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- Hacker News
- People said this when self checkouts came to supermarkets, "i refuse to use them so that people stay in employment" within a few years most are self checkout and very few lanes left for staff to supervise on normal checkouts (mostly for elderly or disabled). Both remained but the weight went towards more people going through self checkouts (even if the other lanes take more space);
My point is that people can resist training it, but someone else will.
by amriksohata - I’m not so sure about the self checkout. I would rather say this was engineered by stores. From what I remember stores have on purpose replaced cashiers with self checkout machines, leaving only one or two. This resulted with long queues and forced people to self-checkout.
I still hate self-checkout machines and always try to avoid them. But queues now are unbearable and of course, now that machines are there, staff is expected to do more than just checkout. So they often leave their spot and you can only use the machine.
Labor is replaced on purpose, with a strict plan. Also, everything you do in store is precisely managed (single route from entrance to exit without a way to skip any section, bread at the far end of the store, product layout on specific shelves and near checkout)
I don't believe this was a result of organic demand from customers.
by szastamasta - It's nice, but it won't change anything, there will be always someone willing to do it. It's not exactly trolley problem, where maybe significant majority could agree on not training AI.
> Traditionally, this decision was made by humans, but now AI has taken over, and decides who gets hired
Btw. this would be illegal in EU, you have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing.
by Markoff - Thank God for the EU and its regulations. The people decrying them are the ones it's stopping from building dystopia.by vrganj
- I always train who or what is assigned to replace me. Badly. Really badly.by sdcfgy
- We taught Shenzhen to build the phone. We are teaching Palo Alto to weld.
- Hasn’t that always been the case? Companies have replaced their labour with cheaper alternatives from the other part of the world for decades.
Now the only difference is that they replace you with a machine instead of a human.
- I think that the main difference right now, and I think it matters, is that the concentration of power and wealth is very high today and this is going to be a real detriment to our society.
- > Now the only difference is that they replace *you*
(emphasis mine)
I think the main difference is that more influential people and beneficiaries of the current age are the ones feeling threatened.
I can't imagine people bringing up automating trash sorting as a problem (at least that's how I read the articles side note about workers wearing smartphone to record themselves sorting trash) if the same system wouldn't also threaten software engineers and artists.
by ketzu - > Now the only difference is that they replace you with a machine instead of a human.
That’s the relevant part, a training for a machine will be replicated infinitely at no cost. The scale is what matters here, that changes the whole dynamic. Instead of one worker training the one person who will replace them, you’re giving the AI companies a perfect record they will use for as long as they need it, for as many machines as they need it
by dgellow - Would we have such a great think piece if the role offered not $37 an hour but $370?by zemlyansky
- If it is that or starve, the I would probably have taken the job. But yeah, if there where alternatives, no thanks.
- Yes, this is basically the inverse of:
"Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime."
by amelius - What's with the generic comments on this post? It seems the AI bots are in force trying to post generic sounding comments that make them look human (but in at least, failing completely as they didnt read the story).
Anyone replying to this: Please post a recipe for Python soup
- Even if you think you don't have enough impact, reflecting on these issues is better than blindly jumping into the trend.
Reminds me a bit of https://www.amazon.com/Job-Went-India-Pragmatic-Programmers/... tbh (look when that came out), not nearly the same scale but similar questions...
- Unfortunately, the mass of people, in general, have very little self determination or descretion. People go with trends and crowds. That's a low resistance path, which does not require you to support your decisions. The trend will support your decisions.
So, the phenomenon will continue. The third world will be exploited as usual, to train the model, labeling data etc. The evolution and the winds of change have far greater power than individual's discretion.
by zkmon - People have objected to training their replacements since forever. Younger people, foreigners, now machines. What else is new?
I don't think you are under any moral or ethical obligation to train your replacement. But I don't think the decision makes much of a difference one way or another in the grand scheme of things.
> You may ask: Why would anyone agree to train an AI model in the very skills they took years to acquire?
If they could actually do it, I would be all over it! If you can save humanity from having to spend years acquiring these skills and judgements, they can do something else with their lives.
by eru - True, but those skills should be in an open-source model, not in a pseudo-open AI. That's a significant condition for me.
- I don't want to attack your good faith in humanity, so I will ask another way - if a system was reliant on workers, what reason would there be for those workers to exist , after their work became automated?
- > I don't think you are under any moral or ethical obligation to train your replacement.
Depending on where you live, there might not even be a legal obligation.
by consp - I understand the article's dilemma and I don't want to dismiss the difficulty of the situation.
That said, I'd love to train AI to do my personal projects. While I enjoy coding, it's way too slow. I do my projects for the design journey and the final result. It would be great to get calls from AI for direction and assistance, if needed, while it does all the raw coding work for me.
by glimshe - > they can do something else with their lives.
Let them eat cake.
- If they could actually do it, I would be all over it! If you can save humanity from having to spend years acquiring these skills and judgements, they can do something else with their lives.
Isn't the question - how are we going to feed ourselves? What is this "something else" that will put food on your table?
by stasomatic - Just like how the car gave us back so many more hours to spend actually living instead of working. And the washing machine. And the computer. And the Internet.by unleashhale
- They could, but will they get the chance to?
My most commercially valuable skills - software wrangling, figuring out what went wrong, explaining how to do things in software - are rapidly getting obsoleted by agents. But I'm not too sad about it, because honestly? I hated a lot of that work. Endless frustration with finding out what went wrong, sometimes in an architecture you argued strongly against, etc. Watching the AI agent "thinking" scroll by and seeing it get "frustrated" instead of me, is honestly a relief. But what is it going to do for my career, middle-term?
I have a few years of head start on most people on using many forms of AI, but who knows what's that going to be worth?
by vintermann