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AI needs to augment rather than replace humans or the workplace is doomed
- _23sd 9mo agoOriginal title: AI must augment rather than replace us or human workers are doomed The article does not mention the workplace as the editorialized title would imply. It's primarily about trade unions.
- lenerdenator 9mo agoThere will be new constraints where humans can fill the gaps. But, who knows if that'll be enough.
- CrzyLngPwd 9mo agoSmash the looms, people before profit! If it can be automated, it will be, and there is no avoiding it, since the people with the robots and the automation care only about profit, nothing more. We, little people, are merely annoyances, and the sooner they can be done with us, the better.
- mannyv 9mo agoThe hope is that society will turn into Banks' "Culture." The reality is that it'll probably turn into Idiocracy.
- kelseyfrog 9mo agoWe're genuinely speculating on the end of work and the thorn of the Protestant Work Ethic, and the imaginative void left by There Is No Alternative has us existentially paralyzed? How depressing. If we're distressed at the thought of liberation then the bars of containment exist within our own minds. The door is open, we just have to step out.
- samiv 9mo agoMost people in this econonic system have to work to earn a wage in order to pay for their living. That combined with large swathes of people being made redundant and not able to earn said wage is gonna be a problem.
- stego-tech 9mo agoCame here to say this. Nobody is saying "I want to work forever", we're saying "can we not replace work while our entire global civilization is predicated on working to survive?" JFC, if AI replaces work wholesale right now billions of people will die before society is reshaped accordingly. More people need to think of immediate systemic impacts instead of the high-fantasy post-work future the AI folk are selling.
- Joker_vD 9mo ago> if AI replaces work wholesale right now billions of people will die before society is reshaped accordingly. Don't worry, the economists will slap the label "natural readjustment of labour supply levels" on this phenomenon, and it will make everything morally better. Edit: in fact, we have historic precedents in e.g. Indian famines and how the British administrations talked about them and handled them [0][1]. Ah, malthusianism and undisguised racism, what a mixture. Of course, nobody counts those as part of "the millions of victims of Capitalism". [0] Rune Møller Stahl, "The Economics of Starvation: Laissez-Faire Ideology and Famine in Colonial India": https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304189843_The_Economics_of_Starvation_Laissez-Faire_Ideology_and_Famine_in_Colonial_India https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304189843_The_Econo... [1] Jayant Chandel, "Political Economy of Famines in the British Empire: An Analysis of the Great Famines in India from 1876–1879" (PDF): https://www.journalofpoliticalscience.com/uploads/archives/8-1-8-248.pdf https://www.journalofpoliticalscience.com/uploads/archives/8...
- LurkandComment 9mo agoBut we all went back to the office 5 days a week? Surely we are too valuable to replace!
- stego-tech 9mo agoI love how myopic the knee-jerk reactions to these pleas of modesty and decency tend to be. "If AI replaces all jobs, none of us will have to work!" Alright, let's extrapolate a bit. Society is currently organized around working to survive. AI suddenly replaces all work. How do people survive? "Well everything will just be free now" Will it? Will the Capitalists who built these systems and replaced that labor now suddenly just give away product? Housing? Food? Care? "Well, we'll just have to reconfigure society!" I mean, yeah, sure, obviously that'll have to happen. Will the Capitalists who empower the current systems of governance now cede said power when work is no longer available but still necessary to survive? "Oh, well, people need to cooperate then, speak up for themselves, take action now." I don't disagree, and I think these sorts of Op-Eds, the "AI Doomers" making pleas for decency and civility in comments sections, the artisans demanding compensation for the theft of their work, and the myriad of folks who recognize the pace we're on will get people killed - nevermind the folks highlighting AI's disproportionate use in mass surveillance, genocide, and inflicting harm on "undesirables - are doing exactly that: speaking up, taking action, and attempting proactive reform. "But they're hindering AI!" That's the fucking point you colossal numpty. The point is to slow it down so we have time to adapt. Like...jesus, I expected more/better from folks who digest mathematical proofs and Arxiv papers for funsies, yet so many people here just cannot think critically about complex issues that involve people other than themselves.
- samiv 9mo agoSome people seem to think that the capital owning class is somehow going to grow a conscious and start sharing their wealth with the common folks. Let's be real that has never happened willingly only by force and bloodshed have the working people ever gotten anything. Moreover it's possible to use military power to lock things down so hard that the people don't even have a chance to revolt. For example North Korea, or any other despotic regime in the world. If you think the musks and zuckerbergs are going to ever give anyone anything think again! The post scarcity post work future means complete poverty for the majority of the worlds people. (So in fact the complete opposite, lots of work and lots of scarcity)
- Legend2440 9mo agoI'm tired of these gloomy takes. Everyone only ever focuses on the negatives. Automation being the end of work would be an unambiguously good thing. Machines can be far more productive than humans ever can, and it would free us up to do whatever we want. We might have to rework the social and economic order a little bit, but we probably needed to do that anyway.
- stego-tech 9mo agoIt's less "gloomy" and more of a passionate "Hey, we need to rework the social order anyway, so can we maybe not set everything on fire before we do so?" Nobody's disagreeing with your latter line, just vehemently screaming that there's no need for willful harm.
- Legend2440 9mo agoSeveral issues with this: 1. Economic change drives social change. The political will to create something like UBI will not exist unless there is mass unemployment. 2. Right now we need people to work, in order to create the things they need to live. It will not be possible to allow willful unemployment until machines can actually do most jobs. 3. We don't actually know if 100% automation will happen. Past automation has tended to create new jobs, and we've maintained full employment at higher wages. We should see if this happens again before we start panicking. We just have to jump ahead with automation and figure out the rest as we go.
- stego-tech 9mo ago> We just have to jump ahead with automation and figure out the rest as we go. Get that accelerationist fatalism outta my face. Just because you personally have no qualms with harming others in the name of some facsimile of progress, doesn't mean it's the only option available to us. Slowing things down through regulations, through employment mandates, through pleas for cooperation instead of immediate replacement, all of those and more are ways of gradual reform and adaptation. We're proposing letting the organism (humanity) adapt to traditional work and employment being wholesale eliminated in a society that demands work for basic survival through gradual and continuous reforms as circumstances change. Your proposal is the functional equivalent of telling an endangered species, "lol get gud bruv". We are not the same.
- elif 9mo agoDooming the workplace is peter thiel's stated position, as he attempts to crash the currency to better control the future corporate economy
- pllbnk 9mo agoPeter Thiel thinks that he has the upper hand and will outsmart everyone to stay at the top. The problem with chaos is that it’s very difficult to control so there’s a good chance he won’t and different actors will come to the top.
- Hizonner 9mo agoI'm sure Think-o-Tron 9000 will find some kind of use for Thiel. I can't think of one myself, but then I'm not a superintelligence.
- dwb 9mo ago> Work brings dignity and purpose to people’s lives. Speak for yourself! For me, and in my experience many others, work is a necessary evil. I’ve experienced more indignities in the workplace than anywhere else (though fortunately not as consistently as some people), and the thought of work being my life’s purpose is too bleak to entertain. I’m very happy for those who have a more positive experience, but some of us don’t fit so well.
- danaris 9mo agoFirst, I want to be clear that in the sense you are talking about, I fully agree with you. But "work", in the sense that AI can, in theory, replace humans in, is about more than just jobs. It's about many of the things that humans do—including many that we do for pleasure as well as for money, like painting, writing, and other forms of art. In that sense, it absolutely does bring dignity and purpose to people's lives. Very few people can feel fulfilled without some form of work in their lives, whatever that looks like for them.
- dsign 9mo agoAre we gonna get a cure for cancer and other devastating ailments? Because if AI gives us that, I'll let it destroy the workplace and boil the oceans. If not, I may be part of the crowd that goes to arson the data centers and hang the barons, when that day comes.
- ihsw 9mo ago[dead]
- Hizonner 9mo ago> the workplace is doomed 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
- deadbabe 9mo agoWhat does a true post-workplace world look like?
- amarant 9mo agoUbi I guess? Loaaaads of spare time. Anything that the machines can't do for whatever reason is crazy expensive and reserved for the rich. The only way to get rich is to do one of the things the machines can't do. But you don't have to. You can just chill and be ok.
- mraml 9mo agoAi should be a vehicle for us to amplify individual human purpose and authenticity while it learns from our stupidity and risk taking along the way. Sprinkle in some guard rails for harm reduction and boom, perfect partnership.
- cadamsdotcom 9mo agoWhat work is is always changing. Construction used to involve shoveling shit and dirt. But thanks to technology road workers sit in air conditioned cubicles manipulating hydraulic levers, gaining tremendous leverage. Yes, sometimes they go outside to dig around fragile stuff with a shovel - old pipes, the odd archaeological find.. With AI, we gained “hydraulic levers for knowledge work”. What will your “comfy air conditioned cabin” look like in that analogy? I love programming without having to also type. My days involve watching the computer type code, making zero typos and zero mismatched variable names. When it refactors it keeps the comments updated, making that industry truism that “comments lie” obsolete. In my codebase 100% of the comments are true and up to date. For $100/mo (Anthropic) I don’t have to code by hand and can focus on whether I’m building what customers want and need.
- ImPostingOnHN 9mo agoWhat happened to the 6 people outside the cabin who used to dig the hole?
- margalabargala 9mo agoWhat happened to all the people who used to nail horseshoes to horse hooves?
- SideQuark 9mo agoThey got higher paying jobs as more of mankind could specialize away from grunt labor. How do you think, despite centuries of jobs being automated, that more people work than ever before, and have quality of life few if any could dream of when large parts of the workforce was employed in backbreaking labor?
- samiv 9mo agoDoes this extend to the ones pushed into the gig economy working 16h a week every day without holidays or sick leaves or anything really. No? Didn't think so really. Even the literal slaves in the 1800 century had housing.
- thefz 9mo agoCan AI fix a leaking pipe? Identify a faulty power wire? Care for farm animals? Et cetera. So far it looks like a faster search engine that a human has to double check every time, so not really.
- almosthere 9mo agoThe current trend seems to be that fewer and fewer people will be employed with larger and larger salaries.