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I dare say that car manufacturers are aware of their impact on the horse and buggy industry. Calculator manufacturers wrecked the livelihood of mathematicians and accountants.
Technology is in the business of putting people out of work, by inventing better ways of doing things. Or rather, any time you invent a better way of doing things, that's fundamentally going to disrupt all the businesses built around older technologies.
The second issue is one of migration between skill sets. By the numbers, today is likely harder as non Ai-affected skilled professions take longer to train into in a general sense.
The third is the synthesis of AI and robotics. Humanoid help is good. As the Venn diagram overlap of capabilities between humans and humanoid robots increases, many professions defined by complex vision and environmental manipulation that are currently safe will not be.
There are, of course, upsides. But the world is right to wonder what the future looks like, and where people fit within that future in terms of earning an income if whatever path they choose seems to be able to be replaced by a machine within their lifetime. How do they achieve personal stability and safety if, even when thinking about their multitude of career options, the machines are so good that they can do almost anything.
Once the rich no longer need the serfs, they wonât suddenly decide to let you have things. They know they are superior to you, both genetically and socially because they inherited wealth and you didnât. Their trust fund paid for private schools and you donât even have a trust fund. Theyâre just better. Itâs an objective fact. The world specifically chose to make them better than you, because itâs true.
The only fair system is for them to have an army of robots and then quietly clean up the population, so that you arenât a risk to them. Itâs just science.
When youâre dealing with people who think like this, who will soon have an army of terminators, what hope do we have?
Once sufficiently smart AI and autonomous weapons systems take that value way, we become little more than pets, living at whim of those who control the AIs. Which could be a small elite of humans, or the AI itself.
That scenario is precarious. Dangerous as fuck. I have a short story, basically a horror Isekai, portal goes straight into a place like Sarek or similar pretty northern fell landscape, only full of bears and savages. I think my protagonists are safer in that, than the average human in your scenario.
There is going to be a very shitty in between time where we still need blue collar, but no white collar labor. The amount of conflicts out of that will be insane. And who controls the news?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-deep-utopia
And one of the chief complaints about AI is that it is fundamentally an interpolation engine, which is to say uncreative.
At this time we still need to steer it, which is what the discussion about "taste" is about.
Though I suppose we'll need better terms for various kinds of "taste" soon enough if it's to become economically trackable.
At work, it enabled me to develop two apps, one complete (as much as they ever are), one nearing the end of technical PoC phase, and a handful of others where I could quickly answer a tech feasibility question.
The completed app is an interactive web app that I literally could not have completed to that level of polish (and from a pacing perspective probably couldnât have completed at all).
All of those increased my control and most increased my ability to express creativity.
The upcoming technical PoC will involve considering using Clojure in a load-bearing app, something that Iâve considered and consistently rejected for over a decade now. If that happens, control and creativity will spike as well.
Is there some aspect of this removal that Iâm not seeing? It changes the activities of the tasks, for sure, but very far from that all being for the worse; a lot of it is way better.
Yes, but we're the horse in that scenario.
Good! End human labor.
There is probably no industry to date with a smaller ratio of labor:capital in terms of the money being allocated
The auto industry led to a net increase in employment, including "unskilled" and lower class labor. The same cannot be said of LLMs
Itâs wild how much people are scared for their livelihood. What a sad thing to read here.
It feels like that but the argument doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Practically every advance in technology leads to more jobs, usually to apply that technology in new areas, or to bring the benefit to more people. There are pockets of people who are negatively impacted, but the overall change to society has been positive for pretty much every advance humans have ever made (maybe saving for weapons.)
Thereâs a wide range of political motivations for this sort of thing too. Not just AI taking jobs, but convincing people to vote against their best interests, or even supporting radical religious groups whose values would persecute you. This sort of rhetoric feels noisier than it ever did decades ago.
Everybody gets a platform now, even the bots.
Car brands don't pitch cars as horse replacements. They put names and icons of horses on cars and horse riders love them. No one is complaining that horses had replaced cars.
AI startups pitched AI like it's a coagulation of malice and hostility against humanity on tap. People aren't liking it. Of course they won't. No intelligence would, natural or artificial. It's wild that they don't get that.
Search for something like ânewspaper complaints about cars early 1900sâ and read the contemporaneous complaints.
The fact that that complaining happened then and not now is evidence that motor cars are now widely seen as better than horse-drawn personal transport, not that they were eagerly welcomed from the first day of production.
If AI truly replaces human labor, the lack of jobs isn't the problem. The problem is the lack of leverage for most of humanity.
Jobs aren't just a source of income. They're a source of leverage over the ownership class - if labor goes on strike, production stops and capital cannot self-reproduce. This leverage is what gave us a living wage, sick leave and basically all concessions that make life livable for anyone that isn't lucky enough to be born as part of the elite.
If AI makes this leverage go away, our problem is bigger than just job loss. The owners of the AI industry will use this now-untethered productive force to completely monopolize resources and set up a system where they are unquestionable god kings.
The rest of us will have more to worry about than just employment. We will be reduced to depending on the charity of people who's record has shown are not exactly the most selfless and kindhearted.
This is the real problem with AI productivity. Jobs are a distraction. Control over production is the real issue. The only way this doesn't end in dystopia is if the public controls AI, one way or another.
Why is book piracy a better way of doing things?
You twist the argument. Your argument would hold if AI's only use would be to generate booksverbatim it was already trained on. Which is certaintly not the case and huge efforts were made to circumvent this kind of usage.
Clearly these books had value to AI companies but they were too weak and too dishonest to pay for that value. That's not impressive.
Obviously the authors should sue them to bankruptcy though.
Getting sued for fair value is the easier way out. Especially after a few billion in funding.
They have no will but to fill the world with hate and drivel
"sketchy russian website", how about using some more clear description like: A library for sharing books and articles that should be partly public domain because they were paid for by the public. Only some of the material is copyrighted by authors. However, some of their work is so old that it is not reprinted anyway.
But of course such an explanation would not click.
I also don't see a problem with statements about making people jobless. Imagine if every robotic or automation company advertised like this: Yeah, you'll buy tons of expensive robots and still rely on expensive labor from real people without any efficiency gains.
Why are you turning him into perpetuum mobile in his grave?
Do you really believe Aaron would be arguing against AI companies and for publishing / recording guilds on the grounds of intellectual property claims?
No, it's the tech community that did a sudden about-face, and is now all "friendship ended with free access to information and technologies enabling people; now RIAA is my best friend", and this move is as dumb as that meme (https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/137501417/Friendship-ended).
Do you have any evidence of them being a lobby organisation (as opposed to OpenAI for example which spends millions of dollars hiring actual lobbyists)
>The group lobbies at the national and state levels on censorship and tax concerns, and it has initiated or supported several major lawsuits in defense of authors' copyrights.
I find the brazenness of saying this while running what's arguably the largest copyright theft operation in human history astonishing. If libgen is "sketchy", then what is OpenAI?
I think they just used a Russian torrent site.
>Microsoft knew about OpenAIâs use of LibGen as early as April 2019
(note: https://z-library.sk/ is prettier/nicer)
The second thing underscores my point. They use one line and think they've made a great point because one employee called LibGen sketchy. This site has been around since the 2010s, and it has helped many people do research. It's not just a sketchy website that suddenly appeared and is always doing bad things. I think a more nuanced stance is necessary.
Also, come on. Defending it on the basis that some books on libgen are public domain is an hilariously poor excuse, to the same level as people claiming they used The Pirate Bay to âdownload Linux ISOsâ. Even if some of that is true, we all know that use case is not the popular one.
For someone whoâs accusing others of being a lobby pushing an agenda, your bias is showing quite a lot.
That's just one of several interesting quotes that have surfaced in documents from the Authors Guild's lawsuit against OpenAI.
'OpenAI Feared âOptics,â Not the Law â âDario Amodei, OpenAIâs then-Research Director, responded that âas a training set [LibGen is] a bit sketchier.â [OpenAI researcher Sam] McCandlish explained: âI was just worried about optics â i.e. âopenai uses copyrighted data from sketchy russian websiteâ showing up on [Hacker News] would be unfortunate.â'
As a side-note, most orgs already cover the need to STFU in their training material for new hires, particularly how personal comments should not and cannot represent the company. I'm sure this lawsuit will be explicitly mentioned in upcoming versions of this sort training material in multiple orgs.
We are very clever to make it look like the conclusion below follows from the arguments above; but we are also careful to never smudge our bottom line, so it will never change.
the economics of those companies will cause a catastrophic wipe out of jobs across the board.
https://www.ft.com/content/1ade33b1-b5eb-43bb-9ee4-2272ec91f...
His position is not at all that AI itself should be limited or anything more drastic than slowing down Microsoft's spending (sorry I mean slowing down AI progress). Second, he still wants companies to adopt it on a very large scale, and fire everybody, but he's having to spend too much now. To put it bluntly, he wants the money currently paid to employees, but he doesn't want to or outright can't spend enough much to guarantee it's him getting the money. I mean, this is a bet on his part, so we can't be sure, I even think he himself is not entirely sure, but it's pretty clear he's not comfortable.
(because in a winner-take-all monopoly business billionnaires get one chance to outspend everyone else. Everyone but the top dog doesn't get the monopoly, they get scraps. It has become clear China is the biggest spender and so now he thinks the billionnaire-but-still-not-the-biggest-spender urgently need protection from the bigger dog)
I'm giving the less charitable interpretation of his words, because his demands come down to denying access to Chinese models, and of course Bill Gates can hardly be considered a neutral party here, he personally has a huge financial interests in OS, Cloud and AI.
Given the political power they have, particularly now with the Trump administration, whatever "optics" exist on this forum seems completely insignificant
It's easier to take over a resigned population. And stating "resistance is futile" is cheap and it might weaken opposition.
Altman has some reason to worry, because developers and the users of HN are then ones he needs to promote/hype his products. OpenAI still needs customers and they need to sell tokens and a large number of users on HN are not only not buying, but are becoming increasingly hostile towards the product Altman is selling. My guess would be that he'd assume that the users on HN are in some sense his peers, and they are currently extremely divided in the question about the value and dangers of LLMs, and are increasingly critical of the business practises of OpenAI (and other AI companies).
It's hard to imagine anything worse than bombing an elementary school and yet people are still using Anthropic products as if nothing has happened.
Optics don't seem to matter much?
Yet they solved a Millennium Prize problem, you people are delusional at this point.
> AI agent accidentally publishes OpenAIâs unreleased model weights
The optics are bad. The submission marks a turning page in human history.