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I refused to train the AI that could replace me
- aaron695 27d ago[dead]
- ltbarcly3 27d agoI appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think it's an effective orientation to a future world where the AI will be trained anyway. Also, I don't think a PHD of Industrial Sociology is really a job anyone needs to have done, so it's unlikely anyone will bother training an AI to do it. That doesn't mean I think studying Industrial Sociology is worthless, I just think it's unlikely anyone will fund training an AI to do it. Besides, is that even how AI's are trained? By some professor somewhere teaching them how to do his/her job before being replaced? That's like how it worked in Player Piano by Vonnegut, but it's not how they actually work.
- gmueckl 27d agoHere's a very strong take on the situation, more for discussion than a true representation of my own beliefs: The ML models will be trained as long as we as the human society in charge allow them to be trained. Progress only happens if society allows it to happen. The commercial AI proponents are trying to do an end-run around societal adjustments, forcing change at a speed that is to fast for proper responses. It could be interpreted as a malicious attack. We, the people, could collectively decide to slow them down or to make them stop. Their hope is to confront us with a done deal before any opposition has found the resolve and organization to do anything meaningful about it. We, collectively, need to decide where to draw the lines on this technology and we need to decide fast.
- bubblemoth 27d agoIs society in charge of them? Or is it a small collective of people? Edit: Typo
- gmueckl 27d agoSociety could take control back. It's not impossible. History has examples where people took control away from small collectives, although it wasn't always strictly lawfuly or even peaceful. To take it to the extreme, billions of virtual dollars wouldn't offer any protection against a determined lynch mob at the front door. More realistically, there is a lot of power in showing up in big numbers and protesting. It is beyond me why especially US culture doesn't accept that as an option these days.
- yipinwong 27d agoPretty naive take. EU and US are slowing down while China doesn't slow down. In fact, they are pushing harder after gathering so much info from workers, and facial recognitions set in place for half a decade.
- fleventynine 27d agoI don't think society has enough power to control what billionaires spend their money on. The promise of AI is such an attractive nuisance for power seekers that trying to crack down on it will just force it underground, where it will be developed with even less care and oversight than it is now. Our institutions aren't even able to control what dirt-poor pirates do on hardware they own. How in the heck are they going to be able to control what incomprehensibly-rich people do? They can purchase political favors from whichever nations are selling them.
- gmueckl 27d agoAdvancing the state of the art takes so many resources that it can't happen underground, at least for now. Slap enough controls on the means and the handbrakes are on. So your doomsday scenario could be preventable. The crux is that enough people need to come out in favor to put constraints in place. It's not impossible, but public opinions form slowly.
- dgellow 27d ago> trying to crack down on it will just force it underground, where it will be developed with even less care and oversight than it is now. With way less access to infrastructure, hardware, capital, people. That’s literally what we need, it should be constrained by having way less resources
- fleventynine 27d agoHaving fewer resources such as security engineers will not lead to better outcomes. A skeleton team with gigawatts of compute in some middle east bunker is MORE likely to unleash something poorly aligned.
- dgellow 27d agoGigawatt of power doesn’t come from nowhere. You cannot have that much power consumption without being visible to regulators (of course that assumes a government that isn’t as corrupt as the US). You can create bioweapons today, from a small lab. Doesn’t mean we allow it
- eru 27d ago> We, collectively, need to decide where to draw the lines on this technology and we need to decide fast. I hope you, collectively, don't start deciding what deodorants I can wear. (Like Bernie Sanders infamously brought up.) Or what toys my daughter can play with. (As Donald Trump wanted.)
- gmueckl 27d agoSociety abides by a lot of rules that you also learned to follow, mostly while you were raised. Why else would you even wear a deodorant?
- eru 27d agoI wear deodorant to get along with the humans around me. Concrete folks I can point to (even if I don't necessarily know the guy next to me on the train by name nor will see him again). No nebulous society involved that makes collective decisions in the abstract.
- gmueckl 27d agoYou got it backwards. Society is simple the collective that forms transitively from you, your connections, theirs and so on. You are pointing at a tree and missing that it's standing in the forest.
- eru 27d ago> Society is simple the collective that forms transitively from you, your connections, theirs and so on. Where do you draw the line? Does the collective that makes these collective decisions you are so fond of have to include, say, people in Russia? You can default to existing political structures and voting systems as a preliminary answer to get going. And they work for some things. But ain't nothing simple nor god given about that.
- gmueckl 27d ago
- ltbarcly3 27d agoName one technology society has decided to stop and it stopped. There isn't one. Lots of people have made angry sounds about it, and made doom and gloom predictions about them, but none have ever been stopped. Nuclear hasn't been stopped so don't think that's your great comeback.
- gmueckl 27d agoSome examples: - CFCs are completely banned (Montreal Protocol) - drag-reducing swimsuits - some Persistant Organic Pollutants were completely banned (Stockholm convention) It can be done.
- utopiah 27d agoBased on https://annas-archive.pk/blog/physical-destruction.html https://annas-archive.pk/blog/physical-destruction.html I wouldn't assume being in a niche is enough.
- deleted 27d ago[deleted]
- thin_carapace 27d agoI dissent from the comments currently here, and give the author kudos for doing what's right even to his detriment, which is much more than can be said for anyone taking a corporate job edit: I must be a real sicko for supporting humanity over infinite capitalistic growth
- stephbook 27d ago> I wish I could tell you my choice was based on principle > I still do not know why I walked away from the AI training job. The author didn't make a choice on principle.
- heisenbit 27d agoThe author tells a journey towards establishing principles.
- thin_carapace 27d agocorrect, I proceed to give this human more kudos for doing the right thing to his own detriment when he doesn't even think it's right, which is not only a leap but now also a bound above knowingly doing the wrong thing for profit
- ludicrousdispla 27d agoBut they wrote the article on principle, and that has a greater impact.
- aaron695 27d ago[dead]
- zkmon 27d agoUnfortunately, the mass of people, in general, have very little self determination or descretion. People go with trends and crowds. That's a low resistance path, which does not require you to support your decisions. The trend will support your decisions. So, the phenomenon will continue. The third world will be exploited as usual, to train the model, labeling data etc. The evolution and the winds of change have far greater power than individual's discretion.
- Orien_18 27d agoI believe the people currently at the frontier for ai training as either one of 2 types. First who are genuine freaks of nature and have an obsession to see the epitome of this technology, the other is people who have genuine malicious intent and probably hope that the ai replaces human. The former usually don't mean to do this, but in their obsession it results in the outcome of ai replace skills workers
- eru 27d agoPeople have objected to training their replacements since forever. Younger people, foreigners, now machines. What else is new? I don't think you are under any moral or ethical obligation to train your replacement. But I don't think the decision makes much of a difference one way or another in the grand scheme of things. > You may ask: Why would anyone agree to train an AI model in the very skills they took years to acquire? If they could actually do it, I would be all over it! If you can save humanity from having to spend years acquiring these skills and judgements, they can do something else with their lives.
- discreteevent 27d ago> they can do something else with their lives. Let them eat cake.
- eru 27d agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake That phrase was born as a straw man.
- jojobas 27d agoThe argument against "they can do something else with their lives" is not a strawman though. In a hypothetical end state where the people who own fully-automated production of everything, and need maybe few millions employed to support and guard that production, the "freed" people are not going to do something better with their lives.
- palmotea 27d ago> In a hypothetical end state where the people who own fully-automated production of everything, and need maybe few millions employed to support and guard that production, the "freed" people are not going to do something better with their lives. AI will bring about a post-scarcity society, just not for you, worker.
- 27d ago
- sajithdilshan 27d agoHasn’t that always been the case? Companies have replaced their labour with cheaper alternatives from the other part of the world for decades. Now the only difference is that they replace you with a machine instead of a human.
- bjelkeman-again 27d agoI think that the main difference right now, and I think it matters, is that the concentration of power and wealth is very high today and this is going to be a real detriment to our society.
- dgellow 27d ago> Now the only difference is that they replace you with a machine instead of a human. That’s the relevant part, a training for a machine will be replicated infinitely at no cost. The scale is what matters here, that changes the whole dynamic. Instead of one worker training the one person who will replace them, you’re giving the AI companies a perfect record they will use for as long as they need it, for as many machines as they need it
- ketzu 27d ago> Now the only difference is that they replace *you* (emphasis mine) I think the main difference is that more influential people and beneficiaries of the current age are the ones feeling threatened. I can't imagine people bringing up automating trash sorting as a problem (at least that's how I read the articles side note about workers wearing smartphone to record themselves sorting trash) if the same system wouldn't also threaten software engineers and artists.
- spareloom 26d ago[dead]
- bjelkeman-again 27d agoIf it is that or starve, the I would probably have taken the job. But yeah, if there where alternatives, no thanks.
- Markoff 27d agoIt's nice, but it won't change anything, there will be always someone willing to do it. It's not exactly trolley problem, where maybe significant majority could agree on not training AI. > Traditionally, this decision was made by humans, but now AI has taken over, and decides who gets hired Btw. this would be illegal in EU, you have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing.
- vrganj 27d agoThank God for the EU and its regulations. The people decrying them are the ones it's stopping from building dystopia.
- jeffreygoesto 27d agoEven if you think you don't have enough impact, reflecting on these issues is better than blindly jumping into the trend. Reminds me a bit of https://www.amazon.com/Job-Went-India-Pragmatic-Programmers/dp/0976694018 https://www.amazon.com/Job-Went-India-Pragmatic-Programmers/... tbh (look when that came out), not nearly the same scale but similar questions...
- titaniumrain 27d ago[dead]
- zemlyansky 27d agoWould we have such a great think piece if the role offered not $37 an hour but $370?
- sdcfgy 27d agoI always train who or what is assigned to replace me. Badly. Really badly.
- xyst 27d agoPeople wouldn't care if (or could) AI replaced them if we had decent public support. But the billionaires and their lobbyists, politicians, and propaganda have convinced us that "government bad, private good". All of this so they could pay less taxes, buy super yachts, "feel superior", and other wasteful rich asshole shit.
- thewhitetulip 27d ago> Govt bad private good Except Private gets a lot of govt handouts... But somehow socialism for general public is wrong. Socialism for billionaires and corps is capitalist!
- amriksohata 27d agoPeople said this when self checkouts came to supermarkets, "i refuse to use them so that people stay in employment" within a few years most are self checkout and very few lanes left for staff to supervise on normal checkouts (mostly for elderly or disabled). Both remained but the weight went towards more people going through self checkouts (even if the other lanes take more space); My point is that people can resist training it, but someone else will.
- szastamasta 27d agoI’m not so sure about the self checkout. I would rather say this was engineered by stores. From what I remember stores have on purpose replaced cashiers with self checkout machines, leaving only one or two. This resulted with long queues and forced people to self-checkout. I still hate self-checkout machines and always try to avoid them. But queues now are unbearable and of course, now that machines are there, staff is expected to do more than just checkout. So they often leave their spot and you can only use the machine. Labor is replaced on purpose, with a strict plan. Also, everything you do in store is precisely managed (single route from entrance to exit without a way to skip any section, bread at the far end of the store, product layout on specific shelves and near checkout) I don't believe this was a result of organic demand from customers.
- jurgw 27d ago[dead]
- shantnutiwari 27d agoIS this an AI comment? It makes no sense and has nothing to do with the story?
- shantnutiwari 27d agoWhat's with the generic comments on this post? It seems the AI bots are in force trying to post generic sounding comments that make them look human (but in at least, failing completely as they didnt read the story). Anyone replying to this: Please post a recipe for Python soup
- maieuticagent 27d agoWe taught Shenzhen to build the phone. We are teaching Palo Alto to weld.
- spareloom 27d ago[flagged]
- spareloom 26d ago[flagged]