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However what nobody has really answered well is what happens to the artists

So does the world currently only listen to singer-songwriters on acoustic guitar at small local venues?

The humanity in the consumption of art has been subject to mass commodification for centuries at this point.

This process is driven by money and not love. Technology has nothing to do with it.

You're technically correct, but missing the point:

When technology destroys menial jobs, it's progress.

When technology destroys white-color jobs, it's a threat.

</irony>

When technology destroys work people don't like to do, it's progress.

When technology destroys work people like to do, it's _______.

> When technology destroys work people like to do, it's _______.

Liberating. I remember enjoying laying out sheet music. Doesn't mean I scorn my iPad.

Did you lose your livelihood because your iPad made composing easier?

If not, then technology didn't destroy your work.

> Did you lose your livelihood because your iPad made composing easier

Page flippers sure did. (I'm not a professional musician.)

> When technology destroys work people don't like to do, it's progress.

The Luddites would beg to differ.

People don't work because they like it, they work because they need to. "Work" that doesn't support your livelihood is correctly referred to as "play."

The interesting thing is how society differently reacts when different classes of people lose their work due to progress.

I dont think I have ever said this though. Telling truck drivers to learn to code was disgusting and horrible. There HAS to be a better solution to these things that society can come up with. I don't have those answers, but jesus christ look at the shit show below my original comment. I am not saying pause research, stop AI, or do anything like that. I welcome the eradication of certain medical issues. I just want to know what society will do? To be frank I have said in other threads as well... if I lose my visa and job my only solution I've thought of as of yet is suicide.

We've had big advancements before that allow people to do more with less, but this is a staggering leap. The jump from "you need to get a whole bunch of people together to practice and play music together" to "one person can make skilled music in their bedroom" isn't even comparable to "Hey AI, make me a reggaeton darkwave album performed by Kurt Cobain and Tiny Tim".

We're not talking just more art here, or some people losing jobs who then have to retrain. We're talking with possibly very near advancements, entire industries completely emptying, with hundreds of millions of people who now have nothing to do and nowhere to retrain to.

Other advancements have caused job losses and opened many more. I'm not understanding where all the potential displacements from AI are supposed to go, or how we're going to balance an economy when you need an order of magnitude fewer employees than ever to pump out more content than anybody could hope to consume.

> but this is a staggering leap

More than industrialization? Come on. It's staggering because it's impacting us.

Absolutely more. This takes very hard and challenging work and turns it into nearly nothing. This reduces decades of skilled labor and education into an algorithm. I'm not undervaluing industrialization, but the improvement in productivity wasn't on the same scale. We're talking reducing weeks of work to seconds in some cases, and that's not even being optimistic with what improvements we might still see in the coming years.

> takes very hard and challenging work and turns it into nearly nothing. This reduces decades of skilled labor and education into an algorithm

Read up on Luddism. These were multi-generational trades undone by the loom alone. The Industrial Revolution required millions of people to not only retrain, but also relocate. It changed political structures, often violently.

Even in the 1980s, skilled spreadsheets were done in by Excel. Does that mean we should ban Microsoft Office so folks can sketch out models by hand?

The scale is different by a grand margin. If 50% of US jobs are replaced by AI in the next 20 years, and those jobs aren't replaced by other jobs, and people depend on income to survive, what happens?

I'm not saying to ban it. I think the productivity gain could be a gift. Everybody being freed from the need to work would be amazing.

But without actually dealing with it, what's the proposal for dealing with the majority of the population of your country being completely without employment? What do we do for money when there's no work left to be done? The whole country can't trade stocks for a living.

> If 50% of US jobs are replaced by AI in the next 20 years, and those jobs aren't replaced by other jobs, and people depend on income to survive, what happens?

Which 50% are you seeing replaced? We can, and have, always imagined mass income eradication.

I'm not arguing we do nothing. But zero problems surfaced so far are even remotely actionable, as they're all well within the realm of hypothesis versus evidence.

Potentially? Most artists, programmers, musicians, most teachers, huge amounts of finance, marketing, legal and especially paralegal, most journalism and technical writing positions, stock trading (most traders don't do anything that AI can't fully replace), and even more of customer service.

The majority of those will probably be staffed at 10% what they are now at best. Some, like stock trading, will probably be almost completely erased as a human job.

I'm not so worried about legal. Lawyers seem to be in a good position to gatekeep AI out (e.g. suing DoNotPay). Paralegals could go extinct though.

>The Industrial Revolution required millions of people to not only retrain, but also relocate. It changed political structures, often violently

Can't wait for my political system to be violently up ended by AI. I can imagine it will only change for the better, right? Right??

Industrialization was slow - it took many decades to happen, so people could adapt. I don’t see us having that luxury of time.

AI is slow, it's been coming since the 1980s and still has decades to go.

> maybe even doctors and lawyers

I don't think any profession that requires a license is at risk. Software engineers resisted a licensing regiment for decades and now the profession will pay a price.

They are at risk; the ones that use AI will remove the ones that don’t in the end. The average lawyer does very little already; last week I had some papers that I needed to be checked legally; gpt4 found some issues that the expensive lawyer overlooked. Not big issues but issues. And this document was not in English either. It explained the issues in English, it provided a lot of text which the lawyer did not. But they did spend (assuming they didn’t lie) 3 hours and some minutes on them; if they can do this with AI in 15-30 minutes, which they can (it is enough time to recognise if it’s hallucinating), then they can put 3-4 lawyers out of a job by lowering prices. And that’s just using gpt as tool, not as the primary driver; just to speed up the work.

I don’t think it would destroy jobs for anything high profile (including programmers), but the grunts is a different story. If the secretary or, for instance, nurse, can feed through info and the ‘head’ lawyer/doctor of the practice only has to sign off on the result, the license is not an issue.

Not there yet, but can’t see this as avoidable anymore.

I agree and disagree.

Law firms make money, like any professional services firm, by billing hours. Fewer billable hours means less income for the partners. So while it's the low hanging fruit technically, it will resist as long as possible. It will be clients saying no to paying $250-$500 an hour for work that AI could do better and for free that will force the issue. I foresee more legal work moving in-house.

Medicine is a different beast. There's an acute shortage and a different incentive model (not run as partnerships). Big hospital/medical/insurance firms will invest most heavily in AI.

If AI enables a 12 year old in India to write the code of a 2019 software developer then that is a positive for the earth. If someone is upset that they're losing their lunch to their skillset that earned them an outrageous salary then might I suggest they, and I, learn to augment your productivity with the skills or take up something with better permanence like drywall or plumbing.

Hundreds of millions of people cant suddenly become tradespeople and society turns out okay. There aren't that many homeowners with kitchen and bathroom projects to keep them all employed, and there would be far less such clients after the fact.

I'm also not entirely convinced that more software is by default a net positive for humanity, let alone "the earth"

The other comment said it best. Let's say programming is going way. Do you think there is suddenly a need for hundreds of millions of trade workers? The economy will support that...? Have you thought this through?

I think we can look at history and see how revolutionary technologies changed the landscape of society.

No one knows really the magnitude of AI, but if we take the two extremes, AI takes all our jobs, and AI is just some stats that has no real utility, we’ll probably land somewhere in the middle.

Personally, I’m trying to learn these technologies to augment my current work. I’m treating it like going from using Notepad to program Java, over to a full fledged IDE. Not a perfect analogy, I know.

Given its inevitability, I think it’s logical to try and use it to our advantage as workers. If it ends up taking our jobs anyways, at least we tried. If it doesn’t take our jobs outright, then we’ll still be behind those that use the AI products as tools that augment their productivity, leading to a game of catch-up.

Even with the 6 month hiatus proposed, AI versions will still be released by those that refuse to follow the agreement. We’re in an AI arms race against the likes of other world super powers. And the morality of some are quite questionable (not that US’ morality is perfect by any means)

I firmly believe that once ai is in a position to replace programmers and other white collar workers, it's more of "we're all fucked" moment. Society would have to so radically change once we reach even that infantile level of post-scarcity, when a large portion of society that loses their jobs, that we have to have serious discussions about what life is supposed to be about and what our places in society are.

when there is no more desire to be quenched, when there are no jobs to do, when we have solved all disease, what do we do? Man has been defined so much by his suffering and toil, that when we take it away we are in an environment that we are not prepared for in any kind of sense.

More importantly, how do we keep everybody alive and cared for when all our systems are built around needing a job to survive when we then don't even have jobs to do for more than a quarter of our population?

Sadly nobody seems to be giving a fk. That until we find ourselves in crisis that leads to a lot of violence and a societal collapse. Hope I’m dead wrong, really do

I hear you man. Initially I was excited about this tech, and the more I game out what the actual effects might be, I just think it gets dark and the cognitive dissonance that kicks in prevents people from thinking about it too deeply, so they don't.

When AI Chess started kicking my @ss, I assumed that human competitive Chess was over.

Quite the opposite happened. We appreciate human-vs-human Chess even more because Stockfish, and other AIs, demonstrated there are more challenging lines and strategies to pursue.

That is fine when it comes to competition. How does a graphic artist or programmer compete?

The best ones will stay. People are still buying hand made items because they are unique and of better quality than those mass produced.

I know a few graphical artists, they would tell you that half of their pay is for dealing with annoying customers, and I can't see AI is going to make the clients happy.

I'm also seeing a lot of Graphic/3D Artists incorporating AI prompts into their craft.

Generative AI is just one-step in the overall process.

A train is approaching on the tracks, on one track you create free energy, solve diseases, create a new dawn for human ingenuity and also some white collar jobs are removed, others are created. On the other track we continue to toil in the dirt.

The answer to this entirely depends on who it is gets to hop on board the “free energy, solves diseases” train. If the tracks continue on the current American path of widening inequality and declining lifespans, I’m sure plenty of people would be happy to see the whole thing derail.

American innovation, and innovation of all countries flows through the world. Reactor designs, fiber optic cable, the internet, wikipedia. These are a few examples of the old world. The new world will feature new achievements that will unlock more prosperity.

Restating my point: prosperity for whom? The answer for the past 50 years has certainly not been “everyone” or even “most people” in wealthy countries like America.

> prosperity for whom? The answer for the past 50 years has certainly not been “everyone” or even “most people” in wealthy countries like America.

The poorest state in America, Mississippi, is richer than most of the world [1][2]. (No. 19, between the U.K. and New Zealand.) The post-war era experienced the largest and most broad-based increase in material prosperity in human history. Our poorest Americans saw real economic gains rivaling multi-generational ones for Rome's richest. If there is something that will kill us, it's ahistorical nihilism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

I would say that someone looking at all the problems that Mississippi has, while existing inside the richest country in human history, and saying “well, it’s not as bad as XYZ poor country” is a textbook example of the nihilism and failed imagination that has led us to wealth inequality and declining lifespans.

> someone looking at all the problems that Mississippi has, while existing inside the richest country in human history, and saying “well, it’s not as bad as XYZ poor country” is a textbook example of nihilism and failed imagination

I'm not saying there aren't problems. We're comparing medians. The poorest Mississippians struggles with problems on Maslow's hierarchy well above the median or even top quartile human.

So yes, we've been halfway better than nothing at distributing gains. That isn't an argument against change. But it is solid against arguing were should stall all progress until some imaginary threshold is met.

If we’re comparing medians, it’s far better to be born an average person the UK or New Zealand than Mississippi, where your risk of dying from childbirth, disease, or injury are far more guarded against, you have the right to paid time off, better labor protections, etc. This is another classic example of Americans mistaking the wealth of some small percentage of society for its general well-being.

Not all roads are paved, but everyone who accesses learning content on the internet is a beneficiary. Anyone who accesses youtube to learn a new skill is a beneficiary. The development of the train, a British technology I know, allowed the movement of massive freights for pennies compared to automobile traffic. That cost of transport allows food costs to be as low as they are in places that use trains. Which is everywhere. Technology facilitates the costs we have for subsistence.

How many jobs lost and how many created?

On this track, we continue to toil in the dirt, unless we figured out how to automate all the farming too. In fact, it looks like we're automatic all the fulfilling jobs and only leaving toil for the humans.

> we continue to toil in the dirt, unless we figured out how to automate all the farming

Who, on this forum, is forced "to toil in the dirt" for subsistence?

It seems like... everyone soon.

I am for the jobs that AI will provide!

Are as many jobs created as lost? People always assume this because it's been true in the past, but is that really enough reason to believe it will always be true going forward, especially when a technology threatens to upend so many types of jobs across so many industries all close to simultaneously?

And even if it were true, what's the quality of those new jobs? Sitting in front of a command line engineering "prompts"? Sounds more like a particularly dystopian sci-fi story than a bright future.

Ageed, the stakes of not doing this to appease some short term disruption is not worth the opportunity cost. Some might say we need better social support for lower wage jobs getting replaced by AI, but if we've learned anything from history is that humans (and especially gov) does not act until it was obvious it was needed yesterday.

I'm not willing to pretend that we'll somehow get basic income before the need and economic tradeoffs become very apparent. Democracy rarely ever works like that and the alternative isn't any prettier.

Regardless, like most tech/social evolution, we can't stop it even if we wanted to. Even if we try to slow it down it will probably just slow it down for some and build a bigger moat around the few with connections to power.

Except that’s not what’s happening right now. That’s just a list of flowery “might happen” ideas people can use to justify the disruption of society so some people can pad their bank accounts. If they cared they wouldn’t be focusing their attention on art/music.

We've been on this track before. Even more will be toiling in the dirt. Quite literally when AI takes every job that doesn't involve physical labor.

If you assume that an AI capable enough to replace all knowledge labor will simultaneously be forever incapable of designing commodity robots to let it also replace all physical labor, then sure.

Physical resources are limited and take time to ramp up regardless of how many smarts you have behind it. Knowledge work has significantly fewer barriers.

They will eventually come for it, but it will happen much slower.

This same sort of logic can be applied to a lot of things like Soviet style collective farms. A few Kulaks killed and starved is better for the Soviet Union. I just don't think it is a good argument.

> what happens to the artists, writers, programmers, scientists, maybe even doctors and lawyers

They find better things. Maybe agitating for a different economic system. Some countries will fail horribly at this. In any case, LLMs aren't coming for most writers or coders or scientists or medical researchers. They will help with our credentialing fetish.

Ah yes - what the world really need is less artists and more activists.

> what the world really need is less artists and more activists

That's not all they can do. And the line between artistry and activism is blurry at best. But yet, if your art can be replicated by Stability, it's no longer novel.

>They find better things

Better things that an AI can't do. To clarify.

What would your reply be to the following comment? (Not pasting it directly since it's frowned upon here)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34378139

This comes off as incredibly passive. You are in control of how you use and adapt to AI.

>if AI takes my job

AI is not going to take anyone's job. People using AI will take jobs from people who don't use AI.

>What happens to the doctors

That's completely up to them. Some will use AI to research new treatments, to assist with their daily workload, or even to treat patients.

Some doctors will stick their head in the sand and refuse to work with the new technology. They might lose their jobs if they can't compete with AI-assisted doctors, and it will be entirely their fault.

“AI is not going to take anyone's job. People using AI will take jobs from people who don't use AI.”

An incredible distinction on the level of “guns don’t kill people, people with guns kill people”. The difference is practically meaningless. By your logic, if everybody uses AI then no one loses their job but that’s not how productivity gains work is it?

> People using AI will take jobs from people who don't use AI.

Not really sure what point you’re making though. This almost makes it sounds like you want the reader to conclude that it’s going to be a one-for-one trade, but the whole concern is that it won’t be. If your manager uses AI to replace the job of you and 9 other people on your team, I think it’s a bit silly to say “don’t worry, AI didn’t take your job, a person using AI just took the jobs of 10 people not using AI.”

> AI is not going to take anyone's job. People using AI will take jobs from people who don't use AI.

If your boss fires you because your colleague uses AI sooner or better than you, sure, AI didn’t take your job, but what’s the distinction? If you are in a team of 10 translators and 9 get fired overnight, I would say AI took their jobs. Which is happening.

Also, this is probably shortsighted; when going forward, it will be possible for a manager/hr to chuck a resume and typical tasks into an AI and ask it if it can do it or they should hire a human. Now the AI will lie it can do it, but a lot of work goes into making that better and the execution of the provided tasks for the job will show if it’s lying.