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> But the moment it becomes good enough, it's game over for everyone in that field of work HN really fails to see this. The writing is on the wall. But HN keep

> But the moment it becomes good enough, it's game over for everyone in that field of work HN really fails to see this. The writing is on the wall. But HN keeps writing about their techno utopia fantasies very reminiscent of the comic strip about the nerd who thought that having a super strong encryption would somehow keep his data totally safe (hint: it didn't). The reality is likely to be that most people will be unemployed and then re-employed into low-value min-wage soul-destroying dead-end jobs while all the profits from AI will go towards the people who financed the very development of AI and then used dirty tactics to destroy small companies from the market (see AI 1%rs).

ben_w 3y ago
What you fear is certainly a possibility. There was a story a while back about a society where ever more jobs are done by AI, eventually including the police. In such a situation (and in the story) it would be cheap enough to keep all the unemployed people housed and fed with all that automation; in the story the people have no freedom, the robots keep them from going too far from their free apartment. That could totally happen, even in our various current governments in the real world, leaders can be very divorced from the lives of those at the bottom — "let them eat cake" may not have really come from Marie Antoinette, but the cliché exists for a reason. I didn't like the twist for the final chapter where the lead character was rescued by a Deus Ex Machina in the form of winning a surprise two-person ticket to a fully automated UBI trust fund based in Australia, but my problem was with the tonal shift of the story rather than plausibility given the prior world building. Likewise in reality, while the cliché "a rising tide lifts all boats" is often wrong because of the metaphorical equivalent of many not being maintained in a seaworthy state, technological advances do change the lives of even the poorest. My 18 month old iPhone SE can run some Stable Diffusion models locally, in addition to being a near-real-time audio and visual translator, a route finder, and having some limited healthcare functions. The wealth will concentrate unless governments take special care to prevent that, but it takes active malice (which can and does happen) to prevent many of the benefits from reaching even the worst-off.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  The twist was there to show an alternative future to the techno-dystopia. I think the author now believes that we’re merely waiting for the latent effects of climate change to destroy civilization, so I doubt he’s worried about an AI takeover these days.

ben_w 3y ago

What you fear is certainly a possibility. There was a story a while back about a society where ever more jobs are done by AI, eventually including the police. In such a situation (and in the story) it would be cheap enough to keep all the unemployed people housed and fed with all that automation; in the story the people have no freedom, the robots keep them from going too far from their free apartment. That could totally happen, even in our various current governments in the real world, leaders can be very divorced from the lives of those at the bottom — "let them eat cake" may not have really come from Marie Antoinette, but the cliché exists for a reason. I didn't like the twist for the final chapter where the lead character was rescued by a Deus Ex Machina in the form of winning a surprise two-person ticket to a fully automated UBI trust fund based in Australia, but my problem was with the tonal shift of the story rather than plausibility given the prior world building. Likewise in reality, while the cliché "a rising tide lifts all boats" is often wrong because of the metaphorical equivalent of many not being maintained in a seaworthy state, technological advances do change the lives of even the poorest. My 18 month old iPhone SE can run some Stable Diffusion models locally, in addition to being a near-real-time audio and visual translator, a route finder, and having some limited healthcare functions. The wealth will concentrate unless governments take special care to prevent that, but it takes active malice (which can and does happen) to prevent many of the benefits from reaching even the worst-off.

hotpotamus 3y ago
The twist was there to show an alternative future to the techno-dystopia. I think the author now believes that we’re merely waiting for the latent effects of climate change to destroy civilization, so I doubt he’s worried about an AI takeover these days.