risk, and we must not let the market work? Are you ignoring the massive wave of hysteria, including this article, for the last several months? Straight from the 'white collar' class. There's a lot going on here but concentrating on your core point: saying "let the market work" without being curious about what the actual human beings involved are actually going to do is nothing more than your thinking money is more important than human life and that people are only as important as their commercial potential. Why beat around the bush? To put it lightly, I disagree. > If the AI is so powerful at whatever bullshit job the white collar worker has, and you want to make white collar workers the glorified elevator attendant, be my guest. But it certainly reveals a glaring hypocrisy, that jobs only matter when they're well-off people's jobs, but fuck the average joe when it comes to their skills and livelihood, they should just "re-skill!" Once again, I'm not really sure where you get this idea that I'm being a hypocrite here considering that I've been very consistent for decades about it being pretty bullshit how our society treats obsoleted workers like used condoms and says "well that's the market!" If you want to go argue that point with someone else who actually has that opinion, feel free. I can tell that we're not going to get anywhere because free market zealots have a philosophically different understanding of human worth than I do.
    - srslack 3y ago
      To be fair, I wasn't calling you a hypocrite. I was implying that the "journalists" who shovel shit, whose prospects of being replaced by the predictor is almost certain at this point, are hypocrites. I do enjoy a little schadenfreude every now and then. And certainly, other people, including two-faced elected politicians. I apologize if you felt it was directed towards you. >The idea that mid and late career tech, creative, medical, etc. professional will be able to easily "reskill," or that there will be good jobs for them if they manage to, is magical thinking The jobs aren't going anywhere. Some will be made redundant, a lot will be augmented, and if we're so lucky, there will be more content shoveled out by the text predictor than ever before (garbage.) There is no medical, tech, or "truly" creative professional that is going to be replaced wholly by an LLM or diffusion model, not anytime soon. I'm assuming you're referencing the "study" done on reddit with /r/AskDoctors, and it's a laughable study. Certainly, docs can augment themselves, and they should, but not wholly rely on the model. Even 70B+ LLMs do not produce consistent facts, they produce plausibility, despite the facts most definitely being in their corpus. They predict. If you read Microsoft/OpenAI's paper around a month ago, it appears that RLHF actually reduces the quality in many aspects, despite it increasing the quality of output for whatever they deem quality elsewhere, so it's a double edged source instead of "add more tokens" + "add more layers." But more importantly, new jobs will come, more than before. >without being curious about what the actual human beings involved I'm back in the rust belt with family after moving around the US for software jobs in the last five years, I see it first hand. LLMs are like Google on steroids for a (compressed) corpus (the internet.) But you have to know that it's simply predicting. It's plausibilities. Once you know their limitations in that respect, they are useful.

chefandy 3y ago

I'm not really sure what you're trying to argue here. It was, in fact, a huge problem from a humanitarian perspective and the state of rust belt cities is a shining example of what happens when we ignore these forces. We, as a society, hung those people out to dry and the current batch of workers doesn't even have the meager protections afforded to some factory workers by their union affiliation. If it was deliberately legislated for, that's a really great example of what we should not do in the future.

srslack 3y ago
That, if the market deems the value of a white collar to be less than the output of a text predictor, maybe you should "reskill" and "learn to code"? What's wrong with letting the market speak? Since apparently the white collar class celebrates, while chastising and legislating away the jobs of the blue collar class, apparently it's different when the white collar jobs are at risk, and we must not let the market work? Are you ignoring the massive wave of hysteria, including this article, for the last several months? Straight from the 'white collar' class. If the AI is so powerful at whatever bullshit job the white collar worker has, and you want to make white collar workers the glorified elevator attendant, be my guest. But it certainly reveals a glaring hypocrisy, that jobs only matter when they're well-off people's jobs, but fuck the average joe when it comes to their skills and livelihood, they should just "re-skill!"
- chefandy 3y ago
  > That, if the market deems the value of a white collar to be less than the output of a text predictor, maybe you should "reskill" and "learn to code"? The idea that mid and late career tech, creative, medical, etc. professional will be able to easily "reskill," or that there will be good jobs for them if they manage to, is magical thinking. > What's wrong with letting the market speak? Since apparently the white collar class celebrates, while chastising and legislating away the jobs of the blue collar class, apparently it's different when the white collar jobs are at risk, and we must not let the market work? Are you ignoring the massive wave of hysteria, including this article, for the last several months? Straight from the 'white collar' class. There's a lot going on here but concentrating on your core point: saying "let the market work" without being curious about what the actual human beings involved are actually going to do is nothing more than your thinking money is more important than human life and that people are only as important as their commercial potential. Why beat around the bush? To put it lightly, I disagree. > If the AI is so powerful at whatever bullshit job the white collar worker has, and you want to make white collar workers the glorified elevator attendant, be my guest. But it certainly reveals a glaring hypocrisy, that jobs only matter when they're well-off people's jobs, but fuck the average joe when it comes to their skills and livelihood, they should just "re-skill!" Once again, I'm not really sure where you get this idea that I'm being a hypocrite here considering that I've been very consistent for decades about it being pretty bullshit how our society treats obsoleted workers like used condoms and says "well that's the market!" If you want to go argue that point with someone else who actually has that opinion, feel free. I can tell that we're not going to get anywhere because free market zealots have a philosophically different understanding of human worth than I do.
  - srslack 3y ago
    To be fair, I wasn't calling you a hypocrite. I was implying that the "journalists" who shovel shit, whose prospects of being replaced by the predictor is almost certain at this point, are hypocrites. I do enjoy a little schadenfreude every now and then. And certainly, other people, including two-faced elected politicians. I apologize if you felt it was directed towards you. >The idea that mid and late career tech, creative, medical, etc. professional will be able to easily "reskill," or that there will be good jobs for them if they manage to, is magical thinking The jobs aren't going anywhere. Some will be made redundant, a lot will be augmented, and if we're so lucky, there will be more content shoveled out by the text predictor than ever before (garbage.) There is no medical, tech, or "truly" creative professional that is going to be replaced wholly by an LLM or diffusion model, not anytime soon. I'm assuming you're referencing the "study" done on reddit with /r/AskDoctors, and it's a laughable study. Certainly, docs can augment themselves, and they should, but not wholly rely on the model. Even 70B+ LLMs do not produce consistent facts, they produce plausibility, despite the facts most definitely being in their corpus. They predict. If you read Microsoft/OpenAI's paper around a month ago, it appears that RLHF actually reduces the quality in many aspects, despite it increasing the quality of output for whatever they deem quality elsewhere, so it's a double edged source instead of "add more tokens" + "add more layers." But more importantly, new jobs will come, more than before. >without being curious about what the actual human beings involved I'm back in the rust belt with family after moving around the US for software jobs in the last five years, I see it first hand. LLMs are like Google on steroids for a (compressed) corpus (the internet.) But you have to know that it's simply predicting. It's plausibilities. Once you know their limitations in that respect, they are useful.