[littlestymaar]

> Would knowing that Claude is maybe kinda sorta conscious lead more people to subscribe to it?

For anyone having paid attention, it has been clear for the past two years that Dario Amodei is lobbying for strict regulation on LLMs to prevent new entrants on the market, and the core of its argument is that LLMs are fundamentally intelligent and dangerous.

So this kind of “research” isn't targeted towards their customers but towards the legislators.

[baq]

The thing is, if he is right, or will be in the near future, regulators will get scared and ban the things outright, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Yes, he benefits if they step in early, but it isn’t a given that we all don’t when this happens.

[littlestymaar]

We already know AI is a very serious threat:

- it's a threat for young graduates' jobs.

- it's a threat to the school system, undermining its ability to teach through exercises.

- it's a threat to the internet given how easily it can create tons of fake content.

- it's a threat to mental health of fragile people.

- it's a gigantic threat to a competitive economy if all the productivity gains are being grabbed by the AI editors through a monopolistic position.

The terminator threat is pure fantasy and it's just here to distract from the very real threats that are already doing harm today.

[astrange]

Automation increases employment.

The mechanism which causes job less is that when your competitors automate, all the business goes to them because they're more productive.

[littlestymaar]

Well, maybe look at how many people worked in the agricultural sector is 1900 and how many do so today.

Automation of field labour has decreased the worker count by a factor 20 or something.

Same for the mining sector.

It's not necessarily a bad thing as working in the fields or in coal mines wasn't pleasant, but pretending automation doesn't reduce employment is nonsense.

[astrange]

Did those people become unemployed? (Not because of that they didn't. There was a Great Depression and a few wars that could've caused it.)

They mostly stopped working in those fields because everyone hates farming and mining and quits the first chance they get.

Here's recent evidence from Canada, Japan and Spain showing automation caused employment increases:

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2020.3812

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3377705

https://econpapers.repec.org/paper/etidpaper/20051.htm

[littlestymaar]

> Did those people become unemployed?

Either unemployed or forced to work in even less desirable places, yes.

> They mostly stopped working in those fields because everyone hates farming and mining

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984%E2%80%931985_United_Kingd...

No matter how hard the work conditions are, people don't usually accept its disappearance.

Automatization reducing work can actually be a good thing, as it is the reason why we can have vacations, retirement and long studies: because the society's need for work is lower than before.

[xanderlewis]

I can't be exactly sure of the intended target, but it certainly helps to increase the sense of FOMO among investors even if as an unintended side effect (though I don't think it is unintended).