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Comment by whiddershins | Hacker News Reader

How about people want to live how they want to live and we should innovate to accommodate that not restructure society?

Innovation is still finite per unit of time. People's wants are infinite.

Everyone wants to live in a sprawling castle far away from pesky neighbors, they want to have an entire forest as a backyard and at the same time they want to have access to the same urban facilities as those in Manhattan.

There's no amount of innovation we could muster at least the next 2 decades to make that a financially feasible reality.

> Innovation is still finite per unit of time. People's wants are infinite.

That's what I say to people afraid AI will steal their jobs. No way we run out of jobs before we run out of desires. We can always imagine and want more, and it's so easy to become entitled to what you already have and think nothing of it.

People are not necessarily afraid of AIs on their own (though they are afraid of them, too, at least a bit, see Skynet).

I think the bigger fear is that of AI ownership. In a "winner takes all world" where people have a hard time sharing effectively, if there's no need for human labor for many fields and AI owners can just buy lawmakers, some people can just become infinitely powerful. Creating a permanent underclass of those who missed their chance.

See what's happening with coal mining, for example. People keep talking about reconversions but frequently what happens with these people is... Nothing. Their kids are the ones that move away or work in new fields, but most adults over 40 or 50 don't radically change their field of work en masse, or if they do, it's towards even crappier jobs.

Use it or lose it - this new technology will also be available in open source, easy to use format for everyone to empower their lives, but those who refuse to partake will be at a disadvantage.

It used to be that you needed a large dataset and a custom architecture for each individual task. Now you can use a general model and a few examples, it will catch on much faster on what you want it to do. Sometimes it's just as simple as telling it in free language what the task is.

What took whole departments multiple years to achieve will become something regular people could do. We learned to live with internet and cell phones, we can learn to program AI that is by design especially easy to program.

For example, how easy is it to make an image classifier with CLIP. https://openai.com/blog/clip/

What if you don't work in IT? So probably 95% of all workers out there?

Is everyone supposed to work in IT in AI-related fields?

Suburbs were not created out of a natural desire people had. There was a combination of federal financial incentives and racist motives in the 50s that created them, and they are far less efficient than cities by basically every metric.

Not Just Bikes series on Strong Towns: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-federal-governmen...

There are reasons people like having a yard, more space, less noise, and an automobile, other than racism.

Yes. Many people. Issue is lack of alternative and how the whole society is built to cater to this lifestyle so many people are forced into it if they want anything more than a shoebox 1 bedroom. That’s why understanding why this option became the only choice is interesting to study.

Because climate change is quickly killing our planet as we know it.

We don't have that now (and never have). There are always constraints on what we can do.

Written on the website whose reason for existence is innovations that restructure society.

We have to stop with this toddler mentality. Wanting something isn't nearly enough to make it a sustainable reality.

Tragedy of the Commons.

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