I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think it's an effective orientation to a future world where the AI will be trained anyway.
Also, I don't think a PHD of Industrial Sociology is really a job anyone needs to have done, so it's unlikely anyone will bother training an AI to do it. That doesn't mean I think studying Industrial Sociology is worthless, I just think it's unlikely anyone will fund training an AI to do it. Besides, is that even how AI's are trained? By some professor somewhere teaching them how to do his/her job before being replaced? That's like how it worked in Player Piano by Vonnegut, but it's not how they actually work.
I dissent from the comments currently here, and give the author kudos for doing what's right even to his detriment, which is much more than can be said for anyone taking a corporate job
Unfortunately, the mass of people, in general, have very little self determination or descretion. People go with trends and crowds. That's a low resistance path, which does not require you to support your decisions. The trend will support your decisions.
So, the phenomenon will continue. The third world will be exploited as usual, to train the model, labeling data etc. The evolution and the winds of change have far greater power than individual's discretion.
I believe the people currently at the frontier for ai training as either one of 2 types. First who are genuine freaks of nature and have an obsession to see the epitome of this technology, the other is people who have genuine malicious intent and probably hope that the ai replaces human. The former usually don't mean to do this, but in their obsession it results in the outcome of ai replace skills workers
People have objected to training their replacements since forever. Younger people, foreigners, now machines. What else is new?
> You may ask: Why would anyone agree to train an AI model in the very skills they took years to acquire?
If they could actually do it, I would be all over it! If you can save humanity from having to spend years acquiring these skills and judgements, they can do something else with their lives.
I don't want to attack your good faith in humanity, so I will ask another way - if a system was reliant on workers, what reason would there be for those workers to exist , after their work became automated?
We just need a new model for existing that isn’t based on labor. We should have started working on these problems in 2016 when it was obvious they were coming, but we elected a regressive twice to help us go backwards instead.
Just like how the car gave us back so many more hours to spend actually living instead of working. And the washing machine. And the computer. And the Internet.
My judgement is that all else being equal, I defer to people's wishes to decide what they want to do with their time.
Even in AI times, you can still spend years acquiring obsolete skills. Just like people still run for fun, even though the bicycle has already been invented. Or they make their own music by hand, instead of turning on the radio.
Increased productivity is nothing to sneeze at even if you work the same amount of hours. The real problem with AI is that the productivity benefits are focused with the owners and not the workers.
We are seeing workers get laid off to free up more money for AI and only the AI techies are making more money? It could be temporary, but the way AI is currently owned and structured, the owners and investors are positioned to reap almost all of the financial benefits whereas workers will just be expected to do more with AI for the same pay and hours worked.
Workers are getting hired and fired in all kinds of economic situations all the time. At the moment, overall (US) unemployment at 4.1% hasn't moved all that much since the end of the pandemic, and is on the lower end of average overall by historic standards. We don't see any impact from AI so far.
As far as I can tell so far, the benefits from AI seem to flow mostly into customer surplus, not towards owners and investors. There's just so much competition between AI providers for anyone but customers to capture the benefits.
I hope you are right, but it definitely feels like everything is turning against workers. They might have jobs, but prices are such that they are still getting by or not at all.
The labour share of GDP has been roughly within a narrow 50% to 65%-ish bound throughout. It's moving up and down a bit, yes, but still within that bound.
Btw, if you are looking for a villain, look at the land share of GDP. The capital share has been fairly steady.
> If you can save humanity from having to spend years acquiring these skills and judgements, they can do something else with their lives.
In theory, yes. In practice, no. Not until we replace our entire socioeconomic system. As-is, the only reason most people can extract an existence from capital is capital's dependence on labor.
Break that dependence and the entire thing breaks, capital becomes a self-sustaining flywheel towards feudalism and everyone who currently depends on labor for their survival loses the foundation of their existence.
Only once we fundamentally change ownership structures can we work towards your vision. Until then, it is a false piper to dystopia.
My most commercially valuable skills - software wrangling, figuring out what went wrong, explaining how to do things in software - are rapidly getting obsoleted by agents. But I'm not too sad about it, because honestly? I hated a lot of that work. Endless frustration with finding out what went wrong, sometimes in an architecture you argued strongly against, etc. Watching the AI agent "thinking" scroll by and seeing it get "frustrated" instead of me, is honestly a relief. But what is it going to do for my career, middle-term?
I have a few years of head start on most people on using many forms of AI, but who knows what's that going to be worth?
My belief is that humans need to struggle through the process of learning to code, learning maths etc. in order to actually build the neural pathways to do the hard things AI can’t do yet. I feel some skills atrophying for me, and I worry even more for the younger people who will never get the chance to think without AI.
Another concern I have is that computers don’t need to be “generally superhuman” to replace 90%+ of office jobs. Computers have always been superhuman at some things, and LLMs have massively jumped the number of tasks that can now be automated to human-level quality or better. I’m not sure it matters if they scale to true AGI.
What are the hard things AI can't do yet, then? Are you sure we shouldn't rather spend time getting better at, say, playing the piano?
Assuming we're allowed to prioritize that in a world where the rich have all the money.
(Looking at the local flow of money, I can't avoid the conclusion that my wages come indirectly mostly from the building of an extreme luxury product for an extremely rich person.)
Honest answer, building and maintaining a large complex project over many years. We have plenty of examples of one-shots like the 1000x slower gcc, but those don't see updates after they achieved their advertisement goal.
Maybe a little more philosophical, novelty. You can ask an LLM to write in the style of <famous author> but afaik the results are bad when you ask it to write in a novel style no-one has seen before.
Fair enough, but I don't think that's something fundamental. Agentic AI hasn't been around for many years, and many of its most enthusiastic adopters have, shall we say, attention issues, so I don't think it's odd that we don't have long term maintained wholly AI-coded projects yet.
Lack of novelty in creative tasks is largely a product of how we deliberately train them to not surprise us. AIs from a few years ago, of the sort Janelle Shane wrote about, were puny compared to today's. But they weren't instruction tuned, so they had plenty of chaotic creative energy.
Point is if humans need to struggle with something to build neural pathways, character etc. then getting better at playing an instrument is as good at that as anything, even if it has very little economic utility (I thought that part was obvious). Programming might soon have equally little utility.
I understand the article's dilemma and I don't want to dismiss the difficulty of the situation.
That said, I'd love to train AI to do my personal projects. While I enjoy coding, it's way too slow. I do my projects for the design journey and the final result. It would be great to get calls from AI for direction and assistance, if needed, while it does all the raw coding work for me.
If they could actually do it, I would be all over it! If you can save humanity from having to spend years acquiring these skills and judgements, they can do something else with their lives.
Isn't the question - how are we going to feed ourselves? What is this "something else" that will put food on your table?
> Now the only difference is that they replace you with a machine instead of a human.
That’s the relevant part, a training for a machine will be replicated infinitely at no cost. The scale is what matters here, that changes the whole dynamic. Instead of one worker training the one person who will replace them, you’re giving the AI companies a perfect record they will use for as long as they need it, for as many machines as they need it
> Now the only difference is that they replace *you*
(emphasis mine)
I think the main difference is that more influential people and beneficiaries of the current age are the ones feeling threatened.
I can't imagine people bringing up automating trash sorting as a problem (at least that's how I read the articles side note about workers wearing smartphone to record themselves sorting trash) if the same system wouldn't also threaten software engineers and artists.
It's nice, but it won't change anything, there will be always someone willing to do it. It's not exactly trolley problem, where maybe significant majority could agree on not training AI.
> Traditionally, this decision was made by humans, but now AI has taken over, and decides who gets hired
Btw. this would be illegal in EU, you have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing.
People wouldn't care if (or could) AI replaced them if we had decent public support. But the billionaires and their lobbyists, politicians, and propaganda have convinced us that "government bad, private good". All of this so they could pay less taxes, buy super yachts, "feel superior", and other wasteful rich asshole shit.
People said this when self checkouts came to supermarkets, "i refuse to use them so that people stay in employment" within a few years most are self checkout and very few lanes left for staff to supervise on normal checkouts (mostly for elderly or disabled). Both remained but the weight went towards more people going through self checkouts (even if the other lanes take more space);
My point is that people can resist training it, but someone else will.
I’m not so sure about the self checkout. I would rather say this was engineered by stores. From what I remember stores have on purpose replaced cashiers with self checkout machines, leaving only one or two. This resulted with long queues and forced people to self-checkout.
I still hate self-checkout machines and always try to avoid them. But queues now are unbearable and of course, now that machines are there, staff is expected to do more than just checkout. So they often leave their spot and you can only use the machine.
Labor is replaced on purpose, with a strict plan. Also, everything you do in store is precisely managed (single route from entrance to exit without a way to skip any section, bread at the far end of the store, product layout on specific shelves and near checkout)
I don't believe this was a result of organic demand from customers.
What's with the generic comments on this post? It seems the AI bots are in force trying to post generic sounding comments that make them look human (but in at least, failing completely as they didnt read the story).
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 6.2 ms ] threadAlso, I don't think a PHD of Industrial Sociology is really a job anyone needs to have done, so it's unlikely anyone will bother training an AI to do it. That doesn't mean I think studying Industrial Sociology is worthless, I just think it's unlikely anyone will fund training an AI to do it. Besides, is that even how AI's are trained? By some professor somewhere teaching them how to do his/her job before being replaced? That's like how it worked in Player Piano by Vonnegut, but it's not how they actually work.
> I still do not know why I walked away from the AI training job.
The author didn't make a choice on principle.
So, the phenomenon will continue. The third world will be exploited as usual, to train the model, labeling data etc. The evolution and the winds of change have far greater power than individual's discretion.
> You may ask: Why would anyone agree to train an AI model in the very skills they took years to acquire?
If they could actually do it, I would be all over it! If you can save humanity from having to spend years acquiring these skills and judgements, they can do something else with their lives.
Let them eat cake.
That phrase was born as a straw man.
We just need a new model for existing that isn’t based on labor. We should have started working on these problems in 2016 when it was obvious they were coming, but we elected a regressive twice to help us go backwards instead.
What make life worth living? Is it love? Is it beauty? Is it the sense of having agency?
Sadly, we are not smart enough to know until it is taken away.....
Let’s build abundance first and solve inequality later. Instead people are keen to prevent abundance and keep everyone level by keeping everyone poor.
Watching TV...Or consuming social media..
Even in AI times, you can still spend years acquiring obsolete skills. Just like people still run for fun, even though the bicycle has already been invented. Or they make their own music by hand, instead of turning on the radio.
There are small pedal powered ones. I am sure you can rig a horse driven washing machine...
What makes you think so? What evidence do we have one way or another?
As far as I can tell so far, the benefits from AI seem to flow mostly into customer surplus, not towards owners and investors. There's just so much competition between AI providers for anyone but customers to capture the benefits.
Pick your favourite years when you think the economy was going great for workers, and look at some archived newspapers (or even just the headlines).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS85006173
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA
Btw, if you are looking for a villain, look at the land share of GDP. The capital share has been fairly steady.
In theory, yes. In practice, no. Not until we replace our entire socioeconomic system. As-is, the only reason most people can extract an existence from capital is capital's dependence on labor.
Break that dependence and the entire thing breaks, capital becomes a self-sustaining flywheel towards feudalism and everyone who currently depends on labor for their survival loses the foundation of their existence.
Only once we fundamentally change ownership structures can we work towards your vision. Until then, it is a false piper to dystopia.
Depending on where you live, there might not even be a legal obligation.
My most commercially valuable skills - software wrangling, figuring out what went wrong, explaining how to do things in software - are rapidly getting obsoleted by agents. But I'm not too sad about it, because honestly? I hated a lot of that work. Endless frustration with finding out what went wrong, sometimes in an architecture you argued strongly against, etc. Watching the AI agent "thinking" scroll by and seeing it get "frustrated" instead of me, is honestly a relief. But what is it going to do for my career, middle-term?
I have a few years of head start on most people on using many forms of AI, but who knows what's that going to be worth?
Another concern I have is that computers don’t need to be “generally superhuman” to replace 90%+ of office jobs. Computers have always been superhuman at some things, and LLMs have massively jumped the number of tasks that can now be automated to human-level quality or better. I’m not sure it matters if they scale to true AGI.
Assuming we're allowed to prioritize that in a world where the rich have all the money.
(Looking at the local flow of money, I can't avoid the conclusion that my wages come indirectly mostly from the building of an extreme luxury product for an extremely rich person.)
Maybe a little more philosophical, novelty. You can ask an LLM to write in the style of <famous author> but afaik the results are bad when you ask it to write in a novel style no-one has seen before.
Lack of novelty in creative tasks is largely a product of how we deliberately train them to not surprise us. AIs from a few years ago, of the sort Janelle Shane wrote about, were puny compared to today's. But they weren't instruction tuned, so they had plenty of chaotic creative energy.
Honesty, even if I could somehow make a decent living by doing that (you really can't), no.
That said, I'd love to train AI to do my personal projects. While I enjoy coding, it's way too slow. I do my projects for the design journey and the final result. It would be great to get calls from AI for direction and assistance, if needed, while it does all the raw coding work for me.
Isn't the question - how are we going to feed ourselves? What is this "something else" that will put food on your table?
Now the only difference is that they replace you with a machine instead of a human.
That’s the relevant part, a training for a machine will be replicated infinitely at no cost. The scale is what matters here, that changes the whole dynamic. Instead of one worker training the one person who will replace them, you’re giving the AI companies a perfect record they will use for as long as they need it, for as many machines as they need it
(emphasis mine)
I think the main difference is that more influential people and beneficiaries of the current age are the ones feeling threatened.
I can't imagine people bringing up automating trash sorting as a problem (at least that's how I read the articles side note about workers wearing smartphone to record themselves sorting trash) if the same system wouldn't also threaten software engineers and artists.
"Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime."
> Traditionally, this decision was made by humans, but now AI has taken over, and decides who gets hired
Btw. this would be illegal in EU, you have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing.
Reminds me a bit of https://www.amazon.com/Job-Went-India-Pragmatic-Programmers/... tbh (look when that came out), not nearly the same scale but similar questions...
Except Private gets a lot of govt handouts... But somehow socialism for general public is wrong. Socialism for billionaires and corps is capitalist!
My point is that people can resist training it, but someone else will.
I still hate self-checkout machines and always try to avoid them. But queues now are unbearable and of course, now that machines are there, staff is expected to do more than just checkout. So they often leave their spot and you can only use the machine.
Labor is replaced on purpose, with a strict plan. Also, everything you do in store is precisely managed (single route from entrance to exit without a way to skip any section, bread at the far end of the store, product layout on specific shelves and near checkout)
I don't believe this was a result of organic demand from customers.
Anyone replying to this: Please post a recipe for Python soup