I never understood the longterm logic of protecting jobs by not using tools.
Any tools goal is to reduce work.
Any tools goal is to reduce work.
Luddites weren't against automation. They were just against automation being used against them by others, rather than for them, by them.
> Any tools goal is to reduce work.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. Yes, a dishwasher reduces the work you have to do washing dishes. That is true. But is also creates an entire economic ecosystem to support the existence of that dishwasher. You have the entire supply chain, the manufacturer, the repairmen, etc, etc, etc; the dependencies are vast. Technology is always thoroughly embedded in a living culture. It is a product of that culture and an instrument of that culture. It is just a dead and empty husk without a culture to breathe life into it and make it what it is, like a severed finger. A 21st century smartphone beamed to 5th century Arabia would be worthless.
That's also why all sorts of initiatives in places like Africa have often been boneheaded. Someone from an NGO decides that farmers in Africa need tractors, or a water pump, or whatever. So they bring these things to a remote rural village somewhere, thinking that with this tractor, they'll increase agriculture yields and free up children from having to work the fields so they can go to school, and with this water pump, they'll relieve these people of drought. They show the villagers how to drive the tractor, how to turn the water pump on, and so on. So they use these things for a couple months. Something breaks. Nobody knows how to repair the tractor. Nobody has the parts needed to repair the tractor. Nobody has the tools to repair the tractor. Things go back to the way they were and the tractor is left to rust behind a shed somewhere. You need an economic ecosystem (and economies are a part of culture and a reflection of culture) that supports the existence and usefulness of the tractor and that water pump.
But transitioning to that ecosystem can be uncomfortable, even painful, especially when done too rapidly.
I’ll be glad when the dust settles as it’s really limiting what’s possible since Steam is also outright banning AI art tooling.
There is a 0% chance I’d pay the price this would have been a couple years ago. I can’t even fathom how much this quality of art would cost, probably tens of thousands of dollars.
Before the DM would just hunt and peck around for online images that sorta matched what he was going for, mostly rudimentary pencil drawings with some color fills.
To me the dream is saying “Elmo is king of a Mad Max style castle, please write a story and generate art assets” and in front of you on the tabletop your Apple Vision Pro tiles out a whole dungeon, does voices, you can go in and inspect and interrogate the pieces and make tweaks to get it just right.
I don't think, in all my years of role playing, I've _ever_ seen an image of one of the NPCs in our stories; at least outside of the rare store-bought adventures. Or, at least that I can recall, an image of _anything_ in our campaigns. Everything was verbally described.
I wasn't even aware people generated pictures for home-grown adventures/campaigns.
Art is nice. Customized art is nicer. Also, it's interesting that (as you note) it's far from universal. My group would likely have enjoyed using AI art for our campaigns, but my girlfriend's groups have completely rejected it.
Ever read thelastpsychiatrist? The website is dead now (and he may be too, for all I know), but he was on the money when talking about why a specific amount is paid by the state to the unemployed - it's the exact amount of money that would stop the idle masses from burning down the city.
You don't understand it now, but you will if we had a transition to completely automated driving in a short period - those millions of unemployed drivers, that are now never going to be employed, are a risk to the city.
That seems awfully pessimistic. There's a couple different reasons
- To stop the masses from uprising (as noted)
- Because the health of the society as a whole depends on the health of the people in the society. And sometimes you need safety nets for the people in that society, because people can't always do for themselves. Fire departments, unemployment, health care, education; these all fall into that category in one way or another. Some places provide all of these, some provide none, and most provide somewhere in the middle. In the end, we provide for those that can't because it's better for the society that we live in if we do. And we are all served by a better healthier society.
“Driver” happens to be the most popular job in the United States
What exactly is hard to understand here?
...which still only work out to 1-2%
It might be possible for some minority that has a particular penchant for this type of work, but neither the jobs nor the training exist at such scale that would be able to absorb the entirety of the driver workforce into the “write software for automated driving“ job.
It’s not an actual argument because it doesn’t have specific measurable distinctions between deaths related to driverless vehicles versus driver vehicles
We don’t have these types of measurable capabilities because we don’t actually have the data that shows what is the fatality rate per million miles at the scale of integration that an entire fleet they have supplanted the taxi industry would do.
You’re better off actually evaluating what is the death rate of taxis compared to individual drivers because the individual drivers are not going to be replaced at the same rate as taxi drivers and so the taxi drivers is the first more important number to evaluate with respect to traffic fatalities
Unless you’ve done that specific math, and walk the dog out, including the Wayno reports, some of the cruise reports, and some of the reports from Tesla (which killed a guy if you recall) then you might have an argument
As it stands, all I see with driverless cars is we’re trying to replace humans in an entire labor category, and we have nothing for those people to do
I suspect that is actually a much bigger problem than the theoretical reduction in fatalities on roads
It's not remotely like saying this, and going straight to child pornography in is like going straight to the Nazis - the sign of an unserious argument.
> It’s not an actual argument because it doesn’t have specific measurable distinctions between deaths related to driverless vehicles versus driver vehicles
You're just not understanding the definition of the word argument if you think this is true. Also, these things are being measured, so we're getting to this understanding. If your argument is that we shouldn't put robotaxis on the road because we don't know if they're safer means that we can't measure if robotaxis are safer and thus regardless of their relative safety, we must ban them because we don't have measurements yet.
> I suspect that is actually a much bigger problem than the theoretical reduction in fatalities on roads
But that's not an actual argument because it doesn't have specific, measurable distinctions, no?
Why not ban personal car to make the demand for driver even higher?