[KaiserPro]

I don't think thats really it.

For me personally I am vaguely indifferent to programmers using LLMs to make more shitty code. My worry is the second and third order effects

For work currently, as an SRE, I'm being asked to maintain and look after slop as if its properly built and instrumented. Our platform has clear rules and conventions, and AI isn't following those.

For the wider world, I fucking hate that image/video generation is evaporating what is "real". For memes sure its great, but for bad actors it gives a brilliant way to say "its AI wasn't me" and then the debate moves away from "did person do bad thing" to "is it wrong to say that things are AI?"

I also worry about the debasement of value of human work. Looking at history, say of the weavers, it didn't work out to well for them when the powered loom came along.

[customguy]

This is the opposite of a loom. With a loom you can very easily see that what it makes is exactly like cloth made by hand, except it's more uniform and faster. There also wasn't this weird drive to drive out the heretics so the AI messiah may dwell among us, this desire to put all eggs in one basket, instead of welcoming competition and a control group.

[KaiserPro]

I would suggest that you are looking at the product, not the effect on the workers.

The powered loom produced more uniform, much cheaper fabric. It wasn't colourful or particularly flamboyant. It took a lot more work to get patterns (its where punch card come from)

But thats not the point. Powered looms meant that cottage industry that employed people close to sources of production (ie cotton/calico in india and wool in england) were thrown out on their arses. The majority lived on rented land/housing. Couldn't pay the rent and were kicked out into the loving arms of the poor laws. Lots of people had to re-train, the rest went begging. Combine that with agricultural reform, meant that Lots of people moved into slums in the towns, where they worked much longer, unsafer hours.

The rest dispersed into the wider world.

[customguy]

> I would suggest that you are looking at the product, not the effect on the workers.

Sure, I was in that comment. What you said is true, too, and given how much of this is driven by greed and not need, I would even say it's more important.

But the effect on the product matters, too, of course. Not just quality and bloat wise, but in a way it's like saying we no longer need to know how to read and write, we all get a butler and just ask them what a text says, or to write letters for us. Because the butler is smarter than any human, and it's so convenient. I'm ironically "with the Catholic Church" (not really, but you know) on this one because I see people/companies who want to be like the Catholic Church in the middle ages, and even without those, how sheer laziness can plunge us into some idiocratic abyss.

[merrua]

The industrial loom didn't make cloth the same as made by hand. All machine made cloth is worst than the best weavers could make. The cloth was just okay, and could be made faster and at scale and then sold. Now you can't buy cloth to the standard it used to be made.

[skeledrew]

> I also worry about the debasement of value of human work. Looking at history, say of the weavers, it didn't work out to well for them when the powered loom came along.

They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option. And the world is better with the power loom. It's scary but we still have to embrace that eventually pretty much all valuable labour will be automated, and by then our society and economy needs to have been restructured for supporting humans providing 0 economic value.

[jplusequalt]

>They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option.

Who is they? The majority of British textile workers experienced destitute conditions following industrialization.

That's one of my two gripes with AI:

1) It's posed to take over knowledge work, and yet our societies have no safety nets for the millions of knowledge workers.

2) It promotes superficial understanding. It sounds so convincing and compresses complex topics into a few messages, leaving users thinking they know more than they actually do.

[skeledrew]

1) Yes, that's a serious issues that needs to be addressed, but many are too high on the status quo, because freedom and meritocracy and self-determination and all that. Rather watch the world burn than give up the ability to be able to earn and own more than the next person.

2) That's up to users. Those who only want superficial understanding will get that, and those who want deep understanding will question more and ask for citations so they can verify.

[KaiserPro]

> They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option.

Yes, but then whole swathes of the English countryside (and then the Indian countryside) was plunged into destitution for generations and it took rebellions, massacres and revolutions to get something like comfortable living.

[skeledrew]

Yeah there was no system in place then to ensure those who were left without means to survive would be able to survive. Shouldn't be the case with the knowledge of that history and all this time we have to actually change things. We quite literally know that it's a matter of only a few years now before the vast amount of knowledge work (at least) is fully automated away; governments should be making changes to make the economic transition more smooth. It'd be highly irresponsible to not do so, and I dread that most will be irresponsible.

[jplusequalt]

>It'd be highly irresponsible to not do so, and I dread that most will be irresponsible.

This is why I can't stand people who talk about embracing AI. You suggest that society needs to adjust to AI, but then turn around and admit you doubt it'll happen.

You'd rather roll over, than take a stance.

[skeledrew]

> You'd rather roll over, than take a stance.

You can stand on a beach and shout at a tsunami, and maybe if you have a stick and time it right, get a hit in when it arrives. But I don't see how that helps anything. The only thing I see is to do as much as possible to prepare for when it hits, to help as many as possible to survive the onslaught.

Like a tsunami, preventing the arrival of AI is essentially impossible, unless you nuke all the data centers in the US and China and kill all the scientists and engineers with even a modicum of interest in working on it. Unlike a tsunami, AI is actually pretty useful: there are many already getting value from it in it's infancy, and its value will only keep on increasing with every release. But it's going to turn the world upside-down in the process and there are many too afraid of change. That's just how people are.

[KaiserPro]

> governments should be making changes to make the economic transition more smooth.

With what money. Knowledge work brings in taxes. Taxes are spent redistributing wealth so that the bottom percent are cared for.

But all that money will be concentrated into the hands of the few (even more than it is now) and china.

After all caring for the poor is socialism, and we can't have that.

[skeledrew]

Forget about "money", and the economy in general as you know it. All that's going out the window because it's rooted in wage labour aka jobs, which will ultimately disappear. Those who don't like the actually-effective-but-highly-disliked system... well things are just going to suck for them.

[trumpdong]

It's like climate change: Earth will survive. I and my family won't. Therefore we get wars.