[Legend2440]

AI is also an incredibly useful tool that could automate many industries, so it deserves some leeway because of the benefits it provides.

And while it is 'fastest-growing', it is small as an absolute share - around 0.2% of total world CO2 emissions.

[dminik]

So it can both outprice people as well as take their jobs? Well, leeway away.

[Legend2440]

The only reason we have the standard of living we do today is because of automation. I welcome more of it.

[dminik]

Only insofar as you were able to keep a job. If you lose your job to automation, and there are no more jobs left, what do you do? Where do you get the money to keep your standard of living?

[Legend2440]

Either we will invent new jobs, as we have always done in the past.

Or if truly all jobs can be done by machine, we retire and go live a life of fully automated luxury space communism.

[dminik]

I wish I could share your optimism.

[mbrumlow]

Having jobs for the sake of having jobs sounds like living in hell.

From what I can tell your argument works out to be as simple as we can’t do this because we want to keep people working, which the vast majority of people hate doing.

There is a small minority of people who enjoy work. It seems cruel to enslave a people in mass simply to keep them busy.

[cuu508]

Incredibly useful for some definition of incredibly useful. What I see:

- I now regularly receive AI-written spam emails (marketing pitches, "vulnerability reports").

- I was receiving AI-written garbage quality pull requests. It got so annoying I closed pull requests on my project's repo.

- When I try to contact some company's customer support these days there's a good chance I will be fed slop by an agent posing as a customer support person, this is absolutely infuriating.

- When I search for information on the internet, for certain queries, 90% of the results is slop.

- AI crawlers are DDoSing websites.

- The already mentioned things – hardware getting more expensive, climate impact, unethically sourced training data.