I agree completely, and I have been constantly speaking about how AI will be a wealth concentrator, replacing a mass of jobs more diverse than previously seen. Unlike previous machines which can take 1-2 jobs, when humans get REALLY efficient at training AI, it will replacing hundreds en masse.
AI will also have an additional effect: it will be isolating in the sense that the need for other humans will decrease.
These two points alone, strengthened by many others, have led me to conclude that the world is MUCH better off with AI and that tech companies are ruining the world with their abominations.
> These two points alone, strengthened by many others, have led me to conclude that the world is MUCH better off with AI and that tech companies are ruining the world with their abominations.
Do you mean "world is MUCH better off without AI."
What you wrote doesn't make much sense withing the context of your comment, but I have to ask because there are some software engineers that find abominations appealing for some reason, or just lack the ability to tell the difference between desirable technology and a technological abomination. I think a big component of the latter is many software engineers' overconfidence in their abilities that makes them easy marks, and the willingness of many kinds of hype men to exploit that to con them with propaganda.
I am not a software engineer. When (for my work) I/we need a decent chunk of development done, we get the pros.
BUT, sometimes I want something that will automate the fudge out of my PC (imagine command prompt on overdrive). I usually DDG for the solution and end up in some 10yo solution in StackExchange, which doesn't do the thing.
My friends have all forgotten their DOS skills.. so I turn to ChatGPT and boom! I get me 2 paragraphs script in 30secs.
Do I hire devs? Hell yeah and we pay well, and we will continue to do so for many years.
Do I use ChatGPT for the small (personal) stuff? Hell yeah too.
Now, if a company wants to outsource everything to an LLM/AI then I wish them the best of luck, coz when something will break (and oh IT WILL), Tthe contractor they screwed over should charge them x50!!!!
Definitely agree, LLMs are only as useful as the person interpreting and implementing the output; if someone doesn't have enough knowledge or context about the thing they are trying to solve/create then copy & pasting blindly while asking the wrong questions will lead projects to disaster.
I have witnessed this firsthand when I dove into the deep end on something over my head, GPT-4 Code Interpreter went into an error loop and I had to learn all of the background knowledge I was foolishly trying to avoid.
For software devs AI will mostly be a golden goose because they can leverage it to full extend to increase their portfolio of solutions they can sell.
> Tthe contractor they screwed over should charge them x50!!!!
IT already does this after they were outsourced. They build up IT companies that take at least 3 times as much for consultation and you still need to employ local IT that actually implements the solutions. And their wage also doubled as well.
What about socialized housing, food, and health care then?
Socialize the essentials, let people work for the non-essentials.
If there isn't enough work to go around for people who want more than a substistence living, start reducing the definition of "full-time" until there is. If only 50% of working aged people can find work, redefine full-time as 24 hours/week
It definitely can work… it depends on the size of ubi and how creative we get. We could for example just say that banks no longer get to do 10-1 fractional reserve banking and instead all the free money gets distributed to their customers accounts. And do a cap and trade carbon system with auctions where all the revenue goes to ubi. And all the revenue from spectrum auctions. And repurposing some existing spending. And printing a little more money. And congestion pricing. Etc, etc…
> banks no longer get to do 10-1 fractional reserve banking
Fractional reserve banking is pretty much an urban myth. Banks create money when they make commercial loans. The Bank of England explains it quite nicely here:
What doesn't work about the math? There are many alternate taxation schemes and strategies that can be tried, such as increasing VAT on certain products, adjusting tax brackets to income changes, higher capital gains taxes on investments, and making tax evasion more difficult.
Don’t you think if it were possible for governments to gain multiples more tax revenue, they would do it already?
Taxes are competitive. If you have extremely high taxes, then the businesses that can move out will move out, leaving a smaller tax base and requiring you to raise taxes even more in a death spiral.
Possibly, but depending on the level of budgetary entrenchment it would prove difficult for some governments. In any case, a staged roll-out is more likely to succeed, with many hurdles along the way.
It's worth repeating that doing nothing increases overall societal costs if large parts of the population become unemployed, whether due to lower statewide income taxes, increased welfare costs, people resorting to grey collar work, and other secondary effects from increased displacement (lower consumer spending, rentals sitting empty, health epidemics, increased crime, etc.). UBI does not have to be a blanket instrument either: rather than income, we can focus on making certain goods and services universally available, such as access to food surpluses that would otherwise be overturned or basic internet access to enable people to remain connected without expensive contracts.
A solution may even exist beyond taxation: making reschooling and job pivoting more accepted within industry, lowering admission costs to tertiary education, or guaranteeing placement of employees when let go on account of automation or cost-cutting. What way the pendulum will swing remains to be seen.
Those corporations still want access to the US / EU / etc. customers so if they move elsewhere to dodge taxes you need to increase tariffs to compensate or deny them access to the market entirely. Those businesses are not irreplacable and they are worth nothing without customers.
No, of course they wouldn't. A politician cares far more about protecting their own wealth than increasing the size of some government department budget.
There won't be UBI, period. Though I could see a future where obsolete people are warehoused in sex-segregated poor houses until they die out, if it's determined that their freedom is threat to stability.
Another side effect: the wealth will be concentrated in rich tax-avoiding corporations and elites, meaning that the tax burden for society will fall even harder on the remaining middle and working classes, who will have to pay for the upkeep of everything.
And yet another side effect, the one that I believe trumps them all: a loss of meaning.
If somebody with zero skill in the arts can produce output of similar quality as a craftsman and about a thousand times faster, what is the point of art anymore? Sure, one can enjoy the very act of creating art, but we can't deny that art has value in relation to an audience, and is also a display of skill and a source of pride.
What if AI generates the perfect music just for you, based on your taste? Here we lose any and all social/cultural aspects of music. There's no point in discussing music as we have no shared experience. There's no point in emphasizing your favorite song because everybody exclusively listens to favorite songs.
What if you need to write a long essay and use AI to help write it. I receive it and use AI to summarize it. Other than this interaction being supremely depressing, what is the point of it at all? Just submit it to the big machine and perhaps some of it will show up in my use of ChatGPT-17.
So you were faster to write something whilst I was faster to consume it. This allows the both of us to do more in a single day. This "big win" won't gives us back free time nor raise our wages though. I just means that the nature of the work is for us to take the job of being guard rails for AI, a soul crushing job in itself but also temporary, until the rails are no longer needed.
>If somebody with zero skill in the arts can produce output of similar quality as a craftsman and about a thousand times faster, what is the point of art anymore?
I like to think "AI" will make art better reflect its real value, devoid of the tangential flat costs associated with housing, clothing, and feeding humans in the process of producing art.
The consumers at large demand driving down the cost for consuming and enjoying art, and raise hellfire if there is so much as a suggestion of raising that cost. Remember how much controversy there was and still is about raising the standard price of video games from $60 USD to $70 USD? And that $60 USD today is pennies compared to $60 back in, say, 1995.
If the consumers at large demand the cost of art to go down and "AI" will make the process of producing that art better reflect that real value, isn't this overall a good thing insofar as making the price tag more clear and agreeable and closing down sweatshops?
AI can probably replace Katy Perry, but could AI generated music ever replace Rancid or Junior Kimbrough or Fela Kuti? I don’t think so personally. I think truly human music will continue to stand apart.
I do agree with you in large part. I think I’m just slightly more optimistic that people who are driven to create will continue to do so and that people who really want real and human experiences and interactions will be able to find them with effort. Probably not anywhere on the mainstream internet though. Maybe even only in person.
Ever is a strong word. I shouldn’t rule out a future like that. But I don’t see the through line from our current ai to one that has entirely supplanted all human creation.
That consideration seems more along the lines of worrying about the eventual need to escape earth than a future on a closer horizon worth worrying about.
I’m more concerned about how every facet of our children’s lives will become inundated with shoddy ai being used to extract maximum profits at the cost of any humanness, and the death of all genuine communication on the internet.
AI has, in a few short years, gone from hardly being able to string words together, to writing coherent grammatical sentences, to being more proficient than an untrained human in many cases. ChatGPT is way better at writing poems than me, for example. Its style transfer capabilities are out of this world.
Thinking that the progression is going to slow down is just wishful thinking.
It is more visible with image synthesis. Sure, the style can be freely switched in a few seconds, fitting compositions from trained concepts is very impressive.
But there still is no real creativity. No emerging concepts aside from complete accidents that cannot be replicated again. The same is true for the other direction with models like Clip could create an interpretation of generated images. It is impressive, but there are still clear limitations. You cannot expect linear growth here, it could be that the current AI approaches are wrong, we hit a plateau and need fully new approaches for significant improvements. What we now have is insane amount of data and more powerful hardware, it could be that we have years of iterative and slow improvement while people fine tune their models.
I think LLM have the same problem overall, it is just more difficult to notice.
I think they mean jobs as in lines of work not jobs as in instances of employment.
One thing I wonder about a repeat of history is if the lowest classes still get enough of a share of the increased output in income/QoL would there still be a revolt about the increasing wealth concentration?
Not a real equivalent. Those machines are made by many, many people along the way. Industries exist from those machines.
With software you could say chip makers, developers, and energy companies will get stronger but I don't think there's a comparison. The keyholders will be a much smaller group with a greater power if we stay onboard the AI train.
And they do lead to unemployment. What are the people thinking? There is unemployment, and technology causes it more than it relieves it, especially software technology.
AI will also have an additional effect: it will be isolating in the sense that the need for other humans will decrease.
These two points alone, strengthened by many others, have led me to conclude that the world is MUCH better off with AI and that tech companies are ruining the world with their abominations.