Every major technology progression has come with 'sky is falling' predictions.
Generative AI accelerates the productivity of productive people, and potentially replaces the efforts of button-pusher types adding minimal value or creative input to a process. Not entirely different than personal computers, robots, locomotives, printing presses, and so on.
Some of the things you haven’t listed — air conditioning, internal combustion engines, car-centric cities — are busy causing so much harm that our biosphere is showing the strain.
Other things you haven’t listed — government-subsidized sugar production, sedentary lifestyles due to constant PC use — are busy causing so much harm to out bodies that humans are dying of simultaneous over-indulgence and despair.
People warning about these harms were _right_, and in each case they were greeted by similar dismissiveness. No technology guarantees a rosy future. All of it has a cost, some of those costs are very heavy, and some are permanent.
Air conditioners did not replace humans in jobs, they made indoor spaces more habitable. The internal combustion engine alone did not directly replace people, we didn't really have at that point humans turning cranks all day, the IC engine was a component of bigger machines.
Several of the other examples you mentioned definitely had negative impacts as well as positive ones, but they were never really seen as creating risk to peoples ability to earn money. If anything, they created new industries and jobs.
AI will definitely offset some jobs that are menial or able to be done with low cognitive effort. But historically those kinds of things have always been overtaken by the progression of human invention. Elsewhere in this thread someone mentioned lamplighters as an example. "Jobs" are frequently replaced by progression. "Careers" less so (but not totally immune).
As the efficiency of our means of production increases, so too does its ability to leave behind those who are not your so-called “productive people.” Now, we have more than enough wealth in this country to solve that problem to everyone’s benefit, and I’d like to think that we will. However, some of those most directly involved and invested in bringing on the AI-powered future are literally right now attempting to gut the social safety net for the same country.
So, truthfully, I don’t believe a word of it. I think that an AI-powered future is just another ladder that the super-privileged want to climb and then pull up after themselves.
> In my own practice, I’m learning to use AI not as a tool of compression, but one of expansion. Prompts become not endpoints but starting points. They create new voids to explore, new territories for my mind to inhabit.
They're talking about the future, though. You are correct that they, nor you or I, have a solid understanding of technology in the future.
The dangerous interactions were already known, the risk-level was criticized, but there was money to be made...
This cynical invincibility complex is becoming a tacit allowance of extreme danger. It's not some annoyance for people to act responsible, and not all technological achievements are the same as ones previously produced.
What is this reference?
If your urn contained even one black ball, your membership was vetoed and your chances - ruined.
Ubiquity kills the value of anything.
Anything short of an actual boycott on AI produced work/art will result in this.
For example our consumer laws emerged out of anxiety about poisonous food. Our libel laws emerged out of moral panics about misuse of the press. Etc. But were still good measures.
There's also the asymmetric risk element. The social risks of the technology are larger than the material risks of putting it off. Being wary of that isn't Luddism, it's just math
I mean, an argument that "technology" hasn't eliminated work previously so we can assume it won't do so now is ridiculously broad.
I don't even think current LLMs will eliminate all jobs - I think it's limited to a particular kind of mediocre output, an output the demand for which is very elastic. But an arguments about what "AI" can do should based on it's potential, not on some "technology has always created jobs" incantation.
Maybe equality is good? For utilities like locomotion, that sounds great. But for creativity?
I think what will happen is a later generation will grow up bombarded by level-100 art and music. I guess that sounds net positive...right?
As a musician, I can tell you one thing: part of what gives me drive to make music is knowing that what I'm creating is a scarce resource. (For example, if I realize one of my songs sounds like another existing song, it stops sounding good to me.) If it comes that AI can generate new songs for me, all of that value I assign to creating music is lost.
This dilemma came up before, as photography started to become practical. Artists didn't see the point in painting what the camera could render perfectly. So instead, we got Impressionism, and everything that grew out of it.
There will always be room in art to do something different, something "out of distribution," so to speak. Great artists will still surprise us. Average ones can still have fun. Crappy ones will just have to find something else to do. Life will go on.
As for the notion of a "creativity equalizer", that's laughable. It would take a god to do that, not a computer. AI is a tool, and some people will always be better than others at using the available tools. Those are the ones we will continue to call "artists," "musicians," and "writers."
So if AI reaches that point in the next few years, machines will replace humans for all productive work.
They organized protests, strikes, and sabotaged the electrical systems because their livelihood was threatened by a given tech.
I work hunched over a computer, but I have realized over the years how hollow it all is internally. Most people do not only have no conception of what I actually do, but also, most people will never see it, use it, etc.. My work brings no pleasure to people and is confined to live on a bunch of NAND gates and across various wires.
I think it hurt me most when I realized, on days when I have been really productive, if I just turn my computer off and look around me, then I have absolutely nothing to show for it.
I got a new job, I do websites and CRUD apps still, but it’s in service of a large multinational construction company, and seeing engineers and the actual boots on the ground doing construction work really makes me feel like the stuff I’m making means something.
We get an opportunity to go out in the field sometimes and it was an eye opener, a “small” construction site may employee 800 people and have people working round the clock.
There are ways to make this work meaningful, you just have to seek it out. Wish you all the best.
> and it will destroy the value of most human work
From my view, as someone studying and working with ML and AI since 2017, these two statements seem in conflict.
Either you’re overestimating what AI actually provides, you’re understanding of what “most human work” is skewed by the field you work in, or you’re underestimating the value of human labor.
We’ll just have to wait and see, I suppose.
I've seen this rough formula applied to earlier tech. But it's hard to see how, if AI/LLM usage consists of mainly in simple commands ("prompts"), it won't be about making people into "button-pusher types" or just empowering exactly those types. Indeed, one of the draws of generative AI is that it allows managers/marketers to get default mediocre illustrations for a text without having to consult with an artist or even a stock-photo agency (which peddled things made by artists - up until now).
I can design reasonably decent PCBs (up to 4 layers), I can hack together not-terrible code in a handful of languages from embedded-C (eg: ESP32 stuff) up to Windows or linux apps. But I absolutely suck at graphic design and basic layout. Many of my creative projects stall at the UI level, and rarely are they worth paying someone to help. I've been using genAI tools to help with design, layout, etc. things. I can also see the inverse, someone who may be good at design and can craft something that just oozes "use me", but perhaps they struggle with coding, genAI tools might allow them to use robust components, like ESP32's with attached touchscreens, to build things previously out of reach to them. This seems to me like something that can propel things forward, but potentially at the cost of a person whose previous job was mostly editing powerpoint slides on the corporate template.
It’s about the friction that AI removes from making things and the discomfort with what that might mean. This point is fair and your take on productive people is reductive. People aren’t 1:1 factories.
I’ve been watching my spouse participate in a seriously intensive prestigious typography course. It’s quite fascinating to watch how a part of the process involves slow walking through all of the tedious hand lettering stuff. Like mr. Miyagi level training. The depth and complexity of things they’re discovering and learning at a deep level by hand is quite enlightening. It would not be possible to convey other than by this process - to understand how to design typography you basically have to practically engage with how it was in every other earlier historical period.
I believe this is the essence of the point of the article - that working through your ideas by hand involved lots of friction which was valuable in training you how to slow down your thinking. And now that is being done away and everyone can fart out nuanced BS and disregard anything that is more than a paragraph long.