[ToucanLoucan]

AI is best stated as a tool to permit wealth to access skill without skill being permitted to access wealth.

I've been called a Luddite so many times on this website asking basic questions of how in a world where your labor is required in order for you to earn a living these entire reams of people are meant to continue living, and nobody has an answer.

[pinkmuffinere]

I think you’re arguing against continued development of AI? (Apologies if I’ve misunderstood)

I won’t use the word “Luddite”, but your argument could be applied word-for-word to automatic looms:

“[The automatic loom] is best stated as a tool to permit wealth to access skill without skill being permitted to access wealth… how in a world where your labor is required in order for you to earn a living these entire reams of people are meant to continue living…“

Historically, automatic looms were a net benefit to society. I think this indicates that your argument against development of AI is insufficient.

[dmonitor]

Perhaps we need to differentiate between "end products" and "intermediate products". Cloth/fabric is an intermediate product. You use it to make things to sell, so increasing its production while decreasing human labor input is net beneficial, since it increases demand for jobs downstream of the supply chain. Music and art are enjoyed as end products, though. There hasn't been an industry-wide supply chain shortage of music since the invention of the record player (an invention that took music to the consumers, increasing demand from artists).

[ToucanLoucan]

Truthfully, I don't give a shit about AI. It's a tool to generate mediocre garbage, be that writing, be that images, be that music, whatever, and in those tasks, it can largely succeed. If you want a lifetime of generated Lo-Fi to listen to, it will do that. If you want a lifetime of generated hentai to fap to, it will do that too, and the outputs meet your standards, congrats, you are an average consumer of mediocre art, one among millions, perhaps billions. I wish you personally no ill will.

What I care about is all the musicians, the designers, the artists, the writers, who to be clear, are already and have been for many years struggling to earn a living plying their craft, who are in for even more torment for trying to just... live. For trying to turn their given and practiced talents into money so they can not freeze to death.

And I'm frustrated that they need to go without a means to live because billionaires, apparently, need more billions. And I'm angry that our society has allocated power solely to those billionaires to make those decisions. And I'm nursing a visceral hatred of every single one of them who are preparing to break the social contract to millions of people so they can have another, and I can't stress this enough, absolutely meaningless massive amount of money, to go with their already massive amounts of money...

For. Doing. Nothing.

So yes, I am a Luddite. I see monied classes financially backing new technology that will allow them to generate more products of lower quality using fewer (if any) human laborers so they can pocket even more money while fucking over working class people.

[genewitch]

I started writing music in the mid-90s, did 7-8 albums with intrepid demise, and a few solo albums as well.

My latest and possibly last track is called "I ain't even writing music anymore byeeee" because AI can take the shit I hear in my skull and translate it pretty good to an mp3.

I'm done. I made so much $0 that I'm set for life from my music.

https://m.soundcloud.com/djoutcold/i-aint-even-writing-music...

You can peruse my older tracks. My soundcloud is hotlinks and esoteria, not my collected works.

edit: i should explain that track. It was conceived, "written", "mastered", "cut", and then published by me within about 30 minutes of the news of the South Korean Coup attempt. The lyrics are in Lojban. about 5-8 minutes of that 30 was arguing with chatgpt-4o about the proper Lojban transliteration of coup d'etat, i put my foot down, and the lojban translation of that specific word is mine, everything else is from an online translation site. So i wrote the lyrics, managed the translation, and udio or whatever did the music. it took ~12 minutes to re-run the generation and extend it to find the correct "sound".

This is almost exactly what i heard in my head when i heard about the coup attempt. Oh also i don't know how to write "metal" or "djent", so this is what djent sounds like to me; i hope this helps clear up any confusion about why that specific song "sucks" or whatever.

[ta8645]

Money flows to the things people want. The real housewives, the view, twilight, etc. Hell people make millions simply playing video games on twitch. But nobody is owed an income for doing something they love.

The question you should be asking, is how do you increase demand for the things you value? How do you make people want the thing you have to offer. Musicians, comedians, and other artists who figure out that answer (or luck into it), get very wealthy indeed.

> For. Doing. Nothing.

That's obviously not true. I've tried doing nothing for a long time, and am not anywhere close to a billionaire.

[ToucanLoucan]

> Money flows to the things people want. The real housewives, the view, twilight, etc. Hell people make millions simply playing video games on twitch. But nobody is owed an income for doing something they love.

It's not about love. Tons of creatives work jobs they loathe just as much as any other profession, but it's what they're trained to do. It's their specialization, one honed over their entire lives, which can be like 25 years, or 50, or 70. What are those people supposed to do when the job market for the skill they're in rapidly shrinks?

And, in a larger view: what do you think is going to happen to the society you live in when thousands, millions of workers who work these jobs, now no longer can make rent? Can't pay their bills? Can't buy food? Like this is one of the better arguments against socialized medicine is that we have millions of people in the USA who work in the insurance industry, both for insurers, and for doctors offices. Medical billing is an entire job description and skillset, and like, I don't think that should be a thing, I think we should get rid of it, but I'm also cognizant that we'll have tons of white collar professionals who will need financial support and job training as part of that because I'm not a heartless monster and don't want to send millions of people to die on the streets.

> The question you should be asking, is how do you increase demand for the things you value? How do you make people want the thing you have to offer. Musicians, comedians, and other artists who figure out that answer (or luck into it), get very wealthy indeed.

A tiny, tiny minority get wealthy. Most creatives, even successful ones, earn like... a middling middle class income, in good times. But that income also comes with a lot of it's own issues: having to arrange their own insurance, their taxes are a nightmare, and the income stream isn't steady like a paycheck, it's gig-based.

And a whole lot more do it, indeed, for the love of their craft and oftentimes have other jobs to make enough to get by.

[ta8645]

> It's their specialization.

As others have mentioned, we have gone through this in human history before, say when looms became automated and huge employers disappeared overnight. Things change, and those that come after us, wont miss the things that disappeared; nobody is calling for the destruction of automated looms today in order to restore those manual jobs.

To my mind, the problem is one of expectations, and wildly out of control governments which empower corporate monopolies. It has disempowered small, local communities to trade and lift each other up, in small and simple ways.

[pixl97]

The key to doing nearly nothing and getting rich is to start out rich and then invest.

The problem is not being 'owed' an income. The problem comes in when there end up being a class of people that can't make a living doing anything. When this class becomes too large bad things tend to happen. Be it government enabled purges or the masses breaking out guillotines or riots burning entire cities down.

I, an invested member in the continuation of society, would like a rather non-violent world to be in our future.

[ta8645]

> I, an invested member in the continuation of society, would like a rather non-violent world to be in our future.

Of course, but we don't get there following fantasies. The truth is, through most of human history, most people were peasants eking out the most meager of lives. Often dying of disease in childhood, or at least well before their 30th birthday.

The problem is not poverty today.

By all realistic measures, nearly every single person in America (even those living on the street) is wealthier than most of our ancestors. The problem isn't even wealth inequality, since that's always existed as well, (and probably always will since it seems impossible to devise a political system that is durable and corruption proof).

The problem is unrealistic desires and a fantasy that everyone can live a rich life unconstrained by material limitations. The incredible wealth that Americans had enjoyed post WWII (arguably at the expense of much of the rest of the world) has set up unattainable expectations in people.

That's not to say we can't do better, but we need to reframe the entire problem and set it in the context of human history, not the last few hundred years of unsustainable growth.

[simonbarker87]

I also wonder what everyone is supposed to do if skills are simply AI’d in to uselessness.

The usual answer is something about how rich people want to rule the world and not pay for labour … but then that world will become pretty unpleasant for them to live in so that doesn’t track to me.

[ToucanLoucan]

This presumes the rich are looking further ahead than next quarter which doesn't scan for me considering the sorts of things a lot of them say.

[thatguy0900]

Rich people seem to be content with building a luxurious emergency bunker in new Zealand and then just rolling the dice on whether the world will go to shit or not. The only conclusion I can really come to is that they know the world will be going to shit no matter what they do or something.

[avidiax]

Rich people have a prisoner's dilemma if they are sufficiently self-aware. Maximum individual wealth and profit will come from maximally embracing AI. But if everyone does that, they are indeed rolling the dice on whether they'll instead be eating canned beans in New Zealand instead of upgrading their 150ft. yacht to a 155ft. yacht.

[ToucanLoucan]

> sufficiently self-aware

You look at people like Bezos, Musk and Zuck and tell me they have a shred of self-awareness.

[avidiax]

There is this narrative that "every technological revolution eventually created jobs, and this one is no different."

I think that glosses over some critical historical facts. When the saw mill upfitted with "labor-saving" machinery, those displaced saw hands didn't necessarily "upskill" themselves to get office jobs or start waiting tables. Chronic unemployment and an early grave from drink was a pretty likely outcome.

Where AI is different is that the scale and speed of job displacement is going to be unprecedented. We will need a new operating principle for our societies, and it will have to come about quickly. Otherwise, millions of displaced workers will have no reason not to defect from the social contract.

Eventually, humans can act as a managerial class for AI agents, just as we manage existing technologies. But you have to transition to that point without blowing up society.

It's little comfort that current AI has some rough edges. Sure, current AI might be adequate as a junior graphic designer or junior software engineer. But in the process of using these AIs, the senior humans will be generating the data to train the AI to replace at least mid-level positions. This doesn't require "AGI", just that the AI can follow instructions at one level higher abstraction and critically judge its own work.

This is a subtle and uncomfortable argument to make without falling into the "class warfare" or "luddite" tropes.

[dublinben]

Would an AGI that is “intelligent” enough to replace any kind of human labor deserve independent personhood and remuneration, or would they just be the perfect slave to capital?

[ixtli]

The second thing.

Also AGI is a floating signifier thats going to mean whatever is useful to marketers once they've used up the easier ones.

[ixtli]

Thats because there is no answer. Marx and all of the people who developed his theories after him have exhaustively and scientifically proved this. That's really whats happening: its not that people dont have an answer is that they're not admitting to the exploitative nature of private capital accumulation. The main internal contradiction of capitalism leads to the system creating large amounts of wealth but also equivalently large amounts of poverty.

Also, if you havent read the wikipedia article on the luddites you should. It's not as bad a moniker as revisionists would have you think! (Hint: they were protesting labor abuses, not simply opposed to advencement.)

[Reasoning]

> The main internal contradiction of capitalism leads to the system creating large amounts of wealth but also equivalently large amounts of poverty.

No it hasn't, the global poverty rate has been falling for 20+ years. 69% of people globally lived on <$5.50 a day in 2000, that number is down to 47% today.

You can also look at China and Vietnam, countries that have had drastic improvements to standards of living and collapsing poverty rates after abandoned communism. Or you could look at the divide between East Germany and West Germany or North Korea and South Korea. Or the economic collapse in Venezuela. The communist experiment was tried and it failed miserably.

[ixtli]

"capitalism solves this problem, just look at all the revolutions communists did that erased more poverty faster than at any time in human history"

i get what you're trying to say but ultimately it just seems like you're pointing at everything positive and saying "capitalism did that" without much effort or investigation. there's too much to cover in an HN thread but one thing thats interesting is that when this ideological sentiment is brought out no one ever seems to want to deal with the backslide in equity that happened across all measurements after the fall of the USSR. i think partially because westerners dont seem to be able to engage with the discussion without immediately whatabout-ing and claiming that doing the analysis is somehow stalin worship.

[quintes]

So communism it’s the answer cuz Marx?

[ixtli]

its funny, it seems the point of this kind of response is to imply that my analysis is naive or overly simplistic but there are hundreds of thousands of pages of math and science and philosophy on the topic. im not just making this up, im simply explaining why its happening. these smug responses never seem to actually engage with anything except simplistic propaganda substituted in for the actual argument being made.

[quintes]

How can it be propaganda? It’s a short question based on your comment. The onus on you is to expand.

There is plenty of evidence against the principles and implementation of communism.

This post was about lofi you started about Marx and capitalism not me mate

[pixl97]

The answer doesn't seem to be late stage capitalism.

[tartoran]

No but some form of socialism mixed with capitalism