[ta8645]

My guess is that guys being replaced by the steam shovel said the same thing about the quality of holes being dug into the ground. "No machine is ever going to be able to dig a hole as lovingly or as accurately as a man with a shovel". "The digging machines consume way too much energy" etc.

I'm pretty sure all the hand wringing about A.I. is going to fade into the past in the same way as every other strand of technophobia has before.

[kartoffelsaft]

I'm sure you can find people making arguments about a lack of quality from machines about textiles, woodworking, cinematography, etc., but digging holes? If you have a source of someone complaining about hole quality I'll be fascinated, but I moreso am thinking about a disconnecion here:

It looks like you see writing & editing as a menial task that we just do for it's extrinsic value, whereas these people who complain about quality see it as art we make for it's intrinsic value.

Where I think a lot of this "technophobia" actually comes from though are people who do/did this for a living and are not happy about their profession being obsolesced, and so try to justify their continued employment. And no, "there were new jobs after the cotton gin" will not comfort them, because that doesn't tell them what their next profession will be and presumes that the early industrial revolution was all peachy (it wasn't).

[bgwalter]

DDT has been banned, nuclear reactors have been banned in Germany, many people want to ban internal combustion engines, supersonic flight has been banned.

Moreover, most people have more attachment to their own thoughts or to reading the unaltered, genuine thoughts of other humans than to a hole in the ground. The comment you respond to literally talks about the Orwellian aspects of altering someone's works.

[therobots927]

Don't let ideas like human rights and dignity get in the way of the tech marketing hype...

[uz3snolc3t6fnrq]

there is no way you aren't able to discern the obvious differences between physical labor such as digging a hole and something as innate to human nature as creativity. you realize just how hollow a set of matrix multiplications are when you try to "talk to it" for more than 3 minutes. the whole point of language is to talk to other people and to communicate ideas to them. that is something that requires a human factor, otherwise the ideas are simply regurgitations of whatever the training set happened to contain. there are no original ideas in there. a steam shovel, on the other hand, does not need to be creative or to have human factor, it's simply digging a hole in the ground

[CamperBob2]

you realize just how hollow a set of matrix multiplications are when you try to "talk to it" for more than 3 minutes.

Then again, it only takes 2 minutes to come to that realization when talking with many humans.

[tempodox]

So why are you wasting your precious comments on the hollow humans here? Leave us alone and talk to LLMs. No doubt they will tell you you’re absolutely right.

[CamperBob2]

Oops, something went wrong

[os2warpman]

There is a difference.

Excavation is an inherently dangerous and physically strenuous job. Additionally, when precision or delicateness is required human diggers are still used.

If AI was being used to automate dangerous and physically strenuous jobs, I wouldn't mind.

Instead it is being used to make everything it touches worse.

Imagine an AI-powered excavator that fucked up every trench that it dug and techbros insisted you were wrong for criticizing the fucked up trench.

[ta8645]

> Instead it is being used to make everything it touches worse.

Your bias is showing through.

For what it's worth, it has made everything I use it for, much better. I can search the web for things on the net in mere seconds, where previously it could often take hours of tedious searching and reading.

And it used to be that Youtube comments were an absolute shit show of vitriol and bickering. A.I. moderation has made it so that now it's often a very pleasant experience chatting with people about video content.

[_DeadFred_]

Reading leads to the actual thoughts in our brains. It's a form of self programming. So yeah, it's OK for people to care about what they consume.

[ta8645]

And shovelling leads to actual muscles in our arms. People said that calculators would be the end of mathematical intelligence too, but it turns out to be largely a non-issue. People might not be as adept at calculating proper change in their heads today, but does it have a real-world consequence of note? Not really.

[anigbrowl]

When I see an argument like this I'm inclined to assume the author is motivated by jealousy or some strange kind of nihilism. Reminds me of the comment the other day expressing perplexity over why anyone would learn a new language instead of relying on machine translation.

[aspenmayer]

No one ever wrote a song or erected a statue for a steam shovel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)

[dahart]

There’s a song about Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, and there’s a monument to the Marion Steam Shovel in Le Roy, New York…

[aspenmayer]

I don't think parking an old steam shovel is much of a monument, but I'll give that one to you. No one built it for display, but they did put one there for that purpose, so I'll meet you halfway. I was wrong to suggest no one would do so, and there is clearly interest in such a thing, but I can't say that I agree that a statue exists. The song exists, the steam shovel monument exists. Appreciate the correction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Steam_Shovel_(Le_Roy,_N...

[therobots927]

You realize that making an analogy doesn't make your argument correct, right? And comparing digging through the ground to human thought and creativity is an odd mix of self debasement and arrogance. I'm guessing there is an unspoken financial incentive guiding your point of view.

[lotsofpulp]

ta8645 did not make an analogy, nor did they use it to support an argument.

They posited that a similar series of events happen before, and predicted they will happen again.

[pessimizer]

Why, pray tell, would a similar series of events be relevant to a completely different series of events except as analogy? Let me use an extremely close analogy to illustrate:

Imagine someone shot a basketball, and it didn't go into the hoop. Why would telling a story about somebody else who once shot a basketball which failed to go into the hoop be helpful or relevant?

[cgriswald]

Your extremely close analogy gets to the crux of why people are disagreeing here: It doesn’t have to be analogy. You can be pointing out an equivalence.

[therobots927]

Regardless this was my whole point. The original point was a fallacy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

[cgriswald]

I'd be interested in your reason for thinking so but I think you can see your supporting argument is not compelling:

> And comparing digging through the ground to human thought and creativity is an odd mix of self debasement and arrogance.

> I'm guessing there is an unspoken financial incentive guiding your point of view.

[therobots927]

That's the definition of using an analogy to support an argument.