The process you're cheering on gives more power to the powers that be who are the problem.
Theyre never going to use that power to provide basic income for everybody. You cannot wave a wand to make them do that. Theyre going to use that power to accumulate even more resources and raw materials and impoverish/expel the "useless" labor.
Realistically our leverage over the powers that be is mostly about our labor and our ability to withdraw it.
> The process you're cheering on gives more power to the powers that be who are the problem.
That's not necessarily true. Technology gives more power to everyone. The rise of factories historically did not give more power to the powers that were at the time (the aristocracy), but instead lifted the masses from poverty (after some initial turbulent period).
> Theyre never going to use that power to provide basic income for everybody. You cannot wave a wand to make them do that. Theyre going to use that power to accumulate even more resources and raw materials and impoverish/expel the "useless" labor.
Contrary to leftist propaganda, the rich are not some cartoon villains and psychopaths that abuse people just for fun. The reason why the rich currently exploit the poor is because doing so provides them with significant material gains. Once they can obtain the same or even better material gains by "exploiting" robotic labor instead of human labor, the logical outcome is not further abuse and exploitation of other humans, but simply indifference.
> Realistically our leverage over the powers that be is mostly about our labor and our ability to withdraw it.
That is (partly) true, but only in the current economic system. Widespread human-level AI changes the equation, and not necessarily in favor of those who are currently rich. You are applying capitalist and socialist analysis to a system that transcends those terms (AI post-scarcity economy).
>That's not necessarily true. Technology gives more power to everyone. The rise of factories
Did not give more power to everyone. At best you could say that it shifted power from landed gentry to industrialists. Even that switchover was less of a change than you'd think.
The practical upshot of the beginning of industrialization was very negative. The enclosure movement stripped families of their land to push them to work in the factories where they would never go willingly. The famines in Ireland and Ukraine were both triggered by redirecting grain to export in order to fund domestic industrial expansion.
The most brutal two wars in human history were that brutal precisely because industrialization made it possible.
>instead lifted the masses from poverty (after some initial turbulent period).
What lifted the masses from poverty wasnt the factories it was the labor movement which occurred in response to horrific working conditions and the reliance those factory workers had on mass labor (specifically coal mining which was incredibly labor intensive and a key economic chokepoint).
The whole of that is glossed over by right wing libertarian propaganda but that last part is particularly underemphasized.
>Contrary to leftist propaganda, the rich are not some cartoon villains and psychopaths
Do you look at peter thiel and elon musk or the robber barons and see anything else?
The few billionaires ive encountered personally were no less sociopathic but they kept it hidden better. Power corrupts. Immense wealth corrupts. That isnt a leftist thing, that's a human thing.
>The reason why the rich currently exploit the poor is because doing so provides them with significant material gains. Once they can obtain the same or even better material gains by "exploiting" robotic labor instead of human labor, the logical outcome is not further abuse
False. It just shifts the focus of their exploitation from human labor to natural resources.
They'll fight over oil and minerals and gas and water resources and at best leave us to rot (homelessness will skyrocket) and at worst they'll find some excuse to exterminate those of us they particularly dislike (Gaza serves as a model here).
The world economy's reliance on human labor has been the best inducement to peace there is. It's no coincidence that all of the countries in the world with lots of natural resources and no industry are the biggest shitholes and vice versa.
>That is (partly) true, but only in the current economic system. Widespread human-level AI changes the equation, and not necessarily in favor of those who are currently rich.
Human level AI (assuming it ever happens) will simply make the fight over natural resources that much more intense because labor will matter that much less.
You're living at the tail end of a relatively golden period in a country where labor was the economic bottleneck and natural resources were relatively plentiful. Venezuela and Angola and Iraq are models of what happens when that equation is reversed.
Nobody gives a shit about appeasing the people who live in those countries, their labor is virtually worthless. They are a model for how the rest of us will be treated in a world where human labor loses its value.
> Did not give more power to everyone. At best you could say that it shifted power from landed gentry to industrialists. Even that switchover was less of a change than you'd think.
Compare the standard of living in 1850 vs. 1950. Even of relatively poor people. I rest my case. Technology is the main force that improves human wellbeing. There are of course also other factors, but they are less important.
> The practical upshot of the beginning of industrialization was very negative. The enclosure movement stripped families of their land to push them to work in the factories where they would never go willingly. The famines in Ireland and Ukraine were both triggered by redirecting grain to export in order to fund domestic industrial expansion.
Yes, that's what I mean by "initial turbulent period". Perhaps the same will happen with AI, but it will be worth it in the end. Don't give up prematurely!
> What lifted the masses from poverty wasnt the factories it was the labor movement which occurred in response to horrific working conditions and the reliance those factory workers had on mass labor (specifically coal mining which was incredibly labor intensive and a key economic chokepoint).
It was not one or the other. It was both. The rise from poverty would not be possible if factories were not developed. And I am not saying that in the AI world we would not have to fight for our rights. Of course we would. But the problem is not AI, just like historically the problem were not the actual machines in factories.
> False. It just shifts the focus of their exploitation from human labor to natural resources.
Exploiting more natural resources is the only way to increase standard of living of humanity. I am OK with that. Resources don't have feelings, and ecology is not more important than human wellbeing.
> The world economy's reliance on human labor has been the best inducement to peace there is. It's no coincidence that all of the countries in the world with lots of natural resources and no industry are the biggest shitholes and vice versa.
The reason why some countries become shitholes is mostly ideological (extremist political or religious ideologies take hold of the population). Every shithole country is non-democratic (communist, totalitarian, fascist, theocratic etc..). This is not a problem of natural resources. It is a problem of people, their education, their beliefs/ideology, or, as capitalists say, "human capital" is the main problem here. AI could help here too, especially with education.
But yes, if people themselves are largely ignorant and extremist, no amount of resources and human-level AI robots will help them make a well-functioning society. You could drop masses of AGI robots into Afghanistan tomorrow, and people will just use them to kill or oppress each other more effectively, instead of using them to start building an AGI utopia...
Nobody is. It's the AI slop which is supposed to replace this shit which barely worked with equally shit shit which doesnt work which people are romanticizing.
Most of the human written code was slop, but the really fundamental and successful stuff we relied upon and which we didnt want to throw away? yeah, not so much. most of that was actually really good.
those EJB monstrosities were routinely swapped out by some saas written in python by somebody who did it properly and werent responsible for a lot of late and over budget projects which barely worked or didnt work.
>Copyright exists to encourage progress in the arts and sciences. Not to enrich artists or scientists.
Is impoverishing them supposed to encourage progress in the arts and sciences?
Whatever it started out as (and I have my doubts it was ever a tool to help artists), it's now primarily a tool corporations use to milk creativity for profit and squash it where it might interfere with that profit.
> Is impoverishing them supposed to encourage progress in the arts and sciences?
No, but that needs new laws. Not an abuse of the old ones justified under the thinnest of pretenses.
I don't think that folks stop to consider what bending copyright law into these weird shapes to meet their ends will do to other aspects of copyright.
For example, sampling in music. How is that different from AI generated music? If anything AI uses LESS of any individual song. You can't just say "no derivative works." That would fully halt progress on many fronts.
Sampling in music is long settled in the US - it is a copyright violation if not licensed, with the rare exception being cases where the sample is fair use:
If a song was made purely of samples with no original input I'd argue it's in the same category.
Maybe AI uses less of any individual song, but does AI make something actually original and transformative or is it just bits and pieces of all the things it learnt on (in simplified terms)? I think that's where the discussion lies.
Entirely new works are often created entirely from samples, and can be amazing. See "Frontier Psychiatrist" by The Avalanches for one example done entirely by humans. There are many others.
Amazing or not, that is not the discussion. LLM output can look amazing as well but that's not what I'm arguing about.
Also with LLM's we'll reach a point when everything is made out of samples (metaphorically speaking), where do we fit original content then, or who will make it if it means it's going to be consumed by data centers immediately.
> Also with LLM's we'll reach a point when everything is made out of samples
We reached that point with humans long ago. There's nothing new under the sun. Only remixes of dead peoples greatest hits. The pentatonic scale, for example, was not invented by the people who use it.
Science and art would have to start over from scratch if you expect things to all be genuinely new from first principles.
> who will make it if it means it's going to be consumed by data centers immediately
people who enjoy making it won't be able to afford to do it, alternatively only rich people will have means to do so. So I guess thats progress in some eyes
> people who enjoy making it won't be able to afford to do it
The demand for paintings did not disappear when photography was invented. Though many Luddites claimed it would. There were even those who wanted cameras outlawed to protect the artists livelihoods. Do you think we should have listened to those people?
Product manager skills do not overlap much with dev skills.
If I put some devs in front of a customer I'd be very much afraid of them doing what they ask rather than what they want, for instance, or overindexing on one particular customer's problem.
If the devs understand and can empathise with the users and there aren't a lot of them, sure, maybe but on most projects it's more effective to have the distilled and filtered customer feedback from a PM who is good at being a PM.
It feels economically naive because theyre presuming LLMs are magical boxes that replace humans.
I doubt 99% of what a nurse does would be meaningfully aided by an LLM and where it would help it'd probably be a crappy band aid around a bigger festering issue anyway (e.g. poorly managed IT, deliberately confusing insurance processes).
we have literal "starving authors" - they pretty much all need second jobs to survive.
for the authors themselves I don't see much difference between having no copyright at all and being thrown a few pennies on their work from amazon. either way the ability to make a living from those pennies clearly isnt motivating them.
the future jk rowlings of the world will still buy lottery tickets to fame and fortune whether or not she ends up being worth $20 million (weak/no copyright) or $1 billion (strong copyright).
i think product just uses these use cases as their example demos and then when they show it to marketing theyre like "OK I guess this is what it's for".
I think most people miss the point of TDD. It is not just about edge cases. It ought to be:
* A way of matching requirement use cases to tests.
* to modulate the number of tests written not only to make sure you have enough coverage but also to make sure you don't pointlessly cover the same edge cases multiple times.
* a way to cheaply provide feedback and validation on code as you are writing it.
With AI the ability to churn out useless tests has exploded (both with TDD done badly and with no TDD at all) and that has actually incurred a new type of cost we didnt have to face before.
I remember having a conversation with somebody from the BBC about a study they commissioned once to ask license payers about how the license fee was spent.
the overwhelming response apparently was:
* we don't have particular concerns about how the license fee is spent.
Theyre never going to use that power to provide basic income for everybody. You cannot wave a wand to make them do that. Theyre going to use that power to accumulate even more resources and raw materials and impoverish/expel the "useless" labor.
Realistically our leverage over the powers that be is mostly about our labor and our ability to withdraw it.
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