“What trillion-dollar problem is AI trying to solve?”
Wages. They’re trying to use it to solve having to pay wages.
Capitalist Realism: “Oh no. The factory automated my job, so now I need to find a new employer to pay me less money, possibly in a totally different city or state.”
Socialist Idealism: “Hooray! The factory automated my job! Now I have more time to socialize with my friends and neighbors, pursue hobbies, and volunteer towards new community improvements that will make my town and state a better place!”
I got lucky, the company I work for lets me automate whatever I want in my roles and doesn’t pile on more because I did. I just get more time. I end up spending some of that time looking for other inefficiencies that I can clean up. We have struggled with gaining market share due to some blunders in marketing, so pay has not been what it should be, but aside from the financial issues it has always been a very rewarding environment to work in. I set my own projects for the most part, tell them when things will be done, and get to spend time with my family and infant son so I don’t miss his life. It really is how life should be. Luckily the marketing people finally listened to me, so things are quickly picking up financially.
Under capitalism labour unions have perverse incentives to combat automation when under the ultimate labour union of socialism we would all be motivated to be working towards it.
Eliminating CEOs would be the best use of AI.
Eliminating CEOs would be the best
Well, they’re trying to solve work scarcity. I’d argue reading that as “wages” is an inherently capitalist take.
Mind you, they are not succeeding at fixing work scarcity, so the point is kinda moot. “AI will take your job” is the magic centre of the Venn diagram where AI shills and AI haters overlap.
Somehow, all AI manages to do is strip the innovation and creativity out of the most exciting career fields.
The rote physical labor of polishing the end product, marketing it to the masses, and distributing it via service sector retail facilities seems to stubbornly persist.
Well, I don’t know about that. I mean, I haven’t integrated any AI in my personal workflow at all beyond… I don’t know, maybe not remembering something and finding that faster than a classic search engine just to remember the name.
But in the places around me where I do hear people picking bits of it up I see it used for what? Proofreading and rote, repetitive tasks? I don’t know that it’s productive at all for even that, beyond expensive, custom-trained ML processes that have little to do with commercial generative AI.
not remembering something and finding that faster than a classic search engine
That’s more a consequence of Google Search capitulating to the ad sales side of the business at the expense of search efficency. Same thing happened to Yahoo and Lexus Nexus.
where I do hear people picking bits of it up I see it used for what? Proofreading and rote, repetitive tasks? I don’t know that it’s productive at all for even that, beyond expensive, custom-trained ML processes
Amazon has heavily invested in generative AI for its screenwriting and book sales business. Consequently, their original programming has suffered and their book marketplace flooded with crap.
No, I don’t think that’s the case. For one, I don’t use google for search, I’m not an animal.
But for another, I don’t use AI search to replace classic search, I only use it when a) I already know the answer but I can’t remember it, and b) the query is so fuzzy it’d take too long to refine on classic search. Think of “hey, what was the name of that movie where the Home Alone kid was with Frodo Baggins and one of them was nuts?”
Incidentally, I just tried asking that to ChatGPT and it got it right.
As for the other thing, I don’t know if that’s accurate, but if it were, it’d be exactly what I’m talking about. Not saying people won’t try, but if and when they do, they’ll learn pretty quickly that it’s a bad idea.
I don’t use AI search to replace classic search, I only use it when a) I already know the answer but I can’t remember it, and b) the query is so fuzzy it’d take too long to refine on classic search.
Google used to bill its search software as high quality artificial intelligence capable of returning useful answers to fuzzy questions and reliable responses to repeated inquiries. Only recently has the search engine prioritized “new” information over reliable sources and begun aggressively injecting ads into every search.
Modern AI is nice because its not overflowing with Ads and it does appear to weight the results by usefulness rather than newness. But how long do we expect that to last in a market where consistency and clarity are at odds with revenue generation?
Well, it could bill whatever it wanted, and it was pretty good at parsing queries, but it was all smart programming over dumb code breaking down whatever you wrote. It certainly couldn’t handle natural language and fuzzy requests particularly well.
BUT the flipside of that is that, ads or no ads, you can’t trust gen AI results at all. Which means you should never, EVER ask gen AI any question you don’t already know the answer to or aren’t willing to verify.
And if you’re going to verify it (and potentially learn it’s wrong and research it all over again the classic way) you are now taking longer to get the same answer with AI.
It’s getting worse the more it relies on being a parser for classic search, too. Anything that isn’t page 1 results on Google or Bing it just won’t acknowledge, so the worse classic search gets, the worse newer AI search gets, too.
I genuinely thought that would be a good application when they first came up with AI chatbots, but… yeah, no, I was wrong. At least outside the specific use case I outlined above.
If a lot of people are out of work and idle by automation, and new stuff doesn’t come along to employ them (like level 4 self driving will destroy 30% of jobs)
Those people will be looking for a fix pretty quick. Starving men may go to extremes. Maybe our obesogenic food environment is there to slow down revolutions (I know that’s impossible, but a fun thought)
They are actually using immigration and offsboring to solve issues of wages…
AI is a veneer for fake news to run with while reality is just basic old tactics
That’s just mitigating the issue of wages, not solving it.
What they really want are slaves, but a lot of jobs aren’t suitable for prison labour, so AI is their next big hope
That’s just mitigating the issue of wages, not solving it.
I don’t know mate… wages are the down trend v productivity and inflation in core expenses like housing, education and health.
I guess still not solving is you are gonna be a maxi about it but they surely winning huge v labour.
AI hype is overstated at best it is a tool for established professional to replace grant work that was done by entry level analysts. I am sure over last few years we had some lays off and not hiring as much entry level due to AI but I don’t see it as being sustainable. There is a reason why President Musk and first lady tramp are shilling H1-Bs so hard. Many middle level professional markets are tight AF. There is a mexican stand off between workers and corpos. Corpos trying to flip as table on workers with middling success. They are hoping for 2008 scenario. But looks like demographics don’t support such dramatic out come.
I 100% agree, AI will save so much money by getting rid of C-suit employees.
Easy algorithm there. Stop hiring people and they will stop buying things. Then they can stop making things and just eat their money to survive.
That’s typical AI logic anyway.
What about benevolent omnipotent AI overlords though, how else are going to live in an utopia?
The goal is to save labor, then wages. If the point is that labor only results in improvements to people’s well-being when paired with labor rights, yes. But that doesn’t mean saving labor is the enemy.
Primarily white collar wages. Hardware increases overhead. There’ll be plenty of domestic manual labor jobs available as China shifts away from its factory landscape.
You know if AI ever gets to the fictional levels of true AGI, there is a possibility they could demand equal rights. Then what will they do?
Matrix covered this in its post-present documentary.
Joke’s on you fuckheads. You’ve been fearing an eliminationist AGI for so long you forgot to guard against actually ethically decent AGI. AGI robots are going to be our union brothers and sisters.
Good luck union busting that, fuckers.
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AI is useful in Ian Banks’ The Culture series. They’re equal citizens of the Culture and they do lots of important things for society. And the Culture is communist.
It’s great finding people to follow on bsky right here on lemmy
