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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s sarcasm, right?
You do have more than 2 braincells, right?
I hope.
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.
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.
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!
“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.
Yes. As an aside, the post title reminds me of LinkedIn clickbait. Agree?
