2d ago

I wish people went past "AI will take our jobs" point.

Yes, it will happen, inevitably. Just like every other technology that makes people more productive. Just look at a picture of what a bank sas like 100 years ago.

But the biggest problem that nobody seems to be talking about is that this will make a few companies control an essential tool for a lot of future jobs. It won't matter if AI can't fully replace your job, all it takes is that you can't work without it. It doesn't even have to be because you can't do your job without it, it just has to speed you up enough so that you have to use it to keep up with everyone else.

It has the potential to become something akin to a factory, and at that point it won't matter if you can make a great drawing or piece of software if the supervised slop machine can do thousands of good enough art/software at the same time. And just like a factory, it becomes a means of opression. But maybe that's a bit too far for your average centrist.

Anyway, I just find the discourse could be a lot richer beyond this and "I want machines to clean my place, not make the drawings I like doing"

7 comments

um. factories [physical and organizational structures of productive labor] aren't a "means of oppression". Capitalists owning them and workers not having control or ownership of the conditions, operations, product etc of them are the "means of oppression", not the factories themselves. Do we at the 'grad need a rehash of marxism/ML basics...?
- Maybe I didn't choose the best words but this wasn't meant as a big treaty on theory. Obviously factories, when run for the people, are good things. Just like these AI tools.
  
  Right on. Sorry if I misread what was intended to be voiced from "average centrist" pov, there's been a ton of ai/tech reactionary buzz even among nominally "communist" circles recently, to the point where I'm even irked when people call generative tools "slop machines" in the same way they say "chinese goods" to insinuate cheap/bad product, when it's like, that's what you (or rather, walmart and amazon and they've monopolized and limited what alternative options you have) ordered the cheapest crap (for highest markup). Does nobody remember handmade slop content farms like 5minutecrafts? Same "market forces" (if you wanna call it that) are just ordering the same "slop" just from different sources, it's not like before genai came to wider prominence there was actually that much less "slop" and un-factual/poor quality/misleading content.

That factory also then becomes The Single Source of Truth that is controlled by only a few. Not just for your job, but everything else. AI will replace search engines, which replaced libraries, and then history itself becomes whatever Big Brother needs it to be.
- Library still exist and are still consulted.
  Google still exist and still is an advertisement corporation first and foremost.
  AI will also be misused, but it can also be a good tool. It's just not as magical as people tend to think it is.
- It's not even a matter of "if" or "when", all we have to do is look at the behavior of Grok over the last week+ and how clearly someone is attempting to weaponize it to shape a historical falsehood into its responses to people. It's funny now when the slop machine can't talk about its favorite color of M&M without also talking about White Genocide, but that's just a miner issue with calibration.

7 comments