Peter Gabriel: AI competition statement
petergabriel.comWell said, this thing is here to stay. When I first played around with gpt-4 I was filled with immense dread. I, as many others have, immediately understood what kind of enormous societal impact this would have.
But I put the question to myself, if I could magically wish this thing away, would I? I wouldn't. I understand the many that would, this thing completely upends the status quo. Massive swathes of people will have skills they have built up their entire lives become worthless. But the potential for good that can emerge from this, can potentially benefit everyone and the people that are not benefitting from the status quo the most.
If you think AI is a disaster, think about the potential for medical breakthroughs that can emerge from this. Doctors will spend fewer hours writing charts and more time with patients. Every underprivileged child could have a personalized tutor. The number of discoveries and ideas that can be generated are endless.
"Every underprivileged child could have a personalized tutor." Tutor for what, prompt engineering? The impact of this on the kids is hard to fathom and just because "similar" advancements in the past opened up doors does not mean this one will as well.
I think it's more that the (ad-riddles, SEO-centric) internet is no longer the education tool it used to be, but chatgpt is. I asked it to walk me through cross-compiling for an old NAS, how to setup Ethernet over coaxial in my custom setup, what legal advice.I should take,etc etc. It did not give perfect answers, but the answers were good enough to build upon, and after working with of for so long, it really feels like it's a friend that's trying to help.
I can definitely picture this being a personal tutor to a child
Do you have kids? My young child wants to "ask the AI" stuff all the time - which is a relief, because I'd much prefer that over giving them full Internet access until they're mature enough. AI is a huge accelerant for childhood learning.
Either way you'd have to be watching what the kid was asking and making sure what they found was accurate and appropriate. I don't think I'd trust an AI trained on random crap found on the internet to teach my children unattended any more than I'd trust youtube's algorithm to feed them video suggestions all day without oversight.
Not only would I be risking my kids being exposed to things that were outright wrong or entirely inappropriate, but I'd also be missing the opportunity to discuss their questions and the answers with them, provide context, and learn new things myself in the process.
Sounds like school.
Thankfully teachers don't usually get their degrees by reading social media posts and whatever else they happened to find on the internet. That said, you should absolutely be paying attention to what your kids are (and more importantly aren't) being taught in schools too.
They don't get their degrees that way, but they absolutely do use social media and have their views shaped by it. ChatGPT is also trained on a lot more than social media, you can be sure it's read a lot of scientific literature as well.
But yes, you're final point is the one I'm getting at: You should be actively monitoring and explaining what your child is being told whether it comes from a human or an LLM.
Tutor for whatever the kid has the curiosity to ask.
You don’t need to be a “prompt engineer” to get use out of a language model. You just have to recognize what it is, and what it isn’t.
If that can’t be taught to children, there’s no sense fretting over AI. We don’t need it to fail.
I'd rather kids not be taught by something that hallucinates and spits out accurate-sounding lies. The education system is already struggling to teach kids to read and has been removing math from california schools (two front page news here this week). Adding a lying tutor should be classified as child neglect.
That said, I like the AI, but only as an adult who has enough training to question whether I'm being lied to by an auto regressive Turing machine.
Newspapers and the government already basically spit out accurate sounding lies all the time also.
it would make a poor tutor for you. even as an adult.
go find examples of the lying tutor you hypothesize - you might just find smart kids extracting value from chaos. your fears will not deny them that.
>If you think AI is a disaster, think about the potential for medical breakthroughs that can emerge from this.
Don't bother. People here love to miser. There's no way you're getting any positive responses to this. Let doom and gloom begin.
>When I first played around with gpt-4 I was filled with immense dread
Really? When I played around with it I was filled with incredible optimism and hope. It was an amazing companion that helped me with my code, answered questions, and what I hoped Google Assistant/Alexa/Siri etc would become a few years in. Sadly they never did.
This is amazing, and would be an excellent personal assistant when it becomes cheap enough for smaller personalized LLMs.
If you think AI is a disaster, think about the potential for medical breakthroughs that can emerge from this.
The “think of the good” argument is over played. Same was true for combustion engines, they will probably send us extinct.
I’d like it if people just stopped with it. People aren’t idiots, they know good things and very bad things can be achieved.
Yeah I really hate this line of argument as well. We obviously understand it can have a lot of beneficial effects in society. It's a strawman to say that people don't see that. The problem is nobody seems to be properly discussing the bad things that can and will occur.
We can of course also judge the track record on this kind of techno-optimist rhetoric. People expressed all the same lofty ideals about social media, almost all of which have been outweighed by what we really got: anger-driven addiction, micro-targeted propaganda, turn-key state surveillance, and teenagers attempting suicide at all time highs.
> People expressed all the same lofty ideals about social media
Who (that wasn't a billionaire owner of a social media company)? Also, major strawman.
Now take that and 100x it.
> We obviously understand it can have a lot of beneficial effects in society
Really? Because nobody seems to be talking about them. You talk about how bad things "will" occur. What about bad things that are literally happening right now?
Maybe think of the children.
Why should they go to school at all? Why should they study? What should they study? What should I tell them?
A person who works in tourism just told me that he wants to learn something safer, because he had no job during COVID, so he started studying web design. All I could tell him is that that job has peaked, and I believe tourism is safer at this point.
What will all the serfs and slaves do for a living, now that we have tractors and combine harvesters?
I mean, that's > 90% of all jobs! How will we cope with 90% unemployment?
(it should be obvious that this is not serious... humanity has survived "machines are taking all the jobs" many times before, and it will survive this one too)
Maybe they shouldn’t? Jesus what is with people shaming others for not attaining some arbitrary level of education and career?
Ok so what will they be doing instead ?
Playing? Actually enjoying their childhoods?
Then, where do they get money from and food, will that be provided for fee by AGIs? Who will own the AGI systems ? How will they ensure they’re in alignment with the children’s goals ?
> Then, where do they get money from and food, will that be provided for fee by AGIs?
Works for me.
> Who will own the AGI systems ?
Communities, ideally:
> How will they ensure they’re in alignment with the children’s goals ?
Community ownership tends to produce the best alignments with the goals of said community - including the children thereof.
At what stage with the AGI be handed over to “the people”.
I’m not being a prick on purpose, but one should ask these questions rather than reaching for blind optimism.
> At what stage with the AGI be handed over to “the people”.
That's pretty much automatic if the AGI is free software trained on free data.
> I’m not being a prick on purpose
You ain't being a prick at all; they're questions worth asking. Their answers do depend on optimism, but said optimism ain't "blind" in the slightest; rather, the optimism is a prescription: a goal for which we should be striving, and which we should be keeping in mind in our slow march toward an AGI-enabled potentially-post-scarcity society.
Do you think throwing “AI” problems at scale into this mix is a good thing to do right now ?
> What about bad things that are literally happening right now?
Our lives are good. No child loses sleep for the bogeyman under the neighbor's bed.
> Same was true for combustion engines, they will probably send us extinct.
What? Because we weren't burning fossil fuels before cars?
Besides forgetting about trains, steamships and the coal-powered Industrial Revolution, you're ignoring the billions of lives lifted out of poverty.
I guess one could argue this was also a pretty stupid thing to do ? I read Tesla’s auto-biography, he even knew back then we were messing up a lot.
Given the ability to sustain billions, statistically speaking neither of us would've been born if it weren't for the combustion engine.
> combustion engines, they will probably send us extinct.
!RemindMe 150 years
> Same was true for combustion engines, they will probably send us extinct.
Climate change is a serious issue, but you cheapen and discredit it by exaggerating its impact. There is zero chance climate change will cause humans to go extinct. If my stance is incorrect, please reply with some evidence.
You're being pedantic. Sure, there's zero chance humans will actually go extinct; instead, the climatic effects and then the ensuing breakdown in society leading up to thermonuclear war will "only" wipe out 99% of the population, leaving some bands of survivors to live in the rubble. In 10,000 years, humans will still be around, living in small tribes just as they were 1M years ago, and unable to regain ever regain the level of technology they had before because easy-to-access energy sources are all depleted so a new industrial revolution is impossible. For all intents and purposes, humans as a global society will be extinct, even if the species itself isn't. Perhaps our descendants will evolve into aquatic creatures with smaller heads and brains.
I don’t think you need a paper to understand that if unchecked, climate change will mean humans are pretty much done.
At least a modern civilisation like the one we have today. Societal collapse is on the cards for sure if we stay in the current trajectory.
I’m not going to waste time providing you with evidence I’m sorry. You should already understand the situation.
Are you seriously suggesting humanity would be better off without the combustion engine? Also, presumably an AI powerful enough to kill vast swathes of humanity would be powerful enough to prevent something like climate change.
Yes, I am absolutely suggesting that. Not all engines but petroleum fuelled combustion engines, yes.
The world is going through a mass extinction event because of burning oil and coal and combustion engines have been an absolutely integral part of that ecological disaster. So yes.
Just be real about it? Why do “EV” subsidies exist? To wean us off combustion engines to save the planet.
Combustion engines should’ve been much more carefully regulated and we should’ve had better incentives against their use.
>Yes, I am absolutely suggesting that.
Alright unabomber. What an unhinged statement that is.
Combustion engine that is arguably one of the major causes of reducing poverty everywhere is a bad thing, I tell you hwat!
I love how you people(and it's generally people from developed countries too lol) can't think beyond your own needs and POVs. Yeah man, how dare the poor people in developing and impoverished nations increase their QoL.
I'm not going to get upset about your ignorant statements, but you should be easily able to realize that we could've achieved similar results with electric systems a long time ago.
We could've deployed nuclear a long time ago, wind etc. We could've used and invested further in electric tractors 50 years ago.
You're conflating what I'm saying, I'm not saying technology wasn't helpful, I'm saying the internal combustion engine, sucked and still sucks and that we need to be careful when deploying technology at scale.
It wasn't just the internal combustion engine that has been a problem, oil wars, dictators, lead based fuels, deaths from air pollute, these thing have caused incredible amounts of harm.
Lastly, we're not also out of the woods yet, it's not over, go look at some climate charts and look at the trajectory we're on, the world is getting hotter, faster. Also strip mining the world for lithium and cobalt will also have massive implications for the planet.
I know we like to think we're clever, but we're rarely wise.
For our civilization the time to proliferate electric engines before ICEs is gone, though. I have to wonder if there's something inherit to the properties/efficiency of petroleum combustion that ensures that intelligent civilization will proliferate it first over electric engines.
It sounds like the bottleneck is lack of foresight. Our ancestors were incapable of seeing the end result of ICEs everywhere when they were first used. How is any future civilization supposed to combat this when they aren't handed the correct answer by some forebearer civilization that destroyed itself first? It feels like not only humans but all future intelligent life with access to petroleum would fall into this trap over and over again.
It's as if the only way to avoid the current scenario is to discover all the petroleum and then not touch it for the rest of time. About the only guardrail that could incentivize that behavior in my mind is the blind faith of religion.
It was lobbying, it had little to do with psychology or prehistoric urges or anything like that. Greed of a few mostly.
Read up about the world class tram system in Sydney, bicycle networks in LA and what killed all that. Take a look at all the coal lobbies in Australia. Wars for oil in the Middle East, it just goes on and on.
If only they’d focus their research on that instead of art and music.
Presumably in response to this; https://petergabriel.com/news/diffusetogether-ai-video-conte...
Thanks, that's helpful.
It seems to me that he's really missing some of the major concerns about "AI" as it stands today. As often happens with new technology, the old rules that secure rights don't quite fit anymore. E.g., if I were an artist who had spent years developing a unique, recognizable style, I'd be furious to have a for-profit company use my work to create something to imitate my art. It's probably not illegal at the moment, but it easily could be down the road, and it regardless raises real ethical questions. I'm disappointed to see Gabriel fail to grapple with that here, where his cache as a prominent artist is being used by a for-profit company for their own ends.
Yes. This is about the ethics of AI training data sources.
Peter is OK with AI consuming his tracks. But other Artists... not so much.
There's a massive piece of the music scene that I can't imagine AI ever replacing. Some genres are formulaic by design, but the draw for so many others is the human experience and the inventiveness. Many people follow artists because they connect with material that could only have come from the artist.
One reasonable concern is that tech supplementation will lead to a deluge of derivative work, nullifying the efforts of the actual creators. That's always happened in some form or another, and does it really lead genuine fans away from artists they care about?
There's a comment in another thread about generating a song that includes Kurt Cobain, which is such a weird example because a computer could not have dreamed that up in a thousand years. A computer couldn't write a punk song, and mean it. It will never replace the open mic, the buskers, the songs passed across generations, the Zappas of the world, and millions of others.
>Some genres are formulaic by design, but the draw for so many others is the human experience and the inventiveness.
Those genres are safe (for a while), but they're also a puny portion of the market. American pop music is totally going to be replaced by AI. It's been nothing but awful, formulaic crap for the last 25 years, so there's no way that AI-generated music could possibly be worse.
I believe it can and ultimately will, given enough training data.
By the time it does, it's no longer a "computer" it's a form of life, and that's not "training data", that's "experience", thus by all intents and purposes it's a "person" and so it is still true that a "computer" cannot possess the free will required to express ones self creatively
Nice to see an artist who have a website and post readable messages there instead of posting images with text on Twitter or Instagram.
> there should be a right to choose to refuse it
Even out of the context of AI, I think this isn't stressed enough in general copyright discussion, especially around piracy.
People often say that piracy doesn't actually reduce the sale -- which I fully agree -- but that's not the only concern artists have, especially some indie ones. I have seen both illustration/musical artists explicitly stating they don't care if "their work is enjoyed and known by more people because of piracy", they only want paid users to get it. I don't even agree with this sentiment, but I respect it since it's their choice to make, not mine.
"When an artist's work is copied for commercial gain, there should be [(a)] a right to choose to refuse it or [(b)] to participate financially.
If anyone legitimately feels their copyright has been infringed by this competition, we and Stability AI will work to take down the video until the dispute has been resolved."
StabilityAI and Gabriel are providing (a) but not (b).
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66788385/13/getty-image...
If Getty wins, is Gabriel committing contributory infringement.
Even if what happens after text is entered into a prompt is not infringement, mass copying for "training" is done for commercial gain and it is done without consent. Google gets away with copying websites en masse into a cache for the purposes of running a commercial web search engine. Maybe copying for purpose of commercial "AI" will get similar treatment.
That said, consider what happened when Google tried scanning books. It seems that some of these training sets have used hundreds of thousands of copyrighted works from "pirate" sources on the web.
IMO, this is just another example of so-called "tech" companies, e.g., Uber, that can only operate if they are free from existing laws and regulations.
Does StabilityAI have a commercially-viable plan if "training" requires obtaining consent.
Peter Gabriel is fucking courageous. I love it. I'm a 50+ programmer. I can absolutely feel this shit pressing on me. Good. Are people right that there are ethical concerns, absolutely. We need to get busy realizing the potential and dealing with the issues.
I’m in your same demographic. However I see these technologies as career extenders, not career threats. I can learn things faster than ever and adapt to changes more easily.
As someone much younger (mid 20's), I have absolutely no idea what to do. I don't even think there _is_ anything I can do, aside from waiting to see what happens. What happens when programmers are no longer needed? That certainly (I hope) won't happen in 5 years, but given the exponential rate of improvement, I can see programming as a profession being gone in 20-30 years.
> What happens when programmers are no longer needed?
I can't imagine a situation like this. Who is doing all the actual programming work ? Who is receiving the products of the work ? Who is competing with the previous two groups ?
Writing code might be no longer needed at some point but programmers don't spend majority of their time writing code.
you sound too pessimistic
even if programming is gone in 20-30 years, you have plenty of time (and energy) to make your daily move to "what is needed".
That's awesome. That's exactly the kind of thinking that turns L's to W's.
This wave of AI has the power to be incredibly transformative for good, but not given any of the current economic or copyright systems we have now.
I don't know how any of the proponents can pretend that this isn't an abject disaster on the horizon for anybody who depends on copyright to make their living.
This is the natural progression to the unnatural properties of the shared delusion of pretending like ideas are property or that it every was natural to keep them artificially scarce. If we lived in an ideal system where ideas are free, copyright didn't exist, and artists and programmers could survive and thrive without the ability or need to hoard their work as if they were physical goods, this would be a non-issue. The system was antiquated for the needs of the modern world for multiple human generations already, and this is the dam breaking.
> I don't know how any of the proponents can pretend that this isn't an abject disaster on the horizon for anybody who depends on copyright to make their living.
OK, I'll bite. How is the an abject disaster on the horizon for... let's say, novelists?
My wife is a novelist who widely participates in fiction writing communities, and a lot of competitions have had to stop taking submissions entirely due to AI work flooding all the submissions. There's been drama on and off recently with AI generated covers, too. Some waves have been made with people winning contests with AI generated short stories. Agents are absolutely inundated with AI queries, and it's only going to get worse as the technology gets better.
It's actually really scary for writers right now. You just have to look at the huge amount of AI generated attempts and think "what do we do when the writing gets really good? What do we do when most novels are mostly AI generated?"
People have spent decades working their ass off to get good and try to get their work sold, and they come out the end of this tunnel right into an era telling them that they're just about to be obsolete.
> What do we do when most novels are mostly AI generated?
Much of modern fiction is farmed out or padded for page count. ChatGPT may be the death of anonymous online writing communities. It doesn't portend is the end of fiction or writing altogether.
That's not true of novel writing in the least, and clearly not what I was talking about. AI is already heavily impacting fiction and writing communities. How many active novelists do you hang out with? The ones I know are talking a lot about how much harder it's already making their lives, especially the ones who are still trying to get picked up by their first agent.
> How many active novelists do you hang out with?
Small number. Acquaintances. Published. They complain about e.g. getting into the Paris Review or New Yorker, now. I imagine traditional gatekeepers are screwed. But not authors. Even if their job transitions to expert prompt engineering and editing, that's a niche.
So you didn't know how absolutely crushing it is to spend years trying to get your first novel published while working full time in a manual position, and find that you moved from competing with hundreds of other people every time you send a query to an agent to thousands of mostly AI generated queries, with signs pointing to dozens coming from the same people?
Or how crushing it is to be told that the right solution is to just abandon your dream and start generating a novel a month instead of writing?
I know a lot of authors, published and unpublished. This technology is thrilling for corporations, worrying for the established, and absolutely annihilating for somebody who is just trying to get started. Many of the unpublished ones have given up and just self publish to ~zero sales, because they want to actually have their book out there.
Expert prompt editing is not a niche most people want, and it's not one most people will get. It's not a movement from X authors producing Y novels to X prompt engineering editors producing Y novels. It's a movement to X/N prompt editors producing Y novels. Even as an expert AI user, the progression is way fewer people doing way more work, and the death of the dream for the very vast majority.
What's screwed is nearly everybody.
> you didn't know how absolutely crushing it is to spend years trying to get your first novel published while working full time in a manual position, and find that you moved from competing with hundreds of other people every time you send a query to an agent to thousands of mostly AI generated queries, with signs pointing to dozens coming from the same people
No, I don't. But I don't see this as the end of the art. I certainly see no evidence of those AI-generated queries pushing out legitimate novelists.
The last time we saw a copyright struggle like this was Napster. After a lot of ire we eventually landed on Spotify, shows, and merch. Musicians seem fine this time around, but graphic designers are in for a world of hurt. Artists and musicians mostly already starve, unless they're extremely lucky and famous.
Every class of artist will now be able do more than they could alone in the world before AI. They no longer need institutional capital to make big, ambitious works.
Graphics designers will have tools and will make movies and interactive fictions. They'll build their own following.
It'll look like YouTube and the rise of the YouTuber, except bigger and broader.
Yeah and we can give money to AI so it can read/watch/review all the extra content we don’t already have enough of.
There isn't enough content that tailors to my interests. In fact, there's barely any.
Nearly every film I watch, I question the director's choices. I'd do casting and set dec differently. I'd change the music and design.
The plot and writing and character development are the things that can irk me the most.
Very seldom do I finish an experience and feel sated. When it happens, I feel elated and the experience sits with me for days. But that's not frequent enough.
We all deserve more, not less.
I feel generally there is too much but I can respect your desire for more tailored content. It just seems discovery would be difficult in such a landscape.
... and streaming services being silos for content, so I'm not sure the 'last round' was even all that beneficial[0] in the long run. Anyway... RRRRR!
As to AI-generated content: Who knows?
[0] Towards humanity and creative endeavor in general.
I think it's only natural to think of AI as the enemy no? Sure theoretically it means better healthcare, scientific improvement. However what nobody has really answered well is what happens to the artists, writers, programmers, scientists, maybe even doctors and lawyers. As we become potentially obsolete what happens to us. Saying that you can do art as a hobby or programming as a hobby really isn't an answer people want to hear. If you want people to not see AI as an enemy then perhaps you should have that discussion. Just to give an anecdotal sob story, my mother passed away from cancer and if AI means a solution to cancer that is amazing, that no other person has to go through the anguish my mother and family had to go through would be amazing. That still doesn't change the point that what will millions of people do in this new industrial revolution? I've said in other threads that my visa is a working visa, if (when?) AI takes my job without that permanent residence what do I do? I don't have anything that ties me to my home country anymore. For me I can only see AI as a future enemy who can do a lot of good...
However what nobody has really answered well is what happens to the artists
So does the world currently only listen to singer-songwriters on acoustic guitar at small local venues?
The humanity in the consumption of art has been subject to mass commodification for centuries at this point.
This process is driven by money and not love. Technology has nothing to do with it.
We've had big advancements before that allow people to do more with less, but this is a staggering leap. The jump from "you need to get a whole bunch of people together to practice and play music together" to "one person can make skilled music in their bedroom" isn't even comparable to "Hey AI, make me a reggaeton darkwave album performed by Kurt Cobain and Tiny Tim".
We're not talking just more art here, or some people losing jobs who then have to retrain. We're talking with possibly very near advancements, entire industries completely emptying, with hundreds of millions of people who now have nothing to do and nowhere to retrain to.
Other advancements have caused job losses and opened many more. I'm not understanding where all the potential displacements from AI are supposed to go, or how we're going to balance an economy when you need an order of magnitude fewer employees than ever to pump out more content than anybody could hope to consume.
> but this is a staggering leap
More than industrialization? Come on. It's staggering because it's impacting us.
Absolutely more. This takes very hard and challenging work and turns it into nearly nothing. This reduces decades of skilled labor and education into an algorithm. I'm not undervaluing industrialization, but the improvement in productivity wasn't on the same scale. We're talking reducing weeks of work to seconds in some cases, and that's not even being optimistic with what improvements we might still see in the coming years.
> takes very hard and challenging work and turns it into nearly nothing. This reduces decades of skilled labor and education into an algorithm
Read up on Luddism. These were multi-generational trades undone by the loom alone. The Industrial Revolution required millions of people to not only retrain, but also relocate. It changed political structures, often violently.
Even in the 1980s, skilled spreadsheets were done in by Excel. Does that mean we should ban Microsoft Office so folks can sketch out models by hand?
The scale is different by a grand margin. If 50% of US jobs are replaced by AI in the next 20 years, and those jobs aren't replaced by other jobs, and people depend on income to survive, what happens?
I'm not saying to ban it. I think the productivity gain could be a gift. Everybody being freed from the need to work would be amazing.
But without actually dealing with it, what's the proposal for dealing with the majority of the population of your country being completely without employment? What do we do for money when there's no work left to be done? The whole country can't trade stocks for a living.
> If 50% of US jobs are replaced by AI in the next 20 years, and those jobs aren't replaced by other jobs, and people depend on income to survive, what happens?
Which 50% are you seeing replaced? We can, and have, always imagined mass income eradication.
I'm not arguing we do nothing. But zero problems surfaced so far are even remotely actionable, as they're all well within the realm of hypothesis versus evidence.
Potentially? Most artists, programmers, musicians, most teachers, huge amounts of finance, marketing, legal and especially paralegal, most journalism and technical writing positions, stock trading (most traders don't do anything that AI can't fully replace), and even more of customer service.
The majority of those will probably be staffed at 10% what they are now at best. Some, like stock trading, will probably be almost completely erased as a human job.
I'm not so worried about legal. Lawyers seem to be in a good position to gatekeep AI out (e.g. suing DoNotPay). Paralegals could go extinct though.
>The Industrial Revolution required millions of people to not only retrain, but also relocate. It changed political structures, often violently
Can't wait for my political system to be violently up ended by AI. I can imagine it will only change for the better, right? Right??
Industrialization was slow - it took many decades to happen, so people could adapt. I don’t see us having that luxury of time.
AI is slow, it's been coming since the 1980s and still has decades to go.
You're technically correct, but missing the point:
When technology destroys menial jobs, it's progress.
When technology destroys white-color jobs, it's a threat.
</irony>
I dont think I have ever said this though. Telling truck drivers to learn to code was disgusting and horrible. There HAS to be a better solution to these things that society can come up with. I don't have those answers, but jesus christ look at the shit show below my original comment. I am not saying pause research, stop AI, or do anything like that. I welcome the eradication of certain medical issues. I just want to know what society will do? To be frank I have said in other threads as well... if I lose my visa and job my only solution I've thought of as of yet is suicide.
When technology destroys work people don't like to do, it's progress.
When technology destroys work people like to do, it's _______.
> When technology destroys work people don't like to do, it's progress.
The Luddites would beg to differ.
People don't work because they like it, they work because they need to. "Work" that doesn't support your livelihood is correctly referred to as "play."
The interesting thing is how society differently reacts when different classes of people lose their work due to progress.
> When technology destroys work people like to do, it's _______.
Liberating. I remember enjoying laying out sheet music. Doesn't mean I scorn my iPad.
Did you lose your livelihood because your iPad made composing easier?
If not, then technology didn't destroy your work.
> Did you lose your livelihood because your iPad made composing easier
Page flippers sure did. (I'm not a professional musician.)
> maybe even doctors and lawyers
I don't think any profession that requires a license is at risk. Software engineers resisted a licensing regiment for decades and now the profession will pay a price.
They are at risk; the ones that use AI will remove the ones that don’t in the end. The average lawyer does very little already; last week I had some papers that I needed to be checked legally; gpt4 found some issues that the expensive lawyer overlooked. Not big issues but issues. And this document was not in English either. It explained the issues in English, it provided a lot of text which the lawyer did not. But they did spend (assuming they didn’t lie) 3 hours and some minutes on them; if they can do this with AI in 15-30 minutes, which they can (it is enough time to recognise if it’s hallucinating), then they can put 3-4 lawyers out of a job by lowering prices. And that’s just using gpt as tool, not as the primary driver; just to speed up the work.
I don’t think it would destroy jobs for anything high profile (including programmers), but the grunts is a different story. If the secretary or, for instance, nurse, can feed through info and the ‘head’ lawyer/doctor of the practice only has to sign off on the result, the license is not an issue.
Not there yet, but can’t see this as avoidable anymore.
I agree and disagree.
Law firms make money, like any professional services firm, by billing hours. Fewer billable hours means less income for the partners. So while it's the low hanging fruit technically, it will resist as long as possible. It will be clients saying no to paying $250-$500 an hour for work that AI could do better and for free that will force the issue. I foresee more legal work moving in-house.
Medicine is a different beast. There's an acute shortage and a different incentive model (not run as partnerships). Big hospital/medical/insurance firms will invest most heavily in AI.
If AI enables a 12 year old in India to write the code of a 2019 software developer then that is a positive for the earth. If someone is upset that they're losing their lunch to their skillset that earned them an outrageous salary then might I suggest they, and I, learn to augment your productivity with the skills or take up something with better permanence like drywall or plumbing.
Hundreds of millions of people cant suddenly become tradespeople and society turns out okay. There aren't that many homeowners with kitchen and bathroom projects to keep them all employed, and there would be far less such clients after the fact.
I'm also not entirely convinced that more software is by default a net positive for humanity, let alone "the earth"
The other comment said it best. Let's say programming is going way. Do you think there is suddenly a need for hundreds of millions of trade workers? The economy will support that...? Have you thought this through?
I think we can look at history and see how revolutionary technologies changed the landscape of society.
No one knows really the magnitude of AI, but if we take the two extremes, AI takes all our jobs, and AI is just some stats that has no real utility, we’ll probably land somewhere in the middle.
Personally, I’m trying to learn these technologies to augment my current work. I’m treating it like going from using Notepad to program Java, over to a full fledged IDE. Not a perfect analogy, I know.
Given its inevitability, I think it’s logical to try and use it to our advantage as workers. If it ends up taking our jobs anyways, at least we tried. If it doesn’t take our jobs outright, then we’ll still be behind those that use the AI products as tools that augment their productivity, leading to a game of catch-up.
Even with the 6 month hiatus proposed, AI versions will still be released by those that refuse to follow the agreement. We’re in an AI arms race against the likes of other world super powers. And the morality of some are quite questionable (not that US’ morality is perfect by any means)
I firmly believe that once ai is in a position to replace programmers and other white collar workers, it's more of "we're all fucked" moment. Society would have to so radically change once we reach even that infantile level of post-scarcity, when a large portion of society that loses their jobs, that we have to have serious discussions about what life is supposed to be about and what our places in society are.
when there is no more desire to be quenched, when there are no jobs to do, when we have solved all disease, what do we do? Man has been defined so much by his suffering and toil, that when we take it away we are in an environment that we are not prepared for in any kind of sense.
More importantly, how do we keep everybody alive and cared for when all our systems are built around needing a job to survive when we then don't even have jobs to do for more than a quarter of our population?
Sadly nobody seems to be giving a fk. That until we find ourselves in crisis that leads to a lot of violence and a societal collapse. Hope I’m dead wrong, really do
I hear you man. Initially I was excited about this tech, and the more I game out what the actual effects might be, I just think it gets dark and the cognitive dissonance that kicks in prevents people from thinking about it too deeply, so they don't.
When AI Chess started kicking my @ss, I assumed that human competitive Chess was over.
Quite the opposite happened. We appreciate human-vs-human Chess even more because Stockfish, and other AIs, demonstrated there are more challenging lines and strategies to pursue.
That is fine when it comes to competition. How does a graphic artist or programmer compete?
The best ones will stay. People are still buying hand made items because they are unique and of better quality than those mass produced.
I know a few graphical artists, they would tell you that half of their pay is for dealing with annoying customers, and I can't see AI is going to make the clients happy.
I'm also seeing a lot of Graphic/3D Artists incorporating AI prompts into their craft.
Generative AI is just one-step in the overall process.
A train is approaching on the tracks, on one track you create free energy, solve diseases, create a new dawn for human ingenuity and also some white collar jobs are removed, others are created. On the other track we continue to toil in the dirt.
Ageed, the stakes of not doing this to appease some short term disruption is not worth the opportunity cost. Some might say we need better social support for lower wage jobs getting replaced by AI, but if we've learned anything from history is that humans (and especially gov) does not act until it was obvious it was needed yesterday.
I'm not willing to pretend that we'll somehow get basic income before the need and economic tradeoffs become very apparent. Democracy rarely ever works like that and the alternative isn't any prettier.
Regardless, like most tech/social evolution, we can't stop it even if we wanted to. Even if we try to slow it down it will probably just slow it down for some and build a bigger moat around the few with connections to power.
We've been on this track before. Even more will be toiling in the dirt. Quite literally when AI takes every job that doesn't involve physical labor.
If you assume that an AI capable enough to replace all knowledge labor will simultaneously be forever incapable of designing commodity robots to let it also replace all physical labor, then sure.
Physical resources are limited and take time to ramp up regardless of how many smarts you have behind it. Knowledge work has significantly fewer barriers.
They will eventually come for it, but it will happen much slower.
How many jobs lost and how many created?
On this track, we continue to toil in the dirt, unless we figured out how to automate all the farming too. In fact, it looks like we're automatic all the fulfilling jobs and only leaving toil for the humans.
> we continue to toil in the dirt, unless we figured out how to automate all the farming
Who, on this forum, is forced "to toil in the dirt" for subsistence?
It seems like... everyone soon.
Are as many jobs created as lost? People always assume this because it's been true in the past, but is that really enough reason to believe it will always be true going forward, especially when a technology threatens to upend so many types of jobs across so many industries all close to simultaneously?
And even if it were true, what's the quality of those new jobs? Sitting in front of a command line engineering "prompts"? Sounds more like a particularly dystopian sci-fi story than a bright future.
Except that’s not what’s happening right now. That’s just a list of flowery “might happen” ideas people can use to justify the disruption of society so some people can pad their bank accounts. If they cared they wouldn’t be focusing their attention on art/music.
The answer to this entirely depends on who it is gets to hop on board the “free energy, solves diseases” train. If the tracks continue on the current American path of widening inequality and declining lifespans, I’m sure plenty of people would be happy to see the whole thing derail.
American innovation, and innovation of all countries flows through the world. Reactor designs, fiber optic cable, the internet, wikipedia. These are a few examples of the old world. The new world will feature new achievements that will unlock more prosperity.
Restating my point: prosperity for whom? The answer for the past 50 years has certainly not been “everyone” or even “most people” in wealthy countries like America.
> prosperity for whom? The answer for the past 50 years has certainly not been “everyone” or even “most people” in wealthy countries like America.
The poorest state in America, Mississippi, is richer than most of the world [1][2]. (No. 19, between the U.K. and New Zealand.) The post-war era experienced the largest and most broad-based increase in material prosperity in human history. Our poorest Americans saw real economic gains rivaling multi-generational ones for Rome's richest. If there is something that will kill us, it's ahistorical nihilism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
I would say that someone looking at all the problems that Mississippi has, while existing inside the richest country in human history, and saying “well, it’s not as bad as XYZ poor country” is a textbook example of the nihilism and failed imagination that has led us to wealth inequality and declining lifespans.
> someone looking at all the problems that Mississippi has, while existing inside the richest country in human history, and saying “well, it’s not as bad as XYZ poor country” is a textbook example of nihilism and failed imagination
I'm not saying there aren't problems. We're comparing medians. The poorest Mississippians struggles with problems on Maslow's hierarchy well above the median or even top quartile human.
So yes, we've been halfway better than nothing at distributing gains. That isn't an argument against change. But it is solid against arguing were should stall all progress until some imaginary threshold is met.
If we’re comparing medians, it’s far better to be born an average person the UK or New Zealand than Mississippi, where your risk of dying from childbirth, disease, or injury are far more guarded against, you have the right to paid time off, better labor protections, etc. This is another classic example of Americans mistaking the wealth of some small percentage of society for its general well-being.
Not all roads are paved, but everyone who accesses learning content on the internet is a beneficiary. Anyone who accesses youtube to learn a new skill is a beneficiary. The development of the train, a British technology I know, allowed the movement of massive freights for pennies compared to automobile traffic. That cost of transport allows food costs to be as low as they are in places that use trains. Which is everywhere. Technology facilitates the costs we have for subsistence.
I am for the jobs that AI will provide!
This same sort of logic can be applied to a lot of things like Soviet style collective farms. A few Kulaks killed and starved is better for the Soviet Union. I just don't think it is a good argument.
> what happens to the artists, writers, programmers, scientists, maybe even doctors and lawyers
They find better things. Maybe agitating for a different economic system. Some countries will fail horribly at this. In any case, LLMs aren't coming for most writers or coders or scientists or medical researchers. They will help with our credentialing fetish.
Ah yes - what the world really need is less artists and more activists.
> what the world really need is less artists and more activists
That's not all they can do. And the line between artistry and activism is blurry at best. But yet, if your art can be replicated by Stability, it's no longer novel.
>They find better things
Better things that an AI can't do. To clarify.
What would your reply be to the following comment? (Not pasting it directly since it's frowned upon here)
This comes off as incredibly passive. You are in control of how you use and adapt to AI.
>if AI takes my job
AI is not going to take anyone's job. People using AI will take jobs from people who don't use AI.
>What happens to the doctors
That's completely up to them. Some will use AI to research new treatments, to assist with their daily workload, or even to treat patients.
Some doctors will stick their head in the sand and refuse to work with the new technology. They might lose their jobs if they can't compete with AI-assisted doctors, and it will be entirely their fault.
> AI is not going to take anyone's job. People using AI will take jobs from people who don't use AI.
If your boss fires you because your colleague uses AI sooner or better than you, sure, AI didn’t take your job, but what’s the distinction? If you are in a team of 10 translators and 9 get fired overnight, I would say AI took their jobs. Which is happening.
Also, this is probably shortsighted; when going forward, it will be possible for a manager/hr to chuck a resume and typical tasks into an AI and ask it if it can do it or they should hire a human. Now the AI will lie it can do it, but a lot of work goes into making that better and the execution of the provided tasks for the job will show if it’s lying.
> People using AI will take jobs from people who don't use AI.
Not really sure what point you’re making though. This almost makes it sounds like you want the reader to conclude that it’s going to be a one-for-one trade, but the whole concern is that it won’t be. If your manager uses AI to replace the job of you and 9 other people on your team, I think it’s a bit silly to say “don’t worry, AI didn’t take your job, a person using AI just took the jobs of 10 people not using AI.”
“AI is not going to take anyone's job. People using AI will take jobs from people who don't use AI.”
An incredible distinction on the level of “guns don’t kill people, people with guns kill people”. The difference is practically meaningless. By your logic, if everybody uses AI then no one loses their job but that’s not how productivity gains work is it?
it's interesting that the letter he signed is for large language and language + image (input) models, have nothing to do with this
Is it not crazy, asks Mr Senior, that the piano maker is a productive worker, but not the piano player, although obviously the piano would be absurd without the piano player? But this is exactly the case. The piano maker reproduces capital, the pianist only exchanges his labour for revenue. But doesn’t the pianist produce music and satisfy our musical ear, does he not even to a certain extent produce the latter? He does indeed: his labour produces some- thing; but that does not make it productive labour in the economic sense; no more than the labour of the mad man who produces delusions is productive.
— Karl Marx in Grundrisse (1857-61)
> piano maker reproduces capital, the pianist only exchanges his labour for revenue
Literally why we have intellectual property. So you can capitalize your intellectual work.
> it can provide great education and better healthcare to billions.
Correction: if you are in America, *to those who can afford it.
So tired of these kinds of Debbie Downer comments.
It's entirely possible that new technology could drive the cost of these things down even in America.
why, if you are in America? afaik chatGPT is available everywhere, & there's a huge amount of alternatives
Just a heads up ChatGPT isn’t a substitute for a real doctor.
Easier said when you collect royalties from a 50y+ catalogue of quality music for yourself.
Not only that he’s 73 years old. Hard to believe he’d feel this way starting out his career. He has nothing to lose at this point.
Possibly true. On the other hand, I think there's something laudable about a man in his mid-70s embracing new technology and looking for the good in it.
if society is going to collapse it is going to collapse. Even if we did pause AI development, bad actors would just ignore the rule and continue anyway.
It's easy for me to say, I am young and healthy and can move away from programming after it bought me a house. Maybe I'll work in a brewery...
Either way, the dirty words everyone seems to be avoiding is UBI and socialism.
If AI sincerely destroys every white collar job, well... that will be interesting.
"Make tomorrow today"
Serious wisdom in there.
>I have added my name to a letter written by Max Tegmark, Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk amongst others to pause on the release of new AI for six months while we try and figure out what we should be doing, but if we don’t use this time to play with and learn from what we have already created how can we hope to understand it?
this is a great point, and i think represents a really good attitude. it seems like there's a whole lot of people who think if they pretend hard enough, AI will go away. and that's obviously not going to happen - it's a useful tool, and so let's all try to figure out how it can be useful in a productive way, not a world-ruining way. and that means using it.
I thought this was the singer, I was so confused…
It is the singer.
* The award-winning singer, musician, songwriter, record producer, and activist.
He has a great voice, but that's hardly everything. He is somewhat of a "grand old man" now. And he makes "grand old man" pronouncements like this one.
But it is the singer.
I too couldn't recognize him. I had to dig around the main site and verify that this is indeed the Peter Gabriel that we all know.