In the grand scheme it's good to invent things that replace human labor. It frees up people to do more interesting things. The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.
Well, because consuming art, reading poems, having code written for you that solves a problem, and listening to music is also fun. Recently I wanted a grand elegy to Britain written as the Empire started failing and set to music in a specific style. I had it playing in the background while fixing some issues with some software.
It truly was joyful to have this available to me. It didn’t have to have mass appeal or need me to pay the right artists the right amounts. I had it in moments.
And if you consider art something to be consumed for light entertainment, that viewpoint makes sense. For people that consider art a way to express, and conversely experience, otherwise inexpressible things about our humanity, your wonderful world is a cheap, superficial, and sad way for tech companies to amalgamate and sell other people’s ideas and labor.
To me the image of a world where everyone does menial work while entertaining themselves with AI-generated "art" doesn't seem fun, it seems extremely depressing and dystopian. I guess we just have different values.
Yes. The entire job markets for game concept art, stock photography, and storyboarding have been decimated and those were the lowest-hanging fruit for diffusion model applications.
Like beg on the corners and starve in the street? Trying to figure out how the basics of capitalism where labor is exchanged for money is not going to work well when the only jobs left are side gigs. Something will have to change and a lot of People will fight said change.
We will come up with new jobs, like we have for all of human history. I think even in an abundance utopia people will still work - we need purpose to sustain our existence.
The work will become even more fulfilling however.
Throughout human history that didn’t happen fast enough to avoid an astonishing amount of human misery. Nobody’s worried about the future of work. They’re worried about the people that rely on tech jobs for food, mortgage/rent, cancer treatments, elder care, retirement, et al. Look at what happened to the rust belt, coal country, etc. etc. etc.
I agree with you, IMO largely this is an affordability crisis though, which is fuelled by inflation. I don't really offer many solutions besides eliminating inflation. I apologise if that is insufficient (it is).
1) It’s not my job to fix all the problems of Capitalism. It’s painful to try to fight the system without collective action. My family and I have to eat too.
2) We have had a solution all along for the particular problem of AI putting devs out of work. It’s called professional licensure, and you can see it in action in engineering and medical fields. Professional Software Engineers would assume a certain amount of liability and responsibility for the software they develop. That’s regardless of whether they develop it with LLM tools or something else.
For example, you let your tools write slop that you ship without even looking? And it goes on to wreak havoc? That’s professional malpractice. Bad engineer.
If we do this then Software Engineers become the responsible humans in the loop of so-called “AI” systems.
It’s not your job to fix capitalism. But it is your job to evaluate if your money making skill comes at too high a price for others.
Say you found a job shooting people in the head for money. Like if you work for ICE or something…
You need to feed your family. Is this job ok? You may decide yes. I decided no. I will find another way to feed my family.
You don’t get to escape consequences because you are a small cog in a large system.
In the bigger picture, automation should free people from labor. But that requires some very greedy people to relax their grip ever so slightly. I imagine they see automation as a way to reduce reliance on labor, and if they don’t need labor, they don’t need people. So let them starve and stop having kids.
> But it is your job to evaluate if your money making skill comes at too high a price for others.
It’s not even the money-making skill: it’s the application of it. People that are good at shooting people can be beneficial to society as protectors or they can be the the business end of systemic oppression. People with software development skills don’t have to help optimize the motor in the brand-new shiny capitalism juicer.
> In the grand scheme it's good to invent things that replace human labor. It frees up people to do more interesting things. The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.
To a point. Then it just frees up people to do nothing.
> The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.
That is in fact the goal. The less labor capital needs, the more money (and power) the capitalists get to keep for themselves.
The problem is that most people consider doing art, writing, making music, and heck, even coding, “more interesting” than orchestrating a pile of knowledgeable but idiotic robot interns because that’s what’s profitable.
Agents playing the iterated prisoner's dilemma learn to cooperate. It's usually not a dominant strategy to be entirely sociopathic when other players are involved.
You don't get that many iterations in the real world though, and if one of your first iterations is particularly bad you don't get any more iterations.
> You don't get that many iterations in the real world though
True, for iterations between the same two players, but humans evolved the ability to communicate and so can share the results of past interactions through a network with other agents, aka a reputation. Thus any interaction with a new person doesn't start from a neutral prior.
They still fail in the real world, where a single failure can be highly consequential. AI coding is lucky it has early failure modes, pretty low consequence. But I don't see how that looks for an autonomous management agent with arbitrary metrics as goals.
Anyone doing AI coding can tell you once an agent gets on the wrong path, it can get very confused and is usually irrecoverable. What does that look like in other contexts? Is restarting the process from scratch even possible in other types of work, or is that unique to only some kinds of work?
What hit me when I read Rama in the 1980s is how alien it all was. This is not Star Trek where the aliens speak English and look human-ish.
There's a lesson there for AI I think. We anthropomorphize AI in the media but perhaps the more realistic possibility is that AI is a fundamentally different type of intelligence that may never be fully human-like.
IMHO the EU is the best place to live if you're a rank-and-file worker, and the US is the best place to live if you're ambitious.
EU integration brings some advantages but it also becomes harder to experiment. Ideally you'd have a few member states vying to become the Shenzhen of Europe but that won't happen under EU integration.
Well said. Another factor that nobody in the EU likes to talk about is regulations like worker protections that make it hard to do layoffs. Such regulations are popular but they strongly favor large predictable companies over startups.
No economy has both: (1) a predictable investment and work environment, and (2) a vibrant technology sector. You make your choices and you live with them.
As we approach this pole running off to infinity, what bit of reality will intervene? An infinity in a model indicates you're missing some aspect of saturation or friction that will act to slow things down. Every exponential eventually becomes an s-curve.
Data center space? Electrical power? The amount of training data available? Society's capacity to accept rapid change?
Yes but the thing is, most people don't actually want realistic movement. They want to be Neo in The Matrix, not some average schlub that gets easily winded and jumps six inches high.
Lex Fridman's interview with Todd Howard goes into this in depth.
Intel should have spun out their fab in 2009-2010 when the signs were clear: Mobile was taking off, AMD spun out their fab, Intel had missed the boat on mobile CPUs, and Apple had acquired PA Semi and was investing heavily in custom silicon.
High-end fab is a volume game and that was the time frame when Intel was still process competitive and could have competed for Apple's business (and Nvidia's, ...). But that would never happen as a division of Intel, nobody wants to send their designs to a competitor.
Thats such a rear view mirror take. I am not in this industry but it was obvious Intel had a manufacturing advantage back then and this let them be the dominant player in this space for decades. High margins and they were the only game in town for the x86 in most key markets (AMD was just a cover for antitrust cases).
Even 10 years ago Intel was a blue chip stock, saying they should have cannibalized their lead to go into a lower margin market for volume would have gotten you kicked off any executive role.
Imagine being in a boardroom in 2010:
- You're printing money with 60%+ gross margins
- You have a 2-3 year process lead over everyone
- Your R&D budget dwarfs competitors because of your integrated model
- PC sales are still growing and servers are booming with cloud build-outs
- Also you are betting that Apple is going all in on your foundry to drive the volume and R&D
And someone proposes: "Let's split the company, cut our margins for a bet against our design team in mobile volume, and start manufacturing chips for companies that might become our competitors."
You're probably right; either that or beat Qualcomm/Samsung at providing the non-Apple chips. As rafaelmn points out, 2010 may be premature, but by 2015, they should have understood.
How they fiddled and watched Apple take the phones that make a profit; Samsung/Qualcomm provide chips to the rest; and all the hyperscalers make their own arm chips in the data center while doing nothing. Absolutely nothing. Is beyond comprehension.
Meanwhile, (I think Asianometry?) pointed out that Intel's headcount was recently as large as AMD, nVidia, and TSMC combined.
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