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by beebmam 14 days ago
99.9% of people complaining about AI making the world a worse place would be fully happy with AI if they shared in the economic benefits of automation.
5 comments

Not if it ends up deskilling society and taking away what brings us meaning in life.
I don't see why AI would deskill what you love to do. People still do embroidery even though mass manufacturing exists. If you love something you would continue doing it irrespective of automation.
For better or worse this round of "automation" will hit harder than most others because it comes for what makes you you. Your brain, not your body. The industrial revolution replaced your body, this one could in theory replace you entirely. And it isn't coming for some job, it comes for most. It's not just a hobby but being able to do the job. You are replacing 10000 types of jobs with 1 type: AI prompter. We'll probably have an AI just to help ask for the right thing.

You have transferred all the skills and knowledge to the AI. When the skills are gone, who's going to teach you to do any non-trivial job? What will give you any sense of accomplishment when all you do is ask the AI but have no capability yourself?

Even if you have a guaranteed income, because "your AI" is getting paid for the work, where will you be with close to 0 contribution to anything? Maybe we're overreacting and this will never be an issue. I know we shouldn't take cues from fiction to predict reality but it's hard not to picture a world with a combination of Idiocracy and Wall-e (or the famous "Paradise" Matrix) where we decay because the change is so fundamental that we aren't ready to adapt.

Yeah this round replaces both body and knowledge.

Basically what is left is internal politics and cross company dynamics until we get to the point where a company is self autonomous.

For a lot of people it’s not the job that is rewarding it the role having a job gives them in life and home life. Financially contributing to the household through earning it through work is a meaningful and rewarding thing that can define the near total of how good you feel about yourself thing even if you don’t like the job?
But do people make a living doing embroidery by hand? Or is it more of a hobby?
Yes. I love eating pieces of string. I'm partial to wool myself, really filling.

I suppose you're a cake enjoyer, miss Marie Antoinette?

The bonuses SK Hynix staff are getting might vindicate that point of view. Of course, that's from AI investment, not revenue itself. They are the extremely successful shovel manufacturers, who for once have managed to leverage their power collectively as employees to benefit from a one-off like this.

Perhaps it has always been the case that people would be happy if they shared the benefits, but that is not how the world run by billionaires works.

I've been benefitting from automation my entire life. I don't see why anything would change when that automation is driven by language models.
for your first couple of B you stop complaining about anything
"People complaining slavery makes the world a worse place would be fully happy if they were slave owners"

Probably, but just proves people can ignore bad things when they benefit them.

Not what it pretends to prove, that the thing isn't bad.