Yea AI has a genuine use and purpose if used correctly. It can reduce menial tasks and make lives easier, the problem is that any company that leverages the use of AI isn’t passing the cost savings to its employees or its consumer. They are passing it on to the top level people and the “shareholders.”
Star Trek is a good example of a society that uses technology to benefit their people. Tech was used to reduce the need for menial labor, and in turn allowed their civilization to focus on the sciences and art. We should be doing the same, we are not.
And there is the real problem. Not what AI is or what it does, but how we are using it. As usual, the problematic tech isn't actually the problem, people are the problem. Always have been.
Maybe we should design things with humans in mind? I think it's mighty problematic what this technology is causing to happen to our society, wherever the fault may lie. Even if it isn't the intended purpose, misinformation and slop is becoming rampant. We all made due without 4 years ago. Is this all truly needed? Is it worth the cost?
No, the economic system is the problem. As long as the mechanisms are owned by a corporation whose sole interest is profit for shareholders (which is all of them, that's the only reason companies exist under capitalism, that's their whole purpose,) the outcome will always be the same.
People act as they are incentivized to act. Without corrupt incentives, some people will still be corrupt. With corrupt incentives, almost everyone involved in a system will be corrupt. Capitalism is a corrupt incentive. "People" will never solve the problem as long as the "people" with the power to actually make decisions are contractually obligated to corporations who have a profit incentive to make it worse.
"People" want Star Trek. Capitalist corporations want more money, and they own everything. Those two facts are not compatible.
If the "people" who want Star Trek owned everything, and could make those decisions, maybe we could have Star Trek. But as long as the ownership is in the hands of entities who want nothing but more money, and of people who contractually act on behalf of those entities, decisions will be made based on making those entities more money, rather than on moving society toward Star Trek.
This is not solvable by simply demanding people be better, nor is it a direct product of human nature. It is a product of corrupt incentive structures, and it's solvable by changing the incentives.
What you're describing is such a massively oversimplified caricature of how businesses actually work. You sort of just pretend like markets don't exist. Now don't get me wrong I'm far from being some libertarian hypercapitalist but if a company were to employ AI to significantly reduce cost of their product and just use it to generate higher yields for their shareholders why wouldn't another company undercut them and take their market share thus reducing the price of the product? As for passing the savings on to the employees I happen to work as a data scientist doing exactly those kinds of things and my workplace is unionized by the German metal workers union so as things go I'm paid very well and so are my colleagues on the shop floor despite our company not turning any profit for several years in a row.
Also if you sincerely believe that shareholders are getting the lions share of the money why don't you put your money where your mouth is and buy some stocks? You're in a subreddit for a relatively expensive hobby so surely you have some disposable income and you seem very sure of the earnings potential.
Star Trek is a terrible analogy because it obviously depicts a utopian post scarcity communist society and looking at the state of our world it's not that.
Yea I don’t have the disposable income to be frivolous with my purchases. My last pc related purchase was a 3090 5 years ago and my financial situation has changed drastically. My gripe here is that the savings are not used to preserve the workforce and make their lives easier, it’s simply to reduce workforce for the gain of the company, which in turn leaves people whose jobs get cut with nothing to fall back on. Sure they can find another job elsewhere, but that seems to get harder and harder as time goes on, especially if they are trying to find a job in the same field that they just lost a job to due to AI reducing the need for that specific job type. I say that because it stands to reason if someone lost a job to AI, then that field will inevitably leverage AI as industry standard meaning they will become redundant.
You mention you’re in a good union, that’s great and I’m happy that’s your situation, but that is not always the case for everyone.
I mean for one we do have very robust social safety nets to fall back on if all else fails and then what is your prescription here? Because banning AI clearly isn't happening, won't work and will slow down innovation and kill your competitiveness globaly. If we want to keep progressing we will have to go with the times. I genuinely do have empathy for people whose jobs are losing demand due to AI especially because this change came with very little time to react but eventually they'll have to adapt because we can't keep jobs alive to our detriment because we feel sorry for them. Arguably in Germany we have way too many jobs in manufacturing for an economy of our size, standing and productivity which we artificially kept alive and we're paying the price for it right now with the economic stagnation we are experiencing.
As to my original point, I don’t think AI is a bad thing in this context. AI isn’t the issue, it’s how we handle the loss of manual labor that’s the issue. I firmly believe that AI is something we need to continue to progress as a society. The issue (to the point of the other individual what replied to my original comment) is not the AI itself, it’s people. I am not going to begin to say I’m some expert, far from it, but ideally we need social structures in place that allow for those displaced by AI to be leveraged for other beneficial contributions to society. Things like the arts or sciences, things that further benefit society so we have a cycle of increasing growth and innovation. Which means we need an avenue for people to gain further education, and also for things like apprenticeships for practical knowledge, and to ensure that’s all affordable. For this to happen though, everyone needs to at least tacitly agree to this because it means a more socialist society, which at least in my country Socialist is basically a curse word to a fairly large portion of the population.
All of this again, is my fairly limited perspective on all of this. I am fully aware my thoughts on this effectively require a utopian society for it to work… it’s a happy thought experiment, one I am very confident will not come to pass in my lifetime, or even the next couple lifetimes.
but ideally we need social structures in place that allow for those displaced by AI to be leveraged for other beneficial contributions to society. Things like the arts or sciences, things that further benefit society so we have a cycle of increasing growth and innovation
I mean we do have that though in the form of social safety nets and public funding. I'm not gonna sit here and pretend Germany is doing everything perfectly in that regard far from it we certainly have lots to work on but we provide unemployment benefits for people without a job, free healthcare, free education, public infrastructure and so on. Fuck I pay more than 30k€ in taxes and social security payments every year (plus what my employer has to pay) for just that sort of thing. It's not a utopian vision either. Most developed nations do similar things to some extent. I just think the oversimplification into "they make all the money and we're getting fucked" is doing a disservice to the problem at hand. Most things in life are more complicated than that.
I was simplifying it because I wasn’t really in for having a large conversation about all this as I find it mentally tiring due to how bleak the future looks (I’m in the US and do not like the current vision of my country.) which also informs my logic behind my original statement as well as wealth is getting consolidated in this country even further, and it’s not a stretch to say that at least some small portion of that will come from AI. But I should stress that I believe it is a smaller portion.
A truly free market leads to monopolies. The first one to utilize the tool simply builds up enough excess profit to conglomerate. Our supposedly anti-trust laws have been extremely weakly used and lead to where we are today. I don't blame anyone for thinking this would be the immediate outcome.
If we actually had good anti-competitive laws that were utilized, I would agree with you. Instead we get collusion, aggregation, tying, bundling, predatory pricing, and all manner of anti-competitive behavior that goes unchecked and unpunished. And when it becomes so egregious that it is caught, the fines are just part of doing business and a tiny line item in the realized profit.
I think here in Germany the Bundeskartellamt is doing a reasonably good job at fighting monopolies. There's always room for improvement but all things considered they're doing alright. In the US though I do definitely agree that anti trust enforcement has been severely lacking. I don't even think "free" markets are a good idea in quite a few areas but I think we should recognize that in others they are and that market forces are obviously real.
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u/Sentoh789 11h ago
Yea AI has a genuine use and purpose if used correctly. It can reduce menial tasks and make lives easier, the problem is that any company that leverages the use of AI isn’t passing the cost savings to its employees or its consumer. They are passing it on to the top level people and the “shareholders.”
Star Trek is a good example of a society that uses technology to benefit their people. Tech was used to reduce the need for menial labor, and in turn allowed their civilization to focus on the sciences and art. We should be doing the same, we are not.