I worry less about AI taking jobs and more with AI providing incompetent people with a job. I don't want a lawyer who graduated law school with AI written papers that aren't even read before being submitted for grading. I worry that AI will turn out a generation of idiots with college degrees. Oh, wait...
perhaps instead AI will eliminate the need for and/or value of idiots with college degrees (already happening, but this will accelerate it) and many will choose more viable careers instead.
perhaps we can finally have enough plumbers and electricians again. (and have you seen what those guys are earning?)
We have known our ext house painter for 23 years. He has grown from a small business to a very large company. He still paints houses and other exterior work but also paints these ridiculous massive data centers in Loudoun County Virginia.
He just spent $300K over winter to spiff out his back yard with pool and exterior buildings etc. Not bad for a high school grad
Who "just" runs a painting company! Amazing what providing a good service can get you! I haven't seen a doctor since 2010. I'm 53. I had completely lost faith in them and just decided to try to stay in good health as best I can. When covid broke out I told everybody who would listen not to touch the vaccines... I was telling people this in April of 2020 before they were even talking about vaccines! Supposedly they are providing a service nobody can do without... yet I do without. If I really get in trouble I'll probably got to Mexico for help. I do not trust the US medical professionals at all. One of the issues I had with them was the poor service, poor outcomes, and them pushing pharma products for the rest of our life. The other was the massive construction projects all over the USA going up. We build medical complexes instead of Cathedrals now... and listening to people complain about the lack of money for medical treatment and healthcare! That never made any sense at all.
I dated a plumber back in college days. I am sure he is loaded now.
I also dated a welder, he ended up becoming VP of the big company (Coakley Williams)
Spiffed out indeed.
I married "government guy" and we're just slumming it here in No Va 😂😂😂😂 He is retired and he was probably one of a few dozen government guys that actually worked.
I live in a modest subdivision here in Oregon. Many low-level "professional" types; teachers, management, medical services, sales, etc. Know which neighbor has the nicest cars, the biggest boats and haw two houses elsewhere (one on a lake, and one in the forest). The god damn electrician, of course. And God bless that man, he's earning it.
Not Mansion Works? Used to live in Loco (and it really IS Loco by the way). In much more sane (if congested) Florida now. Funnily enough though I can't find a single tradesperson to do painting, general contracting, small jobs etc. No trouble with that in LoCo. I guess all the tradespeople here are fully employed on the 'big contracts' here, eg hotels, condos and developments.
I’m a chef. I went to Uni to go into Nutrition research but hated studying, quit in the middle of my Masters and went to Germany to train. Never regretted it but chefs are underpaid and overworked so this is not a trade I’d go into for the $.
You are assuming that the sort of people who go into law would make good plumbers and electricians which I doubt. I’m a pretty good veterinarian but no amount of training would make me a good plumber, carpenter, or mechanic. After years and years of work I could probably reach competent but I would never be good. Working with my hands in that way is just beyond my ability, which is why I don’t do orthopedic medicine. I’m no good with a drill doesn’t matter if it’s used on a wall or a bone.
one can always find a counter case, but at the margin i suspect there could be quite a large shift. this sort of technical/skilled trades education works wonderfully in germany and i have no reason to suspect americans are somehow far worse with their hands or at tactile learning.
Several generations of a lack of tactile teaching in schools not to mention drugging the kids best at tactile learning is bound to have pretty major effects. Maybe these could be undone in a couple generations but I doubt it. I think there are both demographic and cultural reasons why something that works well in Germany wouldn’t work here. I think it’s worth a try but I don’t think the students who would benefit from it most (boys who don’t do well sitting quietly) are the same students going to law school (girls who excel at sitting quietly).
Don’t get me wrong in a communist society where you were assigned a job and had to do it or die I think most lawyers could do trade jobs well enough not to get killed. But personally I want more from my electrician than that level of skill.
Realistically let’s look at who makes up law school these days. 55% are women and those women are the sit in the classroom regurgitate answers type women. They aren’t going to be plumbers and electricians. If law wasn’t an option they would go into education or medicine. Plus unlike for men unemployment is actually an option for many women. If forced to choose I think most women would choose housewife before they chose to be electricians or plumbers. (Which might actually be the best possible outcome in many ways but that’s an entirely different can of worms.)
The lack of tradesmen is a serious problem and I agree that we need a more trades oriented education system. But the idea that getting rid of intellectual jobs that are mostly held by women is going to do anything at all to alleviate that lack is erroneous.
In vet school the question of what would you do if you couldn’t be a vet came up a fair bit. No one ever mentioned a trade. People talked about going into human medicine, pharmacology, law, teaching, but no one ever mentioned a trade. I suspect it would be the same for law students.
Don’t get me wrong I’m all for eliminating lawyers, I just don’t think I would want very many of the girls who typically make up a law school class in charge of ensuring my house doesn’t burn down due to an electrical fire.
"I just don’t think I would want very many of the girls who typically make up a law school class in charge of ensuring my house doesn’t burn down due to an electrical fire."
This is wise. Maybe 'the girls' should see if there skills are more relevant in fields like publishing, research, helping the indigent navigate all the crazy rules and regulations and laws that intimidate entrepeneurs, immigrants, people who want to build a shed but not be in violation of zoning, want to open a Taco and Kugel Truck, adopt...
Or - and this might be the really, really important part - many of us have fostered hobbies and other activities that include useful, marketable skills for completely unrelated endeavors. Again, it might not be satisfying for everyone but for some, arguably many more, it will be better because we'll all be more productive.
Some of this has already played out in the metro Detroit area in the auto industry. There have been hundreds of people who were laid off from their very well paid assembly line jobs and told to "retrain" and go into other industries. It's all well and good to say "retain" and to actually do so and then find a job in your new field. I suppose it's easy if you're under 50 to go back to college/trade school, take on new debt and find a new career. Or start a business. Both would require taking on new debt, which is something many would not want to do, especially if they're older.
If you're over 50 and have to retrain and trade fields, it's almost impossible to get a job. One of the only real options is to start your own business, but not everyone is suited for that. So to say that automation/ AI isn't going to take your job is something of a fallacy; it's already happened and is happening in a variety of industries. For the young, a new path is fine; if you're older, you're pretty much screwed; employers don't want to hire someone who is 55 in an entry level job in a new field, knowing they are going to retire.
A friend of mine was an agriculture veterinarian and told me it was not work for women, physically too demanding, with arms elbow-deep in a cow, muscling out a breached calf. Too many sweaty, dirty, tiring nights.
As a woman agricultural veterinarian I both agree and disagree, not a lot of women want to do the work and it’s harder for those of us who do than for our male counterparts. But there are lots of women agricultural vets in the US so wether or not it’s work for women plenty of women are doing the work.
We see it in the UK. We have a lot of female equine vets (I have a very good one, part of the reason being because she's completely independent & owns her own business and is not dictated to by the awful venture capitalist/similar companies who have sadly bought up most of the excellent veterinary hospitals/practices in the UK) - but they don't need very significantly overt physical strength. The very powerful IV sedation they liberally use facilitates the latter. When they experience a needle shy young, powerful, very upset horse there are sometimes problems (although owners have a big responsibility to desensitise young horses to expected vet procedures & it's hugely upsetting & unsafe for all (especially the poor horse) when this critical horse husbandry work is not done.
We have far fewer female agricultural vets, for the reasons you set out. My female friend is a dairy worker & horse groom & she is very much in the minority and has to hold her own in the male work group on the dairy farms. It's very hard, dirty, cold often very upsetting work. The cows love her, her natural empathy shines through in everything she does.
What is it that is never said when people are erroneously complaining about the gender (should be sex but that's another story) pay gap - just how many women do you know who want to be bin men, oil rig workers, slaughter house workers, fire fighters, road diggers, grave diggers, miners. No .... thought not. Said as a woman.
I grew up in the "German" system of trade education, and must say that a significant majority of people I know do not do the work they spent three years learning. On the other hand, it's finally in my retirement that I picked up the tools I used to detest and use them with joy. Life is funny.
Please remember that schools like Worcester Polytechnic Institute (Worcester Ma) --and probably Rochester Poly. as well--began as training schools for the technicians who worked on the machines in the mills which were expanding like crazy in the late 18th, all through the 19th century--especially in New England where those rushing streams/rivers provided water power. And that the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 set aside, in each state of the Union, land for a training facility to encourage the agricultural and technical "arts" of that state. When my mother was in college (1936-40) Univ Mass (where 35 years later I did an M.A. in Classics) was still known as Mass Aggie. That is to say, every state university in the USA began as an ag/tech school.
This presumes that a person is only capable of being or doing a single thing. We're all so much more multi-faceted than that, I think.
That it might be less satisfying for some than their previous gig is not a good reason to stop others from enjoying the benefits of the same inventions and techniques.
But ultimately, a Brother's Gotta Eat so pretty much everyone finds some way to be gainfully employed.
She was a very principled politician and person. So many smears and untruths published about her. We miss her so much from the British political scene, which is now a nightmare of socialists masquerading as Conservatives, and hard left Marxists masquerading as "new Labour" who are completely captured by evil woke ideology and more than willing to throw women, girls & children's health, safety, sport etc under the bus....and prosecute you if you dare to protest. The absolute bin fire of the SNP woke theocracy in Scotland being the path that Labour is on track to emulate.
My dad once won the Queen's award for export as part of the board of the company he worked for. It was one of his proudest days meeting Mrs Thatcher, who came to present the award.
What if? I think idiots probably ARE doing it. However, I did hear someone mention the other day that a conservative type was working on an AI with a conservative slant, if anything. Ultimately, what any AI spits out to you was put in there by a human/humans with points of view that could be very wrong and even twisted. So anything coming from AI has to be just as suspect as anything else out there.
I'm currently restoring a 1935 Dodge pickup truck. All the machinist work, the body work, and the upholstery work is being done by old retired guys who got bored and set up shops in their garages and I'm paying a huge premium even to get them to do the work. I can't find any actual shops to do the work that are not scheduled 8 to 12 months out. The local car carpeting shop is scheduling work for next year! The story I hear from these shops is that they cannot find/hire qualified people to do the work because there are no young people learning how to do this kind of work anymore. As the old guys retire, nobody is replacing them.
The dealership where I usually take my car for service won't accept the work now because I didn't buy the car there. They are down three technicians, so they have to prioritize customers who bought the vehicle at the dealership.
A great shop near me that had been around for at least 25 years just closed down because he couldn't find mechanics who were reliable and who would stay with him. Sad.
This is so true. AI is going to allow the creative class that’s been oppressed by mediocre leadership and gatekeepers to actually move up. Middle management or bad leadership will be completely demolished once ppl like me get their hands on this. Ai will replace systems like excel and once it’s user friendly enough it’ll become an extremely useful interface to layer data from previously incompatible sources.
I haven’t even actually used it yet and I got asked to present my opinions at a conference. Automation is great except when it’s not. Humans cannot be replaced by a machine, duh 🙄. It’s truly mind boggling to me that so few are unwilling to challenge these “tech geniuses” clearly delusional and ridiculous (lies) visions for AI. It’s textbook witchcraft bs fear psychological manipulation 101.
AI is going to replace excel and Microsoft not human beings. Or at least the ones still capable of learning something new, which should still be everyone with a pulse.
Y’all seriously need to find Jesus if you believe a human being made in the image of the creator god can be replaced by a machine. 🤦♀️ I feel like all of human history should be proof that dog don’t hunt. Technology is an inanimate object, a tool, end of discussion.
Master it instead of worshipping it as an idol. There’s a parable about a golden calf that’s particularly relevant. Problem solved. 💁♀️
I'm not sure if it will elevate the creative class at all. The marketing woman at my company uses ChatGPT to write copy. It's awful and at times really inaccurate; the other day, it said that people at the firm have degrees in electricity.
However, I was the only one out of five people that thought the text was bad; everyone else (ranging from 20s' to 50s) thought it was fine, because "I can't write." Lots of people in all ages don't have writing skills, so they won't see a problem with AI written text. I think that in many cases, writers--especially business writers-- will be replaced by AI because it's cheap, and to many, it doesn't matter if it's inferior or bad.
I went to elementary and high school in the 1950s and 60s. There was major much emphasis on reading, writing well, correct grammar etc. Today, I'm continually appalled about people's inability to think clearly, present a coherent argument supported by facts, an inability to write grammatical sentences, poor spelling, on and on. BUT...if AI produces weakly written or inaccurate text, many or even most of the younger people today won't know it. People say they "can't write". Well, they were never taught to write, they never practiced writing. Now they're busy learning about racism and equity.
I wrote a more complex analysis earlier today that I think you’d find useful. This is a high level long term opinion, a good one. I don’t get it wrong often.
Automation is king... except when it isn’t. AI is going to replace software systems like excel and Microsoft not the corporate class that actually produces something of real value. Personally I think the only jobs that will be getting axed are those of mediocre middle management, gatekeepers who use information hoarding to maintain power, finance ppl who majored in algorithm monopoly and produce nothing/use complexity to manipulate the system, and workaholics who work harder not smarter. AI business strategies that focus on using it to minimize repetitive busywork and allow workers to focus on more creative or important tasks/decisions are going to be the most successful in my opinion. It’s literally just PATTERN RECOGNITION. These companies should be pushing integration that promotes human innovation/creativity not replacing people and automation for automations sake.
AI might only get rid of middle managers and people who don't want to write anything. I don't know.
However... I know more than a handful of people who have had technical jobs in the broadcast media automated away. Plus... I don't know if those jobs are being replaced; remember the phrase "learn to code?" I don't really care if the rich are getting richer, but it does bother me to see friends and neighbors lose their livelihood and end up in menial jobs (big box stores, Amazon, warehouses, etc) because there are no jobs for them. Thanks to automation. My guess is the same will happen with those replaced by AI. Where will the 55+ go when they're replaced by AI, can't retire and can't find a comparable job?
We are very different creatures you and I. The media broadcast positions getting automated away are a direct consequence of irresponsible/unethical/predatory/negligent practices and behavior that has become extremely prevalent in that particular industry. It is necessary to clean house and restructure when corruption becomes so rampant that it’s recognizable even to uneducated outsiders.
As for “learn to code”, AI will actually write code for you and be much more user friendly for those who don’t have time or the inclination to learn 15 different computer languages. It can be leveraged as an equalizer for the little guy if designed correctly.
As for the 55+ age group, NOTHING can replace the wisdom and skill gained through EXPERIENCE. People in this age group are considered extremely valuable mentors and irreplaceable in my industry. In any industry with a good leadership if I’m being honest. Wisdom is eternal for a reason. I suggest taking the time to recognize and appreciate the value of age instead of assuming youth is the only thing of value in life. Age before beauty 💁♀️
Real competence is nearly impossible to teach. But mindless drones? They can be replaced. Mindless drivel copy for real estate ads? Sure. Replace that. But, case in point, that amazing Bud promotion with that cute young girl in the bath tub. Genius! Genius, I tell ya! AI will never duplicate that.
It seems to me that if what you want is precedent and information on what already exists, AI is perfect for the job. If that's what my lawyer does, then AI is a suitable replacement. If creativity and discovery of that which has not been conceived are tantamount, I don't reckon a glorified Google search tool will pose a serious problem, but I could be wrong.
Try to make something new yourself, and work hard to integrate gpt4 as much as possible in the process. You will notice a drastic increase in productivity. First and second drafts are instant, suggestions to move forward, avenues to explore. It makes you blazing fast.
"income rises, buying power rises, and the tide lifts all boats"
What else rises? Free time. And with it, leisure activities. Which create entire new industries. Take golf. 150 years ago it didn't exist in this country. Today it provides tens of thousands of jobs via equipment makers, course architects, clothing designers and course maintenance workers.
leisure time for workers has barely increased at all in the last few decades, if at all. Also those vacation days off had to be negotiated by trade union power, it’s not innate to capitalism to pay for time off.
this is only sort of half true (and not at all true about unions).
the number of hours one would need to work to have a 1900 lifetsyle is very low.
however, behaviorally, people seem to keep work about the same hours and increase lifestyle instead. this is a common human response. (it's also why ABS has not saved lives. people with it drive faster until risk is about the same)
and leisure time has still increased a great deal because people do not come home and start more work. how much time is saved by ordering from amazon instead of having to do day long shopping trips on the weekend? how many by the roomba or the travel booking site?
"the number of hours one would need to work to have a 1900 lifetsyle is very low."
GMU economist Don Boudreaux does these sorts of comparisons on his website, Cafe Hayek https://cafehayek.com/
Using a 1975 Sears Catalog he demonstrates how we get so much more Bang For The Buck - yes, that is the technical term - becuase _we are more productive_. That is, we produce more for less because of, among other things, improvements in technology.
People always wax poetic about how their dad 'raised 3 kids on a single income' in the 50s
What they neglect to remember was that 50s lifestyle was quite modest by today's standards.
One vehicle, a rather small rectangular house with a simple roof (Ranch style home of course), a single bathroom, one phone (rare long distance use), one TV (maybe), one radio, no air conditioning (maybe just a single room).
If you went on vacation you drove there and you probably camped. You certainly didn't fly anywhere.
I grew up poor in the fifties. We darned our socks. We never threw anything away. Your little brother got it, and when the youngest outgrew it you walked it to a neighbour with a younger child. Where it was very gratefully accepted. We went out to dinner once in a year, or less. One bathroom was standard in every house. I can remember using outhouses. And chamber pots!!
In California, where I live, it would be impossible for the vast majority of people . The only families I see doing it are getting government assistance or are quite rich. In other words - the extremes. My wife and I managed it, but that was because I lived in company housing and ate company food nearly my entire work life. So my situation was a bit like the government subsidized households.
Values were also different in the 50s and 60s (I was born in the early 60s). Technology may bring us more discretionary time and more stuff. Virtue and happiness seem to be on the decline however. There are several studies that show a decline in happiness over several decades. The decline in virtue seems obvious.
Very few people choose hard work. Most prefer easy work, or no work. Could there be a link between a free person engaging in a lifetime of hard work and virtuous happiness? I think so.
Honestly I think you would do better than that 50s lifestyle actually.
I think most of the local manufacturing starts at $20-24 an hour. So you graduate from the local high schools, live with parents for 2-3 more years till you save a down payment and get a modest used car.
Its getting a bit harder to find houses under 150k here but still possible on occasion which means mortgage + interest + taxes of $750-1000 a month. Easier to find such homes in the two adjacent towns 7-10 miles away though. A bit of sweat equity to update them over time w/o taking additional debt.
Used cars are a bit more of a challenge these days, but thankfully they don't make vehicles like they did in the 50s so even a 15 year old vehicle ought to last long enough to save for its replacement.
Not a lot of room for splurging, but I think it could be done.
I think the trick would be the housing. Rental? Most likely not. The field that used to be next to me is now a bunch of duplexes. Their monthly price is 2x the cost of my house that I've been in for 12 years, and they're half the size.
All this leisure time creates "golf widdows". Which btw they like not having us around....it's when they go buy "elective" items. Like going into Costco with a list of 6 things and the bill ends up being $500.
So the guy with free time is spending a good chunk on golf, and in my case, my wife has selected an item from every end cap inn the store in addition to what she went there for.
Seems equitable to me. She still thinks a round of golf takes 7 hours...wink...lol.
What you think of as "paid time off" is really just every other paycheck being reduced a little bit so that you can still get a check for the days you take off work
the government has mandated a new bank holiday this year in the U.K. You could look at their as a pay rise for everybody caused by the largesse of capitalism or by government intervention. I’d go with the latter.
And since nobody has renegotiated their contracts this is clearly not “every other pay check being reduced”. The cost is to the employers.
Anyway my point is that it’s not capitalism itself that produces leisure time - what capitalism wants is 365 days of work per worker per year - but either workers organising to demand it or government legislating for it.
The 'wage increase' from that new 'holiday' will be factored in the next time a wage adjustments and contract negotiations occur for the workers who 'benefited'
So its really just a temporary wage increase
No matter how many times unions or government claim otherwise, they are not what gives you weekends or 'time off'
That is only possible because of productivity gains, skill attainment, and individuals valuing weekends/vacation more than they do more money from working.
You see this in which jobs get lots of vacation, and which don't.
Retail work doesn't typically get lots of vacation because its no-skill, low productivity, and the people doing the job value making more money than they do the time off.
Non-government professionals with 20 years experience on the other hand, you got to offer them more than just money.
At my job I get something like 256 hours of 'time off' (no its not government, union, or seasonal).
I get this only because the company knows to get someone of my skill and experience level you need to offer me more than just money. You need to offer me time off.
"Retail work doesn't typically get lots of vacation because its no-skill, low productivity..."
They typically get paid less and include few if any benefits because employers don't have to compete so hard to find qualified applicants. BigCompany doesn't give Leave Time and Health Insurance and 401k options because They Love Their Fellow Man So Much.
They offer all that to sway prospective employees away from competitors.
I am a real estate developer. I don’t want that. No one does. I want rested workers. I have done biz in two countries with 6 day work weeks. Saturdays are a waste. Nothing gets done.
What else rises? Filthification of everything. Doesn't "standard of living" include non-toxic land, squeaky fresh & wholesome food, and clean water? Apparently not, because most of us don't have it anymore.
"farming? my god, these were jobs people hated so much they were lining up to apply to work 16 hour shifts at victorian mills because it was better." Nope. People loved smallholding type of farming, the way the Amish do. It's a good life. The land was stolen via Enclosure Acts so they HAD to pile into filthy, smoke-filled cities to eke out pennies in brutal factories.
I agree with the premise, but not the details. The Luddites had a point.
I know some small holding organic farmers. They really believe in it as being essential. It is a brutal life. I have yet to meet any small farmer that can do it for long.
I know some heavily mechanized modern farmers who do well. They would not be considered small by old fashioned standards. But small farmers squeaking out a living have tough lives.
Not talking about Amish. They have a communitarian culture. They likely have owned the land for generations, ie no mortgage payments. They live simply.
Let's take a step deeper: what's lurking behind, ie powers the tide? 😊
💬 prosperity comes from making more with less
Not zizactly so: we need aptly-named ‘energy slaves’ to make up for—and build on top of—the finite resource of human labour 🙂 The [deservedly!] lauded technology doesn’t conjure stuff up out of thin air. The underlying thing that alone makes all our modern marvels and our 'great plenty’ possible, *that* particular thing manages to escape our sights entirely. Myopia par excellence.
Check out an exquisitely fun comic strip featuring a maverick protagonist and imperial tons of illuminating analogies --> stuartmcmillen.com/comic/energy-slaves
The school system was intended, in part, to keep young people out of the workforce longer and thus “protect” jobs. Kids are already getting wise about the college racket-it will take another generation because parents tend to make their kids do the same dumb things they did out of knee-jerk conservativism, but the money is so prohibitive and the debt burden so ruinous that the issue is forcing itself.
Where I live, parents are getting wise to the whole school racket as well. My kids don’t go to school; my 17 year old has been employed since 14 and now has as much work as he wants, doing something a robot can never do: playing with children in the woods.
I tried to encourage my youngest to not go to college - we homeschooled ours too. He did but fortunately didn’t come out crazy. But he loves outdoor things and had done survival training and a lot of boat stuff so it seemed like a waste of 4 years. He’s been out 4 years now and I sometimes wonder what he would have done if he’d pursued those other passions instead of being (for now) “corporate.”
Can I say I am cautiously intrigued. Yes a lot of good can happen but will it? What happens if AI is just educated by educators with no experience in the real world? What would happen to AI developed in China instead of Russia, Ukraine, Great Britain or in addition to? We each have our own vision of freedom, fairness, morals, experiences can they be programmed in AI? Will wealthy people only have access to AI? What about relationships, will AI demand equality? How do you measure independent thoughts? What happens if AI becomes aware, but for survival reasons doesn’t communicate this to humans? Do we recognize, reward, an AI when human ideas are built upon and the AI finesse the harder aspects? There is part of me, that loves the end part where the android is talking to Harrison Ford, saying how he has seen things no human will ever see. The moment in time that he glimpses beauty and recognizes it. He just wants to live. Beautiful.
It's true, we can't know until we see. But there is a degree to which we create the world we envision. I believe the choices we make about how we point our eyes do have an effect on the world because there is so much below the conscious, or even the physical, that we act on. I never pretend not to see reality, but when I am anticipating the future, I assume a benevolent universe, because it makes me part of creating one.
For some of us, maybe even a lot of us, education was a way to get out of poverty. We bought it and to some extent we learned, questioned, and worked to get ahead. For me it worked, still, at 63 I wonder if I had chosen the path I wanted would I be where I am today. I can never know this, it is the big part of the mystery of life and choices.
My youngest is by far the most successful of my three. My second eldest is next. Neither went to college. My eldest did, doesnt use it, and is way less successful.
Can I ask what sort of jobs they have? I have four kids, the eldest a junior in high school. He is all set and wanting to go to a high academic college. 🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️ He wants to be a doctor like my husbands. Mixed feelings from me. The second wants to be a pilot, so we can go less conventional there. I’d love to steer the youngest two away from conventional college...
1. Eldest. School teacher. Hated it. Said 3/10 teachers are evil, 6/10 walking zombies, and one in ten really really great. 2. Second eldest is an electrician. Works with PLCs. Makes very good money. 3. Youngest. Real estate developer. Very very competent. Very successful.
Yes to your thoughts on the secondary education racket. Not so sure your kid’s job will be secure, even tho it’s a non-standard job. Why can’t the coming cyborg tech do what your son does, given ten years? Sure, the soul inspired creativity that defines the quality of his work can’t be replicated, but the trappings of it can be and it will feel nearly the same for the client (parents of the child and maybe the child) for a fraction of the cost.
The thing is, if we want to foster continued human development through non-AI enhanced means (in a world where humans and cyborgs will be AI enhanced in a major way beginning sooner than you think), we’re going to either have to separate in some way (as in: live where AI doesn’t reside), or support the idea of an immediate “pause” in the massive momentum for AI and human-like robots that’s already reaching critical stages.
The people who pay my son to play with their kids in the woods are already choosing to do that at a premium to parking the kids in institutions.
As AI continues to shave away at bespoke manifestations of the lazier aspects of being human, we get a better sense of what is left that makes us truly human, and it raises the standard to which we must hold ourselves in order to be excellent in those ways.
What my son is *really* doing is teaching children how to follow their intuition, cooperatively engage with other humans, manage themselves in moments of discomfort, and generally become whole and fully-realized people (and he is modeling for them what a good man is, the role of yang in strength with softness, earned authority exercised with restraint and wisdom).
The rub is that, to do that, we must learn those abilities ourselves. The challenge of our time is to become whole and good *people*, not better robots.
So glad you posted this. Made my morning happier reading your comment. And double thanks to Gato Malo for expounding on this (potentially depressing) topic. It’s wonderful to be exposed to a good dose of optimism!
Weirdly enough it’s entirely possible that in the very near future not only will AI be able to do most of that, it will be able to do it better than a person can. A recent study was done where the researcher took answers from doctors on Reddit and answers to the same questions by that Chat AI that is so popular (that most people say really isn’t that good anyway) and presented them to people to grade which answers were the best. The AI not only gave more thorough and scientific answers (somewhat expected) but scored better on empathy and listening skills. AI in the future for instance will undoubtedly be better able to help others cooperatively engage with others due to the overwhelming amount of information at its fingertips. It won’t just be able to impart general help in this area but pinpoint behavior based on the people you interact with.
You are meeting with a first generation immigrant millennial Muslim from Pakistan? Great then here is the information you need to make that interaction positive based on the culture that person come from. Your new boss is a WASP boomer? No problem here’s how you approach him when you want a raise. Not only that but it will be able to predict what types of people you will interact with based on your location and focus on those specific interactions.
The same is true with learning to manage discomfort. Your son might know ten different general approaches to how to do that, AI will know every approach ever used in human history.
So while AI will probably never be able to model what a good man is, it will do everything else he does and it will do it for cheaper and it will do a better job.
I will believe that AI can develop intuition when I see it. You are telling me what it *will* do, I am telling you what *is* happening. As AI evolves, humans will, too, and continue to niche down what our humanness actually is. Circular hypotheticals are fine and fun, but we don’t know what we haven’t seen yet. If AI makes human intuition obsolete, then human intuition will evolve.
ChatGPT isn’t “intelligent.” It’s just an excellent aggregator and mimic.
I’m saying that AI will be able to break human intuition down into its constituent parts and turn it into a predictable algorithm that it can then replicate and probably with higher accuracy than actual intuition.
I know that ChatGPT isn’t intelligent and that’s the scary part. One argument against the idea of AI taking over medicine is that AI cannot replace bedside manner. Well a very early version of an excellent aggregator and mimic has a better bedside manner than human doctors. What will actual AI be able to do in this area?
The problem with assuming that human behavior will evolve is the potential speed at which these things happen. It takes time for humans to change and it’s very possible that these changes happen too quickly for the mass changes necessary in human thought and behavior to keep up let alone stay ahead.
Perhaps. It’s a hypothetical so there’s no debate to be had. I don’t believe there is any irreducible constituent part to humanness. Medical science and biology are in the dark ages; they have no idea what makes life. If the robots can figure out something their programmers can’t about it, I’ll be curious to see what they come up with.
I don’t see an AI replacing an electrician. We build high rises. Every single foot is different. Every wall the robot have to be programmed for that wall. Could you build most buildings in factories and assembled on site using robotics? Yeah. You could. My youngest is a real estate developer. He makes 1000s of decisions a year. All one off events. Things come up. Can a robot do that? Not well. Design decisions. We anticipate market trends eight years out. A robot can’t do that.
Our businesses are blue collar and not replicable by AI either. We sort of accidentally got into them 30 years ago and made jokes over the years about our country club grandparents’ reactions to them (if they’d been alive). Now we just figure our livelihoods are safe for the foreseeable future. Crazy times.
Lets say analyzing market needs eight years out. Very very few people are even remotely good at it. Who programs the AI? My decisions are gut level, careful analysis, based on decades of experience, try and duplicate that. The AI has to be programmed by someone. Maybe it can run by itself after a few years out and build on its decisions. But if the initial Data input is weak or sketchy each iteration will become less good, not better.
2 - We don’t get the same medicine as Gates or the crew, none of them died of the Bioweapon. They got hOrSePaStE while the masses got death by vents and rundeathisnear
Clarifying: In the 70s, 80s, 90s I dreamed of improving technology (like an iPod, color printing, clearer photography) and those things came to be, and I thought life would be better.
Then we got to the oughts, teens and now the 20s... and the social fabric is disintegrating.
Life was tougher yet in many ways better pre-this-hi-tech.
1. Yes we did. 2. I wasn’t vaxed. Nor would I have taken RunDeathIsNear. Why? Because i have been granted access to a world of information, which I take advantage of.
AI is "artificial" intelligence. The soul is genuine intelligence. Transhumanism is meant to replace the genuine human body, AI is meant to replace the genuine human consciousness. Just my opinion.
Large-language models generating news stories? I may be off base but my understanding of the “AI” of generating text is that it has to have a source corpus on which to base the model. Someone has to write the source corpus, I would assume.
And how good is the output? Is “mario cat” an example? Looking closely at the image, there are several peculiarities and illogical artifacts. From what I have seen, “AI” (I have a fundamental objection to the use of “intelligence” when it comes to machine-generated output) frequently produces text with similar, sometimes subtle, illogic. I struggle to see how, in principle, such illogic can be guaranteed to be eliminated. Human intelligence is way more than just super-duper pattern matching -- I believe that there are elements of it that can’t be explained by the brain-generates-mind theory. But that’s outside the scope of a comment on a blog.
Of course, neither point refutes your thesis, to which I subscribe without reservation. Thank you for yet another insightful article, the likes of which I guarantee will never be generated by computer.
LLM is a very limited form of AI and you can do A LOT more with something more powerful like chat GPT that, while built on top of an LLM has far greater capability.
i know people using it to hunt for lagging correlation trading arbs and sifting the spurious by only pointing to those where there is external reason to suspect causality.
AI is not just playing word salad. it can already take a speech or a press release and summarize for meaning. the speed with which it's improving is stunning. gpt4 is so much more powerful than 3.
and failing to call it "intelligence" seems a dangerous conceit. why not? because it's not human? why is human intelligence such a pinnacle? these machines can beat us at nearly all games now including some like GO that are far to complex to have a solvable possibility space. how are you defining "intelligence" here?
ditto graphics. the current ones are oddly surreal and impressionistic (though you have to look closely, it's already to the point where cursory human vision knows just what it's a picture of which may have interesting implications for how the AI is modeling human perception and images or how its own works)
and it has gotten SO much better. it seems to struggle with cats and hands and perspective. but it can do you a human face that's staggeringly good including very convincing full expressions that escape the uncanny valley. it's early tech but has gotten so much better already it's unreal.
you can also tighten it up a lot if you use longer prompts.
i literally just used "a cat driving a lamborghini" and it generated that picture with zero additional prompt. it's shockingly capable.
I would argue that no amount of software cleverness is going to allow a Turing machine to escape its fundamentals. That which is not computable will remain so. Computing machines, virtually by definition, are constrained to manipulating symbols within the boundaries of a formal system. Human thought is far, far more than symbol manipulation and brute-force search of the solution space (or search aided by clever statistical organization of data and advanced retrieval algorithms). I find vague arguments about “quantum computing” entirely unconvincing.
Sure computers can outperform humans at many games precisely because of their capacity to search the solution space. That is, in my mind, a clear demonstration that a human chess player does not rely on a process that is in any way comparable to how the computer plays. The giant-Turing-machine model of human intelligence is wanting.
I will point out that everything software can do required a programmer. Software does not spontaneously coalesce ex nihilo. Nor did “AI” create itself from simpler programs. I work for a company that has an enormous array of computers that has not programmed itself in any non-trivial way, and even in the trivial cases, it was programmed to do so by humans. On the other hand, I have taught myself many things without anyone (other than the “me” that is my self-awareness) either instructing me to do so or teaching me.
"Computing machines, virtually by definition, are constrained to manipulating symbols within the boundaries of a formal system"
this seems unlikely to remain true if it even is now. many are writing and re-writing their own code, languages, and though processes. alpha go did not win by brute force, it created a stronger theory of the game than humans ever have. go is far too complex to "search a solution space" or even a meaningful fraction of it.
i think you're modeling AI as quite a bit more limited than it is/will be on the presumption that only humans can self-teach.
alpha go was just show the game, the rules, the scoring and told "learn to play to win."
I’d be interested to hear the theory of how the non-computable might be computed. The current understanding of “computation” is inseparable from symbol manipulation — has been since the 1930’s (weak “quantum computing” handwaving notwithstanding — I’m not convinced that some unspecified indeterminacy counts as intelligence or some new way of computing the non-computable).
No clever software is going to make a Turing machine into anything else: no matter how many levels of recursion are embedded in the programming, the end result is always going to be a program that directs the underlying hardware to manipulate symbols according to pre-defined rules.
By way of analogy, I studied some small amount of mathematics long ago. I was taught algebra and calculus in high school as symbol manipulation. While that may have been passable pedagogy, it didn’t provide much insight into what was really going on. Later, when studying analysis, I struggled mightily until I broke free of the symbol-manipulation way of thinking and started to actually intuit what it was all about. My classmates who earlier arrived at that intuition did better than I, and those who could not escape symbol manipulation failed.
Manipulating some finite set of symbols under some set finite set of rules, which is what computers can only do, and both of which are directly or indirectly determined by the programmer, is completely different from understanding the underlying problem domain.
this feels tautological. how are you defining "non-computable" and why do you think it does not apply to humans?
can you think in abstraction without language or symbols (like math)? this idea of "intuit" sounds suspect and is probably just "seeing from a larger frame" and you cannot get there without starting with symbols.
many argue this is precisely what alpha go did and that it is playing an intuitive game based on a broader view than a human can have and is just understanding the evolving "shape" of the board in a manner humans cannot. the grand masters have no idea how it's playing, what it's maximizing, or how it plays. they were completely baffled trying to play it.
it seems to quite literally just have a stronger theory of the problem than humans and go is MUCH too big a problem space to brute force in finite time.
you seem to be starting from the conclusion that human though is some sort of apogee and that emulating it constitutes "intelligence" but i find this assuptive.
why would human thought somehow be "the best" thought as opposed to a deeply limited machine working with small amounts of info input from a desperately inadequate sensorium in biased and non rigorous fashions?
it's not even clear that intuition is a feature so much as a kludge work around for a mind structure not up to real thinking.
such a concept is inherently abhorrent and challenging to human vanity but it's not going to change the sort of output one gets from a potentially superior theory of mind and cognition that may emerge.
it seems to me that you're loading your questions and assumptions in such a way as to presume your conclusion of "if not just like human, inferior to human."
why isn't "relying on sloppy and unreliable processes like "intuition" instead of really learning how to think will always hold humans back by trapping them in local but not general maxima of cognition and understanding" the more plausible base reality?
I don’t define computable; the commonly accepted model of computation does. It is generally considered to be “that which can be done with a Turing machine”. Soare argued that this definition of computability is no less likely to be correct than the epsilon-delta definition of continuity. So yes, the entire field is somewhat tautological.
I would disagree, although it’s only from personal experience, that the transition from symbol manipulation to understanding was simply a matter of more rules and more symbols — I know what I experienced and that wasn’t it — it was qualitative rather than quantitative. It (my awareness of my experience) is what sparked the beginning of my understanding that human thought and machine computation are two different animals — a distinction I had previously failed to see. No genuine creativity can arise from symbol manipulation. Can I prove that? Only to myself — my personal experience with what limited creativity I have demonstrates to me that my admittedly somewhat pathetic creative output is at least not a mathematical function.
When formulating a mathematical proof, the good mathematicians start with an intuition about the proposition and then backfills the formality, not the other way around. That’s the intuition to which I refer. In my view it’s a phenomenon related to the feeling you get about a situation in which something is off, something isn’t quite right but you don’t know what — the sensation of your hairs standing on end that leads you to investigate.
I think human thought is an apogee (or at least a local maximum — there’s a long way to go), but not of computation, specifically because I don’t confuse thinking and computation any more than I confuse swimming and commercial shipping. I don’t confuse a hammer and saw with carpentry.
I can understand how there are those who think “Mr. Spock” is the model of human perfection. I used to. But that’s so awfully limiting as to be pathetic.
Human thinking necessary implies self-consciousness, curiosity, the gregarious urge, the adventure lure, subjectivity, feelings, morals, ethics — mind — the capacity for which has never been demonstrated to be possible in a Turing machine, and there’s no falsifiable hypothesis to suggest that it ever will be.
Games are closed circuit knowledge systems. There are a large number of moves in chess, but it is not incalculable. Most of real humanness involves infinite or as close to infinite as to be practically infinite. Ten trillion compounds in the body, for example. We have identified a thousand or so of them. We don’t know how each interacts with each. This is as close to being infinitely complicated as one can get. How they interact is not knowable, period. Not by you or me
Or a super robot. I see way better data being spit out, super fast. But making the decision on what to do I don’t think can be outsourced.
I guess I'm not entitled to an opinion. Am I not allowed an opinion on pictures or paintings made by humans? Or is that an acceptable item to criticize?
FYI, there are odd things about 2 of the other pix, too. Once the errors are noticed it makes the pix creepy.
my point it only that it's a young tech and will rapidly get better, just like other technologies did. it's not like AI art is anything like mature. this is very early days.
in a couple years, this will be very different. in 5, i doubt you can tell AI generated video from camera video.
That will be very handy for people in power who wish to rewrite the receipts to match their narrative. Forget linking to a video. It's just as likely to have been constructed by an AI.
I am an artist and one of those useless graphic artists that has been replaced supposedly by AI. I agree the images of the cats in this post look weird to my eyes. I was thinking that before it was mentioned they were generated by AI. Too smooth and dark.
But to each his own. What I want to know is when AI going to drive my car? What happened to driverless cars? If AI drives my car I can save a crapload of money by not paying car insurance. Let AI pay it.
For me the devil is in the details of the pix. The Nordic cat is very well done, to me, until you look at his left hand. The yelling man it's his right hand, and the fact that I just don't like that pic, period. The cat in the car it's mostly all the crap in front of him that's facing away from him. How do you use controls you can't reach? Too weird.
Not even that. Try to generate beautiful AI images like Gato by yourself. I somehow completely fail to reproduce anything close in quality.
So I guess he pays some better AI engine ooor the AI engine knows who he is and produces more convincing pictures for him. For me creates total rubbish. If AI will work like this in the future then it will only help the people in power.
As you may be aware, The Shamen were quoting Terence McKenna, an ethnobotanist and proponent of psychedelics as mankind's salvation. It continues:
"Human history represents such a radical break with the natural systems of biological organization that preceded it, that it must be the response to a kind of attractor or dwell point that lies ahead in the temporal dimension. Persistently western religions have integrated into their theologies the notion of a kind of end of the world. And I think that a lot of psychedelic experimentation sort of confirms this intuition. I mean, it isn’t going to happen according to any of the scenarios of orthodox religion, but the basic intuition that the universe seeks closure in a kind of Omega point of transcendence is confirmed. It’s almost as though this object in hyperspace, glittering in hyperspace, throws off reflections of itself, which actually ricochet into the past, illuminating this mystic, inspiring that saint or visionary, and that out of these fragmentary glimpses of Eternity we can build a kind of a map of not only the past universe and the evolutionary ingression into novelty, but a kind of map of the phuture."
they had a thesis about rave culture/electronic music as a form of linguistic evolution and a rediscovery of biologically compatible rhythm signatures/natural magic. suspecting this may also derive from mckenna influence.
I would have agreed with this 5 years ago, but the way things have gone I just see this as idealistic.
Specifically I would challenge the ideas that AI is directly akin to previous mechanizations and that increased productivity through mechanization leads to better outcomes for the non-ruling classes.
The first point should be obvious: AI isn't replacing tedious, brainless manual labor like the loom, combine harvester, or printing press. It's designed to replace human creative endeavor; things like generation of art, writing, code, etc. Not just make easier for humans to produce, but producing in their stead. Sure, there are consistency problems, sure it takes infrastructure to maintain so it's not as cheap as it looks, and sure it requires human-produced input, but do the corporate and government mouthbreathers running our society care about any of that? Why would they not replace all human creativity with something mass-produced and devoid of humanity, surely that's easier than dealing with the poors? Do we really want to live in a society where some large proportion of our creative work no longer bears connection to another human?
The second point I agree with you on in the purely abstract. Industrialization has increased standard of living in the West in many ways, and *in theory* should be increasing standard of living in all ways. But I have to recognize that the latter just hasn't been the case. Productivity increases have not been allocated back to the working classes meaningfully for centuries, and huge amounts of the re-allocation have been wrestled away from the elites with blood and tears. Aggregated across a year, the modern American worker works twice as many hours as a 13th century serf, and while we have so many shiny things to show for it, are we any happier? Suicide rates are at immense levels, depression and anxiety are nearly ubiquitous, obesity, sexual impotence, and general ennui have literally never been higher in recorded peacetime.
And why has this been the case? Well put simply, when you have immense institutions (government, corporate, NGO, academic, you name it) with their own inertia, their members are not the ones who are going to be replaced by mechanization even if they should be. They reap the benefits of increased prosperity, while also requiring the same level of capital flow to continue their operation. What happens is that, in order for the cashflow to be maintained as people exit the workforce even temporarily thanks to mechanization, increased burdens (higher taxes, prices, etc.) are placed on those still working. As a result, those still working have to work even more to make ends meet. Sure, they'll reap some of the benefits of the increased prosperity, but at what cost? And have they been given a chance to do that cost benefit analysis and decide if the prosperity increase is worth the cost to them? Try not paying taxes and refusing to comply with orders to do so and you'll have the answer.
I'm not one for luddite-ism, and my background is experimental physics and I currently work in tech. Believe you me when I say I'm not opposed to technological progress in all of its forms or anything like that. But the notion that all progress is good progress when it comes to technology, predicated on the nebulous notion that prosperity will somehow make its way out to everyone magically despite thousands of years of oligarchic interference in that process I find uncompelling, and the full steam ahead approach to all progress without time to assess impact terrifying.
I think you’re right about a lot of what you’ve written here, particularly about past “scares.” I hope you’re right about most or all of it. One thing that’s different about AI might be the breadth of jobs that could be impacted. We’re not talking about enhancement here, e.g., cell phones or washing machines for households, we’re talking about replacing positions that have required human bodies and brains with AI equipped cyborgs which will be far more efficient in many respects and will cost pennies on the dollar compared to their human counterparts over the course of their lifespan. Teachers, police, clerks, journalists, accountants, laborers, yes, graphic artists, musicians, truck drivers, even military will experience significant replacement, all in a short period of time. The flickering totalitarian era we’re sparking and spraying gasoline on these days is unlikely to result in a greater middle class. Where’s the profit wringing in that?
So, here’s hoping you’re right, but there’s a better chance you’d be wrong about this one than you would have been in past eras.
I agree. Some people are panicking and if anything I lean that way, rather than thinking AI is just a better tool. The real killer feature is it can UNDERSTAND.
It does that the same way we do, via LANGUAGE. If a capable robot understands what it is trying to do, what situation it is in and what problems or obstacles it needs to overcome, then it can do pretty much anything.
Let me ask an AI to name 3 random jobs... Billboard installer, florist, chef.
An AI can definitely do chef work with greater accuracy and speed than a human chef, and with zero chance of forgetting the salt.
Billboard installer is simple work for an AI that knows what a billboard is and what it's role is for installing it.
Florist sounds impossible for an AI, but since they can draw a bouquet I see no reason they cannot design and create one from available inventory. Indeed such a bot could great you at the door, ask your interest and budget, then create and show you a screen of various combinations which don't yet exist, then create the one you pick - fast and efficiently, and without making you feel awkward about your budget or anything else.
Mix Boston Dynamics with ChatGPT4 and we're already nearly there, because the same bot that installed the billboard late last night can sit on a charger in the florist shop, waiting for a customer, before starting work as a chef in the evening.
The fairly steep rate of decrease in live births suggests that there may not be many humans around to have their jobs replaced, in say, 20 or 30 years.
This article focuses so hard on the word 'jobs', it misses the real issues:
1) It is the type of jobs that matter, not the number, nor the historical trend.
AI has taken the job of critical thinking. It has taken over the job of training AI. It is taking over more decisions about the flow of wealth, or the use of power. (https://www.corbettreport.com/how-blackrock-conquered-the-world-part-3/). We only really need one AI in a certain role to lead to catastrophe.
2)There are no jobs if AI is an existential threat. See the arguments presented by Elieza Yudhowksy and his critics. They all agree that the threat of AI is not taking jobs, but wiping out humanity. Elieza states a high probability on a smaller timeline, his critics, state a lower probability on a longer timeline.
Thank you for the reference, I will have to look up this Yudhowsky.
My concern with AI is that previous technologies didn't simply leave people unemployed because they (we) could shift from manual labor to mental labor. Where once we had farmers and assembly-line workers, we got proofreaders and paralegals and programmers. Once machines could do physical tasks better/faster/cheaper than people could, there was still a whole other category of work that people could turn to: intellectual work.
But if mental workers get replaced too -- what's left then for people to do for a living? Do we most of us become "useless eaters" depending on UBI (universal basic income) to stay alive?
And technology is deflationary. Absent the manipulation of money the price of everything falls toward the marginal cost of production. AI will kill bullshit jobs that add little or no value to society. Sure, there’s more to the story, but wiping out administrative, bureaucratic, make work jobs that drive the cost of everything up is a good thing.
it's not about adding little to no value. those who farmed by hand provided vital value. it's about providing the same or greater value at lower human (and overall) cost to generate the same outputs more readily and free up scarce resources to move to ne pursuits that can be supported by that plenty.
before food was plentiful, there were no "trades." we needed to get good enough at feeding ourselves that you could have a shoemaker or a blacksmith or even a flint axe maker who would do other work instead and trade that work for food.
I would suggest that it wasn't about food being plentiful. It was about food being scarce enough that it was necessary to claim it as property and keep other people away from it. From there on, trades developed as the only peaceful way for non-owners to get access to food.
Agreed... Technology makes necessary or desirable tasks more efficient and less costly and frees up capital, including time, for allocation elsewhere. Effectively utilized and distributed everyone on the planet is a potential beneficiary.
It's also what the hated corporate raiders were doing in the 80s - yes, in some instances they were selling off pieces of a holding company's portfolio, but they were also purging the company of redundant or unnecessary jobs, and/or dead weight that only HAD the job because no one else had the spine to tell him it was time to go.
I think it will actually increase the proportion of bullshit jobs that add little or no value to society. The people who are put out of work by AI will still need to be fed. Increased efficiency in production will lead to more unemployment, make-work, and administrative/bureaucratic careers in the labor market.
No kidding. Especially considering how terrible the overall administrative response is.
Hey Dave now that you are back from the grave can you comment on your ideas on proprioceptive thought? And maybe take it to the next obvious level *what* do you think consciousness is? 😊
I’ll answer your broader question. The implicate order is consciousness. Duality and the continual unfolding and enfolding of the holomovement that is spacetime are emergent.
It’s good to be back from the dead. I’m particularly interested to see where theoretical physics goes when it becomes apparent that spacetime is quantized.
we here in the unfolded explicate space are going to be deeply distressed when we find out that the divergence of behavior in the quantum realm is not actually a greater enfolding so much as raster limitation of the simulation we inhabit. it's just the point where we stop analyzing the picture and start analyzing the workings of the underlying model that paints the picture in some alien child's version of "the SIMS." will be anti-climactic as an implicate order, but would explain quite a lot...
I made a response but it went to the main thread. Duh. No worries all this blah blah quickly becomes mental masturbation. Appreciate your insights, Thanks Dave!
Sure, we gain when new technology reduces demand for labour. We gain time, time we could spend doing more productive or enjoyable things. Or we could sit on our increasingly fat asses watching TV or going down the mall and buying processed junk and sugary drinks in half gallon buckets.
Look how much easier our lives are, now we don't have to labour in the fields... working hard, keeping fit and strong, learning from older generations, retaining a sense of time and place, and history and community.
Look how much better our lives are now, with all mod cons, look how smart we are, compared with those who lived a hundred years ago, compare the language of our parliamentarians with the founding fathers, the concepts they discuss, the breadth of knowledge and wisdom and understanding.
For everything we think we gain, we lose something. And in this heedless, destructive rush to change, who considers what we have lost? The skills that built churches and cathedrals. The ornamentation that furnished them. The beauty of traditional architecture, that now we try and fail to replicate in plastic.
We live in a fake world, bereft of authenticity, worshipping cost and convenience. Are you so sure that things are so much better, and progressively getting better? I'm not.
I completely agree. Assuming that AI doesn’t either turn against us or get used by some nefarious faction to cause widespread chaos I think the children’s movie Wall-E is the best example of our dystopian future. I’m not even referring to the trash filled earth and space travel aspect, just the everyone is morbidly obese eating crap and unaware of the world around them part.
I disagree, when you stop abusing child and third world labor the price for goods and services will skyrocket. It's only result of outsourcing and globalisation which made this crappy products so cheap. It will not repeat, you don't have anymore countries which are willing to work for food so you have to increase prices and also start watching the quality of the products.
Todays abuse is simply yesterdays standard for children. Each society must pay its due on the way to better. There is no “all at once”. And when machines replace the children, the price comes down and the quality (if built in to the process) improves.
People don't realize that here in the West it took nearly a hundred years of industrialization before people could really afford to not have their kids do paid labor.
That process is going to happen a whole lot faster for places modernizing today.
Amen. My grandparents went to work full time after they finished 8th grade, yet my oldest children hardly knew what work was until they graduated college!
From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting."
Many more than 300 million jobs have been destroyed since the start of the Industrial Revolution thanks to technological advance and innovation, and as a consequence many more new jobs have been created in their place. Somebody needs to introduce these clowns to history classes and the works of Joseph Schumpeter who in 1942 coined the term “Creative Destruction”.
Fear not. The Universe is chaotic, dynamic, non-linear, nothing is inevitable. Things don’t just change once, or in any particular direction, by any plan, or by command - although plenty try to make it so. It is a long process of spontaneous, emergent order. The notion of Apocalypse and predictable change is summed up in the climate change folly, and failure to consider the unseen and counter forces.
I worry less about AI taking jobs and more with AI providing incompetent people with a job. I don't want a lawyer who graduated law school with AI written papers that aren't even read before being submitted for grading. I worry that AI will turn out a generation of idiots with college degrees. Oh, wait...
perhaps instead AI will eliminate the need for and/or value of idiots with college degrees (already happening, but this will accelerate it) and many will choose more viable careers instead.
perhaps we can finally have enough plumbers and electricians again. (and have you seen what those guys are earning?)
and house painters.
We have known our ext house painter for 23 years. He has grown from a small business to a very large company. He still paints houses and other exterior work but also paints these ridiculous massive data centers in Loudoun County Virginia.
He just spent $300K over winter to spiff out his back yard with pool and exterior buildings etc. Not bad for a high school grad
Who "just" runs a painting company! Amazing what providing a good service can get you! I haven't seen a doctor since 2010. I'm 53. I had completely lost faith in them and just decided to try to stay in good health as best I can. When covid broke out I told everybody who would listen not to touch the vaccines... I was telling people this in April of 2020 before they were even talking about vaccines! Supposedly they are providing a service nobody can do without... yet I do without. If I really get in trouble I'll probably got to Mexico for help. I do not trust the US medical professionals at all. One of the issues I had with them was the poor service, poor outcomes, and them pushing pharma products for the rest of our life. The other was the massive construction projects all over the USA going up. We build medical complexes instead of Cathedrals now... and listening to people complain about the lack of money for medical treatment and healthcare! That never made any sense at all.
Sometimes I wish my dad had urged me to be a plumber.
Like my neighbor Tom the Plumber. They just spent $124k on Pool Deck and Cabana reno to, as you say, spiff out his backyard.
yes.
I dated a plumber back in college days. I am sure he is loaded now.
I also dated a welder, he ended up becoming VP of the big company (Coakley Williams)
Spiffed out indeed.
I married "government guy" and we're just slumming it here in No Va 😂😂😂😂 He is retired and he was probably one of a few dozen government guys that actually worked.
Sounds like slumming it has worked out just fine. 👍
There's still time to become a plumber.
Dag, you're right.
I live in a modest subdivision here in Oregon. Many low-level "professional" types; teachers, management, medical services, sales, etc. Know which neighbor has the nicest cars, the biggest boats and haw two houses elsewhere (one on a lake, and one in the forest). The god damn electrician, of course. And God bless that man, he's earning it.
The most well off people I know of are plumbers and electricians. I'd bet few to none of them went to college.
Not Mansion Works? Used to live in Loco (and it really IS Loco by the way). In much more sane (if congested) Florida now. Funnily enough though I can't find a single tradesperson to do painting, general contracting, small jobs etc. No trouble with that in LoCo. I guess all the tradespeople here are fully employed on the 'big contracts' here, eg hotels, condos and developments.
Lately, when 'interacting' with a tradesman, I have taken to congratulating him on his choice of career.
And having posted that 8 hours ago, have just said goodbye to a lunch guest, who told me of her college-trained nephew who is now a carpenter. YAY!
I’m a chef. I went to Uni to go into Nutrition research but hated studying, quit in the middle of my Masters and went to Germany to train. Never regretted it but chefs are underpaid and overworked so this is not a trade I’d go into for the $.
agree.
way back when, I was an RN, back in the day they were also paid pretty shitty for all the stuff we did.
I think they get paid better now.
You are assuming that the sort of people who go into law would make good plumbers and electricians which I doubt. I’m a pretty good veterinarian but no amount of training would make me a good plumber, carpenter, or mechanic. After years and years of work I could probably reach competent but I would never be good. Working with my hands in that way is just beyond my ability, which is why I don’t do orthopedic medicine. I’m no good with a drill doesn’t matter if it’s used on a wall or a bone.
one can always find a counter case, but at the margin i suspect there could be quite a large shift. this sort of technical/skilled trades education works wonderfully in germany and i have no reason to suspect americans are somehow far worse with their hands or at tactile learning.
Several generations of a lack of tactile teaching in schools not to mention drugging the kids best at tactile learning is bound to have pretty major effects. Maybe these could be undone in a couple generations but I doubt it. I think there are both demographic and cultural reasons why something that works well in Germany wouldn’t work here. I think it’s worth a try but I don’t think the students who would benefit from it most (boys who don’t do well sitting quietly) are the same students going to law school (girls who excel at sitting quietly).
Don’t get me wrong in a communist society where you were assigned a job and had to do it or die I think most lawyers could do trade jobs well enough not to get killed. But personally I want more from my electrician than that level of skill.
Realistically let’s look at who makes up law school these days. 55% are women and those women are the sit in the classroom regurgitate answers type women. They aren’t going to be plumbers and electricians. If law wasn’t an option they would go into education or medicine. Plus unlike for men unemployment is actually an option for many women. If forced to choose I think most women would choose housewife before they chose to be electricians or plumbers. (Which might actually be the best possible outcome in many ways but that’s an entirely different can of worms.)
The lack of tradesmen is a serious problem and I agree that we need a more trades oriented education system. But the idea that getting rid of intellectual jobs that are mostly held by women is going to do anything at all to alleviate that lack is erroneous.
In vet school the question of what would you do if you couldn’t be a vet came up a fair bit. No one ever mentioned a trade. People talked about going into human medicine, pharmacology, law, teaching, but no one ever mentioned a trade. I suspect it would be the same for law students.
Don’t get me wrong I’m all for eliminating lawyers, I just don’t think I would want very many of the girls who typically make up a law school class in charge of ensuring my house doesn’t burn down due to an electrical fire.
"I just don’t think I would want very many of the girls who typically make up a law school class in charge of ensuring my house doesn’t burn down due to an electrical fire."
This is wise. Maybe 'the girls' should see if there skills are more relevant in fields like publishing, research, helping the indigent navigate all the crazy rules and regulations and laws that intimidate entrepeneurs, immigrants, people who want to build a shed but not be in violation of zoning, want to open a Taco and Kugel Truck, adopt...
Or - and this might be the really, really important part - many of us have fostered hobbies and other activities that include useful, marketable skills for completely unrelated endeavors. Again, it might not be satisfying for everyone but for some, arguably many more, it will be better because we'll all be more productive.
Some of this has already played out in the metro Detroit area in the auto industry. There have been hundreds of people who were laid off from their very well paid assembly line jobs and told to "retrain" and go into other industries. It's all well and good to say "retain" and to actually do so and then find a job in your new field. I suppose it's easy if you're under 50 to go back to college/trade school, take on new debt and find a new career. Or start a business. Both would require taking on new debt, which is something many would not want to do, especially if they're older.
If you're over 50 and have to retrain and trade fields, it's almost impossible to get a job. One of the only real options is to start your own business, but not everyone is suited for that. So to say that automation/ AI isn't going to take your job is something of a fallacy; it's already happened and is happening in a variety of industries. For the young, a new path is fine; if you're older, you're pretty much screwed; employers don't want to hire someone who is 55 in an entry level job in a new field, knowing they are going to retire.
A friend of mine was an agriculture veterinarian and told me it was not work for women, physically too demanding, with arms elbow-deep in a cow, muscling out a breached calf. Too many sweaty, dirty, tiring nights.
As a woman agricultural veterinarian I both agree and disagree, not a lot of women want to do the work and it’s harder for those of us who do than for our male counterparts. But there are lots of women agricultural vets in the US so wether or not it’s work for women plenty of women are doing the work.
We see it in the UK. We have a lot of female equine vets (I have a very good one, part of the reason being because she's completely independent & owns her own business and is not dictated to by the awful venture capitalist/similar companies who have sadly bought up most of the excellent veterinary hospitals/practices in the UK) - but they don't need very significantly overt physical strength. The very powerful IV sedation they liberally use facilitates the latter. When they experience a needle shy young, powerful, very upset horse there are sometimes problems (although owners have a big responsibility to desensitise young horses to expected vet procedures & it's hugely upsetting & unsafe for all (especially the poor horse) when this critical horse husbandry work is not done.
We have far fewer female agricultural vets, for the reasons you set out. My female friend is a dairy worker & horse groom & she is very much in the minority and has to hold her own in the male work group on the dairy farms. It's very hard, dirty, cold often very upsetting work. The cows love her, her natural empathy shines through in everything she does.
What is it that is never said when people are erroneously complaining about the gender (should be sex but that's another story) pay gap - just how many women do you know who want to be bin men, oil rig workers, slaughter house workers, fire fighters, road diggers, grave diggers, miners. No .... thought not. Said as a woman.
I grew up in the "German" system of trade education, and must say that a significant majority of people I know do not do the work they spent three years learning. On the other hand, it's finally in my retirement that I picked up the tools I used to detest and use them with joy. Life is funny.
Great comment, and surprising. I'm in the U.S. and have contemplated the advantages of the German system of trade education.
Please remember that schools like Worcester Polytechnic Institute (Worcester Ma) --and probably Rochester Poly. as well--began as training schools for the technicians who worked on the machines in the mills which were expanding like crazy in the late 18th, all through the 19th century--especially in New England where those rushing streams/rivers provided water power. And that the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 set aside, in each state of the Union, land for a training facility to encourage the agricultural and technical "arts" of that state. When my mother was in college (1936-40) Univ Mass (where 35 years later I did an M.A. in Classics) was still known as Mass Aggie. That is to say, every state university in the USA began as an ag/tech school.
This presumes that a person is only capable of being or doing a single thing. We're all so much more multi-faceted than that, I think.
That it might be less satisfying for some than their previous gig is not a good reason to stop others from enjoying the benefits of the same inventions and techniques.
But ultimately, a Brother's Gotta Eat so pretty much everyone finds some way to be gainfully employed.
She was a very principled politician and person. So many smears and untruths published about her. We miss her so much from the British political scene, which is now a nightmare of socialists masquerading as Conservatives, and hard left Marxists masquerading as "new Labour" who are completely captured by evil woke ideology and more than willing to throw women, girls & children's health, safety, sport etc under the bus....and prosecute you if you dare to protest. The absolute bin fire of the SNP woke theocracy in Scotland being the path that Labour is on track to emulate.
My dad once won the Queen's award for export as part of the board of the company he worked for. It was one of his proudest days meeting Mrs Thatcher, who came to present the award.
https://twitter.com/realmrsthatcher/status/1647484517618180096?s=20
But what if idiots are the ones creating the AI algorithms?
What if? I think idiots probably ARE doing it. However, I did hear someone mention the other day that a conservative type was working on an AI with a conservative slant, if anything. Ultimately, what any AI spits out to you was put in there by a human/humans with points of view that could be very wrong and even twisted. So anything coming from AI has to be just as suspect as anything else out there.
I'm currently restoring a 1935 Dodge pickup truck. All the machinist work, the body work, and the upholstery work is being done by old retired guys who got bored and set up shops in their garages and I'm paying a huge premium even to get them to do the work. I can't find any actual shops to do the work that are not scheduled 8 to 12 months out. The local car carpeting shop is scheduling work for next year! The story I hear from these shops is that they cannot find/hire qualified people to do the work because there are no young people learning how to do this kind of work anymore. As the old guys retire, nobody is replacing them.
The dealership where I usually take my car for service won't accept the work now because I didn't buy the car there. They are down three technicians, so they have to prioritize customers who bought the vehicle at the dealership.
A great shop near me that had been around for at least 25 years just closed down because he couldn't find mechanics who were reliable and who would stay with him. Sad.
I own a '83 H-D WideGlide w/ a Shovelhead - there is only ONE guy I know of in all of Texas who CAN work on it, not that he WILL, without a premium...
No, it's because a lot of that knowledge, and experience has died with those mechanics.
The service and tech manuals (if you can even find 'em now, only help so much.
If I ever have to replace the other valve stem guide in the forward cylinder head, I'm screwed.
Why don’t the old guys connect to Mike Rowe and set up trade schools for this kind of work?
This is so true. AI is going to allow the creative class that’s been oppressed by mediocre leadership and gatekeepers to actually move up. Middle management or bad leadership will be completely demolished once ppl like me get their hands on this. Ai will replace systems like excel and once it’s user friendly enough it’ll become an extremely useful interface to layer data from previously incompatible sources.
I haven’t even actually used it yet and I got asked to present my opinions at a conference. Automation is great except when it’s not. Humans cannot be replaced by a machine, duh 🙄. It’s truly mind boggling to me that so few are unwilling to challenge these “tech geniuses” clearly delusional and ridiculous (lies) visions for AI. It’s textbook witchcraft bs fear psychological manipulation 101.
AI is going to replace excel and Microsoft not human beings. Or at least the ones still capable of learning something new, which should still be everyone with a pulse.
Y’all seriously need to find Jesus if you believe a human being made in the image of the creator god can be replaced by a machine. 🤦♀️ I feel like all of human history should be proof that dog don’t hunt. Technology is an inanimate object, a tool, end of discussion.
Master it instead of worshipping it as an idol. There’s a parable about a golden calf that’s particularly relevant. Problem solved. 💁♀️
I'm not sure if it will elevate the creative class at all. The marketing woman at my company uses ChatGPT to write copy. It's awful and at times really inaccurate; the other day, it said that people at the firm have degrees in electricity.
However, I was the only one out of five people that thought the text was bad; everyone else (ranging from 20s' to 50s) thought it was fine, because "I can't write." Lots of people in all ages don't have writing skills, so they won't see a problem with AI written text. I think that in many cases, writers--especially business writers-- will be replaced by AI because it's cheap, and to many, it doesn't matter if it's inferior or bad.
I went to elementary and high school in the 1950s and 60s. There was major much emphasis on reading, writing well, correct grammar etc. Today, I'm continually appalled about people's inability to think clearly, present a coherent argument supported by facts, an inability to write grammatical sentences, poor spelling, on and on. BUT...if AI produces weakly written or inaccurate text, many or even most of the younger people today won't know it. People say they "can't write". Well, they were never taught to write, they never practiced writing. Now they're busy learning about racism and equity.
I went to elementary/ high school in the 70s/early 80s. Grammar, writing essays and reports and so on. Today... "social justice classes."
Writing will be dead. Collect the books you want now, I don't necessarily see many good ones in the future, if they keep publishing books.
I wrote a more complex analysis earlier today that I think you’d find useful. This is a high level long term opinion, a good one. I don’t get it wrong often.
Automation is king... except when it isn’t. AI is going to replace software systems like excel and Microsoft not the corporate class that actually produces something of real value. Personally I think the only jobs that will be getting axed are those of mediocre middle management, gatekeepers who use information hoarding to maintain power, finance ppl who majored in algorithm monopoly and produce nothing/use complexity to manipulate the system, and workaholics who work harder not smarter. AI business strategies that focus on using it to minimize repetitive busywork and allow workers to focus on more creative or important tasks/decisions are going to be the most successful in my opinion. It’s literally just PATTERN RECOGNITION. These companies should be pushing integration that promotes human innovation/creativity not replacing people and automation for automations sake.
AI might only get rid of middle managers and people who don't want to write anything. I don't know.
However... I know more than a handful of people who have had technical jobs in the broadcast media automated away. Plus... I don't know if those jobs are being replaced; remember the phrase "learn to code?" I don't really care if the rich are getting richer, but it does bother me to see friends and neighbors lose their livelihood and end up in menial jobs (big box stores, Amazon, warehouses, etc) because there are no jobs for them. Thanks to automation. My guess is the same will happen with those replaced by AI. Where will the 55+ go when they're replaced by AI, can't retire and can't find a comparable job?
We are very different creatures you and I. The media broadcast positions getting automated away are a direct consequence of irresponsible/unethical/predatory/negligent practices and behavior that has become extremely prevalent in that particular industry. It is necessary to clean house and restructure when corruption becomes so rampant that it’s recognizable even to uneducated outsiders.
As for “learn to code”, AI will actually write code for you and be much more user friendly for those who don’t have time or the inclination to learn 15 different computer languages. It can be leveraged as an equalizer for the little guy if designed correctly.
As for the 55+ age group, NOTHING can replace the wisdom and skill gained through EXPERIENCE. People in this age group are considered extremely valuable mentors and irreplaceable in my industry. In any industry with a good leadership if I’m being honest. Wisdom is eternal for a reason. I suggest taking the time to recognize and appreciate the value of age instead of assuming youth is the only thing of value in life. Age before beauty 💁♀️
Real competence is nearly impossible to teach. But mindless drones? They can be replaced. Mindless drivel copy for real estate ads? Sure. Replace that. But, case in point, that amazing Bud promotion with that cute young girl in the bath tub. Genius! Genius, I tell ya! AI will never duplicate that.
It seems to me that if what you want is precedent and information on what already exists, AI is perfect for the job. If that's what my lawyer does, then AI is a suitable replacement. If creativity and discovery of that which has not been conceived are tantamount, I don't reckon a glorified Google search tool will pose a serious problem, but I could be wrong.
Try to make something new yourself, and work hard to integrate gpt4 as much as possible in the process. You will notice a drastic increase in productivity. First and second drafts are instant, suggestions to move forward, avenues to explore. It makes you blazing fast.
I won't be sad to lose the check-the-box diversity-in-all-but-thought doctors, lawyers, airplane pilots and other "professionals" to AI.
"income rises, buying power rises, and the tide lifts all boats"
What else rises? Free time. And with it, leisure activities. Which create entire new industries. Take golf. 150 years ago it didn't exist in this country. Today it provides tens of thousands of jobs via equipment makers, course architects, clothing designers and course maintenance workers.
leisure time for workers has barely increased at all in the last few decades, if at all. Also those vacation days off had to be negotiated by trade union power, it’s not innate to capitalism to pay for time off.
this is only sort of half true (and not at all true about unions).
the number of hours one would need to work to have a 1900 lifetsyle is very low.
however, behaviorally, people seem to keep work about the same hours and increase lifestyle instead. this is a common human response. (it's also why ABS has not saved lives. people with it drive faster until risk is about the same)
and leisure time has still increased a great deal because people do not come home and start more work. how much time is saved by ordering from amazon instead of having to do day long shopping trips on the weekend? how many by the roomba or the travel booking site?
"the number of hours one would need to work to have a 1900 lifetsyle is very low."
GMU economist Don Boudreaux does these sorts of comparisons on his website, Cafe Hayek https://cafehayek.com/
Using a 1975 Sears Catalog he demonstrates how we get so much more Bang For The Buck - yes, that is the technical term - becuase _we are more productive_. That is, we produce more for less because of, among other things, improvements in technology.
https://cafehayek.com/2006/01/a_1975_sears_ca.html
i love don.
he's awesome.
I would even apply this to the 50s
People always wax poetic about how their dad 'raised 3 kids on a single income' in the 50s
What they neglect to remember was that 50s lifestyle was quite modest by today's standards.
One vehicle, a rather small rectangular house with a simple roof (Ranch style home of course), a single bathroom, one phone (rare long distance use), one TV (maybe), one radio, no air conditioning (maybe just a single room).
If you went on vacation you drove there and you probably camped. You certainly didn't fly anywhere.
I grew up poor in the fifties. We darned our socks. We never threw anything away. Your little brother got it, and when the youngest outgrew it you walked it to a neighbour with a younger child. Where it was very gratefully accepted. We went out to dinner once in a year, or less. One bathroom was standard in every house. I can remember using outhouses. And chamber pots!!
Heck - I was the oldest, and had to wear hand-me-downs from the neighbors!
I remember those days, and miss them.
Question: Could a regular, unskilled working man raise 3 kids today, even if willing to accept that modest lifestyle?
In California, where I live, it would be impossible for the vast majority of people . The only families I see doing it are getting government assistance or are quite rich. In other words - the extremes. My wife and I managed it, but that was because I lived in company housing and ate company food nearly my entire work life. So my situation was a bit like the government subsidized households.
Values were also different in the 50s and 60s (I was born in the early 60s). Technology may bring us more discretionary time and more stuff. Virtue and happiness seem to be on the decline however. There are several studies that show a decline in happiness over several decades. The decline in virtue seems obvious.
Very few people choose hard work. Most prefer easy work, or no work. Could there be a link between a free person engaging in a lifetime of hard work and virtuous happiness? I think so.
Honestly I think you would do better than that 50s lifestyle actually.
I think most of the local manufacturing starts at $20-24 an hour. So you graduate from the local high schools, live with parents for 2-3 more years till you save a down payment and get a modest used car.
Its getting a bit harder to find houses under 150k here but still possible on occasion which means mortgage + interest + taxes of $750-1000 a month. Easier to find such homes in the two adjacent towns 7-10 miles away though. A bit of sweat equity to update them over time w/o taking additional debt.
Used cars are a bit more of a challenge these days, but thankfully they don't make vehicles like they did in the 50s so even a 15 year old vehicle ought to last long enough to save for its replacement.
Not a lot of room for splurging, but I think it could be done.
It just wouldn't be very bourgie
I think the trick would be the housing. Rental? Most likely not. The field that used to be next to me is now a bunch of duplexes. Their monthly price is 2x the cost of my house that I've been in for 12 years, and they're half the size.
My Robo Vac just finished cleaning my living area and my washer just finished cleaning my golf clothes. All while I read the latest Goto droppings. 😎
All this leisure time creates "golf widdows". Which btw they like not having us around....it's when they go buy "elective" items. Like going into Costco with a list of 6 things and the bill ends up being $500.
So the guy with free time is spending a good chunk on golf, and in my case, my wife has selected an item from every end cap inn the store in addition to what she went there for.
Seems equitable to me. She still thinks a round of golf takes 7 hours...wink...lol.
It still doesn't pay for time off.
Your job only pays you when you work.
What you think of as "paid time off" is really just every other paycheck being reduced a little bit so that you can still get a check for the days you take off work
indeed, and a clear way of demonstrating this is the fact that most companies will let you trade your untaken vacation days for extra money.
the government has mandated a new bank holiday this year in the U.K. You could look at their as a pay rise for everybody caused by the largesse of capitalism or by government intervention. I’d go with the latter.
And since nobody has renegotiated their contracts this is clearly not “every other pay check being reduced”. The cost is to the employers.
Anyway my point is that it’s not capitalism itself that produces leisure time - what capitalism wants is 365 days of work per worker per year - but either workers organising to demand it or government legislating for it.
i wouldn't. i'd call it "more hours you'll need to work some other time or an advance on the raise you're not getting this year."
and my point is that yes, it is precisely capitalism that creates the potential for the leisure time/better lifestyle trade off that people demand.
regulation and unions mostly impede or distort this.
it's not "farm unions" that made food cheap, it's tractors.
you're mistaking the brake for the gas.
The 'wage increase' from that new 'holiday' will be factored in the next time a wage adjustments and contract negotiations occur for the workers who 'benefited'
So its really just a temporary wage increase
No matter how many times unions or government claim otherwise, they are not what gives you weekends or 'time off'
That is only possible because of productivity gains, skill attainment, and individuals valuing weekends/vacation more than they do more money from working.
You see this in which jobs get lots of vacation, and which don't.
Retail work doesn't typically get lots of vacation because its no-skill, low productivity, and the people doing the job value making more money than they do the time off.
Non-government professionals with 20 years experience on the other hand, you got to offer them more than just money.
At my job I get something like 256 hours of 'time off' (no its not government, union, or seasonal).
I get this only because the company knows to get someone of my skill and experience level you need to offer me more than just money. You need to offer me time off.
"Retail work doesn't typically get lots of vacation because its no-skill, low productivity..."
They typically get paid less and include few if any benefits because employers don't have to compete so hard to find qualified applicants. BigCompany doesn't give Leave Time and Health Insurance and 401k options because They Love Their Fellow Man So Much.
They offer all that to sway prospective employees away from competitors.
I am a real estate developer. I don’t want that. No one does. I want rested workers. I have done biz in two countries with 6 day work weeks. Saturdays are a waste. Nothing gets done.
Thailand and Mexico. They both would be better off working harder and less.
"The cost is to the employers."
Yes Yes Yes
What else rises? Filthification of everything. Doesn't "standard of living" include non-toxic land, squeaky fresh & wholesome food, and clean water? Apparently not, because most of us don't have it anymore.
"farming? my god, these were jobs people hated so much they were lining up to apply to work 16 hour shifts at victorian mills because it was better." Nope. People loved smallholding type of farming, the way the Amish do. It's a good life. The land was stolen via Enclosure Acts so they HAD to pile into filthy, smoke-filled cities to eke out pennies in brutal factories.
I agree with the premise, but not the details. The Luddites had a point.
I know some small holding organic farmers. They really believe in it as being essential. It is a brutal life. I have yet to meet any small farmer that can do it for long.
In what way is it a brutal life? I know people who did it all their lives, and lived well. As part of many such successive generations.
I know some heavily mechanized modern farmers who do well. They would not be considered small by old fashioned standards. But small farmers squeaking out a living have tough lives.
In what way are they tough? Why do you assume they are "sqeaking by"? The Amish, for example, are wildly prosperous and thriving.
Amish are Amish. I am
Not talking about Amish. They have a communitarian culture. They likely have owned the land for generations, ie no mortgage payments. They live simply.
At least the ones I know.
Let's take a step deeper: what's lurking behind, ie powers the tide? 😊
💬 prosperity comes from making more with less
Not zizactly so: we need aptly-named ‘energy slaves’ to make up for—and build on top of—the finite resource of human labour 🙂 The [deservedly!] lauded technology doesn’t conjure stuff up out of thin air. The underlying thing that alone makes all our modern marvels and our 'great plenty’ possible, *that* particular thing manages to escape our sights entirely. Myopia par excellence.
Check out an exquisitely fun comic strip featuring a maverick protagonist and imperial tons of illuminating analogies --> stuartmcmillen.com/comic/energy-slaves
The school system was intended, in part, to keep young people out of the workforce longer and thus “protect” jobs. Kids are already getting wise about the college racket-it will take another generation because parents tend to make their kids do the same dumb things they did out of knee-jerk conservativism, but the money is so prohibitive and the debt burden so ruinous that the issue is forcing itself.
Where I live, parents are getting wise to the whole school racket as well. My kids don’t go to school; my 17 year old has been employed since 14 and now has as much work as he wants, doing something a robot can never do: playing with children in the woods.
I tried to encourage my youngest to not go to college - we homeschooled ours too. He did but fortunately didn’t come out crazy. But he loves outdoor things and had done survival training and a lot of boat stuff so it seemed like a waste of 4 years. He’s been out 4 years now and I sometimes wonder what he would have done if he’d pursued those other passions instead of being (for now) “corporate.”
I wonder how much earlier in life I would have found my path if I hadn’t been bogged down in the distraction and misdirection of school.
Can I say I am cautiously intrigued. Yes a lot of good can happen but will it? What happens if AI is just educated by educators with no experience in the real world? What would happen to AI developed in China instead of Russia, Ukraine, Great Britain or in addition to? We each have our own vision of freedom, fairness, morals, experiences can they be programmed in AI? Will wealthy people only have access to AI? What about relationships, will AI demand equality? How do you measure independent thoughts? What happens if AI becomes aware, but for survival reasons doesn’t communicate this to humans? Do we recognize, reward, an AI when human ideas are built upon and the AI finesse the harder aspects? There is part of me, that loves the end part where the android is talking to Harrison Ford, saying how he has seen things no human will ever see. The moment in time that he glimpses beauty and recognizes it. He just wants to live. Beautiful.
It's true, we can't know until we see. But there is a degree to which we create the world we envision. I believe the choices we make about how we point our eyes do have an effect on the world because there is so much below the conscious, or even the physical, that we act on. I never pretend not to see reality, but when I am anticipating the future, I assume a benevolent universe, because it makes me part of creating one.
For some of us, maybe even a lot of us, education was a way to get out of poverty. We bought it and to some extent we learned, questioned, and worked to get ahead. For me it worked, still, at 63 I wonder if I had chosen the path I wanted would I be where I am today. I can never know this, it is the big part of the mystery of life and choices.
many had to go to school to become healthcare workers, nurses, PA's are now a big thing, and medical technicians.
My youngest is by far the most successful of my three. My second eldest is next. Neither went to college. My eldest did, doesnt use it, and is way less successful.
Can I ask what sort of jobs they have? I have four kids, the eldest a junior in high school. He is all set and wanting to go to a high academic college. 🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️ He wants to be a doctor like my husbands. Mixed feelings from me. The second wants to be a pilot, so we can go less conventional there. I’d love to steer the youngest two away from conventional college...
1. Eldest. School teacher. Hated it. Said 3/10 teachers are evil, 6/10 walking zombies, and one in ten really really great. 2. Second eldest is an electrician. Works with PLCs. Makes very good money. 3. Youngest. Real estate developer. Very very competent. Very successful.
Trades
Property repairs
Property management
Real estate
Own something and be happy
* Own RE in owner’s rights states
Yes to your thoughts on the secondary education racket. Not so sure your kid’s job will be secure, even tho it’s a non-standard job. Why can’t the coming cyborg tech do what your son does, given ten years? Sure, the soul inspired creativity that defines the quality of his work can’t be replicated, but the trappings of it can be and it will feel nearly the same for the client (parents of the child and maybe the child) for a fraction of the cost.
The thing is, if we want to foster continued human development through non-AI enhanced means (in a world where humans and cyborgs will be AI enhanced in a major way beginning sooner than you think), we’re going to either have to separate in some way (as in: live where AI doesn’t reside), or support the idea of an immediate “pause” in the massive momentum for AI and human-like robots that’s already reaching critical stages.
The people who pay my son to play with their kids in the woods are already choosing to do that at a premium to parking the kids in institutions.
As AI continues to shave away at bespoke manifestations of the lazier aspects of being human, we get a better sense of what is left that makes us truly human, and it raises the standard to which we must hold ourselves in order to be excellent in those ways.
What my son is *really* doing is teaching children how to follow their intuition, cooperatively engage with other humans, manage themselves in moments of discomfort, and generally become whole and fully-realized people (and he is modeling for them what a good man is, the role of yang in strength with softness, earned authority exercised with restraint and wisdom).
The rub is that, to do that, we must learn those abilities ourselves. The challenge of our time is to become whole and good *people*, not better robots.
So glad you posted this. Made my morning happier reading your comment. And double thanks to Gato Malo for expounding on this (potentially depressing) topic. It’s wonderful to be exposed to a good dose of optimism!
Weirdly enough it’s entirely possible that in the very near future not only will AI be able to do most of that, it will be able to do it better than a person can. A recent study was done where the researcher took answers from doctors on Reddit and answers to the same questions by that Chat AI that is so popular (that most people say really isn’t that good anyway) and presented them to people to grade which answers were the best. The AI not only gave more thorough and scientific answers (somewhat expected) but scored better on empathy and listening skills. AI in the future for instance will undoubtedly be better able to help others cooperatively engage with others due to the overwhelming amount of information at its fingertips. It won’t just be able to impart general help in this area but pinpoint behavior based on the people you interact with.
You are meeting with a first generation immigrant millennial Muslim from Pakistan? Great then here is the information you need to make that interaction positive based on the culture that person come from. Your new boss is a WASP boomer? No problem here’s how you approach him when you want a raise. Not only that but it will be able to predict what types of people you will interact with based on your location and focus on those specific interactions.
The same is true with learning to manage discomfort. Your son might know ten different general approaches to how to do that, AI will know every approach ever used in human history.
So while AI will probably never be able to model what a good man is, it will do everything else he does and it will do it for cheaper and it will do a better job.
I will believe that AI can develop intuition when I see it. You are telling me what it *will* do, I am telling you what *is* happening. As AI evolves, humans will, too, and continue to niche down what our humanness actually is. Circular hypotheticals are fine and fun, but we don’t know what we haven’t seen yet. If AI makes human intuition obsolete, then human intuition will evolve.
ChatGPT isn’t “intelligent.” It’s just an excellent aggregator and mimic.
I’m saying that AI will be able to break human intuition down into its constituent parts and turn it into a predictable algorithm that it can then replicate and probably with higher accuracy than actual intuition.
I know that ChatGPT isn’t intelligent and that’s the scary part. One argument against the idea of AI taking over medicine is that AI cannot replace bedside manner. Well a very early version of an excellent aggregator and mimic has a better bedside manner than human doctors. What will actual AI be able to do in this area?
The problem with assuming that human behavior will evolve is the potential speed at which these things happen. It takes time for humans to change and it’s very possible that these changes happen too quickly for the mass changes necessary in human thought and behavior to keep up let alone stay ahead.
Perhaps. It’s a hypothetical so there’s no debate to be had. I don’t believe there is any irreducible constituent part to humanness. Medical science and biology are in the dark ages; they have no idea what makes life. If the robots can figure out something their programmers can’t about it, I’ll be curious to see what they come up with.
I don’t see an AI replacing an electrician. We build high rises. Every single foot is different. Every wall the robot have to be programmed for that wall. Could you build most buildings in factories and assembled on site using robotics? Yeah. You could. My youngest is a real estate developer. He makes 1000s of decisions a year. All one off events. Things come up. Can a robot do that? Not well. Design decisions. We anticipate market trends eight years out. A robot can’t do that.
Our businesses are blue collar and not replicable by AI either. We sort of accidentally got into them 30 years ago and made jokes over the years about our country club grandparents’ reactions to them (if they’d been alive). Now we just figure our livelihoods are safe for the foreseeable future. Crazy times.
Yet.
Lets say analyzing market needs eight years out. Very very few people are even remotely good at it. Who programs the AI? My decisions are gut level, careful analysis, based on decades of experience, try and duplicate that. The AI has to be programmed by someone. Maybe it can run by itself after a few years out and build on its decisions. But if the initial Data input is weak or sketchy each iteration will become less good, not better.
Thank you for your common sense and putting a smile on my face this morning!
people always underestimate the therapeutic value of cats.
I see you, gato, and you got some 'splainin to do...
https://www.psypost.org/2016/11/study-toxoplasma-gondii-parasite-can-alter-humans-sexual-desires-45990
i did warn you about prolonged exposure...
https://substack.com/profile/32715357-el-gato-malo?utm_source=about-page
Touché, gato 🐈⬛
Just don't bring out The Gimp...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8kPqAV_74M
Egads ...
(I actually expected exactly that scene *high five*)
Wow. Although comparing 741 to some 5000 doesn't seem like a well-designed study.
I agree!
Dos quejas, gato amigo:
1 - We didn’t get the good life with technology
2 - We don’t get the same medicine as Gates or the crew, none of them died of the Bioweapon. They got hOrSePaStE while the masses got death by vents and rundeathisnear
Clarifying: In the 70s, 80s, 90s I dreamed of improving technology (like an iPod, color printing, clearer photography) and those things came to be, and I thought life would be better.
Then we got to the oughts, teens and now the 20s... and the social fabric is disintegrating.
Life was tougher yet in many ways better pre-this-hi-tech.
Wow. Exactamente lo que comenté hace poco. Pero lo dijiste más claro 😊
1. Yes we did. 2. I wasn’t vaxed. Nor would I have taken RunDeathIsNear. Why? Because i have been granted access to a world of information, which I take advantage of.
1 - Compared to almost every human whose ever lived, and many that live today, I do indeed live The Good Life.
2- But I agree in kind, if not degree, with this. WEF delenda est!
Respect
AI just kills souls.
i'm honestly curious:
what does that even mean?
what is this conception of soul and of AI that makes the latter fatal to the former?
AI is "artificial" intelligence. The soul is genuine intelligence. Transhumanism is meant to replace the genuine human body, AI is meant to replace the genuine human consciousness. Just my opinion.
But it can’t replace human consciousness.
Conceptually, is there any difference between AI generated images and a kaleidoscope?
That's the spirit!
In my opinion, there are many dead souls out there before this AI situation.
Guessing your job is threatened.
Nope. Covid mandates took care of that.
Thank you, that was well said.
Just a few possibly somewhat tangential thoughts.
Large-language models generating news stories? I may be off base but my understanding of the “AI” of generating text is that it has to have a source corpus on which to base the model. Someone has to write the source corpus, I would assume.
And how good is the output? Is “mario cat” an example? Looking closely at the image, there are several peculiarities and illogical artifacts. From what I have seen, “AI” (I have a fundamental objection to the use of “intelligence” when it comes to machine-generated output) frequently produces text with similar, sometimes subtle, illogic. I struggle to see how, in principle, such illogic can be guaranteed to be eliminated. Human intelligence is way more than just super-duper pattern matching -- I believe that there are elements of it that can’t be explained by the brain-generates-mind theory. But that’s outside the scope of a comment on a blog.
Of course, neither point refutes your thesis, to which I subscribe without reservation. Thank you for yet another insightful article, the likes of which I guarantee will never be generated by computer.
LLM is a very limited form of AI and you can do A LOT more with something more powerful like chat GPT that, while built on top of an LLM has far greater capability.
i know people using it to hunt for lagging correlation trading arbs and sifting the spurious by only pointing to those where there is external reason to suspect causality.
AI is not just playing word salad. it can already take a speech or a press release and summarize for meaning. the speed with which it's improving is stunning. gpt4 is so much more powerful than 3.
and failing to call it "intelligence" seems a dangerous conceit. why not? because it's not human? why is human intelligence such a pinnacle? these machines can beat us at nearly all games now including some like GO that are far to complex to have a solvable possibility space. how are you defining "intelligence" here?
ditto graphics. the current ones are oddly surreal and impressionistic (though you have to look closely, it's already to the point where cursory human vision knows just what it's a picture of which may have interesting implications for how the AI is modeling human perception and images or how its own works)
and it has gotten SO much better. it seems to struggle with cats and hands and perspective. but it can do you a human face that's staggeringly good including very convincing full expressions that escape the uncanny valley. it's early tech but has gotten so much better already it's unreal.
you can also tighten it up a lot if you use longer prompts.
i literally just used "a cat driving a lamborghini" and it generated that picture with zero additional prompt. it's shockingly capable.
Yes, capable they are. But at what?
I would argue that no amount of software cleverness is going to allow a Turing machine to escape its fundamentals. That which is not computable will remain so. Computing machines, virtually by definition, are constrained to manipulating symbols within the boundaries of a formal system. Human thought is far, far more than symbol manipulation and brute-force search of the solution space (or search aided by clever statistical organization of data and advanced retrieval algorithms). I find vague arguments about “quantum computing” entirely unconvincing.
Sure computers can outperform humans at many games precisely because of their capacity to search the solution space. That is, in my mind, a clear demonstration that a human chess player does not rely on a process that is in any way comparable to how the computer plays. The giant-Turing-machine model of human intelligence is wanting.
I will point out that everything software can do required a programmer. Software does not spontaneously coalesce ex nihilo. Nor did “AI” create itself from simpler programs. I work for a company that has an enormous array of computers that has not programmed itself in any non-trivial way, and even in the trivial cases, it was programmed to do so by humans. On the other hand, I have taught myself many things without anyone (other than the “me” that is my self-awareness) either instructing me to do so or teaching me.
"Computing machines, virtually by definition, are constrained to manipulating symbols within the boundaries of a formal system"
this seems unlikely to remain true if it even is now. many are writing and re-writing their own code, languages, and though processes. alpha go did not win by brute force, it created a stronger theory of the game than humans ever have. go is far too complex to "search a solution space" or even a meaningful fraction of it.
i think you're modeling AI as quite a bit more limited than it is/will be on the presumption that only humans can self-teach.
alpha go was just show the game, the rules, the scoring and told "learn to play to win."
I’d be interested to hear the theory of how the non-computable might be computed. The current understanding of “computation” is inseparable from symbol manipulation — has been since the 1930’s (weak “quantum computing” handwaving notwithstanding — I’m not convinced that some unspecified indeterminacy counts as intelligence or some new way of computing the non-computable).
No clever software is going to make a Turing machine into anything else: no matter how many levels of recursion are embedded in the programming, the end result is always going to be a program that directs the underlying hardware to manipulate symbols according to pre-defined rules.
By way of analogy, I studied some small amount of mathematics long ago. I was taught algebra and calculus in high school as symbol manipulation. While that may have been passable pedagogy, it didn’t provide much insight into what was really going on. Later, when studying analysis, I struggled mightily until I broke free of the symbol-manipulation way of thinking and started to actually intuit what it was all about. My classmates who earlier arrived at that intuition did better than I, and those who could not escape symbol manipulation failed.
Manipulating some finite set of symbols under some set finite set of rules, which is what computers can only do, and both of which are directly or indirectly determined by the programmer, is completely different from understanding the underlying problem domain.
this feels tautological. how are you defining "non-computable" and why do you think it does not apply to humans?
can you think in abstraction without language or symbols (like math)? this idea of "intuit" sounds suspect and is probably just "seeing from a larger frame" and you cannot get there without starting with symbols.
many argue this is precisely what alpha go did and that it is playing an intuitive game based on a broader view than a human can have and is just understanding the evolving "shape" of the board in a manner humans cannot. the grand masters have no idea how it's playing, what it's maximizing, or how it plays. they were completely baffled trying to play it.
it seems to quite literally just have a stronger theory of the problem than humans and go is MUCH too big a problem space to brute force in finite time.
you seem to be starting from the conclusion that human though is some sort of apogee and that emulating it constitutes "intelligence" but i find this assuptive.
why would human thought somehow be "the best" thought as opposed to a deeply limited machine working with small amounts of info input from a desperately inadequate sensorium in biased and non rigorous fashions?
it's not even clear that intuition is a feature so much as a kludge work around for a mind structure not up to real thinking.
such a concept is inherently abhorrent and challenging to human vanity but it's not going to change the sort of output one gets from a potentially superior theory of mind and cognition that may emerge.
it seems to me that you're loading your questions and assumptions in such a way as to presume your conclusion of "if not just like human, inferior to human."
why isn't "relying on sloppy and unreliable processes like "intuition" instead of really learning how to think will always hold humans back by trapping them in local but not general maxima of cognition and understanding" the more plausible base reality?
I don’t define computable; the commonly accepted model of computation does. It is generally considered to be “that which can be done with a Turing machine”. Soare argued that this definition of computability is no less likely to be correct than the epsilon-delta definition of continuity. So yes, the entire field is somewhat tautological.
I would disagree, although it’s only from personal experience, that the transition from symbol manipulation to understanding was simply a matter of more rules and more symbols — I know what I experienced and that wasn’t it — it was qualitative rather than quantitative. It (my awareness of my experience) is what sparked the beginning of my understanding that human thought and machine computation are two different animals — a distinction I had previously failed to see. No genuine creativity can arise from symbol manipulation. Can I prove that? Only to myself — my personal experience with what limited creativity I have demonstrates to me that my admittedly somewhat pathetic creative output is at least not a mathematical function.
When formulating a mathematical proof, the good mathematicians start with an intuition about the proposition and then backfills the formality, not the other way around. That’s the intuition to which I refer. In my view it’s a phenomenon related to the feeling you get about a situation in which something is off, something isn’t quite right but you don’t know what — the sensation of your hairs standing on end that leads you to investigate.
I think human thought is an apogee (or at least a local maximum — there’s a long way to go), but not of computation, specifically because I don’t confuse thinking and computation any more than I confuse swimming and commercial shipping. I don’t confuse a hammer and saw with carpentry.
I can understand how there are those who think “Mr. Spock” is the model of human perfection. I used to. But that’s so awfully limiting as to be pathetic.
Human thinking necessary implies self-consciousness, curiosity, the gregarious urge, the adventure lure, subjectivity, feelings, morals, ethics — mind — the capacity for which has never been demonstrated to be possible in a Turing machine, and there’s no falsifiable hypothesis to suggest that it ever will be.
Games are closed circuit knowledge systems. There are a large number of moves in chess, but it is not incalculable. Most of real humanness involves infinite or as close to infinite as to be practically infinite. Ten trillion compounds in the body, for example. We have identified a thousand or so of them. We don’t know how each interacts with each. This is as close to being infinitely complicated as one can get. How they interact is not knowable, period. Not by you or me
Or a super robot. I see way better data being spit out, super fast. But making the decision on what to do I don’t think can be outsourced.
Yes. What intelligence is higher? God. Tap into that instead of AI.
I'm so glad you said that about "mario cat." Pretty cat, but that's about all that I liked about that pic. Too much "off" about it.
sure, but isn't that a bit like saying "these early TV's have tiny screens and are only in black and white and the resolution stinks?"
I guess I'm not entitled to an opinion. Am I not allowed an opinion on pictures or paintings made by humans? Or is that an acceptable item to criticize?
FYI, there are odd things about 2 of the other pix, too. Once the errors are noticed it makes the pix creepy.
that seems an odd response.
who said you could not have an opinion?
my point it only that it's a young tech and will rapidly get better, just like other technologies did. it's not like AI art is anything like mature. this is very early days.
in a couple years, this will be very different. in 5, i doubt you can tell AI generated video from camera video.
That will be very handy for people in power who wish to rewrite the receipts to match their narrative. Forget linking to a video. It's just as likely to have been constructed by an AI.
I am an artist and one of those useless graphic artists that has been replaced supposedly by AI. I agree the images of the cats in this post look weird to my eyes. I was thinking that before it was mentioned they were generated by AI. Too smooth and dark.
But to each his own. What I want to know is when AI going to drive my car? What happened to driverless cars? If AI drives my car I can save a crapload of money by not paying car insurance. Let AI pay it.
worth noting is that i was using very simple 5-6 word prompts because i like the surreal/cartoony output.
if you dial up the specificity and ask for "real/hyper real" you can get very different levels of output.
https://twitter.com/justin_hart/status/1653779509450010626?s=20
For me the devil is in the details of the pix. The Nordic cat is very well done, to me, until you look at his left hand. The yelling man it's his right hand, and the fact that I just don't like that pic, period. The cat in the car it's mostly all the crap in front of him that's facing away from him. How do you use controls you can't reach? Too weird.
I love the Mario Cat!
Best meme everrrrr
I am gonna print this one out!!
Not even that. Try to generate beautiful AI images like Gato by yourself. I somehow completely fail to reproduce anything close in quality.
So I guess he pays some better AI engine ooor the AI engine knows who he is and produces more convincing pictures for him. For me creates total rubbish. If AI will work like this in the future then it will only help the people in power.
i'm using an engine called midjourney that costs $8 a month to use and that can create images from 5 word prompts.
this does not seem like a product that is somehow limited to rich elites.
Oh yeah. You fancy shmancy types who can just drop $8 a month, just like that. Nearly a 1%er.
Thank you Gato for the detailed answer and thanks for the tip for midjourney. I am off to try it out ;)
I have wondered about your images. They are always superb
Once again you’ve changed my mind.
there was an awesome 90's proto raver electronic music group called "the shamen."
they had a wonderful line:
"if the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed."
i think there's a lot to that.
As you may be aware, The Shamen were quoting Terence McKenna, an ethnobotanist and proponent of psychedelics as mankind's salvation. It continues:
"Human history represents such a radical break with the natural systems of biological organization that preceded it, that it must be the response to a kind of attractor or dwell point that lies ahead in the temporal dimension. Persistently western religions have integrated into their theologies the notion of a kind of end of the world. And I think that a lot of psychedelic experimentation sort of confirms this intuition. I mean, it isn’t going to happen according to any of the scenarios of orthodox religion, but the basic intuition that the universe seeks closure in a kind of Omega point of transcendence is confirmed. It’s almost as though this object in hyperspace, glittering in hyperspace, throws off reflections of itself, which actually ricochet into the past, illuminating this mystic, inspiring that saint or visionary, and that out of these fragmentary glimpses of Eternity we can build a kind of a map of not only the past universe and the evolutionary ingression into novelty, but a kind of map of the phuture."
Mind you, he did a LOT of drugs, our Terence.
ah, useful. they quote the whole piece.
they had a thesis about rave culture/electronic music as a form of linguistic evolution and a rediscovery of biologically compatible rhythm signatures/natural magic. suspecting this may also derive from mckenna influence.
We should all be be persuadable when exposed to good evidence.
I would have agreed with this 5 years ago, but the way things have gone I just see this as idealistic.
Specifically I would challenge the ideas that AI is directly akin to previous mechanizations and that increased productivity through mechanization leads to better outcomes for the non-ruling classes.
The first point should be obvious: AI isn't replacing tedious, brainless manual labor like the loom, combine harvester, or printing press. It's designed to replace human creative endeavor; things like generation of art, writing, code, etc. Not just make easier for humans to produce, but producing in their stead. Sure, there are consistency problems, sure it takes infrastructure to maintain so it's not as cheap as it looks, and sure it requires human-produced input, but do the corporate and government mouthbreathers running our society care about any of that? Why would they not replace all human creativity with something mass-produced and devoid of humanity, surely that's easier than dealing with the poors? Do we really want to live in a society where some large proportion of our creative work no longer bears connection to another human?
The second point I agree with you on in the purely abstract. Industrialization has increased standard of living in the West in many ways, and *in theory* should be increasing standard of living in all ways. But I have to recognize that the latter just hasn't been the case. Productivity increases have not been allocated back to the working classes meaningfully for centuries, and huge amounts of the re-allocation have been wrestled away from the elites with blood and tears. Aggregated across a year, the modern American worker works twice as many hours as a 13th century serf, and while we have so many shiny things to show for it, are we any happier? Suicide rates are at immense levels, depression and anxiety are nearly ubiquitous, obesity, sexual impotence, and general ennui have literally never been higher in recorded peacetime.
And why has this been the case? Well put simply, when you have immense institutions (government, corporate, NGO, academic, you name it) with their own inertia, their members are not the ones who are going to be replaced by mechanization even if they should be. They reap the benefits of increased prosperity, while also requiring the same level of capital flow to continue their operation. What happens is that, in order for the cashflow to be maintained as people exit the workforce even temporarily thanks to mechanization, increased burdens (higher taxes, prices, etc.) are placed on those still working. As a result, those still working have to work even more to make ends meet. Sure, they'll reap some of the benefits of the increased prosperity, but at what cost? And have they been given a chance to do that cost benefit analysis and decide if the prosperity increase is worth the cost to them? Try not paying taxes and refusing to comply with orders to do so and you'll have the answer.
I'm not one for luddite-ism, and my background is experimental physics and I currently work in tech. Believe you me when I say I'm not opposed to technological progress in all of its forms or anything like that. But the notion that all progress is good progress when it comes to technology, predicated on the nebulous notion that prosperity will somehow make its way out to everyone magically despite thousands of years of oligarchic interference in that process I find uncompelling, and the full steam ahead approach to all progress without time to assess impact terrifying.
I think you’re right about a lot of what you’ve written here, particularly about past “scares.” I hope you’re right about most or all of it. One thing that’s different about AI might be the breadth of jobs that could be impacted. We’re not talking about enhancement here, e.g., cell phones or washing machines for households, we’re talking about replacing positions that have required human bodies and brains with AI equipped cyborgs which will be far more efficient in many respects and will cost pennies on the dollar compared to their human counterparts over the course of their lifespan. Teachers, police, clerks, journalists, accountants, laborers, yes, graphic artists, musicians, truck drivers, even military will experience significant replacement, all in a short period of time. The flickering totalitarian era we’re sparking and spraying gasoline on these days is unlikely to result in a greater middle class. Where’s the profit wringing in that?
So, here’s hoping you’re right, but there’s a better chance you’d be wrong about this one than you would have been in past eras.
I agree. Some people are panicking and if anything I lean that way, rather than thinking AI is just a better tool. The real killer feature is it can UNDERSTAND.
It does that the same way we do, via LANGUAGE. If a capable robot understands what it is trying to do, what situation it is in and what problems or obstacles it needs to overcome, then it can do pretty much anything.
Let me ask an AI to name 3 random jobs... Billboard installer, florist, chef.
An AI can definitely do chef work with greater accuracy and speed than a human chef, and with zero chance of forgetting the salt.
Billboard installer is simple work for an AI that knows what a billboard is and what it's role is for installing it.
Florist sounds impossible for an AI, but since they can draw a bouquet I see no reason they cannot design and create one from available inventory. Indeed such a bot could great you at the door, ask your interest and budget, then create and show you a screen of various combinations which don't yet exist, then create the one you pick - fast and efficiently, and without making you feel awkward about your budget or anything else.
Mix Boston Dynamics with ChatGPT4 and we're already nearly there, because the same bot that installed the billboard late last night can sit on a charger in the florist shop, waiting for a customer, before starting work as a chef in the evening.
The fairly steep rate of decrease in live births suggests that there may not be many humans around to have their jobs replaced, in say, 20 or 30 years.
This article focuses so hard on the word 'jobs', it misses the real issues:
1) It is the type of jobs that matter, not the number, nor the historical trend.
AI has taken the job of critical thinking. It has taken over the job of training AI. It is taking over more decisions about the flow of wealth, or the use of power. (https://www.corbettreport.com/how-blackrock-conquered-the-world-part-3/). We only really need one AI in a certain role to lead to catastrophe.
2)There are no jobs if AI is an existential threat. See the arguments presented by Elieza Yudhowksy and his critics. They all agree that the threat of AI is not taking jobs, but wiping out humanity. Elieza states a high probability on a smaller timeline, his critics, state a lower probability on a longer timeline.
Thank you for the reference, I will have to look up this Yudhowsky.
My concern with AI is that previous technologies didn't simply leave people unemployed because they (we) could shift from manual labor to mental labor. Where once we had farmers and assembly-line workers, we got proofreaders and paralegals and programmers. Once machines could do physical tasks better/faster/cheaper than people could, there was still a whole other category of work that people could turn to: intellectual work.
But if mental workers get replaced too -- what's left then for people to do for a living? Do we most of us become "useless eaters" depending on UBI (universal basic income) to stay alive?
And technology is deflationary. Absent the manipulation of money the price of everything falls toward the marginal cost of production. AI will kill bullshit jobs that add little or no value to society. Sure, there’s more to the story, but wiping out administrative, bureaucratic, make work jobs that drive the cost of everything up is a good thing.
"AI will kill bullshit jobs that add little or no value to society."
A bit harsh but I think this is largely correct.
it's not about adding little to no value. those who farmed by hand provided vital value. it's about providing the same or greater value at lower human (and overall) cost to generate the same outputs more readily and free up scarce resources to move to ne pursuits that can be supported by that plenty.
before food was plentiful, there were no "trades." we needed to get good enough at feeding ourselves that you could have a shoemaker or a blacksmith or even a flint axe maker who would do other work instead and trade that work for food.
"t's about providing the same or greater value at lower human (and overall) cost"
*nods* Yes, right.
Whoever has the Best ROI Wins.
Right
I would suggest that it wasn't about food being plentiful. It was about food being scarce enough that it was necessary to claim it as property and keep other people away from it. From there on, trades developed as the only peaceful way for non-owners to get access to food.
Agreed... Technology makes necessary or desirable tasks more efficient and less costly and frees up capital, including time, for allocation elsewhere. Effectively utilized and distributed everyone on the planet is a potential beneficiary.
It's also what the hated corporate raiders were doing in the 80s - yes, in some instances they were selling off pieces of a holding company's portfolio, but they were also purging the company of redundant or unnecessary jobs, and/or dead weight that only HAD the job because no one else had the spine to tell him it was time to go.
I am OK with harsh.
I think it will actually increase the proportion of bullshit jobs that add little or no value to society. The people who are put out of work by AI will still need to be fed. Increased efficiency in production will lead to more unemployment, make-work, and administrative/bureaucratic careers in the labor market.
Yes, in the current system bullshit is conserved. But there is an alternative within which bullshit is disincentivized.
No kidding. Especially considering how terrible the overall administrative response is.
Hey Dave now that you are back from the grave can you comment on your ideas on proprioceptive thought? And maybe take it to the next obvious level *what* do you think consciousness is? 😊
Nice ... you’re the first here to recognize the pseudonym. Give me a moment to collect my thoughts. I will have one.
I’ll answer your broader question. The implicate order is consciousness. Duality and the continual unfolding and enfolding of the holomovement that is spacetime are emergent.
It’s good to be back from the dead. I’m particularly interested to see where theoretical physics goes when it becomes apparent that spacetime is quantized.
we here in the unfolded explicate space are going to be deeply distressed when we find out that the divergence of behavior in the quantum realm is not actually a greater enfolding so much as raster limitation of the simulation we inhabit. it's just the point where we stop analyzing the picture and start analyzing the workings of the underlying model that paints the picture in some alien child's version of "the SIMS." will be anti-climactic as an implicate order, but would explain quite a lot...
Crap. My Wave Function just collapsed.
I hate when that happens.
not as much as you'd hate it if it didn't...
Ha! ... well done! If this is true I will be distressed only long enough to return to my death state. Oh wait, can I do that?
Oops .... meant to say explicate.
David Bohm the Physicist?
Bohm, you magnificent bastard. I read your book!
https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Theory-Dover-Books-Physics/dp/0486659690
Yes, that’s me. I appreciate the compliment.
Well, I wouldn't call just any old rando on the internet a magnificent bastard.
With respect to proprioceptive thought, can you be more specific?
I made a response but it went to the main thread. Duh. No worries all this blah blah quickly becomes mental masturbation. Appreciate your insights, Thanks Dave!
Sure, we gain when new technology reduces demand for labour. We gain time, time we could spend doing more productive or enjoyable things. Or we could sit on our increasingly fat asses watching TV or going down the mall and buying processed junk and sugary drinks in half gallon buckets.
Look how much easier our lives are, now we don't have to labour in the fields... working hard, keeping fit and strong, learning from older generations, retaining a sense of time and place, and history and community.
Look how much better our lives are now, with all mod cons, look how smart we are, compared with those who lived a hundred years ago, compare the language of our parliamentarians with the founding fathers, the concepts they discuss, the breadth of knowledge and wisdom and understanding.
For everything we think we gain, we lose something. And in this heedless, destructive rush to change, who considers what we have lost? The skills that built churches and cathedrals. The ornamentation that furnished them. The beauty of traditional architecture, that now we try and fail to replicate in plastic.
We live in a fake world, bereft of authenticity, worshipping cost and convenience. Are you so sure that things are so much better, and progressively getting better? I'm not.
"For everything we think we gain, we lose something."
"There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs."
- Thomas Sowell, Wise Guy
I completely agree. Assuming that AI doesn’t either turn against us or get used by some nefarious faction to cause widespread chaos I think the children’s movie Wall-E is the best example of our dystopian future. I’m not even referring to the trash filled earth and space travel aspect, just the everyone is morbidly obese eating crap and unaware of the world around them part.
To quote someone else paraphrasing Tonto, "Wuh-tchoo mean 'we,' kemosabe?"
Are you going to fall for that? No? Ok, then what's the problem?
It's all of the other belligerent rubes who will, right? Uh-huh.
Once again, it's always someone else's weaknesses that requires "us" to do something about "the current thing."
it’ll be the same people that fell for masks…this is the problem, we’re so stupid of course AI will wipe us out.
I disagree, when you stop abusing child and third world labor the price for goods and services will skyrocket. It's only result of outsourcing and globalisation which made this crappy products so cheap. It will not repeat, you don't have anymore countries which are willing to work for food so you have to increase prices and also start watching the quality of the products.
Todays abuse is simply yesterdays standard for children. Each society must pay its due on the way to better. There is no “all at once”. And when machines replace the children, the price comes down and the quality (if built in to the process) improves.
People don't realize that here in the West it took nearly a hundred years of industrialization before people could really afford to not have their kids do paid labor.
That process is going to happen a whole lot faster for places modernizing today.
Amen. My grandparents went to work full time after they finished 8th grade, yet my oldest children hardly knew what work was until they graduated college!
I say, reparations for telephone operators! I say, bring them back! Direct-dial isn't what it's cracked up to be.
Oh for the party line! (Actually, I never experienced it in my nearly 73 years--it was just something others apparently had, or had had)
We had it when I was a kid. That is one technological improvement I don't mourn. :)
Ah. The Candle Makers' Grievance.
"A PETITION:
From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting."
http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html
That’s how Proctor & Gamble started. They were candle makers. I think they are still in business.
👍
Many more than 300 million jobs have been destroyed since the start of the Industrial Revolution thanks to technological advance and innovation, and as a consequence many more new jobs have been created in their place. Somebody needs to introduce these clowns to history classes and the works of Joseph Schumpeter who in 1942 coined the term “Creative Destruction”.
You know things change right. Just as you must know that the apocalypse can only happen once.
"The apocalypse can only happen once" That's pretty thought provoking. Somehow it doesn't make me feel any better. 😎
Fear not. The Universe is chaotic, dynamic, non-linear, nothing is inevitable. Things don’t just change once, or in any particular direction, by any plan, or by command - although plenty try to make it so. It is a long process of spontaneous, emergent order. The notion of Apocalypse and predictable change is summed up in the climate change folly, and failure to consider the unseen and counter forces.