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People have objected to training their replacements since forever. Younger people, foreigners, now machines. What else is new? I don't think you are under an
by eru 1mo ago
People 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 1mo ago> they can do something else with their lives. Let them eat cake.
- eru 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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.
- thin_carapace 1mo agoI don't want to attack your good faith in humanity, so I will ask another way - if a system was reliant on workers, what reason would there be for those workers to exist , after their work became automated?
- nosedivedcaptai 1mo ago[dead]
- eru 1mo agoWorkers are humans. Humans don't need any system's permission or reasoning to exist. If you've ever been laid off or fired, you might have noticed that you don't cease to exist when your contract ends.
- vrganj 1mo agoYou do cease to exist once you don't get access to food, water or health care long enough. Think just a little past the most direct consequence - let me rephrase GP's question: What reason would the ownership class have to provide these necessities to workers when they no longer require their work?
- OKRainbowKid 1mo agoYou may however notice that your existence might be cut short if you don't have access to food, shelter, medical treatments, because "the system" eventually has no incentive to provide for you anymore, because your labor is now worthless to capital.
- thin_carapace 1mo agowell i brought up the system for a reason, human existence is relative to the system in which humans exist. are there any examples of humans being systematically supported when their class of labor ceased to exist on a widespread scale? if so, did those supportive aspects spontaneously manifest? all in all, would such insights apply to a more widespread scenario, where the affected labor classes are all those involving human computer interaction?
- unleashhale 1mo agoJust like how the car gave us back so many more hours to spend actually living instead of working. And the washing machine. And the computer. And the Internet.
- eru 1mo agoThe washing machine and dishwasher definitely did. I don't own a car, so I can't comment on that.
- raincole 1mo agoThey release women from housekeeping... to workplaces.
- yen223 1mo agoYou should ask a working woman if she'd rather be at home doing dishes and laundry by hand without pay
- number6 1mo agoSounds tempting
- qsera 1mo agoWhy would you put yourself in a jail 9 to 5 every day even if you get paid, if it can be spared?
- thin_carapace 1mo agosome in this thread call out the author for doing what he did without principle. while i dont agree with the argument applied there, i do apply it here. which is to say that feminism did enable some avenues of freedom to women, therefore i wonder how that act benefitted the system, and whether such freedom has culminated in net benefit for the common man & woman
- dzhiurgis 1mo ago
- vrganj 1mo ago> If you can save humanity from having to spend years acquiring these skills and judgements, they can do something else with their lives. In theory, yes. In practice, no. Not until we replace our entire socioeconomic system. As-is, the only reason most people can extract an existence from capital is capital's dependence on labor. Break that dependence and the entire thing breaks, capital becomes a self-sustaining flywheel towards feudalism and everyone who currently depends on labor for their survival loses the foundation of their existence. Only once we fundamentally change ownership structures can we work towards your vision. Until then, it is a false piper to dystopia.
- consp 1mo ago> I don't think you are under any moral or ethical obligation to train your replacement. Depending on where you live, there might not even be a legal obligation.
- eru 1mo agoDetails likely depend on whatever contract you are signing.
- vintermann 1mo agoThey could, but will they get the chance to? My most commercially valuable skills - software wrangling, figuring out what went wrong, explaining how to do things in software - are rapidly getting obsoleted by agents. But I'm not too sad about it, because honestly? I hated a lot of that work. Endless frustration with finding out what went wrong, sometimes in an architecture you argued strongly against, etc. Watching the AI agent "thinking" scroll by and seeing it get "frustrated" instead of me, is honestly a relief. But what is it going to do for my career, middle-term? I have a few years of head start on most people on using many forms of AI, but who knows what's that going to be worth?
- MyelinatedT 1mo agoMy belief is that humans need to struggle through the process of learning to code, learning maths etc. in order to actually build the neural pathways to do the hard things AI can’t do yet. I feel some skills atrophying for me, and I worry even more for the younger people who will never get the chance to think without AI. Another concern I have is that computers don’t need to be “generally superhuman” to replace 90%+ of office jobs. Computers have always been superhuman at some things, and LLMs have massively jumped the number of tasks that can now be automated to human-level quality or better. I’m not sure it matters if they scale to true AGI.
- vintermann 1mo agoWhat are the hard things AI can't do yet, then? Are you sure we shouldn't rather spend time getting better at, say, playing the piano? Assuming we're allowed to prioritize that in a world where the rich have all the money. (Looking at the local flow of money, I can't avoid the conclusion that my wages come indirectly mostly from the building of an extreme luxury product for an extremely rich person.)
- Voultapher 1mo agoHonest answer, building and maintaining a large complex project over many years. We have plenty of examples of one-shots like the 1000x slower gcc, but those don't see updates after they achieved their advertisement goal. Maybe a little more philosophical, novelty. You can ask an LLM to write in the style of <famous author> but afaik the results are bad when you ask it to write in a novel style no-one has seen before.
- glimshe 1mo agoI understand the article's dilemma and I don't want to dismiss the difficulty of the situation. That said, I'd love to train AI to do my personal projects. While I enjoy coding, it's way too slow. I do my projects for the design journey and the final result. It would be great to get calls from AI for direction and assistance, if needed, while it does all the raw coding work for me.
- attendant3446 1mo agoTrue, but those skills should be in an open-source model, not in a pseudo-open AI. That's a significant condition for me.
- stasomatic 1mo agoIf 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. Isn't the question - how are we going to feed ourselves? What is this "something else" that will put food on your table?