tavavex
Let me know when you're ready to move onto advanced economic theory, including what happens to efficiency and value when a tiny number of entities concentrate an in-demand commodity in their hands and refuse to share.
I think the only way out is extreme scrutiny of all updates and paranoid minimization of all attack vectors, but the industry is only going to settle into that local minimum after we go through some devastating breaches.
Do you not see any difference between creating garbage in these ways?
People have created low-quality things since the dawn of humanity, using all sorts of tools, professional and not. However, before AI, making most types of garbage still required some human work, it wasn't infinitely scalable. And what was automatable ended up being so horrible that most people could easily dismiss it on the spot, or for them to even be filtered out algorithmically. On the internet, it wasn't perfect, but the signal-to-noise ratio was still at a level where you reliably discern the signal part.
AI changed this. Even a beginner can set one up to run almost fully unattended - and while what comes out won't be good, it also won't be immediately apparent as such, especially to the general public. More and more I find myself being fooled by a website link, a YouTube video thumbnail or a paragraph in an article. AI lets people create garbage that can impersonate real effort decently well, and they've used that to great extents. As we speak, thousands of agents are working day and night to pump every online platform with their 'content', without a single person in the world to care about what they put out. They're taking over and removing any good signal we had, everything becomes diluted with trash on a scale we have never seen. People notice that. Many are clueless about AI, and social influence plays a role, but they're not being misled and have their opinions manipulated. They wouldn't enjoy most of this content regardless.
In addition to the dilution of good information, they care about appearances and how AI lets you create an appearance of caring about something. The cheap food stand seemed honest when they put up an unassuming print of a simple Word document, and now seems dishonest when they put up an AI-generated mess that looks nothing like the real product and desperately tries to seem more refined than they are. Their manager was at least honest when he replied with a lazy 'k', and now he's lying about caring by dumping out a bullet point list of AI-generated text for a response that we know he himself hasn't read. It's the dream product for scammers, grifters and people who simply don't care.
Can you use AI to help create something good? Sure, but anyone doing that still needs to take their time and put care into it. Even if AI makes them faster, by the time they finish, 10TB of more slop has already been produced to drown them out, because that can be fully automated. Effectively 99.9% of AI content ends up being garbage, so of course people are going to reject it. Most probably don't want the few nuggets of gold for the ocean of waste.
Ludditism is not 'a disease', how dehumanizing. It's an expected response. If we did anything towards sharing the profits, it would not exist. If we answered the hard question of "how will a person survive if we permanently cut the number of all jobs in half?", it would not exist. Ludditism for the people being made irrelevant is stepping out of the oncoming train instead of proudly letting yourself be run over to take one for the team so maybe in a few decades' time some of the added value of new automation cancels out the job loss (how it was in the past - and that was when automated jobs still required loads of brand new workers).
Same one as almost every other modern tech company. AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI
This is evil in ways most people probably don't understand. To explain, here is the real message behind this, stripped of neutral journalism language. I'm not going to be shocked if this is the actual hidden thought process.
"Hello. You have now worked at our company for 7 years, contributing thousands of hours of work towards making our products better. We regret to inform you that you are worthless. Your so-called 'contributions' don't deserve to be printed on toilet paper our CEO wipes with. Frankly, you are a waste of space sucking up the air inside our offices, and we are itching to get rid of degenerates like you at the first opportunity. Your only chance to temporarily offset our perception of your uselessness is our upcoming 20-minute degradation ritual where you'll dance to our whims and plead by showing how much you love using whatever our CEO says you'll use. Building good solutions, knowing our tech stack, working with other people, being creative? All worthless, just like you. What really matters is if you can make me feel good. Fuck you and get ready to crawl on your knees."
But beside that, I don't think that LLM non-determinism is really the same thing as what you see in engineering. Engineering has things like tolerances and redundancy, and while they accommodate random events, they're known, estimated and expected. They also deal with external factors, not the potential of shoddy engineering in the same system they're working on. The best way I can compare it is building a bridge that can withstand twice the normal expected full load and with enough structural redundancy to not collapse even after a prolonged lack of maintenance. These things account for many types of natural degradation and edge cases that are expected. And then there's building a bridge that you know will collapse in the next 10 years at a completely random moment, and instead of engineering a more robust solution, tacking on more gadgets to make the collapse less bad - automatic gates that close the entrances to the bridge, lake drainage system that will suck out the debris, a drone system that drops a brand new randomized bridge on the same spot, and so on. It doesn't feel very much like engineering.
If that doesn't sound convincing to you, consider one other thing. If you gave an engineer a non-deterministic solution and a deterministic solution to the exact same problem, which do you think they would prefer? Would they willingly remove determinism from a system? Maybe it's not the chaos of the real world that scares software developers so much - lots of them have to work on systems that directly interact with the real world. What if it's the fact that there is now a fight to take away their nice, understandable, satisfying deterministic solutions and inject probabilistic chaos into things that never had to have it in the first place - into absolutely everything?
The game in the post is basically identical to Gerrymandle, they're far more similar to one another than either game is to what you've posted.
Or are you perhaps using a game that was merely inspired by another concept but expanded on it in brand new ways to defend a game that is literally identical to what it's copying?
In factory building games, the systems in play can be understood and are fully deterministic. You're given a set of tools and a problem, and then craft together a solution. Your reward isn't just seeing the item you want on a conveyor belt, but looking at the factory you built ticking like clockwork.
What you're describing is beating out endless nondeterministic fires. It's like you were forced to play Factorio exclusively through an algorithm that designs incomprehensible factories that don't work sometimes, but designs them much faster than you ever could. So you click the magic button and see a mass of buildings appear in front of you. They may work perfectly fine, but if they don't, you need to use the same statistical factory estimator to build an in-game factory fixer mechanism and factory tester mechanism. And then a few updates later the factory fixer breaks so you need to deploy a factory fixer fixer, and a belt clean-up machine, and so on ad infinitum. To me this doesn't seem satisfying in the slightest.
> Maybe don't start physical alterations with the police when you're armed?
A masterstroke of weasel word craftsmanship, it almost helps you get away with the fact the "physical altercation" means 'getting beaten to the ground after barely getting in the way', and "armed" means 'unarmed' as they pulled his gun from him before the killing. They had him pinned down to the ground, and then decided that summary execution sounded about right.
No, what you mean to say is that automation has eventually (decades later) led to higher purchasing power in the system as a whole. The outlook for people that were directly automated away was pretty bleak, actually. The hundreds of thousands of lamplighters did not largely become the thousands of electricians that were needed in this new industry.
This tracks for all industries. Automation literally means far fewer people will be employed to do the same job (otherwise what's the point of it?). That dumps these workers out at the low end of the general job market, where they have to compete with an increasing number of people. Because of the desperation to get any job, the wages fall. It's only decades later that societies settled into a new place and created enough brand new jobs to make up the shortfall, or applied regulation to reign in the crazy power imbalance. That's the stuff you miss out on if you only look at statistics that span centuries and treat the population as one homogeneous mass. The people who are directly targeted by automation are very likely to have their lives messed up for a very long time.
The closest they ever got to a 'nothing' NT was something like Windows Core or Factory/Validation OS. They still ship with some windowing capabilities, but they could strip them out if they wanted to, because there is a barebones text-only mode in Windows. Of course, all these editions are or were tightly regulated and only issued to big businesses who are supposed to have them, it's nothing that a Linux user would want.
That world can't exist. Mass surveillance IS power, and power corrupts. Any situation where the use of surveillance is reasonable is a temporary transitory state, the final end is always the same - repressions and authoritarianism. The technology is a siren song, it's too attractive for bad actors so they will try to get it in somehow. And once your system of checks and balances springs a leak somewhere, it sets in motion its eventual undoing, because there's almost no stopping it once it's relied upon somewhere.
The art you posted is like the first example. See, someone even made a blog all about it, they enjoy picking that stuff apart. Repetitive AI art created by typing out four words or pasting a Facebook post into the prompt text box is the second. People don't even entertain themselves by looking at how bad it is, they just plain hate it.
If so many of your friends are becoming unemployed, isn't this a sign of things to come? If people keep getting laid off in tech, what is the motivation to stay there if you might be next?
Like you, I'm confused by the dreams people post about working low-paid jobs if they're laid off. If the job market is flooded with tech workers, all these jobs will become even more competitive than before, and wages will fall. If you think your own career in tech is actually in danger (as in, you don't think you have any skills that couldn't be fully automated in the near future), I think the best option is getting some different education to put some barrier of certification between yourself and the rest of the desperate job market. But it should be something that's highly employable and difficult to automate, which is a scope that keeps narrowing.