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Comment by mapcars | Hacker News Reader

There was a time factory workers protested against automatisation too. You can't stop it, you have to adapt.

You also can't really stop the protests. People will be displaced from highly specialized skills that some spent a lifetime developing. Jobs that gave their lives meaning, financial security and a sense of community and accomplishment. You can't fault them for being angry or even hostile if they aren't presented with a dignified alternative. When you're building any disruptive technology, you should be prepared for hostility.

This is an important point. Modern man is conditioned to find purpose through employment. The notion of the heroism of work isn't as cartoonish as it was in communist societies, but it's implicitly there - in the centrality of work to every part of culture and customs like that go-to ice-breaker, "What do you do?" The psychological shift of moving past that will be every bit as challenging as the economic adjustments of full automation.

It's not just communism that celebrates the heroism of work. Providing for your family is viewed as a heroic act across civilizations. People speak of the sacrifices they make for their families. For most children, parents are their first superheroes and some of that is the safety and security they provide through their income, their sense of professional pride and success and participation in communities.

We can build a bleak dystopian AI driven future where we all work in service to the machines or we can build one that pays dividends by continuing to give humans an inflated sense of their potential. The later is preferable.

Sure, I don't blame anyone, they can protest as much as they want, but its not going to solve anything.

Protest = statement of objection. Visual artists are protesting by exploring legal solutions for economic recompense for the use of their work in training and inference. It's clear they see neural nets a mechanism for copying and modifying their original work without permission.

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