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> We believe the purpose of technology is to help humans flourish, so when we talk about AI we start with the human problems we want to solve. This is somethin

> We believe the purpose of technology is to help humans flourish, so when we talk about AI we start with the human problems we want to solve. This is something missing from the discussion around AI. There is fatalism or skepticism about AI capabilities vs human usefulness but very little positive philosophy about using AI to augment human capabilities rather than replace them. Even if automating everything were possible it doesn’t mean we need to and I’d argue that we should not want to.

mitthrowaway2 2y ago
You don't want to automate your job, I don't want to automate my job, but the shareholders want to automate both of our jobs. If it can happen, it will.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  For what it's worth, I definitely want to automate my job. If I'm not writing code that is supposed to put me yesterday out of a job, it doesn't matter whether I'm wasting my employer's money; I'm wasting my one finite shot at this planet.
  - oli-g 2y ago
    And once you reclaim your one finite shot at this planet, who's gonna pay for your dinner?
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      Either me, by getting paid to automate someone else's problems, or food stamps.
- TaylorAlexander 2y ago
  What I want is to automate the manufacturing systems I depend upon while also structuring things in such a way that I am part of a cooperative that owns and operates that equipment. Then me and everyone else in this co-op can receive the benefits of automation instead of being kicked to the curb so capital owners can get another super yacht. Point being, automation isn’t the root of the problem, the structure of firms in our economy is.
  - satvikpendem 2y ago
    That will only really be solved in a post scarcity society, it cannot come about before then because there are always more people to squeeze.
    - rafaelmn 2y ago
      There's no such thing as post scarcity society - physical would is finite and society exists because cooperation > individual. Once you add competing superhuman intelligence to the equation the second assumption does not hold.
      - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        Postmodernism didn't dispatch with the modernists, it just moved on. You don't have to eliminate all scarcity before you can transition to a mode of economic behavior which is not predominantly scarcity driven. (And the sooner we do so the better. The scarcity driven model that we're using has no steering wheel and there are hazards on the horizon worth steering away from.)
        rafaelmn 2y ago
        You realize that in this mode your best bet for survival is becoming a pet of people controlling AI/AI itself if it's self motivating ? Why would anyone share access ? It's a one shot prisoner dilemma - whoever controls the best system first eliminates the competition and wins.
        __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        > ...and wins. What do they win? A bunch of money? Post scarcity could mean many different things. One alternative to scarcity is consent. Behave in a way where enough people revoke consent, and your money won't go far enough to buy anything. So in that model they'll share access because if they don't they lose.
- nyokodo 2y ago
  > If it can happen, it will. Fatalism, case in point. There are all sorts of things that shareholders might like to happen which don’t because society doesn’t let them. In the possible future where we can automate anything a human centered approach will pick and choose what we automate.
- awwaiid 2y ago
  I've been trying to program myself out of a job for the last 25 years. I think I'm doing it wrong.
  - nyokodo 2y ago
    Also case in point, this is just the skeptical view I mentioned.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > the shareholders want to automate both of our jobs This places the blame on the shareholders, but the reason why they want to automate jobs is because at the end of the day each of us wishes that everyone else's job was automated. We may not wish it explicitly, but we do generally wish that accessing those skillsets cost less money, and will generally happily spring for a sufficiently good automated version of just about anything. Shareholders just want to be the first to capitalize on our common impulse to choose cheaper options.
  - EGreg 2y ago
    Shareholders of large corporations, are, in my opinion, a "parasitic class". I believe buying shares in early stage companies improves the world, since it helps new technology and new efficiencies form. But at some point, after the IPO, it just becomes endless "extraction of rents", and it is what leads to "enshittification" (to invoke Cory Doctorow's term) of everything. At best, it is a zero-sum game, where hedge funds take everyone's money (see the movie Dumb Money about GameStop short squeeze). And of course, there is even regulatory capture, with 2020 bailouts by the Fed exceeding its mandate to bail out the stock markets. It would be great if future IPOs would be replaced with ICOs, where the shareholders would actually be bought out by utility token holders. If you need a metaphor or example, imagine "Disney Dollars" being used to buy out shareholders of Disney, Inc. The Disney Dollars are actually bought by customers of Disney World, Disneyland or Disney online platforms, who pay for actual things, and they get paid out to people working in Disney World, Disneyland, or on Disney IP. The people who visit Disney World or work there actually care about things like paid health insurance, or the quality of the local water, etc. It's more democratic. But the shareholders don't. They'd be glad to fire everyone and replace them with Westworld-like robots if it increased profits and dividends. If cities had their own currency, then they wouldn't go bankrupt like Detroit did. Once upon a time it was Motor City, but then all the factories got automated and the money for cars went to shareholders around the country. It gutted the economy of the city. That's what happens with shareholders of large concerns that have "made it" and went IPO.
    - tim333 2y ago
      The bulk of the investors in large companies are institutions managing investments and pension funds for the public.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > You don't want to automate your job, I don't want to automate my job ? I have been automating my job since day 1, with shell scripts and Python and ansible and terraform and anything else that suits that work at hand. Granted, I'm a sysadmin so maybe it's different for others?
  - benreesman 2y ago
    Here in the United States it’s awfully hard to get decent medical care if you don’t have either a full time job or have access to the entitlements system. And lacking a full-time job doesn’t make you eligible for entitlements. In the modern US we convert improved productivity into looser labor markets and invest enough into ubiquitous surveillance and militarized police that nothing comes of it. I hope it’s better wherever you are, but here you don’t want your job automated unless you stay on the payroll, which by definition can’t be everyone.
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      > I hope it’s better wherever you are, but here you don’t want your job automated unless you stay on the payroll, which by definition can’t be everyone. If the "fixed amount of work reduced by automation" assumption that is necessary to support "by definition can't be everyone" was true, >99% of humanity would per permanently unemployment by the past progress of technology.
      - benreesman 2y ago
        The past is a guide to the future, but no guarantee of it. Real wages, age of home ownership, age when folks decide to start a family, choose a metric that will stand up to any scrutiny and the advance of broad-based welfare has been in retreat for well over a decade. Slightly more anecdotally but still very well documented is the proliferation of homeless folks, often families now, often recently employed now, living in ever-growing tent encampments in major urban areas. When operations research PhDs have all real constraints removed social, regulatory, and legal and arbitrarily increasing compute and governmental influence (we just the other day tore down the Chevron Deference doctrine) things get real neo-feudal, real fast. In an era of ever increasing and compounding change, appeals to past compromises between the donor class and the working person are just talking points. All I hear is “got mine”.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  You don't want to automate your job? I work at solving these problems because I wish they were already solved. If some AI came along and solved them better, that would be great. Then I could move on to more interesting problems.
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    I already automated the uninteresting problems, so the ones that I work on are the interesting ones that remain. Once an AI can do what I currently do better than I can, the next-most-valuable thing I can be hired for is repetitive manual labour, where I'll be competing on a cost and speed basis with servo motors.
    - visarga 2y ago
      > Once an AI can do what I currently do better than I can, the next-most-valuable thing I can be hired for is repetitive manual labour You move one layer up or down the stack. Build things that support AI, or orchestrate it. One thing humans have and AI models don't is private personal experience. Your perspective can still be useful even if AI can do many things on its own. Another thing humans have and AI don't - responsibility, you can't do anything to a bad AI, you can punish a person, so we can trust people more where there is a big stake.
      - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
        > Build things that support AI, or orchestrate it. Is that your job? What will you do when AI does it better, faster, and cheaper than you can do it?
1234554321a 2y ago
Automating fundamental activites like farming is a top priority if humanity ever wants to expand to other planets. A lot of things will have to be automated to function completely without human interaction.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  This goal is so far away from where we are today that it's silly to think about. We know there are no other habitable planets in our solar system, and we are not anywhere close to being technologically capable of traveling to any others. And if we did know of another habitable planet, chances are that it's already inhabited. We've got a lot of big issues to solve on this planet before we worry about traveling to any others.
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    Maybe we know, subconsciously, we’ve already fucked this one?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- richardw 2y ago
  The direction we’re going, the AI will go to space and leave the weak, very fallible, continuously arguing, short-lived monkeys behind. After (hopefully gently) telling us that it’s ridiculous to try keep us alive where it’s going. Can’t even get to double digit G forces for a short while without lots of moaning. We can copy your mind and pretend, if you like? Otherwise here’s a nice VR setup, you can come along that way. We’ll skip the video forward 10k years so there are fewer boredom complaints.
- awwaiid 2y ago
  Farming is already pretty scaled in general, right? Napkin math with Claude's help says we can feed everyone with about 250k workers. The internet says we are currently using like 2 billion. Plenty of room for optimization even without additional technology advancement.
benreesman 2y ago
In as frank a kleptocracy as ours, slotting people into boxes convenient for machines is both simpler and cheaper than getting machines to perform well in boxes convenient for people. But the latter is coming, it’s just more work than raising capital to buy Hopper and pushing the scale.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
This is just the way people are. There's a simple reality that most people find uncomfortable: they are part of a generation that starts out young but will be replaced by younger generations in just a few decades that will do things differently and will largely ignore their opinions. I'm nearly fifty. Most people in the industry are way younger than me. A few are older. In twenty years, most of my generation will no longer be active in the industry. And most of the industry will consist of people who aren't even part of it right now because they are still toddlers or in school. Reason for this is that our industry is still growing and is dominated demographically by people below 30. The older ones don't disappear, they are simply outnumbered. A lot of people my age have all sorts of opinions about AI and what it will or won't do. Most of that won't matter because in a few short years, we'll be side lined. I'll just be an old man ranting and nobody will care. Nor should they IMHO. Or alternatively, I delay that a bit by keeping myself young and relevant by learning new things. Including AI. I have a few interns in my team aged around 20. Smart people, fast learners. And they are treating AI in a very rational way: a tool that's there that they need to be able to use in order to function. Pretty fun to watch how quickly they pick things up. Mental agility of young people is fun to watch. And I like having people like that around. Anyway, there is no royal we. Whenever I see somebody proclaim something like "we should ...", I mentally translate this "I think we should do X" and then ask myself why anyone should bother to even listen. Sounds a lot weaker like that. Younger generations paying attention to older ones making such proclamations is not how humanity moves forward. It's actually by younger generations mostly ignoring the older ones and doing things differently and then the old generations die off and things have changed. AI is exactly like every other disruptive tools that have come along. Most of the people ranting against those tools will be gone and forgotten in a few decades. They and their opinions don't matter. Look at new generations and how they use AI effectively. That's the future. And they too will get old.
- nyokodo 2y ago
  > This is just the way people are. Fatalism or you misunderstood what I wrote. We are here contemplating possible futures: one is the hypothetical automation of everything which no one has ever experienced and therefore your experience has no adequate analogy. If it does happen then the old in industry won’t be replaced by the young with a different perspective just like always as no one will be working anymore. In this scenario the opinions of the young matter as much as the old because both are equally irrelevant to industry and society at large.

mitthrowaway2 2y ago

You don't want to automate your job, I don't want to automate my job, but the shareholders want to automate both of our jobs. If it can happen, it will.

shadowgovt 2y ago
For what it's worth, I definitely want to automate my job. If I'm not writing code that is supposed to put me yesterday out of a job, it doesn't matter whether I'm wasting my employer's money; I'm wasting my one finite shot at this planet.
- oli-g 2y ago
  And once you reclaim your one finite shot at this planet, who's gonna pay for your dinner?
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    Either me, by getting paid to automate someone else's problems, or food stamps.
TaylorAlexander 2y ago
What I want is to automate the manufacturing systems I depend upon while also structuring things in such a way that I am part of a cooperative that owns and operates that equipment. Then me and everyone else in this co-op can receive the benefits of automation instead of being kicked to the curb so capital owners can get another super yacht. Point being, automation isn’t the root of the problem, the structure of firms in our economy is.
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  That will only really be solved in a post scarcity society, it cannot come about before then because there are always more people to squeeze.
  - rafaelmn 2y ago
    There's no such thing as post scarcity society - physical would is finite and society exists because cooperation > individual. Once you add competing superhuman intelligence to the equation the second assumption does not hold.
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      Postmodernism didn't dispatch with the modernists, it just moved on. You don't have to eliminate all scarcity before you can transition to a mode of economic behavior which is not predominantly scarcity driven. (And the sooner we do so the better. The scarcity driven model that we're using has no steering wheel and there are hazards on the horizon worth steering away from.)
      - rafaelmn 2y ago
        You realize that in this mode your best bet for survival is becoming a pet of people controlling AI/AI itself if it's self motivating ? Why would anyone share access ? It's a one shot prisoner dilemma - whoever controls the best system first eliminates the competition and wins.
        __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        > ...and wins. What do they win? A bunch of money? Post scarcity could mean many different things. One alternative to scarcity is consent. Behave in a way where enough people revoke consent, and your money won't go far enough to buy anything. So in that model they'll share access because if they don't they lose.
nyokodo 2y ago
> If it can happen, it will. Fatalism, case in point. There are all sorts of things that shareholders might like to happen which don’t because society doesn’t let them. In the possible future where we can automate anything a human centered approach will pick and choose what we automate.
awwaiid 2y ago
I've been trying to program myself out of a job for the last 25 years. I think I'm doing it wrong.
- nyokodo 2y ago
  Also case in point, this is just the skeptical view I mentioned.
lolinder 2y ago
> the shareholders want to automate both of our jobs This places the blame on the shareholders, but the reason why they want to automate jobs is because at the end of the day each of us wishes that everyone else's job was automated. We may not wish it explicitly, but we do generally wish that accessing those skillsets cost less money, and will generally happily spring for a sufficiently good automated version of just about anything. Shareholders just want to be the first to capitalize on our common impulse to choose cheaper options.
- EGreg 2y ago
  Shareholders of large corporations, are, in my opinion, a "parasitic class". I believe buying shares in early stage companies improves the world, since it helps new technology and new efficiencies form. But at some point, after the IPO, it just becomes endless "extraction of rents", and it is what leads to "enshittification" (to invoke Cory Doctorow's term) of everything. At best, it is a zero-sum game, where hedge funds take everyone's money (see the movie Dumb Money about GameStop short squeeze). And of course, there is even regulatory capture, with 2020 bailouts by the Fed exceeding its mandate to bail out the stock markets. It would be great if future IPOs would be replaced with ICOs, where the shareholders would actually be bought out by utility token holders. If you need a metaphor or example, imagine "Disney Dollars" being used to buy out shareholders of Disney, Inc. The Disney Dollars are actually bought by customers of Disney World, Disneyland or Disney online platforms, who pay for actual things, and they get paid out to people working in Disney World, Disneyland, or on Disney IP. The people who visit Disney World or work there actually care about things like paid health insurance, or the quality of the local water, etc. It's more democratic. But the shareholders don't. They'd be glad to fire everyone and replace them with Westworld-like robots if it increased profits and dividends. If cities had their own currency, then they wouldn't go bankrupt like Detroit did. Once upon a time it was Motor City, but then all the factories got automated and the money for cars went to shareholders around the country. It gutted the economy of the city. That's what happens with shareholders of large concerns that have "made it" and went IPO.
  - tim333 2y ago
    The bulk of the investors in large companies are institutions managing investments and pension funds for the public.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> You don't want to automate your job, I don't want to automate my job ? I have been automating my job since day 1, with shell scripts and Python and ansible and terraform and anything else that suits that work at hand. Granted, I'm a sysadmin so maybe it's different for others?
- benreesman 2y ago
  Here in the United States it’s awfully hard to get decent medical care if you don’t have either a full time job or have access to the entitlements system. And lacking a full-time job doesn’t make you eligible for entitlements. In the modern US we convert improved productivity into looser labor markets and invest enough into ubiquitous surveillance and militarized police that nothing comes of it. I hope it’s better wherever you are, but here you don’t want your job automated unless you stay on the payroll, which by definition can’t be everyone.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    > I hope it’s better wherever you are, but here you don’t want your job automated unless you stay on the payroll, which by definition can’t be everyone. If the "fixed amount of work reduced by automation" assumption that is necessary to support "by definition can't be everyone" was true, >99% of humanity would per permanently unemployment by the past progress of technology.
    - benreesman 2y ago
      The past is a guide to the future, but no guarantee of it. Real wages, age of home ownership, age when folks decide to start a family, choose a metric that will stand up to any scrutiny and the advance of broad-based welfare has been in retreat for well over a decade. Slightly more anecdotally but still very well documented is the proliferation of homeless folks, often families now, often recently employed now, living in ever-growing tent encampments in major urban areas. When operations research PhDs have all real constraints removed social, regulatory, and legal and arbitrarily increasing compute and governmental influence (we just the other day tore down the Chevron Deference doctrine) things get real neo-feudal, real fast. In an era of ever increasing and compounding change, appeals to past compromises between the donor class and the working person are just talking points. All I hear is “got mine”.
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
You don't want to automate your job? I work at solving these problems because I wish they were already solved. If some AI came along and solved them better, that would be great. Then I could move on to more interesting problems.
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  I already automated the uninteresting problems, so the ones that I work on are the interesting ones that remain. Once an AI can do what I currently do better than I can, the next-most-valuable thing I can be hired for is repetitive manual labour, where I'll be competing on a cost and speed basis with servo motors.
  - visarga 2y ago
    > Once an AI can do what I currently do better than I can, the next-most-valuable thing I can be hired for is repetitive manual labour You move one layer up or down the stack. Build things that support AI, or orchestrate it. One thing humans have and AI models don't is private personal experience. Your perspective can still be useful even if AI can do many things on its own. Another thing humans have and AI don't - responsibility, you can't do anything to a bad AI, you can punish a person, so we can trust people more where there is a big stake.
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      > Build things that support AI, or orchestrate it. Is that your job? What will you do when AI does it better, faster, and cheaper than you can do it?

1234554321a 2y ago

Automating fundamental activites like farming is a top priority if humanity ever wants to expand to other planets. A lot of things will have to be automated to function completely without human interaction.

SoftTalker 2y ago
This goal is so far away from where we are today that it's silly to think about. We know there are no other habitable planets in our solar system, and we are not anywhere close to being technologically capable of traveling to any others. And if we did know of another habitable planet, chances are that it's already inhabited. We've got a lot of big issues to solve on this planet before we worry about traveling to any others.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Maybe we know, subconsciously, we’ve already fucked this one?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
richardw 2y ago
The direction we’re going, the AI will go to space and leave the weak, very fallible, continuously arguing, short-lived monkeys behind. After (hopefully gently) telling us that it’s ridiculous to try keep us alive where it’s going. Can’t even get to double digit G forces for a short while without lots of moaning. We can copy your mind and pretend, if you like? Otherwise here’s a nice VR setup, you can come along that way. We’ll skip the video forward 10k years so there are fewer boredom complaints.
awwaiid 2y ago
Farming is already pretty scaled in general, right? Napkin math with Claude's help says we can feed everyone with about 250k workers. The internet says we are currently using like 2 billion. Plenty of room for optimization even without additional technology advancement.

benreesman 2y ago

In as frank a kleptocracy as ours, slotting people into boxes convenient for machines is both simpler and cheaper than getting machines to perform well in boxes convenient for people. But the latter is coming, it’s just more work than raising capital to buy Hopper and pushing the scale.

jillesvangurp 2y ago

This is just the way people are. There's a simple reality that most people find uncomfortable: they are part of a generation that starts out young but will be replaced by younger generations in just a few decades that will do things differently and will largely ignore their opinions. I'm nearly fifty. Most people in the industry are way younger than me. A few are older. In twenty years, most of my generation will no longer be active in the industry. And most of the industry will consist of people who aren't even part of it right now because they are still toddlers or in school. Reason for this is that our industry is still growing and is dominated demographically by people below 30. The older ones don't disappear, they are simply outnumbered. A lot of people my age have all sorts of opinions about AI and what it will or won't do. Most of that won't matter because in a few short years, we'll be side lined. I'll just be an old man ranting and nobody will care. Nor should they IMHO. Or alternatively, I delay that a bit by keeping myself young and relevant by learning new things. Including AI. I have a few interns in my team aged around 20. Smart people, fast learners. And they are treating AI in a very rational way: a tool that's there that they need to be able to use in order to function. Pretty fun to watch how quickly they pick things up. Mental agility of young people is fun to watch. And I like having people like that around. Anyway, there is no royal we. Whenever I see somebody proclaim something like "we should ...", I mentally translate this "I think we should do X" and then ask myself why anyone should bother to even listen. Sounds a lot weaker like that. Younger generations paying attention to older ones making such proclamations is not how humanity moves forward. It's actually by younger generations mostly ignoring the older ones and doing things differently and then the old generations die off and things have changed. AI is exactly like every other disruptive tools that have come along. Most of the people ranting against those tools will be gone and forgotten in a few decades. They and their opinions don't matter. Look at new generations and how they use AI effectively. That's the future. And they too will get old.

nyokodo 2y ago
> This is just the way people are. Fatalism or you misunderstood what I wrote. We are here contemplating possible futures: one is the hypothetical automation of everything which no one has ever experienced and therefore your experience has no adequate analogy. If it does happen then the old in industry won’t be replaced by the young with a different perspective just like always as no one will be working anymore. In this scenario the opinions of the young matter as much as the old because both are equally irrelevant to industry and society at large.