One could probably think of dozens of reasonable arguments for avoiding LLM use, but this one is awful. If LLMs actually are able to get more work done with fewer people aka "firing people" that would be wonderful for humankind. If you disagree and like getting less work done with more people, you are welcome to forego tractors, dishwashers, the steam engine, and all the rest.
Yeah. This has been an interesting cultural shift, especially with “the kids”.
I’ve had at least a few people passionately tell me that using (non-generative, non-LLM) AI to assist with social network content moderation, is unethical, because it takes away jobs from people. Mind you, these are jobs in which people are exposed to CSAM, gore, etc. A fact that does not dissuade people of this view.
There are certainly some sensible arguments against using “AI” for content moderation. This is not one of them.
It’s really intriguing how an increasingly popular view of what’s “ethical” is anything that doesn’t stand in the way of the ‘proletariat’ getting their bag, and anything that protects content creators’ intellectual property rights, with no real interest in the greater good.
Such a dramatic shift from the music piracy generation a mere decade or two ago.
It’s especially intriguing as a non-American.
Again, as you say, many sensible arguments against AI, but for some people it really takes a backseat to “they took our jerbs!”
I can't speak to outside the US, but here companies have gotten much more worker-hostile in the last 30 years and generally the economy has not delivered a bunch of wonderful new jobs to replace the ones that the information age already eliminated (let alone the ones that people are trying to eliminate now). A lot of new job growth is in relatively lower-paying and lower-stability roles.
Forty years ago I would've had a personal secretary for my engineering job, and most likely a private office. Now I get to manage more things myself in addition to being expected to be online 24x7 - so I'm not even convinced that eliminating those jobs improve things for the people who now get to self-serve instead of being more directly assisted.
I can talk as a non American: it's the same everywhere in the countries where no new jobs are created. It's maybe less visible when the law is more protective, but at the end a social security net is still a net and works only as long as the rest is sturdy
Last time I checked, most people needed a "jerb" to buy food, have a shelter or provide their children. So when the promise is to lose this "jerb" they are fully in the right to be scared.
They took our jerbs is a perfectly valid argument for people which face ruin without a jerb.
Capitalism is not prepared nor willing to retrain people, drastically lower the workweek, or bring about a UBI sourced from the value of the commons. So indeed, if the promises of AI hold true, a catastrophe is incoming. Fortunately for us, the promises of AI CEOs are unlikely to be true.
This is the bit I get frustrated by - the need for jerbs at all.
If we manage to replace all the workers with AI - that's awesome! We will obviously have to work out a system for everyone to get shelter, and food, and so on. But that post-scarcity utopia of everyone being able to do whatever they want with their time and not have to work, that's the goal, right? That's where we want to be.
Jerbs are an interim nightmare that we have had to do to get from subsistence agriculture to post-scarcity abundance, they're not some intrinsic part of human existence.
That's the optimistic take. The pessimistic one is that we, people who need to work jobs to survive, are not an intrinsic part of human existence and will be obsolete and/or left to die once we no longer have an economic purpose.
I can't see that being a realistic outcome. We're a long, long way from that, if it is possible. Billionaires are only billionaires because people buy their company shares. If no-one has any money and we're consigned to scrape in the dust for food, what will billionaires do? Who will buy their products, their shares?
Somehow there is always this huge leap between "Strong AI" -> stuff happens -> "about 10k people live in cloud cities and everyone else lives in the dirt".
Money is a tool that has no value by itself. Billionaires are billionaires because they get a much bigger part of the work their group is producing (the group can be one company, a region, a country or the whole world depending on how you see things). If AI does the work instead of people, it will change nothing for them.
You can be optimistic (it will self regulate and everyone will benefit from AI) or pessimistic (only the billionaire class will benefit from AI). But in any case, there will be no need to sell products or share if there is a class of artificial slaves that can replace workers
But right now, there is no way in hell we're going to get any kind of support for people who lost their jobs to AI. Not in the US, at least.
Look at the current administration. Do you think they would even consider providing anything like UBI?
They actively want to take us down the cyberpunk dystopia route (or even the Christofascist regressive dystopia route...). They want us to become serfs to technofeudal overlords. Or just die, and decrease the surplus population.
I would like for an AI to do my work, unfortunately I have to buy food and pay my rent.
The Industrial Revolution caused a great deal of damage. It was a net positive in the long term because new jobs were created to replace those that were lost, but it took decades and enormous violence. Now, the promise of AI is that it will be more efficient than any human being. If this becomes a reality, there will be, by definition, no new jobs created for the people replaced by AI.
I personally wish for the time when AI can replace everything I can do (at least in my current field). I'm not sure how exactly I'll feel about it then, but it'd be a technological advancement I'd enjoy seeing in my lifetime.
One question perhaps is, even if AI can do everything I can do (i.e., has the skills for it), will it do everything I do? I'm sure there are many people in the world with the superset of my skills, yet I bet there are some things only I'm doing, and I don't think a really smart AI will change that.
Yup. The problem was never with the technology replacing work, it was always with the social aspect of deploying it, that ends up pulling the rug under people whose livelihood depend on exchanging labor for money.
The luddites didn't destroy automatic looms because they hated technology; they did it because losing their jobs and seeing their whole occupation disappear ruined their lives and lives of their families.
The problem to fix isn't automation, but preventing it from destroying people's lives at scale.
Does this argument still work if LLMs end up increasing unemployment and making it a lot harder for graduates to find good jobs? Who is it good for in that case, the shareholders? It's nice if humans can always create more jobs, but that's not what the tech bros are promising investors. They're making claims about how AI is going to seriously reduce the need for human labor. Programming, writing and art are just the starting ground for what's coming, if their predictions are anywhere close to being correct.
Because consumer demand is infinite, the only way to majorly and permanently increase unemployment is to completely automate all labor or maybe almost all. We have been automating away jobs for hundreds of years and unemployment is still ~4%
unemployment figures are a joke. What matters is how much able bodied people that could work, actually do have a job. And this number tells a completely different history from the feel good libertarian narratives such as this one.
Have you ever taken a decent dose of an amphetamine? It isn't going to make you smarter but it will almost certainly boost your energy and ability to get stuff done.
The type of person who gets elected to Congress is likely to be far above average in charisma/intelligence/skill, and hence underpaid relative to what they could attain in the private sector
If a given person's labor is of poor enough quality such that its value is not enough to provide whatever is considered a reasonable quality of life in a given circumstance, adding a UBI or other welfare payment is not just subsidizing employers
It's definitely about money, but "inequality" makes it sound like the fact that other people out there are wealthy is the cause of antisocial people destroying property to pay for drugs
I would posit that a society of reasonably well-off people would be less likely to steal guardrails for drug money than a society with a lot of poverty.
I would guess certain voting patterns would be different too, for that matter.
Perhaps part of that is: what underlies the inequality? Are folks getting wealthy by good old-fashioned hard work? Or something else?
> The details will seem foreign to many in the West, where building home equity is baked into the system. But the central idea is simple: What if homeownership had no profit motive and no capital gains?
People are already taking to the streets there over immigration. I've thought about submitting that story but it's hard to find a source that I'd feel comfortable posting that also covers enough of what's going on to be worthwhile.
(The optics are incredible, though. The protesters are able to show footage of women being arrested ostensibly for putting up English and even UK flags, in the UK, and crowds being pushed around by police phalanxes in riot gear; meanwhile counter-protesters call them "fascists" and ramble about domestic violence charges.)
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