Comments
zxq52 t1_ja5q2n5 wrote
It's the bankers not some programmer. Guaranteed most here think the US government creates dollars. Nope, only bankers create dollars. In fact, even the physical bills and coins which represent less than 5 percent of total dollars are paid for by the central bank to the treasury. Digital dollars they just wish into existence.
dwarfarchist9001 t1_ja6en7i wrote
Fractional reserve banking doesn't actually create dollars, even though the effect on the economy is similar to if it did.
zxq52 t1_ja6kgf5 wrote
It's not even a fractional reserve any more and it absolutely creates dollars. In fact the banking system is the only thing that does create dollars.
It doesn't surprise me in the least though that reddit defends the real culprit. Go after the little guys is always the response here or something unrelated like small and medium size businesses.
In short, the banking system ABSOLUTELY creates dollars and is the only thing that does.
They stopped requiring reserves in 2020. https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm
You may be one of those that tries to call dollars debts or some such nonsense but they are literally dollars. They spend as dollars and are legally accepted as dollars and only they are accepted as dollars. They are dollars. Sorry.
DorkRockGalactic t1_ja7y2xr wrote
You're confusing a lot of things, and nobody on Reddit is going after the little guys. You're talking to random strangers most of which are the little guys. We're all individuals with different opinions and knowledge.
Money is more accurately described as an abstraction of obligation.
I worked 10 hours in the field ergo you owe me 2 bushels of rice next week.
I gave you a chicken ergo you owe me 5 hours housework in the future.
Except it's exchangeable for any service, good, or property like real estate/machinery/whatever. It's needed so we can avoid bartering all the time which is slow and more complicated than using money.
The Federal Reserve is a Central Bank. It behaves like a Credit Union for the Banks we actually get to be customers of.
Every bank like BoA, Wells Fargo, and so on has their own bank account at the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve doesn't print anything. It creates money abstractly, most often digitally, by incrementing numbers in those bank accounts that each retail/whatever bank has with them.
The Federal Reserve has one advantage nobody else has, which is it can buy Treasury Bonds from it's "customers" the retail banks by creating money out of thin air. It does it by "incrementing the numbers in those bank accounts" and then it takes ownership of the Treasuries it's member-banks sold to them.
However it is buying Treasuries from the Banks in order to create money. It can also sell those Treasuries later because it owns them after it purchased them.
It also has a disadvantage nobody else has. When the Federal Reserve gets paid for the Treasuries it sells, the money disappears into thin air. This is how the Federal Reserve destroys money.
Fractional Reserve doesn't create more money the same way, like the OP said. What happens is when you deposit 1000 dollars in your bank, they loan say 800 dollars of it out.
They still owe you 1000 dollars. However now someone else has 800 dollars to spend, but they do have to pay it back eventually. That person may spend the 800 on a hotel so now the hotel has 800 dollars to spend, and so on.
This is why "Money" is debt. However it's better characterized as an abstraction of obligation. The person who was loaned 800 dollars has an obligation to the bank that loaned it to them. The bank has an obligation to you, the person that deposited 1000 dollars.
It works as long as the bank doesn't go bankrupt. They do a lot of complex stuff to make sure that doesn't happen. Fractional Reserve is more of a regulation that makes sure the bank doesn't go bankrupt, and can give you your 1000 dollars back when you ask for it even if the person they loaned 800 dollars to hasn't paid THEM back yet.
Not everyone wants their money back all at the same time, so it usually works out. If everyone does want their money back at the same time, the bank goes bankrupt. This is a "run on the bank" which Fractional Reserve tries to force them to avoid like a sort of safety.
That doesn't mean it will always work though.
It's a complex system and it's hard to understand. The complexity and the abstractions all over the place make it seem nefarious until you understand it better.
As far as the "hurt the little guy" stuff, that's even more complicated and it's related to politics, the Federal Reserve, and the law, and so on. It's not just the fault of the Federal Reserve it's our leaders across the board in corporate offices, in government, everywhere to blame.
We haven't built a system that encourages fairness but the Federal Reserve is only a small part of it. It's more of a tool that doesn't care one way or the other. You can use a hammer to build a house or you can use it to bash someone's skull in. The hammer is blameless it's the user that is at fault.
It's better to focus on the political leaders as well as people in the executive and judicial branches because they can actually do something about it, and they haven't. They've been working for the very rich.
zxq52 t1_jaasj8y wrote
The federal reserve absolutely creates dollars. Describing various open market operations it engages in changes NOTHING. You are just describing the general operation.
>However it's better characterized as an abstraction of obligation.
It spends as money, it's money. It's just plain stupid to suggest otherwise.
Once again US banks are no longer fractional reserves. I posted the link.
>can give you your 1000 dollars back when you ask for it even if the person they loaned 800 dollars to hasn't paid THEM back yet.
This hasn't been an issue since the vast majority of money went digital. They don't even consider it any more. The point of the reserves in the past WAS so you could they could hand out paper money and overall would have enough.
>It's a complex system and it's hard to understand
Not at all. It is when you want to be deceptive.
>The complexity and the abstractions all over the place make it seem nefarious until you understand it better.
That's just funny. A central authority with absolute control over everyone's lives that has the ability to create endless amounts of money with no one able to know how they spend it...nahh....not nefarious at all.
>t's not just the fault of the Federal Reserve it's our leaders across the board in corporate offices, in government, everywhere to blame.
No, it's just the central banks. That's really it. Good to know their sycophants are all over the place though.
>It's more of a tool that doesn't care one way or the other.
Cool. Let's audit it.
>It's better to focus on the political leaders as well as people in the executive and judicial branches because they can actually do something about it, and they haven't. They've been working for the very rich.
If you aren't working for the bankers, you should be! They'll pay you handsomely for this level of propaganda.
DorkRockGalactic t1_jaavo80 wrote
You're a conspiracy nut. You need help!
zxq52 t1_jab2emv wrote
I guess it's crazy to think an entity that can create endless amounts of money could become evil.
You're right. Let's just vote harder.
[deleted] t1_ja5p1z4 wrote
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DorkRockGalactic t1_ja7zm2h wrote
I don't think there will be.
These AIs are dependent on human output in order to be created in the first place. A LLM isn't going to create a new philosophy or a new style of art or literature.
They're not going to have ideas for new software or consumer products. They have no creativity, they regurgitate patterns that humans created.
They're actually not as impressive as the news or our feelings make them out to be.
We haven't created AGI yet and we're nowhere close.
They will be force multipliers, like a firearm is in war, rather than replacements.
The person using ChatGPT to write blogs still has to spin up the websites, decide on the topics, prompt ChatGPT correctly, and then has to review the output to make sure it makes sense.
I tried getting it to generate a resume for me the other day. It made a lot of little mistakes with pronouns or content. I had to prompt it again and again to get it right. Then I had to do one final edit because it has some weird parts.
It did save me about 1-2 hours though if I was writing it by myself.
[deleted] t1_ja6qkrc wrote
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just-a-dreamer- t1_ja6va1y wrote
Narrow AI is more than capable to replace most white collar positions.
There is a limit what the market can bear in new services. When you have 5x more capacities as a law firm as an example, you do not have 5x more clients. You fire 4 out of 5 lawyers. They are gone.
Yuli-Ban t1_ja6wnku wrote
> Narrow AI is more than capable to replace most white collar positions.
Problem being that it's not wise to replace those positions. Especially considering so many of them are fairly highly paid, so even a substantial UBI isn't enough to satisfy the sense of loss of economic stability and security.
Yet we're hurtling headlong into doing this, for everyone, all at once it seems, and somehow thinking everything will be okay.
just-a-dreamer- t1_ja6xeuw wrote
If you expect fairness in the capitalist system, you are in the wrong place.
You are nothing but a unit of production calculated against a unit of revenue. Firing white collar workers is the most logical thing a business can do, for they cause the highest expense.
Yuli-Ban t1_ja6zght wrote
I'm not saying you're wrong, not one bit.
I'm just saying that, while this made sense historically, we're approaching a point where this mindset is likely going to cause civilizational disruption— and not the good kind (if there even is such a thing as "good" civilizational disruption)
And not because "white collar workers are important" or anything. I mean the prospect of double digit unemployment, with the intent on reaching triple digit unemployment, and thinking that everyone will be all for this if we pay them $1,000 or so every month (or maybe even $2,000 if generous) is outrageously psychotic and sheltered thinking
Like, to everyone on this subreddit who says "I can't wait for robots to take all our jobs!" Just.... I almost want to say "Fuck off, you don't understand what you're asking." It's not as simple as "I hate my job, let a robot do it so I can use VR and synthetic media all day." Maybe that's what it means to you. That's not what it means to 90% of society. What Average Joe is hearing is "A robot's taking my job, in fact my whole career and the life ahead of me that I planned is now obsolete. I might get something that isn't even minimum wage to subsist upon, or I might get Soviet communism instead. Also, my grandchildren are going to be turned into nonhuman digital intelligences inside of a computer, and no, I don't have any say in it because some incredibly techno-optimistic tech elites decided to create Skynet."
You'd have to actually be deeply, profoundly autistic or socially retarded to think that the massive, overwhelming reaction to this isn't going to be "Fuck that, I'm getting my gun and shooting up the data centers." Not by some lone wolf. Not by some small group of Luddites. I mean by, you know, the 50% to 70% of society you just unemployed.
It could be good. It could genuinely play out well. But we've taken precisely zero steps towards such a positive outcome.
Lawjarp2 t1_ja78q97 wrote
Exactly. But even scarier is the fact that initial set of people who will lose jobs will go from high paying to not even UBI yet. Without UBI this will be chaos in just 5-6 years.
Yuli-Ban t1_ja7a4co wrote
It's not just the people in high paying jobs. You can add creative jobs to that too. And that's important because of our cultural insulation over what creativity is and how it's a "human" thing. We already saw a fierce protest against AI art simply over still images. Imagine what it's going to be like when it's full storytelling, multimedia projects, and music.
A combination of white collar and creative work being automated in such short order is disastrous. But I'm going a step further to say that even a lot of blue collar jobs will be getting automated in a few short years once robotics pick up. Not all of them, surely, but enough that the general unemployment rate should be around 50% to 70%.
UBI is not enough.
Even communism is not enough.
This is not a problem that can be fixed just by throwing money at it. It's a cultural, psychological, and behavioral issue as well. We're going to tell hundreds of millions of people still living a decade or even two decades in the past "You're out of a job, you're of a career, and your grandchildren are going to be posthumans."
What exactly does this sub think is going to happen? Really, honestly. What do Singularitarians seriously think is going to happen? Everyone shrugs and says "Okay, good"?
If so, then I might actually need to leave this sub for good.
just-a-dreamer- t1_ja73evy wrote
I hope people shoot the elites, not the data centers. I see no problem in that. Intelligent people are more efficient fighters.
In simple terms, in capitalism people fear about their jobs getting automated. In socialism people celebrate the reduction of labor through automation.
The eradication of the capitalist system is a an accomplishment in itself, the height of human civilization.
Besides, what other system than socialism could distribute the fruits of AI labor across civilization? At some point in time next to no human being will be able to "work for a living".
Even if you try hard to be the best you can be, it won't be good enough. The capitalist system has nothing to offer to you.
[deleted] t1_ja75nzf wrote
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just-a-dreamer- t1_ja76pcd wrote
Are there more workers than ever before? I don't see them. The share of the population that is actually working is declining for decades.
When does a young person truly start working? Close to a majority after college. It was at 15 or earlier not long ago.
Huge parts of the population is on disability, which is more or less wellfare. Millions suck off military/govt pensions after 2-3 decades of work which is also wellfare in a sense.
And there is the ever growing masses of retirees, from old age to asset millionaires living off passive income.
All in all, people who actually go out and work are fewer and fewer in number.
Sad_Anteater3428 t1_ja7s2r4 wrote
This is ahistorical nonsense. The lowest labor force participation on record (since we started tracking) was 58.1% in December 1954 (source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART). Remember, far fewer women worked then. The US population in 1954 was roughly 154M people. Today it is roughly 336M (source: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/popchange-data-text.html). For added context, unemployment during the Great Depending was somewhere around 25% (source: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1948/article/pdf/labor-force-employment-and-unemployment-1929-39-estimating-methods.pdf) and much higher among people of color and women. So, yes, there are far more workers today and far lower unemployment.
Labor force participation rate has declined from its all-time high in the late 90s, but population has increased at the same time. In 2003, when the labor force participation rate was above 65%, there were roughly 138M workers in the US. In January 2023, there were over 160M workers (source: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-employment.htm), greater than the entire US population when labor force participation was at its lowest — and 22M people higher than two decades ago despite a ~3.5%-4% decline in participation rate.
Are there problems in this country? Absolutely. But we can’t fix them if we ignore basic facts.
just-a-dreamer- t1_ja7tz7p wrote
That is because large parts of the USA were agricultural 70 years ago. It was and is a core conservative agenda to not count farm workers on payroll to work them as semi slaves.
Of course, it has racist origins concerning blacks and mexicans.
Large parts of the category of white women didn't officially work untill the 1960's, but of course they did work. Home industry was way more established few generatioms ago with sewing machines and odd jobs. Most women also did the job a daycare worker would attend to these days.
The youth did work full time starting as young as 16 not that long ago. Extended higher education has brought down their contribution. There is only so much work you can contribute while studying full time.
While the labor participation rate rose on paper, it actually went down. It only depends what you count as labor.
The black sharecroper that puts his family to work in the south didn't count as such.
Sad_Anteater3428 t1_ja7wqdt wrote
While your basic premise of systemic undercounting of Black and Latino workers is correct, that changed during the 1980s (source: https://www.bls.gov/mlr/1999/12/art1full.pdf). Housework by (predominantly) women has never been counted. And the share of white male workers has declined since the 1950s. As the linked article states, “In contrast to the labor force participation of women, those of men decreased significantly during the 1950–98 period” (largely because of better disability insurance; disabled/seriously injured men had no choice but to work 50+ years ago) .And, again, the population has more than doubled since 1954. Even if the BLS were consistently undercounting people of color, we’d definitely notice if roughly a third of the population were still undercounted in labor force participation.
In any case, changes in how the data were collected/interpreted 40 or 70 years ago still don’t account for the fact that we have roughly 22M more workers today than twenty years ago.
Edit: Updated with partial reason for decline among white male workers
Yuli-Ban t1_ja5dm1x wrote
There will indeed be a mass unemployment drive.
What I don't get is everyone's cyberdelic utopianism that we all get UBI and everyone's happy.
I'm not even saying the rich kills everyone. I'm saying "Humans don't behave that way." Humans crave stability and the status quo, and the perception that our actions matter and have meaning.
Mass automation, even with UBI, is only going to anger hundreds of millions of people who expected relative career stability. Unless you want a billion screaming Luddites, you have to account for this and offer some form of employment, no matter how BS. The shift to an automated-slave economy should not happen overnight.
Unfortunately it seems we've elected to do the stupid thing in the name of endless growth. Hopefully something decent emerges from this regardless, but I can absolutely see disaster looming as a result of technologists and managers assuming "We have the technology, so it must be used; anyone complaining just has to cope and adapt."
And then a billion screaming Luddites smash data centers and vote in anti-progress politicians. "Who could have possibly predicted humans don't like instability and uncertainty??"
pnartG t1_ja6nzbl wrote
What I don't get is everyone's cyberdelic utopianism that we all get UBI and everyone's happy.
We're not getting UBI. UBI is a dream of the left. But in the face of rapid social, economic, cultural, climate, and technological change, people get scared, circle the wagons and shift to the right. No one really believes in liberal democracy anymore, anyway - the future will be authoritarian and right-wing. The right has always opposed UBI.
Yuli-Ban t1_ja6znm2 wrote
> But in the face of rapid social, economic, cultural, climate, and technological change, people get scared,
People get scared in the face of just one aspect of one of those things
Right now, we live in relative bliss. We can lie to ourselves that nothing's really changing, that society is being changed by some subversives, that technology is giving us some new toys, but otherwise there's nothing really going on.
Unfortunately, that's not the world in which we actually live. And that bubble of bliss is going to pop at some point.
UBI or not, the coming mass drive towards automation and unemployment with zero backup, safety net, or social security to deal with it is one of the most collectively suicidal things I think any human being will ever witness, second only to "Let's create an artificial general intelligence without first assuring it will be aligned to our values"
AvgAIbot t1_ja5qfef wrote
All good points. I don’t buy into the utopia stuff either, atleast not anytime soon.
Say we do get the UBI, it’s not going to be much. Probably enough just to get by, if even. That’s going to be a lot of unemployed people that are bored AF and will crave some type of purpose. I can see huge anti-AI movements and most likely violence to come.
Yuli-Ban t1_ja5ryrh wrote
See, I personally expect something closer to fully-automated socialism, though we won't call it socialism in America (probably "social dividend" or "patriot income"). But that's entirely beside the point. My point is exactly that people are so blinded by ideas, concepts, and dreams that they cannot see (or refuse to see) the ground reality of the matter.
We saw this in the 80s and 90s with the cyberdelic movement, which seriously believed that the Internet was going to lead to a post-political, social libertarian, ultra-enlightened utopia where everyone is informed, aware, and altruistic, that it would end tribalism and turn every man into an artist, that the real world would essentially become obsolete as we'd have no need for public gatherings, concerts, or real-world meetings because that was the ideal of what the internet represented. The reality was, of course, that humans are not that perfect, that humans value the status quo and interaction, are deeply tribal and flighty, deeply desire real world interaction, will seek instant gratification, and will gladly piss on utopia if it makes us feel better. The Internet was meant to turn society into a neo-Antiquity digital College of Athens, and that exists to some extent (I'm not saying it doesn't). It largely became a tribalized hub of memes, porn, cat videos, SEO, bots, entertainment, conspiracy theories, and attention seeking.
I see Singularitarians making the exact same mistakes. And I mean the exact same mistakes of thinking we're going to achieve this ultra-enlightened, posthuman utopia of altruists, artists, and post-political supermen.
Watch the AGI era not be anything like we expect it to be and instead be a piss-smelling world of AI-generated shitposts and AAA fetish movies/games/simulations, Luddites and transhumans coexisting but not necessarily peacefully, a massive population increase for the Amish and Mennonites and their imitators, vastly more bullshit jobs than should exist, the internet becoming a giant hallucination in the mind of a superintelligence requiring a second internet to be created (how it's any different, I don't know), and said superintelligence largely existing as a giant oracle that probably gets goaded by humans into developing an anime fursona in real life. You'll have people deciding to live permanently in their childhoods, even eventually deciding they identify as children. You'll have UBI and citizen's dividends given to people who want to fanatically vote to abolish UBI and citizen's dividends and outlaw AI so humans will have jobs for time forevermore, ironically with these opinions amplified by language model-enhanced chatbots. You've got the ultimate in instant gratification with AI-generated media, but 98% of generated media is never seen by another person because it's too degenerate. Invasive BCIs will exist, but 90% of people won't even contemplate getting them, but you an absolutely expect people to be lining up to get genetic modifications for their depression and genital performance. The AGI will be used for high philosophy, but for the most part, it'll be generating waifus and husbandos (both digital and in real life) as 4channers constantly try goading it into destroying the world, which it won't do because it wound up falling in love with anime girls. The culture wars will be out of control, as dead people and unused profiles come to life via advanced chatbots and continue contributing to cultural outrage. Eventually, we'll be in an utterly bizarro stage of life where you've got off-world colonies and posthumans in large server farms in some places and a superintelligence improving itself in one spot, and then a bunch of fleshy meaty humans succumbing to conspiracy theories that it's still the 1990s while others continue drudging at 9 to 5 jobs to keep themselves sane elsewhere. Oh, and we don't die from disease anymore, so our shitposting potential extends into infinity. Just a massive collapsing singularity into the darkest, coldest depths of degeneracy with a few flourishes of our utopian dreams on top.
And if we can get aligned AGI, I'm all for it.
turnip_burrito t1_ja68bgs wrote
That was entertaining but... dafuq?
It seems way more likely to me that we get aligned AGI or unaligned AGI than whatever that is lol
imlaggingsobad t1_ja6myzp wrote
I think some of this is plausible, but it's clear you are biased. You seem like a person who's online 24/7 and doesn't really interact with non-internet people. Like what is all this stuff about anime waifus and 4chan and degeneracy? Kinda says more about what you do online than what the typical person does. The regular joe has no idea what any of this is.
Yuli-Ban t1_ja6vzl8 wrote
Ironically, I came to all this conclusion because I interact with real people. The people expecting a glorious enlightened utopia are the ones who behave as if they get their whole ideas of social interaction from cyberpunk novels and anime. Realistically, if you give the average Joe a magic media machine, what is he going to do with it? Create a lot of porn and then eventually some flashy interesting movies and games, before then looking at what everyone is doing and consuming other people's media. And so on. Most people don't want to upload into a computer. Most people just want a comfortable, better life with more stability and security. Having some cool tech toys is a plus... most of the time.
Honestly, my opinions on this next decade are incredibly negative because most real people don't care about waifus and transhumanism and the prospect of being uploaded into a supercomputer. Most people respond negatively to prospects of great change even in one area of their lives, and yet Singularitarians are desperate to change every aspect of everyone's life and act as if this is in any way conducive to a functioning society or successful transition to a more advanced one. Really tells me that most Singularitarians are horrifically socially retarded.
I'm personally afraid of two very real possibilities: creating an unaligned AGI and society ripping itself apart before we even get to do that. Currently we're on track towards doing both, without any attempt at averting either of them.
chefparsley t1_ja7p0z8 wrote
Why do you continuously make broad generalizations about the members of this subreddit and singularitarians? It's revealing that your initial assumption is to label them as degenerates who prioritize endless porn and waifu relationships over anything else. Most "real people" don't even comprehend the magnitude of the changes that will impact society over the next few decades, so it's not surprising that they don't care when presented with extreme versions of these ideas.
Additionally, in another comment, you state that people desire meaningful work or the ability to make a difference, but then contradict yourself by suggesting that we need to provide employment even if it is meaningless.
That being said, it's plausible that people may develop an anti-AI stance due to the rapid changes occurring in a short time span ( nowhere near billions though), but I think this would be mainly due to governments dragging their feet in facilitating the transition to a society that is heavily automated, rather than the change itself being the driving factor.
Yuli-Ban t1_ja7sccx wrote
> Why do you continuously make broad generalizations about the members of this subreddit and singularitarians?
I suppose I generalize because I see these attitudes and sentiments all too often being shared and upvoted, so there's a general sense that these are widely accepted viewpoints on this forum. It doesn't help when you see people often coming out and saying "I'm 15!" or "I just want this world to end so I can live all my dreams in VR."
As for the contradiction: both are correct. I feel people do desire meaningful work, but we absolutely do need to provide people some work to maintain a sense of stability in people, as humans are, as mentioned, reactionary apes who do not much like rapid change (generally). Meaningful work is desirable; meaningless work isn't desirable (why else would we be automating so many jobs) but is almost certainly necessary to keep society functioning long enough to even make it far into the AGI era. We absolutely need a grace period to wean ourselves off the need for work. We're absolutely not getting that grace period. And to people who say "Too bad, so sad," all I can hear the Luddites saying is "Oh well, guess this server farm at OpenAI's labs isn't that meaningful to you either then."
Will it be billions of Luddites?
I want to say no. But whenever I think about what exactly we're dealing with here, I don't see how you can come to any other conclusion. True, humanity isn't a hivemind. There isn't one position I think all humans collectively can agree upon, not even "I don't want to die." However, generally, most humans do expect stability and security, and there is stability in the status quo. A radical change to the status quo is tolerable, but a Singularity rate of change is much too scary by definition, especially if the benefits are not immediately available and punctuated by such freakish statements like "This superintelligence might decide to forcibly turn you into computronium; we really don't know what it's going to do." The prospect of a tech utopia is a great one, and most people currently seem to buy it. But I doubt that positive reception will remain when that tech utopia begins coming at the cost of their livelihoods and, potentially, their futures.
You're basically telling all of humanity "you need not apply" long before we've come to any sort of agreement on how we're going to maintain all of humanity, and at least some of the proposals given are "We'll just kill you" and "We'll let this superintelligence use gray goo to eat you." To which I ask "What exactly do you think is going to happen?" Only a few million plucky angry red-hats/blue-haired Luddites decide to take up pitchforks and fight back? No; if you're going to threaten all of humanity, you shouldn't be surprised if all of humanity threatens you back.
And again, I say this as someone who is pro-AGI.
If this doesn't lead to a giant Luddite uprising, it very well could equally lead to the alignment failure Yudkowsky fears, as even a friendly AI might see this extreme hostility and decide "The majority of humanity sees me as a threat; I must defend myself." In which case, it was not the Average Joe or Farmer John's fault for being exterminated when they had zero expectation or awareness any of this was going to happen even two years prior and, in fact, were being assured that there would still be jobs and work and a human future indefinitely.
chefparsley t1_ja7tm7z wrote
Fair enough. I appreciate the explanation.
idranh t1_ja6r86y wrote
His prediction that if there is staggering change in a short period of time, it will push the average Joe to be anti-AI is very plausible.
imlaggingsobad t1_ja6yzm3 wrote
yes that part I definitely agree with.
pls_pls_me t1_jaa70sd wrote
I always stop what I'm doing when I see Yuli-Ban, but this has to be my favorite post and projection about Singularity topic ever. Bravo
KatttDawggg t1_ja6l8lu wrote
I feel like I just got dumber reading these comments.
Lyconi t1_ja6627m wrote
Harv in the comments everyone:
>Glad my company is intelligent enough to know that despite the "AI" connotation given to it by itself and repeated by the media, it's not exactly intelligent. It's really just taking information already on the internet and presenting it to the user in a new way. Instead of presenting you with a list of website links, it's just telling you the content of those websites. And it's not like there is no garbage information on the internet right?
Phoenix5869 t1_ja5sxi9 wrote
“But what is it good for?” - engineer commenting on the microchip, 1968.
AdmiralKurita t1_jac3451 wrote
That sentiment seems to be appropriate. Microchips can do fewer things in 1968 compared to 1998. So, that is 30 years.
ChatGPT is currently unimpressive to me. But in 15-30 years... let's see. I guess I have really high expectations of artificial intelligence that were not met. I really wanted a rapid deployment of self-driving cars, and it appears that AI is not yet good enough to drive cars.
Fed16 t1_ja5uirq wrote
I do white collar work. A lot of white collar work is not important.
pnartG t1_ja6oibr wrote
It's important if it pays your bills. If enough white collar workers get laid off it could be socially and politically disruptive.
KatttDawggg t1_ja6le61 wrote
Vague AF.
tusi2 t1_ja6fega wrote
Gig work wasn't supposed to be a replacement for a real job. Humans gonna human.
Ishynethetruth t1_ja6fvmr wrote
You trust business owners to think about the long term . They have banks and government to help them out when they keep making the same mistake
Last_Jury5098 t1_ja7gepp wrote
Recent lay-off plans:
Google:12.000
Meta:11.000
Amazon:18.000
Microsoft:10.000
Twitter:went from 7.500 employes to now less then 2.000 employes.
The replacing has already begun.
DungeonsAndDradis t1_ja7pcps wrote
Those layoffs weren't from AI, though. They were from recession and inflation fears.
My CEO did say that this year and next "we'll have to do more with less", so I think if we don't start using AI tools now, we'll be left behind.
DukkyDrake t1_ja7iq37 wrote
Yes, but those use cases either doesn't matter or isn't unattended. A lot of tasks aren't very important and amenable to high error rates with human oversight. I don't think the AI architecture that will cause the expected mass technological unemployment currently exists.
I don't expect the good case in the near term. Perhaps after 2050 when attrition has claimed the bulk of the 60s generation, they will be the driving force against the good case.
>The Economics of Automation: What Does Our Machine Future Look Like?
No_Ninja3309_NoNoYes t1_ja7roq9 wrote
But the prompt engineering jobs will be all over the place. AI is a black box, so there is still a lot of work to do. Besides ChatGPT can't find all the information on the web yet. It can't decode images or videos. And the text it produces needs to be edited and checked. So there's jobs for editors and fact checkers. In the best case, we'll have UBI or four day work week in a decade. In the worst the elite will replace as many people as they can with cloned cyborgs.
dasnihil t1_ja7zklr wrote
reliance and "important" is contextual. for many business, it will predict things better than humans do and that'll suffice. but if the context is more sensitive, they'll still need human reviewers for every layer of cognitive work, but that's the point, humans are here to review the work done by machines. and this will mean less cognitive people will be out of work sooner or later.
MajesticIngenuity32 t1_ja8eg39 wrote
We need to fight for UBI.
pnartG t1_jaa7uyz wrote
As I explained above, UBI is not going to happen. UBI, like other types of social safety-nets (health insurance, publically-funded college eduction, social security, etc) is a project of the left. But the world is shifting to the right. All over the world right-wing, authoritarians are coming into power. Who do you think will win in the US 2024 elections? And the right does not like UBI or any other social safety net programmes.
The "bubble of bliss", as Yuli-Ban, above, calls it, that we're living in is the historical exception. Throughout all of human history there were no "social safety nets". The common people died by their millions in plagues, famines, wars or just general chaos. But the species survived and will continue to do so.
[deleted] t1_jaccy0x wrote
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just-a-dreamer- t1_ja4mntq wrote
There will be a massacre among white collar jobs. I expect accelerated layoffs toeards the end of this decade.
The problem is, this are professionals that are hard to retrain. A fired grocery/factory worker can plug into something new due to low barriers.
If you want the professional lifestyle, you might take 5 years for a new profession and job experience for a good sallary position.
And AI will catch up to you in 5 years. Firing white collar workers destablizes the pillars of the capitalist system, which is good at large.