For thousands of years the ruling class has tolerated the rest of us because they needed us for labor and protection. We're approaching the first time in human history where this may no longer be the case. If any of us are invited to the AI utopia, I suspect it will only be to worship those who control it. I'm not sure what utility we'll have to offer beyond that. I doubt they'll keep us around just to collect UBI checks.
A lot of the "elites" (OpenAI board, Thiel, Andreessen, etc) are on the effective-accelerationism grift now. The idea is to disregard all negative effects of pursuing technological "progress," because techno-capitalism will solve all problems. They support burning fossil fuels as fast as possible because that will enable "progress," which will solve climate change (through geoengineering, presumably). I've seen some accelerationists write that it would be ok if AI destroys humanity, because it would be the next evolution of "intelligence." I dunno if they've fallen for their own grift or not, but it's obviously a very convenient belief for them.
Effective-accelerationism was first coined by Nick Land, who appears to be some kind of fascist.
The problem with this approach is that progress here is viewed like a brick wall you build.
You don't get progress from just burning a lot of wood in 1400s. You can get it if that wood is burnt with the goal of, I dunno, making better metal or bricks for some specific mechanism.
Same with our time, how can they expect solutions of problems to be found when they don't understand what they are trying to find?
It's like a cargo cult - "white people had this thing and it could fly and drop cargo, so we must reproduce its shape and we'll be rich", only in this case it's even dumber - nobody has seen the things they are trying to reach anywhere outside of space opera series.
What differentiates IT from most other engineering areas is that most of people doing it solve abstract tasks in abstract environments, defined by social and market demand. They are, sadly, simply a grade below real engineers and scientists for that reason alone.
Behind the wall, an army of robots, also powered by new Nvidia robotics processors, will assemble your food, no humans needed. We've already seen the introduction of these kinds of 'labor-saving' technologies in the form of self-checkout counters, food ordering kiosks, and other similar human-replacements in service industries, so there's no reason to think that this trend won't continue with AI.
not being seen as the paradise? It's like the enterprise crew is concerned about replicators because people will lose their jobs.
This is madness, to be honest, this is what humankind ultimately should evolve into. No stupid labour for anyone. But the truth is: capitalism will take care of that, it will make sure, that not everyone is free but that a small percentage is more free and the rest is fucked.There lies the problem not in being able to make human labour obsolete.
Yup. Realistic result of things becoming automated is that we have several decades of social strife grappling with the fact there's too many people for the amount of human labor actually needed, until there's enough possibly violent unrest for the powers that be to realize "oh, maybe we shouldn't require people to have jobs that don't exist "
Solid agree, but it's so hard to persuade the brainwashed (let alone their capitalist masters) that the purpose of economic growth should be to generate sufficient leisure time to permit self-actualising activities for those who seek them.
I've been watching people try to deliver the end-to-end Food Making conveyor belt for my entire life. What I've consistently seen delivered are novelties, more prone to creating a giant mess in your mechanical kitchen than producing anything both efficient and edible. The closest I've seen are those microwaved dinners, and they're hardly what I'd call an exciting meal.
But they are cheap to churn out. That's what is ultimately upsetting about this overall trend. Not that we'll be eliminating a chronic demand on human labor, but that we'll be excising any amount of artistry or quality from the menu in order to sell people assembly line TV dinners at 100x markups in pursuit of another percentage point of GDP growth.
As more and more of the agricultural sector falls under the domain of business interests fixated on profits ahead of product, we're going to see the volume and quality of food squeezed down into what a robot can shove through a tube.
The wealthy ruling class have siphoned off nearly all of the productivity gains since the 70s. AI won’t stop that machine. If half of us die of starvation and half the remaining half die from fighting each other for cake, they don’t care.
Innovation is a scam, it breeds endless bullshit we keep buying and talking about like 10 year olds with their latest gimmick. Look, they replaced this button with A TOUCHSCREEN! Look! This artficial face has PORES NOW! LOOK! This coffee machine costs 2000$ now and uses PROPRIATARY SUPEREXPENSIVE CAPSULES!!
We need progress, which is harder to do because it takes a paradigm shift on an Individual and social level. It's much less gadgety.
You're not wrong. We've reached a point, technologically, where there is little-to-no true innovation left... and what I mean by that is that everything is now built on incredible amounts of work by others who came before. "Standing on the shoulders of giants", as it were. And yet we have a corrupt "patent" system that is exclusively used to steal the work of those giants while at the same time depriving all of humanity of true progress. And why? So that a handful of very rich people can get even more rich.
Exactly, innovations no longer help to satisfy real basic needs, they are used to create new, artificial needs. Always new toys that make us feel like we're making progress.
I remember hearing this argument before...about the Internet. Glad that fad went away.
As it has always been, these technologies are being used to push us forward by teams of underpaid unnamed researchers with no interest in profit. Meanwhile you focus on the scammers and capitalists and unload your wallets to them, all while complaining about the lack of progress as measured by the products you see in advertisements.
Luckily, when you get that cancer diagnosis or your child is born with some rare disease, that progress will attend to your needs despite your ignorance if it.
Exactly. OP is mad at alienation, not at progress. In a different, less stupid world these labor saving devices would actually be great, leading to a better quality of life for everyone, and getting a really awesome coffee maker. But the people making the decisions aren't the consumers or the researchers.
You misunderstood me. I have nothing against progress. Medical progress is great! But what is often sold to us as innovation is not progress but just more nonsense that only pretends to get us further.
Innovatin is good if it results in clean water, meds, housing, safe food and goods and services.
It's bad if it means: the most profit for useless shit that people only buy because advertisment made them believe they need it.
Capitalism is a tool. Please let's grow a pair and stop letting it decide how it will be used. It's like pulling the trigger on an ak47 without holding it tight. Do we expect the weapon to know where to shot?
Capitalism is a tool that wants to maximize its profits. Unfortunately it discovered that changing the politics and laws is an easy way to do that, even if it's bad for the people.
Capitalism is per definition not bound to ethics or moral. We need to set rules, even if big corporations made us to believe we shouldn't.
We need progress, which is harder to do because it takes a paradigm shift on an Individual and social level.
Sometimes it just takes a marginal improvement to the quality of the engineering. But these "what if manual labor but fascade of robots!" gimmicks aren't improvements in engineering. They're an effort to cut corners on quality in pursuit of a higher profit margin.
Innovation is a scam created by representing change as improvement when it isn't.
And every time change gets replaced with innovation, it's connected to totalitarian\fascist tendencies, because it makes easier to sell societal change which is clearly not improvement.
A person who seriously affected my life advised "Homo Ludens" by Johan Huizinga, not sure whether because of the part of it about fascism in the 30s.
And that energy doesn't just go away after computing. You'll have the equivalent of an average space heater of heat coming out of your computer. It'd be awesome to compute with heating energy when needed, but when you need AC it's going to be a bitch.
Yes, but they are not gaming devices. They are meant to efficiently compute things. When used for that purpose they use little energy compared to other devices doing the same thing.
You still need a massive fleet of these to train those multi-billion parameter models.
On the invocation side, if you have a cloud SaaS service like ChatGPT, hosted Anthropic, or AWS Bedrock, these could answer questions quickly. But they cost a lot to operate at scale. I have a feeling the bean-counters are going to slow down the crazy overspending.
We're heading into a world where edge computing is more cost and energy efficient to operate. It's also more privacy-friendly. I'm more enthused about a running these models on our phones and in-home devices. There, the race will be for TOPS vs power savings.
The Matrix was such a nice movie. In 2000 they already had Linux, PlayStation, ICQ, filesharing, old Star Wars (with a good chunk of the classical EU) and even the Phantom Menace (haters gonna hate), and the first 3 Harry Potter books. And WarCraft II, and X-Wing Alliance, and I'm lazy to go on with this
I like that the writer thought re climate change. I think it's been 1 of the biggest global issues for a long time. I hope there'll be increasing use of sustainable energy for not just data centers but the whole tech world in the coming years.
I think a digital waiter doesn't need a rendered human face. We have food ordering kiosks. Those aren't ai. I think those suffice. A self-checkout grocer kiosk doesn't need a face too.
I think "client help" is where ai can at least aid. Imagine a firm that's been operating for decades and encountered so many kinds of client complaints. It can feed all those data to a large language model. With that model responding to most of the client complaints, the firm can reduce the number of their client support people. The model will pass the complaints that are so complex or that it doesn't know how to address to the client support people. The model will handle the easy and medium complaints; the client support people will handle the rest.
Idk whether the government or the public should stop ai from taking human jobs or let it. I'm torn. Optimistically, workers can find new jobs. But we should imagine that at least 1 human will be fired and can't find a new job. He'll be jobless for months. He'll have an epic headache as he can't pay next month's bills.
