Equal pay for robots!!
2) somebody still has to fix those robots.
3) if control over the economy were wrested from oligarchs and were put under democratic control, the economy wouldnt be geared towards frittering away billions on trying to deskill, dehumanize and eliminate labor.
Ah, I see we're following the foundation timeline.
Not necessarily. If the manufacturing of robots can be made cheap enough it may be cheaper to replace broken robots with new ones and send the broken ones off to be recycled rather than fix them.
CirclesUBI is an attempt at getting that alternative rolling. It ain't perfect but I think it's a good start.
This argument always gets made, but I don't think it works.
If 10 factory workers are replaced with 1 robot, the technician job created will not go to any of the people displaced by the robot. It goes to someone privileged enough to have gone to robot-mechanic school. We then avoid all mention of those 10 factory workers and pretend they never existed. We tell ourselves they landed on their feet, after finding lower-paying work amidst rising inflation-- but don't dare follow up with them because we don't want to learn otherwise.
"So let's subsidize mechanic school, make it free!" you say. "Those people can retrain to become mechanics!" Sure. Except the promises of tech have proven to be lies, and every generation of it is more demanding than the one before. "This guy knows computers" used to mean you could put some numbers in a spreadsheet and make a pivot table. Then, maybe HTML. Everything else followed.
Even auto mechanics-- you can't just understand how ICE works, now there's an electrical system. Now there's a computer. Now there are two drivetrains. Now there's also an optional all-electric system, requiring an electrical specialization. Now there's a network interface. And some self-driving tech (robotics). You have to understand the whole stack to keep up, and not everyone has what it takes to do that. And if you don't keep up, someone younger will, as you're able to service less of the market and watch your potential customer base dry up. You bring in partners and have to split everything with them, which doesn't advance either of you as much as it holds you both back.
My grandfather bought an apartment building (multiple units!) with the money he earned painting fucking lightposts. My dad was a network engineer, which he worked hard at, and paid for a middle-class life. That stopped being enough very shortly after I started working, and now we're all supposed to compete with "full-stack engineers" hopped up on amphetamines and doing the job of ten people-- just to live paycheck-to-paycheck, while your spouse also works, with the spectre of AI on the horizon poised to replace both jobs with schizophrenic parrots. Thankfully I bought a house right before the COVID price explosion, but the generations after me aren't so lucky. They're pretty fucked. Unfortunately they blame us, our parents, or their parents for this mess, ignoring the fact that while some of us are more upstream than others, we're all being swept in the same direction. If only the kids would direct their anger not at the Boomers, but at the oligarchs throwing coins at us from the shore and telling us to swim faster.
This idea that aging people can just infinitely "retrain" into fields that take longer and longer to achieve basic competence in is not founded in reality or history. Again, my grandfather bought an entire apartment building from wages earned watching paint dry. That was what he retrained into, after doing whatever gypsies do for 40 years before they're chased out of their host country. It was a job that required nothing more than a pulse, no degree required, no continuing education needed. Since then, the promise of tech was supposed to make our lives easier, but nothing is easier now. Everything is more expensive, less repairable, more competitive, and more difficult in every way. We're competing with people on the other side of the planet for jobs in our own cities, and competing with Chinese and Saudi billionaires (and domestic REITs) just to buy a home.
But that leads into your point 3:
> 3) if control over the economy were wrested from oligarchs and were put under democratic control, the economy wouldnt be geared towards frittering away billions on trying to deskill, dehumanize and eliminate labor.
We've let the hogs become too fat. We're feeding them our grain reserves while we starve, then turn our knives on each other as we fight the emaciated hordes for the promise of bones and gristle. This is not how the human-pig relationship is supposed to work.
On what planet are lightposts painted?
I always wondered: how did the late middle-aged coachmen of England make a living when the railroad boom arrived in the mid 1800s? Even Charles Dickens did not seem to care about them. I can hardly believe that they "retrained" to become locomotive pilots.
Automation is a wonderful thing, it reduces cost, errors, labor and time. But we need to think of ways of paying pensions or such for the immediate generation who lose their jobs. There are also future generations who would have been gainfully employed in a low-skill job which will now be left out. I am not sure what to do about them except education at a younger age.
It's not sustainable, or even just possible on a larger scale. You can't have people doing simple, low paid jobs owning apartment buildings, as that means there'd need to be a 100+ million apartment buildings (or investments of comparable value) in America.
There’s this weird place some of you have ended up, wherein all prior automation is good and fine, but future automation must cease immediately, solely to preserve people’s current work exactly as is.
I don’t get it.
People have always been able to find other work when displaced by automation - unpleasant task though. What happens when there are no more “other work” or there aren’t enough remaining jobs to support the population?
Automating the printing press, building the cotton gin, widespread use of combines to harvest wheat (or whatever) - none of these led to mass unemployment. They all created change and churn, for sure, but people will always find new things to do.
I’m always struck by this discussion - should we continue to operate coal mines, and refuse to move off fossil fuel? Those are massive job displacements across, for instance, Appalachia. The common argument is that those people should retrain to new skills. Why is that not the argument for people whose job can be automated?
One of the first groups that will likely lose big to LLMs is lawyers - how hard should we fight to make sure that the law remains incomprehensible and inaccessible in order to preserve those jobs?
Why is anyone’s job a sacred cow?
Sorry, the number of questions read more aggressively than I intend them - I’m earnestly interested in the answers.
All the automations you have mentioned all automate a very specific task.
AI on the other hand can potentially become the do-it-all automation. A universal automation.
> but people will always find new things to do
That’s no longer true if you have a machine that can do it all - that can match (or even surpass) humans in all (or even the vast majority of) activities.
Every “new thing” it would do too.
I'm not sure what hierarchies you've been a part of where people actively trying to treat people poorly leads to their success - I'd wager those are few in far between in reality, and over represented in media. Maybe you're cynical about a few high profile companies or how U.S. politics appears, but positions of power exist everywhere in society, and society wouldn't be even remotely functional if people followed your assumed behavior.
So, yeah, Americans aren't working 16 hour shifts in mines anymore and child labor laws are largely in effect. But, I also wouldn't say most people are treated "quite well." That's not the media force-feeding me stuff. That's first-hand experience and watching what friends and family are going through right now.
I think some people treat people well, but I've met too many small business owners who bristle at paying minimum wage.
Within any organization, you will have the sociopaths who want the glitz and title and power but have no respect for those they'll have to knock down to get there. That is what we're talking about.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
This is a very important point and the strength of capitalism. Even a self asshole like Elon Musk is incentivized to provide useful goods and services and create jobs that raise people's standard of living.
Profit > everything else
People who align with that are profiting from capitalism.
The burden of proof is thus on those who want to destroy it, to prove they have a viable and useful alternative that will ACTUALLY make the lives of people better. Instead, what I see is a direction that is guaranteed to lead to bloodshed and misery, with only a dreamers hope that what comes afterward is any better.
I'd like to see some real numbers for this. Capitalism creates inequality which even the feudal eras of various countries couldn't match. Serfs enjoyed more spare time in their day than the modern full-time worker. Granted, they had their own problems to deal with, but to pretend that capitalism is the best because it's created the most inequality (i.e. someone's hit a really high score)
Capitalism enables sociopathic behavior. In fact, it rewards it. The more profit you get from something, the better you're playing capitalism. Doesn't matter if what you're selling is remotely close to what you're charging, in value. Endless growth and profit must come from somewhere. Money and resources do not just poof into the world. Money can be printed, but that has consequences.
A corporation exploiting my labor so they can profit, and shareholders giving them money with the expectation to make more back later (i.e. gambling) is not making the world any better. It's trapping people into a cycle of giving their most valuable resource -- time -- to others of its kind that wouldn't care if they died tomorrow.
I'm not sure what an alternative would be. People act like there's only 2 or 3 systems out there. That dogmatic myopia is part of what traps us in shitty systems.
Without capitalism, I could have control over my life. Why should an economic system dominate one's waking life? Businesses are not more important than individuals. They have no more right to exist than we do.
Says who? You think people in China and Russia have more control over their life than those in the west? You've still not offered anything other than wishful thinking. You've not proposed any system to replace capitalism. Ultimately you're just offering destruction, with no vision for rebuilding other than, "I hope it gives me an easier life".
Do you really think there isn't a better system than accepting that some other human out there is going to get more out of your work than you?
In nations with extreme abundance, it should be trivial to solve problems of homelessness and hunger. We have the means, but capitalism says "no, people must not be allowed to survive without working for others".
Why are we the only animal on Earth that pays others of its kind to survive and exist?
If capitalism cannot bring people up then its cancerous nature will naturally give way to unrest and change. Expecting me to know what that change would be, and what conditions would settle, is unreasonable.
Labor should be a choice, and you should get the vast majority of the benefit for it. Capitalism cannot offer such things. It has nothing to offer except exploitation. It rewards preying on your fellow person and justifies everything with profits. Cancer incarnate.
There's unemployment benefit. In the UK, that's £85 a week. There's also council housing.
People who are mentally ok and who land on the streets via a series of unfortunate incidends are often back into a house and a job a year later - it's really not that hard in most developed countries.
Capitalism's goal is to maximize the creation wealth by allowing individuals to privately hold wealth and efficiently leverage it to produce more wealth. Currently, humans are a crucial element in the production of wealth, which has allowed labor to capture some amount of that wealth for themselves. But that's not central to Capitalism. If you can generate massive amounts of wealth and give none of it to your workforce, you've succeeded at Capitalism, even if it means the 90+% of the population who don't own much capital at all starve in the streets.
In contrast, Communism's stated goal is the achievement of a classless, moneyless society that provides to each according to their need, and each works according to their ability. Unlike Capitalism, the elimination of the necessity of labor doesn't intrinsically cause everybody to starve. It just dwindles away the necessity of the "from each according to their ability" part.
So you can argue about what other better solutions there are, but if we're pushing towards a world with less and less need for human labor, Capitalism is flatly untenable. Capitalism's answer to human labor being optional is that the former labor class dies.
What good is a stated goal if the reality is the opposite? Capitalism may not have a lofty sounding goal to your ear, but the fair trade of goods and services is actually a pursuit in the betterment and empowerment of mankind. Of course, human nature gets in the way, and leads to corruption that needs to be constantly addressed and readdressed, but that will never change no matter what system you dream up.
And while capitalism isn't draped in utpoian idealism, it has the benefit of having proven to be able to lift a huge bulk of humanity out of subsistence living.
Look at a company. The purpose of a company is to make money. Not all companies are successful: lots of companies fail to make money. But, when push comes to shove, and a company needs to choose between "make money" and something else, say, a commitment to not being evil, the company will choose "make money".
Capitalism does not have meeting basic human needs as a core goal. Capitalism's distribution of money to labor is a side effect, not a goal. It has the freedom of capital to amass capital as a core goal. Thus, if something needs to go, it's not going to be capital's ability to amass more capital.
As automation comes for more and more jobs, the demand for labor in general will fall. Capitalism, even in its most idealistic "a rising tide lifts all ships" form, does not care about those it doesn't need. If your preferred answer to "what do we do when human labor is no longer necessary" isn't "extinction", you can't rely on Capitalism as an ideology.
Are non-profits not “companies”? Are there no small businesses that opt against expansion?
This is a reductive and ridiculous take. The real world isn’t Soc101 or a poor reading of Marx, nor is it black and white.
Well, non-profits are not exactly capitalist companies like the ones for profit. Neither necessarily are the small business where the owner values other things over the expansion and profit. But these things are not much relevant when concerning most of production, the things that influence a country's GDP. These small businesses or non-profit organizations indeed may have concerns other than profit. But good luck convincing shareholders in a big company that they should take the less profitable path, especially if there is competition with other companies.
Shareholders can be convinced that a long term play may be less profitable today than it will be in a decade and opt to take that path. I’m not sure why that’s assumed to be prima facie untrue.
Is Uber or Door Dash not a company or mot capitalist? The latter especially appears to have no road to profit. If it’s not capitalist, by your definition, what is it? Why are its shareholders not replacing the board on a daily basis until someone makes it profitable?
> Are non-profits not “companies”? Are there no small businesses that opt against expansion?
The law makes such businesses slightly less likely to survive. There are ideas and ideals that are the source of that law.
Do you think that’s unfair? Do you think suggesting that capitalism is just about enriching shareholders today is not reductive?
Whether the law makes small businesses less likely to survive (citation needed) is immaterial to the question.
This is what happens when you smoke too much of your own propaganda.
America is very much a mixed economy, and we're the so called 'leader' of the capitalistic world. If the US had been allowed to be an unchallenged capitalistic country then we'd look very much like Russia today (which is not communistic in any way), a corrupt shithole. A huge part of our success was the labor movements of the mid 1800s in which a fair number of people died in. Then later in the 1930s after unchecked capitalism brought about a horrific crash that required a massive amount of socialistic policies to bring us back from the brink and get the economy working.
The reality of these situations is far more complex than the red white and blue cheerleading we're taught in school.
My point was that slavery is still a real thing even in poor countries. Hence the second link about Africa.
That being said, I know no better alternative, albeit I think high automation may make some solutions feasible.
We need a new era of carefulness in computing, both as programmers and as users. We need to demand better accountability. As long as the leaders we have now are still there tomorrow, I'm afraid this goal will never happen. You need a nation who cares more about its people than its GDP to achieve that, and I posit no nation on Earth has that level of care for its people.
The only people I know who remotely care about things like data privacy and GDPR are techies. I personally will never install a “smart home” device.
Therefore, if a machine surpasses this threshold, they will win marketshare.
how are the capital owners deciding what a consumer would choose to spend their money on?
Selling lower quality goods like the article mentions is not a problem if the customers are fine with it given the lower price of the goods. The customer is responsible for making their own decisions about whether to prioritize cost or quality. As the person you were replying to says, by their actions (purchasing the cheaper, automated cloth), you can tell that the customers to appear to vastly prefer the cheaper, poor quality cloth. Who are we to tell them their preferences are wrong?
Edit: I see your original comment. Where the heck did you get that factory owners were doing illegal worker displacement or doing false advertisement? I don’t see that claim in the article.
He has a long sections: > The true tale of the Luddites starts with workers demanding that the laws be upheld. When factory owners began to buy automation systems for textile production, they did so in violation of laws that required collaboration with existing craft guilds – laws designed to ensure that automation was phased in gradually, with accommodations for displaced workers. These laws also protected the public, with the guilds evaluating the quality of cloth produced on the machine, acting as a proxy for buyers who might otherwise be tricked into buying inferior goods. > > Factory owners flouted these laws. Though the machines made cloth that was less durable and of inferior weave, they sold it to consumers as though it were as good as the guild-made textiles.
Now. The New Yorker article simply states the factories sold worse goods cheaper. Other articles I’ve found published today on it are as vague, or say nothing at all about this specific thing.
The ebook is only sold with Adobe’s DRM, so I won’t be buying that. So I’ll have find another way to see what’s true.
[0]: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#more-6752
People don't 'prefer cheap low quality' they can't afford anything else.
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
I much prefer modern society over what they had. Commonly available running water, electricity, heating, insulation, the internet are some pretty nice things.
>You need a nation who cares more about its people than its GDP to achieve that, and I posit no nation on Earth has that level of care for its people.
And it will come at the expense of future generations. All the advancements of yesterday are what make our modern comforts possible. If we stop that in some redistribution fantasy then tomorrow will not be an improvement over today.
This is totally, completely, utterly irrelevant to the GP's point.
I mean, if you believe you live in a binary world everything is pretty easy. It's a one or a zero. Capitalism, or some kind of hellish pit of communism.
That is not the real world. Instead it is a moderation of forces. Capitalist robber barons would enslave you just as quickly as the most brutal authoritarian would, if allowed. We succeed not because we let the captains of industry do what they like, for we know their greed can never be sated. Instead we have we share are progress in a way that benefits humanity and not the few. We strive to make the world better and not just ourselves richer.
We put radium on shit because it glowed, without adequately studying why until women's jaws were deteriorating in their faces.
We put asbestos on shit to prevent fires, but oopsie poopsie, better not breathe any in! And man, those knocking engines just need a little heavy metals to settle down. Whoops, IQ just noticeably dropped? Oh well.
History shows us that humankind, even when assembled and "organized" is always a day late and a dollar short to averting disaster. Nothing ever happens of import until something unavoidable and existentially threatening happens. That's when, magically, we'll be "friends" and "allies" and talk about "camaraderie". As soon as disaster is averted, they go back to being assholes to each other, just like during COVID-19.
What, pray tell, do you think humankind was able to do about evil in the past 5 years?
Imagine if we were all working 18 hour subsistence farming jobs now just to survive, it's ridiculous to argue that eschewing automation for anything is detrimental, it only serves to enhance society and make it more productive.
Then you definitely shouldn't look at actual reports of time spent, leisure time, etc, in those eras.
Because that's nothing at all what life was in the eras you're thinking of.
How much of our modern time - work hours - do we spend to maintain the cars we take to work, and the large houses we were convinced to buy "as an investment," etc? Or just our personal tech stacks that always somehow seem to need replacement?
Sure, they might not have spent as many hours farming, but they also needed to manually do all of the other things necessary for a decent life. Wash clothes by hand, take care of the (farm) animals, repair your house, build a house, cut trees, make firewood etc. It's an endless list of things that nowadays you just pay someone some money for.
Nurses, teachers? Those bring insane value but get little recognition, in all senses, for that.
but those value is not privately captureable by them, but is instead captured by the students, or the patients etc.
My theory is the 18 hour subsistence farmer story is a myth we tell ourselves that the world we’ve created is better, no questions asked.
I live in a part of the world where people do a surprising amount of farming by hand. Very little machines and almost no fertiliser is used. No one, absolutely no one is working 18 hours. Mostly they have busy springs, relaxing summers and festivals for autumn harvest. Most farmers are in their 70s so they’re not looking to work hard either.
I’m sure subsistence farmers existed, but they likely worked hard because they weren’t educated well. I bet there have always been some higher quality farming going on.
I’ve also stayed with a remote Aboriginal tribe in Australia. I have to be honest they had very relaxed lifestyles.
We bag out the last to make ourselves feel better about the future we’re creating. We’re insecure.
Pre-industrial workers actually worked less than people who have 40 hour work weeks do[1].
[1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
Not in America - upskilling workers is too expensive.
Displaced workers are gonna break rocks in debtor’s prisons & the median voter already thinks they deserve it.
AI will bring mass downward mobility.
Companies already send that clear message even without AI. That's why there's fear here: we expect companies to behave as they always have, and that is with a level of contempt for human workers.
Your mistake is you’re looking at a future world in todays state.
Replacing horses with cars will free up those horses to do other productive work, like pulling plows and turning stone mills, thereby benifiting the horses.
Ultimately the fact that you an individual intended to intend an intention continues to hold a $1 value represented in metal coins until the last of us joins the rest in pickle jars.
Most of the people I personally know who are 60 and older have jobs.
The economy will shift to just addressing the wants and needs of those with wealth via luxury goods and services:
> How do we make money from this theme? We see two ways. The first is simple. If you believe, like us, that the Plutonomy exists, and explains why global imbalances have built up (for example the savings rate differentials), and you believe there is no imminent threat to plutonomy, you must in turn believe that the current “end of the world is nigh” risk premium on equities, due to current account deficits, is too high. Conclusion: buy equities.
> There is however a more refined way to play plutonomy, and this is to buy shares in the companies that make the toys that the Plutonomists enjoy.
You don't have to read between the lines, you can simply read the lines.
Companies are people. You are saying people running those companies are doing that to other people
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. - Aristotle
Companies exhibit emergent behavior that might be hard, if at all possible, to predict if you only had a single individual as reference. For instance, most individuals would probably never agree to manufacture a weapon that is specifically requested to kill your neighbor. However, this same individual will show no empathy and remorse for their labor in a company that produces something that is used to commit incredible destruction to the earth, even contributing to the deaths of millions of people.
Are you talking about gun manufacturing for law enforcement or military purposes? Because those weapons aren’t manufactured to kill one specific person (my neighbor).
If somehow the government were to pay me adequately to hand-craft a gun for the police or military, I would have no moral compunctions in doing so. I see no reason for the government to ask me to hand-make an inferior good at such high cost, though.
Everyone has a boss, and a budget to hit.
It is the Banality of Evil.
US corporations are full of layers of Middle management made of "Eichmann"s.
Be it violating environmental laws on dumping, covering up sexual abuse, or sending people to ovens.
It happens, has happened, and will get worse.
And yes, it will be done by humans to other humans.
Or that we should just allow for any group of people to do anything to another group of people, because it just happens, it’s just human nature, so whatever?
I guess that’s kind of the way the US has been going for a while now
Just because humans tend to create systems that tend to reward evil doesn't mean we can't try to be better.
The problem isn't capitalism or communism. Both are run by humans who could choose to be better.
I don't know how to improve humans. I know it isn't religion given it's tendency to just become another system that rewards evil.
Maybe it is just groups, humans don't do well in large hierarchies.
But not saying to give up, maybe just saying, stop arguing about capitalism versus communism, since they both can be good or bad depending on the humans that make it up.
Seems like you are just arguing with yourself there
Meditations on Moloch
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Companies are a completely made up concept. Made up by, you guessed it, people
People create them, people run them, people decide what to do with them
It’s the same for any organization
It’s people all the way down
Well, of course. Edge cases aside, why shouldn’t anyone save on money when it’s acceptable to do so?
Reducing costs is really, really important, and nothing to be ashamed about.
At that point, there's absolutely something to be ashamed about.
Eg you could build a smart phone that mechanically lasts ten years, but who would want to use a ten year old smart phone anyway?
The thing is we can't help but compare people on the value that they bring. We can't go on about human value being tied to our creativity, emotional sensitivity, or any skill because once AI can do that, that value goes out the window for humans. Humans have to be valuable for no other reason than the fact that they are human, even if they technically are a burden. This is the only mentality that will keep humans safe in the AI apocalypse.
It has always been unclear--in cases where people's objectives differ--just whose values are used determine what counts as "value".
It's a simplification that served us well when the common threat was famine or disease or war, but those threats weigh less on us these days. We're more concerned with mistreatment from each other, so we probably need something that answers "whose values?" instead so that we can be reminded to check if that person's agenda is actually worth persuing.
Such a shift might help interrupt dangerous optimizations such as optimizing for GDP at the expense of biosphere stability.
“Laborers fret not, you’ve been liberated from your job actually, and I sure hope you bought securities!”
Just imagine how many more people would be even more liberated from inhumane work and low living conditions if wealth didn’t accrue quite so severely to the top N%.
Not a reason to stop progress IMO but a good reason to question it and try to nudge it in certain directions.
Automation can be great when used to replace dangerous or back breaking work that is difficult for humans to preform. AI is not really that though.
I see many problems with this statement:
- Is a new robot-only company fairer than firing humans at an old company?
- Should we as a society forego the benefits of automation, because it makes some people unemployed?
- Should there be a robot tax? What is a robot? Is my calculator a robot that keeps an arithmeticist out of a job?
- Should an enterprise created for profit consider other values than profit?
In my view, we should automate as much as we can, because we spend less valuable human time on what is achievable by machine. However, as more and more people fall behind as technology progresses, it might pose a problem, so I think we should institute basic income.
I wouldn't bother with regulating the minutia, just tax Laffer-optimally and give out benefits so as not to create perverse incentives.
But I am keen to know someone's thoughts to the contrary.
Basic income is the most counterproductive idea possible. We should have spent more on education over 100 years ago.
Or maybe it’s less counterproductive, more irrelevant, if some topic at hand is “what should we do about increasing automation [in the future]?”
If that's at hand, the answer is to let the rest of society catch up before increasing automation.
I agree some form of government intervention is needed because it's the government's fault in the first place. I'm just saying something that should not be controversial at all: throwing money at the problem is crazy.
It’s a time to be pro-human, across many topics.
Yes! Very much yes! Adam Smith himself noted that a capitalist enterprise, if not run according to good values (which to him meant Christian values, but it need not be that for everyone), would be a horrible thing. That hasn't really changed since. A business needs to have some values behind it other than pure profit-seeking, or else it becomes a serious ill for society.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
-- John Adams
Moral people don't really need laws, laws exist to deter crime.
Frankly I don't get what John Adams was trying say? Can someone explain?
As an example in recent news Super Court justices have been accused of taking bribes. It is no surprise because there is now ethical rules the right-wing majority of the Supreme Court says it would have to follow, by law. I'm not sure if that is true but surely there could be such a law.
So we need laws, and we need better laws, which means laws that have fewer loopholes, and which apply to all, even Supreme Court justices and Presidents. Are we there yet? Not yet.
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-un...
> Because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by [...] morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or [amorous] galantry, would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
-- Douglas Adams
"If Joe Biden is elected to the White House, there’s a good chance you will be dead within the year." "Republicans will be hunted, police will stand down."
-- Scott Adams
"Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the fuck away. I don’t think it makes any sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens any more […] I’m going to back off on being helpful to Black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off."
-- Scott Adams
"The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It's just easier this way for everyone. You don't argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn't eat candy for dinner. You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don't argue when a women tells you she's only making 80 cents to your dollar. It's the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles."
-- Scott Adams
And from the lunatic, eccentric, enigmatic, passionate, romantic, homicidal end:
"We danced the Mamushka while Nero fiddled, we danced the Mamushka at Waterloo. We danced the Mamushka for Jack the Ripper, and now, Fester Addams, this Mamushka is for you."
-- Gomez Addams
"Fan out. Pugsley, head for the dung heap. Mama and Morticia, the shallow graves. I'll take the abyss. Lurch, check out the bottomless pit. Fester?"
-- Gomez Addams
Enterprises don't consider anything, enterprises cannot think. Only people do. Enterprise is made of people. Should people consider other values than profit?
Yes. AI generates sameness on a good day, and comical gibberish on a bad day, that will never change because, AI isn't human.
Sameness will drive customers to look for human made stuff, gibberish will drive them away.
It seems to be a lot of zealotry, buttery and violence. Learning to be good with all that free time will take work.
Of course, we often pay each other for these frivolities. So people don't treat them as free time.
Do we measure software engineers in terms of their lines of code per day? I feel that this is basically what you and others are doing when you compare writing or illustration to digging holes. You're seriously misunderstanding the economy of these fields. Productivity has almost nothing to do with the market for art or writing. What matters is the quality of a work (very hard to measure and deeply ingrained in our psyche) and the attention a work receives (Software engineers should be more familiar with this. It is the "algorithm" people love to disparage). We had more than enough productivity already in these spaces. Does giving people a content firehose actually do anything to these markets? Have you read any books written using AI? Do you know and follow any AI artists? Is anyone besides Nvidia and OpenAI making money here?
I understand the appeal of the models, and as a software engineer I've gotten at least some use out of them. But even in that space I have to wonder if producing more code is a net positive. There's a lot of drawbacks to producing more code. There's more chances to write bugs, more you have to document and maintain, and you're potentially overlooking simpler and more elegant solutions.
I guess all I'm trying to say is when you say this is just a hole digger, you're glossing over a lot of nuance.
Depends very highly on what kind of art we're talking about.
There's the "I get my stuff into galleries" artist. This IMO has an extremely high social component. It's in good part about who you know, how well you can spin your work, how much some rich guy has paid for it in the past, etc.
There's the "I sell commissions on Deviant Art" artist. That's to me a kind of hole digging position already. Certainly you need to produce good work, but what seems to make a good artist in that scope is good work, reliably, fast.
There's the "I illustrate stuff" artist. A more properly commercial version of the above. From my limited experience there's demand to pump out work quickly and as cheaply as possible. Eg, a book may need a cover or a few illustrations, or an ad might need something drawn on it. In many cases the client is basically looking for a hole to fill. The cases where somebody wants to have something truly beautiful that lots of effort went into seem vanishingly rare. There's a reason why corporate styles like "Alegria" exist and are annoyingly common.
There's the "I draw comics" artist. Those need extreme consistency because they're on a tight deadline.
> Do you know and follow any AI artists?
Honestly, I'm beginning to. AI is just a tool like any other. Some people use it to faff about and make random stuff, but I'm starting to notice people using it to produce things that have a coherent plot or tell a story, or at least keep a consistent setting. It's still janky at this point because it's hard to maintain consistency.
Really, there's nothing weird about that. Think about supremely lazy things like Garfield or Ctrl+Alt+Del. They still had a following even when graphically they were supremely lazy. If you can copy/paste body parts to assemble a comic and still get some people interested, no reason why you couldn't do it with AI. Heck, it'd come out looking better at this point.
Even better, agricultural machinery. At one time > 90% of humans were unfree agricultural laborers ("unfree" = slaves, serfs, or something similar). The remaining 10% were mostly soldiers, with a thin veneer of lords and priests at the very top.
unless the AI models surpass a certain critical point, with which new and original works could be generated without using original human derived works.
aka, an AGI.
We as society aren't the beneficiaries of automation, those profits go to private owners. Given that price points exist, the benefits of lowering costs of production are captured by increasing profit margins.
After those profits are captured, we as society have to shoulder the burden of caring for potentially thousands, or more, people who are put out of work, and their families.
Historically, that hasn't held true for long: competition catches up.
Or increased diversity, customisation, higher quality, more availability, and because of competition - where it exists, cheaper products and services.
Increased capability leads to demand scaling. Making a road wider will increase traffic to match.
Should an AI created to make paper clips consider other values than making paper clips?
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/squiggle-maximizer-formerly-pa...
Diving all the way down ad absurdum: What's the point of maximizing profit if there are no humans to utilize those profits?
"Dude, you broke the future": https://youtube.com/watch?v=RmIgJ64z6Y4
It’s better to have a machine that makes 100 cakes for 100 people with only 2 people working than to employ all 100 people without the machine to make 4 cakes.
The people who make the profits have the power to influence legislation to benefit themselves and keep from sharing in their profit. This is one of the fears that actually gave rise to the Luddite movement, and so far history has only proven that there is merit to this fear.
When workers brought up these concerns, the factory owners brushed them aside which forced the Luddites to use more extreme measures to be heard like breaking factory machinery. Eventually the wealthy owner class pushed parliament to pass a law that made machine-breaking subject to the death penalty.
“In an attempt to halt or at least make the transition smoother, the Luddites initially sought to renegotiate terms of working conditions based on the changing circumstances in the workplace. Some of the ideas and requests included the introduction of a minimum wage, the adherence of companies to abide by minimum labour standards, and taxes which would enable funds to be created for workers’ pensions. Whilst these terms do not seem unreasonable in the modern day workplace, for the wealthy factory owners, these attempts at bargaining proved futile.
The Luddite movement therefore emerged when attempts at negotiation failed and their valid concerns were not listened to, let alone addressed. “
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/The-L...
What are you talking about? Taxation has been around for a very very long time.
False dichotomy + poorly statistically worded.
The proper question is always "Would society be better off at the margin with more automation". The answer someday may well be "No, because many people are already unemployed, and this will exacerbate that even further", but there's no reason to add that clause to the question.
Enterprise is created to provide a beneficial service to the society/humanity/world. Profit is a means to sustain the people, who are working in the enterprise, and subsequently the enterprise. The problem starts when some smartass in power becomes greedy and turns an enterprise for service to people into an enterprise ONLY for profit. If you only want to make money, work in a govt mint.
This just sounds like rent-seeking. People should get paid, because they once upon a time had a job. Now machines do the job better and for cheaper, therefore you deserve to be paid for it?
How about the compensation is the improved products or better prices for all of society?
Lets imagine your future world.
Manual labor, right? No, that's done by robots.
Arts and music... well, no. Some generative LLM hooked up to the data feeds of all human emotions is cranking more art/music per day then all 10 billion people on the planet can ever consume.
Sex, the oldest profession. Na, Cherry (and Ken) 2000 came out a decade ago and has met our more primal needs since then.
So, now what do you do with all these masses have have no purpose. Oh, you don't care because you're going to be one of the enlightened few that somehow makes it out of the rat trap? Seems unlikely.
Stop demanding a future dystopia.
Somebody has to take all these disparate pieces of technology and glue them together to create useful stuff. Programming has an endless list of useful libraries and yet programmers are as much in demand as ever, because it's not easy to glue different libraries together. The same thing is important in every other type of business.
You want your AI to do manual labor? You better figure out a way to glue the AI to a robot and make it understand its environment and goals.
Want your AI to make music? It might be able to come up with a great composition itself, but you're still going to have to pick out the best one out of the 10,000 you generated. Then you've got to title it, publish it, and spread it around.
All of these are things AI could conceivably do, but it will require an enormous amount of work. If there's not enough scale there then that work is not worth it. Ie it's going to be left for humans to do.
Wasn't this message sent in the 80s and 90s when it was somehow acceptable to offshore manufacturing for increased bottom line devastating economies and people of small/mid size cities.
Huh, what? When you get a glass of fresh water from your tap, do you send a dollar to the displaced water carriers of yesteryear?
Compensation doesn't fix the problem. As more and more jobs get replaced with AI or robots, the number of ways of earning a living shrinks and people have no money to buy the products and services offered by the AI-poweered industrial complex. It's a problem that the billionaire gods don't want to see. The politicians don't have a clue how to address it either.
Is this true? it seems there are new ways cropping up all the time
Only now when "prestigious" white collar positions are being threatened people are starting to freak out.
By replacing labour with robots and not compensating them, you're sending a clear message that you don't respect people and the value that they bring.
We have a mandate for us and our future generations to learn from the lessons of history and stand together as human beings to ensure that the value that we have created is respected and shared with those who created it.
We don't deserve the scraps that fall to us, we deserve a seat at the damn table.