Comment by staunton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by staunton | Hacker News Reader

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I'm personally least worried about short-term unemployment resulting from AI progress. Such structural unemployment and poverty resulting from it happens when a region loses the industry that is close to the single employer there and people affected don't have the means to move elsewhere or change careers.

AI is going to replace jobs that can be done remotely from anywhere in the world. The people affected will (for the first time in history!) not mostly be the poorest and disenfranchised parts of society.

Therefore, as long as countries can maintain political power in their populations, the labor market transition will mostly be fine. The part where we "maintain political power in populations" is what worries me personally. AI enables mass surveillance and personalized propaganda. Let's see how we deal with those appearing, which will be sudden by history's standards... The printing press (30 years war, witch-hunts) and radio (Hitler, Rwandan genocide) might be slow and small innovations compared at what might be to come.

With respect to communication innovation, I think AI Hitler put it best: "we can't rewind we've gone too far."

Here's a link to the relevant historical record: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25GjijODWoI&t=93s

I don't think existing media channels will continue to be an effective way to disseminate information. The noise destroys the usefulness of it. I think people will stop coming to platforms for news and entertainment as they begin to distrust them.

The surveillance prospect however, is frightening.

I think people aren't thinking about these things in the aggregate enough. In the long term, this does a lot of damage to existing communication infrastructure. Productivity alone isn't necessarily a virtue.

I've recently switched to a dumb phone. Why keep an internet browsing device in my pocket if the internet's largest players are designing services that will turn a lot of its output into noise?

I don't know if I'll stick with the change, but so far I'm having fun with the experience.

The Israel/Gaza war is a large factor - I don't know what to believe when I read about it online. I can be more slow and careful about what I read and consume from my desktop, from trusted sources. I'm insulated from viral images sent hastily to me via social media, from thumbnails of twitter threads of people with no care if they're right or wrong, from texts containing links with juicy headlines that I have no hope of critically examining while briefly checking my phone in traffic.

This is all infinitely worse in a world where content can be generated by multi-modal LLMs.

I have no way to know if any of the horrific images/videos I've already seen thru the outlets I've identified were real or AI generated. I'll never know, but it's too important to leave to chance. For that reason I'm trying something new to set myself up for success. I'm still informed, but my information intake is deliberately slowed. I think that others may follow in time, in various ways.

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