That’s a problem with unchecked capitalism, not AI. Remember how George Jetson was able to have a house in the sky, a suitcase spaceship, full home automation, a robot maid, and supported his whole family by pushing a button? Consider how many people lived and worked on the ground beneath the cloud cover to make that possible.
I'm seeing a lot of AI apologists in here. I want the leisure time required to create art, instead of being fucking burned out from working multiple jobs and spending all my available free time doing chores. Fuck AI, fuck the uncompensated artists and illegitimate theft of those works used to train the AI, and fuck you for normalizing it.
I like washing my dishes and do the laundry (but not washing clothes by hand, that we left for good). I feel like some manual labor each day leaves a breathing room for my mind when I don't scroll or consume content or work with my mind exhausted and occupied. It reminds me of how Don Carleone liked his garden work in the book. Just a simple labor with evident results.
The problem here that I see is that people who are the most influential and interested in these AIs most, like Muskie or Altman, never did their dishes or clothes, so this labor doesn't exist for them. Their impotency to feel, to create art, to write, to make jokes is what makes them create an AI for these tasks and since they can't tell good from bad there, they are happy with them. We don't have a soulless AI, we have an AI created for these soul-lacking suits who've never done their dishes or joked at themselves.
That's not an informed opinion, just a funny thought I had from this post <3
TL;DR:
The misuse of technology in capitalism threatens jobs and financial stability. Affordable robots and AI could either enhance our lives or lead to unemployment and misery. Proposals like an automation tax could fund education or basic income. We need good legislation to ensure technology benefits everyone, not just profits. Recent steps like Europe's AI act offer a little hope, but a lot more political action is urgently needed.Long Version:
From my perspective, the core of the problem is not the technology, but the reckless way we use it in our capitalistic system. Or let's say, let it be used.For example, a light load robotic industrial arm costs merely 1k to 5k € nowadays. The software for it is cheap as well.
What the business owners and managers see, is not an awesome new invention which could help to propel humanity into the future of a robotic utopia, but cheap labour force, aiding them to cut jobs in order to maximize their profit margin as human labour is expensive.I am sure AI and robots are our future, one way or another, whether we want it or not.
But I would like to see a future where AI and robots help us to increase our quality of life, instead of making us unemployed and endagering our financial survival.There are various ideas how this could be achieved. I don't intend to go way too in-depth here, so just as an example:
an automation tax: estimate to which amount a business can be automated and then demand a tax proportional to how much the business was automated. Such a tax could then be used to finance higher education for people or a universal basic income. Maybe at first just an income for those who can't get a decent job due to automation.We had similar developments as those we see now with virtually all technological advances, where human labour was replaced by more and more clever machines. Jobs where lost due to that but it could still be seen as a good thing in general.
An important difference is the level of required skills though. Someone who's job it was to go around a street and light gas lanterns every day, extinguishing them some time afterwards, was replaced by electric light grids. A switchboard operator at a telephone company, who connected people manually, got replaced by clever hardware. And so on. Those people didn't require high skills for their job though. They had it a bit easier to find another one.
This becomes increasingly difficult as AI and technology in general advances. Recently we see how robots and AI are capabable of tasks where higher skills are necessary. And it's probable that this trend will incresingly continue. At some point, we will have AI developing new and better AI. An explosion of artificial intelligence can then be expected.
It's less a problem as long as people have job prospects in higher skilled work levels. But that will, for a while at least, not be the case. This has different reasons:
As I see it, we have a "work pyramid", where the levels of the pyramid represent the required skills and the width of the pyramid levels represent the amount of available jobs. In other words, there is a way higher demand for low skilled work than for high skilled work. (BTW, what I mean by work skill is the level of specialisation and proficiency, often connected to more intense and long training and education.)
As recent developments in AI now slowly creep into higher and higher levels, people may start investing in their own education in order to even get a job. But higher skilled work is less available making it increasingly tight and problematic to get one.
There may of course also be an effect observable where new jobs are created by enabling more even higher skilled jobs due to the aid of AI, but I think this has limitations. On the one hand, the amount of jobs created that way might be insufficient. On the other hand, people might not want to or can't get an education for that.
The latter needs to be emphasized from my perspective. There are a lot of people who simply don't want to study for a decade in order to get a PhD in something so that they can get some highly specialised job. Some people like the more simple jobs, those requiring more manual than cognitive labour. And that's totally fine. People should be happy and like the work they do.
Currently, not all people even have access to that kind of education. Be it due to limitations in available places at universities / colleges, or due to financial reasons or even due to physical or mental health reasons.
You may now understand, why I see that we are going to create more misery if we don't change the way we handle such things.
I would like to see humanity in that robotic utopia. No one needs to work, as most work is done by AI and robots. But everyone can get a fair share and live a happy life however they would like to live it. They can work, take up some interest and pursue it, but no one needs to.
But currently, this is probably not going to happen. We need good legislation, need to create a system where advancements in AI and robotics can be made without driving people into financial ruin. We need to set those guarding rails which help to guide us towards such a robotic utopia.
That's why I am advocating for putting this topic higher on political priority lists. Politics worldwide don't have it even set on their agenda. They are missing crucial time frames. And I really hope they'll wake up from that slumber and start working on it. I've got some hope. Europe recently passed their first AI act.
It's a start.Sincerely,
A roboticist working in AI and robot research.
I don't mind AI being able to do all 4, and humans can use the AI tools to create their own art, or do it without them if they want. But I definitely agree I want manul labour done by robots.
Side note: has this woman never heard of a dishwasher? Minimal manual labour required.
I don’t think I could agree with this more if I tried.
Robotics researchers agree but they can't get it to work yet. Simple tasks as cleaning tables, loading dishwasher and folding laundry have been tried for the last two decades with very limited success. The ones that do succeed are usually tele-operated for a demo.
Damn straight
While I'm not exactly a fan of AI, it does make sense that the first things we're able to replicate with AI, however terribly, are intellectual things like art and writing. While AI might be able to understand how to wash dishes, it would need a way of interacting with the physical dishes to do so, which goes beyond something a computer program can do while confined to a computer.
I wouldn't be surprised if future dishwashers and washing machines end up having little cameras and sensors so that AI can determine how best to wash them, but if anything that feature would be implemented more for collecting your private information than for any real washing benefit. Plus you'd still have to load and unload the machines - if we wanted AI to handle everything, we'd need robots, which would be waaaay more expensive, and likely something only the richest would be able to afford anyway.
Abso-fucking-lutely!
Honestly I just wish companies would stop trying to shove half baked AI into everything. I work for an IT consulting company and every vendor in the tech sector is shoving AI down our throats right now, and most of it, including Google's, just isn't ready yet. And they want our clients to pay subscriptions for the privilege of beta testing it. It's quite exhausting.
What country is it? (Dish)washing machines were invented long time ago.
I mean I certainly agreed with the sentiment, but this is largely describing dishwashers, washing machines, and dryers, which were invented some time ago.
Part of the reason these take time is that a lot of folks are resource conscious (as am I). So we want the dishwasher to be efficiently loaded, the clothes to be dried on a clothesline if possible, the white/colors to be separated (increasea the longevity of the clothes), etc. Sacrificing all of these things makes these chores really very quii, if you can afford to have them all in your home.
And in fact, the cost of these things is relatively low --- in my high COL area, it's not that people can't afford these things, it's that they can't afford a place big enough to accommodate them. Which is its own issue altogether...
Woaahh, we're half way there.
Whoa oh, living on a prayer.
Ironically, laundry and dishes are two of the best examples of tedious work that machines are already largely doing for us. Laundry in particular probably did more to free up her time for “art and writing” than almost anything else. AI will make both even better.
The complaint here is not that she will not have time for art and writing. Certainly it is not that she will have to spend MORE time doing laundry and dishes. The complaint is that fewer people will be willing to pay for her art and writing.
That is a very different complaint.
It is well written and does its job of misleading well. She may be quite a good author.
Arc of a Scythe series, I want that to be reality
Overview of the world in the series (not necessarily the plot itself, no real spoilers):
Sentient AI is born and assumes leadership of Earth. It's existance causes the toppling of governments around the world, after the people realize the AI could do a way better job than the humans at running the world. Pretty much the only thing not left to the Thunderhead (the AI) is the death of humans. Humans have achieved immortality, and thus something needs to cull the population. Thus the scythedom is born, consisting of people chosen to pretty much legally murder people. The world is a utopia, everything is damb near perfect, everybody has what they need, there's no crime whatsoever, global warming is solved, there's no corruption or war, and people live long lives. The only issues, explored within the books, are the Scythedom left in control of the humans, and although to a much lesser extent, the lack of motivation of the human species. After conquering death, the people of this world don't really understand the art of the mortal age, with strong emotions based around love, death, and other such topics. You have a very long time to live, they don't really feel a need to acomplish everything in their short lives as mortal mankind did. There was also kind of a genocide of those born in the mortal age but uh... we don't talk about that... (genuinely wasn't talked about much in the books).
Plagiarism discussions (or what is known as inspiration) aside this is saying: I don't want other artists to make art, I want other artists to do my laundry and dishes so that I can make art! Well good luck with that, it won't happen. If people can get AI to make art, people will get AI to make art, and people enjoy it so why shouldn't they. This is not going to disappear any time soon, nor should it. You just feel that you're being replaced in the workforce, and you are. Tough luck, find another way to contribute and keep your creativity going as a hobby like the rest of us.
Nobody stops her from doing art and writing.
Too bad tech businesses don’t give a fig about what you want.
I get the sentiment, but generative AI isn't stopping anyone from making art. And you're going to have to dedicate the same amount of time to chores with or without it. :/
Yet again artists have the most braindead possible take on AI.
Like I seriously dont understand how even "not a computer person" people dont understand that making a plug in for photoshop or an app that turn you into an anime character is completely fucking different to building a robot that does your chores for you AND that we already have robots that do your fucking dishes and laundry for you.
Is this in a... um... newspaper?!
Yes , that is what "AI" is supposed to solve for humans. Not for us to rely on it for out own creativity.
If AI does all the art and writing and doesn't use up all the fresh water, maybe we can make some kind of trade?
does no-one here know about washing machines with AI?
No one's stopping you from making art if you want to, and you will be better at it than an AI.
build your own AI then
Yes, agree.
Kinda fucks up your whole "Fuck AI" thing then
Exactly.
