Yeah. This has been an interesting cultural shift, especially with “the kids”.
I’ve had at least a few people passionately tell me that using (non-generative, non-LLM) AI to assist with social network content moderation, is unethical, because it takes away jobs from people. Mind you, these are jobs in which people are exposed to CSAM, gore, etc. A fact that does not dissuade people of this view.
There are certainly some sensible arguments against using “AI” for content moderation. This is not one of them.
It’s really intriguing how an increasingly popular view of what’s “ethical” is anything that doesn’t stand in the way of the ‘proletariat’ getting their bag, and anything that protects content creators’ intellectual property rights, with no real interest in the greater good.
Such a dramatic shift from the music piracy generation a mere decade or two ago.
It’s especially intriguing as a non-American.
Again, as you say, many sensible arguments against AI, but for some people it really takes a backseat to “they took our jerbs!”
I can't speak to outside the US, but here companies have gotten much more worker-hostile in the last 30 years and generally the economy has not delivered a bunch of wonderful new jobs to replace the ones that the information age already eliminated (let alone the ones that people are trying to eliminate now). A lot of new job growth is in relatively lower-paying and lower-stability roles.
Forty years ago I would've had a personal secretary for my engineering job, and most likely a private office. Now I get to manage more things myself in addition to being expected to be online 24x7 - so I'm not even convinced that eliminating those jobs improve things for the people who now get to self-serve instead of being more directly assisted.
I can talk as a non American: it's the same everywhere in the countries where no new jobs are created. It's maybe less visible when the law is more protective, but at the end a social security net is still a net and works only as long as the rest is sturdy
Last time I checked, most people needed a "jerb" to buy food, have a shelter or provide their children. So when the promise is to lose this "jerb" they are fully in the right to be scared.
They took our jerbs is a perfectly valid argument for people which face ruin without a jerb.
Capitalism is not prepared nor willing to retrain people, drastically lower the workweek, or bring about a UBI sourced from the value of the commons. So indeed, if the promises of AI hold true, a catastrophe is incoming. Fortunately for us, the promises of AI CEOs are unlikely to be true.
This is the bit I get frustrated by - the need for jerbs at all.
If we manage to replace all the workers with AI - that's awesome! We will obviously have to work out a system for everyone to get shelter, and food, and so on. But that post-scarcity utopia of everyone being able to do whatever they want with their time and not have to work, that's the goal, right? That's where we want to be.
Jerbs are an interim nightmare that we have had to do to get from subsistence agriculture to post-scarcity abundance, they're not some intrinsic part of human existence.
That's the optimistic take. The pessimistic one is that we, people who need to work jobs to survive, are not an intrinsic part of human existence and will be obsolete and/or left to die once we no longer have an economic purpose.
I can't see that being a realistic outcome. We're a long, long way from that, if it is possible. Billionaires are only billionaires because people buy their company shares. If no-one has any money and we're consigned to scrape in the dust for food, what will billionaires do? Who will buy their products, their shares?
Somehow there is always this huge leap between "Strong AI" -> stuff happens -> "about 10k people live in cloud cities and everyone else lives in the dirt".
Money is a tool that has no value by itself. Billionaires are billionaires because they get a much bigger part of the work their group is producing (the group can be one company, a region, a country or the whole world depending on how you see things). If AI does the work instead of people, it will change nothing for them.
You can be optimistic (it will self regulate and everyone will benefit from AI) or pessimistic (only the billionaire class will benefit from AI). But in any case, there will be no need to sell products or share if there is a class of artificial slaves that can replace workers
But right now, there is no way in hell we're going to get any kind of support for people who lost their jobs to AI. Not in the US, at least.
Look at the current administration. Do you think they would even consider providing anything like UBI?
They actively want to take us down the cyberpunk dystopia route (or even the Christofascist regressive dystopia route...). They want us to become serfs to technofeudal overlords. Or just die, and decrease the surplus population.
I think you (and many others) are overestimating the degree to which everyone does, in fact, know that (everyone should, but not everyone does...), while simultaneously underestimating the degree to which the people in charge right now think they're the absolute most specialest people. Or, in some cases, literally God's chosen.
Furthermore, they really, really want to be absolute rulers being treated like (the popular conception of) medieval lords by all of us, the peasants. They deeply believe that we are beneath them; that we do not deserve to have the means to thrive or even survive if they do not explicitly grant it to us; that our natural state is that of supplication, and theirs is that of power and control.
UBI would give that up. It would give us the unconditional means to live, regardless of their approval. And that they cannot abide.
I don't know any billionaires personally to be able to verify your statement, but I get the feeling this is a media caricature rather than their actual opinions. I've met a few tech millionaires and their opinions vary pretty wildly on this stuff.
Well...millionaires and billionaires aren't exactly the same group, are they?
An ordinary person, working diligently at a decent-paying job, can save up a million dollars if they're not unlucky.
Even a million-dollar-a-year salary is only 10x a fairly modest tech salary of 100k.
But a billion dollars a year is 1000 times that.
So...no, I don't know any billionaires personally either. I'm extrapolating from the things they say and do. But frankly, with the way the media is today, do you really think that more than a tiny fraction of it is trying to portray billionaires as worse than they are? Given how much of it is actually controlled by them, and bears the clear marks of their editorial hand?
It’s really intriguing how an increasingly popular view of what’s “ethical” is anything that doesn’t stand in the way of the ‘proletariat’ getting their bag, and anything that protects content creators’ intellectual property rights, with no real interest in the greater good.
Such a dramatic shift from the music piracy generation a mere decade or two ago.
It’s especially intriguing as a non-American.
Again, as you say, many sensible arguments against AI, but for some people it really takes a backseat to “they took our jerbs!”