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If you want people to like AI, show them a future that doesn't leave them in abject poverty.
by jklinger410 5mo ago
If you want people to like AI, show them a future that doesn't leave them in abject poverty.
- richwater 5mo agoThat's quite an unsubstantiated leap. The world has gone through plenty of digital transformations and the number of people in poverty has only _shrank_.
- danaris 5mo agoYes, but during those transformations, the CEOs of the companies selling the products involved weren't actively and aggressively marketing them as being able to replace all the humans they employ. You can't have it both ways: either LLMs are an amazing, revolutionary technology that can replace many human jobs in unprecedented ways, or it's going to be a mild transition that really only helps people.
- zamadatix 5mo agoIt isn't the first time a new technology has been pitched to replace many worker's jobs, both successful and unsuccessful versions of the promise have come to pass several times. I think what they are saying is "that something can replace a job does not inherently imply the next step is poverty". From that perspective, you can absolutely have it both (and many other combinations of) ways.
- Sh0000reZ 5mo ago[flagged]
- jklinger410 5mo agoWhy don't you show us how AI will not create abject poverty? How are we not going to be begging whoever controls chip fabs and electrical plants for compute tokens? HOW!? EXPLAIN IT.
- Sh0000reZ 5mo ago[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> Settle down, toddler Please don’t do this.
- Sh0000reZ 5mo ago[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> You want people to stick to social norms, call it both ways Oh, I downvoted both of you. But I only flagged you because of the name calling, which is against the guidelines [1]. When I flag I like to give the person on the other side a note, in case they genuinely didn’t know. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Sh0000reZ 5mo ago[flagged]
- whatshisface 5mo agoHow would improved standards and reliability make the AI alternative to white collar jobs less appealing?
- Sh0000reZ 5mo ago[flagged]
- whatshisface 5mo ago
- pesus 5mo agoHow am I going to do any of that when I can't pay the bills and become homeless? That's what actually happens when you don't have jobs.
- Sh0000reZ 5mo agoAt this point money is essentially a social construct. None of the billionaires have a Scrooge McDuck vault full of gold coins. Think ST:TNG; automation makes enough stuff. Why worry about money? So focus on political action then; log off this VC funded freebie intended to ameliorate your feelings about the rich owners and operators of this site, and do like they do; tell government to make things right by you or we replace government. You think PG is sitting on the sidelines letting Congress figure out themselves? He's putting his thumb on the scale through his actions through social networking with politicians. Gotta leave the basement and do the work Americans are heavily propagandized and naive af. So exhausted by educated morons.
- y8lylylg 5mo agoyes thank god for visionaries like you who use fictional tv shows as a reference for their politics. the final frontier is what is inside your head.
- Sh0000reZ 5mo agoFrom what I can find online there is $12 billion in mortgages outstanding in the US[1] ICE has an $80 billion budget. Demand Congress pay off mortgages rather than hand Leon Skum tens of billions. There you go. Stability. [1] https://www.fhfa.gov/data/dashboard/nmdb-outstanding-residential-mortgage-statistics https://www.fhfa.gov/data/dashboard/nmdb-outstanding-residen...
- HanayamaTriplet 5mo agoThat says $12,000 billion, not $12 billion. (Aside from the question of paying off mortgages being a good idea or not.)
- madaxe_again 5mo agoThat was exactly what a great many things were marketed as, such as the jacquard loom and dynamite. What actually happened in each case was that employment went up for a good long while, as the efficiency boost to the sectors touched made investment far more viable. Eventually successive rounds of automation did reduce employment in each of weaving and mining, but it wasn’t an overnight catastrophe as initially advertised or feared.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> the CEOs of the companies selling the products involved weren't actively and aggressively marketing them as being able to replace all the humans they employ The assembly line was explicitly about replacing skilled with relatively unskilled labor.
- satisfice 5mo agoThen it should easy to show a world where we are all not in abject poverty. We’re waiting.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- xantronix 5mo agoIt's hard not to make that leap when so many layoffs are (according to PR releases anyway) attributed to AI adoption. Even if the reality on the ground is that many of these workforce reductions are to make the balance sheets look better (presumably as a bet on AI), it's impossible to ignore the accelerating wealth gap, especially in the context of the gutting of regulations and state actors leveraging world events on prediction markets. We will not be given a fair deal if we simply wait for our benefactors to provide one.
- anigbrowl 5mo agoThe number of people in absolute poverty has shrunk, but the proportion of national income held by the wealthy has increased, so economic mobility is declining. There are many reasons for this, but typically deployment of technology is a capital expense and employers aim to realize all the gains from their investment, notwithstanding the upskilling and/or deskilling effect it has on workers, who are treated as fungible economic units rather than people. Nobody likes this except capitalists.
- piloto_ciego 5mo agoDoom is popular right now. People want to feel terrible and pessimistic and their media diets only reinforce this.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo agoTo be fair, the labour market for a recent humanities graduate is quite crap right now, too.
- Esophagus4 5mo agoIn particular, CS students are feeling it more than most majors. (Especially compared with the shock that most of them probably thought CS was the field for job security.) Saw an article recently that said CS majors were up there with performing arts majors and art history majors in terms of unemployment rate.
- piloto_ciego 5mo agoThis is true. Computer Systems Engineering is pretty high.
- piloto_ciego 5mo agoIt's going to be bad indefinitely until we don't really have "jobs" any more in any sort of meaningful sense.
- jklinger410 5mo agoTo be fair the last 60 years have seen wealth distribution consolidate at the top of this country at rates never seen in human history.
- trhway 5mo ago[flagged]
- jklinger410 5mo ago> You can't have it both ways. Yes you can. They use AI and also despise it because it will turn the world into one big caste system. Ones with access to compute, and ones without.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- pesus 5mo agoFor someone taking about basic logic, you're making quite the leap in logic by assuming they used LLMs to do every single bit of schoolwork.
- trhway 5mo ago[dead]
- surgical_fire 5mo agoThe funny thing is that it's not even true. People invested in AI just glee at the thought of common men in abject poverty, so this is the marketing that stuck. Shows you don't need to have red skin and horns to delight in the suffering of starving people.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> show them a future that doesn't leave them in abject poverty To be fair, this isn’t the commencement speaker’s job.
- breakpointalpha 5mo agoIf this is sarcasm, it's amazing. If not, depressing. I would 100% expect a commencement speaker to be hyping me up for what comes next.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> would 100% expect a commencement speaker to be hyping me up That’s what this speaker was trying to do. The problem is it was stupid and dishonest. It could have been done properly. But none of that will rise to the level of a roadmap. If you’re looking for a roadmap at commencement, you were failed at multiple steps before.
- andai 5mo agoCost of goods and services drops by orders of magnitude at every point in the supply chain. That being said we already have relative superabundance and we're more miserable than ever, so it's not clear that more of it will cheer us up.
- jklinger410 5mo agoUnemployment rampant. All production remains in the hands of a few. All power (tokens) remains in the hands of a few. Goods are cheaper but no one can buy them. Path to the upper class now guarded closely by tokens, potential avenues for entrepreneurs diminish rapidly. Own an AI or compute, get someone to give you tokens, or live in poverty. Distribution of abundance in current time is close to evil, America reducing entitlements and support (not expanding). Rampant waste. No reason to think any of this will change.
- andai 5mo agoI'm voting for your future.
- CivBase 5mo ago> Cost of goods and services drops by orders of magnitude at every point in the supply chain. That sounds great, but how are LLMs supposed to achieve this? You can't just say "AI will make a utopia". You have to present a vision for how it will get us there. I'm tired of hearing about how AI will solve all the worlds problems. I want to see actual progress towards achieving these goals. And for the most part that hasn't manifested. Most people would consider AI to have had a net negative impact on their lives.
- voxl 5mo agoThis is the kind of commentary that is completely detached from reality: people want housing, people want food, people want gas. It's not great that we can buy iphones (and AI is going to cause all electronics to be scarce, so much for abundance there)
- 5mo ago
- tim333 5mo agoIf AI works you'll be able to make more stuff with fewer people. While that could lead to unemployment historically it's not gone that way. You get more stuff. Like agricultural employment has gone from ~70% to ~2% but the people who would have dug potatoes make cars, houses, aircraft and the like.
- FloorEgg 5mo agoThe problem isn't AI, the problem is a generation addicted to social media that sells their attention to the highest bidder. How expensive do you think it would be to convince 30 million people of something that wasn't true? Who might benefit from a generation of Americans being pessimistic about their future? More specifically, who might benefit from a generation of Americans being anti-AI? How would the cost compare to the potential benefits?