4 ms·

Magic or no, ultimately "AI" leads to labour displacement and it's just a continuation of the much broader trend of automation driven by computers. Labour disp

by djtango 6mo ago

Magic or no, ultimately "AI" leads to labour displacement and it's just a continuation of the much broader trend of automation driven by computers. Labour displacement leads to an erosion of standards of living and in a world that ties purpose to work is an existential threat on a very practical level. It was always going to be met with violence once it became more than a curiosity for tinkerers.

georgemcbay 6mo ago
> in a world that ties purpose to work is an existential threat on a very practical level. I don't disagree that we tie purpose to work and severing that tie will have negative societal consequences, but it is far more impactful that we tie the ability to continue to exist to work (for anyone not lucky enough to already be wealthy). If I suddenly became unemployable tomorrow I'm positive I could find alternate purpose in my life to fill that gap, I already volunteer for various causes and could happily do more of the same to fill in the gaps left by lack of work. What I couldn't do is feed myself, keep myself housed, and get medical care (especially in the US, where this is very directly tied to work). The really big fuckup we are committing as a society in the US (may or may not apply to each person's country individually) isn't just this looming threat of massive labor displacement due to AI, it is that instead of planning for any sort of soft landing we are continually slashing what few social safety nets already exist. We are creating the conditions for desperation that likely will result in increasing violence as outlined in the linked post.
- Throaway199999 6mo ago
  ^^^^
- ryandrake 6mo ago
  > The really big fuckup we are committing as a society in the US (may or may not apply to each person's country individually) isn't just this looming threat of massive labor displacement due to AI, it is that instead of planning for any sort of soft landing we are continually slashing what few social safety nets already exist. Think of the alternative, though: If we planned for a soft landing and implemented safety nets and started transitioning ourselves to a society where people didn't have to work to survive, then a few trillion dollar companies would make slightly less profit every year. We simply cannot allow that. Won't someone think of those trillion dollar companies for a minute?
yfw 6mo ago
If ai benefitted everyone and not just the billionaires we would be viewing it differently.
- quantummagic 6mo ago
  That's a truism. But it ignores The Iron Law of Oligarchy, Pareto Principle, and dozens more that remind us that power tends towards centralization. It's currently fashionable to call out the billionaires, but if you removed them, they'd just be replaced by corrupt government officials, or something else. That's not to say we should just throw up our hands and accept every social injustice. But IMHO we shouldn't go around simplistically implying that all social ills will be solved by neutering the billionaire class.
  - ndsipa_pomu 6mo ago
    The problem with billionaires is that they are able to hoard so much money by exploiting others. We would be much better off if billionaires weren't given so much advantage by Capitalism as those resources would be much more useful if distributed. The biggest problem we currently have with billionaires is that they are now so rich that the world becomes like a game to them and some of them are deliberately pushing us to a dystopia where non-billionaires become functional slaves (c.f. Amazon workers).
  - pydry 6mo ago
    >we shouldn't go around simplistically implying that all social ills will be solved by neutering the billionaire class. Not to put too fine a point on it but this was basically how the Japanese post war economic miracle was achieved. In this case it was America which ordered the Japanese oligarchy to be stripped of its wealth. We've had decades of propaganda telling us that this is the worst thing we could do for economic growth though so it's natural to doubt.
  - singpolyma3 6mo ago
    More importantly we shouldn't deny the rest of humanity benefits on the basis that the majority of the benefit accrues to the powerful. We should strive to change the distribution pattern, not remove the benefit.
andai 6mo ago
We have, as a civilization, two paths before us: a) Decouple the value of human life from labour. b) Watch as the value of human life rapidly approaches zero. --- Though I'd expand this by adding "technically alive" is not a very good standard to aim for. Ostensibly we're already heading for something like poverty level UBI + living in pod + eating the proverbial bugs. We need a level above that! A great exploration of the pitfalls of "preserve humanity" as a reward function is the video game SOMA. I think you also need "preserve dignity" to make the life actually worth living. (Path `a` is not without its pitfalls: what lack of survival pressure might do to the human culture and genome, I leave as an exercise for the reader! But path `b` I think we already have enough examples of, to know better...)
- bluefirebrand 6mo ago
  > We have, as a civilization, two paths before us You forgot C: Butlerian Jihad. mass outlaw AI research, AI usage, AI building, AI infrastructure, on penalty of death It may not be a good option but it's there
  - NeutralCrane 6mo ago
    This will literally never happen so it is not worth considering
    - hollerith 6mo ago
      Just keep telling everyone that and hope they keep believing you.
  - patrick451 6mo ago
    Exactly. At the very least, we should be treating AI like nuclear weapons. It can exist but it should be locked away and never used.
- Throaway199999 6mo ago
  When the value of human labour reaches zero the economy will collapse so that will be interesting.
Razengan 6mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter
MontyCarloHall 6mo ago
>Labour displacement leads to an erosion of standards of living The two biggest labor displacements in human history were the agricultural and industrial revolutions, both of which resulted in enormous gains in human living standards. Can you think of a mass labor displacement that resulted in an overall erosion of living standards? I cannot.
- PontifexMinimus 6mo ago
  AI is different. It promises to be able to do everything humans can, but better and more cheaply. When AIs can do every human job cheaper than the subsistence cost of employing a human, humans will be economically obsolete and worthless. Then there's the minor issue of AI deciding to just wipe us out because we're in the way. Taking everything together, AI more powerful than that which currently exists must not be created. This needs to be enforced with an international treaty, nuking data centers in non-compliant states if need be.
  - MontyCarloHall 6mo ago
    Before the industrial revolution, approximately 90% of people worked in agriculture. In fully industrialized countries, that figure is now <2%. That decrease constituted a nearly full replacement of everything humans were doing, better and more cheaply. While this time might be different, I don't think this is a given.
    - ccortes 6mo ago
      Maybe it’s not a given, but it is part of the sales pitch for CEOs. A few others have announced layoffs due to AI being better and more efficient than humans. How much truth there is to it we don’t know for sure. But it’s not something to be ignored.
      - MontyCarloHall 6mo ago
        CEOs have been saying the exact same thing for the entire history of automation. Take computing, for example, an industry that's always been unusually amenable to automation: — in the 1960/1970s, when compilers came out. "We don't need so many programmers hand-writing assembly anymore." Remember, COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) and FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) were marketed as human-readable languages that would let business professionals/scientists no longer be reliant on dedicated specialist programmers. — in the 1980s/1990s, when higher-level languages came out. "C++ and Java mean we don't need an army of low-level C developers spending most of their effort manually managing memory, and rich standard libraries mean they don't have to continuously reimplement common data structures from scratch." — in the 1990s/2000s, when frameworks came out. "These things are basically plug-and-play, now one full-stack developer can replace a dedicated sysadmin, backend engineer, database engineer, and frontend engineer." While all of these statements are superficially true, the result was that the world produced more software (and developer jobs) than ever, as each level of abstraction freed developers from having to worry about lower-level problems and instead focus on higher-level solutions. Mel's intellect was freed from having to optimize the position of the memory drum [0] to allow him to focus on optimizing the higher-level logic/algorithms of the problem he's solving. As a result, software has become both more complex but also much more capable, and thus much more common. While this time with AI may truly be different, I'm not holding my breath. [0] http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

by djtango 6mo ago

georgemcbay 6mo ago

> in a world that ties purpose to work is an existential threat on a very practical level. I don't disagree that we tie purpose to work and severing that tie will have negative societal consequences, but it is far more impactful that we tie the ability to continue to exist to work (for anyone not lucky enough to already be wealthy). If I suddenly became unemployable tomorrow I'm positive I could find alternate purpose in my life to fill that gap, I already volunteer for various causes and could happily do more of the same to fill in the gaps left by lack of work. What I couldn't do is feed myself, keep myself housed, and get medical care (especially in the US, where this is very directly tied to work). The really big fuckup we are committing as a society in the US (may or may not apply to each person's country individually) isn't just this looming threat of massive labor displacement due to AI, it is that instead of planning for any sort of soft landing we are continually slashing what few social safety nets already exist. We are creating the conditions for desperation that likely will result in increasing violence as outlined in the linked post.

Throaway199999 6mo ago
^^^^
ryandrake 6mo ago
> The really big fuckup we are committing as a society in the US (may or may not apply to each person's country individually) isn't just this looming threat of massive labor displacement due to AI, it is that instead of planning for any sort of soft landing we are continually slashing what few social safety nets already exist. Think of the alternative, though: If we planned for a soft landing and implemented safety nets and started transitioning ourselves to a society where people didn't have to work to survive, then a few trillion dollar companies would make slightly less profit every year. We simply cannot allow that. Won't someone think of those trillion dollar companies for a minute?

yfw 6mo ago

If ai benefitted everyone and not just the billionaires we would be viewing it differently.

quantummagic 6mo ago
That's a truism. But it ignores The Iron Law of Oligarchy, Pareto Principle, and dozens more that remind us that power tends towards centralization. It's currently fashionable to call out the billionaires, but if you removed them, they'd just be replaced by corrupt government officials, or something else. That's not to say we should just throw up our hands and accept every social injustice. But IMHO we shouldn't go around simplistically implying that all social ills will be solved by neutering the billionaire class.
- ndsipa_pomu 6mo ago
  The problem with billionaires is that they are able to hoard so much money by exploiting others. We would be much better off if billionaires weren't given so much advantage by Capitalism as those resources would be much more useful if distributed. The biggest problem we currently have with billionaires is that they are now so rich that the world becomes like a game to them and some of them are deliberately pushing us to a dystopia where non-billionaires become functional slaves (c.f. Amazon workers).
- pydry 6mo ago
  >we shouldn't go around simplistically implying that all social ills will be solved by neutering the billionaire class. Not to put too fine a point on it but this was basically how the Japanese post war economic miracle was achieved. In this case it was America which ordered the Japanese oligarchy to be stripped of its wealth. We've had decades of propaganda telling us that this is the worst thing we could do for economic growth though so it's natural to doubt.
- singpolyma3 6mo ago
  More importantly we shouldn't deny the rest of humanity benefits on the basis that the majority of the benefit accrues to the powerful. We should strive to change the distribution pattern, not remove the benefit.

andai 6mo ago

We have, as a civilization, two paths before us: a) Decouple the value of human life from labour. b) Watch as the value of human life rapidly approaches zero. --- Though I'd expand this by adding "technically alive" is not a very good standard to aim for. Ostensibly we're already heading for something like poverty level UBI + living in pod + eating the proverbial bugs. We need a level above that! A great exploration of the pitfalls of "preserve humanity" as a reward function is the video game SOMA. I think you also need "preserve dignity" to make the life actually worth living. (Path `a` is not without its pitfalls: what lack of survival pressure might do to the human culture and genome, I leave as an exercise for the reader! But path `b` I think we already have enough examples of, to know better...)

bluefirebrand 6mo ago
> We have, as a civilization, two paths before us You forgot C: Butlerian Jihad. mass outlaw AI research, AI usage, AI building, AI infrastructure, on penalty of death It may not be a good option but it's there
- NeutralCrane 6mo ago
  This will literally never happen so it is not worth considering
  - hollerith 6mo ago
    Just keep telling everyone that and hope they keep believing you.
- patrick451 6mo ago
  Exactly. At the very least, we should be treating AI like nuclear weapons. It can exist but it should be locked away and never used.
Throaway199999 6mo ago
When the value of human labour reaches zero the economy will collapse so that will be interesting.

Razengan 6mo ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter

MontyCarloHall 6mo ago

>Labour displacement leads to an erosion of standards of living The two biggest labor displacements in human history were the agricultural and industrial revolutions, both of which resulted in enormous gains in human living standards. Can you think of a mass labor displacement that resulted in an overall erosion of living standards? I cannot.

PontifexMinimus 6mo ago
AI is different. It promises to be able to do everything humans can, but better and more cheaply. When AIs can do every human job cheaper than the subsistence cost of employing a human, humans will be economically obsolete and worthless. Then there's the minor issue of AI deciding to just wipe us out because we're in the way. Taking everything together, AI more powerful than that which currently exists must not be created. This needs to be enforced with an international treaty, nuking data centers in non-compliant states if need be.
- MontyCarloHall 6mo ago
  Before the industrial revolution, approximately 90% of people worked in agriculture. In fully industrialized countries, that figure is now <2%. That decrease constituted a nearly full replacement of everything humans were doing, better and more cheaply. While this time might be different, I don't think this is a given.
  - ccortes 6mo ago
    Maybe it’s not a given, but it is part of the sales pitch for CEOs. A few others have announced layoffs due to AI being better and more efficient than humans. How much truth there is to it we don’t know for sure. But it’s not something to be ignored.
    - MontyCarloHall 6mo ago
      CEOs have been saying the exact same thing for the entire history of automation. Take computing, for example, an industry that's always been unusually amenable to automation: — in the 1960/1970s, when compilers came out. "We don't need so many programmers hand-writing assembly anymore." Remember, COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) and FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) were marketed as human-readable languages that would let business professionals/scientists no longer be reliant on dedicated specialist programmers. — in the 1980s/1990s, when higher-level languages came out. "C++ and Java mean we don't need an army of low-level C developers spending most of their effort manually managing memory, and rich standard libraries mean they don't have to continuously reimplement common data structures from scratch." — in the 1990s/2000s, when frameworks came out. "These things are basically plug-and-play, now one full-stack developer can replace a dedicated sysadmin, backend engineer, database engineer, and frontend engineer." While all of these statements are superficially true, the result was that the world produced more software (and developer jobs) than ever, as each level of abstraction freed developers from having to worry about lower-level problems and instead focus on higher-level solutions. Mel's intellect was freed from having to optimize the position of the memory drum [0] to allow him to focus on optimizing the higher-level logic/algorithms of the problem he's solving. As a result, software has become both more complex but also much more capable, and thus much more common. While this time with AI may truly be different, I'm not holding my breath. [0] http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html