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by visarga 1609 days ago
> Innovation is still finite per unit of time. People's wants are infinite.

That's what I say to people afraid AI will steal their jobs. No way we run out of jobs before we run out of desires. We can always imagine and want more, and it's so easy to become entitled to what you already have and think nothing of it.
1 comments
oblio 1609 days ago
People are not necessarily afraid of AIs on their own (though they are afraid of them, too, at least a bit, see Skynet).

I think the bigger fear is that of AI ownership. In a "winner takes all world" where people have a hard time sharing effectively, if there's no need for human labor for many fields and AI owners can just buy lawmakers, some people can just become infinitely powerful. Creating a permanent underclass of those who missed their chance.

See what's happening with coal mining, for example. People keep talking about reconversions but frequently what happens with these people is... Nothing. Their kids are the ones that move away or work in new fields, but most adults over 40 or 50 don't radically change their field of work en masse, or if they do, it's towards even crappier jobs.

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visarga 1609 days ago
Use it or lose it - this new technology will also be available in open source, easy to use format for everyone to empower their lives, but those who refuse to partake will be at a disadvantage.

It used to be that you needed a large dataset and a custom architecture for each individual task. Now you can use a general model and a few examples, it will catch on much faster on what you want it to do. Sometimes it's just as simple as telling it in free language what the task is.

What took whole departments multiple years to achieve will become something regular people could do. We learned to live with internet and cell phones, we can learn to program AI that is by design especially easy to program.

For example, how easy is it to make an image classifier with CLIP. https://openai.com/blog/clip/

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oblio 1609 days ago
What if you don't work in IT? So probably 95% of all workers out there?

Is everyone supposed to work in IT in AI-related fields?

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