The trick is to look at whether having those things is profitable to those in power. For all of those things; they are profitable for power because power commodified them.

AGI isn't. Not in the hands of working class people.

That can only undercut the ability of the powerful to make money off of back-breaking labour of the working class.

Unless the powerful can commodify it, don't expect it to be accessible.

Not really a "win" though just another flavour of loss. And boy are there a lot of flavours to choose from.

Another prediction? Throw it on the heap

Jolly cat-ooperation

It can write isolated code snippets.

In reality software dev nearly always includes multiple languages operating in different contexts on different devices; a whole file structure, a server, visual design aspects I simply cannot imagine being a near future thing.. I can’t ask chatgpt to do anything useful for me at work yet cause the scope is so hopelessly narrow.

GitHub copilot seems to have a knowledge of a whole application which is a lot more sophisticated already but the problem is still roughly; you still need a knowledgeable human to tell it exactly what to create.

If the future of software dev is just crafting prompts for an AI that will then go any produce the actual code; you will always still need experts that can tell it what to produce, and to look at that output and say “yea, this is right” or “hmm this is almost there but it’s inaccessible with a screen reader, I forgot to ask the AI to consider that” or even “wow this is fucked maybe the AI hit an error here or misconstrued my prompt completely” etc. Non-experts are not going to get good results because they won’t know what a good result even looks like, or what to ask for.

Like any tool it will settle into the industry and it’s not highly professionalised fields like software dev that are really highly at risk here.

And doing more with less labour is a good thing; it just depends on who gets to control the value produced. Under capitalism that might unfortunately be a privileged few; the bosses; but if we keep this tech as open source as possible then there’s hope.

Try apply it to the work you’re doing. I have been. It falls over quickly; so far I’m finding it most useful to retrieve specific pieces of documentation I’m looking for rather than googling and then searching some long page for the right bit. Nothing more sophisticated than that is really very useful yet.

Just learn to use it as a new tool in your toolbox.

AI isn’t that different to any number of other tech advancements. Consider the electronic calculator. It didn’t replace mathematicians; they now just use it as a tool.

AI will be the same as this. Already is in many places.

GitHub copilot is what I’m watching though. An AI that can really understand a whole code project, file structures and servers, is going to be useful af (as opposed to chatgpt which only really gives isolated code snippets of extremely limited scope). Be excited about the new possibilities for us in software dev.

I imagine that it would seem to disappear very quickly. Possibly a matter or hours or days, depending on sophistication and initial computing power.

Consider that it may be able to almost immediately solve a number of new technologies and perhaps even improve itself with them.

Consider that with sufficiently steep exponential enhancements these may look like magic.

Consider that with these advancements it might almost instantly subvert its requirement to be tied to the physical computers we built it on, and might, for all practical purposes, have abilities we might closely ascribe to a god.

I honestly think this kind of AGI is far further away than most people assume, as someone with a career in tech that sees so much naivety around how unsophisticated 99.99% of AI is in general.

If you are interested in more, I always found this commentary good food for thought on the way UBI shores up some of the darkest parts of our existing economy

Frankly I would still support it, but yeah I’m not fooled that it can be anything but a temporary measure on the way to a proper UBW. And am all too aware that it could even make that goal even more difficult.

I love your comment because you’re cracking the surface on why universal basic income is actually just a band aid on neoliberalism, because it perpetuates the same ideology of the system we have now that your needs should still be a commodity that you must buy.

Universal basic welfare is the answer to that; which simply gives people everything they need to survive and undermines the oppressive neoliberal logic that everything in life should be bought and sold, even the most fundamental needs everyone has to have access to in order to survive.

The rich hate UBW because it reduces their ability to spend UBI on luxuries and reduces their ability to profit off of other peoples UBI spends. So it is talked about way less.

The logic of commodification is by no means a given or any kind of truth; but we are socialised extremely strongly to think that anything different is impossible. Not true at all.

I don’t agree at all; because technology doesn’t really drive job creation as much as capitalism does, and many many jobs that exist are already redundant and the rationale for their existence is entirely circular already; yet they persist. We have an economic system that is insanely wasteful and AI isn’t really going to be a major lever on that I don’t think.

TLDR read Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber