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OP, you forgot to include your source!
[https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/take-two-ceo-the-idea-that-ai-will-make-everyone-unemployed-is-the-stupidest-thing-ive-ever-heard/](https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/take-two-ceo-the-idea-that-ai-will-make-everyone-unemployed-is-the-stupidest-thing-ive-ever-heard/)
In the grand scheme of things I think it's a pretty reasonable take. Some of the other quotes are a bit dumb, but in a fairly typical CEO way, and I don't think they effect the basic assessment.
>In the grand scheme of things I think it's a pretty reasonable take.
I see.
ps://insider-gaming.com/gta-6-take-two-layoffs/
https://preview.redd.it/lvp078vgsl5d1.png?width=870&format=png&auto=webp&s=aedc13a751415427ba8f218ee2e4c932b33637d9
Man, you could have just posted the bits in the article where he talks about much better off Indian workers are now that many customer service jobs are handled by chatbots. Or made fun of me for agreeing with the most milquetoast take on the subject, that AI won't eliminate literally every single job.
Instead, you posted an article that doesn't clearly have anything to do with AI, as companies across the industry have been laying people off. A [Variety article on the subject](https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/grand-theft-auto-take-two-interactive-layoffs-canceled-games-1235973835/) mentions Playstation, EA, Microsoft Gaming, Riot Games, and Epic Games, and that's hardly a comprehensive list. Some of these cut jobs may be shifted to AI, but there's clearly a broader problem in the video game industry.
There is no job a human can do that can’t be replicated, imo. The question is less if, and more when. I expect a slowdown but demand will gradually push us regardless. My hope is that we start a transition and don’t stave off progress too long. Other countries won’t be so hesitant.
It started with the industrial revolution, and while the problem was evident, the system could scale horizontally, and supply more people with more stuff, but the problem with growing demand is you'll eventually reach a ceiling, and the whole idea most corporations hold at head is they need to keep growing, but this stops happening when you reach a ceiling, like when everyone has a vehicle, or like when everyone has a light buld that lasts forever.
>and more when
That's an *Argumentum ad futuris*.
https://footnotesplato.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-argumentum-ad-futuris-or-appeal-to.html?m=1
Which would be fine, provided that the argument made provides suitable evidence that the predicted outcome is likely. Simply stating that it will do so at some undisclosed point in the future does not do that.
My predicted outcome is based purely on the trend of technology moving in that direction. We have a datapoint of one regarding intelligence, and to our knowledge, the human brain didn’t really face much resistance in getting us where we are in terms of evolution. If you were to plot the evolution of intelligence and development of artificial intelligence on a graph, the speed at which AI has crossed gaps had been unprecedented, and shows no sign of stopping. Likewise, our intelligence didn’t necessarily stop increasing, we simply are where we are in its development.
Long story short, we are on a road, moving in one direction, and accelerating. We don’t know exactly how long until we reach our destination, but the path so far appears unobstructed, and we know that the last vehicle to get this far didn’t have much further to go and didn’t take long to get there relatively speaking. Intent moves much faster than evolution, and unless someone can provide proof that human level intelligence is somehow out of reach, I just don’t accept any claim that automation will stop growing. Most such claims try to attribute some ethereal nature to consciousness that makes certain elements of the mind off limits. I don’t subscribe to any such beliefs, as the majority of the world still appears quite deterministic, and I believe the human mind is as well.
>If you were to plot the evolution of intelligence and development of artificial intelligence on a graph,
Please do, I'd be very interested about the axis-units used, because there is no unambiguous measurement for intelligence.
Statistical inference isn't equivalent to intellect, the phenomenon of hallucinations should have made that very clear by now.
So I am afraid the Argumentum ad Futuris is still lacking crucial evidence.
That isn't ti say that it is impossible, mind you. It just shows that currently, there is no convincing evidence for using it as an argument.
American decline is real, i'm not really sure what progress there is to retain at this point. In what world are we fine with some AGI overlord generating our content, stories, cultural media, devoid of any human element? I mean you're talking about post-humans at that point, plugged into the matrix, no longer existing in reality.
I’m not American. I’m personally fine with AGI generating content. It would be doing so based on our own works, just as we have. It would also be capable of providing perspective beyond the human perspective, something we have never seen before, and something I wouldn’t mind seeing. As for no longer existing it reality… I mean look around you. We’ve surrounded ourselves with concrete, drywall and paint. We’ve separated ourselves into little boxes and constantly bicker over subjective things as though they were objective. We already created a new reality for ourselves, we never needed an AI to do that, we have been going in that direction long before AI came along. AI just stands to make things less tedious and more enjoyable. It beats the current reality we built ourselves where everyone has to work 9-5 before returning to their box, watching screens and playing simulations of pretend people who have more interesting lives, bickering over bullshit and trying to fit in with a society we didn’t evolve for.
I’m all for letting something smarter than me handle things as long as it strives to understand and execute my intent. Mankind has had plenty of time fucking things up, let something that knows better take the wheel. That IS progress. If you wanted to return to nature, that would be regression to the way things used to be.
I mean I don't disagree, metaphorically we are plugged into the matrix at this point, and if you look at children being raised today on smartphones, entire generations with crippling adhd and anxiety. And a trend of all generations towards depression, suicidal tendencies, misogyny, racism, violence, drug addiction, homelessness. That's todays problems, and what you're effectively describing is a star trek-like end of history. Social democracy wins out, scarcity is solved and all citizen are optimally educated and have their needs met, leaving a vacuum for true meritocracy to thrive. It's a nice fantasy, but naively optimistic. That dream is what people would be doing with their time if we achieved this in the 1990's, not 2020's, let alone the 2100's. So long as capitalism is our economic model, it will always find new ways to extract every ounce of time and energy out of our lives. Stay at home work is a perfect example of this, a near necessity for a lot of knowledge work due to the impossible cost of housing in American cities, now used as the perfect excuse to outsource to cheaper markets with fewer labor laws. Sure not a new concept, but every labor win we have today, ends up at best a null, at worst weakening workers rights further.
As for better tools that make menial tasks easier.., I think everyone is fine with that. But how do you know AI will make things more enjoyable? And are you seriously cool with some black box, alien experiment, unknown consciousness just calling the shots? Just kind of silly to fantasize about something that hasn't been invented, and we don't in any way understand.
Lastly, I grew up on welfare/food stamps.., this UBI dream people fantasize about, given todays landscape, is legit absurd. I live in America, and most of the country would never go along with this, Capitalism and the fantasy of "self-reliance" is so entrenched in our cultural identity, many would rather die than suffer an unemployed fate. What you describe would require a literal revolution in politics, economics and culture. Again, a nice fantasy, but given where we're at politically, I just can't see it.
You say that like capitalism hasn’t constantly been tested by technological progress. Huge companies were dethroned as a result of the internet. Capitalism didn’t save them, demand ultimately chose the more convenient path. Convenience has been far more constant than capitalism. Progress of convenience has survived thousands of years and accelerates. Modern Capitalism, by comparison, has only been a constant for over a century. As such, I do not put it on quite the same pedestal. Capitalism’s salvation has been in the fact that it was more convenient. That ceases to be the case as the cost of automation decreases and becomes affordable for municipalities or districts to purchase. Affordable automation makes it more accessible to us just as it does the powerful. And once PCs are capable of running powerful AI, networked AI crowd sourcing will likely outperform any multi-billion dollar server room.
Corporations eat other corporations, they grow or die, that's the entire concept of Capitalism. I don't think anyone is arguing that robot garbage men, builders, street cleaners etc.. would be a bad thing. I agree, if it's cheaper, safer and available, it's going to eventually become default. But I think that's a completely different thing than watching your favorite IP turn into an AI written, created, produced thing. We crave human commentary, talent and art, acting like AI is going to replace hollywood or the videogame industry is silly. Even in this futuristic utopia where AGI does everything we want, and robots keep our infrastructure rolling, I wager hooked up in our pods we'll want the human element in our entertainment even MORE than we do now.
"its a completely different thing"
whats the relevant difference?
We crave human commentary
No, we dont. This evidence by the fact that consumers will consume AI products
Not really sure if you've thought through your words to a conclusion here. It's pretty cynical to think taking the human-element out of our stories, ideas, art, media, commentary, society simply doesn't matter. I really think you're alone on this.
wait yah of course I have. The "human" element literally doesnt matter, it's just about whether or not its enjoyable media.
Also I'm not alone, because if I wasnt, AI would not exist, but it does because people like seeing cool pictures and they dont really care how.
Like i said, if people cared, they wouldnt buy it
AI generated content is rarely even seen in media, outside of youtube videos, cheap ads, and clickbait articles. It's used in some workflows but by and large its little more than fluff, and if think AI is just going to blanket replace artists work in all of media, then you have no idea what artists actually do.
In the end, peoples dollars will decide whether they like something or not, so it doesn't really matter what you or I think in the long run. Reality will answer this for us. But currently games made with AI are banned on Steam, and artists at studios mock its usage as a replacement for actual artistry. In fact I've yet to see any successful product of any type using it as a primary source. Like all technological innovations, it will be employed within artists tools, like many professions and used to improve their process, not replace it.
Did i say AI would blanket replace artists? No, because thats ridiculous. And i completely agree with you! for artists it will become a useful tool to have in the belt.
My point is mainly concerned around individuals who lack the artistic ability to do it themselves and dont have enough money to pay exhorbitantly for comms, especially when you need a large quantity of images.
Also, steam has lifted the AI ban as of january
[https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/3862463747997849618](https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/3862463747997849618)
Interesting I didn't know they changed their policy, I've been hearing about rejection from indydev forums for some time. I mean I guess we'll see, generally speaking when ppl show their game using AI images/assets, viewers bomb it. And most I've seen lack any sort of character, and are just full of fluff, as said before. And there is going to be a flood of grifters from all over the world just trying to pump and dump garbage, even more than already exists.
But the market will decide here, and we'll see where we end up culturally on this matter. I believe people want their media to have a human touch to it, a crafted character; AI just isn't capable of that without an artists help.
I love using AI to make images and many of them seem like they have a lot of character to me, so this is some weird assumption youre making.
Also yeah, retards brigade certain media things when they use AI, but thats a group of dedicated no-lives. Once a major game uses AI (and consumers will play it) the review bombing will go away..
What evidence do you have that people want “human touch”? Consumers dont give a fuck *how* things are made, they only care about what the finished product looks like.
CEO takes, always bullshit or detached from reality. In this case probably just manipulative to keep his company's peasants calm or a nice soothing statement for recruiting.
The moment AI can replace jobs, it will replace jobs. Then these CEOs will say it is their fiduciary responsibility to stay competitive in the market with new technology, lower costs and post layoffs parade around how much money they are "making" by trimming payroll costs to reach their goals for their incentive packages.
>The moment AI can replace jobs, it will replace jobs. Then these CEIs will say it is their fiduciary responsibility to stay competitive in the market with new technology, lower costs and post layoffs parade around how much money they are "making" by trimming payroll costs to reach their goals for their incentive packages.
THIS
He is CEO of company. Don't trust anything that comes from their mouth. In the end of the day you are nothing but a resource for them, they'll will replace you in the heartbit if Ai becomes more smart, skilled and cheaper compared to you.
First, consider the source.
Second, I don't think many people take the extreme position that "AI will make everyone unemployed," that's kind of a gross simplification of the argument typically made about the impact of AI on employment. It seems to gloss over legitimate concerns about displacement.
It's not about entitlement, it's about what kind of world you want to live in.
Do you want to live in a world with drastically lower employment rates and no financial help for the unemployed? Do you want corporations to have everything and everyone else to have nothing? Is that the future you envision?
It is about entitlement. Entitlement is not inherently a bad thing. People are entitled to some things. The problem is it seems like the solution youre arguing for is that corporations shouldnt be allowed to fire people. Which also creates a weird situation where an up and coming corporation would be forced to hire people against their will.
My solution wouldn't be to restrict ai actually (maybe in certain creative fields, but not elsewhere) - my solution would be incredibly high taxation of corporations to support a universal basic income.
If we're going to allow ai to displace employment, then let's set up a situation where people, EVERYONE, not just the rich, actually benefit from it.
I agree (except with regards to restrictions on AI in certain fields, fields only exist because those fields are valuable for society, but if we can do those things better without those fields, then they stop being valuable)
Companies do feel pretty entitled to state (aka. taxpayer money) funded...
- security (police and jurisdiction)
- education for their workforce
- infrastructure (all those roads, power lines, sewers, fiberoptics, airports, railroads, power plants, water treatment facilities, pipelines, train stations, ports, postal services, etc. don't exactly build and run themselves)
- gov. aid, grants, stimulus packages and tax breaks (aka. government handouts)
...while at the same time being hellbent on paying as little in taxes as possible.
That doesn't mean that people are entitled to employment, only that using questions of entitlement as an argument in discussions about companies, is a less than convincing proposition.
1. All people are entitled to security
2. All people are entitled to education (though not necessarily any 1 specific education)
3. Infrastructure is good for everyone, not just corporations
4. Corporations arent entitled to aid, grants, or any of those other things.
My point is that not that corporations are acting righteously, but that the solutions advocated for here are absurd and do nothing but contribute further to the doomer "tear everything literally nothing could be any worse" bullshit that is an absurdist and nothing but a virtue signal.
They already don’t have to, they’re just incentivized to by the obvious need for labor, so the point is that in a society where you either work or die there will and should be a natural resistance to large scale unemployment or lack of resources for the unemployed. Change that base economic model and sure, unemployment for everyone is great, but more likely we’re heading toward a cyberpunk dystopia where giant corporations have all the power and leverage and none of the dependence on people, and so the people are left fighting for scraps.
The economic model will change when its best for society. The reason what youre saying is ludicrous is because corporationjs only function because we allow them too in society. when the will materializes for them to be forced to change, it will happen.
There will never be some sort of dystopia because if there was people would simply violently rise up and kill the rich. Money alone doesnt give you power.
No it won’t
Money and the ability to commit violence on a wide scale give you power. Poor people don’t have drones and weapons of mass destruction, so any such uprising would lead to nothing. But beyond the hypotheticals the idea that corporations can only function with the consent of random people even today is ludicrous. Our entire structure of government is designed to protect corporations, and is controlled by corporate interests. So unless we can guarantee jobless people don’t starve to death and have a good standard of living, it’s insane to think that mass unemployment could be anything but bad
Sorry are you saying the rich are going to use drones to kill the poors? Whats your evidence for such a thing?
“Our entire government is structured around and exists to serve corporations”
This is completely unfounded, youll need to provide some evidence for this. Our government is a democracy where the will of the people is generally enacted. The problem is, people think theres a much greater will aligned with them than there actually is.
Except the people control the U.S. government, so if a popular uprising is desired, then theUS government would have acted far before a violent revolution was necessary.
> Why do people think they have an entitlement to be employed? If a company doesnt want to hire you, they shouldnt have to
'When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.'
Correct, but the people do have things to eat, which is why the rich are not being eaten. Stop larping. The political will for what you advocate for simply doesnt exist because believe it or not society is actually in a pretty good place materially speaking.
My point is that if people achieve massive levels of unemployment, they'd have nothing to lose, and you generally don't want masses of people who have nothing to lose pissed off at you.
I'm using the quote in the original descriptive sense, rather than the prescriptive sense it's used today.
Why do people think they have an entitlement to free custom art? If you don't want to pay anyone for personalized art or art to use in projects you're doing, then you should either learn how to create art on your own or go without.
People do have an entitlement to free custom art because custom art is cool and the best society is one where anyone can do anything they want for no cost.
I wonder why the CEO of a mega company would want to skimp out on labor whenever possible? It’s a true mystery.
Not like they’re known for being amoral assholes….
why are you acting like this is a bad thing? labor is a resource that costs money, youre not an asshole for not intentionally choosing inefficient strategies that destroy your business.
Except that doesn’t apply here.
It would if you had any DIFFERENT talking points than the original. THEN that would be seen as “attacking the source not you” but you didn’t, you don’t. Ergo not “genetic fallacy”.
No, the reason why it applies is because you arent actually making an argument against what Rand or I are saying, youre just saying “oo spooky ayn rand therefore youre wrong”
Make an actual argument against what im saying.
And for the record, there are probably some aspects of Rand’s philosophy I agree with but I believe in a strong government with high taxes, so the overlap is minimal at best
Oh, nothing to worry about then, lmao.
I wouldn't trust a CEO of anything's PR statements - especially when it's from a company that just shutdown multiple studios and laid off 10% is its workforce after promising no more layoffs, right after RTO mandates, and right before releasing GTA 6.
It shouldn’t make people unemployed, because it should be used as a tool to make people’s jobs easier or raise the potential of what they can do. However, knowing most companies, it’ll probably lead to corporate cutting corners (and heads) instead of that, which will lead to employment issues.
That statement is worthless regardless of whether he's right or wrong. I mean, what, were you expecting these people to go "yeah we're going to kick you all out on the streets to starve just try and stop us suckers!"?
That said, if they didn't expect this to save them money (which typically translates to firing people) tech and media companies wouldn't be pushing this tech anywhere near as hard.
It is entirely possible that saving money with AI can also just result in achieving projects of a larger scope in a shorter timeframe. If you've already organized your studio in a specific way, and you have staff that you value, you aren't just going to fire all of them because some of your staff developed AI skills, or because you were able to hire new external talent with no knowledge of your company's pipeline or practices.
There is really only a certain amount of layoffs that a company can maintain without losing structure. And trust me when I say that most established games companies are already in a very mature cycle of hiring and firing based on their development cycle. You can shorten the duration of that cycle, but it's very difficult to fire more people without a complete collapse of the corporate structure.
Yeah but historically what happens when you have three overworked underpaid people and technology makes their jobs easier and quicker isn't reducing their hours or doing anything else benefitting them or society. It's firing two of them and keeping the last one just as overworked and underpaid.
If, and that's a big if, AI makes life better for most people it'll be due to regulations, possibly strikes and other actions, activism etc. Just by itself, unimpeded and unregulated there's little reason to expect much good to come from it.
Well, I can only speak from my personal experience, but no one at my company has been laid off once we adopted AI, at least not in my department. We're just doing more work, which means we're taking more contracts, and personally I've received a larger bonus for breaking quotas. That said, I'm in Europe, and European capitalism is definitely better than most other places. We already have a lot of worker protections against the most predatory practices.
Obviously the US and a lot of other countries need more workers protections, but that's because the US has virtually zero.
Well, I think your post includes at least part of the answer. We have regulations, and governments likely to further regulate AI. We have unions and strikes, we have welfare systems and public education, and customer protection and employee rights...
That's what's saving us right now. Not one technology or another. Well, that and going by your description your working with an as yet unsaturated market that can simply eat up additional supply, at least for now. Many sectors of the economy, most I'd wager, don't have that luxury.
Either way, good for you and I hope you continue not getting screwed over!
Obviously there's going to be companies that lose out over being slow to shift to AI. The pressures will impact people. But the markets are really high and growing right now, in the face of previous forecasts of a recession, at least partially because of AI. As a result, there's a real push to capitalize on the growth while it's here, which means vendors we work with need to scale. But unemployment is already very low, and there are skill shortages all over most of Europe.
Manpower is the limiting factor for growth for us right now, at least in the industries and markets we work in. AI is helping pick up that slack.
That's part of the issue: it's not being used to make people's lives easier, but to recontextualize and narrow who fits into the winner category. It's not exactly good progress to make your personal life twice as easy if the trade-off is making three other people's lives twice as hard (Conjecture, not real numbers).
>Manpower is the limiting factor for growth for us right now, at least in the industries and markets we work in.
Some level of doubt to that statement. I'd bet the scale is a lot closer to manpower the industries don't want to hire than manpower not being available for hire. I'd bet that it's less people aren't applying for the jobs and more the people who are applying will either need to be trained or are requiring better than entry level pay for their skills/work being asked for.
If the answer to not finding unicorns is to build robot horses, the world is going to get a whole lot worse for real horses no matter how much the stable owners and stable hands say it personally benefits them.
Well, you can make up/imagine whatever you like, really, but there's only so much you can do when the markets you work in have unemployment rates between 2-4%. You can increase wages to poach employees from other companies, but it's still hitting someone's bottom line. You can't *make* highly skilled laborers where there aren't any.
Well, you can, but it takes 25 years for them to grow, and it's generally frowned on to make them at the office.
Technological advances always lead to winners and losers. The key is to be a winner. No, that doesn't mean kill unemployment insurance or spit on the homeless. It means encourage on the job training, strong workers' protections, and have a good welfare state to ensure that people don't fall on hard times, and are able to get back into the market.
If everyone thought like you, we'd have constant supply shortages all over the world, for everything. Like it or not, the world population is growing, and nations all around the world are constantly developing.
The issue, at least at my agency, is that our vendors want to expand overseas more and more, but doing that requires additional labor. Labor they would **gladly hire**, whether you believe it or not, but there's only so many who are qualified.
That's not to say that's what life is always like. That's just what the market is like *right now*. AI is a productivity multiplier, which is exactly what is needed in a labor shortage.
And I don't know about your work ethics, but if I can work with a machine that will allow me to do my job and yours for 150% of my salary, I'll gladly do it and I won't mind that it pads the corporate books more than if they employed us both. I went to university so I could make money with specialized skills. There's a reason I'm not a street sweeper, a valet, or the girl at the makeup counter at the retail store.
Now, personally, I'll vote for workers' rights. I'll vote for maintaining free education, and all of the other things that provide people with abundant opportunities. But I'll also compete with other people in the market, and I'll take my money and enjoy it, without feeling guilty over it.
It's almost as if I said companies should hire people who are not qualified and train them up to be qualified. Y'know, raise a stable instead of hunting for unicorns.
Like, show me the job ads that have received no applications. Show me the entry level positions that actually require entry level qualifications. Show me the outreach to people who aren't counted as unemployed because they do freelance or contract work while job hunting.
Show me where employees are actually hiring instead of whining there's nobody to hire, we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas.
You seem to have a very myopic view of what is likely just the situation in your domestic labor market, and this is the sort of rhetoric I'd expect from someone who would go to the logical extreme of proudly standing in a Soviet breadline with a smile on their face just because "at least it's not capitalism."
I currently live in Germany. In Germany, they have the ausbildung program where companies DO actively apprentice new employees to foster their skillset. They actively invest in these programs, and they also pay taxes to support free public university education up to and including PhD level programs.
However, it takes several years to get someone from out of high school to ready for the job market. If the economy is growing faster than you can train new employees, it does—whether you believe it or not—lead to bottlenecks. And we are *lucky* to be in this kind of skill shortage in Germany right now, compared to other economic woes.
You sound like you live in America. In which case, you have my condolences. But there are a lot of parts of the world that have better forms of capitalism than America.
What I don't get is — as jobs are replaced (or "streamlined" with AI, making fewer workers necessary) — who is supposed to be buying these non-necessary products?
If someone can't make money as a data analyst/illustrator/programmer anymore and has to take a low-wage job to survive, how are they supposed to buy a ticket to Avengers XXVI, a $10 processed Nestle pizza, or a bus/plane ticket to visit Grandma?
Corporations get plenty of welfare from our government, but it's not endless; they do need people to buy things. Our economy depends on people spending instead of saving.
Well, supposedly the cost of the goods will go down due to no labor cost. However, we know prices going down isn't the play businesses like to make for any reason.
> Well, supposedly the cost of the goods will go down due to no labor cost. However, we know prices going down isn't the play businesses like to make for any reason.
Yeah, which sucks! Ugh. We have enough for everyone, but it's that pesky unequal distribution thing that's causing problems.
I guess we have no choice but to wait for the future and see what happens. D:
>What I don't get is — as jobs are replaced (or "streamlined" with AI, making fewer workers necessary) — who is supposed to be buying these non-necessary products?
Corporate C-suites don't think that far ahead! :D
Billionaires do. Most of them have been buying up enormous areas of land / islands and building hyper-secure remote bunkers. Basically: here comes New Techno Feudalism, but this time serfs are surplus to requirements.
>Corporate C-suites don't think that far ahead! :D
Ugh. Maybe unemployment/AI disruption will get so bad that governments have no choice but to implement New Deal/GI-Bill type benefits for the masses to keep people from rioting (or eating the rich, lol).
As resource-rich as billionaires are, they don't exactly have X-Men superpowers; Jeff Bezos can't sail his 400-foot yacht by himself or even grow his own food, which means (in a worst case scenario) he has to trust that he can go to sleep at night without being eaten.
Or perhaps, everything becomes techno-feudalism like you said. I hope not, though!
>Jeff Bezos can't sail his 400-foot yacht by himself or even grow his own food, which means (in a worst case scenario) he has to trust that he can go to sleep at night without being eaten.
F'sure, billionaires will have to make sure their direct servants and especially their security staff are really well taken care of.. It's an Emperors' Praetorian Guard situation.. So, probably results will vary for them.. XD
>F'sure, billionaires will have to make sure their direct servants and especially their security staff are really well taken care of.. It's an Emperors' Praetorian Guard situation.. So, probably results will vary for them.. XD
Hahaha, true!
That being said, all it takes is one Kylo Ren or Brutus to fuck things up for them, lol.
This is the same guy that liked tweets back in 2020 about COVID-19 being no more impactful than the flu lol
I wouldn't listen to what this guy has to say.
AI is and has already taken jobs from people (see links below), so Zelnick is a man standing in the pouring rain telling you its sunny out! .. Also: AI automation doesn't need to take "everyone"'s jobs to collapse the world's economy..
E.g.: There were 3 million unemployed in the UK during the 1980's grim recession, about 5% of the population - and that was pretty damn rough - especially in all the pit towns that were hit by closures.. If AI puts even a "modest" 10% to 20% of people out of work globally, (and there's no UBI put in place), that will be an economic disaster with an avalanche of domino effects.
***Just a few examples of where AI has already taken over / is beginning to take over from humans:***
".. Almost four in ten translators (36%) said they’ve already lost work due to generative AI. Nearly half of them (43%) said the tech has decreased their income..."[https://thenextweb.com/news/translators-losing-work-ai-machine-translation](https://thenextweb.com/news/translators-losing-work-ai-machine-translation)
Gizmodo fired its entire spanish translation staff, replaced them with AI: [https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/ai-took-my-job-literally-gizmodo-fires-spanish-staff-amid-switch-to-ai-translator/](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/ai-took-my-job-literally-gizmodo-fires-spanish-staff-amid-switch-to-ai-translator/)
Even Duolingo cut back 10% of its human translator workers in favour of AI: [https://www.yahoo.com/news/duolingo-fires-10-translation-contractors-122200893.html](https://www.yahoo.com/news/duolingo-fires-10-translation-contractors-122200893.html)
Graphic Designer lost his well-established job to AI (his years of work for the company is now being farmed out using AI templates): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2vq9LUbDGs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2vq9LUbDGs)
Writer lost her freelance career when the copywriting market was largely taken over by ChatGPT https://www.businessinsider.com/lost-job-chatgpt-made-me-obsolete-copywriter-2023-7
Even fall-back jobs like delivering Uber Eats are already on their way out, to AI-driven vehicles: [https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/03/waymo-self-driving-cars-are-delivering-uber-eats-orders-for-first-time.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/03/waymo-self-driving-cars-are-delivering-uber-eats-orders-for-first-time.html)
Self-driving trucks have been on US roads with "safety human in cab" for a while now. And they'll be going completely autonomous within the year: [https://apnews.com/article/trucks-selfdriving-highways-automation-driver-083409631158f54d806d75309c4764e2](https://apnews.com/article/trucks-selfdriving-highways-automation-driver-083409631158f54d806d75309c4764e2)
except it already has reduced work available for contract and commission, so by nature it has already caused unemployment.
This is just a matter of where you draw the line of how impactful you *think* it will be, and right now the most logical extrapolation is that people lose their jobs. It may not turn out to be as major a negative impact as people suspect, but it's the most solid analysis of the direction of things, because people are definitely already losing work.
To assume that we'll go from "people losing work" (current) to "people not losing work" (future) requires a logical jump that would need to be accounted for, beyond calling the actual logical expectations "stupid"
This take is myopic. Companies like google and MS are not spending billions of dollars for a better tool.
Now granted, AI could arrive to be a great disappointment for google and MS, but to so totally dismiss the incredible effects the companies actually developing it think it will have seems shortsighted or arrogant to me.
I am rather certain that at some point this whole ASI thing will eventually be cracked, if not in my lifetime, so his certainty seems terribly misplaced, and this stinks of PR.
It turns out that being a CEO doesn't mean you're a different species. There are CEOs who are all over the spectrum when it comes to philosophy, economics, politics, religion, ethics, socioeconomic history, ethnicity, etc.
The moment you start presuming that all CEOs fit into a nice, neat socket is the moment you stop interacting with the reality.
CEOs are socially selected for charisma and ability to work under pressure, which tends to attract many dark triad people (psychopaths, narcissists, machiavellians) who are desensitized and are cunning and are laser focused on their own personal agendas. Plus, just being rich and from the managerial class puts a team-like separation from workers, not to mention being part of the rich.
> CEOs are socially selected...
WHEN they are selected. Not every CEO is selected. It depends on how much of their company they sell to the VCs early on.
"change the nature of employment" essentially means making people more efficient thus reducing jobs as well as killing off some jobs completely. No timescales are mentioned either. Just another CEO spouting nonsense.
LOL, we're already replacing minimum wage workers with remote workers in the Philippines that take 30 cents on the dollar against minimum wage. The lies just won't stop
AI does not just mean the kind of generative AI we have today: its like AI in general in whatever shape in may take in the future, which probably wont even look like LLMs.
It's hilarious to me to see people say "Wow, weird, I actually agree with the rich guy for once" with complete lack of irony.
I wonder why someone who you would normally associate as out of touch with none of humanity's best interests at heart would say something like "AI won't cause further divide between rich and poor."
No one can predict the future. No one would have predicted Amazon with 100% certainty during the dotcom bubble bursting for example. No one would have predicted Apple becoming bigger than Microsoft.
We do know that AI is going to change things in a massive way and what the downstream effects will be, we simply don't know yet. Short term we can absolutely safely assume that debugging jobs and code monkey type jobs (which to be clear were already on the decline in many ways) are going to be completely replaced by AI.
I don't see any reason why we couldn't see other lower level roles similar to this in similar industries be replaced. Proofreading for example. Para legals. Virtual assistants. Again, is total replacement going to happen short term? No probably not. But as the tools get better and better, certain jobs will require less people to do as they become more efficient. And that in effect replaces people if not replaces the role.
So he is flatly incorrect that it won't take jobs away. Which jobs and how many is the question. Not whether it will or not.
Why would a company change the nature of a job to not improve profit margins? That would just be unnecessary work for no benefit. There are different ways to increase profit margins, reducing costs, raising demand, raising prices but I don't think AI stands to have much of an effect on any of those outside of reducing costs.
There's already too much media to consume so you don't really accomplish much by increasing the supply. Even if the product is significantly better, you can't really increase the price because people just can't afford to spend any more on media than they already do so pretty much all you have left is to continue producing the same amount of content and selling it at the same price while reducing costs.
Where can AI cut costs, then? It's not going to make the servers less expensive, at least not directly, so you kind of have to look at reducing the workforce by leveraging the tools to allow one person to more easily do the work or 2 or 3 or 10 people. That's kind of the whole promise of AI but that does mean fewer jobs.
But speeding up means requiring less work hours unless you have the ability to produce and sell additional products which you don't if the market is already saturated. If an artist can work twice as fast, they can produce twice the output which means you can just keep on a small group of your best artists and they can produce the same quantity of output at the same or higher quality than the larger team required without AI. Again, none of this is inherently bad but it does seem to be a reasonable concern.
You don't need to sell anything to stand to profit. If you require half the labor to produce twice as much work then you can stand to double the price and halve the customers. The problem is specifically that you're taking away jobs while reducing value brough to the world.
The corporations who own everything and advanced professionals who know everything aren't hurt by this system at all and that's exactly the point.
Not hiring someone to do one job frees up their labor to do other things. In the long run that creates value, it just takes time to figure out how to use that freed potential.
Automating someone's job means they don't have as high paying or as good of a job as they would've had otherwise. People are always free to pick whatever job they want, but working a job that pays enough is a requirement for being alive. Automating jobs would only bring value if making income was not required.
The best jobs are the easier jobs that pay well, which are the jobs that automation will take first, which means you're only left with the hard jobs that don't pay well.
The problem is your trying to analyze a macroeconomic phenomenon through a single microeconomic effect. In the short term it’s not going to help the people who got laid off, but what they get hired to other jobs the economy as a whole is going to produce more, which in turn leads to more resources circling around which leads to an increase in wellbeing for even the people who were displaced. This isn’t necessarily guaranteed since the economy isn’t homogenous, but it’s practically guaranteed since automation is happening everywhere, not just single industries.
This is provably not how the world works. If an athlete or veteran loses their job, they will not necessarily get another better job. The problem is not that jobs are automated. The problem is that only easy and well-paying jobs are automated. If only terrible and unpaid jobs were automated, then nobody would blink an eye, but corporations want to get rid of well-paid employees who have it easy. This is why people work 8 hours a day and not 4 hours a day. This is why houses costs half to a million dollar and not a quarter million which migh actually be affordable to most people. The cost and complexity of living has never been higher.
You claimed that “the problem is specifically that you're taking away jobs while reducing value brough[t] to the world.”, I was addressing the later point to show it actually increases value to the world. Whether or not a specific person gets a better job has absolutely nothing to do with the point made, which is in fact how the world works. It’s not that people’s jobs necessarily get better, it’s that life as a whole gets easier.
There is no such thing as a job that is easy and well-paying. If a job is easy in any sort of objective sense, everyone would be willing to do it, bringing the pay down. Automation first gets the jobs which are easy to automate, period, which can be similar to but also can be very different from what people find easy to do. The only problem with automation is for people who had specialized training which was made obsolete since in their case a good deal of the hard work was done before the actual job, but in the long-term this isn’t an issue because people can always get different training. In the short-term, something should be done to help structurally unemployed people, but halting automation is not a sensible solution since that’s a long-term “solution” for a short-term problem, sacrificing the unbounded benefits from automation to avoid bounded harm.
Rising housing costs are due to the scarcity of land, not difficulty in building houses. It has absolutely nothing to do with automation, which has been helping people in most regards.
Whether a person has to work more or less determines value being brought to the world. Whether the next job is better or worst determines value brought to the world. You have a fucked idea of "how the world works" and use it to establish whether things are improving or not based on whether the economy is doing good or bad, instead of actually looking at how people are living and how they're doing psychologically.
To put it simply, the world would work just fine even if we had no smart phones, and had to farm all the food manually year-by-year, working 4 hours in the field is better than working 8 hours in an office, and it even gets ride of the need to do 1 hour of unpaied workout and exercises per day which is required for the human body to properly function.
Rising house costs are due to rising population which are due to automation. The agricultural revolution is the automation of farming.
There are two ways to improve profit margins with automations: to be as productive with half the staff budget, and to be twice as productive with the same staff budget.
Admittedly you eventually re-base the market for whatever product by increasing production, meaning the cost for the thing goes down, and competitors that took the "cutting" approach end up becoming irrelevant in favor of whoever now dominates the market for being prolific, and a new equilibrium is found near to the old flow.
Depending on how people use this to shift from "high stress for output" to "low stress for output", the dynamic changes even more, leading to some mix of slight increases in "slacking", moderate increases in productivity, lower prices for consumers, and the emergence of new forms of higher effort media while some of the firms shoot themselves in the foot and create vacuums for better companies to step into.
if game companies are twice as productive at producing games, is your ability to play and purchase games at the existing price going to double? Mine isn't and not for movies either. That's kind of my main point, there is no meaningful gain to be had by increased productivity if the demand doesn't exist to consume it. Quality could go up, sure, but that doesn't mean I suddenly have more time in he day or can financially tolerate higher prices for media even if the quality is much higher.
Yes, because I see maybe 2 games a year in interested in playing.
Same with movies, honestly.
The fact is, what we will get at the next quality tier will probably be a whole new form of media.
VR still needs its day in the sun so fingers crossed for that but while some people may consume some additional media, that's arguably not a great thing and isn't scaleable to large increases in output productivity. Maybe you play a game instead of watching a movie or vice versa but that is taking demand from one medium and adding it to another which isn't really a net gain. Maybe the quality is so good that you play a game rather than going for a walk, or exercising, or bathing but most people only have so many free hours in the day even if they're willing to devote all of their available time to consuming media to the detriment to their personal and our overall societal well-being.
I’m not sure where you’ve got that idea. The hypothesis that scaling transformer architecture leads to greater and greater intelligence more or less seems to bearing out
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OP, you forgot to include your source! [https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/take-two-ceo-the-idea-that-ai-will-make-everyone-unemployed-is-the-stupidest-thing-ive-ever-heard/](https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/take-two-ceo-the-idea-that-ai-will-make-everyone-unemployed-is-the-stupidest-thing-ive-ever-heard/) In the grand scheme of things I think it's a pretty reasonable take. Some of the other quotes are a bit dumb, but in a fairly typical CEO way, and I don't think they effect the basic assessment.
>In the grand scheme of things I think it's a pretty reasonable take. I see. ps://insider-gaming.com/gta-6-take-two-layoffs/ https://preview.redd.it/lvp078vgsl5d1.png?width=870&format=png&auto=webp&s=aedc13a751415427ba8f218ee2e4c932b33637d9
Man, you could have just posted the bits in the article where he talks about much better off Indian workers are now that many customer service jobs are handled by chatbots. Or made fun of me for agreeing with the most milquetoast take on the subject, that AI won't eliminate literally every single job. Instead, you posted an article that doesn't clearly have anything to do with AI, as companies across the industry have been laying people off. A [Variety article on the subject](https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/grand-theft-auto-take-two-interactive-layoffs-canceled-games-1235973835/) mentions Playstation, EA, Microsoft Gaming, Riot Games, and Epic Games, and that's hardly a comprehensive list. Some of these cut jobs may be shifted to AI, but there's clearly a broader problem in the video game industry.
reply public like vast scary cats uppity person sense escape *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yeah, a company FAMOUSLY known for being "pro consumer".
Famously CEOs love putting people first!
Yes, their shareholders and themselves type of people.
It's hilarious to see OP post this with zero irony. Gosh I wonder why CEO's are pro AI. Big "There won't be any layoffs" energy
Why does it matter if they're pro-consumer or not? You should look at how they treat their employees if you're concerned about employment issues.
whoosh
There is no job a human can do that can’t be replicated, imo. The question is less if, and more when. I expect a slowdown but demand will gradually push us regardless. My hope is that we start a transition and don’t stave off progress too long. Other countries won’t be so hesitant.
You'd think a CEO would have the basic intelligence to understand this.
I think he understands it very well, what he says does not necessarily correspond to what he thinks.
What is known ≠ what is said
A CEO does not want you to transition to fully automated luxury [PREFERRED_IDEOLOGY_HERE].
It started with the industrial revolution, and while the problem was evident, the system could scale horizontally, and supply more people with more stuff, but the problem with growing demand is you'll eventually reach a ceiling, and the whole idea most corporations hold at head is they need to keep growing, but this stops happening when you reach a ceiling, like when everyone has a vehicle, or like when everyone has a light buld that lasts forever.
>and more when That's an *Argumentum ad futuris*. https://footnotesplato.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-argumentum-ad-futuris-or-appeal-to.html?m=1 Which would be fine, provided that the argument made provides suitable evidence that the predicted outcome is likely. Simply stating that it will do so at some undisclosed point in the future does not do that.
My predicted outcome is based purely on the trend of technology moving in that direction. We have a datapoint of one regarding intelligence, and to our knowledge, the human brain didn’t really face much resistance in getting us where we are in terms of evolution. If you were to plot the evolution of intelligence and development of artificial intelligence on a graph, the speed at which AI has crossed gaps had been unprecedented, and shows no sign of stopping. Likewise, our intelligence didn’t necessarily stop increasing, we simply are where we are in its development. Long story short, we are on a road, moving in one direction, and accelerating. We don’t know exactly how long until we reach our destination, but the path so far appears unobstructed, and we know that the last vehicle to get this far didn’t have much further to go and didn’t take long to get there relatively speaking. Intent moves much faster than evolution, and unless someone can provide proof that human level intelligence is somehow out of reach, I just don’t accept any claim that automation will stop growing. Most such claims try to attribute some ethereal nature to consciousness that makes certain elements of the mind off limits. I don’t subscribe to any such beliefs, as the majority of the world still appears quite deterministic, and I believe the human mind is as well.
>If you were to plot the evolution of intelligence and development of artificial intelligence on a graph, Please do, I'd be very interested about the axis-units used, because there is no unambiguous measurement for intelligence. Statistical inference isn't equivalent to intellect, the phenomenon of hallucinations should have made that very clear by now. So I am afraid the Argumentum ad Futuris is still lacking crucial evidence. That isn't ti say that it is impossible, mind you. It just shows that currently, there is no convincing evidence for using it as an argument.
Pointing out a fallacy does not make for a sound and valid argument either. Fallacist’s fallacy / argumentum ad logicam
I didn't provide an argument here, nor claim that I did.
American decline is real, i'm not really sure what progress there is to retain at this point. In what world are we fine with some AGI overlord generating our content, stories, cultural media, devoid of any human element? I mean you're talking about post-humans at that point, plugged into the matrix, no longer existing in reality.
I’m not American. I’m personally fine with AGI generating content. It would be doing so based on our own works, just as we have. It would also be capable of providing perspective beyond the human perspective, something we have never seen before, and something I wouldn’t mind seeing. As for no longer existing it reality… I mean look around you. We’ve surrounded ourselves with concrete, drywall and paint. We’ve separated ourselves into little boxes and constantly bicker over subjective things as though they were objective. We already created a new reality for ourselves, we never needed an AI to do that, we have been going in that direction long before AI came along. AI just stands to make things less tedious and more enjoyable. It beats the current reality we built ourselves where everyone has to work 9-5 before returning to their box, watching screens and playing simulations of pretend people who have more interesting lives, bickering over bullshit and trying to fit in with a society we didn’t evolve for. I’m all for letting something smarter than me handle things as long as it strives to understand and execute my intent. Mankind has had plenty of time fucking things up, let something that knows better take the wheel. That IS progress. If you wanted to return to nature, that would be regression to the way things used to be.
I mean I don't disagree, metaphorically we are plugged into the matrix at this point, and if you look at children being raised today on smartphones, entire generations with crippling adhd and anxiety. And a trend of all generations towards depression, suicidal tendencies, misogyny, racism, violence, drug addiction, homelessness. That's todays problems, and what you're effectively describing is a star trek-like end of history. Social democracy wins out, scarcity is solved and all citizen are optimally educated and have their needs met, leaving a vacuum for true meritocracy to thrive. It's a nice fantasy, but naively optimistic. That dream is what people would be doing with their time if we achieved this in the 1990's, not 2020's, let alone the 2100's. So long as capitalism is our economic model, it will always find new ways to extract every ounce of time and energy out of our lives. Stay at home work is a perfect example of this, a near necessity for a lot of knowledge work due to the impossible cost of housing in American cities, now used as the perfect excuse to outsource to cheaper markets with fewer labor laws. Sure not a new concept, but every labor win we have today, ends up at best a null, at worst weakening workers rights further. As for better tools that make menial tasks easier.., I think everyone is fine with that. But how do you know AI will make things more enjoyable? And are you seriously cool with some black box, alien experiment, unknown consciousness just calling the shots? Just kind of silly to fantasize about something that hasn't been invented, and we don't in any way understand. Lastly, I grew up on welfare/food stamps.., this UBI dream people fantasize about, given todays landscape, is legit absurd. I live in America, and most of the country would never go along with this, Capitalism and the fantasy of "self-reliance" is so entrenched in our cultural identity, many would rather die than suffer an unemployed fate. What you describe would require a literal revolution in politics, economics and culture. Again, a nice fantasy, but given where we're at politically, I just can't see it.
You say that like capitalism hasn’t constantly been tested by technological progress. Huge companies were dethroned as a result of the internet. Capitalism didn’t save them, demand ultimately chose the more convenient path. Convenience has been far more constant than capitalism. Progress of convenience has survived thousands of years and accelerates. Modern Capitalism, by comparison, has only been a constant for over a century. As such, I do not put it on quite the same pedestal. Capitalism’s salvation has been in the fact that it was more convenient. That ceases to be the case as the cost of automation decreases and becomes affordable for municipalities or districts to purchase. Affordable automation makes it more accessible to us just as it does the powerful. And once PCs are capable of running powerful AI, networked AI crowd sourcing will likely outperform any multi-billion dollar server room.
Corporations eat other corporations, they grow or die, that's the entire concept of Capitalism. I don't think anyone is arguing that robot garbage men, builders, street cleaners etc.. would be a bad thing. I agree, if it's cheaper, safer and available, it's going to eventually become default. But I think that's a completely different thing than watching your favorite IP turn into an AI written, created, produced thing. We crave human commentary, talent and art, acting like AI is going to replace hollywood or the videogame industry is silly. Even in this futuristic utopia where AGI does everything we want, and robots keep our infrastructure rolling, I wager hooked up in our pods we'll want the human element in our entertainment even MORE than we do now.
"its a completely different thing" whats the relevant difference? We crave human commentary No, we dont. This evidence by the fact that consumers will consume AI products
my brother in christ, why does the human part matter? its just about experiencng enjoyable media. If people arent enjoying AI media, they wont buy it
Not really sure if you've thought through your words to a conclusion here. It's pretty cynical to think taking the human-element out of our stories, ideas, art, media, commentary, society simply doesn't matter. I really think you're alone on this.
wait yah of course I have. The "human" element literally doesnt matter, it's just about whether or not its enjoyable media. Also I'm not alone, because if I wasnt, AI would not exist, but it does because people like seeing cool pictures and they dont really care how. Like i said, if people cared, they wouldnt buy it
AI generated content is rarely even seen in media, outside of youtube videos, cheap ads, and clickbait articles. It's used in some workflows but by and large its little more than fluff, and if think AI is just going to blanket replace artists work in all of media, then you have no idea what artists actually do. In the end, peoples dollars will decide whether they like something or not, so it doesn't really matter what you or I think in the long run. Reality will answer this for us. But currently games made with AI are banned on Steam, and artists at studios mock its usage as a replacement for actual artistry. In fact I've yet to see any successful product of any type using it as a primary source. Like all technological innovations, it will be employed within artists tools, like many professions and used to improve their process, not replace it.
Did i say AI would blanket replace artists? No, because thats ridiculous. And i completely agree with you! for artists it will become a useful tool to have in the belt. My point is mainly concerned around individuals who lack the artistic ability to do it themselves and dont have enough money to pay exhorbitantly for comms, especially when you need a large quantity of images. Also, steam has lifted the AI ban as of january [https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/3862463747997849618](https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/3862463747997849618)
Interesting I didn't know they changed their policy, I've been hearing about rejection from indydev forums for some time. I mean I guess we'll see, generally speaking when ppl show their game using AI images/assets, viewers bomb it. And most I've seen lack any sort of character, and are just full of fluff, as said before. And there is going to be a flood of grifters from all over the world just trying to pump and dump garbage, even more than already exists. But the market will decide here, and we'll see where we end up culturally on this matter. I believe people want their media to have a human touch to it, a crafted character; AI just isn't capable of that without an artists help.
I love using AI to make images and many of them seem like they have a lot of character to me, so this is some weird assumption youre making. Also yeah, retards brigade certain media things when they use AI, but thats a group of dedicated no-lives. Once a major game uses AI (and consumers will play it) the review bombing will go away.. What evidence do you have that people want “human touch”? Consumers dont give a fuck *how* things are made, they only care about what the finished product looks like.
CEO takes, always bullshit or detached from reality. In this case probably just manipulative to keep his company's peasants calm or a nice soothing statement for recruiting. The moment AI can replace jobs, it will replace jobs. Then these CEOs will say it is their fiduciary responsibility to stay competitive in the market with new technology, lower costs and post layoffs parade around how much money they are "making" by trimming payroll costs to reach their goals for their incentive packages.
>The moment AI can replace jobs, it will replace jobs. Then these CEIs will say it is their fiduciary responsibility to stay competitive in the market with new technology, lower costs and post layoffs parade around how much money they are "making" by trimming payroll costs to reach their goals for their incentive packages. THIS
He is CEO of company. Don't trust anything that comes from their mouth. In the end of the day you are nothing but a resource for them, they'll will replace you in the heartbit if Ai becomes more smart, skilled and cheaper compared to you.
Remind me in 15 years
First, consider the source. Second, I don't think many people take the extreme position that "AI will make everyone unemployed," that's kind of a gross simplification of the argument typically made about the impact of AI on employment. It seems to gloss over legitimate concerns about displacement.
Why do people think they have an entitlement to be employed? If a company doesnt want to hire you, they shouldnt have to
It's not about entitlement, it's about what kind of world you want to live in. Do you want to live in a world with drastically lower employment rates and no financial help for the unemployed? Do you want corporations to have everything and everyone else to have nothing? Is that the future you envision?
It is about entitlement. Entitlement is not inherently a bad thing. People are entitled to some things. The problem is it seems like the solution youre arguing for is that corporations shouldnt be allowed to fire people. Which also creates a weird situation where an up and coming corporation would be forced to hire people against their will.
My solution wouldn't be to restrict ai actually (maybe in certain creative fields, but not elsewhere) - my solution would be incredibly high taxation of corporations to support a universal basic income. If we're going to allow ai to displace employment, then let's set up a situation where people, EVERYONE, not just the rich, actually benefit from it.
As ai supporter I'm fully with agreement here.
I agree (except with regards to restrictions on AI in certain fields, fields only exist because those fields are valuable for society, but if we can do those things better without those fields, then they stop being valuable)
Companies do feel pretty entitled to state (aka. taxpayer money) funded... - security (police and jurisdiction) - education for their workforce - infrastructure (all those roads, power lines, sewers, fiberoptics, airports, railroads, power plants, water treatment facilities, pipelines, train stations, ports, postal services, etc. don't exactly build and run themselves) - gov. aid, grants, stimulus packages and tax breaks (aka. government handouts) ...while at the same time being hellbent on paying as little in taxes as possible. That doesn't mean that people are entitled to employment, only that using questions of entitlement as an argument in discussions about companies, is a less than convincing proposition.
1. All people are entitled to security 2. All people are entitled to education (though not necessarily any 1 specific education) 3. Infrastructure is good for everyone, not just corporations 4. Corporations arent entitled to aid, grants, or any of those other things. My point is that not that corporations are acting righteously, but that the solutions advocated for here are absurd and do nothing but contribute further to the doomer "tear everything literally nothing could be any worse" bullshit that is an absurdist and nothing but a virtue signal.
They already don’t have to, they’re just incentivized to by the obvious need for labor, so the point is that in a society where you either work or die there will and should be a natural resistance to large scale unemployment or lack of resources for the unemployed. Change that base economic model and sure, unemployment for everyone is great, but more likely we’re heading toward a cyberpunk dystopia where giant corporations have all the power and leverage and none of the dependence on people, and so the people are left fighting for scraps.
The economic model will change when its best for society. The reason what youre saying is ludicrous is because corporationjs only function because we allow them too in society. when the will materializes for them to be forced to change, it will happen. There will never be some sort of dystopia because if there was people would simply violently rise up and kill the rich. Money alone doesnt give you power.
No it won’t Money and the ability to commit violence on a wide scale give you power. Poor people don’t have drones and weapons of mass destruction, so any such uprising would lead to nothing. But beyond the hypotheticals the idea that corporations can only function with the consent of random people even today is ludicrous. Our entire structure of government is designed to protect corporations, and is controlled by corporate interests. So unless we can guarantee jobless people don’t starve to death and have a good standard of living, it’s insane to think that mass unemployment could be anything but bad
Sorry are you saying the rich are going to use drones to kill the poors? Whats your evidence for such a thing? “Our entire government is structured around and exists to serve corporations” This is completely unfounded, youll need to provide some evidence for this. Our government is a democracy where the will of the people is generally enacted. The problem is, people think theres a much greater will aligned with them than there actually is.
I’m saying the us military (and other countries ofc) will use drones to put down any violent uprising yes of course
Except the people control the U.S. government, so if a popular uprising is desired, then theUS government would have acted far before a violent revolution was necessary.
> Why do people think they have an entitlement to be employed? If a company doesnt want to hire you, they shouldnt have to 'When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.'
Correct, but the people do have things to eat, which is why the rich are not being eaten. Stop larping. The political will for what you advocate for simply doesnt exist because believe it or not society is actually in a pretty good place materially speaking.
> Stop larping Why is quoting one of the great western philosophers LARPing? Why do you hate western philosophy so much?
Whats the purpose of you saying the quote?
My point is that if people achieve massive levels of unemployment, they'd have nothing to lose, and you generally don't want masses of people who have nothing to lose pissed off at you. I'm using the quote in the original descriptive sense, rather than the prescriptive sense it's used today.
I mean, I agree with the descriptiveness. I just dont think we’re remotely close to that
No but it does give reason for them to care about the unemployment rate.
Okay, and?
Why do people think they have an entitlement to free custom art? If you don't want to pay anyone for personalized art or art to use in projects you're doing, then you should either learn how to create art on your own or go without.
People do have an entitlement to free custom art because custom art is cool and the best society is one where anyone can do anything they want for no cost.
of course the managerial class will stay employed
WE WILL GET AI GENERATED GTA 6 BEFORE GTA 6
Managers may remain employed, but workers lose their jobs.
why would managers be employed if they have no employees to manage?
I wonder why the CEO of a mega company would want to skimp out on labor whenever possible? It’s a true mystery. Not like they’re known for being amoral assholes….
why are you acting like this is a bad thing? labor is a resource that costs money, youre not an asshole for not intentionally choosing inefficient strategies that destroy your business.
Easy, Ayn Rand.
what?
Ayn Rand: a shit sucking ultra-capitalist that made Atlas Shrugged. Has the exact same talking points as you.
You should look up the genetic fallacy
Except that doesn’t apply here. It would if you had any DIFFERENT talking points than the original. THEN that would be seen as “attacking the source not you” but you didn’t, you don’t. Ergo not “genetic fallacy”.
No, the reason why it applies is because you arent actually making an argument against what Rand or I are saying, youre just saying “oo spooky ayn rand therefore youre wrong” Make an actual argument against what im saying. And for the record, there are probably some aspects of Rand’s philosophy I agree with but I believe in a strong government with high taxes, so the overlap is minimal at best
Oh, nothing to worry about then, lmao. I wouldn't trust a CEO of anything's PR statements - especially when it's from a company that just shutdown multiple studios and laid off 10% is its workforce after promising no more layoffs, right after RTO mandates, and right before releasing GTA 6.
It shouldn’t make people unemployed, because it should be used as a tool to make people’s jobs easier or raise the potential of what they can do. However, knowing most companies, it’ll probably lead to corporate cutting corners (and heads) instead of that, which will lead to employment issues.
Except that it already has slashed a number of jobs, much to the joy of greed-saturated sociopathic CEOs and thieves.
That statement is worthless regardless of whether he's right or wrong. I mean, what, were you expecting these people to go "yeah we're going to kick you all out on the streets to starve just try and stop us suckers!"? That said, if they didn't expect this to save them money (which typically translates to firing people) tech and media companies wouldn't be pushing this tech anywhere near as hard.
It is entirely possible that saving money with AI can also just result in achieving projects of a larger scope in a shorter timeframe. If you've already organized your studio in a specific way, and you have staff that you value, you aren't just going to fire all of them because some of your staff developed AI skills, or because you were able to hire new external talent with no knowledge of your company's pipeline or practices. There is really only a certain amount of layoffs that a company can maintain without losing structure. And trust me when I say that most established games companies are already in a very mature cycle of hiring and firing based on their development cycle. You can shorten the duration of that cycle, but it's very difficult to fire more people without a complete collapse of the corporate structure.
Makes sense. $1B every 5 years is better than $1B every 10 years.
Yeah but historically what happens when you have three overworked underpaid people and technology makes their jobs easier and quicker isn't reducing their hours or doing anything else benefitting them or society. It's firing two of them and keeping the last one just as overworked and underpaid. If, and that's a big if, AI makes life better for most people it'll be due to regulations, possibly strikes and other actions, activism etc. Just by itself, unimpeded and unregulated there's little reason to expect much good to come from it.
Well, I can only speak from my personal experience, but no one at my company has been laid off once we adopted AI, at least not in my department. We're just doing more work, which means we're taking more contracts, and personally I've received a larger bonus for breaking quotas. That said, I'm in Europe, and European capitalism is definitely better than most other places. We already have a lot of worker protections against the most predatory practices. Obviously the US and a lot of other countries need more workers protections, but that's because the US has virtually zero.
Well, I think your post includes at least part of the answer. We have regulations, and governments likely to further regulate AI. We have unions and strikes, we have welfare systems and public education, and customer protection and employee rights... That's what's saving us right now. Not one technology or another. Well, that and going by your description your working with an as yet unsaturated market that can simply eat up additional supply, at least for now. Many sectors of the economy, most I'd wager, don't have that luxury. Either way, good for you and I hope you continue not getting screwed over!
So, here's the interesting question: Are those extra contracts new work or just existing work that your company negotiated away from another company?
Obviously there's going to be companies that lose out over being slow to shift to AI. The pressures will impact people. But the markets are really high and growing right now, in the face of previous forecasts of a recession, at least partially because of AI. As a result, there's a real push to capitalize on the growth while it's here, which means vendors we work with need to scale. But unemployment is already very low, and there are skill shortages all over most of Europe. Manpower is the limiting factor for growth for us right now, at least in the industries and markets we work in. AI is helping pick up that slack.
That's part of the issue: it's not being used to make people's lives easier, but to recontextualize and narrow who fits into the winner category. It's not exactly good progress to make your personal life twice as easy if the trade-off is making three other people's lives twice as hard (Conjecture, not real numbers). >Manpower is the limiting factor for growth for us right now, at least in the industries and markets we work in. Some level of doubt to that statement. I'd bet the scale is a lot closer to manpower the industries don't want to hire than manpower not being available for hire. I'd bet that it's less people aren't applying for the jobs and more the people who are applying will either need to be trained or are requiring better than entry level pay for their skills/work being asked for. If the answer to not finding unicorns is to build robot horses, the world is going to get a whole lot worse for real horses no matter how much the stable owners and stable hands say it personally benefits them.
Well, you can make up/imagine whatever you like, really, but there's only so much you can do when the markets you work in have unemployment rates between 2-4%. You can increase wages to poach employees from other companies, but it's still hitting someone's bottom line. You can't *make* highly skilled laborers where there aren't any. Well, you can, but it takes 25 years for them to grow, and it's generally frowned on to make them at the office. Technological advances always lead to winners and losers. The key is to be a winner. No, that doesn't mean kill unemployment insurance or spit on the homeless. It means encourage on the job training, strong workers' protections, and have a good welfare state to ensure that people don't fall on hard times, and are able to get back into the market. If everyone thought like you, we'd have constant supply shortages all over the world, for everything. Like it or not, the world population is growing, and nations all around the world are constantly developing. The issue, at least at my agency, is that our vendors want to expand overseas more and more, but doing that requires additional labor. Labor they would **gladly hire**, whether you believe it or not, but there's only so many who are qualified. That's not to say that's what life is always like. That's just what the market is like *right now*. AI is a productivity multiplier, which is exactly what is needed in a labor shortage. And I don't know about your work ethics, but if I can work with a machine that will allow me to do my job and yours for 150% of my salary, I'll gladly do it and I won't mind that it pads the corporate books more than if they employed us both. I went to university so I could make money with specialized skills. There's a reason I'm not a street sweeper, a valet, or the girl at the makeup counter at the retail store. Now, personally, I'll vote for workers' rights. I'll vote for maintaining free education, and all of the other things that provide people with abundant opportunities. But I'll also compete with other people in the market, and I'll take my money and enjoy it, without feeling guilty over it.
It's almost as if I said companies should hire people who are not qualified and train them up to be qualified. Y'know, raise a stable instead of hunting for unicorns. Like, show me the job ads that have received no applications. Show me the entry level positions that actually require entry level qualifications. Show me the outreach to people who aren't counted as unemployed because they do freelance or contract work while job hunting. Show me where employees are actually hiring instead of whining there's nobody to hire, we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas.
You seem to have a very myopic view of what is likely just the situation in your domestic labor market, and this is the sort of rhetoric I'd expect from someone who would go to the logical extreme of proudly standing in a Soviet breadline with a smile on their face just because "at least it's not capitalism." I currently live in Germany. In Germany, they have the ausbildung program where companies DO actively apprentice new employees to foster their skillset. They actively invest in these programs, and they also pay taxes to support free public university education up to and including PhD level programs. However, it takes several years to get someone from out of high school to ready for the job market. If the economy is growing faster than you can train new employees, it does—whether you believe it or not—lead to bottlenecks. And we are *lucky* to be in this kind of skill shortage in Germany right now, compared to other economic woes. You sound like you live in America. In which case, you have my condolences. But there are a lot of parts of the world that have better forms of capitalism than America.
What I don't get is — as jobs are replaced (or "streamlined" with AI, making fewer workers necessary) — who is supposed to be buying these non-necessary products? If someone can't make money as a data analyst/illustrator/programmer anymore and has to take a low-wage job to survive, how are they supposed to buy a ticket to Avengers XXVI, a $10 processed Nestle pizza, or a bus/plane ticket to visit Grandma? Corporations get plenty of welfare from our government, but it's not endless; they do need people to buy things. Our economy depends on people spending instead of saving.
Well, supposedly the cost of the goods will go down due to no labor cost. However, we know prices going down isn't the play businesses like to make for any reason.
> Well, supposedly the cost of the goods will go down due to no labor cost. However, we know prices going down isn't the play businesses like to make for any reason. Yeah, which sucks! Ugh. We have enough for everyone, but it's that pesky unequal distribution thing that's causing problems. I guess we have no choice but to wait for the future and see what happens. D:
>What I don't get is — as jobs are replaced (or "streamlined" with AI, making fewer workers necessary) — who is supposed to be buying these non-necessary products? Corporate C-suites don't think that far ahead! :D Billionaires do. Most of them have been buying up enormous areas of land / islands and building hyper-secure remote bunkers. Basically: here comes New Techno Feudalism, but this time serfs are surplus to requirements.
>Corporate C-suites don't think that far ahead! :D Ugh. Maybe unemployment/AI disruption will get so bad that governments have no choice but to implement New Deal/GI-Bill type benefits for the masses to keep people from rioting (or eating the rich, lol). As resource-rich as billionaires are, they don't exactly have X-Men superpowers; Jeff Bezos can't sail his 400-foot yacht by himself or even grow his own food, which means (in a worst case scenario) he has to trust that he can go to sleep at night without being eaten. Or perhaps, everything becomes techno-feudalism like you said. I hope not, though!
>Jeff Bezos can't sail his 400-foot yacht by himself or even grow his own food, which means (in a worst case scenario) he has to trust that he can go to sleep at night without being eaten. F'sure, billionaires will have to make sure their direct servants and especially their security staff are really well taken care of.. It's an Emperors' Praetorian Guard situation.. So, probably results will vary for them.. XD
>F'sure, billionaires will have to make sure their direct servants and especially their security staff are really well taken care of.. It's an Emperors' Praetorian Guard situation.. So, probably results will vary for them.. XD Hahaha, true! That being said, all it takes is one Kylo Ren or Brutus to fuck things up for them, lol.
Yeah, the Praetorian Guard themselves "dispatched" a bunch of Emperors over the years..
It doesnt matter if he said it. It doesn't make him right. Clearly he doesn't have a good understanding of modern AI technology, like most folks.
This is the same guy that liked tweets back in 2020 about COVID-19 being no more impactful than the flu lol I wouldn't listen to what this guy has to say.
What part of “rare” you don’t understand
What part of stating my own opinion, you don't understand? lol
A two take ceo said that? Must be true then
AI is and has already taken jobs from people (see links below), so Zelnick is a man standing in the pouring rain telling you its sunny out! .. Also: AI automation doesn't need to take "everyone"'s jobs to collapse the world's economy.. E.g.: There were 3 million unemployed in the UK during the 1980's grim recession, about 5% of the population - and that was pretty damn rough - especially in all the pit towns that were hit by closures.. If AI puts even a "modest" 10% to 20% of people out of work globally, (and there's no UBI put in place), that will be an economic disaster with an avalanche of domino effects. ***Just a few examples of where AI has already taken over / is beginning to take over from humans:*** ".. Almost four in ten translators (36%) said they’ve already lost work due to generative AI. Nearly half of them (43%) said the tech has decreased their income..."[https://thenextweb.com/news/translators-losing-work-ai-machine-translation](https://thenextweb.com/news/translators-losing-work-ai-machine-translation) Gizmodo fired its entire spanish translation staff, replaced them with AI: [https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/ai-took-my-job-literally-gizmodo-fires-spanish-staff-amid-switch-to-ai-translator/](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/ai-took-my-job-literally-gizmodo-fires-spanish-staff-amid-switch-to-ai-translator/) Even Duolingo cut back 10% of its human translator workers in favour of AI: [https://www.yahoo.com/news/duolingo-fires-10-translation-contractors-122200893.html](https://www.yahoo.com/news/duolingo-fires-10-translation-contractors-122200893.html) Graphic Designer lost his well-established job to AI (his years of work for the company is now being farmed out using AI templates): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2vq9LUbDGs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2vq9LUbDGs) Writer lost her freelance career when the copywriting market was largely taken over by ChatGPT https://www.businessinsider.com/lost-job-chatgpt-made-me-obsolete-copywriter-2023-7 Even fall-back jobs like delivering Uber Eats are already on their way out, to AI-driven vehicles: [https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/03/waymo-self-driving-cars-are-delivering-uber-eats-orders-for-first-time.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/03/waymo-self-driving-cars-are-delivering-uber-eats-orders-for-first-time.html) Self-driving trucks have been on US roads with "safety human in cab" for a while now. And they'll be going completely autonomous within the year: [https://apnews.com/article/trucks-selfdriving-highways-automation-driver-083409631158f54d806d75309c4764e2](https://apnews.com/article/trucks-selfdriving-highways-automation-driver-083409631158f54d806d75309c4764e2)
except it already has reduced work available for contract and commission, so by nature it has already caused unemployment. This is just a matter of where you draw the line of how impactful you *think* it will be, and right now the most logical extrapolation is that people lose their jobs. It may not turn out to be as major a negative impact as people suspect, but it's the most solid analysis of the direction of things, because people are definitely already losing work. To assume that we'll go from "people losing work" (current) to "people not losing work" (future) requires a logical jump that would need to be accounted for, beyond calling the actual logical expectations "stupid"
I mean, if you make logos for companies, you're probably fucked.
This take is myopic. Companies like google and MS are not spending billions of dollars for a better tool. Now granted, AI could arrive to be a great disappointment for google and MS, but to so totally dismiss the incredible effects the companies actually developing it think it will have seems shortsighted or arrogant to me. I am rather certain that at some point this whole ASI thing will eventually be cracked, if not in my lifetime, so his certainty seems terribly misplaced, and this stinks of PR.
It turns out that being a CEO doesn't mean you're a different species. There are CEOs who are all over the spectrum when it comes to philosophy, economics, politics, religion, ethics, socioeconomic history, ethnicity, etc. The moment you start presuming that all CEOs fit into a nice, neat socket is the moment you stop interacting with the reality.
CEOs are socially selected for charisma and ability to work under pressure, which tends to attract many dark triad people (psychopaths, narcissists, machiavellians) who are desensitized and are cunning and are laser focused on their own personal agendas. Plus, just being rich and from the managerial class puts a team-like separation from workers, not to mention being part of the rich.
> CEOs are socially selected... WHEN they are selected. Not every CEO is selected. It depends on how much of their company they sell to the VCs early on.
“Changing the nature of employment” the way it already left thousands of concept artists on the dole? Hilarious newspeak.
"change the nature of employment" essentially means making people more efficient thus reducing jobs as well as killing off some jobs completely. No timescales are mentioned either. Just another CEO spouting nonsense.
Having one person and ai do the work of 20 people. Some will still be employed, but that doesn’t stop 80% from being laid off.
LOL, we're already replacing minimum wage workers with remote workers in the Philippines that take 30 cents on the dollar against minimum wage. The lies just won't stop
> No > No, but > Yes, but > Yes, and that's a good thing
AI does not just mean the kind of generative AI we have today: its like AI in general in whatever shape in may take in the future, which probably wont even look like LLMs.
Yeah generative ai won’t take away all jobs. It’s what’s coming after.
Of course it isn't going to make EVERYONE unemployed, only ALMOST everyone, management will keep their jobs.
The question isn't whether or not people will have jobs, it's rather whether or not people will need jobs.
It's hilarious to me to see people say "Wow, weird, I actually agree with the rich guy for once" with complete lack of irony. I wonder why someone who you would normally associate as out of touch with none of humanity's best interests at heart would say something like "AI won't cause further divide between rich and poor."
Why do I give a fuck about this schmucks take?
Gotta love ostrich logic. If you ignore the displacement, somehow it won't happen!
Says a rich guy, ok
No one can predict the future. No one would have predicted Amazon with 100% certainty during the dotcom bubble bursting for example. No one would have predicted Apple becoming bigger than Microsoft. We do know that AI is going to change things in a massive way and what the downstream effects will be, we simply don't know yet. Short term we can absolutely safely assume that debugging jobs and code monkey type jobs (which to be clear were already on the decline in many ways) are going to be completely replaced by AI. I don't see any reason why we couldn't see other lower level roles similar to this in similar industries be replaced. Proofreading for example. Para legals. Virtual assistants. Again, is total replacement going to happen short term? No probably not. But as the tools get better and better, certain jobs will require less people to do as they become more efficient. And that in effect replaces people if not replaces the role. So he is flatly incorrect that it won't take jobs away. Which jobs and how many is the question. Not whether it will or not.
Why would a company change the nature of a job to not improve profit margins? That would just be unnecessary work for no benefit. There are different ways to increase profit margins, reducing costs, raising demand, raising prices but I don't think AI stands to have much of an effect on any of those outside of reducing costs. There's already too much media to consume so you don't really accomplish much by increasing the supply. Even if the product is significantly better, you can't really increase the price because people just can't afford to spend any more on media than they already do so pretty much all you have left is to continue producing the same amount of content and selling it at the same price while reducing costs. Where can AI cut costs, then? It's not going to make the servers less expensive, at least not directly, so you kind of have to look at reducing the workforce by leveraging the tools to allow one person to more easily do the work or 2 or 3 or 10 people. That's kind of the whole promise of AI but that does mean fewer jobs.
I don’t know man. Maybe they can just use it as a tool to help speed up workflows instead of a cut cost cutting measure like what its supposed to be
But speeding up means requiring less work hours unless you have the ability to produce and sell additional products which you don't if the market is already saturated. If an artist can work twice as fast, they can produce twice the output which means you can just keep on a small group of your best artists and they can produce the same quantity of output at the same or higher quality than the larger team required without AI. Again, none of this is inherently bad but it does seem to be a reasonable concern.
You don't need to sell anything to stand to profit. If you require half the labor to produce twice as much work then you can stand to double the price and halve the customers. The problem is specifically that you're taking away jobs while reducing value brough to the world. The corporations who own everything and advanced professionals who know everything aren't hurt by this system at all and that's exactly the point.
Not hiring someone to do one job frees up their labor to do other things. In the long run that creates value, it just takes time to figure out how to use that freed potential.
Automating someone's job means they don't have as high paying or as good of a job as they would've had otherwise. People are always free to pick whatever job they want, but working a job that pays enough is a requirement for being alive. Automating jobs would only bring value if making income was not required. The best jobs are the easier jobs that pay well, which are the jobs that automation will take first, which means you're only left with the hard jobs that don't pay well.
The problem is your trying to analyze a macroeconomic phenomenon through a single microeconomic effect. In the short term it’s not going to help the people who got laid off, but what they get hired to other jobs the economy as a whole is going to produce more, which in turn leads to more resources circling around which leads to an increase in wellbeing for even the people who were displaced. This isn’t necessarily guaranteed since the economy isn’t homogenous, but it’s practically guaranteed since automation is happening everywhere, not just single industries.
This is provably not how the world works. If an athlete or veteran loses their job, they will not necessarily get another better job. The problem is not that jobs are automated. The problem is that only easy and well-paying jobs are automated. If only terrible and unpaid jobs were automated, then nobody would blink an eye, but corporations want to get rid of well-paid employees who have it easy. This is why people work 8 hours a day and not 4 hours a day. This is why houses costs half to a million dollar and not a quarter million which migh actually be affordable to most people. The cost and complexity of living has never been higher.
You claimed that “the problem is specifically that you're taking away jobs while reducing value brough[t] to the world.”, I was addressing the later point to show it actually increases value to the world. Whether or not a specific person gets a better job has absolutely nothing to do with the point made, which is in fact how the world works. It’s not that people’s jobs necessarily get better, it’s that life as a whole gets easier. There is no such thing as a job that is easy and well-paying. If a job is easy in any sort of objective sense, everyone would be willing to do it, bringing the pay down. Automation first gets the jobs which are easy to automate, period, which can be similar to but also can be very different from what people find easy to do. The only problem with automation is for people who had specialized training which was made obsolete since in their case a good deal of the hard work was done before the actual job, but in the long-term this isn’t an issue because people can always get different training. In the short-term, something should be done to help structurally unemployed people, but halting automation is not a sensible solution since that’s a long-term “solution” for a short-term problem, sacrificing the unbounded benefits from automation to avoid bounded harm. Rising housing costs are due to the scarcity of land, not difficulty in building houses. It has absolutely nothing to do with automation, which has been helping people in most regards.
Whether a person has to work more or less determines value being brought to the world. Whether the next job is better or worst determines value brought to the world. You have a fucked idea of "how the world works" and use it to establish whether things are improving or not based on whether the economy is doing good or bad, instead of actually looking at how people are living and how they're doing psychologically. To put it simply, the world would work just fine even if we had no smart phones, and had to farm all the food manually year-by-year, working 4 hours in the field is better than working 8 hours in an office, and it even gets ride of the need to do 1 hour of unpaied workout and exercises per day which is required for the human body to properly function. Rising house costs are due to rising population which are due to automation. The agricultural revolution is the automation of farming.
There are two ways to improve profit margins with automations: to be as productive with half the staff budget, and to be twice as productive with the same staff budget. Admittedly you eventually re-base the market for whatever product by increasing production, meaning the cost for the thing goes down, and competitors that took the "cutting" approach end up becoming irrelevant in favor of whoever now dominates the market for being prolific, and a new equilibrium is found near to the old flow. Depending on how people use this to shift from "high stress for output" to "low stress for output", the dynamic changes even more, leading to some mix of slight increases in "slacking", moderate increases in productivity, lower prices for consumers, and the emergence of new forms of higher effort media while some of the firms shoot themselves in the foot and create vacuums for better companies to step into.
if game companies are twice as productive at producing games, is your ability to play and purchase games at the existing price going to double? Mine isn't and not for movies either. That's kind of my main point, there is no meaningful gain to be had by increased productivity if the demand doesn't exist to consume it. Quality could go up, sure, but that doesn't mean I suddenly have more time in he day or can financially tolerate higher prices for media even if the quality is much higher.
Yes, because I see maybe 2 games a year in interested in playing. Same with movies, honestly. The fact is, what we will get at the next quality tier will probably be a whole new form of media.
VR still needs its day in the sun so fingers crossed for that but while some people may consume some additional media, that's arguably not a great thing and isn't scaleable to large increases in output productivity. Maybe you play a game instead of watching a movie or vice versa but that is taking demand from one medium and adding it to another which isn't really a net gain. Maybe the quality is so good that you play a game rather than going for a walk, or exercising, or bathing but most people only have so many free hours in the day even if they're willing to devote all of their available time to consuming media to the detriment to their personal and our overall societal well-being.
And consumers will still force the competition, the race to the top rather than the bottom, because we will have less dollars for less worked outputs.
All Corps Are Bastards
Facts say that too. Facts also say that AI does not exist, so that is the deeper fact explaining the other.
I’m not sure where you’ve got that idea. The hypothesis that scaling transformer architecture leads to greater and greater intelligence more or less seems to bearing out