"What trillion-dollar problem is AI trying to solve?"
Wages. They're trying to use it to solve having to pay wages.
Hear me out. We let the robots take over our jobs and have them overthow the capitalist class for us
this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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Antiwork
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I thought they were trying to defeat the pesky menace of "public opinion" and this is just an extension of Persona Management Software.
The point is to drown out real human voices so it always seems like public opinion supports the status quo.
Makes it a lot easier to massage the message of your bought and paid for mass media.
These folks don't like when public opinion does stuff like... support Luigi Mangione for example. Better to flood the zone with "rational" voices.
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I 100% agree, AI will save so much money by getting rid of C-suit employees.
Capitalist Realism: "Oh no. The factory automated my job, so now I need to find a new employer to pay me less money, possibly in a totally different city or state."
Socialist Idealism: "Hooray! The factory automated my job! Now I have more time to socialize with my friends and neighbors, pursue hobbies, and volunteer towards new community improvements that will make my town and state a better place!"
Absolutely. In a sane world automating work is a good thing. In a less than an ideal world, the transition might be a little painful, but it'd be good in the long run.
In our world, every bit of efficiency gain is eaten by the oligarchy. It's all about how much they can take away from us.
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Under capitalism labour unions have perverse incentives to combat automation when under the ultimate labour union of socialism we would all be motivated to be working towards it.
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Who?
Silicon valley/the capitalist class. Try to keep up, will you?
And not only that -- all of the people you see claiming "AI is worthless"; are just huffing that copium REALLY hard. All of the AI models out there aren't just LLMs and Diffusors; there's a lot of robotics work going on behind the scenes, and a lot of the things that the middle-class do in their day-to-day are being attacked here.
The transition to a post-scarcity world is going to require some major rethinking if we're going to keep our population up at 8 billion. Because at this rate, we're looking at a major turnaround.
there’s a lot of robotics work going on behind the scenes, and a lot of the things that the middle-class do in their day-to-day are being attacked here.
If you get behind the scenes of a big retail company like Amazon or Nike, you get a certain increased amount of automation in the manufacturing and physical sorting. But this isn't happening absent human labor. It's happening in concert with human labor.
The end result is humans expected to work at the speed of machines, rather than humans off-loading the physically intense tasks to machines.
I think "AI" has just become shorthand for LLMs and diffusers though in general conversation.
If being used in that context, the person using it is an idiot.
huggingface.co/models -- shows many of the things AI is being used for. And even in the context of only LLMs and Diffusors, you cannot claim that LLMs are worthless with a straight face.
you cannot claim that LLMs are worthless
It's not a question of "worthless" so much as "net benefit". How much money and manpower are we investing in the tools?
Because, right now, the Sam Altman approach to LLMs is to simply throw more compute at the problem forever. The degree to which he seems interested in reinventing the model or the foundational technology pales beside his demands for GWhs of new power to brute force a better solution.
If you're spending $1T to do $100B worth of human labor, that's not any kind of efficency.
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They are actually using immigration and offsboring to solve issues of wages...
AI is a veneer for fake news to run with while reality is just basic old tactics
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Primarily white collar wages. Hardware increases overhead. There’ll be plenty of domestic manual labor jobs available as China shifts away from its factory landscape.
Well, they're trying to solve work scarcity. I'd argue reading that as "wages" is an inherently capitalist take.
Mind you, they are not succeeding at fixing work scarcity, so the point is kinda moot. "AI will take your job" is the magic centre of the Venn diagram where AI shills and AI haters overlap.
Somehow, all AI manages to do is strip the innovation and creativity out of the most exciting career fields.
The rote physical labor of polishing the end product, marketing it to the masses, and distributing it via service sector retail facilities seems to stubbornly persist.
Well, I don't know about that. I mean, I haven't integrated any AI in my personal workflow at all beyond... I don't know, maybe not remembering something and finding that faster than a classic search engine just to remember the name.
But in the places around me where I do hear people picking bits of it up I see it used for what? Proofreading and rote, repetitive tasks? I don't know that it's productive at all for even that, beyond expensive, custom-trained ML processes that have little to do with commercial generative AI.
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Somewhere, a PhD student 2 years into research on a single protein structure raises an eyebrow.
Hah. Hey, I'm not even saying the tech is useless, but best case scenario that's our PhD student friend using ML to process data faster, or in ways that weren't feasible before, not being replaced by an AI PhD student.
20 years ago, we had 9 people behind the camera running a live local newscast (Floor Director, Cam Operator, Teleprompter, Chyron, Graphics, Video Playback, Live/Commercial Cut-in, Audio, and Director). Now, in a market three times the size, the same job is done with 3 people and a metric ton of automation. What used to feel like a bridge crew piloting a ship now feels like conducting corpo bots within time-frames that prevent giving any of them real attention. I do believe most AI systems will continue to need people in the loop. It'll just be fewer people in less fulfilling positions.
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What about benevolent omnipotent AI overlords though, how else are going to live in an utopia?