this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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I agree this is the real problem. (And also shit like Microsoft's "now I can attend three meetings at once" ad) However:
The industries whose works are being used for training are on the front lines of efforts to replace human workers with AI - writers and visual artists.
The industries whose works are being used for training are on the front lines of efforts to replace human workers with AI - writers and visual artists.
Much the way musicians were on the front line when recording was becoming a thing and movies were turning into talkies. But that's the most visible pushout. We're also seeing clerical work getting automated, and once autonomous vehicles become mastered, freight and courier work (driving freight is like a third of the US workforce).
This is much the same way that GMO technology is fine (and will be necessary) but the way Monsanto has been using it as DRM for seeds is unethical.
I think attacking the technology itself doesn't serve to address the unethical part, and kicks the can down the line to where the fight is going to be more intense. But yes, we haven't found our Mahsa Amini moment to justify nationwide general strikes.
As someone who dabbles in sociology (unaccredited), it's vexed me that we can't organize general strikes (or burning down precincts) until enough people die unjustly and horribly, and even then it's not predictable what will do it. For now it means as a species we're going gentle into multiple good nights.
1 Monsanto doesn't even exist anymore
2 With the amount of AI money going into AI trucking, we could've bought more rail which is inherently automatable.
Rail works at the inter-county scale, but not in local distribution, and self-driving AI is not limited just to trucks, but also extends to couriers that can follow pedestrians (at least to include ramps and elevators. I'd be interesting if little dogs -- the robots -- are used for couriers.) So it's not just truckers but all mail and delivery occupations that are threatened in the coming decade.
For now, the pinch seems to be getting autonomous cars to interact with human-driven automotive traffic, as we already have clerical robots that can be tolerably not-annoying to fellow pedestrians and clerks in a work environment.
If we were actually striving for post-scarcity communism, this would be a major step in letting common workers become artists (with the free time they have after partitioning out jobs that cannot yet be automated) but instead our ownership class is looking for a blast furnace by which to direct the workers they no longer need for their vanity projects.