It may be OpenAI's loss and Microsoft's gain, but any support that AI gets is a tragedy for humanity.
Everything is good in moderation, and with AI we are taking our efficiency past that good point. AI not only takes jobs away from creatives such as illustrators and can be used for identity theft, it also is removing the reliance that people have on each other.
Society is held together because people need each other. People meet each other through needing each other, and this is what makes local communities strong. AI takes that away so that the only entities we need are big tech like Microsoft, Google, and other soulless organizations.
It is a descent into feudalism, where everyone will pay big tech for basic living necessities (first option, later a necessity, like the smartphone).
If a man or woman wants to live independently of big tech, it will be harder and harder now, and we are losing are sense of what it means to be human through the immoral actions of these companies.
I couldn't disagree more. The more wealth is created out of thin air by technology, the better we all live, and the better our relations with one another. Scarcity creates conflict and pain. Prosperity makes good neighbours out of enemies.
I don't care if I have to pay megacorps for a right to my modern conveniences, if that means they extend to more and more people. Monsanto can take all my money if no one ever dies of starvation again. Microsoft can take all my data if we never have to do rote tasks again.
The more wealth is created, the more we abuse wild resources and the natural ecosystem as well. If there were only humans on the planet, I would not disagree. But it is immoral to live better if it comes to destroying out natural connection with the biosphere.
I also disagree that scarcity creates conflict and pain. Scarcity limits growth, which means it limits our expansion, which is good because other creatures have to live here too.
> I also disagree that scarcity creates conflict and pain.
Every war in human history (and there have been a lot of them) was fought over control of scarce resources. Sure looks like scarcity creates conflict and pain to me.
War causes some short-term pain but nothing in comparison to the long-term pain of post-scarcity where we use up so many resources that there are none left to use -- such as depleting most fishing stocks, rainforest destruction, and global warming.
I'd take a few wars here and there over what we have now any day. Even if it means I die. It would be much better if humanity's population were limited.
I think it's important to keep track of which particular wealth we create and how it gets distributed. If eg GDP grows 2x, but instead of affording 2x more food everyone can now afford 10x more/better memes and better drones for their country military, I don't consider it a win.
In other words, "growing wealth" means better access of people (on average) to some resources, but whether it's a good thing depends on the exact resources the world gains.
It's funny, in a sad way, that you think corporations will hold up their end of the "bargain". Can't remember which Youtube video I was watching, but this stuck out: "The irony that we're automating the production of art instead of the jobs everybody hates shouldn't be lost on us."
That pseudoprofound bullshit about automating art is the new version of the old ignorant chestnut of "If we can put a man on the moon why can't we just X?" Newsflash: there are vast differences in what is accomplishable. Self driving cars stalled out but not for lack of trying.
I find it amusing that just a few short years ago the idea was that automation / ai would replace the truck drivers, factory workers, and blue collar jobs where the Developer, the lawyer, information worker was safe from this...
It seems the last mile in replacing blue collar jobs may be more expensive and more challenging (if not impossible) than replacing information workers with AI...
I actually agree with this. All along, people thought that automation would mainly replace manual labor (which I also disagree with in many instances -- I believe people should be able to make a DECENT wage doing things, even manual things, even if other things become more expensive for people "at the top").
It seems likely that AI will either replace or augment people in the most creative fields, creating a homogeneous MUSH out of once interesting things, making us consumerist and mindless drones that simply react like amoebas to advertising, buying junk we don't need so that the top 0.1% rule the world, pushed their by their intense narcissism and lack of empathy (like Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella who are by definition narcissists for doing what they do.)
I emphatically agree, with a caveat: I work in the music business. I've seen homogenous mush before. AI and related technologies have already augmented people in the homogenous mush business, and will most certainly replace them, and this will serve a sort of mass market with mass distribution that's recognizable as 'creative fields' of a sort.
This is self-limiting. It's a sort of built-in plateau. You can't serve the whole market with anything: the closest you'll get is something like a Heinz Ketchup, a miraculously well-balanced creation with something for everyone. It's also a relatively small market segment for all its accessibility.
We cannot be made 'consumerist and mindless drones that simply react like amoebas to advertising' more than we already are, which is a LOT: whole populations are poisoned by carefully designed unhealthy food, conned by carefully designed propaganda in various contradictory directions. We're already at saturation point for that, I think. It's enough to be a really toxic situation: doesn't have to threaten to be far worse.
The backlash always happens, in the form of more indigestible things that aren't homogenous mush, whether that's the Beatles or the Sex Pistols or, say, Flamin' Hot Cheetos. The more homogenous everything is, the more market power is behind whatever backlash happens.
This is actually one argument for modern democracies and their howling levels of cultural tension… it's far more difficult to impose homogenity on them, where other systems can be more easily forced into sameness, only to snap.
Yup. The world we are headed into, accelerated by huge leaps in technology like AI, will be a sorry, pathetic, unforgiving world, that amplifies suffering and nullifies humanity.
Is that image of a child being assaulted by terrorists real or fake? To the victims, its real, to political powers it fake, to mega corporations, its money.
I can't believe I'm playing devil's advocate here because I'm generally a skeptical / pessimistic person, but what?
The world we are headed into, accelerated by huge leaps in technology like AI, will be a sorry, pathetic, unforgiving world, that amplifies suffering and nullifies humanity.
Is that what has happened so far in your life? Technology has messed it up for you ?
I think technology has messed up a lot of lives. Sure, we've got good healthcare and resources in the first-world, but smaller communities are eroding to the global force of technology.
Don't bully people into not expressing critical thought by emphasizing that they have their basic physical needs met. We should be critical of society, even if on the surface it seems pretty good.
We also have more advanced psychological needs such as the need to depend on others, and that is what is at stake here.
I see a contradiction in your message here. On the one hand you're saying people are worse off because of technology, but then you're also saying that people don't rely on each other because they have more of their needs met. So which is it?
Wouldn't the poverty rebuild these communities ? I mean the hardships make people rely on each other right?
I don't entirely doubt what you're saying either, but I'm not so sure I see what you see.
There is no contradiction, because I do not believe that having all your physical needs met is necessarily the best end for a human being, especially if they have the capability to meet a lot of those needs themselves if they were given the tools to do so. It's like those people in the Matrix pods: they have their needs met, but they are being plugged into a machine and are not truly human.
Name a single instance or person who has all their physical needs met by an LLM?
Seriously, we're a long way off technological utopia. Even if we had some type of AGI/ASI that was self-aware like in movies ,there's little if any evidence to suggest it will just work for us and make sure you're ok.
> The decrease in the number of people affected by hunger has happened in a period where the world population has increased by 2.2 billion - from 5,3 billion in 1990 to 7.5 billion in 2018. The share of undernourished people in the world has therefore fallen markedly in the past three decades. From 19% in 1990 to 10.8% in 2018.
Yes, actually. Social media and internet made ad industry much more effective, which in turn made wonders in commerce, which is exactly what raised people out of hunger.
A lot of people in southeastern Asia and China are working in industry and live tens time better than subsiste farmers just one generation before them exactly because the niche trinkets they make can now be sold on instagram.
2. Photographers (Check out Photo.AI). I know a local photographer who takes nice portraits for businesses. Now people can use this service for their headshots. (You may argue that it's good for people but at which point does it remain good if NOBODY can use their creative talents to make a living.)
3. Writing. Many websites are now using writers to write their articles. That means they hire less writers. Again, you can say that it makes society more efficient and I guess it does for consumers, but those people such as copy editors will have to find new jobs.
You may say that new jobs will be created but we have not seen such a versatile tool that can take away so many jobs at such a quick pace before. Moreover, will the world really be a nice place to live in if most of the creative jobs or at least jobs involved IN producing something nice will be left to machines?
What about Hollywood and their desire to replace writers and actors? You may say that Hollywood is dead anyway, but I'm sure it's about to get a lot worse...
There’s a real chance that one thing AI will make better—not just cheaper—is original scores for movies. Get us out of this “just match the shitty generic placeholder music we already edited the movie to” norm we’ve been in for almost two decades (which itself came about due to changes in technology!)
Software engineering for sure. Lots of SV types have a very distorted view of what the average programmer not in a high prestige silicon valley company does. Especially contractors and outsourcing firms and the like? Yeah not great for them. Also analyst type roles and data science type roles, since the level of reasoning plus the ability to parse structured data and write code is pretty much there. Medical scribes are already being automated, voice to text plus context aware parsing. I also think areas of law like patent law (writing provisionals etc) are probably in a situation where the tech is already better than humans at writing claims that are not going to conflict with prior art and the like, though there'll be legal barriers there to adoption. But a lot of the legal staff involved might be replaced even if the lawyers and agents are not. Anyone who writes review papers/research summaries like market reports without actively doing non-internet research like interviewing people are going to struggle against AI written reviews that can just pull from more information than humanly possible to parse. Accounting, preparing financial statements, etc where "creativity" is not necessary a good thing also, though again regulations might stop that. And obviously in healthcare, doctors like radiologists and surgeons etc which we've been talking about as a possibility for a long time but looks more possible than ever now.
Also there's areas where it's quickly becoming a required skill set, so it's not that it's replacing people but that the people there are getting their skills obsoleted. All the molecular biologists I know that used to joke about how they picked biology since they suck with computers and hate excel are at a high risk of getting left behind right now, especially with how steep the improvement's been with protein design models like RFDiffusion. Though by latest rumors it looks like the vast vast majority of biologists involved in protein work have already started using tools like alphafold and esmfold so it does look like people are adapting.
> layoff announcements from U.S.-based employers reached more than 80,000 in May — a 20% jump from the prior month and nearly four times the level for the same month last year. Of those cuts, AI was responsible for 3,900, or roughly 5% of all jobs lost
> The job cuts come as businesses waste no time adopting advanced AI technology to automate a range of tasks — including creative work, such as writing, as well as administrative and clerical work.
Indeed, and these people should be able to do things that are useful, not just for themselves, but because interacting with humans to get these things is much better for society than EVERYONE interacting with a damn computer!
it also is removing the reliance that people have on each other.
On the other hand access to information has given me more independence, and this hasn't been a bad thing. I do rely less on others, like my parents, but I still love them and spend more time having fun with them rather than relying on them.
I do understand what you mean, it just doesn't like up as all negative to me.
I also think open source AI will destroy any feudalistic society. These companies like MS are going to have a problem when their own technology starts to destroy their value add.
Look ad Adobe and some of the open source video and graphis editing AI software, there goes one fiefdom.
> AI not only takes jobs away from creatives such as illustrators
Why do these people deserve protection from automation any more than all the millions of people who worked other jobs tat were eliminated by automation up to this point?
> Why do these people deserve protection from automation any more than all the millions of people who worked other jobs tat were eliminated by automation up to this point?
You got it!!! All those other people DO deserve protection from automation! But our society made a mistake and pushed them out. Many communities were destroyed by efficient automation and guess what, efficient automation via cars and vehicles is what caused our most immense disaster now, the climate crisis.
We made a mistake by creating so much automation. We should strive to recreate smaller communities in which more creative AND manual tasks are appreciated.
> We made a mistake by creating so much automation. We should strive to recreate smaller communities in which more creative AND manual tasks are appreciated.
Basically, you are creating a strawman. I said too much automation. And nothing about removing automation implies going back into serfdom. If you want to actually have a debate, say something intelligent rather than a quick quip.
Why are you the one who gets to decide how much is "too much"?
> And nothing about removing automation implies going back into serfdom.
Sure, just because essentially every society above the level of hunter-gatherers has had some kind of peasant/serf/slave doesn't mean that your utopia will.
They don't. But if you look at predictions of the future like those in optimistic SciFi, the dream was that automation would eliminate repetitive, dirty, and dangerous jobs, eliminate scarcity of basic necessities like food, and free up every individual to pursue whatever creative endeavours they wish.
What we're getting instead is the automation of those creative endeavours, while leaving a "gap" of repetitive, mind numbing work (like labelling data or doing basic physical tasks like "picking" goods in an Amazon warehouse) that still has to be done by humans.
I agree with your point, but I think the honest answer to your question is that people view creative jobs as aspirational whereas the other "rote" jobs that were being automated away were ones that people would have preferred to avoid anyway.
When we're getting rid of assembly line jobs, or checkout counter staff, or data entry clerks, or any other job that we know is demeaning and boring, we can convince ourselves that the thousands/millions put out of work are an unfortunate side effect of progress. Oh sure, the loss of jobs sucks, but no one should have to do those jobs anyway, right? The next generation will be better off, surely. We're just closing the door behind us. And maybe if our economic system didn't suck so much, we would take care of these people.
But when creatives start getting replaced, well, that's different. Many people dream of moving into the creative industry, not out of it. Now it feels like the door is closing ahead of us, not behind us.
Because we don't like white collar people losing their jobs. Blue collar on the other hand deserve what's coming to them, as they didn't prepare themselves for what the future brings.
No kidding. It looks like the most secure jobs will be "the trades" since the environment these professionals work in is the most variable/least structured and thus least susceptible to automation by robotics.
We can say fro big-tech the same for oil, penecilin or gmo's. What does it mean to be human when we, all humans, are the sons and daughters of big industry for profit ventures? Open AI board stopped trusting Altman when he went started pitching the Open AI technology elsewhere behind their backs. At least that the rumors I read. If OpenAI developers truly believe the AI can be weaponized and that they should not be following the leadership of for-profit ventures they won't jump ship. We will see.
> We can say fro big-tech the same for oil, penecilin or gmo's. What does it mean to be human when we, all humans, are the sons and daughters of big industry for profit ventures?
That is why we should be cautious about technology instead of inviting it with open arms. It is a question we should continue to ask ourselves with more wisdom, instead of relying on our mass global capitalistic system to deliver easy answers for us from the depths of the profit motive.
Everything is good in moderation, and with AI we are taking our efficiency past that good point. AI not only takes jobs away from creatives such as illustrators and can be used for identity theft, it also is removing the reliance that people have on each other.
Society is held together because people need each other. People meet each other through needing each other, and this is what makes local communities strong. AI takes that away so that the only entities we need are big tech like Microsoft, Google, and other soulless organizations.
It is a descent into feudalism, where everyone will pay big tech for basic living necessities (first option, later a necessity, like the smartphone).
If a man or woman wants to live independently of big tech, it will be harder and harder now, and we are losing are sense of what it means to be human through the immoral actions of these companies.