It’s not the purpose of the economy, it’s the purpose of civilization.
What makes us different than most types of animals is that we’re capable of supporting the less fortunate members of our species even through life-threatening situations.
I remember some archeologist saying that the first sign of civilization is not some tool or whatever but a healed fractured bone. That means the person that got hurt was cared for by other people who had enough resources to afford for one useless member of the group.
But don't assume it's without its own controversy. Maybe the point of civilization is to allow people to help eachother by providing safeguards against treachery.
Maybe they should be forced to help eachother under threat of violence. There's a massive spectrum of "solutions" between those two, and UBI could be considered pretty close to forcing, depending on how it's implemented.
It's not pedantry or technicalities, a lasting system needs to benefit people and support / build shared principles. Ideally it'd support the principles that enabled it in the first place.
The purpose of civilisation (or rather, why it exists in first place) is that “civilized” peoples managed to survive longer and reproduce more and produce better means to take over the land of those who didn’t adopt technology.
Now we are going to see if there is a limit or not. Or if AI changes the game (the dystopian end game is a small amount of people controlling all the production and getting rid of the rest by one way or another)
The optimistic "another" way is that anyone whose job is now obsolete finds a new job. Ideally within the same company.
(if you live in places with healthy worker protections, a company can't just fire someone, they need reasonable grounds; bar that, they need to first try and place them somewhere else in the company, and if that doesn't work, firing involves paying a severance fee. In an ideal and morally correct situation anyway, in practice they'll use dodgy corporate structures to bankrupt companies before paying or retraining anyone)
Assuming the company still gets some value from them. France has good worker protections but you can always just close shop. (And move elsewhere).
Another optimistic look is that there might just be more work, that otherwise would not be done.
For example we always complain about AAA games coming out riddled with bugs, now we have an opportunity to cut a significant portion of that if we also keep the workforce. Same with administrative tasks that take forever because it’s one person filing it for the whole country etc.
Thats kind of the brilliant thing, you dont need to seek it out. Their AI will just slowly get integrated into their products you already use. I'm more so saying that normies will use AI when it lands in the apps they already use. Google AI features have been popping up all over their ecosystem. Normies do not want claude code and they think Dario and Sam are both disgusting human beings, stictly off of vibes.
Anthropics only moat is vendor lock on Claude Code, especially if they cant maintain being the front runner of the frontier model space, this is a really brittle moat. Brittle moats wont attract strong investment at a 1-2T valuation (not to mention all the other fiscal unknowns).
I just want OpenAI and Anthropic to lose because they seem to be the ones going around saying they're going to replace peoples jobs, and usurp the value of human labor.
Id rather Meta and Gemini suceed who will genuinely just integrate it into normal products we already use. Their sales teams are not approaching my boss and telling them they can reduce their payroll burden by spending my paycheck on tokens and firing me.
Coding is going to be one of the smaller pieces of the AI revolution. People on this site are focused on it, but there are 10000x more opportunities outside of coding where Anthropic and OpenAI have zero presence. Anthropic might as well be an IDE company, Is jetbrains worth 2T? to signal that they can be useful in other fields because they know this is an issue.
> they seem to be the ones going around saying they're going to replace peoples jobs, and usurp the value of human labor.
I don't see why an alternative provider that is quiet but also scrambling to make AI smarter is any safer for jobs. Wouldn't we rather orgs speak honestly about the risks of the industry?
I find it odd that we talked for decades about companies being evil for covering up problems (chemical companies, etc), yet it turns out people hate the ones that talk about risks openly even more.
I don’t think this is really true. If you work at tech companies the people in non-technical roles all request Claude code access, and I think this will gradually expand to most people who aren’t vehemently anti-AI
Wesnoth is great if you like games where you have to create and exploit situational advantages. Using advantageous terrain, the day/night cycle, and varied unit types makes it one of the most tactical games I’ve played.
I mean, why play games on expensive hardware when there’s decades of critically acclaimed games that will run on hardware like your phone? There are more great games out there than any one person can reasonably play.
It’s not technically or financially viable. AAA games are already too expensive to create, and this increases the complexity by an order of magnitude. And that’s before the latency problems that make the game less fun, and therefore more likely to bomb.
39% of people think it does more harm than good, compared to 9% who think it does more good than harm. Now 52% are equivocal, but as you can see, dislike of AI is much more common than like of AI.
I agree with "alot", but i doubt most "hate". Hate is a strong word/emotion that gets thrown around easily for sensationalist or propaganda purposes. Is this an "appeal to hate" argument?
Most people have more going on in their lives than to have chance to hate abstract things.
For most people AI are search results in "human" speech presentation. Or slightly more sophisticated customer service bot. Or the latest form of personalized clipart generator for their group chats.
For most people experiencing AI is not (yet) beyond the experience clash of going from nokia 3310 to a multicamera, ig/fb/doomscroll filled iPhone. Are they seeing much more "slop" in their doomscroll than in 2021? I'd argue not. Social media has been filled with low quality engagement triggering slop way before chatgpt.
Well, poll does not distinguish between "I hate AI slop" and "I hate any use of AI"
While I hate nightmarish ai slop pictures some restaurants use and some very ugly banners some street vendors use, I recognize some some AI generated assets are pretty neat.
Same as when I got annoyed that library I wanted to use turns out does not check any of the boxes it claims to check, because its pure untested slop. I would have no issues with it being AI if it worked because I used it to make my own versio of that library that in fact works as advertised.
> While I hate nightmarish ai slop pictures some restaurants use and some very ugly banners some street vendors use, I recognize some some AI generated assets are pretty neat.
So you don't think it does more harm than good, and think something else instead.
> Well, poll does not distinguish between "I hate AI slop" and "I hate any use of AI"
Isn't the criticism rather that the poll distinguishes between you and the people polled?
> So you don't think it does more harm than good, and think something else instead.
I don't think it does more harm than good. Maybe I'm biased because it's been very good for me and the people around me.
> Isn't the criticism rather that the poll distinguishes between you and the people polled?
No. The argument being made in this thread is that people hate AI slop (people just hate slop), rather than AI in general. This poll was linked as evidence that people hate AI. My argument is that the poll is flawed and does nothing to counter the point being made in this thread about slop vs. AI.
As for Steam...ever since they opened up who can publish and how publishing works, there been _a lot_ of slop pre-AI. I'd rather have more interesting and more controvesial filters. People will get surprised how few recent games aren't going to be filtered by "No AI"
Most people only see the slop. They don't have informed opinions. 1 in 5 American adults is functionally illiterate, and they are supposed to have a valid opinion about the usefulness of AI in contexts they can't see?
Most people hate what they (incorrectly) think AI is.
Somehow I feel like you don't bring this up whenever the general public gets polled and agrees on some other topic with your opinion.
Not even bothering to fight on the original topic and instead retreating to meta-analysis titled "Everyone is stupid anyway, I am the one who's truly informed" doesn't make for a very convincing argument.
Oh, well good thing you feel and assume how I think and debate. Perhaps your invented picture of me is not accurate?
You might not like it, but that doesn't make my argument inaccurate. Every discussion I've had about the topic, anti-AI folks are willing to acknowledge exactly 0 benefits of AI. That is just dumb, because benefits do exist, and it prevents a rational discussion and analysis of costs and benefits.
When a side in a debate cannot or will not acknowledge the strengths of the other side's position, they aren't having an informed argument; they are ranting. (This is also the chief issue with contemporary electoral politics globally, imo. People arguing from principles rather than facts.)
Finally, I don't claim to be the only one who is informed; where did I say that? I didn't even claim that anti-ai people are stupid. I do claim that most anti-ai people are uninformed and this is because in my experience, they are unwilling to acknowledge any benefit of AI. Further, I propose a mechanism for their uninformed opinions: because slop is highly visible, whereas benefits are mostly invisible. As examples, take drug discovery and deeper understanding of maths: do you honestly expect a population where 1 in 5 adults is functionally illiterate and the literacy and numeracy scores of our youth continue to plummet will value those things that are literally not things that can be seen (and rely on very advanced degrees to understand), versus the prevalent and highly visible slop that exists?
Telling people to ignore the evidence of their eyes is a hard sell. They see a ton of AI slop everywhere and they think that AI is harmful because it turned every site and every platform and every type of human expression they’ve experienced into endless piles of AI slop. Can you blame them? Are they even wrong?
>Telling people to ignore the evidence of their eyes is a hard sell.
Yes, I agree. It took science to prove that life doesn't arise from rotting meat. But the fact that populations (even in developed countries) are rapidly getting less and less educated indicates that people are less and less likely to have the critical thinking skills to understand when their eyes are not adequate instruments of observation.
Also AI slop exists, certainly; people aren't wrong to hate AI slop, but you have to agree that slop isn't the entirety of AI.
thats funny, because you are moving the goalposts in the argument i made, which is that people who say they hate AI don't know what AI is and think it is only slop, yet you readily agree that AI is more than slop.
> As always, MOST people don’t hate AI, they hate slop.
That isn't true. AI is overwhelmingly used to create slop, not useful or interesting things. Therefore people hate AI in large part because it is synonymous with slop.
Snap apps also have preposterous security settings, like Inkscape only being able to load SVGs from certain paths on my system. It’s a file editor, it should be able to edit files, period.
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