Poll of the Day > Mark my words, in the next 5 years AI will become the #1 issue in politics

(+) Yeah! (+)

Lay people tend to brush it off as hype, or hype it up for futurism because they like blinking lights and magic tricks. But for people following this closely, it is growing exponentially to the point where jobs are starting to be replaced. The new AI "Devin" is a standalone programmer that can create and close its own issues on GitHub with a 13% success rate. Only 13% you might say, but that's a metric that will only grow, until it's 50%, 80%, 99%. At some point, programmers are going to be out of a job.

So we're going to be relegated to physical jobs only, right? Wrong. Those are going too. These companies have made it their stated goal to replace the human workforce.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiKvPJSOUmE

Why pay someone $30k annually when you could buy one $10k robot to do it forever? And people say there will be jobs that pop up that are more advanced to replace the old ones. Maybe, but most likely there will be something like a 1:10 replacement ratio. And people say it's currently too crappy to replace humans, or that it fundamentally will never be good enough. This is just wrong. With all due respect, you are not paying attention to how fast this is growing with no major hurdles.

There will be mass layoffs, and either we adopt some kind of UBI or we will just collapse. This is a huge curveball from regular political discourse.

I think it'll take longer than 5 years but it has to become a political flashpoint at some point. The effects it has on labor are too huge

We're slowly reaching the point where 1% of the population gets to live like gods and the rest of us are dying of hunger in the streets.

I think AI would be better than the current government, and cheaper too

The silver lining here is that if/when it does take over programming jobs, it will be a problem for all of society as a whole. It won't just be the artists or 3d modelers that will be left behind.

5 years is incredibly optimistic. Congress usually takes at least 10 years to even realize technology issues exist, then another 10-20 years to actually understand them.

I can see Congress starting to discuss it sometime around 2040. And then passing tons of stupid flawed meaningless laws about it for a few years that only make everything worse.

Maybe by 2060 they'll actually understand it well enough to react to it in a worthwhile way. But if we're lucky by then it'll be the AI running the country anyway.



Lokarin posted...

I think AI would be better than the current government, and cheaper too

And based on current standards, would probably be producing better entertainment content - scriptwriting, acting, music, graphical art - than most of what the current generation of humans is putting out there.

I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

Yellow posted...

The silver lining here is that if/when it does take over programming jobs, it will be a problem for all of society as a whole. It won't just be the artists or 3d modelers that will be left behind.

Part of why I have a complete and utter lack of sympathy for the artists and programmers who are now realizing their jobs are at risk is that none of them gave a single solitary shit for the last 40 years when it was happening to everyone else.

Factory workers started losing jobs to automation. Tons of phone operators and consumer service jobs have been lost to automated calls and menus. Cashiers everywhere are slowly losing jobs as stores start installing automated ordering and pay kiosks/self-serve lines (and stores as a whole are losing business to online stores). The current push towards self-driving cars and vehicles in general is potentially going to cost a lot of drivers jobs. We've been slowly trying to automate literally everything we can for decades now.

And whenever anyone complained, the rallying cry has always been "Well, at least computers will never replace the human spirit and creativity!", along with "Lost your job, better learn to program then!" There's always been this sense of superiority and disdain from people who thought they were completely immune to being replaced.

Now the people who always said stuff like that have realized they can probably be replaced as well, and it terrifies them. And I can't find it in myself to give a single solitary shit.

If computers can create better works of art than humans can, then I'd rather have them do it. It can't be any more soulless than a lot of the content we've been getting for years now anyway.

Tbf you are, with respect, very pro-death and anti-human, since you've apparently got nothing to lose and see nothing worth protecting.

I actually think artists are relatively safe, they have to learn to filter out the spam for now, but at least most people would refuse to read a book written by AI (who would do that), would prefer graphics made by a human, and musicians outright have rejected AI altogether. Even though they were attacked first, I think they'll be the last to go, until a generation 100 years from now changes societal views on what art is. Maybe people will just start generating their own custom tailor-fit media that never leaves their computer and that will be the death of art, and that generation will largely see no problem with doing it. Maybe people will decide that having friends and SOs is too hard and just live in virtual worlds.

With desk jobs you're right that no one will cry over something that was arguably lacking human creativity in the first place. Why would anyone prefer a website with backends written by a human instead of an AI? Charity? Handouts? Companies that like wasting time and money?

The sad thing is it's going to lead to even greater economic equality. Companies are just going to pocket all the savings while your average folk will struggle to find a lucrative job. And with financial hardship will come further declining birth rates, and before you know it, we'll be living in a society where androids outnumber the humans. Just like something out of the Twilight Zone, humans will become obsolete.

Yellow posted...

but at least most people would refuse to read a book written by AI (who would do that)

Hard disagree.

People now get pissy over AI art in general, but that's because the controversy is fresh, there's a concerted push, and the tech is still in its infancy. Most people wouldn't read an AI-written book just because an AI-written book would be awkward and poorly written.

But AI in general has make qualitative leaps over the last 5 years, to the point where the AI we have today is starting to border on science fiction compared to the AI we had in 2014. Now imagine where AI will be in 2034, now that there is a strong impetus to fund its development, and people are more able to see what might be possible. Then imagine what it will be in 2044. 2054. And so on.

That's the reason why the Writers' Guild and Actors' Guild went on strike and demanded a ban on AI - they're fully aware that AI can't realistically replace them now, but they're also very much aware that it might easily be able to do so in the very near future. So they're forced to try and take a stand on the issue now while they're still have leverage... because once they can be easily replaced, they have no leverage.

Most people wouldn't read an AI-written novel now (other than for the novelty) because AI isn't advanced enough to write something worth reading. But give it 10 years, 20 - and AI may be able to write novels better than most humans can. And at that point, plenty of people would be more than willing to read AI-written books (assuming people are reading at all by then). There isn't going to be a strong moral stance against it if the content is worthwhile.

There are already people who have a very "ehh" attitude towards AI art. The strong "NOT EVEN ONCE!" backlash against it is coming from a very vocal minority in the midst of a very apathetic majority. If we ever get to the point where AI art is relatively indistinguishable from human art, plenty of people will be more than happy to accept it. Especially as people's resistance is worn down over time, and most people feel like it's just not worth caring about all that much anymore.

It's like how in the 60s and 70s there was a major pushback against synthesizers. Music fans would say "No real band uses them!" or "Electronic music isn't real music!" Now you'd be hard-pressed to find any modern artist who can produce a song without synthesizers (or computers). Bands like Nine Inch Nails and Erasure pretty much only exist because of them. Not to mention things like autotune. You can complain about computers making music, but computers have been making most of our music (albeit with human guidance) for decades now.

We've long since accepted that we can produce art with more and more advanced tools - AI is basically the culmination of that trend. When I was a kid most people would likely have argued that art "drawn on a computer" isn't real art, but most illustration and animation is done via computer now. And most people don't care, if they even think about it at all.

A few decades ago people would have laughed at the idea of people using video games to tell stories, but then machinima became a thing, stuff like Red Versus Blue became popular, and most younger people today wouldn't even bat an eye about people using Minecraft to tell elaborate stories. Art evolves as the tools evolve.

Factory workers in the past complained about how no robot would be able to do their job as well as they did, how "the craft of making things" was an inherently human act and how products (especially things like furniture and musical instruments) made by machine would never be as good as the "real thing". And today no one really gives a shit.

That's the inevitable future. People who think that "the nobility of the human spirit" or "the irreplaceable creativity of the human soul" actually matter are going to be seriously disillusioned when reality comes along to kick them in the teeth. If a thing can be done, it almost certainly will be done.

As a species we've reached the point where we've started to go from "tool-users" to people who have created tools that use themselves. The same impulse that led us to build a Roomba that will vacuum your floors for you is going to push towards computers that can write books, compose music, or draw vast open vistas. And future humans will be moved by those things in exactly the same way they were moved by everything beforehand. Possibly even moreso, if computers reach a point where they can far more easily predict and manipulate how humans respond to things.

Especially when most modern human "art" is barely "art" as is, but is "entertainment" or barely "content". AI will probably be able to reproduce those things just fine.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Now the people who always said stuff like that have realized they can probably be replaced as well, and it terrifies them. And I can't find it in myself to give a single solitary s***.

"Some people in this field didn't have sympathy for workers that were made obsolete by technological advancements, so now I don't have sympathy for anyone in this field being made obsolete by technological advancements!"

Among all the Okay, boomer posts you've made, this might just be the Okay, boomerest.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

If computers can create better works of art than humans can, then I'd rather have them do it.

The issue is not creating *better* works. It's creating *cheaper* ones. No publishers or producers are jumping on the AI bandwagon because they think it'll make content better, just that they can cut down on the costs of making it and churn more out.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It can't be any more soulless than a lot of the content we've been getting for years now anyway.

If you can't find soulful content to consume, you really only have yourself to blame, and if you think paint-by-numbers, algorithmically generated mainstream content can't sink any deeper, you're in for a surprise. Notably, AI taking over will mean there will be much more of it. If you thought Disney was beating Star Wars and Marvel to death now, just imagine how bad it'll be when production no longer involves scheduling multiple different people and places and they can churn out a new series in a matter of hours.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

"Lost your job, better learn to program then!"

As much as that's dismissive and condescending and not really helpful, it has at least been somewhat valid advice. Jobs have been rendered obsolete by technological advances since the dawn of time. It sucks for those left behind, but it's largely inevitable and the only way to really deal with it is to learn new skills that let you work within fields that still exist. Whatever jobs have been lost, the job market has still seen net growth. The skillsets needed to take advantage of those opportunities have just evolved.

That's no longer the case, though. This is the endgame. Without serious active efforts to stifle automation, there isn't a single field that's going to be safe for more than another 20-30 years, and the advent of AI that can replace human creativity is the turning point for that. The limiting factor for what can be automated is "what new automation can people come up with?", but when the automated systems themselves can come up with new automation, there are no more limits. A lot of the outcry around AI art has been a moral objection to the idea of replacing the jobs people actually want to do (which has been a big part of the smugness you're uppity about: It's generally easier to understand somebody liking being an artist than it is to understand somebody liking being a phone operator or assembly line worker), but it goes deeper than that: If AI can gather and apply the information needed to create art, it can gather and apply the information needed to create anything. It's only a matter of time.

Quite simply, there aren't any new fields to go into that can replace the ones being made obsolete. Learning new skills to adapt to an evolving job market is no longer a viable solution, and that's a problem that's only going to be solved with UBI as a stopgap measure until we get to 100% automation and can enter a post-labour robo-communist utopia with no need for money.

Generally I've found that people really only care about 3-4 hobbies, and then after those they sort of fall off caring. I'm not a craftsman I don't go out and rebuild desks with hand crafted wood and carefully make sure things are smooth. I don't make sure my clothes are built from labors of love from seamstresses.
I make sure my RPG book writers and artists are fairly compensated, because I've got a love for the craft. But most people who play RPGs don't, they just go off of the newest DnD edition.

To declare that everyone cares about how the sausage is made in their specific industry is wishful at best. Individuals can't care about that raw number of things they use or think about on a day-to-day basis.

What I have seen is the fervor die down now that photoshop has an AI button that's legally sourced. I haven't seen any company come out and declare that their artists shall never push that button, and artists shall never push that button. Most have, saw it was nice, and then used it or not depending on the situation.

I'm not really convinced. every time I see someone try to use one they fail miserably. they expect it to give them semi-accurate results, but the results aren't just wrong, they're nonsensical. and the people that use them are too "not-smart" to even check the results before posting them. (it's like, they didn't understand the problem, so they can't understand the solution, including a solution that isn't just a little wrong, but has massive failures of assumption about how anything is supposed to work.)

the one time I've seen it used in a marginally useful way, it was still clear that it would not at all be helpful since anything it generates would not be in the context of my codebase. ok it can generate some very basic skeleton code that has nothing to do with an actual system, but why would I want that?

(though I think there are starting to be AI tools that integrate with your IDE which I'm curious to see some results from but I haven't tried anything like that out yet.)

They tried to make a video game with AI and it was utter shit

I always say that AI/Automation/whatever is not going to replace jobs, it is just going to make them more efficient so that less people can produce the same output. Even in programming that is true. Ever use Spring Initializer to build a Spring Boot application? That is AI. It does 90% of the "bitch" work, and you fill in the business logic and fix any bugs in what it produced. So instead of having a team take 6 months to build a program, you can have one person do it in a month.

Personally, I am happy not having to spend hundreds of hours manually typing in hundreds of lines of code like we did 10-15 years ago.

VideoboysaysCube posted...

The sad thing is it's going to lead to even greater economic equality. Companies are just going to pocket all the savings while your average folk will struggle to find a lucrative job. And with financial hardship will come further declining birth rates, and before you know it, we'll be living in a society where androids outnumber the humans. Just like something out of the Twilight Zone, humans will become obsolete.

I look at it more like the scene in Steven Spielberg's movie "AI" where they have sexbots because men and women don't want to be bothered with having relationships with one another any more. Or Skynet from the Terminator movies or even Viki from I, Robot. Or even the computers from the Forbin Project, a movie made in the 1960s that is starting to get a lot more attention recently.