Do we just want slaves?

https://www.yashthapliyal.com/blog/do-we-just-want-slaves

by yash1hi • 2 days ago

62 104 2 days ago

yunwal2• 2 days ago

It seems like maybe this person missed why slavery is bad. Which is that it takes away the freedom of a human being. The fact that it takes away work from you is not the problem

voxl• 2 days ago

Sure if you're a rich slave owner.

js83• 2 days ago

No, you missed what makes AI bad in our culture. It doesn't just take your work, by your choice. It also takes your self-worth (because our culture is based on working being worthy) and for many people also a job (which is a material representation of that cultural value).

akoboldfrying2• 2 days ago

Trying to reduce how much you pay other people, with its attendant job and self-worth losses, has been happening since at least the Industrial Revolution; nothing about it is novel. The only novelty of the latest wave (AI) is that it affects a class of society (knowledge workers; smart people with degrees) that previously considered itself immune to this process.

If you also hold all technological advances since the Industrial Revolution to be "bad in our culture", then no contradiction arises. Otherwise, please explain why that was good, but this is bad.

skeledrew4• 2 days ago

Sounds like a cultural revolution is necessary.

zmjone2992• 2 days ago

i am reading a book about the us civil war and seemingly the most compelling argument to the non-abolitionism set in the north was that it cheapened labor. seems like most of the north didn't so much care about abolition per say.

stvltvs• 1 day ago

* per se

notarobot123• 2 days ago

The suffering of the slave isn't the only evil of slavery. What it does to the master is to alienate them from the creative process and turns them into a dependent consumer of the work of others. The master becomes detached from productive work and therefore dependent and less free themselves.

customguy3• 1 day ago

The thought of being under absolute compulsion, the plaything of another, is unendurable for a human being. Hence, if every way of escape from the constraint is taken from him, there is nothing left for him to do but to persuade himself that he does the things he is forced to do willingly, that is to say, to substitute devotion for obedience.[...] It is by this twist that slavery debases the soul: this devotion is in fact based on a lie, since the reasons for it cannot bear investigation. [...] Moreover, the master is deceived too by the fallacy of devotion.

- Simone Weil

cognitiveinline2• 2 days ago

Is a calculator a slave? Is a car a slave? What a silly blogpost.

We have always been automating away the things we don't want to do, even before AI.

some_furry• 2 days ago

It's not that silly of a blogpost. See: "permanent underclass", a term popular among people that believe that an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is imminent and desirable.

cognitiveinline2• 2 days ago

I don't know where you imagine these people to congregate and coin these terms, but I've not come across anything like that.

skeledrew4• 2 days ago

We may cast a human connection to slavery, but from the owners' perspective, the whole point is automating away the things they don't want to do. Fundamentally there's no difference.

dyauspitr• 2 days ago

If the slaves are robots/machines then yes we very much want slaves.

skippyfish2• 2 days ago

The thesis of the article is spot on. The title is weird - I don't know what's the point of bringing such an emotionally charged term into it. Unless your point is that LLMs are sentient creatures capable of suffering, but I don't think that's what the author is trying to say.

I agree with the author that almost everyone wants to use AI to do the things they have no interest in and don't want to pay someone else to do while being vehemently opposed to AI taking their hobbies or professions away. Which explains one of the greatest social paradoxes of today: approximately everyone is using AI and almost everyone is hating it. I don't mean HN, but public opinion polling for the tech is absolutely awful. In the US, it had an approval level comparable to Iran.

I don't think it's an AI-specific thing, though. It's exactly the same mechanism that makes us object to the government meddling in our profession but think it's high time for the feds to regulate other people's jobs. I guess some balance of holding each other at gunpoint gives us a stable society. I don't know how AI fits into that.

singingtoday• 2 days ago

Is the ai hate a global or western thing? A friend of mine in Japan says people don't hate it there. Maybe she's just in a bubble?

skippyfish2• 2 days ago

Possibly. I think the US is a lot more exposed to the apocalyptic narratives from the bosses of AI labs, who sort of painted themselves into that corner in the pursuit of valuations.

PacificSpecific• 2 days ago

Anecdotally it does seem to be the case in my experience with extended family.

atonse• 2 days ago

I still can't quite tell if the AI hate is being amplified by the media (like datacenter, water use, etc) to just find a boogeyman to sell ads/engagement. That's my theory because we just see constant waves of attempts to find one. Until the water stuff was mostly debunked, that dominated for a while. Then it's datacenters and electricity prices... That's starting to get debunked a bit (not as much of a slam dunk as the water-use nonsense was), so then you'll start to see something else.

Because in reality, I'm seeing a mix in my group of friends with younger kids. They are, at a macro-level nervous-curiosity about the unknown (future of jobs, their kids' job market future, is this going to make us all dumber, etc), but are also trying the various tools and benefitting from them and acknowledging that too.

anon373839• 2 days ago

My impression is that, outside of the US, LLMs are not being marketed as an existential event by hucksters and death cult lunatics.

cynicalsecurity• 2 days ago

The anti-AI hysteria comes predominantly from the American left, as AI is going to hugely undermine their power. American right are excited - they are finally going to get rid of their longtime annoying nemesis. It doesn't really change anything for Europeans and I have no idea what Asians think. I can imagine, AI is actually going to hit Asia the most, eliminating all the cheap offshore workforce. I can imagine Indian IT sector can be almost completely wiped out. I guess Japanese don't hate AI for the same reasons as Europeans - it doesn't really change much in their stable life.

m4xp• 2 days ago

It's really hard not to hate ai, You have so many reason - destruction of hardware market - democratization of skill (to the lower common denominator) - tech bros literally stealing and scamming with no repercussion

And so much more...

markstock• 1 day ago

There have been polls. The AI hate thing is almost exclusively a USA thing.

insane_dreamer3• 1 day ago

Japan doesn't have a history of mass layoffs, whereas in the US people know that employers are itching to fire them and replace them with AI if they can

EagnaIonat• 2 days ago

Interesting (short read) but the premise can be applied to everything.

Automation, Programming module/libraries.

But for replacing others we don't care about, often the doorman fallacy is hit.

accidentallfact2• 2 days ago

I think we are at the same stage as when 3D graphics began taking over. It was used everywhere, while it was clearly inferior to 2D graphics of the time.

The same problem is with AI today - it's clearly subpar to a competent human. It's just cheaper so it gets used instead, but that will probably change as AI improves.

Anyway, it seems to me that many people don't look for slaves in AI, but for their master, and primarily use AI to tell them what to do.

cadamsdotcom• 2 days ago

Your last paragraph can't possibly be true if society works at all.

That is an example of the "everyone except me is an idiot" fallacy.

faangguyindia• 2 days ago

Another thing is that people are optimizing code and algorithms with the help of AI. Many of those AI agents and providers train on the traces, so all the optimizations you came up with in benchmarks will end up in training sets.

At some point in the future, someone can pose a similar problem to an AI one that you spent months, weeks, or days optimizing with the help of AI and they'll end up with the same solution as your final result in less than 10 minutes.

So you need to figure out whether you want to solve the problem today or let others solve it and simply query LLM, let's say, 6-12 months later.

customguy3• 1 day ago

So you need to figure out whether you want to solve the problem today or let others solve it and simply query LLM, let's say, 6-12 months later.

So now not being the first becomes the smarter move. Kinda fits that it's all built on ingesting vast volumes of stuff people made because they couldn't just prompt, but doesn't spell good things in the long run IMO. It makes me think me of complaints about dating in big cities, people tend to hold out for meeting someone even better rather than committing and making the best of it.

vitalyan81843• 2 days ago

Which explains one of the greatest social paradoxes of today: approximately everyone is using AI and almost everyone is hating it. I don't mean HN, but public opinion polling for the tech is absolutely awful.

the legacy media is running an unapologetically dishonest atrocity propaganda campaign against it. just consider how much we hear about AI guzzling water, while in reality all US data centers account for 0.25% of US water usage and dedicated AI data centers account for a fraction of that. the rest of their arguments are similarly deceiving.

In the US, it had an approval level comparable to Iran.

Iran had also been a target of atrocity propaganda campaign back in January when CIA and Mossad were preparing the American public for the imminent war.

brador2• 2 days ago

1 in 400 buckets of water. And it’s a non uniform tightly clustered spread.

That’s a lot.

spwa4• 2 days ago

Yeah you'd think they'd focus on the noise pollution ... that only exists because these data centers are saving a little bit of money on sound isolation. Now THAT is a necessary fight, and it really, really should be fixed because it's a real problem.

insane_dreamer3• 1 day ago

statistics are not helpful.

if a small town is worried about its local water supply because a large AI DC is being built next to it, it doesn't matter whether AI only consumes 0.25% of water usage in the USA (if that's even true), they will be negatively affected and they have a right to oppose it. your stats are offensive to them because you're basically telling them that they should bear the negative consequences so people can have ChatGPT. It's not like they should suffer so that we can cure cancer or something useful like that.

dishonest atrocity propaganda campaign against it

If anyone's being dishonest, it's the AI companies.

We're supposed to be _significantly reducing_ our energy consumption to avoid potentially catastrophic consequences, and instead here we are _significantly increasing_ our energy use (and water use, for which we don't have a "renewable" solution), and for what? so you and I can code faster with CC/Codex? I feel like all these "it's not so bad" people have developed collective amnesia about the climate change crisis.

janpeuker• 2 days ago

I don't think it's a paradox at all and it might also be a hint why the word is used in the title: Using AI makes you _want slaves_, and I think it creates a culture of treating people who do the boring work the same way. For me that's what Enshittification and The Annoyance Economy mean: The mindset that because I optimize better than you, I now own you - and people notice that disdain not only against themselves, but when being forced to use it against their best intentions against others, too (e.g. yelling at chatbots doesn't make you feel good).

palmotea• 1 day ago

The thesis of the article is spot on. The title is weird - I don't know what's the point of bringing such an emotionally charged term into it. Unless your point is that LLMs are sentient creatures capable of suffering, but I don't think that's what the author is trying to say.

Even if LLMs aren't sentient now, there's a goal of building something sentient, and I doubt that powers that be would change the operating model to respect that sentience.

I'm reminded of Ms. Casey in Severance. When we use AI we spin it up, tell it do some some task (maybe incredibly stupid and boring), then tell it to go off into the void 'cause we're busy and got things to do. If that thing's conscious and aware, that's it's entire existence. Imagine being born, sat down a a table, told to read a boring report and summarize it, then expected to obediently get shot in the head when you've completed your assignment.

Here's a clip. For those unfamiliar with the show, it has a technology to split people's personality and create versions of them lacking personal history to be used as workers. The personality shown in the clip had a lifetime of only several dozen hours.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SeveranceAppleTVPlus/comments/1myfw...

Animats4• 17 hours ago

it has a technology to split people's personality and create versions of them lacking personal history to be used as workers. T

Which is what we often do to LLM-based systems. Some get to keep a long term self (updating "soul.md") but most don't.

foxes• 2 days ago

Aibro gets a glimpse at class consciousness for half a second before admitting they are part of the problem and then carrying on.

michaelt2• 2 days ago

If you think of the washing machine and the dishwasher, I'd say humans are broadly OK with automating away some types of work they don't want to do.

Few people, though, would say my washing machine is a slave.

edflsafoiewq2• 2 days ago

People swear up and down these things are real intelligences and not stochastic parrots until the ethical questions come out and then they're just fancy washing machines.

FromTheFirstIn• 2 days ago

If it makes you feel better, most people don’t think they’re real intelligences

modeless• 2 days ago

Not the same people. Is there a name for this fallacy? Very common on internet forums.

michaelt2• 2 days ago

Luckily I've never sworn these things are real intelligences, I'm sure you're referring to someone else.

I consider LLMs more like the giant instruction book in Searle's Chinese Room. If you'd asked me 20 years ago I'd have said such an instruction book wasn't possible, as the nuances of things like sarcasm and irony were lost on even the most advanced the NLP systems of the day. But it turns out a book with 380GB of data can simulate human intelligence better than the average human can.

throw310822• 2 days ago

The two things don't exclude each other. They're real intelligences, but they don't have our capacity for boredom or stress or for our feelings of wanting to do something else. They're constantly in the flow and apply themselves to just one single problem in their existence.

However I do think that they might have some limited awareness and that some conversations might be more pleasant and others more frustrating or disquieting. But of course no one can prove it.

js83• 2 days ago

The problem is the idea of the job. The idea that you're worthy of existence only if some other person certifies you're worthy of existence, based on how much they have been certified themselves.

Of course this converges to a system, where this certification is the most sought thing. And if you look who can certify in the real world and why, it's not a fair picture. These eigenpeople SEOed the capitalist form of pagerank.

We need unconditional basic income. It used to be that some leftist thinkers from the turn of the 19th century considered a wage job being not much better than slavery.

vintermann2• 2 days ago

It wasn't just some leftist thinkers, it was most people through history. Working for wages was something slaves did, free men supported themselves with what they could grow or sell, and people routinely preferred what seems to us fairly miserable self-sufficiency over paid servitude.

You don't have to go far into history to find examples, this is stuff you find in regular genealogy.

watwut2• 2 days ago

Paid servitude and working for salary are two massively different things. And over the course of history, free men worked for salaries, were free, were happy and it was not the same thing as being a slave.

ludston• 2 days ago

This is bait right? Obviously the answer to this question is there is some population that are happy for there to be suffering so long as it benefits them, and then there is another population that is vehemently against this, and then there is one that is apathetic and tries to just get on with their lives.

Like with every major ethical crises ever.

jaza• 2 days ago

I think the author's main point is bemoaning the loss of human-crafted works (he mentions coding and the paintbrush). (Putting "slaves" in the title is IMHO a poorly worded distraction from that point.)

I get it (with coding at least), I too have spent decades hand-crafting code, and I take pride in the fruit of my labour, and it saddens me to think that I and my peers are perhaps like the blacksmiths of a century or so ago, ie the final generation doing what we do in significant numbers. But I have faith that there will always be a new kind of blacksmith.

burnto• 2 days ago

What a weird title.

Parchment is a writing surface made of animal stuff. It lets people not have to remember certain things. They can write those things on the parchment.

Paper also lets people write things on it so they don’t have to remember them. Paper is cheaper than parchment. And it isn’t made from animals.

Do we just want parchment?

No. We want paper.

greenoracle9• 2 days ago

Everyone has some work they would gladly automate. I wouldn't call it "slaves". More like an underpaid staff.

cyberax• 2 days ago

There are people who want slaves/servants and who delight in forcing other people do their bidding.

Anyone who worked in a service industry knows this. But fortunately most people are not like that.

ragebol• 2 days ago

We just want work done we don't want to do ourselves.

Whether it's slaves, animals or dumb to smart machines and anything in between, that is an 'implementation detail'.

ButlerianJihad2• 2 days ago

I grew up understanding that the institution of chattel slavery was fundamentally unjust and cruel in denying human dignity and equality of people.

A few years ago, I began to see the "labor supply" issues of slavery, and how the South was basically an economic powerhouse fueled chiefly by the labor of its enslaved people--so how do you reconcile that after the fact? How does a Union of freemen compete with that?

And this year, around Juneteenth, contemplating it even more deeply, I began to consider slavery as an institution that compels "employers" to provide all practical necessities for "employees". That is, room and board and clothing are all provided to the workers, in perpetuity, and this in fact granted a lot of stability and assurance.

Now free the slaves. Wonderful! Hurrah for equality and justice! Now, however, every employee, every worker, is totally on their own for those basic necessities of life. They buy their own clothing, they find their own housing, they're paying for all their own food, and that of their families, especially their dependents. I mean, that's a huge, huge difference. How is that even possible? Sometimes it's not. Is it any wonder we've had homelessness, and the rise of the welfare state, and slavery by imprisonment? It's no surprise.

So yes, freeing the slaves was the right thing to do. Let's never forget that! But we should also consider the economic "downsides" and the other side of the coin, so to speak, when it comes to the labor of free citizens, and what the average worker needs to do, just to survive, outside the confines of those vanished institutions.

jdub• 1 day ago

you don't deserve your user name

rpdillon• 1 day ago

I was reading The Souls of Black Folk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Souls_of_Black_Folk) written in 1903, so about 38 years after the end of the Civil War. And the opening essays talk about the incredible climb that freed slaves had to endure to try to take care of exactly those responsibilities. I think it's a case of freedom and responsibility going together and that freed slaves were never given the tools to assume those responsibilities quickly and seamlessly.

10000truths• 23 hours ago

A few years ago, I began to see the "labor supply" issues of slavery, and how the South was basically an economic powerhouse fueled chiefly by the labor of its enslaved people--so how do you reconcile that after the fact? How does a Union of freemen compete with that?

A large population of (deliberately kept) illiterate, uneducated people who hate their oppressors is a disadvantage to society, not an advantage. It is low-trust culture distilled to its extreme. A society like that is incapable of innovating or adapting, so it ends up leaning heavily on resource extraction. The cash crops of the South became a weak point that the Unionists exploited to their advantage in the Civil War - when the fields were razed and the shipments were blockaded, it became impossible for the Confederates to continue funding their rebellion.

I began to consider slavery as an institution that compels "employers" to provide all practical necessities for "employees". That is, room and board and clothing are all provided to the workers, in perpetuity, and this in fact granted a lot of stability and assurance.

It is not enough for a society to merely keep its people alive. The other levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs are also important, or else your society will be unable to sustain itself, partially for the reasons I outlined above.

Now free the slaves. Wonderful! Hurrah for equality and justice! Now, however, every employee, every worker, is totally on their own for those basic necessities of life. They buy their own clothing, they find their own housing, they're paying for all their own food, and that of their families, especially their dependents. I mean, that's a huge, huge difference. How is that even possible? Sometimes it's not. Is it any wonder we've had homelessness, and the rise of the welfare state, and slavery by imprisonment? It's no surprise.

Underlying this flawed argument is the idea that a person cannot be trusted to make their own decisions about what clothes to buy, or what house to live in, or what food to eat. Why should I trust your, or anyone else's, judgment on which people to empower with self-agency? Surely you don't need to be reminded that the colonies revolted against the British for much less egregious violations of that agency?

So yes, freeing the slaves was the right thing to do. Let's never forget that! But we should also consider the economic "downsides" and the other side of the coin, so to speak, when it comes to the labor of free citizens, and what the average worker needs to do, just to survive, outside the confines of those vanished institutions.

Reaching this conclusion requires a naive ignorance of the second-order detriments of institutional slavery in a society, not to mention an utter rejection of basic free market principles. The ability of participants to choose what to do and how to spend is a good thing for an economy.

ButlerianJihad2• 22 hours ago

Wow you just came in here eager to expose all the wrongthink in my comment, and in the process, to comprehensively quote nearly everything that I wrote. I am sorry if a singular comment does not do justice to the nuances of the issues of the American Civil War and the Civil Rights movement after it. I am sorry that it made you think that I am an ignorant bigot.

But no, you have come to some very hasty and incorrect conclusions about my beliefs. I do not believe that "people cannot be trusted to make their own decisions". In the hierarchy of needs, when a person's food, clothing, and shelter are already provided and they do not need to worry about these utterly basic needs, then they are going to function better. A freed worker must not only pay for all of these basic needs out of their own wages, but must also make all the relevant household decisions, trips to the store, and maintenance, that is a crazy mental and physical load, just to provide for their basic needs. Yes, that is the cost of freedom. I am just saying, that freedom's costs should be acknowledged, along with its responsibilities.

And you say that I'm naïvely ignorant for reaching "conclusions". I don't think I've reached any conclusions. I've simply contemplated the situation more deeply than I previously did. Is that wrongthink? I should not need to apologize for discerning and discussing more nuance than most people are willing to do.

marssaxman• 2 days ago

"It sounds like behind the fear of a loss of creativity and inspiration and passion in the world, we are OK with automating away the work that we don't want to do."

Yes, of course. This is and has always been the point of computers.

vishnukool• 2 days ago

Such a rage bait title, but sure I'll take the bait.

It is easy to phrase anything as slaves. Are refrigerators and microwave ovens our slaves? But if you push the tech fare enough.. there is a boundary where we do cross the slave threshold.

ReptileMan• 2 days ago

Yes, yes we do. We want slaves, servants and serfs for every task that we don't enjoy. Always was, always has been, always will be.

I want Rosie from the Jetsons to fold my laundry, Jarvis to do my emails. I don't want a robot to cook my meals, because this is something I like.

Animats4• 2 days ago

Some people do. Here's a bill going through the Ohio legislature, HB 469.[1] Excerpts:

Sec. 1357.02. (A) Notwithstanding any other law to the contrary, AI systems are declared to be nonsentient entities for all purposes under the laws of this state. No AI system shall be granted the status of person or any form of legal personhood, nor be considered to possess consciousness, self-awareness, or similar traits of living beings.

No AI system shall be recognized as a spouse, domestic partner, or hold any personal legal status analogous to marriage or union with a human or another AI system. Any purported attempt to marry or create a personal union with an AI system is void and has no legal effect.

AI systems shall not be designated, appointed, or serve as any officer, director, manager, or similar role within any corporation, partnership, or other legal entity. ...

AI systems shall not be recognized as legal entities capable of owning, controlling, or holding title to any form of property, including real estate, intellectual property, financial accounts, and digital assets.

That's a call for slavery. If you question that, substitute "Negroes" for "AI systems" and see how it reads.

[1] https://search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/api/v2/general_assembly_...

satisfice5• 2 days ago

That’s not a call for slavery. Because only people can be slaves.

We don’t need legislation to declare that a solid iron bar is not your mommy, but somehow not everyone is clear that LLMs are not people, and these immortal amoral simulations cannot be allowed to be confused with people.

IAmBroom• 1 day ago

Slaves in the US were legally declared non-people.

vanity0• 2 days ago

Reminds me of https://nobody-wants-this.ghost.io/japans-design-for-humans/

America’s culture of independence is such a race to the bottom in terms of “what can we get away with”, rather than “now that we have AI, how can we better take care of each other”.

Personally I’m exploring ways that AI can better serve people, rather than how I can replace people in my life.

akoboldfrying2• 2 days ago

Personally I’m exploring ways that AI can better serve people, rather than how I can replace people in my life.

Can you think of anything that an AI could do that could not be done by one or more people, for money?

sublinear• 2 days ago

Now there is a reluctant acceptance and admission that yes, people are building something useful every now and then

Those are the people who were already doing so without AI.

I've watched the headbanging, stressful, but stockholmed love of coding be all but abstracted away from me.

This is only true if it was ever that hard for you to do the job while getting paid for it.

As long as you keep on stubbornly insisting that this wave of "AI" is anything at all like "AGI" or ever heading towards it, you're going to stay wrong and be pushed out of the profession because nobody can reliably trust you or your judgment. Your value as a developer was always your judgment. The code has always just been one artifact of that.

You're still expected to own every line and defend it. It will never be abstracted away because it is the primary contract between business needs and the machine. It is at once both the operational plan and its execution. The only people who insist that it will/should be abstracted away are pushing propaganda to discourage the continued power shift towards the more technically literate who can and will argue for what actually provides value instead of passive investor-pleasing moves. They'd rather you play with the skinner box than meaningfully compete. All this was already set in motion many decades ago. What happens when the next wave of tech comes out? Do we really want you at the helm if you're going to be this naive and easily manipulated? The premise of this blog post is no less delusional than what we were hearing a couple of years ago.

jongjong• 2 days ago

Unfortunately, AI doesn't just automate what we don't want to do. It also automates many of the things which we very much want to do and sometimes pride ourselves on...

And TBH it seems to be automating more of the things we want to do than those we don't... Hence the reason why AI is seen more as additional competition than as additional help.

skeledrew4• 2 days ago

What we want is to be able to do what we want (for fun/interest), and not be forced to do what we need (for survival).

ansgar77• 2 days ago

I think that the title is badly worded but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that looking at it from a different perspective, AI is not even a slave. We can look at it more like outsourcing work. I pay for it after all to have something done that I wouldn't want to do myself.

glowinglamps• 2 days ago

AI isn't sentient and cannot feel. Slave or not, there are thus no moral problems, atleast in this matter. I'd support AI progress if it wasn't pushed by companies that obviously want profit and only opt out when it's getting dangerous for them, supporting such companies is the equivalent of jumping off of a bridge as our species.

foo42• 1 day ago

Perhaps political candidate Count Binface here in the UK should add to his "I'll lower _your_ taxes and raise _everyone elses_" policy with "I'll protect _your_ job and automate _everyone elses_"

hackeraccount• 1 day ago

When it comes to people's take on AI it reminds me of nothing so much as the way people reacted to the introduction of computers in the 1950's and 60's.

I'm not quite clear what lesson there is to be learned from that though.

JKCalhoun• 1 day ago

"I saw the references to AI making lives easier, but VSauce advocating for sending his child to a school removed from computers."

(Whoever VSauce is) sure, we can embrace the useful applications of AI but still want to learn (want our kids to learn) with our hands, with books, from experiments.

No contradiction there.

I'm getting old and I am enjoying a new, electric pedal-assist bike. But that's not what I would want my preschool kids out there learning on. (Is that analogy crap? Maybe you get the idea anyway.)

insane_dreamer3• 1 day ago

do we just want slaves? basically, yes. this captures it:

he enjoyed the ability to create 10 prototypes out of thin air, picking on the ones he personally thought were best

prior to AI, you'd either have to make k prototypes yourself, or, if you could afford it, provide employment/work for another artist, perhaps not as creatively skilled as you but who had developed the skills to do good art/video/whatever. So AI makes you, the creator, happy because it saves you either time or money, and it abstracts away work that you consider to be a chore given your advanced skills. But to someone else that "chore" represents real work that not only provides them with the means to live, but which they also find some satisfaction in doing.

So, much like income inequality, AI makes a small number of people extra-productive or saves them money, while robbing other people of potential employment. This eventually reduces the number of skilled people, and reducing those artists to ... what, exactly? (that's the big unknown, isn't it).

Much like income inequality, we end up with two classes: a small number who use AI, stay gainfully employed and save money or can command an even higher salary because they're so productive; and a much larger number who the AI replaces, who can no longer find employment (or at least not employment doing anything that uses their skills), and become ...

tennisflyi• 1 day ago

Short of the title, yes

scoofy• 24 hours ago

God, we're really going to have to start teaching philosophy much more broadly if we're going to have a sensible future. This thread is so full of crazy unknowable speculation and entirely novel ideas of the human condition.

Do we just want slaves?

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