spellbanisher

spellbanisher t1_j1gciyp wrote

It's an incorrect understanding that assumes jobs are a zero sum game. But jobs can beget more jobs. For example, a company may wish to expand into AI. But maybe to do so competently it may need to hire at least 50 people. If it can't find enough people it might not make sense to expand into AI at all. By bringing in 25 workers, they would be creating 25 jobs for domestic workers.

Then there is the fact that immigrant workers create demand in other parts of the economy. They eat out, start businesses, buy cars, etc.

Finally, we shouldn't forget that these tech companies make massive profits. They can afford to pay all their employees very well. If domestic workers fear eroding wages, they should organize with immigrant workers instead of dividing themselves.

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spellbanisher t1_j1fznz2 wrote

You can direct the AI to respond in a different style. While that will change its syntax and word choice to some extent, you still feel like you're reading something genric. I think the reason for that is chatgpt can only relate words to words. It basically pastiches together a bunch of phrases that statistically correlate. But this means it is not really capable of original or fresh turns of phrase. A human writer first thinks of ideas, experiences, or images and then tries to find the words to express it. The AI can only pastiche phrases and change the wording like a student who plagiarizes but uses a thesaurus to change some words or rearranges some sentences to make the copying less obvious.

I had chatgpt write me a scene where a man with robotic tentacles fought a man with enhanced reflexes and strength in a gladiatorial arena. I had it do it again and again in various styles: of Chuck Palahniuk, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Dr. Seuss. And yes, asking for different styles changed some of the wording and syntax. But no matter the style, every sentence, every sentence, EVERY SENTENCE, comprised common or unoriginal phrases. They fought with "fierce intensity." The tentacles "twisted and turned." The sweat gleamed on their tired bodies. Just unoriginal phrase after unoriginal phrase.

To be fair, a good deal of human writing is stock phrases. But if I had to guess, about 50% of a great writers' phrasing is original, 10-20% for an average writer, and 0% for a word sequencing algorithm.

My professors always told me to avoid cliches and common phrases. To produce original writing, you must strive for the precise words or metaphors to describe your ideas. A common phrase or cliche will merely approximate it, or it indicates that your ideas are either fuzzy or trite.

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spellbanisher t1_j0nc8zd wrote

>We’ve lived through an industrial revolution already.

Your direct ancestors did, but hundreds of millions did not. To obtain food for its urban populations, as well as raw materials, Great Britain and other European countries created colonies around the world. Recent estimates have found that British colonialism (again, driven by industrial revolution) caused 165 million excess deaths in India from 1880-1920, and life expectancy declined from 27 to 22 years. That's a lot of people who didn't live through it.

Even in western countries the industrial revolution was brutal for most people who went through it. In the United States life expectancy declined from 44 to 37 years between 1790 and 1860. Again, a lot of people who didn't live through it.

Eventually society may adapt (although the past is a terrible predictor of the future), but we don't have to let the AI revolution decimate several generations. It took a lot of activism, organizing, and political struggle to make industrial society humane for most people: decolonization, the municipalization of sanitation, the regulation of working conditions, the universalization of education, the creation of welfare states. As anthropologist Karl Polanyi argued in The Great Transformation, the commodification of land and labor tends towards their annihilation. It was countermovements to commodification which made industrial society broadly livable.These things didn't just happen. People had to struggle and fight for it..

This is why the deterministic attitude towards AI is so detrimental. It makes people think that, hey, things will just work out because they did in the past, ignoring that people in the past fought to make things work out because they didn't assume that they simply would.

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