Technology

Also, this recent classic: I will fucking piledrive you if you mention AI again was really illuminating.

At some point society will need to realize that traditional work that is handled by automation (whether AI or not) isn’t necessary and economic systems will have to change.

I’m not an expert by any means, and I just don’t see this happening in the near-term. My opinion is that for now (the short-term at least) it’ll just widen the gap between rich and poor.

Never, because it's not. This is the future:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/fully-automated-luxury-gay-space-communism

Let's get there as quickly as possible

Technology like the loom, the steam shovel, the aeroplane, rocketry, computers, nuclear energy, the internet, and now AI, are each tools that have really changed our world, and put many different people out of work, but it has also reduced a lot of back-breaking, time-consuming work, so it has allowed our world to go a lot faster. From an excavator being able to move a lot more dirt in a day than 5 men with shovels, AI can help with getting the initial ideas of the creative process, can help with parsing initial queries from customers, a first pass filter of a huge repository of legal documents, be a patient teacher for beginner programming or other subjects, and so on. Each tool can have been overpromised to do everything, but that doesn't mean it had no purpose.

With that said, any of these tools and technologies can be used for bad as much as they can be used for good. And combatting that doesn't just mean waiting around hoping for the people entrenched in power using tech to satiate their own personal gain, to suddenly reject their gains to commit them for the good of society. It means organizing to protect your neighbour. It means sharing the benefit of these tools with others, using them for good, and improving them for others.

My point is that it's not AI that will cause society to crash, it's greed and corporate greed, who are being assisted by the unrealistic hype over AI.

Replace AI in your argument with industrial machinery, and you'll get your answer. People have always had similar concerns about automation. There are some problems, but it isn't with the technology itself.

The first problem is the concentration of wealth. Societal automation efforts need to start to be viewed as something belonging to everyone, and the profits generated need to go back in to supporting society. This'll need to be solved to move forward peacefully.

The second problem is failure to deal with externalities. The true cost of automation needs to be accounted for from cradle to grave including all externalities. This means the pollution caused by LLM energy use needs to be a part of the cost of running the LLM, for example.

You may be in the younger side, or just not remember, but this happens almost every 20 years like clockwork.

In the 80's it was the PC and computers at large.

In the 00's it was robotic automation that was going to be the end of manual labor.

Now it's this.

The sooner people realize that all of things are just about the small number of wealthy people who control resources making more money at the expense of the majority of all other humans, maybe something will get done. It's been tried before in various movements with little to show for it, but maybe I'm just cynical.

There will need to be a major shift in how economic flow works in order to support an existing or expanding population regardless.

What do you think happened to building full of engineers designing plans and making stress load calculations? What do you think happened to switchboard operators?

Society can exist without jobs, not everything has to be capital, in fact reaching a post scarcity world is needed for communism.

AI hype is also overblown as fuck, I remember watching the CGP grey video Humans Need not Apply, like what, 8 years ago? Haven't really achieved some epic breakthrough did we?

For me from a software engineers perspective, "AI" is nothing but a productivity tool, it reduces the amount of mundane work I have to do, but then so does the IDE I use.

as humans we have been automatic tasks for a long time, just think about your washing machine, you have any idea how hard it would be to have clean clothes without them? Do you think we would be better off if we needed cleaning services that clean our clothes for us using human labour just so people have jobs? Or is it better to use that effort elsewhere?

People had the same fears about cars, the internet, computers, telephones, the printing press, and even just books and reading/writing.

For now, I work in AI.

IMO, using AI to remove jobs is the business equivalent of the Darwin Award. No sane executive will look at AI and see job replacement. A dumb executive will look at AI and see more productivity gains. A smart executive will see AI as a way to improve tooling for workers that explicitly want to use AI.

Sadly, as with most tech improvements, we'll see lots of companies run by stupid people try to do stupid things with it. The best we can hope for is that there are opportunities for people to bail and find better job opportunities when their employer says "let's fire HR and replace with GPT", only to get absolutely brutalized by legal fees when their AI HR decides to fire someone for a protected reason, or refuses to fire a thief because they have a disability, or something that requires human intervention that doesn't exist, or one of the hundreds of ways that it could go hilariously wrong.

It happens all the time. I remember watching solid profitable tech companies pivoting to delivering large apps on the new iPhone app store because "it's the future", only to realise that spending two years to develop an office suite for the iPhone 4 was a fucking stupid idea in hindsight. I remember people firing web developers because WYSIWYG editors would mean that you could design and build a website in the same way you create a Word doc. Stupid execs will always do stupid shit, and the world will move on.

It capitalism. Capitalism will replace you with a machine. AI is just a tool.

The more we automate, the less people can do, so they don't have jobs and no income, not able to survive...

Most solutions to this issue usually involve some variant of a universal basic income. However, that gets politically boiled down to "MOAR TAXES GOVERNMENT IS STIFLING THIS COUNTRY!1!1", so in countries like the US that want to keep the freedom of being able to be homeless and starving, it's not going to be possible.

Depends on your definition of "we"...

I can answer that. We won't.

We'll keep iterating and redesigning until we have actual working general intelligence AI. Once we've created a general intelligence it will be a matter of months or years before it's a super intelligence that far outshines human capabilities. Then you have a whole new set of dilemmas. We'll struggle with those ethical and social dilemmas for some amount of time until the situation flips and the real ethical dilemmas will be shouldered by the AIs: how long do we keep these humans around? Do we let them continue to go to war with each other? do they own this planet? Etc.

Automating jobs away is a good thing, many others here have explained why. When I read your title, I actually expected you would be writing about how AI is "detrimental to society" because it makes mistakes that humans don't make and is therefore useless for anything serious; this, I would have had a harder time arguing against.

Is AI really only detrimental to society? We're in the initial stages where they promise the world in order to get investors attention. But once the investors realize what it's actually capable of they'll have to focus on what it's actually capable of.

I think sometime next year we'll have a crash, and all the companies pushing AI will be forced to either focus on quality, or find the next thing to push.

now we have AI on the horizon promising to make things more efficient

sounds good

but we really know what it is actually going to be used for

Contradicts the first statement and the next statement

They want automate out everything. People packaging up goods for shipping, white collar jobs like analytics, business intelligence, customer service, chat support. Any sort of job that takes a low or moderate amount of effort or intellectual ability is threatened by AI.

OK you do know what they want to use it for.

But once AI takes all these jobs away and shrinks the amount of labor required, what are all these people going to do for work? It’s not like you can train someone who’s a business intelligence engineer easily to go do something else like HVAC, or be a nurse.

Highly untrainable people have always existed and are always the first to get replaced.

But it should be pretty obvious that you can’t run an entire society with no jobs.

Well not one based on capitalism.

The more we automate, the less people can do, so they don’t have jobs and no income, not able to survive…

Well the ones that can't do research and can't look up history maybe. AI is the new Robots, is the new assembly line is the new....

You are just using the age old technology fear narrative.

When Robots Take All of Our Jobs, Remember the Luddites (2017)

Not AI TV's with Bluetooth connection to your phone! Those will be totally fine! Go ahead and say things about Trump and then go to Amazon and search for the grass trimmer you love. Go ahead and talk about the truck you like or the computer ram you need. So you work for Costco? Hmmm tells us more? Are you at the executive level? You wouldn't be a purchaser maybe 🤔? Or what?

What is AI, according to you?

It's a marketing term, aimed to create a void. So I wonder what products you think fills this void.

The 12 year old video below explains the root cause of economic misery. Technology is a tool that can be used for good or evil. But the ruling class wants ALL the money. So technology is often used for more efficient oppression.

Meanwhile, we working class folks are too busy working and/or distracted (often fighting with each other) to mount any real resistance.

https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM

Distracted by media and a market of commodities 
We’re just resources, units for their economy

And they want technology that’ll make us obsolete 
I mean why pay for workers when you can automate machines
yeah we’re being ruled by other human beings 
who seem to have forgotten what that means

we’re hamsters on a wheel we’re a human fucking farm
And they’ve worked us to the bone we’re all weathered and worn

https://ludlowpdx.bandcamp.com/track/times-new-roman

Every Empire on this Earth has fallen...and Floating very much is not flying. 🎵

And so as to not leave you with a Gordion Knot:

The structures of our state economies are going to matter in terms of protecting democracies, and by that I mean if you look at economies that were based in the kind of small producer economies like New England was vs states like the South and the American West that were always built on the idea of very high capital using extractive methods to get resources out of the land either cotton or mining or oil or water or agri business, those economies always depend on a few people with a lot of money, and then a whole bunch of people who are poor and doing the work for those Rich guys -- and that I'm not sure is compatible in terms of governance without addressing the reality that you know if people have more of a foothold in their own communities, they are then more likely to support the kinds of legislation that Community [Education, Healthcare, ..] and that may be the future of democracy, if not a national democracy.”

^ https://youtu.be/D7cKOaBdFWo?t=2139 Heather Cox Richardson, professor of American history

“Practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectually and morally.”

Mutual Aid By Pëtr Kropotkin https://thereitis.org/kropotkins-mutual-aid/ https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarcho-mutual-aid-an-introduction-and-evaluation

Solidarity Economies, and Mutualism, will be the way forward.

To follow Corporate and their bought-out state institutions is to to walk willing into one's own ruin.

Once it stops making money.

People simultaneously seem scared of AI automating jobs, and of there being too many old people for the young people to look after as they'd be too busy with their jobs. Wouldn't those cancel each other out?

how long until it's not making the right people money anymore? Sometime after that.

I think social media provides a good reference to start speculating an answer to your question.

Already figured it out. I am waiting on the rest of you.