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by skeledrew 5 days ago
> 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.
2 comments
jplusequalt 5 days ago
>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.

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skeledrew 5 days ago
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.

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KaiserPro 5 days ago
> 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.

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skeledrew 5 days ago
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.
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jplusequalt 5 days ago
>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.

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skeledrew 5 days ago
> 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.

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KaiserPro 5 days ago
> 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.

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skeledrew 5 days ago
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.
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trumpdong 5 days ago
It's like climate change: Earth will survive. I and my family won't. Therefore we get wars.
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