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Comment by greesil | Hacker News Reader

You could probably say this about anything that improves productivity. FWIW it would be nice if there was a safety net in place to help people recover from having their jobs automated out of existence.

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I agree. I think it's imperative, but will come piecemeal...one industry at a time, and always too late.

Piecemeal or possibly never. Ugh

> it would be nice if there was a safety net in place to help people recover from having their jobs automated

Forgive my ignorance but is this not the whole point of civilized society? Social safety net are what my taxes are supposed to be for isn't it?

I'm from Europe living in USA and the discussion around "What if there were some way to pool our resources to help those in need" is always ... interesting.

The US tends to see the role of government to secure rights and freedoms for its citizens, more than to create social safety nets. That’s one of the founding principles of the country. Not that social safety nets are bad, but I say that is not the primary purpose of civilized society.

What better way to ensure freedom than to give everyone the chance to take risks without fear of destitution?

Having your private property rights enforced by police is an instance of a social safety net. It’s helping you do things that would be much harder or impossible to do by yourself. So is modern agriculture, medicine, engineering, etc.

Protecting private property is a necessary part of a market economy. I wouldn't call it a safety net. The whole point of a safety net is when your livelihood goes poof you don't freefall into the abyss. Should you sell your home when an AI automates your job? These are orthogonal concepts.

The US is what happens when a small group of economic/political competitors get a thinly-populated continent for free. The rights and freedoms emphasis makes total sense in a context where you have what seem like unlimited resources by individual human standards. World population in 1776 was under 1 billion and in Europe it was about 150m, or 1/3 of today's.

It's unwise for Americans to stay so mentally anchored to this origin story. It's not that it doesn't have value, but it has increasingly less to do with reality because it depends on a condition of superabundance that no longer obtains.

You make an interesting point. But I don’t see why the governments role to secure rights and freedoms for its citizens would change with fewer natural resources per person. Certainly the nature of rights may change as new technologies develop (do artists have the rights to AI generated art trained on their works, etc) but the principle still seem the same.

Look back at our original comment to see how it necessarily expands when resources are not superabundant.

> You could probably say this about anything that improves productivity.

The claim goes too far though. Automation, thus far, has been good for everyone. Mostly those with capital, but also those without. The zero sum outcomes implied by the headline don't hold up to what we've observed with increased living standards globally as automation has improved economic output.

The difference is that in the past automation did not have power itself. If displaced workers revolted, those factory machines would do nothing to save wealthy capitalists from the public's vengeance.

Once they have mass produced Terminator-like invincible robot cops they'll be able to do whatever they wish with us. They could give us universal income, they could also round us up and push us into the sea.

I don't think that's true. The important issue isn't productivity but whether a technology is centralizing or decentralizing, whether it benefits or loses from scale.

The personal home computer, the early web etc were productivity boosts but moved power from incumbents to small players. AI as it currently stands almost achieves the exact opposite. A relatively straight forward heuristic to ask is, how much does an authoritarian power like the technology?

Spot on. AI is extremely centralizing and extremely powerful. I'm a big Bitcoiner and definitely against big government. But I fail to see what feasible counter there is except for something as totalitarian and powerful as the government, whether it be to enforce copyright of training data, UBI, or even forceful limitation of AI research (latter prob won't work. And AI research will simply move to more lax jurisdictions).

Even Bitcoin is not going to fix any of this.

What has Bitcoin fixed other than the ease of my buying a rocket launcher on the dark web?

> You could probably say this about anything that improves productivity.

AI does not improve productivity in the technical sense. Productivity improvements are the result of using better tools. I would classify better tools as force multipliers. AI is a force replacement as far as I'm concerned. If I'm using stable diffusion, I'm not painting, I'm writing prompts and hoping I get what I want. It's as far removed from the actual practice as it can be.

I can produce more articles, or legal filings, more SEO spam, faster. That seems like a productivity gain.

Well, you aren't, ChatGPT is. In spirit, it's the equivalent of asking someone else to do a job for you. You wouldn't claim you wrote that article, legal filing, SEO spam, etc, you'd say an AI did it.

If you used Photoshop to manipulate an image over using MS Paint, you wouldn't say that Photoshop made the image for you, because it didn't, you did. Grammarly doesn't write your articles for you, you do. They just maximise your efforts.

You're asserting that ChatGPT is closer to a person than a tool. I don't think this is a settled debate yet.

I wouldn't say it's closer to a person, more simply that to claim it's work verbatim and without substantial modification as your own is perhaps dubious and not entirely honest. Even then, "substantial modification" is somewhat arbitrary. Definitely an interesting philosophical topic.

You're serious?

Yes. I'm not saying LLMs are sentient (corporations are people and similarly not sentient, under the traditional definition of the word), I'm saying there's an active debate on how to view AI, especially in the context of attribution.

Eh, the way I've used these tools are so interactive and iterative that I would absolutely say the output is my work, or at most a collaboration.

Did you dig the hole, or the backhoe you were driving?

That's what a tool is. I plowed my field with a diesel engine pushing my tractor. Clearly I pay the tractor an hourly rate.

You can marry exactly as much actual practice into it as you want. Paint with the AI, not just expect the AI to paint for you.

Modern DJ decks have an auto-mixing switch. DJs still exist and use that switch when they need to take a bathroom break, etc.

Prompt-writing is to interacting with AI as the command line is to using Photoshop - an early UI to a new tech.

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