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AI is not a Net Positive for Society

• xenospn 2y ago
  Our only hope is massive regulations with billions in potential fines and/or actual jail time. But I doubt that will ever happen.
  • golergka 2y ago
    Yeah, because regulations are exactly the thing that prevents big companies from monopolising whole markets and help their small competitors. /s
    • ausbah 2y ago
      they can if done & enforced correctly. lamenting “all regulations bad bc regulatory capture” is intellectually lazy imo
  • germandiago 2y ago
    Regulations are exactly what we would have less of IMHO in so many areas nowadays. Talking about Europe, so if you are american, I do not have an informed opinion.
• rockemsockem 2y ago
  AI is clearly not the problem here. Our preexisting society and massive wealth inequality is. I'll add though that many, many open models of high quality that smaller companies can build on exist and these models and companies are likely to be the most harmed by over-the-top regulation. OpenAI will survive jumping through hoops just fine.
  • bluefirebrand 2y ago
    > Our preexisting society and massive wealth inequality It seems like anything that will make this problem worse is a net negative for society If the only way to make it a positive is to change everything underneath it, then...
    • aperrien 2y ago
      If your subfloor is rotting away, do you replace it or put new carpeting on top of it?
      • funciton 2y ago
        The city is polluted. Do we replace the entire city or install air filters? It's mostly a matter of scale.
        • xboxnolifes 2y ago
          I'd like air filters, but AI is not air filters in this analogy.
          • disqard 2y ago
            Is GenAI more like cigarettes ("cool factor", but harmful in the long run), or is it more like cars (noisy and creates pollution, but super-convenient and therefore something most people should adopt)? I still struggle with this every day. Maybe I'll figure it out someday soon...
      • bluefirebrand 2y ago
        If the carpet is AI, and the subfloor is everything else, then we're already in the process of putting the new carpet overtop of it And there's a lot of people telling us we can't afford the time or money to replace the subfloor first
        • aperrien 2y ago
          I understand in this case the subfloor is unrestrained and unregulated capitalism.
    • rockemsockem 2y ago
      Those two problems are some of the largest we have at the moment. They screw everything up. We should not optimize for a shitty existence. I actually think making the problem worse is a good side-effect. The larger and more direct a problem is impacting us the greater impetus for fixing it.
  • sweetheart 2y ago
    I completely agree. I have many, many friends who are commercial illustrators, and many of them are very anti-AI now due to popularity of DALLE. They feel that they've been cheated out of a job. I'm an artist and a software engineer, though, so I'm in the same boat of having had my output used to train LLMs. But the outrage, at least in the conversations I've had, seems to always be rooted in a fear about economic insecurity if these models take their jobs. To me, this doesn't mean the issue is that we should expect our output to not be used to train models, but that we should expect our governments to support us in the event that large swathes of professionals find their jobs suddenly far less profitable.
    • gsibble 2y ago
      That would require some kind of profit sharing agreement from the companies that benefit from replacing employees to redistribute to society, which frankly I cannot ever seen happening. This is that "tax" I hinted at in my article.
    • smegger001 2y ago
      And professional musicians in a previous century felt cheated out of a job by the phonograph. Time and tech change. Such is life. Painters hated photography when it was invented. Jobs are distroy and new ones made by tech. No one is crying about the typest in typing pools loosing jobs to word processor. Its just artists turn this time.
      • JohnFen 2y ago
        You're not wrong, but the heartlessness of that sentiment is striking. Real people get hurt. That in the long run we'll adapt as a society doesn't mean we should just write off those whose lives are ruined in the now. A little empathy is a good thing here.
        • smegger001 2y ago
          Yet we tell the coal miners to go take job retraining because photovoltaic are a better power source than burning carbon. It suck for people being replaced but is better for the whole. Should we subsidise buggy whip manufactures because they were obsoleted. No one is well served by trying to fight the tides.
  • Justsignedup 2y ago
    Whenever a company is gleeful for regulation this is where my mind goes. Do they see regulation as an extra moat? We have the cash and years head start. It's love government procurement. Companies love it because once they are in, they rarely have competition and can charge extra.
• hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
  Hmmmmmmm. I find this a bold claim, considering I extract several hundreds of dollars a month for the cost of $25 a month for GPT-4 in both language learning and wading my way through tech stacks very different from my own. It could be that my experience is very much an outlier, but even if only 1% of GPT-4's subscribers got the value of it that I do, that would imply it very much is a net positive.
  • wepple 2y ago
    For “net” positive you have to consider the broader downsides. Energy consumption, for example. Or change in incentives for producing original writing. Etc etc. I don’t think we fully comprehend the negatives yet (or, to be fair, the positives)
    • MattGaiser 2y ago
      If original writing is so valuable, people will pay the premium for it in cases where it matters. The reality people don’t want to accept is that in many cases, original work doesn’t matter. There is no value in an original booking reminder for my dentist or most travel agency blogs on reasons to go to Thailand. Most courses don’t even need original work. Is there really any value in having profs generate thousands of different explanations of the same concept for the same topic? I don’t think so, especially as most don’t put much effort in. Thousands of explanations have been written on how to do an integral or how hydrogen bonds to oxygen. That’s not useful in most cases.
      • tombert 2y ago
        > Most courses don’t even need original work. Is there really any value in having profs generate thousands of different explanations of the same concept for the same topic? I don’t think so, especially as most don’t put much effort in. I actually used ChatGPT to generate homework assignments when I was a professor last year. I of course double-checked the questions to make sure they made sense, and I would solve them myself to make sure that the solution was something that I could realistically expect a student to be able to figure out. It was honestly great; making homework and exams was a huge time sink for me the semester before (the supervising professors didn't give me any of the materials like he was supposed to, so I had to improvise), I was teaching another class the next semester, so having ChatGPT give me assignments took a task that took me about three or four hours before to about 30 minutes. Do the students need 100% of the assignments to be my completely unique perspective of Object Oriented Programming? I don't think so, a lot of this stuff is just practice, and they still got my perspective on things during the lectures.
• MattGaiser 2y ago
  > which would cause mass unemployment. Ever since the spinning loom, this claim has been made. It’s been made about the combine harvester, welding robots, computers, and now AI. And it has never once been true as the improved productivity led to different jobs as human wants are pretty unlimited. And the jobs eliminated of are jobs that today would be near impossible to fill, as the modern jobs are much better. Next to nobody would take a job standing in a wheat field chopping it down with a knife on a stick. Yet people protested the combine to try and save them. I don’t see why the programmer wouldn’t just be the AI’s overseer, in the same way a farm worker now drives a combine instead of slashing wheat by hand.
  • hackinthebochs 2y ago
    >I don’t see why the programmer wouldn’t just be the AI’s overseer, We need orders of magnitude fewer AI overseers than we need humans to do the work of the AI. This will flip society on its head.
    • MattGaiser 2y ago
      We need orders of magnitude fewer farm workers than we did a century ago. We don’t miss the jobs. Indeed, our society would collapse if we needed that many farm workers today. It will flip society on its head. For the better, as there is tons of additional productive capacity.
      • hackinthebochs 2y ago
        The problem is the jobs you imagine people moving to won't materialize because AI will do those too. In the past, efficiency increases lead to the realization of new modes of transactions becoming economically viable. The people made obsolete moved to entirely new jobs because the tech was narrowly applicable. AGI is fully general, there is no space of jobs that humans could do but AGI cannot do. This is the end game for human labor. Society is not ready, and probably never will be.
        • 2y ago
• tombert 2y ago
  I don't really think AI training is "stealing", despite how much people seem to keep repeating that. You can't own a "style", and you don't get rights to everything inspired by your work, and you shouldn't be because that would be horrible. A lot of AI images that I've generated, as far as I can tell, are pretty much completely unique in the sense that, yes, they were trained on copyrighted data, they don't really look like anything that has ever existed before. There's been plenty of cases where a big company is inspired by a small company's work, largely redid it, and no one cared, well before AI was a thing. "It! The Terror From Beyond Space" was basically copied by Alien twenty years later, and the latter is considered a masterpiece of cinema, and while most film-geeks know this about Alien, they still consider it unique enough in its own rights to be a great movie. I feel like, in many cases, the stuff generated by Stable Diffusion is transformative enough to be considered fair use. I guess it's a minority opinion, since a large part of the most recent writers strike that everyone seemed to get behind was complaining about AI. As a rule, I think articles like this are just kind of fear-mongering. Every new piece of tech has a risk of displacing workers, especially in the short term. This isn't new, it's the nature of progress: people really want stuff to be cheaper so we invent stuff to make things cheaper. Will AI "replace" jobs? Sure, but so did ditch-digging machines, cars, airplanes, and computers themselves; people find other stuff to do.
  • freitzkriesler2 2y ago
    With all due respect, When AI becomes good enough to code web apps and other simple applications, the people who will be decrying AI will be all of the web devs out of work. Notto mention, all of the creative and entertainment industry jobs that will be destroyed permanently. It's coming whether people want to accept it or not and we're going to reach a point where new roles will not be ready to absorb the loss.
    • vundercind 2y ago
      A widely observed problem with AI we’ve created so far is that it seems best at destroying jobs people tend to like (at least, better than other things they might be paid to do) and replacing them with a smaller set of less-pleasant jobs. At least, within the realm of basically-positive jobs. There’s separately the issue of its being by far the most productivity-enhancing for things that are harmful (scams, astroturfing, spamming)
• kelseyfrog 2y ago
  It doesn't have to be. All that is required is a net positive for shareholders.
• MeImCounting 2y ago
  This is baseless fearmongering. This has been talked to death here and elsewhere. First this overestimates the capabilities of AI second it misses the historical precedent set by the creation of other GPTs throughout history. Yes some peoples lives were negatively influenced by the creation of the railroad or the printing press but that doesnt mean the downfall of society. The problem of AI being concentrated in the hands of the powerful few is certainly a problem. Which is why its very clearly of the utmost importance that we stomp out AI doomerism now before they can convince congress to enact braindead laws limiting open source AI. Unfortunately Brandolini's law is in full effect and the meme of "The Terminator" and "The Matrix" are way too pervasive.
• funciton 2y ago
  I find it a bit strange to make a blanket statement like that, dismissing an entire field of research as 'not a net positive'.
  • cubefox 2y ago
    He is speaking about future AI. Once AI outperforms humans, we will lose our jobs.
• frnkng 2y ago
  I‘m willing to bet money against the core statement of that article. Cut off date +20years. General terms to be negotiated. I see this as an instance of jevrons law. AI will overall induce more demand for work because knowledge work can be leveraged with ai and thus it becomes more productive.
  • cubefox 2y ago
    Humans+AI isn't more productive once AI is smarter than humans. Humans in the loop would only slow things down, like a toddler in command of an adult.
• j-bos 2y ago
  AI is a tool, like all tools it multiplies force, the question is, what's on the other side of the multiplier? It's not even a net destructive tool like a gun.
  • mmh0000 2y ago
    You obviously haven’t been paying attention. AI might be used to create a picture of you! This is way more dangerous than any firearm, or dare I say, even a nuclear weapon. /s for the /s impaired
  • amelius 2y ago
    Perhaps, but this does not contradict the premise in any way.
    • j-bos 2y ago
      Right, I'm saying the premise can be applied so widely it falls flat, for me at least.
• germandiago 2y ago
  I really think that if there is data to be pulled from our work, it should only be used with our permission.
  • rockemsockem 2y ago
    I pulled data from this very sentence when I read it.
• fxtentacle 2y ago
  All capital-intensive technology will amplify preexisting wealth inequality. And that's never a net positive for society, because - well - the top 1% are only 1% of society. AI is just continuing the trend. But I don't think the damage so far is worse than advertising and social media combined.
  • gsibble 2y ago
    That's my point basically. Since AI is owned by so few, all of the profits from it will flow to 0.01% of society or less and leave the rest of us with scraps. And that's the entire point of companies like OpenAI.
    • tombert 2y ago
      Even that I call into question; a lot of image generation stuff has open models, and new models being pushed onto HuggingFace all the time, and if HuggingFace is too centralized for you, good news, it uses git-lfs and lots of other entities can run that as well for free. As GPUs get better I think we will see a rise of a lot of local-AI. The companies that I think will benefit the most are Nvidia and to a lesser extent AMD (eventually). I would agree that that's too centralized, we should probably have more competitors in the GPU space, but I don't think OpenAI will be able to monopolize AI as a whole for forever.
• newswasboring 2y ago
  We should all be ashamed that we have created a society where the prospect of reduced work is a doomsday scenario.
  • gsibble 2y ago
    My prospect is reduced work and no income. Reduced work with everything provided would of course be optimal.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• autokad 2y ago
  I use AI and LLM's at my job every day and its made me at least 2x as efficient. Even if AI helped me complete all my tasks right away, there would still be 10 more things I need to do. AI is a good thing
  • ryandrake 2y ago
    But are you capturing that 2X productivity increase in increased compensation, or is your company capturing all that value?
• gsibble 2y ago
  Well, there goes HN censoring things they don't like again. This was at #5 on the front page and is now around #70 with no explanation.
  • lolinder 2y ago
    In this case I'd guess user flags. People are tired of AI content, especially AI doomerism. Your article can be very thoughtful and even right, but enough people are tired of seeing similar headlines that they flag it off the front page.
• OtherShrezzing 2y ago
  >It’s not to help society, but to sell AI workers at a fraction of the price of human workers to all the world’s companies, which would cause mass unemployment. The cost of a model that is powerful enough to cause a dystopian level of unemployment is - as far as I can tell - considerably beyond the reaches of the private sector. The budgets of the wealthiest companies in history are being stretched to their limits, and they're able to churn out chatbot tech demos, which are admittedly fun, but aren't going to disrupt the entire workforce - or even meaningful percentages of it. The people at the top of the industry are talking about multi-tens-of-trillion dollar training runs (not to mention the US grid requiring a massive overhaul with several new nuclear powerplants). They need those runs to achieve "it can perform as well as the average line-cook at McDonalds" level general intelligence. The private sector just isn't going to throw endless $trillions at this. The most likely scenario for a generally intelligent model coming into existence, which can cause really dystopian levels of productivity replacement, is that it'll be funded by the public sector. The obvious social contract there will be that the taxpayer takes on risk in the near-term in exchange for long-term liberation from mandatory labour via UBI or a similar scheme.
• kkfx 2y ago
  ML is not a net positive for the society, but not because some actor steal the labor of some other human. - it's not net positive because they are proprietary systems trainable only at giant scale so OR humans still have open universities and public research centers who train models on open datasets or it's the definitive proprietary software even in FLOSS form because the model is trained behind the closed door of some enterprises; - it's not a net positive because it's used to make money in scenario where the current state of tech is simply way behind the minimum needed to be ready for production and as a result we get more and more dysfunctional services; - it's not a net positive because to do really not very much it consume an immense amount of resources and we need these resources on other stuff in the present, short and mid term. Automation of any work is not a threat is a target all humans have, who want to need doing more stuff that can be done by some automation? Who want to manually wash clothes when we can use a washing machine? The point is that automation MUST BE OPEN not only to avoid https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica.pdf https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica... but more important to grant control of automation for formal owners not to 4 big power and all are then practically their slaves as Industrie 4.0 essentially imply.
• janice1999 2y ago
  A self-described "hardcore capitalist" realises that a small class of ultra wealthy people monopolise the labor of the masses to the detriment of the many? I can't tell if this is satire or not. God I miss n-gate.com
• cubefox 2y ago
  That's why Sam Altman has said he is in favor of an UBI. But that money would have to be collected from the AI company which owns the AI that does all the work. So only people from the country where this company pays taxes would receive this UBI. So US Americans in case of OpenAI.
• tim333 2y ago
  It remains to be seen if AI is a net positive or not. I think it will be positive on balance.