Ubiquity kills the value of anything.
Anything short of an actual boycott on AI produced work/art will result in this.
> 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 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.
They organized protests, strikes, and sabotaged the electrical systems because their livelihood was threatened by a given tech.
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.