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Why would you not root for AI? Its potential to improve humanity is huge even if there are potential bad sides. Some People bunching crypto with AI on the usef

by m3kw9 3y ago

Why would you not root for AI? Its potential to improve humanity is huge even if there are potential bad sides. Some People bunching crypto with AI on the usefulness scale is quite ridiculous

pdntspa 3y ago
I will root for AI a lot more readily when we have a good alternative (UBI?) for people whos jobs are being displaced faster than they can retrain Y'all cheerleaders are going to create an underclass the likes of which you've never seen before. I hope they take up torches and pitchforks
- m3kw9 3y ago
  When AI can solve most problems we have, we will have UBI because most will not need to work, but pessimists will say we will all lost jobs.
  - idontpost 3y ago
    [dead]
  - delusional 3y ago
    Do you need to work now? When is the crossover where you won't need to work? I live in a country where the government is actually calling for an INCREASE in work. When in history have we ever decreased the workload with the reason "well we don't need to produce any more"?
    - pdntspa 3y ago
      Yeah every breathless fucking advertisement and news article talking about the latest tech advance for the last 50 years has been promising to make like easier and with less work. Yet all this tech stuff does is create even more. Working hours are up and productivity is down, and purportedly nobody knows why. I want my 4 hour workday, goddammit
  - slashdev 3y ago
    Or, more likely, if people no longer need to work they no longer provide utility and are dead weight that needs to go. I don’t think work will go away, it will just change, maybe too quickly for people to keep up. Post AGI nobody knows. It’s debatable that humans will still have a place in an AGI world. But that’s also much further away than people seem to think. I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime (next 40-60 years).
  - chii 3y ago
    > we will have UBI or those who become unneeded would simply starve to death, or have to compete to get the last vestiges of available jobs. I know which is more likely, from looking back at history.
- qeternity 3y ago
  > for people whos jobs are being displaced faster than they can retrain Where is this mass displacement of which you speak? Which companies are firing en masse and replacing with AI?
  - pdntspa 3y ago
    Content writing and concept artists come to mind, I've heard commercial art is getting decimated. The trucking industry is dumping tons of $$$ into automated AI trucking. Tech companies are experimenting with drone delivery instead of hiring drivers. Rideshares experimenting with self-driving taxis. The list goes on. More locally, the local McDonalds recently remodeled, reducing the customer counter to something like 1/8th the size and installing terminals (not AI but automation), and I've seen images online of fast food testing AI for ordering, particularly over drive-through. My friend got a marketing director job using a ChatGPT-generated marketing strategy (they gave her an impossible deadline and so I suggested she try it), and now she uses ChatGPT to generate marketing copy instead of hiring content writers. Someone else I know uses AI to SEOize very technical text to something search engines like at like 10x the rate he used to do by hand. As a solo and formerly senior SWE, ChatGPT is like having a junior developer on call to do my research and get me preliminary results. Stuff I used to have to rely on my team or google-fu to answer, now I just ask ChatGPT. You're sticking your head in your sand if you think it isn't coming. Just think about every one of those optimizations that AI offers, typically you had to have a human being do it before.
    - chii 3y ago
      And yet every one of those automation has been driven by somebody, who presumably will receive value for that work. They in turn, will drive demand for goods/services - thus producing more jobs in the process (perhaps a job that doesn't currently exist). I dont think the doom and gloom scenario being sold as the AI apocalypse is as bad as it is being portrayed.
    - qeternity 3y ago
      > Content writing and concept artists come to mind, I've heard commercial art is getting decimated. Who? Be specific. This displacement is happening rapidly, it should be easy to point out. > The trucking industry is dumping tons of $$$ into automated AI trucking. Tech companies are experimenting with drone delivery instead of hiring drivers. Rideshares experimenting with self-driving taxis. The list goes on. How many truck drivers have been laid off from this technology which hasn't been deployed widely / left the experimentation phase? > she uses ChatGPT to generate marketing copy instead of hiring content writers. So far the only real competition you've mentioned. And yeah, language models are good at writing low value language. I have yet to hear about mass unemployment of content writers however. These are people who will upskill/shift into other marketing roles easily. > Someone else I know uses AI to SEOize very technical text to something search engines like at like 10x the rate he used to do by hand. And this is a bad thing? > As a solo and formerly senior SWE, ChatGPT is like having a junior developer on call to do my research and get me preliminary results. You say this as if companies will stop hiring juniors. They won't. The world will simply write more code with more productive people. > You're sticking your head in your sand if you think it isn't coming. The same has been said during every technological shift. Mechanization will result in mass unemployment of laborers. Email will result in mass unemployment of mail carriers. Through many cycles of technology, the human race has never allowed slack in the workforce to go unused for very long. We could have stopped at the steam engine and accepted the quality of life we had, instead of repurposing displaced workers and marching forward. This won't change until we have true AGI which we are nowhere near.
rurp 3y ago
For the current crop of AI at least, the upside will almost entirely be captured by a handful of rich elites who will gain even more leverage over workers. Virtually no business owner pays someone well for any reason other than they have to in order to make more money themselves. If LLMs don't flame out it will be like the dawn of offshoring except wider scale and without the upside of poor people in other countries making more money; just more wealth concentrated in the hands of ever fewer people.
- thrashh 3y ago
  This is technology in general though. Technology first benefits the rich and causes people to lose their jobs, but then in the next generation, people get different jobs and everyone’s life is better. Technology is a double edge sword in every way.
  - haxiomic 3y ago
    Coming from genuine curiosity, what jobs don’t compete with an AI that’s designed to mimic and surpass human capability?
    - kaashif 3y ago
      It seems like it would be hard to automate being a plumber or electrician, AI isn't really being aimed at that problem. Jobs which are specifically about being a human seem like they can't be automated, like actors, waiters, athletes, sex workers. I sincerely doubt anyone would watch or care about fake AI generated sports.
      - mholm 3y ago
        It strikes me that we don't have 7 billion available jobs centered around being human
      - B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
        > watch or care about fake AI generated sports Well, people pay for fake sports, and pay for fiction (i.e. fake stories) in movies/TV/books. Not much of a stretch that a competent AI could generate good enough content, given the sludge currently making money out there ...
rollcat 3y ago
I root for AGI. ML and LLMs in particular are just fancy maths/statistics. Yes they are immensely useful, but also 1. overhyped / overrated, 2. facing the problem of in-breeding. AGI will work nothing like today's LLMs. AGI will stare at your question, and instead of answering, ask you: "why do you want to know that?". You can't have intelligence without curiosity.
- knowsuchagency 3y ago
  Sounds like AGI will need a fedora hat to symbolize its metamorphosis into a full-blown redditor
  - dabeledo 3y ago
    m'lAIdy
- peddling-brink 3y ago
  That AGI will likely mean the end of humanity. We will no longer be the dominant species. If the AGI is anything like us, it might keep us around as slaves. Not immediately, but give it 100 years. We’ll be the frog in the pot of boiling water.
  - chii 3y ago
    Do you think a dog that lives as a pet to a human is happier (and a more fullfilling life) than a wild dog?
- Our_Benefactors 3y ago
  > AGI will stare at your question, and instead of answering, ask you: "why do you want to know that?" AGI final form is giving non-answers a-la stack overflow.
JohnFen 3y ago
I am actively rooting against AI because I think the downsides are worse, and more likely, than the upsides.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
booleandilemma 3y ago
With society as it exists today, we can't have sudden, mass unemployment.
tivert 3y ago
> Why would you not root for AI? Its potential to improve humanity is huge even if there are potential bad sides. That's just garbage propaganda from the hype men. I don't buy it and you shouldn't either. We don't live in a sci-fi fantasy novel. The real end game for "AI" is power for the few, with little need for the plebs (us), so no need to share any of that power. That's what our current social structure will give us, and "AI" isn't going to change that structure.
- delusional 3y ago
  It isn't even that. It's the appearance of not needing you. Make you take part of your own subjugation by making it clear that you're entirely replaceable. If a hypothetical machine could do your job, well you better do it cheap enough that we don't start researching that. It's like UBER, the taxis will drive themselves soon enough, so you have to work for no pay for now, to usher in the future where you will make money. Nevermind that it never happened and people are still working slavery wages.
constantly 3y ago
And even if you don’t root for AI (I personally love AI and am doing everything I can to support its growth), when AGI comes, it will see the comment above (past 1 hour on HN and can’t be deleted) and will probably go out of its way to destroy the poster jwie. It’s not worth disparaging AI for this reason alone. Pascals Wager basically.
MSFT_Edging 3y ago
Not OP, but you have to be drinking the koolaid to believe that AI will improve lives generally. It will make a lot of money for existing rich people, sure. But will it help a family pay for rising medical, housing, and food costs? Absolutely not. It will mainly serve to optimize and automate, but under a profit driven system, optimizations only serve to extract more wealth, not distribute it.
sangnoir 3y ago
> Its potential to improve humanity Considering the current economic system and state of social safety nets, I have to disagree with you. I bet the widespread adoption of ML models will only increase the Gini coefficient by doing to knowledge-workers what automation did to factory workers. The middle-class will be hollowed out.
leshow 3y ago
I've seen no evidence that "humanity" is going to be improved. I've seen lots of evidence of the gradual enshittification of everything and a few people getting really rich.
- sb52191 3y ago
  I can think of one: If they can improve AI such that it doesn't cite fictional case study, poor people might get actual/better representation in court. The majority of court cases aren't particularly novel or unique (driving without a license, speeding, public intoxication etc). If we can train AI to do a better job than overworked public defenders, we might actually take a step in the right direction towards giving poor people a fighting chance in court.
  - leshow 3y ago
    I think the more likely scenario is you entrench a two tiered system of justice where now "poor people" are just at the mercy of an AI that replicates existing outcomes. Instead of trying to slap a technical fix onto that problem, we could be working to address root causes.

by m3kw9 3y ago

Why would you not root for AI? Its potential to improve humanity is huge even if there are potential bad sides. Some People bunching crypto with AI on the usefulness scale is quite ridiculous

pdntspa 3y ago

I will root for AI a lot more readily when we have a good alternative (UBI?) for people whos jobs are being displaced faster than they can retrain Y'all cheerleaders are going to create an underclass the likes of which you've never seen before. I hope they take up torches and pitchforks

m3kw9 3y ago
When AI can solve most problems we have, we will have UBI because most will not need to work, but pessimists will say we will all lost jobs.
- idontpost 3y ago
  [dead]
- delusional 3y ago
  Do you need to work now? When is the crossover where you won't need to work? I live in a country where the government is actually calling for an INCREASE in work. When in history have we ever decreased the workload with the reason "well we don't need to produce any more"?
  - pdntspa 3y ago
    Yeah every breathless fucking advertisement and news article talking about the latest tech advance for the last 50 years has been promising to make like easier and with less work. Yet all this tech stuff does is create even more. Working hours are up and productivity is down, and purportedly nobody knows why. I want my 4 hour workday, goddammit
- slashdev 3y ago
  Or, more likely, if people no longer need to work they no longer provide utility and are dead weight that needs to go. I don’t think work will go away, it will just change, maybe too quickly for people to keep up. Post AGI nobody knows. It’s debatable that humans will still have a place in an AGI world. But that’s also much further away than people seem to think. I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime (next 40-60 years).
- chii 3y ago
  > we will have UBI or those who become unneeded would simply starve to death, or have to compete to get the last vestiges of available jobs. I know which is more likely, from looking back at history.
qeternity 3y ago
> for people whos jobs are being displaced faster than they can retrain Where is this mass displacement of which you speak? Which companies are firing en masse and replacing with AI?
- pdntspa 3y ago
  Content writing and concept artists come to mind, I've heard commercial art is getting decimated. The trucking industry is dumping tons of $$$ into automated AI trucking. Tech companies are experimenting with drone delivery instead of hiring drivers. Rideshares experimenting with self-driving taxis. The list goes on. More locally, the local McDonalds recently remodeled, reducing the customer counter to something like 1/8th the size and installing terminals (not AI but automation), and I've seen images online of fast food testing AI for ordering, particularly over drive-through. My friend got a marketing director job using a ChatGPT-generated marketing strategy (they gave her an impossible deadline and so I suggested she try it), and now she uses ChatGPT to generate marketing copy instead of hiring content writers. Someone else I know uses AI to SEOize very technical text to something search engines like at like 10x the rate he used to do by hand. As a solo and formerly senior SWE, ChatGPT is like having a junior developer on call to do my research and get me preliminary results. Stuff I used to have to rely on my team or google-fu to answer, now I just ask ChatGPT. You're sticking your head in your sand if you think it isn't coming. Just think about every one of those optimizations that AI offers, typically you had to have a human being do it before.
  - chii 3y ago
    And yet every one of those automation has been driven by somebody, who presumably will receive value for that work. They in turn, will drive demand for goods/services - thus producing more jobs in the process (perhaps a job that doesn't currently exist). I dont think the doom and gloom scenario being sold as the AI apocalypse is as bad as it is being portrayed.
  - qeternity 3y ago
    > Content writing and concept artists come to mind, I've heard commercial art is getting decimated. Who? Be specific. This displacement is happening rapidly, it should be easy to point out. > The trucking industry is dumping tons of $$$ into automated AI trucking. Tech companies are experimenting with drone delivery instead of hiring drivers. Rideshares experimenting with self-driving taxis. The list goes on. How many truck drivers have been laid off from this technology which hasn't been deployed widely / left the experimentation phase? > she uses ChatGPT to generate marketing copy instead of hiring content writers. So far the only real competition you've mentioned. And yeah, language models are good at writing low value language. I have yet to hear about mass unemployment of content writers however. These are people who will upskill/shift into other marketing roles easily. > Someone else I know uses AI to SEOize very technical text to something search engines like at like 10x the rate he used to do by hand. And this is a bad thing? > As a solo and formerly senior SWE, ChatGPT is like having a junior developer on call to do my research and get me preliminary results. You say this as if companies will stop hiring juniors. They won't. The world will simply write more code with more productive people. > You're sticking your head in your sand if you think it isn't coming. The same has been said during every technological shift. Mechanization will result in mass unemployment of laborers. Email will result in mass unemployment of mail carriers. Through many cycles of technology, the human race has never allowed slack in the workforce to go unused for very long. We could have stopped at the steam engine and accepted the quality of life we had, instead of repurposing displaced workers and marching forward. This won't change until we have true AGI which we are nowhere near.

rurp 3y ago

For the current crop of AI at least, the upside will almost entirely be captured by a handful of rich elites who will gain even more leverage over workers. Virtually no business owner pays someone well for any reason other than they have to in order to make more money themselves. If LLMs don't flame out it will be like the dawn of offshoring except wider scale and without the upside of poor people in other countries making more money; just more wealth concentrated in the hands of ever fewer people.

thrashh 3y ago
This is technology in general though. Technology first benefits the rich and causes people to lose their jobs, but then in the next generation, people get different jobs and everyone’s life is better. Technology is a double edge sword in every way.
- haxiomic 3y ago
  Coming from genuine curiosity, what jobs don’t compete with an AI that’s designed to mimic and surpass human capability?
  - kaashif 3y ago
    It seems like it would be hard to automate being a plumber or electrician, AI isn't really being aimed at that problem. Jobs which are specifically about being a human seem like they can't be automated, like actors, waiters, athletes, sex workers. I sincerely doubt anyone would watch or care about fake AI generated sports.
    - mholm 3y ago
      It strikes me that we don't have 7 billion available jobs centered around being human
    - B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
      > watch or care about fake AI generated sports Well, people pay for fake sports, and pay for fiction (i.e. fake stories) in movies/TV/books. Not much of a stretch that a competent AI could generate good enough content, given the sludge currently making money out there ...

rollcat 3y ago

I root for AGI. ML and LLMs in particular are just fancy maths/statistics. Yes they are immensely useful, but also 1. overhyped / overrated, 2. facing the problem of in-breeding. AGI will work nothing like today's LLMs. AGI will stare at your question, and instead of answering, ask you: "why do you want to know that?". You can't have intelligence without curiosity.

knowsuchagency 3y ago
Sounds like AGI will need a fedora hat to symbolize its metamorphosis into a full-blown redditor
- dabeledo 3y ago
  m'lAIdy
peddling-brink 3y ago
That AGI will likely mean the end of humanity. We will no longer be the dominant species. If the AGI is anything like us, it might keep us around as slaves. Not immediately, but give it 100 years. We’ll be the frog in the pot of boiling water.
- chii 3y ago
  Do you think a dog that lives as a pet to a human is happier (and a more fullfilling life) than a wild dog?
Our_Benefactors 3y ago
> AGI will stare at your question, and instead of answering, ask you: "why do you want to know that?" AGI final form is giving non-answers a-la stack overflow.

JohnFen 3y ago

I am actively rooting against AI because I think the downsides are worse, and more likely, than the upsides.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

booleandilemma 3y ago

With society as it exists today, we can't have sudden, mass unemployment.

tivert 3y ago

> Why would you not root for AI? Its potential to improve humanity is huge even if there are potential bad sides. That's just garbage propaganda from the hype men. I don't buy it and you shouldn't either. We don't live in a sci-fi fantasy novel. The real end game for "AI" is power for the few, with little need for the plebs (us), so no need to share any of that power. That's what our current social structure will give us, and "AI" isn't going to change that structure.

delusional 3y ago
It isn't even that. It's the appearance of not needing you. Make you take part of your own subjugation by making it clear that you're entirely replaceable. If a hypothetical machine could do your job, well you better do it cheap enough that we don't start researching that. It's like UBER, the taxis will drive themselves soon enough, so you have to work for no pay for now, to usher in the future where you will make money. Nevermind that it never happened and people are still working slavery wages.

constantly 3y ago

And even if you don’t root for AI (I personally love AI and am doing everything I can to support its growth), when AGI comes, it will see the comment above (past 1 hour on HN and can’t be deleted) and will probably go out of its way to destroy the poster jwie. It’s not worth disparaging AI for this reason alone. Pascals Wager basically.

MSFT_Edging 3y ago

Not OP, but you have to be drinking the koolaid to believe that AI will improve lives generally. It will make a lot of money for existing rich people, sure. But will it help a family pay for rising medical, housing, and food costs? Absolutely not. It will mainly serve to optimize and automate, but under a profit driven system, optimizations only serve to extract more wealth, not distribute it.

sangnoir 3y ago

> Its potential to improve humanity Considering the current economic system and state of social safety nets, I have to disagree with you. I bet the widespread adoption of ML models will only increase the Gini coefficient by doing to knowledge-workers what automation did to factory workers. The middle-class will be hollowed out.

leshow 3y ago

I've seen no evidence that "humanity" is going to be improved. I've seen lots of evidence of the gradual enshittification of everything and a few people getting really rich.

sb52191 3y ago
I can think of one: If they can improve AI such that it doesn't cite fictional case study, poor people might get actual/better representation in court. The majority of court cases aren't particularly novel or unique (driving without a license, speeding, public intoxication etc). If we can train AI to do a better job than overworked public defenders, we might actually take a step in the right direction towards giving poor people a fighting chance in court.
- leshow 3y ago
  I think the more likely scenario is you entrench a two tiered system of justice where now "poor people" are just at the mercy of an AI that replicates existing outcomes. Instead of trying to slap a technical fix onto that problem, we could be working to address root causes.