“What trillion-dollar problem is AI trying to solve?”
Wages. They’re trying to use it to solve having to pay wages.
Capitalist Realism: “Oh no. The factory automated my job, so now I need to find a new employer to pay me less money, possibly in a totally different city or state.”
Socialist Idealism: “Hooray! The factory automated my job! Now I have more time to socialize with my friends and neighbors, pursue hobbies, and volunteer towards new community improvements that will make my town and state a better place!”
Absolutely. In a sane world automating work is a good thing. In a less than an ideal world, the transition might be a little painful, but it’d be good in the long run.
In our world, every bit of efficiency gain is eaten by the oligarchy. It’s all about how much they can take away from us.
this is how I went from being excited about technology as a young adult to being an anarchist as an older adult haha
Under capitalism labour unions have perverse incentives to combat automation when under the ultimate labour union of socialism we would all be motivated to be working towards it.
I got lucky, the company I work for lets me automate whatever I want in my roles and doesn’t pile on more because I did. I just get more time. I end up spending some of that time looking for other inefficiencies that I can clean up. We have struggled with gaining market share due to some blunders in marketing, so pay has not been what it should be, but aside from the financial issues it has always been a very rewarding environment to work in. I set my own projects for the most part, tell them when things will be done, and get to spend time with my family and infant son so I don’t miss his life. It really is how life should be. Luckily the marketing people finally listened to me, so things are quickly picking up financially.
Eliminating CEOs would be the best use of AI.
Eliminating
CEOsbillionaires would be the best use of AI.CEOs are a great start.
AIs can’t hold guns yet
They can operate a drone and apparently already are used in targeting systems, so they kinda already do
not with that attitude they can’t https://youtu.be/y3RIHnK0_NE
Eliminating CEOs would be the best
This is a stupid take.
We’re already seeing the benefits of using AI in material science research, pharmaceutical research, translating previously lost languages, green energy development, and thousands of other optimizations…
Anyone saying this is only about jobs is woefully ignorant on the subject
We’ve been using machine learning and neural networks to solve particular problems in science for decades. The recent AGI craze is not about this. It’s about creating a speculative investment bubble based around a language algorithm that generates bullshit.
Your right, it’s not only about jobs. But you know why it’s getting funded so heavily? Its a lot cheaper to have a computer do something for basically nothing than to pay people to do it.
Also, I’d be willing to bet money that the coworkers of people being laid off due to increased productivity from LLMs, won’t see a raise from it.
B… b… but it affects my furry commissions!
I thought they were trying to defeat the pesky menace of “public opinion” and this is just an extension of Persona Management Software.
The point is to drown out real human voices so it always seems like public opinion supports the status quo.
Makes it a lot easier to massage the message of your bought and paid for mass media.
These folks don’t like when public opinion does stuff like… support Luigi Mangione for example. Better to flood the zone with “rational” voices.
This is absolutely happening right now at a huge scale, ignore what you know to be wrong, it’s just robots.
Some journalists are literally cracking open /r/canada and sister subreddits and showing they’re run by white nationalists pushing Russian disinformation talking points.
Actually, I think it’s more useful under socialism than capitalism. Most things aren’t economic to automate to a high standard of quality now because human labor is valued so low. In a democratic socialist society where people get to choose whether to work, automating menial tasks that people tend not to want to do will make more sense because folks won’t want to do those things for cheap.
My question is once everyone’s out of a job who’s going to buy things? You end up haveing zero profits.
This is a really good question. What does a post-consumer society look like?
The middle class is an anomaly that occurs when the profit from labor makes it worthwhile. If labor is no longer worth more than the cost of food, then there are 2 options: a welfare state or a cull. To do otherwise is to invite revolt.
I suspect that Luigi is being used as a means to prepare for a cull. By inflating the situation, they are manufacturing consent regarding the right to own advanced weaponry. These could start with semi-autonomous drones, such as the Boston Dynamics dogs. We’ve already seen similar robots with flamethrowers. Later upgrades would make them fully autonomous.
At some point, they will be used for riot control and there will be “terrible accident” caused by “an unforeseen reaction to the violence of the protesters.” It will be very sad and there will be no repercussions because of a law that excuses AI mistakes on the grounds that AIs are very useful and hard to make correct.
After an investigation, it will be determined that the best way to prevent similar mistakes is early intervention. Machines will be spread throughout the city and, nominally, working for a government that’s really just trying to keep up the appearance that it hasn’t lost control.
And not only that – all of the people you see claiming “AI is worthless”; are just huffing that copium REALLY hard. All of the AI models out there aren’t just LLMs and Diffusors; there’s a lot of robotics work going on behind the scenes, and a lot of the things that the middle-class do in their day-to-day are being attacked here.
The transition to a post-scarcity world is going to require some major rethinking if we’re going to keep our population up at 8 billion. Because at this rate, we’re looking at a major turnaround.
I think “AI” has just become shorthand for LLMs and diffusers though in general conversation.
If being used in that context, the person using it is an idiot.
huggingface.co/models – shows many of the things AI is being used for. And even in the context of only LLMs and Diffusors, you cannot claim that LLMs are worthless with a straight face.
you cannot claim that LLMs are worthless
It’s not a question of “worthless” so much as “net benefit”. How much money and manpower are we investing in the tools?
Because, right now, the Sam Altman approach to LLMs is to simply throw more compute at the problem forever. The degree to which he seems interested in reinventing the model or the foundational technology pales beside his demands for GWhs of new power to brute force a better solution.
If you’re spending $1T to do $100B worth of human labor, that’s not any kind of efficency.
I understand the sentiment but there are very few technologies that didn’t need a disproportionate amount of research and development before seeing proper “net benefits”.
The trash bin of history is full of ideas that absorbed enormous amounts of resources and labor, only to flounder on implementation. The idea that Sam Altman’s pet project just needs another trillion to take off is heavily predicated on him building the next Model T and not the next Hindenburg.
The Hindenburg exploded due to political reasons. It was capable of flying with helium, but the US was the biggest He producer in the world during the time.
Americans rapidly constructing for-profit nuclear power plants to power AI server farms without any kind of plan on where to source fuel or dispose of waste won’t know anything about this.
Brute forcing is the least efficient R&D. Best efficiency was achieved at Bell labs, ARPA, early NASA, Xerox PARC.
there’s a lot of robotics work going on behind the scenes, and a lot of the things that the middle-class do in their day-to-day are being attacked here.
If you get behind the scenes of a big retail company like Amazon or Nike, you get a certain increased amount of automation in the manufacturing and physical sorting. But this isn’t happening absent human labor. It’s happening in concert with human labor.
The end result is humans expected to work at the speed of machines, rather than humans off-loading the physically intense tasks to machines.
I 100% agree, AI will save so much money by getting rid of C-suit employees.
In theory AI, even LLMs, have pretty great potential to be authoritative sources of knowledge and reference tools. In practice private companies have scanned the breadth of online human knowledge using an advanced tool they developed (off of the shoulders of giants as they say) and are trying to rent-seek the enhanced access to that information, and the people most willing to pay money for that service are trying to drive down expenses where otherwise they’d have to pay people to produce the same output. Which does lower their bottom line, having a split effect - it may drive down prices in non-monopolistic scenarios (where they exist), but simply drive up profits in monopolistic scenarios while decreasing employment (where those exist). The typical symptom of new technologies in a rigged economy.
You can also use it to influence people on social media, create narratives that don’t exist, and deepen divides. The CCP uses them extensively. Sources:
Easy algorithm there. Stop hiring people and they will stop buying things. Then they can stop making things and just eat their money to survive.
That’s typical AI logic anyway.
If a lot of people are out of work and idle by automation, and new stuff doesn’t come along to employ them (like level 4 self driving will destroy 30% of jobs)
Those people will be looking for a fix pretty quick. Starving men may go to extremes. Maybe our obesogenic food environment is there to slow down revolutions (I know that’s impossible, but a fun thought)
The goal is to save labor, then wages. If the point is that labor only results in improvements to people’s well-being when paired with labor rights, yes. But that doesn’t mean saving labor is the enemy.
AI is useful in Ian Banks’ The Culture series. They’re equal citizens of the Culture and they do lots of important things for society. And the Culture is communist.
Hear me out. We let the robots take over our jobs and have them overthow the capitalist class for us
