whatTheBumfuck

whatTheBumfuck t1_ituddzz wrote

It's not that it's going to take your job. It's that it's going to make the entire conventional notion of work irrelevant. You won't need a job. No one will. It will either be a hell where everyone is a slave, or a post scarcity heaven you're free to do whatever you can imagine.

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whatTheBumfuck t1_iszb842 wrote

Post scarcity, not really. Everyone will have a box that can generate objects out of air and soil or whatever matter you have laying around. There will be no companies that mass produce stuff. It'll just be assemblers all the way down. So your options will be get the assembler version or get the handmade version. Money won't be a thing, but status and prestige will become the main "currency" used to "purchase" time shares of a person's or entities attention. The uber rich today work this way already. When you have billions your most scare resource is your time and attention.

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whatTheBumfuck t1_istf5dk wrote

The problem is that you're imagining an ideal system where it just 'magically' does exactly what you want. And that's assuming you actually know exactly what you want (newsflash usually people don't). In order to get a computer to do exactly what you want, you need be able to describe it in terms that the computer can understand. That's what programming is at its most fundamental level. "Make a form that looks good" isn't going to cut it. It may generate 10 different forms that aren't exactly what you want or need. At that point you need a specialist who is particularly skilled at describing to AI systems exactly what they want, and getting the exact kind of output required. This kind of specialist is also known as a programmer.

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All of this is completely ignoring the fact that we'll still need people who actually understand whatever output 'programs' these AI systems are generating. No sane company is just going to use a bunch of black-box code that could randomly do something unpredictable or unsafe at any time because no one in the company is actually able to understand the generated code.

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Also, who is creating these AI systems? Programmers!

A more reasonable comparison you could make is to tools like WordPress. Web developers used to be able to make a good living from building/coding simple brochure-style websites from scratch with simple css and html. Now you don't really need to know how to code to make one if you're using something like WordPress or Squarespace. But if you've used either of these (wp in particular...) you'll know that it's anything but simple. And also they are usually extremely limited in what they're actually capable of producing. Oh and guess what - thousands of people (at least) make their entire career extending wordpress and other tools like it. I know several people that have built careers out of using wordpress to create simple websites without ever learning a lick of code.

So no, just because you can get a computer to generate some code, doesn't mean it's necessarily going to make the job easier, or more accessible, or that it will put all programmers out of work. The only thing I think is guaranteed is that the tools programmers use will change -- but this has literally always been the case in this field.

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whatTheBumfuck t1_issg254 wrote

Last night I watched the season finale of she hulk, in which there was a large plot point involving ai generated media. My gf turned to me and was like ohh that's like what you were talking about. Sorta seemed like she only then realized that this stuff is for real lol. Anyways, thought that was interesting. It's definitely seeping into mainstream culture. I expect people to take it more seriously the more that happens.

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whatTheBumfuck t1_irc43v3 wrote

Generally speaking it's better to do something slowly at a more controlled pace if you intend to do it safely. The thing with AGI is you can really only fuck it up once, then the next day your civilization has been turned into a paper clip factory. In the long run things like this are going to make positive outcomes more likely.

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