Hacker News Reader

Comment by rockemsockem | Hacker News Reader

AI is clearly not the problem here. Our preexisting society and massive wealth inequality is. I'll add though that many, many open models of high quality that smaller companies can build on exist and these models and companies are likely to be the most harmed by over-the-top regulation. OpenAI will survive jumping through hoops just fine.

View on HN

> Our preexisting society and massive wealth inequality

It seems like anything that will make this problem worse is a net negative for society

If the only way to make it a positive is to change everything underneath it, then...

If your subfloor is rotting away, do you replace it or put new carpeting on top of it?

The city is polluted. Do we replace the entire city or install air filters? It's mostly a matter of scale.

I'd like air filters, but AI is not air filters in this analogy.

Is GenAI more like cigarettes ("cool factor", but harmful in the long run), or is it more like cars (noisy and creates pollution, but super-convenient and therefore something most people should adopt)?

I still struggle with this every day. Maybe I'll figure it out someday soon...

If the carpet is AI, and the subfloor is everything else, then we're already in the process of putting the new carpet overtop of it

And there's a lot of people telling us we can't afford the time or money to replace the subfloor first

I understand in this case the subfloor is unrestrained and unregulated capitalism.

Those two problems are some of the largest we have at the moment. They screw everything up.

We should not optimize for a shitty existence.

I actually think making the problem worse is a good side-effect. The larger and more direct a problem is impacting us the greater impetus for fixing it.

The casualness some people talk about putting large segments of society's lives and livelihoods on the brink never ceases to amaze me.

I really wish our society was able to solve problems before that become enormous, but that just doesn't seem to be something that happens very often. :/

Absolutely. We're incapable of the foresight and coordination needed to stave off these disasters. It doesn't help that "progress" has become the idol of our secular religion. Slowing down or stopping is just sacrilegious to modernity.

I completely agree. I have many, many friends who are commercial illustrators, and many of them are very anti-AI now due to popularity of DALLE. They feel that they've been cheated out of a job. I'm an artist and a software engineer, though, so I'm in the same boat of having had my output used to train LLMs. But the outrage, at least in the conversations I've had, seems to always be rooted in a fear about economic insecurity if these models take their jobs. To me, this doesn't mean the issue is that we should expect our output to not be used to train models, but that we should expect our governments to support us in the event that large swathes of professionals find their jobs suddenly far less profitable.

And professional musicians in a previous century felt cheated out of a job by the phonograph. Time and tech change. Such is life. Painters hated photography when it was invented. Jobs are distroy and new ones made by tech. No one is crying about the typest in typing pools loosing jobs to word processor. Its just artists turn this time.

Another example is Digital photography and cell phone cameras destroying a bunch of professional photographer careers.

You're not wrong, but the heartlessness of that sentiment is striking. Real people get hurt. That in the long run we'll adapt as a society doesn't mean we should just write off those whose lives are ruined in the now.

A little empathy is a good thing here.

Yet we tell the coal miners to go take job retraining because photovoltaic are a better power source than burning carbon. It suck for people being replaced but is better for the whole. Should we subsidise buggy whip manufactures because they were obsoleted. No one is well served by trying to fight the tides.

> Yet we tell the coal miners to go take job retraining because photovoltaic are a better power source than burning carbon.

Do we?

Last I checked (after decades in the mining industry from driving haul paks to geophysical exploration to selling global mineral intelligence software to Standard & Poor) :

Coal mining skills easily transfer to Lithium mining (etc).

Fitters and turners still fit and turn, belt splicers still splice belts, industrial electricians still pull wire and lace looms, mechanics are still required and will easily adapt to EV heavy machines as they've been working on those since the 1970s (electric shovels, ship loaders, etc).

Could you outline some things that coal miners do that aren't applicable to rare earth mining?

That's addressing a different point than I was making. I'm not saying that we need to keep old professions around or that we shouldn't adapt to changing times.

I'm saying that speaking about the people who are harmed when things change as if they don't matter is heartless.

We need to have empathy for them, and to help them where we can, not to talk about them and treat them like obsolete machinery. They're people, not machines.

That would require some kind of profit sharing agreement from the companies that benefit from replacing employees to redistribute to society, which frankly I cannot ever seen happening.

This is that "tax" I hinted at in my article.

Whenever a company is gleeful for regulation this is where my mind goes. Do they see regulation as an extra moat? We have the cash and years head start. It's love government procurement. Companies love it because once they are in, they rarely have competition and can charge extra.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com