I refused to train the AI that could replace me

Even if you think you don't have enough impact, reflecting on these issues is better than blindly jumping into the trend.

Reminds me a bit of https://www.amazon.com/Job-Went-India-Pragmatic-Programmers/... tbh (look when that came out), not nearly the same scale but similar questions...

If it is that or starve, the I would probably have taken the job. But yeah, if there where alternatives, no thanks.

Unfortunately, the mass of people, in general, have very little self determination or descretion. People go with trends and crowds. That's a low resistance path, which does not require you to support your decisions. The trend will support your decisions.

So, the phenomenon will continue. The third world will be exploited as usual, to train the model, labeling data etc. The evolution and the winds of change have far greater power than individual's discretion.

Hasn’t that always been the case? Companies have replaced their labour with cheaper alternatives from the other part of the world for decades.

Now the only difference is that they replace you with a machine instead of a human.

People have objected to training their replacements since forever. Younger people, foreigners, now machines. What else is new?

> 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.

It's nice, but it won't change anything, there will be always someone willing to do it. It's not exactly trolley problem, where maybe significant majority could agree on not training AI.

> Traditionally, this decision was made by humans, but now AI has taken over, and decides who gets hired

Btw. this would be illegal in EU, you have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing.

I believe the people currently at the frontier for ai training as either one of 2 types. First who are genuine freaks of nature and have an obsession to see the epitome of this technology, the other is people who have genuine malicious intent and probably hope that the ai replaces human. The former usually don't mean to do this, but in their obsession it results in the outcome of ai replace skills workers

I dissent from the comments currently here, and give the author kudos for doing what's right even to his detriment, which is much more than can be said for anyone taking a corporate job

I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think it's an effective orientation to a future world where the AI will be trained anyway.

Also, I don't think a PHD of Industrial Sociology is really a job anyone needs to have done, so it's unlikely anyone will bother training an AI to do it. That doesn't mean I think studying Industrial Sociology is worthless, I just think it's unlikely anyone will fund training an AI to do it. Besides, is that even how AI's are trained? By some professor somewhere teaching them how to do his/her job before being replaced? That's like how it worked in Player Piano by Vonnegut, but it's not how they actually work.