AI needs to augment rather than replace humans or the workplace is doomed
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Speak for yourself! For me, and in my experience many others, work is a necessary evil. I’ve experienced more indignities in the workplace than anywhere else (though fortunately not as consistently as some people), and the thought of work being my life’s purpose is too bleak to entertain. I’m very happy for those who have a more positive experience, but some of us don’t fit so well.
But "work", in the sense that AI can, in theory, replace humans in, is about more than just jobs. It's about many of the things that humans do—including many that we do for pleasure as well as for money, like painting, writing, and other forms of art.
In that sense, it absolutely does bring dignity and purpose to people's lives. Very few people can feel fulfilled without some form of work in their lives, whatever that looks like for them.
If I won the lottery, I'd never work again and I'd work every day until I died.
Humans were never meant to work to line the pockets of billionaires who see us as mere speed bumps on the path to their personal success.
Work is an obscene use of intellect.
"If AI replaces all jobs, none of us will have to work!" Alright, let's extrapolate a bit.
Society is currently organized around working to survive. AI suddenly replaces all work. How do people survive?
"Well everything will just be free now" Will it? Will the Capitalists who built these systems and replaced that labor now suddenly just give away product? Housing? Food? Care?
"Well, we'll just have to reconfigure society!" I mean, yeah, sure, obviously that'll have to happen. Will the Capitalists who empower the current systems of governance now cede said power when work is no longer available but still necessary to survive?
"Oh, well, people need to cooperate then, speak up for themselves, take action now." I don't disagree, and I think these sorts of Op-Eds, the "AI Doomers" making pleas for decency and civility in comments sections, the artisans demanding compensation for the theft of their work, and the myriad of folks who recognize the pace we're on will get people killed - nevermind the folks highlighting AI's disproportionate use in mass surveillance, genocide, and inflicting harm on "undesirables - are doing exactly that: speaking up, taking action, and attempting proactive reform.
"But they're hindering AI!" That's the fucking point you colossal numpty. The point is to slow it down so we have time to adapt.
Like...jesus, I expected more/better from folks who digest mathematical proofs and Arxiv papers for funsies, yet so many people here just cannot think critically about complex issues that involve people other than themselves.
Hate to break it to you, but the real hard problems are in the humanities.
I've come a long way since, but yeah, more of the humanities are sorely needed in tech.
The Guardian opinion piece is sad to me, in that the view of humanity freed from work is seen as a problem. I prefer to think that we could adjust our economic goals from 'high employment' to more wholesome metrics about mental health and happiness.
Moreover it's possible to use military power to lock things down so hard that the people don't even have a chance to revolt. For example North Korea, or any other despotic regime in the world.
If you think the musks and zuckerbergs are going to ever give anyone anything think again!
The post scarcity post work future means complete poverty for the majority of the worlds people. (So in fact the complete opposite, lots of work and lots of scarcity)
...and also to try to pry it loose from the fingers of the capitalists, so we have a hope of being able to share in the prosperity it brings.
People who LARP about digesting mathematical proofs and Arxiv papers for funsies.
Damn, call the burn ward.
Construction used to involve shoveling shit and dirt. But thanks to technology road workers sit in air conditioned cubicles manipulating hydraulic levers, gaining tremendous leverage.
Yes, sometimes they go outside to dig around fragile stuff with a shovel - old pipes, the odd archaeological find..
With AI, we gained “hydraulic levers for knowledge work”.
What will your “comfy air conditioned cabin” look like in that analogy?
I love programming without having to also type. My days involve watching the computer type code, making zero typos and zero mismatched variable names. When it refactors it keeps the comments updated, making that industry truism that “comments lie” obsolete. In my codebase 100% of the comments are true and up to date.
For $100/mo (Anthropic) I don’t have to code by hand and can focus on whether I’m building what customers want and need.
The only thing that makes me happy about that is the fact that our entire economy just might not implode. But I think we'd be better off without LLMs at all. Oh well. Pandora Box is open and here we are.
How do you think, despite centuries of jobs being automated, that more people work than ever before, and have quality of life few if any could dream of when large parts of the workforce was employed in backbreaking labor?
When you replace 7 jobs with 1 job, 6 jobs don't magically appear, much less ones which match the qualifications of those 6 people.
How many non-AI companies using AI are increasing headcount as a result, compared to those which don't use AI? Did the Washington Post just hire 33% more people, or did they eliminate 33% of their positions?
What a low bar for quality
'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
The article does not mention the workplace as the editorialized title would imply. It's primarily about trade unions.
Automation being the end of work would be an unambiguously good thing. Machines can be far more productive than humans ever can, and it would free us up to do whatever we want. We might have to rework the social and economic order a little bit, but we probably needed to do that anyway.
Nobody's disagreeing with your latter line, just vehemently screaming that there's no need for willful harm.
1. Economic change drives social change. The political will to create something like UBI will not exist unless there is mass unemployment.
2. Right now we need people to work, in order to create the things they need to live. It will not be possible to allow willful unemployment until machines can actually do most jobs.
3. We don't actually know if 100% automation will happen. Past automation has tended to create new jobs, and we've maintained full employment at higher wages. We should see if this happens again before we start panicking.
We just have to jump ahead with automation and figure out the rest as we go.
Get that accelerationist fatalism outta my face. Just because you personally have no qualms with harming others in the name of some facsimile of progress, doesn't mean it's the only option available to us. Slowing things down through regulations, through employment mandates, through pleas for cooperation instead of immediate replacement, all of those and more are ways of gradual reform and adaptation.
We're proposing letting the organism (humanity) adapt to traditional work and employment being wholesale eliminated in a society that demands work for basic survival through gradual and continuous reforms as circumstances change. Your proposal is the functional equivalent of telling an endangered species, "lol get gud bruv".
We are not the same.
Be careful not to create a permanent future of mandatory makework.
Simple.
Nobody "mandates" work to survive right now. But we do have a system where everything is owned by somebody, and ownership tends to concentrate. You can convince people to give you stuff they own (or money, which stands in for stuff) by doing work. The risk is that nobody will need your work, so you won't be able to convince them to give you any stuff, ownership will concentrate even more, and you will end up with nothing.
If Those In Charge require that "owners" continue to give you stuff for work that they don't need, that crude patch still doesn't provide you with any other way to get stuff. Which means you have to keep doing this useless work forever.
It's not about "don't mandate work". It's about fundamental change to the entire system.
We've done lots of automation before, and we all benefited immensely. Just chill and deal with problems as they come up.
We’ve never seen anything remotely close to this kind of upheaval. This kind of techno-optimism makes sense in the very young, but seems painfully naive once you’ve been around the block a bunch of times.
There are no adults in the room driving this. There’s weird ultra elite people driving this forward with their competitive megalomaniacal egos. And we’re stuck in a game theoretic landscape where it’s effectively an inevitable race to a max AI future. None of this is a recipe for a stable or prosperous future.
If this wild accelerated future ends up being a utopia, I’ll be jazzed to eat my words. I just haven’t seen any utopias unfold in my life, and I’m skeptical of those who tell me to chill and embrace the chaos.
Look, I've got enough things challenging my actual faith that I just cannot deal with piling on more so that the pro-AI camps don't have to do some critical thinking or basic empathy.
Those with the means have an obligation to help those without. It's basic cooperation. It's how humanity made it this far.
I bet that has been said hundreds of times already through history.
I agree with the other poster, this will most likely be a good thing for mankind overall. I'm excited for the future.
I'm 100% with stego-tech that I think we should address the major, glaring concerns that come with greater automation before that happens.
Because I care about my fellow human beings, and do not want them to suffer.
In Victorian England for example, it would have been easy to grow way more food and build way more housing, the government used violence to prevent it to enforce property rights of huge landowners (that then lost anyway, well, except the royal family of course)
>People starving en masse [...] despite there being plentiful food
Not "despite there being plentiful food production capacity". No, it has never happened that people starved in great numbers while the food stores were replete. That's a fantastical scenario. Famines only happen when there is no food, or no food nearby. Nature abhors a vacuum, so if you have hungry people on one side of a wall and food on the other, the wall will tend to become permeable until equilibrium is achieved. Money and violence (or aversion to it) are not factors in that equation.
There is a price below which no farmer is going to sell, regardless of whether they have another buyer.
What you're saying effectively amounts to "come on, there's no way they'd actually let people starve in the streets! That's something that could never happen these days."
Think about whether there might be other things that "could never happen these days" that are happening right now, in various places in America.
How depressing. If we're distressed at the thought of liberation then the bars of containment exist within our own minds. The door is open, we just have to step out.
JFC, if AI replaces work wholesale right now billions of people will die before society is reshaped accordingly. More people need to think of immediate systemic impacts instead of the high-fantasy post-work future the AI folk are selling.
Don't worry, the economists will slap the label "natural readjustment of labour supply levels" on this phenomenon, and it will make everything morally better.
Edit: in fact, we have historic precedents in e.g. Indian famines and how the British administrations talked about them and handled them [0][1]. Ah, malthusianism and undisguised racism, what a mixture. Of course, nobody counts those as part of "the millions of victims of Capitalism".
[0] Rune Møller Stahl, "The Economics of Starvation: Laissez-Faire Ideology and Famine in Colonial India": https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304189843_The_Econo...
[1] Jayant Chandel, "Political Economy of Famines in the British Empire: An Analysis of the Great Famines in India from 1876–1879" (PDF): https://www.journalofpoliticalscience.com/uploads/archives/8...
See: the rapid drop in cost of food, manufactured goods, etc as automation took over those sectors. No one starved when we automated farming; they got fat.
If you take a look how much energy is put into producing 1kcal of food, you will see that its negative. We put around x6 more that we get (diesel, syntetic fertlizers, water pumping, etc). This is because we have cheap energy, like fossil fuels.. Unfortunatelly, it have hidden costs smartasses didnt anticipate.
Let owners/exploiters suppress the wages they pay workers in the name of efficiency.
Encourage owners/exploiters to relentlessly raise the prices workers pay owners/exploiters in the name of shareholder value.
Then say "there is no alternative", our civilization is predicated on systematic exploitation to survive, and if you try to change it now "everyone will die".
The owner/exploiter class is going to replace labor with capital like they always have.
The worker's enemy isn't the automation that eliminates work, the worker's enemy is is the owner/exploiter who weaponizes automation in their class war.
This lacks imagination. If AI ever does get good enough to replace that much human work, we'll just have to drastically change, and we will. We're much better off than humans were even 100 years ago, never mind before that. Why are people so utterly pessimistic?
If it can be automated, it will be, and there is no avoiding it, since the people with the robots and the automation care only about profit, nothing more.
We, little people, are merely annoyances, and the sooner they can be done with us, the better.
The reality is that it'll probably turn into Idiocracy.