People Do Not Yearn for Automation
theverge.com
theverge.com
Well, so far we have been automating many things, and we are still busy working and living as always. It's of course impossible to automate everything - we always have things to do, by necessity by also by choice ; do we really want to be idle and contribute nothing to society ? I don't, and I am sure nobody does. Being useful is an essential need.
Is it pointless then, to automate more and more ? No. It's a way to move forward, and not necessarily a "bad" way. Just not the only way.
The answer has been perfectly captured in this czechoslovakian cartoon made in 1984. https://youtu.be/6Mo8gQ89aEA?feature=shared
Nonsense. To take first two examples:
Power plants may run mostly automatically, but humans decide how/where/when to build new plants, and humans build them. I'll be satisfied when we see 100% automated manufacture, transport, erection, and maintenance of solar farms (or similar) and all associated power storage and transmission.
Humans are still hugely in the loop on food production despite machine assistance, and the current world's systems are hugely wasteful in sharing out food production. I'll be satisfied when we have 100% automated farms, and automated transport and distribution of food such that we use what we've grown efficiently, and no-one can even imagine food shortage ever again.
> they're angry they're forced to forego anything you can't put in a DB, like their jobs or the texture of their lives. Ironically, you have a huge case of software brain.
Maybe you're missing the point.
I'm strongly aligned with this famous-ish tweet: "You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."
I just have a vision far beyond laundry and dishes. Automation (with or without AI) offers us a chance of a future utopia. Unfortunately, the current direction seems to be a corporate-owned AI-driven dystopia. I want the Culture, not Robocop.
But that ain't happening anytime soon.
The problem is the 5% of us are sociopaths. We let them have all the money and power because they're the only ones that want it. Then we let them use that money and power to convince us that the "REAL" problem is the people with no money or power in the neighboring political region (the border having been drawn by a sociopath).
Regular people, not sociopaths, are responsible for most of the evil in the world. There is no tiny minority of 'evildoers' that we could root out and be pure from.
Other bad things happen because of unintended consequences or the collective behavior of many people. Climate change or deforestation are not caused by greed or scheming CEOs; it's a side effect from the actions of billions of people individually trying to better their lives.
Regular people don't all independently decide to "do evil". There is banality in the ones that agree to go along with it, to save themselves from being ostracized or mildly inconvenienced. Do they perpetuate evil? For sure. But are they the villains responsible for it?
The "evildoers" are the tiny minority of sociopaths doing the convincing, because it nets them more personal power, and they don't care who they hurt along the way.
There is a huge amount of injustice in the world, morally speaking I should be out there fighting against it with everything I have. But I'm also the sole breadwinner for my family and I have a mortgage, so I mostly keep my head down and try to survive. Does that make me an evildoer? I sure hope not.
People don't care about the tech, they care about the second-order effects like cheaper prices, and more flexibility.
Also, the article is way too broad, you can't treat automation and it's applications in law along with just "vibes" about how people feel about AI.
Was there an improvement in things ? Obviously, computers are more powerful for example. But with less powerful computers, people could also be happy I believe.
I remember 15 years ago, tech has obviously evolved a lot since then, and I have learned to use more and more tech tools. But am I more efficient than then ? Happier than back then ? More skilled than back then ?
- More efficient for some things, less efficient for others. - Happier ? no. Not sadder either, similar. If anything, it's not related. - More Skilled ? No. Skilled at other things. For example my handwriting is still ok but I believe I won't be able to write so much or so quickly or so well as I used to (I should try though).
Am I saying that progress is not real ? No, of course not. Progress happens. But is it what "people" want or need ? Taking my own perspective : if it happens (and it does), I adapt - no problem. If it does not happen somehow - then I would adapt too. That's what we do.
Take finding cures for cancer. You could automate finding the drug candidates, automate the manufacture of the experiment and preparing the drug candidates, automate the testing and automate the analysis on a massive scale. The limit won't be the number of scientists but physical barriers like energy and materials.
Automation has the potential to make us lead wonderful lives and we should not deny that from happening. The implementation matters though. There is going to be massive disruption to society and that needs to be handled carefully.
True automation of scientific research requires true AI.
I'm not really sure why tech people keep suggesting scientists aren't incorporating the latest tech.
We are all about automation. The issue is funding.
" Software brain is powerful stuff. It’s a way of thinking that basically created our modern world. Marc Andreessen, the literal embodiment of software brain, called it in 2011 when he wrote the piece “Why software is eating the world” as an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. But software thinking has been turbocharged by AI in a way that I think helps explain the enormous gap between how excited the tech industry is about the technology and how regular people are growing to dislike it more and more over time. "
I mean, I would think the opposite it the truth.
Other than a few masochist CEOs, most people don't like having to work for a living to ensure they don't starve and are homeless. It's just in the current paradigm it's what we have do to. And because we have to do it, people get really nervous when rich people attempt to replace human work with automation. Not because we won't have to work, but because we will have to starve.
They wouldn't mind their jobs being eliminated, except for that whole bills thing. Eliminate their jobs without eliminating their bills and they'll hate you.
Contrast this to when I am tasked with creating a report that they need. They're amazed. Absolutely amazed that I can write something coherent. I can only assume that with the Peter Principle, they're all surrounded by idiots who write emails and reports like Epstein.
mm, the fact that you disagree with the article doesn't make it poorly written.
In my experience no, there are significant limits to how much automation the average person wants in their life. Even if automating something would save time, doing so could be undesirable due to other metrics such as correctness, cost, latency, flexibility, or cognitive load.
> The author created a strawman, but that is not what AI is ("Not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized, and it shouldn’t be.")
In context, what you've quoted there is not the creation of a strawman. In fact you yourself seem to have constructed a strawman out of the article.
It's definitely not poorly thought out article. People want to automate away the boring parts of their work and life but, as the meme says, people want AI to do their dishes and laundry so they can do writing and art but instead AI does their writing and art so they can do the laundry.
I'm not sure what you think the straw man is here. I think he already addresses this in the article: "I’m not saying regular people don’t use Excel or Airtable to plan their weddings or have fun throwing PowerPoint parties, or even that AI won’t be useful to regular people over time [...] Not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized, and shouldn’t be."
What do you mean?
(I have a strong case of software brain as he describes it myself.)
I think there's a more general negative sentiment against AI (a specific type of automation) in recent months. I mean, people are trying to burn down Altman's house. The average person who follows tech news might be more reluctant about automation than before. But there'll always be technologists who push for automation at any cost.
We’ve had the ability to automate work between systems with bots and even regular jobs that automate certain repetitive tasks with APIs for years. Yet there’s been a relatively small uptake of bots and there is still a very large market for vendors an SIs who can improve existing processes.
I think it’s pretty clear why this disconnect exists between “regular people” and the people Patel describes as having software brain. And that is that the nature of LLMs is that they are limited to the digital world. At the core they really only do one thing and that is take some text, overlay it with digital representations of the world and try and find the one that most closely matches.
The inborn assumption is that they will get better and better and climb the corporate ladder, starting in the call center but climbing the corporate ladder to replace everyone’s jobs like Michael J Fox in the Secret of my Succcess. But I’m skeptical. Automation always starts in call central customer service use cases because that is one of the few use cases where humans are involved, they are supposed to follow a script, and take actions entirely inside software applications. But it always seems to stall out. Because once you move from jobs where a script can be provided to ones where ambiguity is a constant factor and judgments and decisions have to made that don’t have exact precedents you need humans. LLMs are backwards looking. Humans can consider things that have happened previously as guidance but critically, can also imagine a future state where things operate differently all why considering multiple competing factors, all of which are unique to that situation. They don’t always do it well but LLMs are incapable of doing it in any case.
People hate AI because it doesn’t really do that much for a regular person, is massively hyped by people who look shadier and less credible by the day and has some vague threat of destroying civilization or at least making you homeless.
But- I have zero doubt that if these same companies did actually excel at providing real world value, nobody would care about the negative implications. For example if they produced robots that could automate aspects of your life like cleaning your house, getting your groceries and doing it very inexpensively, I have no doubt the popularity would be off the charts and a bona fide bubble would ensue.
This is plainly true. First off, Waymo is one of the few companies successfully using AI to operate real world objects at enormous complexity and risk. Talk to anyone who just used Waymo for the first time and they will be almost euphoric. It’s amazing technology with overwhelming utility. There are also several examples of companies with less than stellar images who consumers were told they should boycott but most users couldn’t have cared less. Uber in its earlier days and Facebook coming out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal come to mind.
Take making software I felt was making the world better versus software that was not. When I knew my work dramatically improved the lives of tens/hundreds of thousands of people and by extensions their families touched hundreds of thousands more versus just a software job in a kind of bad industry. The positive job it was easy to put in ridiculous hours. For the other straight 9-5 felt like too long.
So much of advancement has gotten rid of jobs you can sort of half-ass, while you put most of your energy into something that advances culture in the off hours. Think of like, photographers and school photos or weddings, poets and copy editing, etc.
This is what happens when one thinks "tech=good" no matter what. I'm not saying we need something like a huge investigation to see if something will disrupt the fragile ecosystem of artists, but I'm not not saying it.
Casual Shirt Manifesto.
Before the Mayflower Compact and the Magna Carta, there was the Casual Shirt Manifesto.
Irish monks kept it safe during the dark ages, along with the rest of written histories deemed critical to continued evolution of mankind.
It was there, in Dublin, in The Stag’s Head at 3 a.m. that I traded my treasured duster for the only remaining copy (still in Latin so please allow me some paraphrasing)…
“Find Henley and wear it. It won’t make you look crisp. Nobody looks crisp in Temple of Dendur. So, look good. When you wear something unstructured, relaxed, something that makes you feel good – you look good.”
Vintage Henley (No. 7129). Classic European military henley style in heavyweight rugby slub jersey. Created with siro yarns for high character and texture. Unique woven bib facing with button closure behind placket (keeps the chill out, looks more interesting than the neckline of your other henleys). Woven cotton twill bib facing and placket. Shell buttons. Flatlock stitching. Reinforced box stitch at placket end. Imported.
It's easy to get users. Speaking of accounting we should probably just measure profits.
That's the difference between your home dishwasher and the means of production.
It's also probably a big part of what worries Gen Z about when it comes to AI. They're thinking about their own employment and employment prospects, where most people probably understand they have little to gain from it long-term.
I do use my dishwasher at home, and I love that dishwasher. However, I also cook and I want to get to bed at a reasonable hour.
Funny enough, I have come across many people in my life who usually only use their dishwashers as drying racks. It's a bit odd whenever I see it, but I get it.
So, people DO like drudgery. People even seek out drudgery. There is no one-size-fits-all of what it means to live a life, and as the article states, the biggest problem for adoption is that AI is so flattening as product.
My job is to improve workflows with automation and analysis, I preach progress, but in my daily life I enjoy shifting gears in my ice car, taking time to make a coffee, developing photos from an analogue camera, listening to music on physical media, all things that could be automated away...if we read stories for the ending we could flip to the last page and get it.
There are a lot of managers out there (my own included) that would automate every aspect of their own life just so they can sit around and wait for death, and assume that is what everyone else wants.
This is sophomoric. This person is the "editor in chief" and I'm guessing that no one had the job security to tell them that this article was silly on the face of it.
The title is good rage bait: "People Do Not Yearn for Automation". Obviously false, and it draws in the readers that want to say "Nuh uh!".
But the meat of the article is on how the seeming disconnect between technological elites and other people has lead to them touting AI when they should consider other alternatives.
This premise is shown to be dubious by a statistics in the article:
> In fact, the polling on this is so strong, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people hate AI ...
> That’s with nearly two thirds of respondents saying they used ChatGPT or Copilot in the last month.
So, a simple question, why are so many people using something they claim to hate? Doesn't that spark a bit of interest in the author? No? They would very much like to blame industry leaders, rather than take a more nuanced view.
That said industry leaders suck. They seem to entertain magical thinking that AI will somehow replace labour. And they seem to deploy it with that end in mind. That's a stupid thing to do, but they have the money so they make the rules.
But this idea that they have "software brain" is just laughable.
> You can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences.
I beg to differ.
"Stelter: Trump encourages people not to believe their eyes, ears or lungs." https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/04/media/donald-trump-disbelief-...