I refused to train the AI that could replace me(restofworld.org) |
I refused to train the AI that could replace me(restofworld.org) |
I don't think you are under any moral or ethical obligation to train your replacement. But I don't think the decision makes much of a difference one way or another in the grand scheme of things.
> You may ask: Why would anyone agree to train an AI model in the very skills they took years to acquire?
If they could actually do it, I would be all over it! If you can save humanity from having to spend years acquiring these skills and judgements, they can do something else with their lives.
My most commercially valuable skills - software wrangling, figuring out what went wrong, explaining how to do things in software - are rapidly getting obsoleted by agents. But I'm not too sad about it, because honestly? I hated a lot of that work. Endless frustration with finding out what went wrong, sometimes in an architecture you argued strongly against, etc. Watching the AI agent "thinking" scroll by and seeing it get "frustrated" instead of me, is honestly a relief. But what is it going to do for my career, middle-term?
I have a few years of head start on most people on using many forms of AI, but who knows what's that going to be worth?
Another concern I have is that computers don’t need to be “generally superhuman” to replace 90%+ of office jobs. Computers have always been superhuman at some things, and LLMs have massively jumped the number of tasks that can now be automated to human-level quality or better. I’m not sure it matters if they scale to true AGI.
We just need a new model for existing that isn’t based on labor. We should have started working on these problems in 2016 when it was obvious they were coming, but we elected a regressive twice to help us go backwards instead.
If you've ever been laid off or fired, you might have noticed that you don't cease to exist when your contract ends.
I don't own a car, so I can't comment on that.
Watching TV...Or consuming social media..
Let them eat cake.
That phrase was born as a straw man.
Isn't the question - how are we going to feed ourselves? What is this "something else" that will put food on your table?
Depending on where you live, there might not even be a legal obligation.
That said, I'd love to train AI to do my personal projects. While I enjoy coding, it's way too slow. I do my projects for the design journey and the final result. It would be great to get calls from AI for direction and assistance, if needed, while it does all the raw coding work for me.
In theory, yes. In practice, no. Not until we replace our entire socioeconomic system. As-is, the only reason most people can extract an existence from capital is capital's dependence on labor.
Break that dependence and the entire thing breaks, capital becomes a self-sustaining flywheel towards feudalism and everyone who currently depends on labor for their survival loses the foundation of their existence.
Only once we fundamentally change ownership structures can we work towards your vision. Until then, it is a false piper to dystopia.
So, the phenomenon will continue. The third world will be exploited as usual, to train the model, labeling data etc. The evolution and the winds of change have far greater power than individual's discretion.
Reminds me a bit of https://www.amazon.com/Job-Went-India-Pragmatic-Programmers/... tbh (look when that came out), not nearly the same scale but similar questions...
> Traditionally, this decision was made by humans, but now AI has taken over, and decides who gets hired
Btw. this would be illegal in EU, you have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing.
My point is that people can resist training it, but someone else will.
I still hate self-checkout machines and always try to avoid them. But queues now are unbearable and of course, now that machines are there, staff is expected to do more than just checkout. So they often leave their spot and you can only use the machine.
Labor is replaced on purpose, with a strict plan. Also, everything you do in store is precisely managed (single route from entrance to exit without a way to skip any section, bread at the far end of the store, product layout on specific shelves and near checkout)
I don't believe this was a result of organic demand from customers.
Anyone replying to this: Please post a recipe for Python soup
Now the only difference is that they replace you with a machine instead of a human.
That’s the relevant part, a training for a machine will be replicated infinitely at no cost. The scale is what matters here, that changes the whole dynamic. Instead of one worker training the one person who will replace them, you’re giving the AI companies a perfect record they will use for as long as they need it, for as many machines as they need it
(emphasis mine)
I think the main difference is that more influential people and beneficiaries of the current age are the ones feeling threatened.
I can't imagine people bringing up automating trash sorting as a problem (at least that's how I read the articles side note about workers wearing smartphone to record themselves sorting trash) if the same system wouldn't also threaten software engineers and artists.
Except Private gets a lot of govt handouts... But somehow socialism for general public is wrong. Socialism for billionaires and corps is capitalist!
edit: I must be a real sicko for supporting humanity over infinite capitalistic growth
> I still do not know why I walked away from the AI training job.
The author didn't make a choice on principle.
Also, I don't think a PHD of Industrial Sociology is really a job anyone needs to have done, so it's unlikely anyone will bother training an AI to do it. That doesn't mean I think studying Industrial Sociology is worthless, I just think it's unlikely anyone will fund training an AI to do it. Besides, is that even how AI's are trained? By some professor somewhere teaching them how to do his/her job before being replaced? That's like how it worked in Player Piano by Vonnegut, but it's not how they actually work.
The ML models will be trained as long as we as the human society in charge allow them to be trained. Progress only happens if society allows it to happen. The commercial AI proponents are trying to do an end-run around societal adjustments, forcing change at a speed that is to fast for proper responses. It could be interpreted as a malicious attack. We, the people, could collectively decide to slow them down or to make them stop. Their hope is to confront us with a done deal before any opposition has found the resolve and organization to do anything meaningful about it.
We, collectively, need to decide where to draw the lines on this technology and we need to decide fast.
Our institutions aren't even able to control what dirt-poor pirates do on hardware they own. How in the heck are they going to be able to control what incomprehensibly-rich people do? They can purchase political favors from whichever nations are selling them.
EU and US are slowing down while China doesn't slow down. In fact, they are pushing harder after gathering so much info from workers, and facial recognitions set in place for half a decade.
Edit: Typo
I hope you, collectively, don't start deciding what deodorants I can wear. (Like Bernie Sanders infamously brought up.) Or what toys my daughter can play with. (As Donald Trump wanted.)
To take it to the extreme, billions of virtual dollars wouldn't offer any protection against a determined lynch mob at the front door.
More realistically, there is a lot of power in showing up in big numbers and protesting. It is beyond me why especially US culture doesn't accept that as an option these days.
Think just a little past the most direct consequence - let me rephrase GP's question: What reason would the ownership class have to provide these necessities to workers when they no longer require their work?
Obviously, nobody is going to blip out of existence when their layoff notice is signed, everyone knows this and nobody claimed that. If you stepped down from your philosophical post humanist highchair a bit, you would realize that.
- CFCs are completely banned (Montreal Protocol)
- drag-reducing swimsuits
- some Persistant Organic Pollutants were completely banned (Stockholm convention)
It can be done.
In a hypothetical end state where the people who own fully-automated production of everything, and need maybe few millions employed to support and guard that production, the "freed" people are not going to do something better with their lives.
AI will bring about a post-scarcity society, just not for you, worker.
What make life worth living? Is it love? Is it beauty? Is it the sense of having agency?
Sadly, we are not smart enough to know until it is taken away.....
Let’s build abundance first and solve inequality later. Instead people are keen to prevent abundance and keep everyone level by keeping everyone poor.
Twice the labour force is just far too much of a power amplifier. Many things that would otherwise lie undone simply get done. Not 2x perhaps because housework etc needs to be done one way or the other but I suspect some large fraction of growth is just better labor participation and labor allocation.
This attitude of unwillingness to do anything except for direct personal gain isn't good for the world and isn't good for yourself.
I very much doubt that most people are greatly more productive, if you can even measure that for most jobs, than they were fifty years ago. Most jobs now are office jobs and service jobs. Much of the purported gains in productivity are soaked up in increased communication effort and in shifting ever more tat.
There are small pedal powered ones. I am sure you can rig a horse driven washing machine...
Even in AI times, you can still spend years acquiring obsolete skills. Just like people still run for fun, even though the bicycle has already been invented. Or they make their own music by hand, instead of turning on the radio.
What makes you think so? What evidence do we have one way or another?
Btw, if you are looking for a villain, look at the land share of GDP. The capital share has been fairly steady.
As far as I can tell so far, the benefits from AI seem to flow mostly into customer surplus, not towards owners and investors. There's just so much competition between AI providers for anyone but customers to capture the benefits.
No nebulous society involved that makes collective decisions in the abstract.
With way less access to infrastructure, hardware, capital, people. That’s literally what we need, it should be constrained by having way less resources
You can create bioweapons today, from a small lab. Doesn’t mean we allow it
The old jobs are a lot more productive. We just decided to consume a lot more, and also a lot more of things that are harder to make more productive, instead of taking extra leisure.
If you were willing to live a 1950s life (and it were legal), you could mostly do that on very little money today.
Assuming we're allowed to prioritize that in a world where the rich have all the money.
(Looking at the local flow of money, I can't avoid the conclusion that my wages come indirectly mostly from the building of an extreme luxury product for an extremely rich person.)
Maybe a little more philosophical, novelty. You can ask an LLM to write in the style of <famous author> but afaik the results are bad when you ask it to write in a novel style no-one has seen before.
Lack of novelty in creative tasks is largely a product of how we deliberately train them to not surprise us. AIs from a few years ago, of the sort Janelle Shane wrote about, were puny compared to today's. But they weren't instruction tuned, so they had plenty of chaotic creative energy.
Honesty, even if I could somehow make a decent living by doing that (you really can't), no I wouldn't.
1. Washing machine
2. Vacuum cleaner
3. Microwave oven
4. Electric refrigerator (but they had a cold underground cellar, while I no longer have such luxuries)
There are also various modern tools that are not used in the normal day-to-day life, but only when incidents happen, which require repairs, for example an electric drill or reciprocating saw, or a soldering iron, or an electric sewing machine (but my grandparents had a mechanical Singer sewing machine, which did the same job, only with more effort) and sometimes, but not often, I prepare some kind of food for which an electric mixer accelerates enough the preparation to compensate for the time spent with assembling, disassembling and washing the mixer.
While other modern inventions, like computers, are very important to me, none of them has reduced the amount of work that must be done in my home (I never felt the need for an automatic dishwasher, because I never let them accumulate, I wash them instantly after use, even while cooking, because I eat only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients).
> (I never felt the need for an automatic dishwasher, because I never let them accumulate, I wash them instantly after use, even while cooking, because I eat only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients).
Batching usually lowers the total amount of work you have to do. In any case, the dishwasher becomes more useful (for most people) as the household gets larger.
I find that when we cook and bake, we need the dishwasher more. If you only eat out or eat take-away, there's barely any washing up to do.
I thought of a fourth modern machine for your list: the elevator. But it only applies for some people.
Moreover, in many past societies where the wives were supposed to work at home and only the husbands were expected to do a job for a salary, it was not at all unusual for the wives to handle most of the finances, so they actually handled most of the money earned by the family, even if their husbands were on the payroll.
What was bad in the past, was not what happened in typical cases, but what happened in the worst cases. Because a fair treatment of the wife depended on the goodwill of the husband, not being codified in laws, as it should have been, that enabled a lot of abuses.
Pick your favourite years when you think the economy was going great for workers, and look at some archived newspapers (or even just the headlines).
This is probably the best division to keep the wife happy, but from a certain point of view, housework should be paid at whatever rate you'd have to pay a maid to do the same.
> Moreover, in many past societies where the wives were supposed to work at home and only the husbands were expected to do a job for a salary, [...]
Where are you getting your 'many past societies' like that from? You know that salaried out-of-the-home work isn't all that old, and wasn't all that common (until recently) even where it existed?
Where do you draw the line? Does the collective that makes these collective decisions you are so fond of have to include, say, people in Russia?
You can default to existing political structures and voting systems as a preliminary answer to get going. And they work for some things. But ain't nothing simple nor god given about that.
It's not on me to declare who is and isn't included or what consensus is being reached. These things normally play out in a self-organizing way.
But some companies try to disturb that process by not allowing it the time it needs. And I think this needs awareness.