I do industrial automation for a living, and I just want to point out that automating things that exist purely in the digital domain is far easier than automating things like ship breaking.
Cant imagine how it even could be automated without advanced robotics. Those ships are freakin HUGE! Maybe a collection of robotic snakes with cutting lazers attached to their heads and some little scuttle bots to pick up the pieces the snakes knock off? Just cut the whole thing into 1' disks or maybe hexagons is better
Maybe a collection of robotic snakes with cutting lazers attached to their heads
Upvoot for the matrix
Just make a huge version of those supermarket bread slicer machines and feed the ships through it.
[...] I just want to point out that automating things that exist purely in the digital domain is far easier than automating things like ship breaking.
Not that you're saying otherwise, however isn't that even more of a reason more developers and resources should be allocated toward automating complex and risky physical processes?
Honestly, I don't see how you would do it without general AI, which is something that will be solved in the digital domain first anyway.
Not that you’re saying otherwise, however isn’t that even more of a reason more developers and resources should be allocated toward automating complex and risky physical processes?
You're solving for the wrong problem from the perspective of people with money investing money to solve these problems.
Shipbreaking, while dangerous for the workers, isn't expensive because it is done in far flung countries with workers that have low wages, few protections for safety, and long term health consequences.
Art and writing (for western consumption) requires educated and talented people which are expensive to employ.
People with money, looking for a return, want that return their spending, not reduce human suffering.
Processing the digital world is just the first step. You can't just build a safe autonomous ship disassembly robot without making sure your algorithms are actually sound. Look at self driving cars, they're far from being safe and acceptable. Jumping straight into this problem without testing the shit out of your code in a virtual world is a mistake.
I mean automating it would certainly be a challenge but the first step would be building tools and robotics to allow human operators to more safely and effectively manage the tasks. Then you streamline the industrialized processes. Then you think about automating things.
But this is all really an economic problem, not a technical one. Software tools have minimal resource costs (compared to building/destroying a ship) but require skilled (expensive) laborers to operate. So to cut costs in any digital field you need to get rid of the expensive laborers. Thus the push for AI to replace any computer-bound work. Physical labor is already considered dirt-cheap in our fucked society, and no one is rushing to add expensive tools in fields where disposable people will suffice.
I sympathize immensely with the OP image's final point, but "working for the right company" isn't going to fix it. Reorganizing society is necessary, rethinking what we culturally value and uphold.
I think the solution for ship breakers is for the job to be a highly paid respectable job with protections. In other words the technology that desperately needs to disrupt this industry is probably... unions
This is kind of a dumb argument, isn't it?
I have to imagine someone centuries ago probably complained about inventors wasting their time on some dumb printing presses so smart people could write books and newspapers better when they could have been building better farm tools. But could we have developed the tractor when we did if we were still handwriting everything?
Progress supports progress. Teaching computers to recognize and reproduce pictures might seem like a waste to some people, but how do you suppose a computer will someday disassemble a ship if it is not capable of recognizing what the ship is and what holds it together? Modern AI is primitive, but it will eventually lead to autonomous machines that can actually do that work intelligently without blindly following an instruction set, oblivious to whatever might be actually happening around it.
The argument isn't against the technology, it's against the application of that technology.
Path of least resistance. It is harder to build a robot who can disassemble ships with its hands than it is to pattern match together pictures.
This XKCD comes to mind: https://xkcd.com/1425/
This isn't even close to what they're saying. It's closer to complaining about how the Yankees replaced their star pitcher with a modified howitzer.
It's not about people "wasting their time on some dumb invention," it's about how that useful invention is being used to replace jobs that people actually like doing because it'll save their bosses money. It's not even like when photography was invented or Photoshop came out and people freaked out about artists being put out of work, because those require different skill sets and opened up entirely new fields of art while also helping optimize other fields. This stuff could improve the fields that they're created for by helping people optimize their workflow to make the act of creating things easier. But that's not what they're doing. It's being used to mimic the skills of the people who enjoy doing these things so that they don't have to pay people to do it.
Even ignoring the ethical/moral aspect of this stuff being trained without permission on the work of the people it's designed to replace, the end goal isn't to increase the quality of life of people, allowing us more time to do the things we love - things like, you know, art and writing - it's to make the rich even richer and push people out of well-paying jobs.
The closest example I can think of is when Disney fired all their 2d animators and switched to 3d. They didn't do it because 3d was better. In many ways, the quality was much worse at the time. But 2d animators are unionized and 3d animators aren't, so they could get away with paying them much less. The same exact thing happened with the practical effects vs. digital effects guys in Hollywood right around the same time.
Society has always been losing jobs, the population just pivots to other specialisations. The only reason we fear it is because of our economic system that preys on it and turns it into profit, but that's an other conversation entirely.
On the subject of losing creative venues, both your examples(photography and Photoshop) show how technology didn't detract from the arts but add to it, letting the average person do much more. The same will be true for AI, I can see an inevitable boom happening in the filmmaking and animation industry, not to mention comic books and most of all indie gaming. It's in the long run empowering for the individual imo.
The economic system is what he's talking about here. That was my point. The entire conversation from the side against this stuff has always been about the economic situation of it. Without that factor, I think the only thing people would care about is whether or not their work is being used without their permission/maliciously.
As for Photoshop and photography, that's actually why I brought those up specifically. Because they were feared as things that would destroy artists' jobs and actually brought about entirely new fields of art - and also because they're the two people bring up when people argue against LLM replacing people's jobs, acting like they're just some Luddites afraid of science.
Right now, the way I see it with AI is that there are 2 distinct groups benefiting from it: those whose workflow has been improved from the use of AI, and those who think AI can get them the result of work without having to either do the work themselves or pay somebody else to do it. And thanks to the economic issues that are at the heart of this whole thing, that second group is set to harm the number of people who can spend time creating things simply because they now have to work a job that isn't creating things and no longer have the time to put towards that. So I can see AI creating a whole new art boom or a bust in equal measure. That second group is of concern to the art communities as well because they only see the destination and don't see that the journey is just as important to the act of creation, and that is already causing schisms between artists and "prompters" who think that they're just as skilled because they used a generator to make some cool stuff. People are already submitting unedited, prompted work to art and writing competitions.
"AI" researcher here. The only reason there are models that can "write" and "create art" is because that data is available for training. Basically people put massive amounts of digital text and images on the Internet and the companies scraped all of it to train the models. If there were big enough datasets for ship building, that would happen too...
Besides, what the guy is yapping about it is 80% a robotics problem not an AI problem. It's apples and oranges.
He's essentially saying why can Will Smith finally eat pasta normally while we still don't have the robotic workforce from the 2001 Will Smith movie "I, Robot".
He's a programmer, why doesn't he stop working on aligning buttons on web applications and work on shipbuilding robots!?!?
Not really. You would still need to, you know, build drones or automated factories to actually perform the salvaging. But the point is that nobody DID, because capitalism values profit over human life. Nobody who "matters" is interested in solving that problem.
Actually that's not true at all, there's lots of interest in robotics (check out Boston Dynamic) but it's a really really hard problem. The main issue is developing a controlling intelligence sophisticated enough to be able to use the robot to do a diverse range of tasks. The actual physical mechanical building of the robot isn't that hard.
Of course the way you get that controlling intelligence is AI. So he is complaining about people developing a solution to the problem he's demanding that they solve. He's not happy because they're not magically skipping steps.
This idiot wants fully sapient robots without developing AI in the first place, not sure how on earth he expects that to happen.
Making art and writing just happens to be easy to automate with neural networks and machine learning, neither of which was originally researched for the purpose of replacing artists and writers.
Good luck disassembling a ship with a neural network. And maybe do some research about the difficulties of application-specific robotics.
I think it is just a matter of where you put resources. I am sure if you put resources into improving recycling ships some advancements will be done (it won't be done using neural network probably).
I get the sentiment, but that is a really dumb take. Software automation is a hell of a lot easier than creating robotic automation to disassemble ships of all shapes and sizes. How would that even be possible? Presumably, you'd need to break the ships down into pieces first, and even then, you'll be dealing with huge numbers of oddly shaped and sized components of varying materials. It makes a lot more sense to have people do that, though it is likely very dangerous.
Seems more like a job for unions and workplace safety regulations than for robots
more like a job for unions and workplace safety regulations
Yes. That's why they do these things in 3th world countries. The people there are cheaper than robots will ever be.
Ah yes just write code for the ship fold itself neatly back into reusable materials.
Just build a grinder the size of a football stadium to shred battleships into pea-sized chunks, and sort according to metal type, how hard can it be?
I hate this take because I dream of a world where AI can assist any storyteller in bringing their story to life.
The rest is just capitalism. Capitilism is the issue, not the AI.
OP: "We've tragically gone down a path of quantifying and min-maxing every aspect of existence, including creativity and the value of human life."
Comments: "OP clearly doesn't understand the comparative efficiency of the ROI here."
Disappointed programmer here. I thought I could automate farming so that people wouldn't die of hunger. Now I realise that if you automate farming, it would just make some CEO more money because his company now makes corn syrup and destroys rural communities even faster.
I got my "contract not renewed", for the Fortune 500 B2B CRM company I worked for.
I can try to bust my ass to make my 2018 laptop try to render images I can't draw, which does give me some pleasure. It's not the AI tool's fault humanity sucks, it's the goddamn people with money.
This sort of ignores the fact that the advances in that technology are widespread applicable to all tasks, we literally just started with text and image generation because:
The training data is plentiful abd basically free to get your hands on
It's easy to verify it works
LLMs will crawl so that ship breaking robots can run.
Oh no. You can't do it for fun now because the computers are doing it.
This shit again?
The tasks AI is replacing only require powerful computers and internet access.
If you want to make that comparison, to scrap fucking ships using AI, you need a robot that the AI can control.
Or what else do you want to do? Putting a fucking computer server that is running some ship scrapping AI in the middle of a shipyard and see if it magically grows arms?
No, I'm not denying we have an issue with this fucking capitalism (with and without AI), but stop comparing "software" tasks with other tasks what would required specialized machinery/robots.
The robot dystopia will not be caused by evil AI enslaving humanity.
No matter how advanced or how self aware, AI will lack the ambition that is part of humanity, part of us due to our evolutionary history.
An AI will never have an opinion, only logical conclusions and directives that it is required to fulfil as efficiently as possible. The directives, however, are programmed by the humans who control these robots.
Humans DO have ambitions and opinions, and they have the ability to use AI to enslave other humans. Human history is filled with powerful, ambitious humans enslaving everyone else.
The robot dystopia is therefor a corporate dystopia.
I always roll my eyes when people invoke Skynet and Terminator whenever something uncanny is shown off. No, it's not the machines I'm worried about.
I remember years ago everyone was saying that art would probably be the last thing AI would be able to handle and menial jobs would probably be the first.
Now look at where we are!
Big reason why I just build cute little games as a hobby instead of writing spreadsheet software for a megacorp to optimize the lowest quarterly earners out of a job, or develop AI to optimize myself out of a job.
According to this guy, only one thing is allowed to happen at a time. Sorry all, LLMs are the only option. Nothing else.
I mean, you can still write and make art? AI isnt taking that away from you? If you're upset that its replacing you career wise, maybe you're just upset that you need a job to live and that livelihood is at the whims of capitalists?
It can be both. Why is the first thing we're seeking to automate with this current generation of ai the creative careers that humans can do?
People are cheaper than robots, ergo they are more expendable
You know, interesting kind of aside here, I haven't seen talked about anywhere at all, but I would like to interrogate everyone here about it to get their thoughts.
I don't think AI is generally going to just replace artists wholesale, or is going to take over without some sort of editing, and that editing will probably necessitate a kind of creative process, and that's probably going to be adjacent to what lots of artists already do. AI as a tool, rather than as a replacement. We saw this with the shift from 2d to 3d in animation. This was accompanied by lack of unionization in the 3d workforce, yes, and was incentivized by it, but the convergence of these mediums, even really only fairly recently, has bolstered artists' ability to make much smaller projects work on a larger scale than they previously would've been able to. If you really need evidence of this, you can kind of look at much earlier newgrounds stuff vs the later work. There's less people using that site now, and the userbase has probably aged up substantially over time, but I do think it's probably fair to say that the quality of the work has gone up (quality obviously being subjective). Basically, Blender is a pretty good software, it's very cool and good.
SO, to the point, if this is the case, and artists are able to substantially cut down on their workload, while still producing similar or larger outputs, or better outputs, will this actually affect art, kind of, as an industry? Is there a pre-allocated volume of art that public consciousness will allow to exist? In which case, the amount of artists would go down. Or is it more the case that there is only a pre-allocated amount of capital that can be given to art? In which case, the number of artists might be the same, and we might just see larger volumes of art in general? I think historically the latter is the case, but that might have changed, or, more realistically, I think it would be dependent on external economic factors.
The most automated stuff are tedious things like rotoscoping. Creative projects still require human expertise to assemble, fine-tune, and use ML tools effectively.
Repetitive Basic tasks have been continually made more manageable by technology, and thanks to that skilled professionals have been able to complete more ambitious projects that would have been impossible for individuals or small groups to take on before.
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