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...
"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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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”.
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...
"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.
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.
Thank you for your common sense and putting a smile on my face this morning!
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
AI just kills souls.
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.
Once again you’ve changed my mind.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I say, reparations for telephone operators! I say, bring them back! Direct-dial isn't what it's cracked up to be.
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”.