Comment by berkes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by berkes | Hacker News Reader

The whole "AI revolution" feels distopian opposite from what I'd naively thought it would do.

My ideal would be a world in which boring, heavy, dangerous, etc work is replaced by machines. Giving humans time and opportunity to pursue creative, fun, stimulating or intellectually challenging tasks.

In which only legit people, and never spammers or scammers get me on the phone. Where I don't have to juggle appointments, pdfs, portals, dossier-codes to have my drivers license renewed. In which I can write software and all the boring stuff is taken care of so I need to only do the creative and fun parts. In which I can go surfing, and AI takes care of my taxes, my home, my income and my dishes.

In which tasks like labelling art, driving a taxi, or annotating pdfs is done by machines. So that the humans have time to make art, get transported anywhere for virtually free, or write stories.

But alas, it's the complete opposite. AI companies promise to replace the people that make art, demand ever more humans to stare at screens in order to "generate useful training data" rather than those humans spending time with each other, or spend time in inspiring surrounding. AI increases robo calling a hundred fold. AI generates more email, content, slop, and other noise that I manually have to wade through to get the actual info.

I get where you're coming from — the naively thought part. You may though just have to get a good deal more cynical. Perhaps you already are.

Tech fascinated me as a kid—and, because of my age, we're talking Apollo-era tech, promises of a moon base, the introduction of the Metric system is U.S. schools, elementary school libraries full of science books for kids on chemistry, electricity, model rocketry, etc.

I have come around to see, as I get older, that tech for tech's sake is often a hollow thing. Its biggest cheerleaders are (of course) the ones that stand to make a lot of money from it.

Change for change's sake follows in stride—is disruptive, unasked for, often benefits a few.

I dislike my modern cynicism on tech but it has also served me well.

Hell, tech used to be.. it still is.. the thing I am interested in.

It meant a cool future to look forward to.

This for sure isn’t that.

To quote several other people who have made thoughtful pieces around this in the past: the futurism espoused by people like Elon Musk seeks to engage with the aesthetics of Star Trek, whilst ignoring entirely the post-scarcity socialism that Roddenberry’s worlds very clearly represented.

That’s not quite as apt today, as it seems he’s just as happy to engage with the aesthetics of Blade Runner while also cheerfully engaging with the fascist dystopia of Blade Runner…

Completely agree with every word except for

> tech for tech's sake

what we're seeing is tech for greed's sake, not tech's sake.

My journey has been the same as yours.

> My ideal would be a world in which boring, heavy, dangerous, etc work is replaced by machines. Giving humans time and opportunity to pursue creative, fun, stimulating or intellectually challenging tasks.

I can't quite square people seriously believing such things, it seems like it must be wishful thinking crossed with denial. We have more than 200 years of technology taking away the hard and dangerous jobs and it hasn't been playing out that way at all, so why should the latest kind of automation have a dramatically different effect on society?

A hydraulic excavator can do the work of dozens of men with shovels, dozens of times faster too, but that hasn't lead to easy lives of luxury for the sort of men that would have been breaking their backs with shovels. They all had to get other manual labor jobs, because they weren't the capital that got to own and profit from the new machines. The best we can hope for is that when all the women manually spinning thread get replaced by factories, that at least some of them will get to have new factory jobs and the rest will at least be offset by society at large benefiting from clothing so cheap that even the poorest people can own more than one outfit.

This is pretty wrong. We went from 90% of the population working in agriculture in ~1800 to (now) 80% working in services. Most services jobs are much nicer (and require far less manual labor) than those in agriculture.

Farming sucks, therefore common laborers will profit and live luxurious when technology takes their jobs is a hell of a stretch. And even saying those displaced farm workers who had to migrate to crowded and dirty cities just to continue to survive personally benefited is a stretch too. As a whole we're better off now, but trying to pretend that you're doing somebody a favor by eliminating their job seems like peak techie cope.

> Most services jobs are much nicer (and require far less manual labor) than those in agriculture.

We tell ourselves that because none of us have ever done agriculture. But I'm not so sure that it's true. Yes, far less manual labor. But manual labor isn't a bad thing.

Technology has made our lives _easier_, no question about it. It could also make our lives _better_, but I'm not sure that it is anymore (I feel like the curve has flattened, except for the few who are reaping nearly all the benefits of increased technological "progress").

Funny. I don't claim to be a person of extraordinary intellect or a tech-visionary. However, the very first time in my life I heard the argument "robots are bad because they will take all the jobs" I immediately realized "oh, so 'who will own the robots' is the question we have to think carefully about". This was in the mid-nineties and I was about 10.

>My ideal would be a world in which boring, heavy, dangerous, etc work is replaced by machines. Giving humans time and opportunity to pursue creative, fun, stimulating or intellectually challenging tasks.

That didn't happen at any previous industrial revolution step either. Instead work for humans became more mechanical and soul-crushing.

Farmers ended up having to work on some factory line for 12 hours. Small store owners and employees were turned into huge chain cogs. People "freed" from household work, were send to the cubicle.

Usually boring and dangerous are harder problems that easy work.

“I want my AI to do dishes and laundry so I can draw, code, write. Not for it to draw, code, write so I can do dishes and laundry”.

>I want my AI to do dishes and laundry

You mean a washing machine and a dish washer?

Pretty wishful thinking to think software and hardware is advanced enough to figure out very advanced materials science and physics to do those tasks requiring manipulation of objects in the real world.

Maybe it happens, maybe it doesn’t, but manipulating digital output seems like a step that would come before manipulating real world objects.

I think you need to get past the literal examples to the concept that they are saying "I wanted AI to free me from the mundane, not imprison me with it". This has long been the promise from the same people who now appear to be quite happy to turn us into the Matrix-style feedstock for AI (again, not literal - but maybe literally?). Natural extrapolation: they may be the last to go, but it won't need them either. How can so many smart people all be Wile E. Coyote?

> How can so many smart people all be Wile E. Coyote?

Money. A whole lot of money. They won't live in the dystopian reality of most people in the near future, they'll buy their way out and live their comfortable lives.

That explains the ultra-wealthy, who likely will be able to buy their way out and live their comfortable lives.

But how do you explain the non-elites who are cheering on this dystopian reality? Some of them here in the HN comment section? If this thing that you are cheering for comes true, you'll be just as out of work and underclass as everyone else!

Do people really think the measly $2M 401(k) they got from their tech job is enough to buy them a ticket to the Elysium space station?

> Do people really think the measly $2M 401(k) they got from their tech job is enough to buy them a ticket to the Elysium space station?

Move to a low cost area and live like a king.

Not having to live in a low cost area is a defining feature of kings.

Not really. Imagine you are a remote worker earning average tech salary. Would you rather live in a San Francisco slum (all you can afford) or a nice beachfront house in (insert random low-cost country of your preference)?

Cheaper places are almost always cheaper due to lack of economic opportunities. If one needs to or desires to reduce income volatility (and have upward potential), the SF slum would be better.

On top of that, more expensive places might have access to better judicial systems, educational opportunities, and networking opportunities for kids.

The literal examples show that their concept is or was a fantasy (within a short timeframe of one person's lifetime).

I don't know why one would have expected "AI" to be capable of stamping out machines that have fine motor skills, but to me, it seems perfectly in line that they can re-arrange pixels on a screen to mimic something humans previously made.

The parameters for folding laundry in each individual's home or doing the dishes are so much greater than deconstructing and re-arranging digital information based on prior probabilities.

All the "smart" people I know were not expecting to replace their HVAC/plumbing/electrical/house cleaners/etc work with automation.

I always believe technological advance eventually bring us to the point that 1) the elites have total control of all resources, and 2) impossible for ordinary people to rise up and clean the slate.

We are very close to it.

> impossible for ordinary people to rise up and clean the slate

Already is. Look at Russia, China and other authoritarian states. Hell, even most democratic ones.

What? I don’t think ordinary people are rising up in China at least.

Would they be able to if they wanted?

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