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I would like to interest some (many? All?) folks in UBI

i have complicated feelings about UBI in the long term but it's certainly something of interest, for sure

I'm not sure how you can be against UBI, it's literally how the wealthy live their life. The 1% and higher basically can never be poor unless they start taking out insane loans because their base wealth generates so much interest.

tbh i find it deeply irritating and disingenuous to call this "automation", as if we'd just invented the dishwasher. it's not a contraption that performs a rote task; it's a box that spits out Whatever

the story of humanity is one of telling stories, and now i am constantly advertised the box as "What if you didn't have to tell stories. What if you could automate talking to your children. What if there were a TikTok nobody had to make. Just endless banal sludge, forever"

What if we could automate humanity, so you had more time to labor

i don't think this actually contradicts what steve is saying? automating away human creativity and connection is bad, automating away merge conflicts and meeting notes is fine. yes the most powerful people are sociopaths but that's always been the case

i think that this is a *little* bit of a waffles situation. i don't disagree that, for example, Sora is boring, bad sludge. but i wasn't talking about that in this thread i have a lot of beefs and concerns with llms! they just aren't what i was talking about here

Automation isn't bad. Trying to do it with expensive tech in fields that have in some cases been efficiently automated for 100 years, is stupid and bad. See: all the crypto idiots that think a humanoid robot makes sense for harvesting grains. When we already had self driving combines for a while.

That's a strawman argument. People don't want AI slop, AI making porn images out of peoples' baby photos, AI spying on them, AI producing flawed records, AI breaking the internet, AI hogging a community's water/electric, etc. AI isn't out there digging ditches, man. 🙄

none of this is stuff i'm talking about in this thread. i agree that these things are bad

AI is objectively not improving the human condition or building anything that's helping people do things more easily. It's used for mass theft of intellectual property, spewing lies & bullshit, & creating porn based on phone shots of the lady who lives next door.

I think the profound sadness of this technology is that it was developed for profit, by corporations, using our, in a way that sounds like it'll steal jobs. If this was made by well funded public universities, to publish openly, even if it used copyright data, the public would love it.

OpenAI being de facto a publicly traded corporation, that are openly glib about copyright, and framing their tech as messianic and scary, it just feels like a cruel scam. This poisoned the well for open source ai, and probably models strictly trained on public domain data, as well.

And I hate it! AI has been of legit use in my life, building my own agents. For example, I set up a presence sensor in my room and a bunch of esp32 buttons around the house, and now it tells me to go to bed and wake up on time and reminds me to do my hobbies, making me go to the rooms at least

oomfie you're so correct and cool

My 2c: we're automating for the wrong reasons. I see *tons* of code written to satisfy the gods of unnecessary complexity, when using a different approach would literally eradicate much of it. To mitigate this burden, we resort to LLMs to do the grunt work for us. It's all self-inflicted.

The thing I keep coming back to is the question of whether its good to automate away the jobs of junior engineers, which is largely how LLMs are being deployed currently. I'm worried we will retire and bequeath an empire of shit to a generation who had no opportunity to learn.

I'm still not sure how much of the job market is really end-of-zirp and Biden-tax-writeoff correction. But I am real worried about the empire of shit. I'm convinced these things are useful now, but they still empower bad actors, copycats, and slop. Legacy software stamping on a human face forever.

i worry a lot about this too. without getting too detailed, someone very close to me who is junior has been looking for work for like three years now. it's fuckin rough out there

i am a little unsure on the learning thing. like, i would hope that llms can make it easier, not harder to learn. there's a weird thing with the sycophancy where it's the inverse of the IRC rooms i cut my teeth on, a sympathetic teacher may help people learn, but of course they can also be incorrect

One argument I've seen in game dev is that "automating tasks like proc gen and QA takes away jobs that people could have used to enter the industry", which doesn't pass the smell test.

Why doesn’t this pass the smell test? How will people get into the industry without these jobs?

The industry will change. We've automated all kinds of jobs that acted as stepping stones to somewhere or other.

one of my best friends is a QA person, we talk about this stuff all the time he hasn't spent enough time with the tools to have a strong opinion yet but he's at least curious in how it can help him focus on the interesting parts of his job while automating the not interesting parts

I know you bring this up later in the thread, but as badly-targeted as the unnaunced anti-automation sentiment is, it's hard not to be pessimistic about the future of the working class without some serious reform to society that ensure that productivity gains aren't just hoarded by billionaires

While their (former) employees are just SOL when they lose their jobs. There's only so many times workers can Just Get Another Job until there aren't enough jobs to sustain the working class, and any economic system that wants to sustain itself needs to recognize this fact and adjust accordingly.

So, the social context we are in is one in which people's access to the essentials of life are contingent upon their labor. If you automate someone's job, they might not have a roof over their heads. This is not because there's an inherent moral good to laboring, but because our society is like that

and our society is very much not well-positioned to change that right now, because reactionaries are ascendant. Automation in this context is therefore more likely to lead to a number of people becoming non-people in the eyes of the economy, and less likely to lead to easier lives.

but some people have an object-level vs meta-level issue and think this is because automation is inherently bad in a universal way that isn't contingent upon anything, which is a bit silly. It's a problem entirely because of where and when we are.

Hey man, then what am I supposed to do with this giant pile of protestant metaphysics that has been accumulating

I would also say that the leverage workers have on bosses is our ability to withhold labor from them; certain types of automation hinder our ability to exert that leverage and aren't morally neutral

Automation of tedium=good Automation of creativity=bad The problem is that there's no clean break between creativity and tedium, the extremes are obvious but the border is fuzzy. One person's tedium can be another's creativity. Make no mistake, there CAN be creativity in tedium, but not always.

Labeling AI as “automation” or “improving conditions” is such a grand euphemism. It’s not like LLMs are fixing our HVAC, mining the rare earths, or sewing garments. It’s keeping people with easy jobs from having to think as much and types fast. It’s not improving conditions anywhere.

i think your view of these is far too narrow and, it's true that i'm only talking about a very narrow thing here. there's more to it! that's not the part i'm talking about right now though

Once capitalists get involved, t goal of automation is no longer “helping us do things more easily”. It’s “getting rid of those pesky workers who want a living wage”.

I think there is a lot to say about applications of generative AI, but specifically for coding what I find ethically problematic is the massive laundering of intellectual output, where clearly licensed code goes in and unlicensed code comes out.

It's entirely clear-cut to me that this is a breach of both the spirit and the wording in licensing. This is particularly so for GPL-licensed code, but also for MIT, where attribution and license reproduction is necessary for substantial portions.

What is substantial? I think those who set arbitrary numbers on line counts and percentages of the code base are missing the point. If someone spends 6 hours debugging and perfecting the 50-line implementation of an algorithm that they were only able to develop because they ...

Weren‘t there some branches of Christianity that more or less implied that if you aren’t overworked and unhappy you are not living a “good” (by their standard) life ?

that's the kinda shit i'd always be saying if all my friends and I were overworked all the time

Right, that’s the kind of thing to program into masses from their childhood, so they don’t question being overworked.

You can’t build just inventions from slave labor and stuff you stole without consent! I need you to actually try and understand why we are mad about this shit.

There's no *ongoing* "slavery" or "theft" in the LLM development right now so this is a moot point. Even if you think the first ones absolutely needed it, at this point they're perfectly capable of improving based on synthetic data.

I don’t excuse a product that was originally built on slavery and theft and retains the roots of slavery and theft at its core. If you’re a good person, you don’t either.

I don’t want you to use my works to build a CSAM generator, I want you to remove my works from the CSAM generator training set, and I want you to respect consent whenever you think about building something based on the works of others. LLM slop companies don’t do any of this.

This thing you think is just “automation” is a nonconsensual way to take what other people built and make the world worse while enriching the wealthy, and I’m so sick of seeing you pretend that this isn’t the problem when we have all repeatedly expressed this to you and others

I keep coming back to, is the plow inherently bad? What about the horse-driven plough? The tractor? Is the right level of automation just "whatever was around when I was child" or do we have some principled theory here

exactly

everyone who automates less than me is an idiot, and everyone who automates more than me is a maniac

sort of along my recent repost, the issue at hand has been the same since the dawn of capitalism: when automation increases productivity, who gets to capture the value of that productivity increase? the beef is not with the productivity. it's with the value capture

Absolutely. When folks tell me about how much more productive AI has made them, my conversation with them goes like this: "Oh that's great! I'm sure you've gotten a raise then right? No? Oh well at least you must not work as many hours now right? No? What's that? Your co-worker got laid off?"

As it happens, labour is currently the primary means of non-upper-class folks getting the money they need to live, so any automation which threatens labour directly threatens their way of life. In order for automation to thrive it's important to first establish better systems for sharing value

Sure—but the folks pushing this are capturing the value. Not the workers. This is the whole historical Luddite argument. It’s about political economy. Why push the tools that are going to further impoverish people who have to make a living through labor?

I think also negative externalities as well not being compensated for by those who are capturing that value e.g. xAI and Gas Turbines being turned on in black neighborhoods. I think it's good to be mad at that and the people making those decisions.

Degradation of quality matters, too. I see a lot of parallels to what happened with textiles. Yeah we got more "productive", but we went from a world where pieces of clothing routinely lasted an entire lifetime to fast fashion and disposable clothing that you're lucky to have last a year

gonna just fully lean into being a stereotypical leftist here: yinz claim to have read marx yet clearly haven't read marx or internalized the ideas within bsky.app/profile/segy...

Also the luddite movement smashed the machines in factories because they hated the *concept* of the factory and the exploitation factory labor inherently represented. They didn't _want_ to control the factories; they wanted to own their own labor and direct it as they pleased. Distributed capital.

a thing i've been thinking about posting for a long time is "back in those days, the workers didn't say "eww factories were created by capitalists to enrich capitalists, we should abandon factories" they said "we should seize them and direct their output for the good of humanity"

I honestly don't know how you're getting code of acceptable quality out of these things. When I use Cursor to generate code, it gets things obviously wrong, struggles to factor things in a way that is extensible or extends existing code, and makes changes unrelated to my requests.

Like, I can see using this to create a single-use disposable application that only needs to *mostly work,* but not something that I'm interested in maintaining. The automation isn't bad (morally), it's bad (low quality).