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Comment by yomkippur | Hacker News Reader

I see this happening in all areas. Everything would be prompt-driven.

Do you like this? What about this? You simply nod or reject the solutions that you don't want.

Pretty soon somebody's expertise and experience is not going to be enough to continue paying them what they used to get before this magic blackbox appeared.

One day enterprises will realize they can just outsource that expert who's been reduced to simply typing prompts and nodding yes or no.

I am worried that the middle class is rapidly disappearing. We will own nothing and be happy seems quite ominous. The question is then what field is safe from advancements in AI?

The only field I can think of is doctors, lawyers, executives, buy-side money managers. Even their jobs will be partially automated but it will be safe as long as they generate revenue.

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You don’t need nodding or really any conscious reaction I think. It should be possible to have some camera directed at face hooked up to another AI that catches slight changes in pupil dilation or other changes imperceptible to naked eye and registers when something looks interesting to the user. You can then quickly show a stream of variations and pick the tagged ones and use them to improve the guesses. I imagine something like this might one day become a preferred way of interacting with computers/AI.

But, if everyone's jobs are automated, nobody is making any money, so nobody has any money to pay doctors, lawyers, executives, money managers, etc. You would think that if these types were thinking rationally, they would be fighting to expand the middle class so more people can pay for their services.

In the past, eliminating humans from one set of jobs has been balanced by a new set of opportunities for humans in different jobs. Usually, the new jobs are more valuable.

That's not utopianism. The new jobs can't always be filled by the people kicked out of jobs. It really sucks to be them.

But it does mean that it's not irrational for people to want to automate other people's jobs. The net amount of stuff generated increases, rather than decreases.

This pattern may not last forever. There's already some thought that we've generated more than enough stuff to guarantee a decent standard of living to everybody (at least in the developed world) without working, and plenty more for luxuries if people choose to work. Even if we haven't reached it, we appear to be heading in that direction sooner rather than later.

That may cause a radical re-think at some point. And it won't be seriously delayed by making sure cartoonists have jobs.

> enough stuff to guarantee a decent standard of living to everybody

It's not a zero sum game. There's still growth in us. We'll go to space and expand 1000x more, the space has plenty of resources, and humans will have jobs working together with AI.

> There's still growth in us. We'll go to space and expand 1000x more, the space has plenty of resources, and humans will have jobs [..]

Q: Am I the only one thinking of Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B?

We'll have to automate childcare to make that happen. Otherwise, the birthrates of the rest of the world will follow the countries with the highest standards of living on a wild plunge into unsustainability.

Jobs are plentiful as long as wealth is well distributed.

In the past, fast automation has led to badly distributed wealth, and job loss. This situation has lasted until the unemployable people died off (yep, that was part of it), and enough wealth was redistributed through violent means.

Today we know better, and have really no reason to repeat the violent means of our previous revolutions. But it's really looking like the people in power want to repeat them.

> enough wealth was redistributed through violent means.

there were no instances of violent redistribution of wealth that ended better for the average person than before. Only that a different group of people ended up with wealth.

Automation makes stuff cheaper, even for people who didn't obtain any of the financial wealth via redistribution - because there's more than just financial wealth that get created with automation. New availability of services and goods (think internet of today - this is a wealth that couldn't have existed before, and one can benefit from it even if they are poor today).

> Everything would be prompt-driven.

Just like in Star Trek. They really knew what the end goal was didn't they.

> enterprises will realize they can just outsource that expert who's been reduced to simply typing prompts and nodding yes or no

Tbf a program averaging the market for a fact gives better returns than most of the financial industry, yet they still exist. Even if we can automate something doesn't mean we will, usually for pointless emotional reasons.

But on the other hand it's hard to say if in a 100 years humans will still be employable in any practical capacity for literally anything.

>Pretty soon somebody's expertise and experience is not going to be enough to continue paying them what they used to get before this magic blackbox appeared.

Every art director at an ad agency just shrieked!

I doubt it, because the process of thinking of phrases to feed dall-e is really the hard bit.

This is ok for a logo like this where it’s fair to say the base level expectation is not super creative. This logo is cool, but it doesn’t really stand out or make the product ver distinctive. If I am running a hobby or OS project that’s fine, but if I was investing a lot in sales/marketing then paying a real artist to make something interesting and novel is a rounding error.

> This logo is cool, but it doesn’t really stand out or make the product ver distinctive. If I am running a hobby or OS project that’s fine, but if I was investing a lot in sales/marketing then paying a real artist to make something interesting and novel is a rounding error.

Q: Are there really logos out there that are "interesting and novel" and that "stand out or make the product [..] distinctive"? Which ones?

EDIT: (perhaps more importantly) are there interesting, novel, distinctive logos that actually contribute to profitability?

tbf I think when it comes to big company branding it's the opposite.

A lot of GPT iterations of the design has left the article author with something which is quirkier than your average logo, but also looks like clipart and probably doesn't scale up or down well or work in monochrome. Which is fine for OSS. (He might get more users from blog traffic about using GPT-3 to design his logo than he ever could from any other logo anyway)

But when it comes to bigger companies, the design agency are the people that sit in meetings with execs persuading them that a well chosen font and a silhouette of a much simplified octopus will work much better ("but maybe the arms could interact with some of the letters etc etc, now lets discuss colours). The actual technical bit of drawing it is the bit that's already relatively cheaply and easily outsourced, and plenty of corporate logos are wordmarks that don't even need to be drawn...

Doctors are very vulnerable. Most of dermatology is simple pattern recognition. I can easily see AI lawyers beating human lawyers in litigation, too. An AI lawyer will have read every single case and know the outcomes, and can fine tune arguments for specific parameters like which judge etc.

> Most of dermatology is simple pattern recognition.

I have a few qualms with this app:

1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.

3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

What on earth are you referring to? I assume it’s some sort of implicit joke but I don’t get it :)

Edit: Ahh, it’s the Dropbox comment of HN fame. Never mind.

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