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.
The Jetsons were the 1% and the Flintstones were the rest.
They were the Elysium space station people
Remember how he also only worked 3 days a week, and had job security even though he was fired every episode?
George Jetson had a very good union.
There were no people down there. It was just a flooded planet
They had an episode on the ground I thought.
What we thought was the ground, could perfectly be a bigger platform for the buildings
Yes. As an aside, the post title reminds me of LinkedIn clickbait. Agree?
Agree. Like. Thumbs up.
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I agree. Thoughts?
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.
A roboticist working in AI and robot research.
Thank you for representing your field better than the other guy in this discussion. This gives me some hope that there are folks involved who can see the forest for the trees.
Yes but the artbro luddites will not read this. They are narcissists who are upset that some kid with a computer in Argentina can now generate anime titties instead of paying $300 for them to draw it and they are fighting the realization of how bullshit their industry was from the get-go
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.
Does anyone still use scruboards and clotheslines for laundry? What about only using the sink for dishes (that one is a bit more common)? I feel automation already hit the bad things she is talking about.
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.
You cannot be an apologist unless there is a credible accusation to defend against.
Disagreeing with people that cannot coherently decide why they are upset is a good thing.
As for your comment, I agree that using art to train AI and then selling the result is a problem. Our legal framework needs to catch up on that. Personally, I do not see why it would not be copyright violation. That is clearly what it would be if a human did the exact same thing. A tool directed by a human does not seem so different from that. In my reading of copyright law, this misuse of AI may already be illegal.
We just need a few court cases to sort that out.
“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.”
So, fair enough. Does this have anything whatsoever to do with AI? It really waters down your other point ( addressed above ).
If you are trying to agree with the OP concerning “laundry and dishes”, please think about your position. Those are two of the best examples for how technology has reduced time spent and effort expended on menial chores. I struggle to think of better ones. They also seem like prime candidates to be improved by adding AI to our existing mechanical devices.
What could the actual complaint be here? At worst, you can assume that AI will not help you with laundry and dishes. Any less extreme position will be that it probably will. The same can be said for any other menial task I can think of in my day-to-day life.
Sorry to be a rationality apologist but I am not going to line-up against totally misdirected outrage. Being mad does not make you right.
Well said.
Let me make it clear first. Generative AI is not art. Prompt engineering is not a real job.
AI is just a tool. It is still waiting for an artist to use it to create art, just as a Photography or Photoshop image is not an art by itself.
But… training with images is the same as humans learning how to draw, though… I know it’s boring but what you said is boring too. We could fall back to the same conversation over and over because you start with the same conversation again and again.
FUCK AI, and also FUCK PEOPLE AGAINST AI, Good thing I hate everyone!
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I mostly agree with this. I’m coming to think that in the future defining the word “art” for the context of a discussion would avoid a lot of the back and forth I’m seeing here and help these discussions be more productive.
“Prompt engineer” is on a lower level than “tarot fortune teller” for me. As a fortune teller, you are required to have people skills, as a prompt engineer, you just have to be an opportunistic dork.
A prompt engineer is nowhere near a tarot card user. Tarot cards do not contribute to a gigantic machine that eats job opportunities and spits out misinfo.
AI apologists
Im not an “AI apologist” because theres nothing to apologise for.
Much like im not an “automatic loom apologist” or a “steam engine apologist”
Apologist comes from the greek word “apologia”, which means “speech in defense.” Apologetics isn’t apologizing, it’s defending.
Huh, well TIL
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Yeah let me just sit down and look up the etymology of literally every single fucking Englush word 🤓🤓🤓
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Who said anything about etymology?
Literally the guy I first replied to?
Don’t be so bitter dude. Go out and be the change you want to see.
What does the even mean? Like what are you even trying to say?
Fuck AI
be the change you want to see
Obviously this means AI sex dolls.
This right here will be our species demise
I want to be able to create all the things Ive dreamed of creating my.whole life without spending 4-8 years in fucking art school, saddling myself in debt for a skill that was virtually impossible to make a living off of. and that was BEFORE ai. AI has enabled me to create things that would have been fucking.impossible for me to.create on my own and and absurdly.expensive to have commissioned. Its allowed me to create things that would be literally.impossible without it.
I had ideas. I just couldn’t afford to make it real. With ai I’ve been able to.
I never would have paid an artist to do what I’ve been able to done for myself. Even if I could have afforded it.
Ai may commodotize creativity but it democratizes art.
Jeans Pierre can still build a lifesized model.of Donald trump.out of tampons and I get an to cover my walls with viking chicks with huge fits that look like they’re painted by van Gogh, and oil paintings of my face instead of whoever the model.was on history’s greatest works.of art.
If you’re an artist pissed off about ai taking your money: you probably wouldn’t have made much anyway. Being an artist was always a reckless gamble.
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That’s sarcasm, right?
You do have more than 2 braincells, right? I hope.Look I got nothing against y’all drawing shit or putting together low fi hiphop beats to shit and piss to or writing some waluigi yaoi or other content production, but it doesn’t exactly put men on the moon, kapische?
The only reason any of you earn money as is is because advertisements can be served embedded into content, while corpos earn money mostly from landlording over IPs. Like all of marketing, it’s a drain on society from an economic standpoint.
I think you have some real mental issues and you are feeling some sort of disconnect from the world. I’ll leave you be, you’re freaking me out.
Yeah scadoodle luddite
I hope you get the help you need.
So your argument is that putting in effort and investing money for a skill is ‘virtually impossible’ and that artists shouldn’t complain because they ‘probably wouldn’t have made much anyway’?
Following your logic generative AI would never come to exist, because there wouldn’t even be anything created for an AI to learn from.
Uh. No. You can tell because of how my post is.
If you weren’t creating before “AI”, you’re not creating after.
It’s like hiring a person to do art for you, but instead you took all their shit and used a machine to make a soup out of it.
Get fcked.
So i had an idea for a thing. This thing did not exist. Parts of it may existed in some fashion, but the thing itself did not.
Now the thing exists. It hangs on my wall.
We may have different definitions of the term creation in mind here. Can you suggest a better word to use for using my input to make a thing that did not exist before? I can use that going forward.
And yes. Ai combines things that other people have made before into something else. Usually the Mona Lisa does not have my face. Then I spent around and hour in stable diffusion and maybe two hours in gimp. Now the Mona Lisa has my face. I would call this new, as the Mona Lisa, to my knowledge, has never before had my face on it. Let alone looked like my face belonged on it.
I’m making an assumption here, and feel free to correct me if its incorrect, but I’m guessing that you feel its okay when a person blends artistic styles into something that is distinctly their own.
If this assumption is true: why is it legitimate when a person does it and not a machine? Or is it?
And another question: if the issue is with artists being compensated (maybe another assumption here, in apologize if I’m off base): would you support legislation to the effect that those that inspired or influenced another artist’s work receive recompense for it?
Second to last question: if an ai is trained solely on works in the public domain do you still have an issue with it?
Final question: if existing artists styles can be replicated using a genealogy of sorts using only those public domain works, and they’re combined in a manner that no one has thought to combine them: are there issues you have with that? What are they?
Honestly trying to get a better understanding of where the borders of right and wrong here for you are so I can better understand your position.
Ai combines things that other people have made before into something else. Usually the Mona Lisa does not have my face. Then I spent around and hour in stable diffusion and maybe two hours in gimp. Now the Mona Lisa has my face. I would call this new, as the Mona Lisa, to my knowledge, has never before had my face on it. Let alone looked like my face belonged on it.
Dude, just use Photoshop. That’s all you have to do. You just cut out the face of Lisa and put your own. You can also use blurring to make it look better. “Ai” isn’t needed.
Based on your first comment, you’re not a person I want to have a discussion with.
Maybe someone else values their time less then I do and will indulge in your quest to find the right and the wrong.
you’re correct and almost intelligent enough to spell so I obviously will lose if I continue this argument I started by shouting in my echo chamber of luddite artbros
My ROFLCopter goes woot woot woot woot.
You’re having a conversation with yourself here? Are you ok?
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Cognitive dissonance at work.
Lol, keep telling that to yourself.
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.
Not to mention if it does happen and it does make it to consumers these robots will be insanely expensive to make and maintain. People going “why doesn’t AI just work on physical labor?!” can’t seem to understand that software is a million times easier and cheaper to make
It’s not like scientists woke up one day and said DAMN we need to make robots take away fun jobs ans nothing else. It’s just where machine learning took us.
I want AI (well, a robotic helper) for laundry and housework. Technically I’ve already got a dishwasher which is close enough there.
I’d love to have AI help me with making art just like other tools, but not take over it
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.
My dishwasher has remote start functionality if I download the app. But what I really need is remote-load functionality.
AI tools to create their »own« art
I would like an AI tool that lets me easily make the art in my mind, skin to how a dishwasher washes dishes. Like, the labor reduction would be a huge boon.
Bingo. The goal is to produce what is in my mind.
A large part of creating art is the process though.
Goes more so for the more physical art forms like traditional painting, sculpting and so on where you have a physical medium that will shape your working process. But even in digital art I feel like you should go through and iterate and let the process shape how the end piece comes out.
Having a program just like translate your brain impulse into a picture feels kinda hollow… it’s definitely better than image generators but still, there’s a part missing.
like 60%
If you’re going to throw out random/arbitary bars like this we can’t have a serious discussion.
I didn’t build my cameras. Or write the software. Or construct the lenses. I didn’t do 60% of the work that goes into my shooting video.
See how arbitrary this all is?
Okay, I edited it, sorry my majesty for using an arbitrary number to illustrate a point.
It was a valid objection.
Anyone who believes AI is being used for art/writing and not for other things like doing the dishes, has a myopic understanding and a strong confirmation bias. This strawman argument is defeated by a simple Google search to see the multitude of other places where this technology is benefiting humanity.
AI is helping physicists speed up experiments into supernovae to better understand the universe.
Isn’t it more relevant to point out, that washing machines are using machine learning algorithms for years?
Anyone who believes that anyone here is trying to suggest that art/writing is the only thing AI is used for, has a myopic understanding of how nuanced conversation works.
I don’t think artists/writers care about what else AI is being used for when they are losing their livelihood to a kid with a computer.
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Why are you here?
To point and laugh?
Bye.
but it is true that big tech companies are pouring disproportionately large sums of money into AI that seems like it is doing creative stuff so that they can ride the AI hype wave.
Oh no big companies are spending money instead of using it to buy back their own stock, giving bonuses to the c-suite, or just hoarding it. And they are spending it on projects that are total moon shots that might take a decade or more to pay off.
This is terrible. And not at all what people have been yelling at tech companies for doing since about 2002.
I expect my tech companies to only invest in proven technology and engage in the shortest possible shortterm thinking.
I dont really expect them to change behaviour, I just hope they cease to exist
Hey hope in one hand and shit in another, then tell me which fills first.
why are you holding shit in your hand?
Alright then, here’s what I think about your sources. A lot of these seem like technologies that won’t really help the plain folk. I’m sorry if this is a bit long, but I made sure to put time into this because I find it very important.
Source 1: I’m not sure if this type of tech, that being neural networks “trained” on previous data, is actually going to help scientists find out what supernovae explosions are like. This is simply a composition of all the explosions the data is trained on. A better process is this designing of an airplane wing. This uses algorithms with vars that actually represent physical variables, like lift and friction, to find the best airplane wing design, instead of feeding a neural network airplane wing designs that work. It ended up performing a bit better than expected because of real-world variables.
Source 2: The problem this AI is trying to solve is brought on by hospitals purposefully laying off staff. However, I really like this quote.
The AI, dubbed MyEleanor, isn’t designed to replace human navigators, Moadel-Robblee explained. “She” calls patients who didn’t show up or canceled their colonoscopy appointments. If they pick up, she has two primary directives: transfer them over to a human navigator and, if the patient consents, guide them through a brief survey on why they missed their appointment. “Our virtual navigator, she doesn’t sleep. So she can call earlier, later, or on different days. The navigators that are human are invaluable. They have the human touch. We can’t replace them, but we can supplement,” Moadel-Robblee said.
I think that this is technically a good thing, but it’s very small compared to the jobs lost from AI.
Source 3: First off, three people already beat this robot to the punch.
The first dishwasher to be granted a patent was invented in 1850 by Joel Houghton. It was a wooden box that used a hand-turned wheel to splash water on dirty dishes, and it had scrubbers. Ten years later, inventor L.A. Alexander improved on Houghton’s machine by adding a “geared mechanism that allowed the user to spin racked dishes through a tub of water,” according to an entry on reference website ThoughtCo. But the person we have to thank for the modern-day dishwasher is Josephine Cochran (sometimes spelled Cochrane). Her machine was the first to use water pressure instead of scrubbers to clean dishes—which made it more efficient than Houghton’s or Alexander’s versions.
After that, the article is almost nothing like you described. The reporter is going off from a promotional video by people clearly trying to bedazzle investors. Then, the article itself states that “[i]t’s unlikely that Figure 01 is using ChatGPT itself”, and ruminates on advancements that would only happen “[s]hould everything in the video work as claimed”. It’s just AI hype.
Overall, this technology is not “benefiting humanity”. I like how open you are about things, tho.
Edit: I made sure that my statements were not in accidentally in a quote.
This strawman argument
Ironic coming from your strawman argument that people believe that is the only thing AI is used for, when literally noone, including the OOP, has claimed anything like that.
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
Keep talking like that and they’re going to take your asshole certificate away.
capitalism is the reason why AI is doing art
Calling AI generated pictures “art” is insulting to most artists. I agree though, all this hype is driven by short-sighted capitalism
It’s good enough that people won’t hire artists to do their art. Are you a corporate suit who needs mock ups of a certain idea or product? Have an unpaid intern spend 5 hours prompting Sora AI to produce hundreds of, and sort down to 5, images that you can use on your post-golf lunch meeting tomorrow afternoon
and you somehow don’t think having slaves/unpaid interns in your story is the real problem?!
I think you might have missed that my entire post was a criticism of that industry.
It’s one of many problems.
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If it’s not art then what are artists afraid of?
You seriously think people wouldn’t do for free what others require pay for under any other socio-economic society?
Oh, right…. Capitalism is to be blamed for…. Everthing ever.
Don’t get me wrong. Capitalism sucks, but let’s not dilute the water.
Capitalism is the reason why AI doing art is a problem.
I cannot overstate how much I want a robot butler to take my dirty dishes and fill and start my dishwasher for me. Or just wash the dishes “by hand”. It’s not that filling the dishwasher takes a long time, but it’s just boring work.
I just can’t fold laundry. Everything else I’m fine.
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…
Joanna just because you get high before your writing or your ‘art’ doesn’t mean it’s good… Go ahead and put it on the fridge but don’t expect it to stay there… wash your own damn dishes and clothes stinky
Who pissed in your cheerios geez?
I did
