AIs gunning for our precious freelancers

[alice]

I wondered where all the horses had gone.

[WeepingElf]

I wondered where all the horses had gone.

Well, we still have horses, but use them mainly for recreational purposes. And it has been said that the horses are now better off than when they had to labour on farms etc.; however, I don't know whether that's true. But AGIs do not necessarily lead to SkyNet; they could also lead to a leisure society. But because they could "go wrong Skynet-wise", as the Pantopia characters say, we'd better be very careful.

[malloc]

Well, we still have horses, but use them mainly for recreational purposes. And it has been said that the horses are now better off than when they had to labour on farms etc.; however, I don't know whether that's true. But AGIs do not necessarily lead to SkyNet; they could also lead to a leisure society. But because they could "go wrong Skynet-wise", as the Pantopia characters say, we'd better be very careful.

Either way, horsekind is not the master of its own destiny. Horses still exist because we find them entertaining and once they've outlived their usefulness to us, they get turned into glue. They have no means to hold us accountable for how we treat them nor even the means to understand our plans for them. What humans need is an alternative to both agonizing toil and the indignity of domestication.

Fundamentally, humans are cheap to employ, whereas any AGI that can compete with humans with regard to intelligence using present-day (or near-future) technology will be prohibitively expensive to compete with real live humans. This is the same reason that clothes are made by real live humans in third-world countries rather than by intricate automated equipment - real live humans are fundamentally cheap at the end of the day.

That basically means that humans will have to accept lower wages and worse working conditions to remain competitive with computers. If they demand higher wages or more time off, AGI will become the cheaper option. Putting it into perspective, those clothes are made by toddlers getting paid five cents an hour. That's the level of deprivation many human workers currently endure to remain competitive with machines. Imagine if every field of employment, even highly prestigious ones like science and acting, had similar competition and pressure to accept horrible wages and working conditions.

[jcb]

Too good to not share:

“Andreessen Horowitz is warning that billions of dollars in AI investments could be worth a lot less if companies developing the technology are forced to pay for the copyrighted data that makes it work.”

"People's investments in our bank robbing scheme could be worth a lot less if we're forced to pay back the money that we stole from the banks."

[zompist]

Interesting article from Cory Doctorow: is the AI bubble likely to leave useful residue or little at all?

[malloc]

Interesting article from Cory Doctorow: is the AI bubble likely to leave useful residue or little at all?

Considering that we already have humans for everything that AI is meant to solve, it seems hard to see anything useful remaining. Nobody outside the tech industry considers artwork or literature drudgery in need of automation. I must also question the assumption that AI is a bubble waiting to burst. Plenty of new technologies have failed to make their mark but others have become integral parts of life and radically changed the world. For every segway, there is an airplane or computer.

[Ares Land]

Interesting article from Cory Doctorow: is the AI bubble likely to leave useful residue or little at all?

I think there's a lot to be done in image interpretation, classification; also better OCR and more generally automatically handling paper documents.
Both my previous and current jobs involved that sort of things and were interested in AI.
The real problem is that ML is horribly expensive. I like the idea of 'useful residue'; in that case that could mean more affordable ML, within the reach of public institutions or smaller businesses.

[rotting bones]

Nobody outside the tech industry considers artwork or literature drudgery in need of automation.

Sounds like an insane perspective. In my experience, most young people consider websites without "art" dripping from every pore, most of which they never glance at twice, to be "boomer websites". Once consumption is normalized, production must follow.

[rotting bones]

All that will change once they've cracked AGI which seems inevitable given the sheer amount of resources going to AI and its rapid pace of development. Marx was writing in an age when most people (possibly even Marx himself for all I know) still denied humans were animals who evolved through natural selection. Today we know there is no ontological gap between humans and any animal, only degrees of neurological development and behavioral complexity.

The difference between humans on the one hand and machines or animals on the other is that only humans can create a real headache for corporations by rising up to demand higher wages.

If animals could rise up collectively to demand animal rights, no one would contest animal rights today. Since animals will never do that, most humans will always regard anyone interested in animal rights to be a fringe cultist.

(Jordan Peterson is so opposed to veganism because he thinks vegans are weak. If they beat him up for a few years, he will sing their praises like a canary. The whip is the only language that "geniuses" understand.)

[rotting bones]

The issue here probably has to do with how people other than Marx interpreted the idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" - if interpreted as meaning rule by a state in the name of the proletariat, it certainly is authoritarian, but interpreted as meaning the direct rule by the proletariat as a whole rather than by some proxy for them, as interpreted by libertarian Marxists, it is not authoritarian. This has been magnified by the conflation of Leninism with Marxism, where the idea of "dictatorship of the proletariat" has been taken to mean a literal dictatorship by a vanguard party acting in the name of the proletariat.

Marx's prototype of the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" was the Paris Commune.

[rotting bones]

But what does progress actually mean or what do you mean by progressivism at least?

Progress is the conquest of bread.

[jcb]

Interesting article from Cory Doctorow: is the AI bubble likely to leave useful residue or little at all?

Speaking of the AI bubble, why does the character recognition on my smartphone still suck? It recognizes only ~95% of my finger-written characters, which is high enough success rate to be useful, but low enough to still be constantly annoying. Surely we have enough computing power to train a neural net to read characters more than 95% accurately by now? If nothing else, I would appreciate it if the AI bubble solved at least this problem for me...

(Also, am I the only one that finds making text messages on phones by typing on a virtual keyboard very annoying? I guess that my body/hands are a bit larger than the average person's, but I'm not big like Shaq ( https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https% ... pl6m21.jpg ) or anything. I guess I could get a bigger phone, but big phones are an annoyance all unto themselves; Phones these days are getting so big that they won't fit in my pocket anymore!, destroying they're supposed portability.)

[Travis B.]

Interesting article from Cory Doctorow: is the AI bubble likely to leave useful residue or little at all?

Speaking of the AI bubble, why does the character recognition on my smartphone still suck? It recognizes only ~95% of my finger-written characters, which is high enough success rate to be useful, but low enough to still be constantly annoying. Surely we have enough computing power to train a neural net to read characters more than 95% accurately by now? If nothing else, I would appreciate it if the AI bubble solved at least this problem for me...

Because high-quality AI recognition would require at least a high-end GPU/NPU on your smartphone that would kill your battery life?

[alice]

Here's something to sober y'all up: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67977967

[Raphael]

Supermarket chatbot raises eyebrows after generating toxic gas, poisonous jelly recipes:

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/sup ... /u4cw51rtw

[Raphael]

Just have to share this, from Mastodon, by Lauren Weinstein:

https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@l ... 3501938710

[Raphael]

Any chance that this might make executive types rethink?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/202 ... s-chatbot/

[jcb]

Any chance that this might make executive types rethink?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/202 ... s-chatbot/

What makes you think that companies won't just push to have what AI chatbots say be immune from prosecution?, like how currently self-driving cars that break traffic laws are immune to traffic tickets: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/busine ... rcna131538

[Raphael]

What makes you think that companies won't just push to have what AI chatbots say be immune from prosecution?

Of course they'll push for that. It might be possible to counter-push, though.

[alice]

Here's something to make you reconsider; AI-generated images of cells:

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula ... f-inspire/

A few more at the reddit link. Perhaps some inspiration for very low-level biological conworlding???