I don’t know if there was one, I’m guessing there wasn’t.
But my point, as I also said in another related comment, is that I think we should vote more often, voting for people representing us is not enough. One size does not fit all.
Having humans do automateable jobs just to keep them employed is perhaps the worst waste of human potential. Why not replace backhoes with shovels - or spoons! I think we should strive to free our greatest resource, ourselves, to focus on avenues a robot cannot do
Agree it results in lots of wasted human hours, not to mention the amount of death and pollution delivery vehicles cause.
I'd like to extend this quote from Stephen Jay Gould:
>I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops [and driving cars to deliver burritos]
I see this argument a lot, and it’s not wrong, but it omits the fact that in the USA we tie a lot of meaning and worth to what people do for a living. It’s going to be hard to get people to buy in to having their jobs automated if they see no path to finding some other source of meaningful employment. This will remain true until such a time that we don’t tie somebody’s societal worth to their ability to be productive.
(This also ignores all the fun things about work culture in the USA, like healthcare being tied to your job.)
But I think we should also make deliberate choices to keep humans and human meaning in many things, even if they are less "efficient" by some chosen metric.
Automation and mechanization is desirable to the point that it serves core human wishes and desires-- and through some kind of global/social metric, not that it serve individual humans at the expense of everyone else.
Its never immediately obvious. Computers put thousands of human calculators out of jobs. Now computers superpowered any and all physical modeling, molecule searches, etc. But, should we have decided eg astronomers or microscopists are required to have jobs, then we wouldn't have developed automated high quality optics, which themselves were required to commoditize computers. Almost all technologies somehow play a role directly or indirectly that existed before a new one for any new advance.
But you are also not understanding my point. What automation or tech will end up useful and a "noble" use later on is never immediately obvious, it depends on a web of past developments which by themselves seem to have no connection.
I think I'm not speaking of the technology itself but the actual ways it's integrated into society. E.g. what is considered socially acceptable, what is given legal rights of passage on a sidewalk, or how we choose to build society/culture around technical implements.
And I agree it's not immediately obvious, but thinking a little more about second order effects before making a long term durable choice makes sense.
Tech's recent overall track record on impacts to quality of life is not great. And there's a lot of possible ways we can use advances that have different benefits and costs. Falling into them for the long term purely by accident isn't always avoidable, but it doesn't seem desirable.
i.e. it makes sense for society to make a conscious choice about how to trade off different interests for road users and sidewalk users, and to be willing to revise that choice based on experience rather than being stuck with inertia (while avoiding excessive churn and unpredictability).
You know what else will lead to us not getting your cures or space travel? Fully automating enough people such that there are no longer enough jobs in society to do for the majority. That would create a destitute underclass that can never get employed and earn anything to survive, and a tiny elite class that can truly live and afford a fully automated lifestyle, space travel, etc. We are well on track to making this happen within this century. The only way to avoid this is to share some of the value of removing people's jobs with the people it displaced. People doing delivery work are already at jobs of last resort, how do you think "sucks to suck" fares for them as an argument towards removing their livelihood?
Ludditism is not 'a disease', how dehumanizing. It's an expected response. If we did anything towards sharing the profits, it would not exist. If we answered the hard question of "how will a person survive if we permanently cut the number of all jobs in half?", it would not exist. Ludditism for the people being made irrelevant is stepping out of the oncoming train instead of proudly letting yourself be run over to take one for the team so maybe in a few decades' time some of the added value of new automation cancels out the job loss (how it was in the past - and that was when automated jobs still required loads of brand new workers).
How exactly do you propose to share the benefits? Do you think only "billionaires" should distribute their money? If you are middle class American you already are in the 1% or 0.1% worldwide. How much of your money are you distributing to African countries? People clamor for "distribution" until it comes to themselves.
Were that the goal of the companies pushing this automation, you'd be 100% right, but they're not going to shift to UBI so you can do art instead of delivering food, they're going to just hoover up as much money from a market as they can and leave people destitute.
What I mean by the term is creating value directly and in response to immediate needs. E.g. "your sink is broken > your sink is fixed" or "here is your burrito" or, ya know, taking care of kids and the elderly. It's stuff that needs no R&D, but also still has to be done for society to work.
Of course, then these persons should avoid using electric drills, bldc motors, digital verniers etc as these tools required computers and motors that were created out of mathematical and engineering curiosity such as developing the electromagnetic theory not out of value for society to work. Since somehow the act of using this machine is more "honest" than creating this amazing machine in the first place.
I don't think there's anything dishonest about being in the business of making tools. I am in that business. ...but I can only afford to fund that R&D because I first worked as the software equivalent of a plumber for many years.
Without the ability to own the things I build I never would have been motivated to build them, and without a career ladder I couldn't have worked my way up until I had the funds (and experience) needed to start my own venture.
Reaching an actual human at Microsoft isn't enough. You have to reach the correct humans which is a much harder task. For example, you might have an idea. What if azure devops had a field for date component only, not date time, just the date because it would help you in an internal project. Can you find out who to reach? Even if you work at Microsoft, I would bet you cannot. Even when you find a defect in an internal product you are using, getting to a human requires you to go through layers of nonsense. I distinctly remember my manager telling me to not even bother explaining myself to the first support chat and to simply ask them to escalate. I was impressed at how they managed to make security a part of your review though. I never thought getting buy-in to update Newtonsoft.Json would be as easy as it was but a CVE meant you had to update it to whatever made the security flags happy.
Once I could reach the actual engineering team to look at the internal tool to look at the bug I had to report though, they were very responsive. The tool for communicating was cumbersome and made me feel like a vendor / customer relationship even though you are supposed to be the same team but once they realized it was an actual defect and not some harebrained feature request, they fixed it relatively quickly.
They had a safe stable business with a loyal user base in a market niche they completely owned, could have basically just sat on their asses and de facto collected taxes from paranoid nerds and journalists for decades.
I just don't understand why they'd want to trade all that away for a chasing the same nebulous "something something AI" business plan as literally every other company in the tech industry right now. The odds they'll be competitive in such an endeavor and see a fraction of the success they had again is minuscule.
Maybe they know fundamentally what they do is trivial? Making something shitty and complex for the sake of it while still maintaining a facade of functionality takes guts and balls.
I dont know a single person who uses this tool (but im sure there are some) our annual subs recently ran out, I hadnt used mine in 6 months, we did not renew.
Elon did the typical boomer tech guy thing when they interact with any slightly impressive AI tool.. Lose their fkn mind and spend tons of money on it. He just took it to another level..
Its like those tech boomers that got obsessed with openclaw and instantly started spending 20k a month on a thing that read their calender outloud to them.
Considering that the biggest and most successful play for SpaceXAI in the AI space has been "Sell compute to Anthropic" I also wouldn't say that all of the grok junk has been obviously successful, either.
There is a difference in moderation policy. There is no difference in the intellectual poverty demonstrated by the purveyor of such insults. If anything, the opposite is true, since a target-rich subject like Musk requires no hyperbole to ridicule.
Money is meaningless nowadays. One billion dollars used to be absolutely huge, now it's a seed round into a team with two MIT dropoffs and one mac mini
I think commenter is drawing a parallel, with leadership demanding both high security and high speed, and then putting pressure on engineers to not be "losers" if they can't do both, leading to exactly this scenario.
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