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Comment by esafak | Hacker News Reader

It's the second sentence of the abstract:

"Current AI models are already automating away the livelihoods of some artists, actors, and writers."

OpenAI's charter says:

"OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity."

https://openai.com/charter

So they are going to develop software that can outperform humans, for less money... Of course people are going to lose their jobs. That's your disempowerment. They're making good on that part. Now we're waiting for the second act where they're going to show us how it magically benefits all of humanity, including the newly unemployed horde.

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A vital part is implied, but not stated - these companies own the novel solutions to training and running the models and they likely own or will own the hardware it runs on.

Without these things the rest of the world, even large corporations, will not be able to compete.

I think this is a great point. If AI becomes much better at certain tasks than humans, this will devalue human labor and cause a power shift towards AI companies which will act as gate keepers. I mean, let's face it, AI is not going to get democratized (at least not the state-of-the-art stuff – that one will always be under tight control). And even if models and hardware schematics were public, the average Joe would still not know what to do with that.

People made this argument every time a new thing gets automated, and so far they've been completely wrong.

Job loss is temporary, the gains from cheaper/better/faster production are permanent.

We've had machines that outperform humans at some tasks, which has always shifted value onto other tasks that human workers could do which machines could not. We've never had a machine that could "outperform humans at most economically valuable work". At some point, there is a finite limit to human capabilities, and it has never in history been reached, so there is no historical example to draw on.

We do have a historical examples for horses, though, which was reached somewhere between around 1900 and 1920.

Farming used to be most economically valuable work until it was not. OpenAI is not even close to producing anything as valuable as farming equipment.

If we need jobs, we will create them, do not worry about that, see David Graebers work on the topic.

People aren't horses. Horses were just a tool, and we found a better one. The economy exists to serve us, not us the economy.

Horses are animals, not tools, but they found an economic role through their labor. Hopefully humans fare better, but as far as the economy is concerned, the difference between horses and people is that horses don't have money to spend; their owners did, and once tractors became available they no longer saw fit to spend that money on horses. The economic role of unemployable humans would depend on how much purchasing power they have access to through means beyond their labor. Economic theory makes no guarantees about that.

Prior to industrialization, there wasn't much affordance in commumities for fully idle people. Give or take toddlers and people troubled by striking physical or mental disabilities, everybody had social duties (i.e. work) and played some role contributing to their community. Even most aristocrats and nobles that lived on the backs of othes's labor had community obligations of some kind.

Now, though, we aim society towards 5% of people who want to work not having some opportunity to do so, while doing some paperwork magic to exlude an order of magnitude of other non-workers from that measure. Meanwhile, we recognize widespread depression and anxiety that makes sense in a society where most people have no clear, constructive community obligations to give them direction and we struggle to reconcile liberal ideas of universal life, liberty, and happiness with the intuitive collectivist expectation that everybody should be chipping in (even when they have no opportunity to do so).

One can argue it's all been worth it, or that it's surely the road to some future utopia, but "completely wrong" is maybe not the right word choice for the opposing view.

That's true, but society has to have a discourse about who owns these gains, and what to do with the negatively affected people.

A scenario where people in creative jobs are essentially dispossessed with tax-avoiding megacorporations being the only profiteers is not the only possible option.

We as society could also decide that e.g. there have to be free occupational retraining options for those affected (as happened in other instances of technological revolutions), and AI models, or their underlying data, have to be open source of some new kind and so on.

We eliminated loom workers and switchboard operators. Nobody cried for them because their jobs were not considered desirable. Do you think art is comparable to that? This is not back-breaking work that people long to be liberated from. I don't care if they can find jobs doing something else. And why are they not being compensated by the AI companies for the golden eggs they have laid? What are tomorrow's models going to be trained on?

People did cry for them. The loom workers started an actual armed rebellion. Thankfully, the army put it down or else we'd still be weaving our clothes by hand.

Consumers decide whether something is too "special" to automate. If you want hand-drawn art, you're welcome to pay extra for it - just like you can get handmade pottery or clothing today.

> People made this argument every time a new thing gets automated, and so far they've been completely wrong.

People make the argument every day that I will die one day. They've been completely wrong so far, this proving that the argument is wrong.

I prefer my car to having a horse. But the car did eliminate the horse.

There is a speed at which people can train for new jobs X, and a speed at which new jobs displace old jobs Y. If Y is twice X then your talent pool is half what it could be.

If Y shrinks to only days and X plateaus then the human body becomes just robotic hands that the computer tells what to do. Unthinking meat, incapable of making a decision, never aware of the implications of the decisions that are made on its behalf.

The ratio of the population chanting "Butlerian Jihad now" is currently small. How can I capitalize on a belief that this number grows fast?

There is not so much net job loss. There is significant job downgrade.

Nope. Everyone has upgraded. Even America's poor are richer than people pre-automation.

Automation has made it possible for cars, cellphones, manufactured goods, air conditioning, running water, etc to be available to everyone.

This is the sort of comment cliched and dishonest. It only muddies the waters of a serious debate.

> Automation has made it possible for;

> cars

We are choking to death on fumes and micro-plastics. CO2 is destroying the planet. The roads are grid-locked. We should be walking more.

> cellphones

We're in a massive global mental health crisis as attention spans plummet and depression soars. Cellphones have ruined family life and turned work in to a 24/7 activity.

> manufactured goods

Our overflowing landfills are spewing methane into the atmosphere from 7 decades of pointless plastic rubbish we make and throw away two weeks later. Nothing we can make lasts.

> air conditioning

Open the window.

> running water

Just No! The Byzantines and Romans had running water. Automation has nothing to do with it.

> Everyone has upgraded.

We work longer hours for less of a stake in society than at any time in history.

You know - I love technology, We really could have done something with it. But we let convenience, greed and vanity be our guides. Just maybe a good start would be to quit with this hopeless mythology and hubris, to actually think critically about the tradeoffs we've made and see just how much harm we're doing to ourselves.

It's kind of astounding to call someone dishonest and then equate air conditioning to opening a window.

Well it took the World Health Organisation, a few hundred medical doctors and PhDs two years to come to the same conclusion. Maybe, I dunno... science?

What the hell are you talking about? Is this some sort of covid ventilation confusion? The primary function of ac is not ventilation.

I feel like a better comparison would be AC vs good quality house design, where we aren't so reliant on AC. AC would still be necessary for some people in some climates, but I know my rental in Australia isn't designed to withstand heat at all, compared to a rental I had in Germany. It's putting an expensive bandaid on something that ought to be fixed in the design stage.

Edit: For context I'm referring to "cheaper/better/faster production" having a negative impact of the quality of housing, which disproportionately impacts renters, who don't have the ability to improve their rented dwelling. Regulation is the only thing that will improve the housing situation for those born too late to buy in the current market.

I don't think it's clear at all that it's better to be a minimum wage button pusher working multiple jobs for a modern lower class life style than it was to be a subsistence farmer. Not to say that either is enviable. But modern comforts are also creating modern horrors.

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