Yes, but during those transformations, the CEOs of the companies selling the products involved weren't actively and aggressively marketing them as being able to replace all the humans they employ.
You can't have it both ways: either LLMs are an amazing, revolutionary technology that can replace many human jobs in unprecedented ways, or it's going to be a mild transition that really only helps people.
> the CEOs of the companies selling the products involved weren't actively and aggressively marketing them as being able to replace all the humans they employ
The assembly line was explicitly about replacing skilled with relatively unskilled labor.
That was exactly what a great many things were marketed as, such as the jacquard loom and dynamite.
What actually happened in each case was that employment went up for a good long while, as the efficiency boost to the sectors touched made investment far more viable. Eventually successive rounds of automation did reduce employment in each of weaving and mining, but it wasn’t an overnight catastrophe as initially advertised or feared.
It isn't the first time a new technology has been pitched to replace many worker's jobs, both successful and unsuccessful versions of the promise have come to pass several times.
I think what they are saying is "that something can replace a job does not inherently imply the next step is poverty". From that perspective, you can absolutely have it both (and many other combinations of) ways.
At this point money is essentially a social construct. None of the billionaires have a Scrooge McDuck vault full of gold coins.
Think ST:TNG; automation makes enough stuff. Why worry about money?
So focus on political action then; log off this VC funded freebie intended to ameliorate your feelings about the rich owners and operators of this site, and do like they do; tell government to make things right by you or we replace government.
You think PG is sitting on the sidelines letting Congress figure out themselves? He's putting his thumb on the scale through his actions through social networking with politicians.
Gotta leave the basement and do the work
Americans are heavily propagandized and naive af. So exhausted by educated morons.
Quality standards benefit the buyers, who on the face of it are corporations replacing representative's constituents with capital investments not made in their districts, not the constituents themselves. I would expect there to be support for limiting quality somehow, maybe by enforcing copyright law (actually legal training datasets are a lot harder to obtain). Regulatory burdens do obstruct commercial investment, but the burden primarily falls on small participants who in the AI market are far from posing a threat to employment. Only the largest firms can threaten the wage and salary model of organization.
> You want people to stick to social norms, call it both ways
Oh, I downvoted both of you. But I only flagged you because of the name calling, which is against the guidelines [1]. When I flag I like to give the person on the other side a note, in case they genuinely didn’t know.
But go ahead and commit to the dogma money must continue to exist even though the financial system is merely a socialized ethno object not immutable physics.
I forget my lived experience is atypical among engineers. Before getting an EE degree (which I have not leveraged in over a decade tbf) I worked to live in ruralandia fixing old tractors electrical issues for poor farmers (which turned me on to EE), building barns, homes, rebuilding cars, growing crops, slaughtering livestock for food. I also play 3 musical instruments fluently.
I have a shit ton of experience and muscle memory for doing without money. Get good scrub?
Do not put all your eggs in a single skills basket.
End of day you aren't in a soup kitchen feeding the hungry and exploiting child labor to avoid sewing a shirt. I guess you get what you give, right?
:shrug:
Guess you all should not have ignored politics this entire time. Live and learn.
But that's the thing, and what's really different from how it's ever been before: there absolutely is enough for everyone.
It's being deliberately gatekept from us by the wealthy, and by those who believe that no one should be allowed to have anything they haven't "earned".
The tragic thing is, to the extent that you're right, people will probably mostly kill other people who have nothing, rather than turning their anger and violence where it truly deserves to go: the rich bastards who want to own everything and prevent the rest of us from having anything.
There isn't though. Our infrastructure cannot sustain the AI race. Food supplies are weakening. An ever increasing population is being encouraged by billionaires.
There could be! But there currently is not. Nor is there any plan for that to change.
Well, you're right that our infrastructure can't sustain the AI race, but (while it's true I didn't make that clear), that's not remotely what I was talking about.
Even with food supplies "weakening"—which is only happening due to the pointless Iran war, not due to any larger trends—we still have plenty of food to feed every human being on the planet.
And regardless of what billionaires might encourage, population growth is slowing. (To the extent that it might become a genuine economic problem in a few decades if we don't find a way to adjust our economic systems to stop depending on a constantly-increasing population.)
Tarrifs wiped out a lot of farmers. Fertilizer shortages absolutely are a result of the Iran war.
Population growth can occur if billionaires lobby Republicans and make birth control illegal. Which is happening right now. Last week we were seeing some scary news about that.
There is a big difference between what we could be doing and what is happening. It's more profitable for the ultra wealthy that we can barely survive. I know it sounds abrasive, but it's a fact and there is a lot of evidence pointing to this. Googling Elon musk wants people to have more children is scary how many hits there are from different conversations. Bezos as well.
"We have enough for everyone, and it is being deliberately gatekept by the wealthy" does not logically equate to "therefore if we removed that gatekeeping we'd have Stalinism" without a whole bunch of extra steps not currently in evidence.
For instance, there's no reason why we can't say "sell your food for lower prices than the maximum the market will bear; the government will pay you to make sure you're still solvent" (this is called subsidies, we do it all the time). We also have a lot of antitrust levers at our disposal that have been growing rusty from disuse since Reagan's administration decided that monopolies were Good For Us, Actually.
I'm not proposing any specific solutions to this problem; I'm merely stating that it is a problem. If anything's "fucking insane" here, it's responding to that with ad hominem attacks and some very thick sarcasm about communism.
Furthermore, "communism" as an economic philosophy does not inherently lead to the specific circumstances that we saw in the Soviet Union during the 20th century. I know people tend to start crying "uh-uh-uhh! No True Scotsman fallacy!" when one points out that the USSR was not, in fact, doing a great job at communism, but it really wasn't. At first they tried, but it very quickly descended into a fairly standard authoritarian regime where economic decisions were being made not based on what was best for the people, but on what was best for the dictators and their cronies. (And funny enough, those same people don't seem to have a problem with the idea that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is not, in fact, particularly democratic...)
I just don't buy that "now there's enough for everyone" as opposed to every other point in history where... contention for resources was pretty much the same. Go as far back as you want and you'll find records of war and strife, even though the planet's resources were limitless compared to the consumptive pressure they're under now.
People think that being the first soldier over the wall in a siege, veritably a death wish, was a punishment reserved for criminals or something, but actually it was a mechanism of social mobility in an ancient society. An individual who breached the enemy's defenses was honored and paid richly.
You can observe the dynamics just as readily in modern society, watching a show like Survivor which puts small-group social politics front and center. Often the players of the game wish that everyone would just go along with the plan. Sometimes it does happen, but just as often a few people see a better opportunity for themselves by breaking with the popular consensus. It doesn't even have to be the same people every time. It's just always better for some people to try going a different way: making their own alliance or their own city or country. Both the drive towards individuality and its results, strife and resilience, are necessarily eternal in the cycle of life.
If you want to be glib, there is a light and a dark side to the force.
Some of them are quite happy! Others are miserable; many are abused. It's a high-control group, that raises its children to believe the outside world as a terrible, scary place, and they are the only safe place to be.
Many people are happy in cults, or they couldn't function. But that doesn't mean that the cults are, overall, a positive thing.
But a high density of tech billionaires does prevent a regular family in Tennessee from putting food on their table, by increasing the poverty rates.
They do this by a number of mechanisms, including lobbying to reduce or end programs like SNAP, gutting labor protections, and various other political means; and more generally by making money in zero-sum ways (financialization of the economy means that people are getting rich by skimming off money from other people, rather than by creating value themselves).
I know it's (genuinely) hard to believe in this day and age, but pre-2000, and especially before the founding of Fox News in 1996, the news you got was much, much more likely to be genuine, with real investigative reporting that wasn't heavily interdicted by powerful and moneyed interests.
This is not to say there was no bias, nor that the powerful and moneyed interests had no influence—but it was much less than it is today. There was much more of a social norm of news being honest, factual, and relevant.
But in real life, any time you have "a free market", by the definition of "no or minimal regulations", you will inevitably end up with a very un-free market, by the definition of "lots of choice for the consumer, healthy competition".
And far, far too many self-proclaimed libertarians think that any regulations that "encumber" the market take it farther away from being "free", when in fact, there are regulations that help and regulations that harm, and you have to be able to actually understand them and use human judgement, rather than thinking One Simple Rule can be applied in every situation without fail to achieve perfection.
> "a free market", by the definition of "no or minimal regulations"
There is no such thing.
A free market is a market in which all transactions are voluntary. That means the market is regulated by the voluntary choices of all of its participants. And since people won't voluntarily choose to make a trade that doesn't benefit them, a free market will be dominated by win-win, positive sum trades. That's how wealth is created.
It's true that a market can also be regulated by a government. Any such regulation will either force people to make trades they wouldn't otherwise choose to make--which means they are worse off--or will prevent people from making trades they otherwise would choose to make--which means they are worse off.
> far too many self-proclaimed libertarians think that any regulations that "encumber" the market take it farther away from being "free"
No, libertarians think that regulations that come from anything other than the voluntary choices of market participants make us worse off. The logic is simple: I just gave it above.
> there are regulations that help and regulations that harm
Please give a specific example of a government regulation that has helped, as compared with a free market regulated by the voluntary choices of all of its participants.
Exactly. My point sort of the converse: that the upthread comment reflected a set of values that, while grounded in "cyberlibertarian" thought, do not reflect actual market value as measured by an actual market. The libertarians tend to think simultaneously that "The Right to Pursue my Niche Ideas" and "The Supremacy of the Market" are related concepts, and they emphatically aren't.
And in particular that the former tends to be the first thing stomped on by runaway market forces.
> do not reflect actual market value as measured by an actual market.
How does the fact that you can have your music in the cloud, and pay a fair price for that, and I can have my music locally on a USB stick, and pay a fair price for that, not reflect "actual market value as measured by an actual market"?
As for the rest of your post, I'm not sure which "libertarians" you're talking about.
You don't think banks should have to follow rules about how they safeguard their depositors' money? (PayPal)
You don't think hotels should have to follow rules about how they keep their properties, or require their tenants to follow local ordinances? (AirBnB)
You don't think it should be illegal to be someone's sole employer, have full and total control over their schedule and duties, and yet treat them for legal and tax purposes as if they're a contractor? (Uber, et al)
'Cause if you're the type of person who believes that laws and regulations like these shouldn't exist, you are 100% part of the problem, and you are (much like the rest of us) only able to live the kind of life you do because of the existence of such laws and regulations, so your desire to remove them is just a matter of pulling up the ladder behind yourself writ large.
yet PayPal was (is still?) notorious for freezing accounts for monts without any communication, and since they had no branch offices, all anyone could do was wait or sue them (which is a very expensive form of waiting).
Laws and regulations should exist to make efficient markets. But obviously there are serious problems today in housing and transportation (and banking too), and in large part due to very suboptimal laws and regulations.
PayPal is not a bank, AirBnb is not a hotel and plenty of drivers will freely serve rides from Uber, Lyft and a variety of other ride sharing services; they aren't "employees" of any single firm. (Of course they must serve a single ride at a time for sensible policy reasons, but aside from that they're quite free to pick their favorite ones.) These things actually make sense, even though they might not be what you're directly used to.
You can't have it both ways: either LLMs are an amazing, revolutionary technology that can replace many human jobs in unprecedented ways, or it's going to be a mild transition that really only helps people.
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