r/WorkReform • u/zzill6 š¤ Join A Union • 3d ago
š” Venting The problem with AI in a nutshell.
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u/hansn 3d ago
I find it strange that people have more faith in technology's ability to remove the need for human labor than in the idea we can tax rich people.
We're not at risk of running out of important problems to solve that humans are very qualified to work on. We only need to ensure humans working on those problems can eat and find a place to live.Ā
The solution is obvious: tax the goddamn rich and fund nurses, teachers, and construction workers to make the world better.
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u/epr-paradox 3d ago edited 3d ago
No, AI gives the wealthy the illusion of access to skill and strip the unskilled of the opportunity to learn because the systems they're now required to use lie to them.
You need to already know what you want ai to do in order for it to be useful. It's an automated intern. If you don't have someone who can check its work, then you get slop. This goes for art, this goes for STEM. This goes for management.
Ai is also the only industry in the world that loses more money the more customers use their service.
It also gets more expensive for the company every time they produce a new model.
An accountant looking through the books once compared it to a company that was selling $100 bills for $1, and when they tried to raise the price to $5 their customers stopped coming.
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u/EliSka93 3d ago
No, AI gives the wealthy the illusion of access to skill and strip the unskilled of the opportunity to learn because the systems they're now required to use lie to them.
It's always nice when you click into a comment section to write a correction, only to find it's already been written.
Yes, this is exactly it.
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u/mrmemo 3d ago
Man 10000%
Egotistical tech bros ran out of sycophants, so they built sycophantic AI that tells them their ideas are amazing. "Oh yeah boss you can totally use AI to replace a quarter of your workforce, here's how!"
Then (best case) they realize AI has no idea what it's doing, declare bankruptcy, dissolve the companies, and start over.
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u/AvatarOfMomus 3d ago
Note, the wealthy already do this, right now they just pay people to do the skilled labor and think they're geniuses for 'having the ideas' because they don't know enough about the hard parrs to know that part js easy. I honestly think this is how Elon Musk thinks of himself.
The difference with AI is that (they hope) it won't file whistleblower complaints or go to the police, it won't demand time off or quit, and they really hope it'll be cheaper and better than humans.
Of course none of them really understand how it works so they don't understand if humans stop creating stuff the AI stagnates too, or worse goes into a self destructive cycle called model collapse.
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u/MelvynAndrew99 2d ago
They hope it will stay unregulated
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u/AvatarOfMomus 2d ago
There's actually a split here... The current industry leaders want regulation to both make it hard for competitors to get going, and so they can get out of a lot of very expensive apending commitments. That's why they keep saying there needs to be a slowdown while not slowing down. They want the government to force one ao they can get out of some very pricey contracts.
The people using AI mostly don't want regulation. Also Musk probably because he lives by selling ridiculous promises.
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u/peanutb-jelly 3d ago
pretty sure musk is fully aware that he is a conman, and just presents himself as an expert, as a con.
but it's absolutely the same thing they do now. i've pointed at disney slop cycles, such as the turn of the millennium dog-shit animated sequel slop onward.
not getting into how copyright is just a colonization of the public domain and public infrastructure, but they definitely use their position to dominate market salience.
also ask me how advertising exists purely for those with existing capital to dominate salience, regardless of quality.
everything is fucked,
and opportunists are allowed to fuck every new invention into another vapid excuse for public exploitation.
"the cloud" = "store you private data on my computer. it's totally secure i promise." + datacenters
proprietary environments (think apple) are just ways to pressure people into using their products exclusively, or else some features or basic quality of life is held hostage, etc.
but the stuff closer to "AI = less reliable interns" is a good starter around concepts like instrumental convergence, goodhart's law, and compression/lossy communication through scale related compression like the telephone game experience, or just in basic language. IE. different predictive models interpreting polysemous language collapsing into different interpretations. you could also include general 'enshitification' in this context, but there's a lot of colourful contexts for those who want to understand the comparison between AI prompting limitations, and corpo team prompting limitations.
often when good art makes it through the corpo slopification, it's because some artist risked their status, time, or health to make something they are proud of. usually to the chagrin of their corporate overlords who would rather have squeezed another penny from some unimportant 'value' such as 'human emotions,' or other things humans care about for some weird reason. what a terrible waste. could have been exploitable environment to extract another farthing from.
and that's usually a big part of the framing. what is being defined as "having value" or "exploitable environment."
much like cancer deciding that the shared infrastructure of a body is exploitable environment,
or basically authoritarianism/fascism at the social scale. how these things are being framed is some reason usually entirely missing from the conversation.
that being said, it's a huge conversation, with a lot of surrounding context, but i definitely appreciate AI slop giving us a good parallel for people to comprehend slop and slopification in general.
now if only we could deal with communication problems within progressive groups over-fitting their local-salient model, and taking the socialized inertia as dogma, even if it means we have to self-segregate and avoid solidarity at all cost.
i really wish people put as much time and energy into learning about how our systems work as they do towards socializing aggression towards other progressive who are trying to make sense of the giant noise machine we are all seemingly befuddled by.
hopefully most of this is interpretable, because i'm tired and not gonna do a second draft.
regardless, y'all are appreciated for trying to comprehend this mess.
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u/huskers2468 3d ago
Ai is also the only industry in the world that loses more money the more customers use their service.
Gyms?
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u/epr-paradox 3d ago
Gyms charge more than the cost of maintenance for membership, and there are tons of memberships that just don't get utilized.
From what I understan (correct me in the comments if I'm wrong) Ai is currently running on capex overflow (even the company I work at that is only periphrially related to AI went from $100 a share to $400 a share in 1 year through no internal effort). They are taking losses until companies are so fully AI integrated that they can increase the price to what it costs to provide the service. Microsoft has even said as much. Something like "we need people to get hooked on AI before they realize how much it costs" talking about money and environmental impact.
Gyms run on opex expenditure. They base the cost of membership on opperating costs with some cushion. Each member grows the size of the cushion.
That's why everyone is holding their breath as grok gets shoehorned into every index fund through a special made back door without the proper market settling time. Once capex slows down, the market is going to adjust to the real cost. Everybody knows the market is currently irrational, but nobody knows how it's going to resolve.
As a side point, currently our layoff rates look like we're in the biggest economic boom America has ever experienced, and our hiring rates look like we're back in the great depression. One of the theories as to why is that no company is confident in what's happening next year, so they're all just holding.
What a time to be alive.
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u/Electrical_Use_8935 1d ago
that automated intern comparison is spot on, never thought about it that way
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u/reloader1977 3d ago
Ai will be what dooms man kind. The wealthy are to greedy to see it.
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u/Jessieflow 3d ago
They are not just too greedy they simply do not care and they do not think past their own lives even about the life of their own children.
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u/BrightCandle 3d ago
We are a long way from Ford realising his workers needed to earn enough to be able to buy the cars he was producing in order to grow the business. Up until the 1970s much of the wealthy class was making numerous investments in society, university wings, libraries etc just building public good all over the place. The current lot are stripping humanity of everything and sending society back to feudalism and I don't think they care that some of them are going to go bust when the rest of the world can't afford their products.
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u/AlcibiadesTheCat 3d ago
The petit-bourgeois think, because they're somewhat wealthy, that the leopards won't eat their faces.
But the leopards come for us all, and unity is what keeps the leopards away.
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u/Idontdanceforfun 3d ago
no they're well enough aware, they just don't give a shit. that's the point of greed. "I get mine and everyone else be damned"
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u/Dubmove 3d ago
The problem is not AI, the problem is capitalism. Pretty much all white collar labor can now be done more efficiently, in the sense that any worker could produce x-times the work in the same time. In any economical system that is designed for people this what naturally result in workers maintaining their output while only working a fraction of their previous workweek. But under capitalism this naturally leads to the company delegating the entire labor to a fraction of the workforce and firing the rest.
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u/Legitimate_Shock4097 3d ago edited 3d ago
This. AI could lead to great societal benefits. The problem is not necessarily with the technology itself, ignoring potential pitfalls of the technology (cyber security, warfare, surveillance, mental health implications among other things).
The problem is the way in which money is distributed as a sole function of the perceived benefit or output to capitalists or agencies (not society). Once that has been eroded, which has been speculated, the potential could be very bad for those used to exchanging time and effort in the exchange of others time and effort.
A system could be developed to combat these potential issues, but itās not the one we have. Capitalism, as we know it, should die if this were to occur. The fear for most is that it will not, and less the other potential problems with the technology itself. That actually says more about the system and those that prop it up than anything else.
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u/Adventurous_Gate3330 3d ago
Stripping knowledge and proficiency from the general public in an effort to cut cost and control your labor force has been the end goal of technology ever sense we switched from apprenticeships to the assembly line. Keep your workers incapable of understanding how to create the finished product, and you don't have to worry about them opening a competitor. Nothing's changed, AI is the next iteration.
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u/seweso 2d ago
If AI can replace humans. Then why is it always painfully obvious if something is made with AI? Why can I sense the sloppiness?
It seems to me that only stupid people think AI gives them access to inteligence. Only people without skill think AI has skills. Only people without creativity think it gives them access to creativity.Ā
Inteligent, creative, skillful people use it as a tool at most.Ā
For me AI has proven without a doubt that CEOs are the ones which can most easily be replace by AI.Ā
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u/laxc0 3d ago
I think the technology and research should be separated from the assholes in management who think itās a shortcut to wealth and domination.
If itās non-monopolized and open, then thereās cases where technology helps the average person save time or reduce friction. Like we all use the internet instead of limiting ourselves to an encyclopedia.
Most of the time AI is way too overzealously applied in work and then it burns a bunch of money or backfires when the complexity or specialization is too much. Then you still need people and have to hire people back with egg on your face. Sure AI can give you an answer, but if you donāt understand the answer or know what to do with it, then itās just creating a false narrative for the ones in management who are too stupid to know whatās a good decision or bad decision.
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u/Boulange1234 3d ago
AI allows the wealthy to access my money and privacy while stripping my ability to access my money and privacy.
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u/Designer_Emu_6518 3d ago
Donāt forget completely ignore individuals trying to grow and refine skills or just eat with money from an entry level position
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u/thinkB4WeSpeak š· Good Union Jobs For All 3d ago
Destroy the middle class and make everyone either rich or poor. Just like the Gilded Age
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u/GrandpaSimpson1086 3d ago
Every disruptive technology was proclaimed that it would destroy the working class, and it always proven to be an exaggeration. Maybe this time is different, but likely not. Just another human invention that overtime becomes a net positive.
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u/Wizywig 3d ago
I mean... the same was said about the internet. The internet converted SO MANY manual tasks into automated systems. I joked "The war on jobs starts today".
This led to more wealth and economy getting created.
This is starting to really feel like FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt).
The problem is we have few safety nets, and whatever we do actually have is being eroded. The problem isn't AI, the problem is that our government is any % speedrunning into fascism thinking they can just replace workers with AI (or at least reduce reliance on workers) and get away with it well enough.
The reality is, in a fair market, the market will adjust.
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u/This-Echidna7139 3d ago
The wealthy have been doing that without AI. Because thatās accessible with lots of wealth you donāt need ai to access it. Ai gives ppl without wealth the ability to also access it. You cant access a team of overworked and under paid Korean animators like big studios can but u can access AI
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u/i_amtheice 3d ago
All wealthy people crow about how hard they work, but most of that "hard work" just involves delegating tasks to various teams and people they've hired. They don't know or do anything, they just know what the people they hire tell them and do for them. At every level of human existence, they've removed all friction. Any problem that arises is immediately some salaried person's problem.
But that's still not good enough.
With AI, they want to make even their immediate helpers/assistants/employees obsolete. They want to exist in a total pleasure vacuum, where every need is a mere keystroke away.
They won't get it. They cannot outrun or outspend their humanity or their mortality. The technology does not exist and if they somehow manage to invent it, it'll take one look at them and see they're the most objectively useless and resource-consuming out of everyone and act accordingly.
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u/grimorg80 2d ago
Like any other automated mean of production. Marx described this extremely clearly and there was no AI involved. But you folks aren't ready for that conversation
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u/dandatrk 3d ago edited 1d ago
AI should be a force multiplier giving chaces to people who can't afford to get their idea off the ground. Instead corpos are leveraging it to squeeze us for thier own greed.
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u/Specific_Age500 3d ago
It also gives poor people access to skills, though they don't have the means to act on them.Ā
But this frames the issue as a wealthy person problem, not an AI problem. Which I actually agree with. It just seems easier to fight AI than to fight rich people.Ā
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u/jennixred 3d ago
there's a lot of truth to this, and we're in the weird era when it's still accessible. More people should take advantage of that, like the cat who knocked off Adobe's whole act: https://app.getartcraft.com/
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u/SharpSocialist 3d ago
The problem is capitalism.