Realize that it's a choice to respond to things this way. This feeling comes from a certain set of assumptions and learned responses.

Remember that people are bad at predicting the future. Look at the historical track record of people predicting the implications of technological advancement. You'll find that almost nobody gets it right. Granted, that sometimes means that things are worse than we expect, but there are also many cases where things turn out better than we expect. If you're prone to focusing on potential negatives, maybe you can consciously balance that out by forcing yourself to imagine potential positives as well.

Try to focus on things you personally have control over. Why worry about something that you can't change? Focus on problems that you can contribute to solving.

It's easy to say "don't worry" if you haven't been affected by events like this. I feel it's stronger for society to say "I don't know what will happen, but we'll work through it together."

We are building technology, to suggest no agency is helpful in avoiding any feeling of responsibility or guilt — perhaps rendering your comment within the realms of waxing philosophical.

Who better to worry about this than the people of hacker news?

From a pure mental health standpoint, sure, it’s solid advice but I think it’s narrowed the context of the broader concern too much.

An alternative to learned helplessness of “nothing you can do” is to encourage technologists to do the opposite.

Instead of forgetting about it, trying to put it out of your mind, fight for the future you want. Join others in that effort. That’s the reason society has hope — not the people shrugging as people fall by the wayside.

Depression mediation by agency feels more positive, but I don’t have a lot of experience tbh. Just a view that we, technologists, shouldn’t abdicate responsibility nor encourage others to do so.

That culture, imo, is why a large section of tech workers, consumers and commentators see the industry in a bad light. They’re not wrong.

EDIT: to add, “what problems can I personally solve” also individualises society’s ability to shape itself for the better. “What problems can I personally get involved in solving”, “what communities are trying to solve problems I care about” is perhaps the message I’d advocate for.

Cat's out of the bag. There is no legislation that will stop this. Not unless/until it has some obscene cost and AI gets locked down like nuclear weapons. But even then, it's just too simple to make these things now that the tech is known.

I sure don't know the answer but we just don't know what's coming next. Gonna have to wait and see.

But reality is as reality is and nobody is owed a desk job. These are very exciting times with what type of society could be built with this tech, human inefficiencies are responsible for a lot of suffering that we can might be ab;e to stamp out soon.

As an individual, I think the experience would be dreadful

Not in my thirties and almost nothing I worried about has come true. I mean, tomorrow we might get wiped out by a runaway technological singularity, but I could've spent the last 30 years of my life worrying a lot less too..

I went to cognitive behavior therapy, for me it was like someone opened up my mind and showed it to me on a screen, it was a mirror into my head. It was amazing how it felt like I could rewire my thought patterns over the course of a few months.

The main takeaway from it all however, was the mantra: _thoughts are not facts_.

If you can realize that your thoughts are not objective truths, you will be much better off in almost every aspect of your life, because after living this mantra for many years, putting it to the test constantly, I know it's solid.

Later on I read a lot of Buddhist philosophy which matched incredibly well with the therapy because a lot of Buddhist thinking and meditation practice is quite similar in it's approach. This sort of reinforced the validity of the CBT because I realized wise people have known about seeing things in an objective light for millennia, which was validating for me and helped me continue on the introspective path.

Basically, we're all hallucinating in one way or another, almost all of the time, and that is ok, just be aware of that. When we're worried about the future, we're worried about something which doesn't yet exist, which is actually crazy.

Of course it doesn't mean we should just ignore long term problems, no one advocates for that. But we shouldn't assume we know the outcome in advance because that often causes stress.

Warning: I think that for most westerners, it's "safer" to get into something like CBT, Buddhism comes with some IMO very confronting ideas for a lot of people where as CBT is much more user friendly for westerners.

Industrial scale technology might ruin us though, so you might have some point, mostly I'm referring to climate change which is for sure the greatest existential threat imaginable right now. However it seems technology might bail us out here too, nuclear and renewables.

We undoubtedly have reaped immense benefits from the industrial revolution for example- that doesn't mean I'd have any interest in living through it or that it was executed in a way that prioritized the people who lived during those times.

The more freely available the tech is, the easier it is to reproduce, the less the average joe is going to be locked out of the benefits.

My entire career and everything good in my working life has involved open source software and I'm sure that it will continue to be the case.

material:

- water: too little => thirst, too much => drown

- heat: too little => freeze, too much => burn

- food: too little => starvation, too much => obesity

spiritual:

- courage: too little => cowardice, too much => foolhardiness

- diligence: too little => slothfulness, too much => workaholism

- respect: too little => disregard, too much => idolatry

etc.

life is a balance

Why do people always say this / think that saying this is helpful? Try saying to someone with ADHD, "realize that you are choosing not to get your chores done today. You're choosing not to get out of bed on time. You're choosing to show behavior that your peers describe as 'lazy'. This will keep happening as long as you let it!"

So what if you have the ability to choose whether you are depressed or not? Not everyone got the same choice. Not everyone still has that choice.

I don't really expect another solution, but this always kind of bothers me when I see people saying everything is a choice.

With neurodivergence and mental disorders, what you see as "choice" can end up not being a choice at all.

So so so much of this about. Not just disorders too.

You might read my comment as trying to claim that my disorders define me and that because I have these disorders I can afford to give up on this stuff because 'it's hopeless'. Truth is I've been trying to get past this for damn near a decade at this point and it's not nearly as easy as you make it out to be, and that's why I say that I don't have the same choice you think I do.

I didn't even know I had ADHD until a year or so ago, I'd just routinely lose the ability to do the stuff I love and I'd have to go find something else to do instead. Depression would stem from all the things I knew I loved but that I could no longer motivate myself to do. In fact I was probably even worse off before I knew about this because I thought that I was just doing something wrong, not being controlled by an invisible menace that most other people don't even know exists

I don't mean to be hostile or to impose that it can't be as easy as you're describing. I just don't think that it's right to say it's always just a choice how you react.

I have tons of completely involuntary reactions caused by primarily trauma, but I can't control them. They do things like force me literally out of consciousness with overwhelming guilt and/or sadness. That's not a choice. I didn't choose that. That's completely autonomous!`

It's an easy thing for people to say when they don't really want to help others.

What I posted is what I have personally found to be the most useful advice in overcoming self-destructive mental habits.

I'm glad a one-time, one-line quip worked for you, but in my experience, positive mental habits are built over time, through support and continuous practice.

That's making a lot of assumptions about my personal history that you couldn't possibly know anything about.

>but in my experience, positive mental habits are built over time, through support and continuous practice.

I agree, and I don't think anything I said implies otherwise.

If you are responding to people's problems with common one-liners, it can be interpreted as belittling someone. It could be interpreted as an attempt to over-simplify or attempt to make them feel they are "inferior" to see and solve their issues, when their issues are to them, much larger than a random one-line quip.

For example, I’m getting text messages all day long from random politicians asking for money. If you told people 50 years ago that one day we’d be carrying devices where we could be pinged with unwanted solicitations all day and night, they might have imagined an asphyxiating nightmare. But in reality, it’s mainly a nuisance.

The point is that your brain makes all kinds of emotional predictions about the future, but they aren’t really very useful and if you’re experiencing depression or anxiety, I can guarantee they are biased predictions.

The tens of thousands of people working in entertainment building other people's visions can now be their own writers, actors, and directors. And they'll find their own fans.

Studios will go away. Disney will no longer control Star Wars, because your kids will make it instead. In fact, the very notion of IP is about to drive to zero.

And OpenAI won't own this. They won't even let you do "off book" things, and that's a no-go for art. Open source is going to own this space.

There are other companies with results just as mature. They just didn't time a press release to go head to head with Gemini.

Only some people can make Star Wars (the pinnacle of independent filmmaking if you read Lucas's biography). It has nothing to do with the tools.

IP in the arts is how artists get paid.

I can assure you that no one in the creative industry feels liberated by these tools. Do you realise that just because you are good at lighting, you don't want to be an actor and make a movie? No, you like to be good at lightning, work with others who are good at what you do, and create a great work of art together.

AI imagery only knows what exists. It's tough to make it do innovative technical effects and great new lightning. "oh my god, stock video sites are dead" Yes, exactly; stock, by definition, is commoditised.

Edit: Putin on AI, 2017 https://youtu.be/aJELcvjREgk?t=29

"Whoever takes the lead in this area will be the ruler of the world."

"тот кто станет лидером в этой сфере будет властелином мира"

I think in the initial years there'll be some major incidents where a fake thing gets major attention for a few days until it's debunked, but the much larger issue will be the inverse.

It's terrible news for the people being replaced. Their training and decades of experience is their competitive advantage and livelihood. When that experience becomes irrelevant because anyone can create similar quality work at the push of a button, they're suddenly left with nothing of value in a world flooded with competition.

Like billionaires didn't already scare a lot of people.

Dall-E was crazy and then suddenly people were doing the same thing on consumer hardware with an open model within a year.

Filmmakers being able to bring their vision to life using generative models is going to create such a huge expansion of the market.

What people don't realize is that long term these advances are a death knell for mega-corps, not for individuals.

Why do I need to kiss Weinstein's ass to get my movie made if I can do it with a shoestring budget and AI and have the same assistance to create marketing materials, etc. I need a lot less money to break even and can focus on niche markets aligned with my artistic vision instead of mass appeal to cover costs plus the middlemen involved in distribution and production.

I’m sure some people would be more ok to work a shitty job with the hope that they might make it as an artist.

Now that it’s becoming more and more obvious they will not be an artist that’s better than AI, what do they have left to hope for ?

I made a twitter thread[1] with weird metal cybertrucks using Midjourney a couple days ago. I personally enjoyed the process and do not have the talent nor the time to do that without generative AI. There are people who do have that talent, but honestly I doubt anyone else would've put in the time.

I think you might have it a little backwards. For most people, the fun part is "making a movie", not "watching hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage picking between 10 different shots". That's the drudgery, and that's the part generative AI can eliminate.

[1] https://twitter.com/acnebs/status/1757641901438894338

I think you might have it a little backwards. For most people, the fun part is "making a movie", not "watching hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage picking between 10 different shots". That's the drudgery, and that's the part generative AI can eliminate.

No, that's the craft, and solving problems where the continuity doesn't line up, or production had to drop shots, or the story as shot and written sucks in some way, is where the art comes in.

The drudgery is things like ingesting all the material, sorting it into bins, lining up slate cues, dealing with timecode errors, rendering schedules, working your way through long lists of deliverables and so on. You have literally confused the logistics part with the creative act.

But many of those things involve a lot of drudgery, and the drudgery is what these "AI" solutions are best at. If you want to go above and beyond and craft the perfect shot, that opportunity would still be available to you. Why would it not?

When we invented machines that make clothes, did that reduce the number of jobs in the clothing industry? When we got better and better at it, did that make fashion worse? No. If you want a machine made suit for $50, you can find one. If you want a handmade suit for $5000, you can find one.

Tech like this expands opportunities, it does not eliminate them. If and when it gets to the point where Sora is better at making videos than a human in every conceivable dimension, then we can have this discussion and bemoan our loss. But we're not even close to that point.

And with your suit example, you're looking at it from the point of view of consumer choice (which is great) without really looking at the question of of how people in the clothing/textile industry are affected. It's difficult to find longitudinal data at the global level, but we can look at the impact of previous innovations (from outsourcing to manufacturing technology) on the US clothing market; employment there has fallen by nearly 90% over 30 years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/242729/number-of-employe...

The usual response to observations like this is 'well who wants to work in the clothing industry, those people are now free to do other things, great opportunity for people in other parts of the world etc.', but the the constant drive to lower prices by cutting labor costs or quality has big negative externalities. Lots of people that used to make a living thanks to their skill with a sewing machine, at least in the US, are no longer able to monetize that and had to switch to something else; chances they were less skilled at that other thing (or they'd have been doing it instead) and so suffered an economic loss while that transition was forced upon them.

Luddism is never the answer.

Scratch that; luddism is the answer for people who don't actually care about humanity as a whole (but frequently pretend they do) and just want their hobby or their job or their neighborhood to stay the same and for everyone else to stop ruining things. But for the rest of the world, increasing technological efficiency means more people get more things for less. This is good actually.

I see these AI models as lowering the barrier to entry, while giving more power to the users that choose to explore that direction.

Meanwhile with AI, given the same model and inputs - including a prompt which may include the names of specific artists "in the style of x" - one can reproduce mathematically equivalent results, regardless of the person using it. If one can perfectly replicate the work by simply replicating the tools, then the human using the tool adds nothing of unique personal value to the end result. Even if one were to concede that AI generated content were art, it still wouldn't be the art of the user, it would be the art of the model.

You asked an AI to make something for you. Thats not really making it yourself. Its like hiring someone to create something for you.

Disclaimer: This post was generated using an llm guided by a human who couldn't be bothered explaining why you're wrong.

The feeling is mutual.

Impressive that you can dismiss an entire genre of art as trivial mindlessness

I'm merely pointing out why it's stupid.

The issue is that those jobs that got automated to "become a craft again" have mostly vanished, except for high-end stuff. Some examples: shoe making, artisan furniture, tailors, watchmakers. Unless you are the best of the best these are hobbies now not something you make money from.

Nowadays most people make money in bleak half-automated jobs (e.g. construction, factory workers) or in white collar jobs sitting in front of a computer in some cubicle doing some mind numbing task for a megacorp.

I'm usually hyped about technological advancement, but very bleak about AI. I think it will just bring more sublte propaganda for state actors, more subtle advertising for megacorps, the dieing of creative jobs like graphic artists or actors is just a sad sideeffect (these will still exist, but only as high end -- we will always have real AAA actors, but the days of extras on movie sets are counted -- lots of the Hollywood protests were because studios started doing contracts for noname actors that stated that the studio will regain rights of the actor's digital likeness)

> Nowadays most people make money in bleak half-automated jobs (e.g. construction, factory workers) or in white collar jobs sitting in front of a computer in some cubicle doing some mind numbing task for a megacorp.

And all the while they enjoy abundance of shoes, furniture, clothes and watches with value/price ratio absurdly high by standards of most of human history.

The craft is an activity, kind of an art by itself. Many find it enjoyable.

The destination is the journey, dude!

https://mikeroweworks.org/

This sounds nice, but having worked with many artists in the past a lot of them do it because they're good at it, it's enjoyable enough, and it pays their bills so they can eat.

Telling them, "You're now free to make the art you really wanted to make!" doesn't bring much comfort when you're taking away their ability to put food on the table.

Also I take issue with your argument about 'none of the jobs we do now' existing through most of history. Farming, construction, fighting, bookkeeping, cooking, transport, security are all jobs that have been around as long as people have lived in settlements.

Sure, you could point to the long history of nomadic hunting and gathering prior to that, but that's like expanding your argument back to the origin of cellular life or forward to the heat death of the universe in order to make your interlocutor's arguments look insignificant on a cosmic scale. It's not a helpful contribution to addressing the real challenges of the present.

For every one musician that's able to pay the bills, there's 1000 equally talented musicians that can't even get noticed.

For what it’s worth, I think we’re going to see a slide in quality. Maybe there will be a niche for some. But, I think companies will settle for 70% quality if it means eliminating 100% of a full-time position.

(edit to give some body to my comment above:

Hosting a great dinner party is hard work and requires coordination between food, decor, seasonality, people attending, etc. It is akin to a director coordinating the parts of a film. So I do think hosting a good dinner party can count as artistic expression.

I don't know the parent comment's intended reading, but I was reacting to the idea that typing a Sora prompt makes someone a good artist. If the parent means instead that AI allows people to coordinate multiple media in a broader expression that was not possible otherwise, then I fully agree.

)

I didn't say "AI art makes you a great artist" I said it helps you make great art

Tools allow people to express themselves at a higher aesthetic level without needing the extreme technical skills.

GenAI is a tool that lets creators of one medium expand to other mediums without much effort. Like having transcripts auto-generated for a visual podcast, just in the other direction. Low budget (or amateur) poems/songs can turn into short videos; or replace generic album art with better quality generic album art.

The draw will be the primary medium, the rest will just be an extra bonus.

I've updated my comment to explain my view, which I think closely aligns with yours.

When cameras were harder to use, you had national geographic taking you all over the world to photograph different locations because only you and a handful of people knew how to take a picture properly. Now you just hire a local person with a camera to go take the picture you want since it’s much easier to use a camera.

You had people doing photography for ads, now stock photography will do for most brands.

You had people buy high school portraits, I am not sure if people buy those anymore, but a picture of what you looked like in high school is worth a lot less when you can take a selfie every other day.

I don't see it as a negative per se, the thing is most people won't have the decency to keep all that shit for themselves and, say, share just the best 1% they produce. They will flood their social networks and the rest of us will have to sweep through the crap for our daily dose of internet memes.

My point is that I am an aspiring artist, who is waiting tables and I invest all my spare cash and time to get better at my craft and hopefully allow my craft to support me financially.

Any hope of financial benefit coming from my craft is quickly taken away by Dall-e. This has nothing to do with how much I enjoy my art.

Most “good” art isn’t just what you see, it’s also the story behind it. Why was it made? What is the story of the artist? What does it make you feel?

AI might allow more people to tell some of those stories they may have lacked the raw skills to tell before. And for those who have the skills, they can make exactly what they envision, without being limited by some of the randomness in the AI. I think there will always be a place for that, and at the top of the market, that’s what people want.

Blockbuster movies depend to a large extent on the pedigree and abilities of their cast. For the big studios, these models are therefore quite useless apart from bringing dead actors alive again. If publishing material created from living actors without isn't illegal already, in a few years it will be.

This might actually save the movie industry and force it to improve the quality of its output. There will be a huge indy scene of movie makers using models that can only compete via the content of the movies they produce. The realism of the characters won't matter because everyone can have those now. The current big studios will be forced to make very good use of human actors to compete with them though, and become innovative again.

Now with such AI tools, you can write scripts, create art work, crate footage, record voice overs and dialogues. All of this means less need for labor - creative that will not only cause huge employment in the sector but also lead to protests, it already happened last year in Hollywood, it's going to get louder and louder unless we put regulations to prevent job disruptions.

I like going to theater or opera. Even for famous pieces, the performance will be slightly different and unique every time. Imperfect, but with changing and nevertheless accomplished actors, singers, musicians, and dancers. Many people feel the same and that's why they watch live performances of singers, bands, and DJs.

Yesterday I asked a local llm to write a python script to have a several multimodal llms rank 50,000 images generated by a stable diffusion model. I then used those images to train a new checkpoint for the model and can now repeat the process ad infinitum.

In the olden days of 2020 I would have had to hire 5000 people each working for a day to do the same.

Are we though? People still do plenty of things out of interest or hobby, despite it being fully automatable?

e.g. blacksmithing or making certain homemade things?

While these are non digital things, why can't we apply the same thing here?

Some people still hand write assembly out of the novelety and interest of it. Despite there being better tools or arguably better ways of writing code.

But I agree, there's going to be a "war" around this and if could go wrong, if we are not careful.

There is no moat. This will all be commonplace for everyone soon, including with a rich open source community.

OpenAI won't let you do nudity or pop culture, but you can bet your uncle that models better than "Sora" will be doing this in just a few months.

> We are giving the enjoyable parts of life to a computer. And we are left with the drudgery.

No. This means that the tens of thousands of people working in entertainment building other people's visions can now be their own writers, actors, and directors.

This is a collapse of the Hollywood studio system and the beginnings of a Cambrian explosion of individual creators.

An AI capable of this would likely also be able to e.g. flip burgers and bring us to Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

The only original creativity will be in creating new formats and new kinds of experiences - which will mostly mean inventing new kinds of AI.

Everything made in an existing format will either be worthless or near as.

Same applies to software dev. Far more quickly than most people expect, it will also apply to AI dev.

And to hit scale first might be enough of a moat?

  these advances are a death knell for mega-corps, not for individuals.

The torrents will be filled with convincing full-length films which are maybe not as good as the originals, but still very watchable.

We will have infinite chances to get better films than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

*: except the ones starved for compute resources of course

I think we'll soon see a suburban mom in middle America with a part-time penchant for storytelling make a blockbuster video game mostly by herself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Entertainment

Anybody can publish anything with the web. Have publishing houses disappeared? Have scientific journals disappeared?

The insanity is doing the same thing over and over and thinking "this time it will work".

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/12/1011944/artifici...

In a world where attention is scare I sadly think big corps and power brokers will still play a large role. Maybe not though.

Of what market? Certainly not film production. I have my doubts about whether it will expand the market for films, in the economic sense. The lower the cost of producing and distributing a film, the lower the monetary value people will place on it.

Look how most music artists are no longer able to survive on royalties, and a few massive streaming companies have an astounding profitable oligopoly of consumers' music interest. Yes, many pre-streaming publishers were exploitative or unethical, but I'm not convinced that it was to a greater degree than the current market leaders. Consider also that the streaming revolution steamrolled many, perhaps most, indie record labels that supported niche genres; some live on but are no longer able to sustain physical output and a reduced to being digital marketing companies.

Now, people will continue to tell stories and entertain others, so technology like this will be good for people with an artistic vision who can't easily access publishers for whatever reason. It will certainly allow people to pursue bold artistic visions that would not otherwise be economically feasible - exotic locations, spectacular special effects, technically complex perspective moves. Those are good things; I worked in the film industry for a long time and have several unproduced scripts that I'd like to apply this technology to, so I'm not rejecting it.

However, more content doesn't necessarily translate into more economic activity; I think it very likely that visual media will be further devalued as a result. People who have spent years or a lifetime developing genuine craft will be told to abandon it in favor of giving suggestions to a computer system, and those who don't will be laughed at or suspected of fakery, because fakery is so widespread these days (Relevant recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39379073). The easier it becomes to make something, the less value the market will assign to it; rational from the abstracted perspective of pure price theory, disastrous in real life.

Increasingly, we seem to be tilting towards a Huxley-esque dystopia of stunning and infinite-feeling virtual worlds to which we can escape on demand, and an increasingly shitty real world marked by the brutal economic logic of total resource and information exploitation. Already a stock rejoinder to complaints about the state of things is that humanity is on paper richer than ever before, to the point that bums have smartphones and anyone can afford an xbox. I have a homeless neighbor who's living in his car, spending his dying years watching YouTube on his phone to fall asleep because he's lonely. Technically this is an expansion of the market, but I don't think it's a good outcome.

Medium term is ... less good.

AI turns skilled labor into cheap ones, supposedly, right? It's a massive enabler for mega-corps. Not a death knell.

Nothing about the future looks particularly good, other than that medicine is improving. But what’s the point of being alive in such a sanitised, ‘perfect’, instant-dopamine-hits-on-demand kind of world anyway?

Just say to hell with it and bury yourself in an interesting textbook. Learn something that inspires you. It doesn’t matter if ‘AI’ can (or soon will be able to) do it a billion times better than you.

And be kind to those around you.

1) My wife trained as a typesetter on a photo typesetting machine. That was already replacing typesetters working with lead, and the people sorting the used lead, and working with inks etc. They still needed a past-up artist and more. Eventually the GUI based computer arrived, with PageMaker, Quark, Indesign etc. These days she is super productive with a massive online icon library available, full printing and distribution capabilities. Able to do a job that could have involved half a dozen or more people previously.

Are those people unemployed now? Not really (we are talking 1.5 generation now, so not the same people). Unemployment levels are low, and the workforce is significantly larger, with men and women working. The working (outside of the home) part of the population has gone up significantly over a few generations, despite all the new enabling productive tech.

What I see is a lot of visually higher quality work being delivered, but often with the same core content. So productivity has increased, but you get a glossy new shiny report in a PDF, instead of a photocopy of a typewritten page. (Yes, I do simplify. But I think you get the gist.)

2) I started as a system admin, the a systems analyst, worked through project manager, etc. until I was leading startups. In the space where I work now, circular economy and food production, there is so much work to do, that any AI support we can get is welcome. But as the work is innovative, new and not done before, most often the AI tools aren’t that useful, yet. That may change, but with a society that needs to replace a significant part of the infrastructure and processes to achieve a long term sustainable society, I actually don’t worry the AI tools will take my job or any of my colleagues job away. There is plenty to do. I have enough new things in front of me that I could probably keep a whole big venture fund occupied for a long time.

"Now, you can typeset everything in your office" - early Macintosh ad.

Sure you have big data centers full of them but that's already happening with other hardware in other businesses too.

- It emits 30% of climate emissions

- 30% of food produced is gone in losses and waste

- People in middle to high income countries have significant obesity and related problems (some countries have either malnourished people or obese people, and less in between)

- Pollution from our agriculture and aquaculture is killing the ocean near land

- Our intensive agriculture is threatening biodiversity

- We have lost up to 70% of insects in many industrial nations

- Essentially all (90%?) of ocean fish stocks are overfished or at capacity. Even a supposedly rational and environmentally aware nation like Sweden can stop the overfishing. The cod stock has collapsed and now the herring is going too

- The soils are being destroyed or depleted

- The phosphor and nitrogen cycle is broken (fossil fuels or resources that are mismanaged)

I could go on. It is well documented.

I work on circular food production, where we really care about putting together highly efficient nutrient loops and make sure they work locally/regionally. A mix of tech (automation, IT, climate control, etc), agriculture, horticulture, aquaculture, insects etc. As part of this there are very interesting completing pieces with ways of getting the nutrients in creative ways (new food tech), dealing with animal disease (new tech), combined with sensors, ML and just plain old common sense, that can make a huge impact. If we just think through the process a bit more and take responsibility for the externalities, which really are starting to bite.

Much is still overhyped in foodtech imho, specifically the stuff which claims silver bullets without proper circularity. Which is detrimental to the real solutions as investors like simple superscalable solutions, and the simple solutions are mostly not sustainable. (There are of course exceptions).

One can adapt to needing to learn new technology, but one cannot adapt to an algorithm out performing you

Sure a part of the population is slow to adapt and therefore at a disadvantage. But the others, like his wife, adapted.

The idea is that this wave of automation will be no different than other times this has happened to us in the past.

I've never totally understood this binary moment when AGI does "everything" better. How can one even define everything?

Our AI partner could be the most intelligent mathematician or researcher. That's great then we can bounce ideas off of them and they can help us realize our professional / creative ambitions.

Sure if our goal is to maximize profit then maybe we can outsource the decisions to an AI agent.

You can get a computer to create infinite remixes of songs. I haven't seen that replacing music producers doing the same.

When everyone can just press a button and have better music automatically generated, based on their exact preferences inferred from their DNA or an fMRI brain scan, what are your creative ambitions?

I'm obviously not talking about today's limited (public) AI, but far into the future, like in 5 years.

* whether or not that is actually the case is irrelevant

So much about music appreciation is about knowing the artist and for example knowing that what they sing about is shaped by their personal history allowing you to identify with it.

A lot about the appreciation of art is the process and the intention behind the artwork. The final image or sond is just one part.

I find it very difficult to define "better" when we're talking about art.

That's the easy stuff! That's the stuff ML has been successful doing for a decade or more.

The world is way bigger than technology and the Internet. It hasn’t really gone anywhere

But AI is different than previous waves, like search engines and social networks. You can download a model on a stick. You can run it on a CPU or GPU, even a phone. These models are easy to work with, directly in natural language, easy to fine-tune, faster, cheaper, and private under your control. AI is a decentralizing technology, will empower everyone directly, it's like open source and Linux in that it puts users in control.

And that sand takes a very, very long time with lots of big brains to figure out how to manipulate at the nanometer level in order to give you a "beep boop"

It's not like Intel could decide tomorrow to spin up a fab and immediately make NVIDIA and TSMC irrelevant. They're the next closest thing given they make chips, have GPU technology, and also foundry experience and it's still multiple years of effort if they chose that direction.

Your statement is a lot like saying "poker has predictable odds" and yet there is still a vast ocean of poker players.

i thought the point of tv was to sit back and be entertained, usually through some form of storytelling. personally, i don't want to have any part in the creation. if anything custom content would be annoying, because i'd lose the only social aspect of tv (discussing with others)

Fresh air and sunlight are important though.

on the flip side, we'll just generate VR wilderness in the near future and nobody will care what's real or not

It's probably the same feeling farmers had in the beginning of the 20th century when they started seeing industrialized farming technologies (tractors, etc). Sure, farming tech eliminated tons of farming jobs, but they have been replaced by other types of jobs in the cities.

It's the same thing with AI. Some will lose their jobs, but only to find different types of jobs that AI can't do.

> jobs that AI can't do.

Sure, by definition, you’ve described the set of jobs that won’t be replaced by AI. But naming a few would be a lot more useful of a comment. It’s not impossible to imagine that that set might shrink to being pretty much empty within the next ten years.

No but it’s also not impossible to imagine the opposite. AI beat humans at chess decades ago but there are more humans generating income from chess today than there were before Deep Blue.

Chess players get paid because it’s entertaining for others to watch.

So your argument only shows that we can expect work as a form of entertainment to survive. Outside of YouTube, where programmers and musicians and such can make a living by streaming their work live, this is a minuscule minority.

The strongest interpretation of what you’re saying seems to be that we’ll end up in a world where everything (science, engineering, writing, design) is a sport and none of it really matters because ultimately it’s ‘just a game’. Maybe so… but is that really something to look forward to?

Now upgrade AI to do every job better than humans so that there are no drudgery jobs. What money are they going to spend?

Not too long ago, people would come and visit the first family in the village who had installed running water, because it was a new and exciting thing to see. And yet people don't wake up every day excited to see water coming from their kitchen tap.

Imagine a breakthrough not only in AI but also robotics, allowing restaurants to replace the entire staff (chefs, cooks, waiters, etc) with AI-powered robots. Then I believe that higher-end restaurants will STILL be employing humans, as it will be perceived as more expensive, more sophisticated, therefore worth a premium price. What if robot cooks cook better and faster than human cooks? Then higher-end restaurants will probably have human cooks supervising robot cooks to correct their occasional errors, thereby still providing a service superior to cheaper restaurants using robot cooks only.

Not remotely comparable. Farming is a backbreaking job, many were happy to see it going away. This is taking over the creative functions. Turns out what Humanity is best at, is menial labor?

So the downside is we have lives devoid of meaning. The upside is we live in a scarcity free paradise where all diseases have been cured by superhuman ai and we can all live doing whatever we want.

Anyhow, what makes you think the AI or whomever controls it has any use for a bunch of useless eaters?

But when one is 30+ years old, or even 40+ years old, it's hard to completely switch careers, especially when you're also dealing with the fact that it's not because you were bad at your job. Rather, a machine was made to replace you and you simply can't compete with a machine.

It's evolution, of course, but it is a stressful process.

Nearly all humans work for money (aka, just basic stuff) and not because they’re passionate about their work. It is just a sad situation all around

The problem is the transition into that new world.

I can't imagine anything changing our culture's insistence that personal responsibility in employment means zero responsibility for employers, policy makers, or society at large. That is, short of a large scale armed rebellion, or maybe mass unionization.

don't worry; AI drones will deal efficiently with both those forms of terrorism and malinformation

Bear in mind that a substantial portion of people (perhaps 30%) don't feel satisfied unless they see someone else worse off. We are not an inherently egalitarian species.

I've started reading again, because reddit/instagram/etc. has become kind of boring for me? Like, I still go on them to get an instant dopamine hit from time to time, but like you said burying yourself in a textbook just feels so much more rewarding.

I’m sure such groups already exist, but maybe not specifically with this goal in mind.

Learning for its own sake really is the answer to lasting happiness… for some of us, anyway.

Since 529 CE!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedictines

But none of these feelings are new, just different problems manifesting the same.

If you’re just talking about the idea of becoming a monk: yes, I very much like the idea of becoming a modern, digitally-enabled monk.

The key though is to avoid becoming a cult.

I doubt much of what we know today will turn out to be wrong. Maybe our abstractions will turn out to have been naive or suboptimal, but at least they're demonstrably predictive. They're not just quackery or mysticism.

You did say ‘wrong’, though, not ‘considered wrong’.

You have 3 baskets with 5 apples each, you remove 7 apples from each basket, remove 5 baskets and you have -2 baskets with -2 apples each thus therefore you have 4 apples left all without the involvement of trees, like Jezus!

Yeah, i can see people laugh at that.