this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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I dont think AI is equivalent. It can create content without you being involved and in massive quantities. It is very much capable of decimating the workforce.
You have to remember that you exist in a capitalist system that would love very much to replace you with cheaper labor if it could and there is no human that can possibly work for cheaper than an appropriately trained AI.
The only way that an artist would have a chance to survive is either through maintaining the craft via the novelty of it. I.e hand drawn/painted etc. (Which would be progresssively easier to fake) Or to become one of the people that make prompts and dont actually generate the content themselves. And the latter group of people is going to shrink over time as AI gets better at making content with little input. So any precedent set now is going to cause issues down the line when the tide shifts in AI's favor.
I agree that AI can decimate workforce. My point is, other tools did that already and this is not unique to AI. Imagine electronic chip design. Transistor was invented in 40s and it was a giant tube. Today we have chips with billions of transistors. Initially people were designing circuits on transistor level, then register transfer level languages got invented and added a layer of abstraction. Today we even have high level synthesis languages which converts C to a gatelist. And consider the backend, this gate list is routed into physical transistors in a way that timing is met, clocks are distributed in balance, signal and power integrity are preserved, heat is removed etc. Considering there are billions of transistors and no single unique way of connecting them, tool gets creative and comes with a solution among virtually infinite possibilities which satisfy your specification. You have to tell the tool what you need, and give some guidance occasionally, but what it does is incredible, creative, and wouldn't be possible if you gathered all engineers in the world and make them focus on a single complex chip without tools' help. So they have been taking engineers' jobs for decades, but what happened so far is that industry grew together with automation. If we reach the limits of demand, or physical limitations of technology, or people cannot adapt to the development of the tools fast enough by updating their job description and skillset, then decimation of the workforce happens. But this isn't unique to AI.
I am not against regulating AI, I am just saying what I think will happen. Offloading all work to AI and getting UBI would be nice, but I don't see that happening in near future.
I don't see the problem with getting replaced by AI or computers.
The goal should be that nobody has to work anymore. And we are free to follow our passions, instead of grinding our way through life in order to survive.
I know the idea doesn't go hand in hand with Capitalism, but most things don't so that isn't unusual.
Thing is... if you are an artist that creates art because creating new things is the fun part to you, what do you do when AI can do everything you can but better and faster with no real input from you? This isnt even about making a living at that point but that the thing you chose to put all that work into, is now effectively something you dont meaningfully contribute to.
And lets be honest, this is capitalism were talking about. Do you really think the rich fucks that benefit from this are going to willingly share that extra productivity with the workers they displace? Or that the government is going to effectively handle the economic transition? Because productivity has been skyrocketing for years but wages havent.
People have this idea that AI could free us from needing to work but forget all the advances that increased productivity over and over that never lifted the burden. Back decades ago if you told someone that we were as productive as we are today, theyd expect that we worked 20 hours a week and lived luxuriously but in reality most people work at least 40 and barely scrape by. The situation is worse for anyone whose craft was made irrelevant by new technology. Good news! Your job isnt necessary. Bad news! Capitalism still expects you to "pull your weight" like it always has.
Every time something disruptive like this came about it effectively relegated whatever that was replaced to a small niche but in the case of AI, there is really nothing that you can do that it in principle cant. There isnt really a niche you will fit into at some point whether its your job or a hobby. If you are like me and enjoy creating things that have never been created before, youre done. AI can eventually create a million new things by the time you create one... that it already effectively made hundreds of thousands of iterations ago.
For AI to do what people are hoping it does, things have to play out differently this time than they have ever played out in history. The productivity gains have to match income. Inflation has to either be at or below the rate that income increases. And you have to find out how to tackle the fact that AI wont replace everyone all at once, it'll do so sequentially. So the guy that used to be able to make a living drawing stuff, whose hobby and job overlapped, is now going to have to take out garbage instead because AI hasnt made robots cheap enough to replace them yet. Yet being the key word, eventually the only people that would have work are people that either manipulate or maintain the AI doing all of the work that remains and even that gets replaced at some point. All the while the value of peoples' labor drops like a stone because AI can do whatever you can do with nothing more than electricity and occasional maintanence. No need for sleep, no need to eat or medical care, no family to support, no desire to travel or have recreation, the perfect worker.
The issue ultimately is that AI requires that we smoothly transition from a mostly capitalist system to a mostly socialist system without the zone of pain between them. And thats just the economic side of it.