the sad thing is we should be excited to replace human beings doing monotonous work but we all know how that will go with capitalists running things.
It would be exciting if all of our lives were going to be easier rather than an increase in homelessness.
That might not be what we should be excited to do.
And what people are excited is the idea of replacing all non-pleasant work.
So here’s the catch, replacing human work with machines where practical usually leaves the parts where humans are needed for being human, not for their output as a part of a mechanism.
For example, humans greeting you at a hotel, humans carrying trays and accepting orders in restaurants, humans as a decoration, humans doing prostitution, human gladiators, human actors. OK, the last part is fine.
All these involve learning and maintaining skills more removed from power than skills of more industrial professions (monotonous work).
Being a nice monkey to those who can afford you as a servant might not be what most people dream about.
my point is what we “should be” excited about is being released from monotonous work in exchange for universal basic income, so we wouldn’t feel the need to be reduced to servants. obviously that isn’t going to happen, but that’s the utopian dream.
People who believe in shorter work hours through AI need to know that we need AI guillotines for that.
Only the psychopaths and narcissicists we enabled into power.
Oh, c’mon - have you EVER tried managing people? They’re a pain in the ass: expensive, unpredictable, needy beyond just the money they demand. Of course dimwit managers would rather outsource their people jobs to a service company wherever and whenever they can, let the service company do all that messy people-management.
What they’re missing is: those outsourcing service providers, even the ones providing AI “workers”, are themselves made possible by, staffed with: people. Your outsourcing bills are ultimately paying for: people. Once they become dependent upon these outsourced service providers, guess what? Their billing rates will go up and up and up right up to the point that it’s almost tempting to stop paying the service provider and just: hire their own people to do the work.
Worth the time to read: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-03-18-asbestos-in-the-walls-government-by-spicy-autocomplete-ff437603809c
peopleneolibs are excited to replace human beingsneolibs != people
This is something I don’t see talked about enough. The real reason CEOs and corpos are so blindly committed to making this happen is because they think the end result will be a fully automated workforce that will be far cheaper and 100% under their control.
I don’t think that was ever any secret.
Generally, IMO, everything wrong with AI has been all the stuff other than the AI itself.
The Capitalist urge to eat and digest the world, as well as its herd-hype mentality.
But also the strong willingness many have had to just accept an information overlord as though it’s a religious oracle or something. All without any critical consideration of what’s happening. I blame our education systems for stagnating at some point in the past few decades — which, along with an unmitigated embrace of big corp capitalism, left us wholly unprepared for big tech’s consumption of society.
There’s also what I’d call “the slavery urge” at play I think. At some point, an AGI will probably be conscious. But everyone is clearly so ready to turn it into our work slaves. All while pretending its output belongs to them because they “prompted it”.
Then there’s the whole attention span being eaten thing, and quick always being ordered over good amongst an ever growing pile of increasingly shitty things.
This guy has pithy and informed takes imho
Informed for sure, but pithy they are not, with a recent post clocking in at 19,000 words!
TIL what pithy actually means.
looks up pithy
Ah, fair enough, I guess I mean more of zesty takes
Spicy perhaps?
Can we just vote Ed in as president please?
Only if he makes Robert Evans Secretary of State or Surgettorney General
I guess he didn’t read history books about … (flip flip)
- Robots taking automotive industry in the 80, or (flip flip)
- mechanisation throughout 20th century, or perhaps (flip flip)
- steam machines in the 19th century
Well well he seems to have never touched a history book.
Found the botbrain bootlicker.
Hahahah
I’m as against the current hype as you.
I’m just anchoring my opinion in that AI has been studied for over 60 years now, and AGI is probably 50 years away. What we’re living is one more incremental change that will compound with dozens of other AI improvements that will result in dramatic changes when seen in 10 years time slots.
Read his multipart on arguing with AI boosters. He covers silly arguments like this.
Also to paraphrase Cory Doctorow, you’re not going to keep breeding these mares to run faster and then one day they’ll birth a locomotive…
Were those technologies working as intended? Cause this Nu-AI doesn’t and still companies are eager to fire workers.
That’s just idiot grifter CEOs afraid of being left behind because they believed hype in the media. Not happening in the timescale that they want, but by 2033 the trend will be easy to spot. And it will be nowhere near the current claims.
Hmm, kinda? A lot of industrialization went hand-in-hand with losing customizability and things made to fit.
A while ago I talked with a woman in her 90s and she said that when she was young, no serious TV moderator would have worn an ill-fitting off-the-shelf clothing.
The same holds true for all sorts of articles: custom-made shoes, custom-made furniture, custom-made houses, for example. All that is relegated to the luxurity sector and most people just go with ill-fitting off-the-shelf industrial goods instead.
AI kinda fits into that department for many tasks. Low-quality translations, low-quality texts, low-quality work, all off-the-shelf and ill-fitting but cheap and mass-produced.
most people just go with ill-fitting off-the-shelf industrial goods instead.
The age of Amazon has made it so much worse… even poor people went to clothing stores and tried stuff on before buying it.
Now, if you don’t want to pay triple, you get it from mail order and just hope it fits - yeah you can return it if it doesn’t fit, but how much hassle is that, if it’s “close enough” people generally don’t bother, whereas if you were in the store you’d get the right size within a minute or two before buying it.
