8 ms·

People are happy to use tech like wix to build a web page because building web pages is hard. Virtually every designer, artist, writer, and musician, were all

People are happy to use tech like wix to build a web page because building web pages is hard. Virtually every designer, artist, writer, and musician, were all very happy to use wix even though it cost the jobs of legions of developers. “Finally I can do what these nerds can do without their help”. I really don’t see the difference.

abakker 3y ago
I love this so much. The reality of _all_ technology is that it allows individuals to do more themselves. It condenses the knowledge domain to accomplish a task. In my mind, there are no downsides in allowing individuals more leverage. The real downsides are with the orthogonal problem of what productivity means in civil society. High productivity through technology is perfectly human - we're tool-builders and tool-makers. But, productivity does not absolve us of our responsibility to each other. People who suggest we should not use tools often justify their point of view with assertions of cost born by others. I am suspicious of this argument because the opportunity cost of _not_ letting people use the best tools available could be much greater. For example, had we not developed tools to create mRNA vaccines, many lives would have been lost to Covid that were saved. We don't know yet what AI will enable, but I'd rather we find out what people can achieve than focus on muddying the waters between productivity and society.
- lewhoo 3y ago
  Sure, if you look at artificial intelligence as a tool (perhaps there is still no reason not to), but the end goal here is not to assist but to replace, isn't it ?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - abakker 3y ago
    I guess I tend to see it as an augmentation simply because I don't see much evidence of it originating expertise. A side comment here is that I am equally skeptical that leveraging copyright work as training data is fair use. if the objective is to retrieve original copyright work, then I think its fair use, but if the goal is to draw me campaign poster in the style of Shepard Fairey, I'm not that sympathetic. If we use AI to replace the creation of copyright free derivative works, it isn't clear what the objection should be?
    - lewhoo 3y ago
      > If we use AI to replace the creation of copyright free derivative works, it isn't clear what the objection should be? None whatsoever, and I agree with everything you stated but this is right here and right now. If the technological boundary of AI had already reached its speed of light then there wouldn't be anyone raising concerns.
      - abakker 3y ago
        I’m far from convinced that the existence of even far future ai would be a problem. But, we certainly aren’t close to that now. We are instead building good generators for DND campaigns and searching through sales decks. I think it is highly possible that even getting close would yield really great outcomes for humans. Better medicine, better travel, better understanding of complexity. We should get closer to the end before we theorize about the finish line. Remember the classic line about not needing more than 640k of ram.
lolinder 3y ago
When a dollar store moves into an area, it provides most products for cheaper than an independent grocer possibly can, inevitably putting the local grocer out of business. It's sad for the grocer, but surely it's for the benefit of the community as a whole, right? Everything is cheaper! Except that the dollar store doesn't sell produce, and it just put the store that did out of business. I see a similar trend with automation: it can do most of the job far cheaper than the specialist can, so short-term rationality says we should embrace it completely. But then the specialist goes away, and we don't have access to them anymore for the things that automation is bad at. When you call in to customer support you can't talk to a human, because they replaced them with chat bots. When you need a good website designer because Wix won't cut it, they're out of your price range because the only ones left are working for large companies. When you want a new book, you can't find one written by a human, not because the robots have gotten as good as a good author, but because they've gotten good enough to spam the marketplaces so thoroughly that writing a good book isn't profitable anymore.
- robbomacrae 3y ago
  This is a really good argument. One that I haven't heard before. Is there a name for it? It seems to cover some of the backward steps we take when meandering (hopefully) forwards that I for one hadn't considered. I suspect it's not worth pausing anything over due to the inevitable if we won't they will excuse and also because its part of the re-invention of business that goes with new technology. The things you want that have gone are now an opportunity for someone else to figure out. If I was an entrepreneur keeping my ear to the ground I'd weigh up starting a boutique produce delivery services, a human agency dedicated to dealing with companies on your behalf, a wix plugin market, a book review site etc.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    > If I was an entrepreneur keeping my ear to the ground I'd weigh up starting a boutique produce delivery services, a human agency dedicated to dealing with companies on your behalf But this just emphasizes the inequalities these automations create—poor people could walk to the neighborhood grocer and buy produce, but now that's reserved for people who can afford to pay for delivery or have a car and money for gas. Poor people could wait on hold like everyone else, but now only the rich can afford your agency. A small business could hire a designer, but now they're left buying stock plugins because being a small-time designer doesn't pay anymore. The premise of this article isn't that automation is bad in and of itself, but that we are bad at considering the inequitable impact these automations have on our world.
zlg_codes 3y ago
This is a great perspective because, if humans acted rationally and ethically, it would be reality. The problem I have with tools like that is the technical quality of the solution (which Wix seemed somewhat reasonable in its output when I briefly looked around at Wix sites) and the social effects. Putting together a Wix site and buying or downloading/installing a theme does not make you a Web developer. You're still getting to the end goal of a site, but without the knowledge of how it works and, should it break, how to fix it, it's more of an appliance to you than an environment to express yourself. (using royal you, not you personally) It's strange to me that people want to be able to "do what the nerds can", but don't want to put any of the effort forth. I would love to be a great drummer or saxophonist, but I recognize it would take years of effort and practice to reach that point. I could compose tracks using synthesized instruments, and that's its own music skill I guess, but it's definitely not the same as playing the instrument. Which jobs are you referring to that were lost? The dot-com era? As far as I understand, a lot of web design firms still exist, and tons more freelancers make cash through selling custom themes for clients or packaged themes on Wordpress, small client-oriented web apps, etc. And, given that much of the market is on Web tech still, a lot of the skills from 20 years ago translate pretty well and can now be used to make software within the browser. In my own efforts to learn how to make webapps, I've only really had to learn flexbox and grid. Most of my old knowledge has carried over, with some slight modernization tweaks as necessary. It's nice to never need to float a div ever again, haha. Having good tools that create good work is a goal I think most of us can get behind. The challenge lies in building the tools and promoting healthy culture.
- nemo44x 3y ago
  > It's strange to me that people want to be able to "do what the nerds can", but don't want to put any of the effort forth. People, generally speaking, want outcomes. They don’t care how it’s done or what is used to get there. No one goes to the hardware store to buy a drill. They go there to buy holes.
- creer 3y ago
  The music example is another good one: you can muddle through doing your own with free tools. Or if you want to get stuff done, you can hire session musicians. Does that mean there is a smaller market for session musicians? Yes. Does it mean the session musician job is now different? Yes. For one thing probably they can't be on autopilot. But there is still going to be a demand. Could it be that it's harder to make a living as a session musician. Probably so. Especially so during the period when there are too many legacy session musicians and already the future's fewer jobs - during that time offer exceeds demand and prices plunge. The historical luddite example comes out - it seems - because the mechanization benefit is so massive to the owners that they convert very quickly. And an entire region relied on one industry. Little chance or time for the workers to convert even if they saw it coming, and they didn't.
Gigachad 3y ago
Reality is that it didn't cost any jobs. Everyone just moved up to making things more complex than what Wix can do. I don't feel my life is any worse off having moved from building static marketing pages to complex web apps.
- nemo44x 3y ago
  Exactly this. As certain types of jobs go away it frees us to do new ones. When we had an agrarian society there weren’t many massage parlors around even though they probably could have used them. Additionally as programming languages and toolkits have become higher level and more accessible there has been more demand for programmers.
- robbintt 3y ago
  It definitely reduced the amount and complexity of work there is to do. So, in a static market, it reduced the number of workers. It's hard to see in tech which is an expanding market.
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    There is no such thing as a static market though. There is no fixed demand of tech or really anything else. People will consume as much tech as they can afford. And if the product gets cheaper, the market just consumes more of it. Notice how the iphone never gets cheaper, it just becomes more capable. You can in theory buy a bottom tier smartphone for $50 which is more capable than the original iphone, but this isn't interesting to most people. So viewing it in such a contrived way is just not useful. If anything, the more automation we get, the more demand for tech workers there is because it's able to deliver increasingly more value.
    - visarga 3y ago
      I believe AI will be amazing at driving job creation - it can be applied to almost all fields and it never works well on its own, it always suffers from limited autonomy. Say your model makes 99% correct predictions, in 20-30 time steps that error rate drops to 73%, that is just not ok for automation. But real accuracy rates per time step are much lower. Compounding errors even when they are small lead a system astray. I think there is no form of AI that achieves autonomy in any field. We're at minutes of autonomy, or seconds. Nobody can go on vacation and leave AI do their job. On the other hand AI will open up new opportunities and markets. Demand will scale up to meet the new productivity level. We can always desire more, it's not a fixed sum game. More fundamentally, LLMs are interpolating between and combining known skills. They don't do radically new discovery. Why? They train on human text instead of human text + world feedback. In order to surpass human experts AI needs labs, experiments or the ability to create its own experience. I can only name AlphaZero, AlphaTensor and AlphaFold as superhuman AIs, and they have been trained on massive experimental feedback, not just text.
gumballindie 3y ago
> were all very happy to use wix even though it cost the jobs of legions of developers. What?
tegmark 3y ago
then you are completely blind. dont see the difference between the printing press and total human obsolescence as well as the insane ramifications of technology explosion that comes with agi
- educaysean 3y ago
  Wow. Computers never should've been invented! Such ramifications of technology explosion that comes with personalized computing
quickthrower2 3y ago
You make a good point. However I think Wix's competitor was not developers. It's competitor was businesses just going without a website.
meheleventyone 3y ago
I actually think this is where automation and tools are most useful in some respects. Instead of displacing workers they bring an ability into the range of the average person. I’m not familiar with Wix specifically but I didn’t see that there was this huge industry of people making websites for individuals. Mostly because individuals can’t afford it! A tool brings it within the budgets of individuals and you get an explosion of websites. MySpace was very similar. 3D printing is another technology that has largely let previously hard and expensive manufacturing to be done by the individual. It’s be callous to disregard that this probably also displaces some people from jobs but personally I think the difference of scale is important. In particular what scale can society and the economy actually absorb. I think there are good arguments that there are social and economic issues already starkly apparent that have been caused by similar shocks. Extrapolating from those experiences the likely impact of large scale AI shocks right now seems to be larger inequality and more social and economic issues than less.

abakker 3y ago

I love this so much. The reality of _all_ technology is that it allows individuals to do more themselves. It condenses the knowledge domain to accomplish a task. In my mind, there are no downsides in allowing individuals more leverage. The real downsides are with the orthogonal problem of what productivity means in civil society. High productivity through technology is perfectly human - we're tool-builders and tool-makers. But, productivity does not absolve us of our responsibility to each other. People who suggest we should not use tools often justify their point of view with assertions of cost born by others. I am suspicious of this argument because the opportunity cost of _not_ letting people use the best tools available could be much greater. For example, had we not developed tools to create mRNA vaccines, many lives would have been lost to Covid that were saved. We don't know yet what AI will enable, but I'd rather we find out what people can achieve than focus on muddying the waters between productivity and society.

lewhoo 3y ago
Sure, if you look at artificial intelligence as a tool (perhaps there is still no reason not to), but the end goal here is not to assist but to replace, isn't it ?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- abakker 3y ago
  I guess I tend to see it as an augmentation simply because I don't see much evidence of it originating expertise. A side comment here is that I am equally skeptical that leveraging copyright work as training data is fair use. if the objective is to retrieve original copyright work, then I think its fair use, but if the goal is to draw me campaign poster in the style of Shepard Fairey, I'm not that sympathetic. If we use AI to replace the creation of copyright free derivative works, it isn't clear what the objection should be?
  - lewhoo 3y ago
    > If we use AI to replace the creation of copyright free derivative works, it isn't clear what the objection should be? None whatsoever, and I agree with everything you stated but this is right here and right now. If the technological boundary of AI had already reached its speed of light then there wouldn't be anyone raising concerns.
    - abakker 3y ago
      I’m far from convinced that the existence of even far future ai would be a problem. But, we certainly aren’t close to that now. We are instead building good generators for DND campaigns and searching through sales decks. I think it is highly possible that even getting close would yield really great outcomes for humans. Better medicine, better travel, better understanding of complexity. We should get closer to the end before we theorize about the finish line. Remember the classic line about not needing more than 640k of ram.

lolinder 3y ago

When a dollar store moves into an area, it provides most products for cheaper than an independent grocer possibly can, inevitably putting the local grocer out of business. It's sad for the grocer, but surely it's for the benefit of the community as a whole, right? Everything is cheaper! Except that the dollar store doesn't sell produce, and it just put the store that did out of business. I see a similar trend with automation: it can do most of the job far cheaper than the specialist can, so short-term rationality says we should embrace it completely. But then the specialist goes away, and we don't have access to them anymore for the things that automation is bad at. When you call in to customer support you can't talk to a human, because they replaced them with chat bots. When you need a good website designer because Wix won't cut it, they're out of your price range because the only ones left are working for large companies. When you want a new book, you can't find one written by a human, not because the robots have gotten as good as a good author, but because they've gotten good enough to spam the marketplaces so thoroughly that writing a good book isn't profitable anymore.

robbomacrae 3y ago
This is a really good argument. One that I haven't heard before. Is there a name for it? It seems to cover some of the backward steps we take when meandering (hopefully) forwards that I for one hadn't considered. I suspect it's not worth pausing anything over due to the inevitable if we won't they will excuse and also because its part of the re-invention of business that goes with new technology. The things you want that have gone are now an opportunity for someone else to figure out. If I was an entrepreneur keeping my ear to the ground I'd weigh up starting a boutique produce delivery services, a human agency dedicated to dealing with companies on your behalf, a wix plugin market, a book review site etc.
- lolinder 3y ago
  > If I was an entrepreneur keeping my ear to the ground I'd weigh up starting a boutique produce delivery services, a human agency dedicated to dealing with companies on your behalf But this just emphasizes the inequalities these automations create—poor people could walk to the neighborhood grocer and buy produce, but now that's reserved for people who can afford to pay for delivery or have a car and money for gas. Poor people could wait on hold like everyone else, but now only the rich can afford your agency. A small business could hire a designer, but now they're left buying stock plugins because being a small-time designer doesn't pay anymore. The premise of this article isn't that automation is bad in and of itself, but that we are bad at considering the inequitable impact these automations have on our world.

zlg_codes 3y ago

This is a great perspective because, if humans acted rationally and ethically, it would be reality. The problem I have with tools like that is the technical quality of the solution (which Wix seemed somewhat reasonable in its output when I briefly looked around at Wix sites) and the social effects. Putting together a Wix site and buying or downloading/installing a theme does not make you a Web developer. You're still getting to the end goal of a site, but without the knowledge of how it works and, should it break, how to fix it, it's more of an appliance to you than an environment to express yourself. (using royal you, not you personally) It's strange to me that people want to be able to "do what the nerds can", but don't want to put any of the effort forth. I would love to be a great drummer or saxophonist, but I recognize it would take years of effort and practice to reach that point. I could compose tracks using synthesized instruments, and that's its own music skill I guess, but it's definitely not the same as playing the instrument. Which jobs are you referring to that were lost? The dot-com era? As far as I understand, a lot of web design firms still exist, and tons more freelancers make cash through selling custom themes for clients or packaged themes on Wordpress, small client-oriented web apps, etc. And, given that much of the market is on Web tech still, a lot of the skills from 20 years ago translate pretty well and can now be used to make software within the browser. In my own efforts to learn how to make webapps, I've only really had to learn flexbox and grid. Most of my old knowledge has carried over, with some slight modernization tweaks as necessary. It's nice to never need to float a div ever again, haha. Having good tools that create good work is a goal I think most of us can get behind. The challenge lies in building the tools and promoting healthy culture.

nemo44x 3y ago
> It's strange to me that people want to be able to "do what the nerds can", but don't want to put any of the effort forth. People, generally speaking, want outcomes. They don’t care how it’s done or what is used to get there. No one goes to the hardware store to buy a drill. They go there to buy holes.
creer 3y ago
The music example is another good one: you can muddle through doing your own with free tools. Or if you want to get stuff done, you can hire session musicians. Does that mean there is a smaller market for session musicians? Yes. Does it mean the session musician job is now different? Yes. For one thing probably they can't be on autopilot. But there is still going to be a demand. Could it be that it's harder to make a living as a session musician. Probably so. Especially so during the period when there are too many legacy session musicians and already the future's fewer jobs - during that time offer exceeds demand and prices plunge. The historical luddite example comes out - it seems - because the mechanization benefit is so massive to the owners that they convert very quickly. And an entire region relied on one industry. Little chance or time for the workers to convert even if they saw it coming, and they didn't.

Gigachad 3y ago

Reality is that it didn't cost any jobs. Everyone just moved up to making things more complex than what Wix can do. I don't feel my life is any worse off having moved from building static marketing pages to complex web apps.

nemo44x 3y ago
Exactly this. As certain types of jobs go away it frees us to do new ones. When we had an agrarian society there weren’t many massage parlors around even though they probably could have used them. Additionally as programming languages and toolkits have become higher level and more accessible there has been more demand for programmers.
robbintt 3y ago
It definitely reduced the amount and complexity of work there is to do. So, in a static market, it reduced the number of workers. It's hard to see in tech which is an expanding market.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  There is no such thing as a static market though. There is no fixed demand of tech or really anything else. People will consume as much tech as they can afford. And if the product gets cheaper, the market just consumes more of it. Notice how the iphone never gets cheaper, it just becomes more capable. You can in theory buy a bottom tier smartphone for $50 which is more capable than the original iphone, but this isn't interesting to most people. So viewing it in such a contrived way is just not useful. If anything, the more automation we get, the more demand for tech workers there is because it's able to deliver increasingly more value.
  - visarga 3y ago
    I believe AI will be amazing at driving job creation - it can be applied to almost all fields and it never works well on its own, it always suffers from limited autonomy. Say your model makes 99% correct predictions, in 20-30 time steps that error rate drops to 73%, that is just not ok for automation. But real accuracy rates per time step are much lower. Compounding errors even when they are small lead a system astray. I think there is no form of AI that achieves autonomy in any field. We're at minutes of autonomy, or seconds. Nobody can go on vacation and leave AI do their job. On the other hand AI will open up new opportunities and markets. Demand will scale up to meet the new productivity level. We can always desire more, it's not a fixed sum game. More fundamentally, LLMs are interpolating between and combining known skills. They don't do radically new discovery. Why? They train on human text instead of human text + world feedback. In order to surpass human experts AI needs labs, experiments or the ability to create its own experience. I can only name AlphaZero, AlphaTensor and AlphaFold as superhuman AIs, and they have been trained on massive experimental feedback, not just text.

gumballindie 3y ago

> were all very happy to use wix even though it cost the jobs of legions of developers. What?

tegmark 3y ago

then you are completely blind. dont see the difference between the printing press and total human obsolescence as well as the insane ramifications of technology explosion that comes with agi

educaysean 3y ago
Wow. Computers never should've been invented! Such ramifications of technology explosion that comes with personalized computing

quickthrower2 3y ago

You make a good point. However I think Wix's competitor was not developers. It's competitor was businesses just going without a website.

meheleventyone 3y ago

I actually think this is where automation and tools are most useful in some respects. Instead of displacing workers they bring an ability into the range of the average person. I’m not familiar with Wix specifically but I didn’t see that there was this huge industry of people making websites for individuals. Mostly because individuals can’t afford it! A tool brings it within the budgets of individuals and you get an explosion of websites. MySpace was very similar. 3D printing is another technology that has largely let previously hard and expensive manufacturing to be done by the individual. It’s be callous to disregard that this probably also displaces some people from jobs but personally I think the difference of scale is important. In particular what scale can society and the economy actually absorb. I think there are good arguments that there are social and economic issues already starkly apparent that have been caused by similar shocks. Extrapolating from those experiences the likely impact of large scale AI shocks right now seems to be larger inequality and more social and economic issues than less.