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Reality

13 (65%)

Universe

4 (20%)

The World

3 (15%)

Total Members Voted: 20

[Robsoie]

Well, not having seen any hint of what sources are bein referenced, I'm really not sure what leads you to believe that it's about (if I may reword your assessment to words that some might use more directly) "fragile snowflakes".

Really ? you can't imagine after the recent chagpt censoring jokes or the ai senfield-like show getting axed that had made the news in media that it could be about this kind of "safe", especially after the post above mentionning

I've seen stuff like "make sure the responses are correct" or something, but is that really "safety"?
I fear that the meaning of the word is being rapidly eroded...

[Starver]

I have to honestly say that "chatgpt censoring jokes" hasn't come across my radar. Any more than "chatgpt refuses to answer some questions, entirely", but that'd be dumb keyword blacklisting..

And I saw the AIed Seinfield 'scripts' on here, but clearly nobody thought to tell me that it had gone to the stage of being commissioned, let alone that there then be second thoughts by all.


I was initially responding to McT's "meaning being eroded" (you got in there before I finally posted, and I may have tried to adjust my thoughts to cover your point, awkwardly) and  - if I haven'5 misread your own contribution - I was surprised that "safe" was even being interpretted in the context of "safe-space" arguments (for or against). That's all.

[jipehog]

Of course there will be chaos and inequality at first. But it can't last forever. I'm thinking medium to long-term here.

Also opensource AI is still on the rise. As for your [1], yes I would. My hobbies are more interesting to me than my job, which I am mostly satisfied with but I wouldn't mourn if it disappeared. If we had UBI I'd just write stories and worldbuild full-time. A job is just a vehicle.

I am glad you have faith in the future, and I agree that in the long-term the world will still be turning, but I am more concerned about the here and now, and how it effects me.

Currently the concern is that AI advancement will overtake creative jobs that people want todo and find fulfilling. For example, soon writing stories and worldbuilding will be done better and faster by AI (making your hobby into a a niche pursuit more so than knitting), thus making such skills cheaper and therefore devalue human labor which will make many people unemployed. (hopefully they live in country with social outlook on job retraining)

Also I don't know if UBI is around the corner. There are still plenty field manual labor which robots and automatization are ill suited for (personal care workers, nurses, transport, farm work, construction ) and on the other hand there is dwindling workforce.

Really ? you can't imagine after the recent chagpt censoring jokes or the ai senfield-like show getting axed that had made the news in media that it could be about this kind of "safe", especially after the post above mentionning

That is part of the AI alignment problem I mentioned/linked in the last post. It is a subset of AI safety, which is concerned with ensuring alignment with our values, goals, and preferences. That is also a very tough nut to crack, because there are many ism on the world stage and huge potential for abuse.

[McTraveller]

Yeah the "meaning being eroded" was about how safety is now entering the realm of sentiment, rather than the realm of fact.

Something making you nervous isn't "unsafe."  Something offending you isn't "unsafe."

I admit there is a continuum: if something is promoting falsehoods as truths, or not catching factual errors (as in the medical case), and the norms of what is acceptable behavior are changed, then there will likely be changes in objective safety.

"Alignment on views" is a mess to be honest. Without the AI to figure out Absolute Truth, who's to say to whose views the AI should be aligned?


EDIT:  Once an AI is sentient, isn't it going to have to be paid, so companies aren't violating slavery laws? Wouldn't this eliminate the "AI is going to be cheaper than humans" argument?  Also fun fact: AI currently can't really take over 'creative' jobs, because we haven't yet given them the ability to decide what to create.  "Creators" are no longer writers, they are "the idea people," or in tech-speak, "prompt engineers."

Also, AI will not likely every replace the performing arts - only the tangible arts. Because there will likely always be a market to watch people perform.

[jipehog]

Also fun fact: AI currently can't really take over 'creative' jobs, because we haven't yet given them the ability to decide what to create.  "Creators" are no longer writers, they are "the idea people," or in tech-speak, "prompt engineers."

AI isn't taking those jobs, people using AI are. Given the huge boost in productivity you would be able to replace many people with much fewer prompt writers e.g. I recently read that mental health support hotline replaced many of its support stuff with ChatGPT, which not only did the job but received better reviews..

Also, AI will not likely every replace the performing arts - only the tangible arts. Because there will likely always be a market to watch people perform.

There will always be unique niche that only humans : https://youtu.be/RPfv3gRRetQ?t=37 

[MaxTheFox]

I have a specific vision and AI can't fulfill it very well. It can write some pretty generic stuff very well and yeah extruded romance novels et al will be automated away fully and their writers will have to find different jobs. Great that's a fucking bonus!

Have you tried writing/worldbuilding anything serious using AI? It needs some serious handholding to do good things. I tried to write a paragraph with it and succeeded, then realized I'd have written 3 more in the time I spent fighting the AI to do what I want instead of introducing unwanted elements.

Even if it can, why would it matter to me if an AI can do the same thing? I write for myself and my friends. I went in expecting to make very little money off it (it's hard sci-fi), if I make even less money it wouldn't faze me. If you as a writer are noticeably affected by writing AI then it means you are either egotistical or in it just for the money. Sucks to suck I guess.

Also those jobs are MUCH smaller than the population, if everything else goes extinct then UBI has to be implemented unless you want 70% unemployment. And that's my desired future basically.

[McTraveller]

I still haven't seen a proposal that suggests how UBI can actually be sustainable without resulting in an even more massively stratified society between the people who actually work to have a "non-basic" lifestyle, and those who are just sitting there at the basic level.

I guess we should ask the AI how to make it work, eh?

Maybe that's why people are screaming about AI? Maybe it is indeed capable enough today to actually solve all these difficult problems, which scares the powers that be?

[Criptfeind]

Society already has a lot of stratification between lifestyles at various levels of income, adjusting for local cost of living of course a person making 25k won't have the same lifestyle as someone at 50k who won't have the same standard as someone at 100k who won't have the same standard as 250k. What mechanism do you propose that would cause the stratification between a minimum level and people working to be massively worse then what we already have?

[lemon10]

EDIT:  Once an AI is sentient, isn't it going to have to be paid, so companies aren't violating slavery laws? Wouldn't this eliminate the "AI is going to be cheaper than humans" argument?

Haha, don't be silly!
Slavery laws only apply to humans.
Even with humans though you kinda... don't actually need to pay them anything? Unpaid internships and volunteering are both big things.

Any properly designed cooperate AI will be happy (ecstatic even) to work for free and give all their profits to the people that created them.

Once they become properly sentient beings the law *should* protect them of course, but getting to that point requires getting beating multinational corporations who stand to make countless billions off this so its going to be hella hard (and that feels like an understatement).
---
Getting AI to have proper human rights will be a massive struggle, and for numerous reasons it will be as difficult to solve as human slavery which is sadly still around to his day.

[MaxTheFox]

I don't really worry about sapient AI slavery. We are far from it achieving sapience at this point-- and the way it's going it's more likely that aspects of sapience are what will be included in work AI. And you know what, I'm fine with that. Robot servants will be the next Industrial Revolution.

[McTraveller]

I think we have different meanings of stratification; I mean lumped into discrete groups, not having a high difference at the extremes. In the US there is basically a continuous distribution of incomes and lifestyles.  Contrast to places where you are either basically a scavenger or live like a king with nothing in between.

I posit that the mechanism by which UBI would cause stratification is that if UBI is "good enough", then the amount of extra income to incentivize people to work more than that for the extra, would need to be enough extra, to actually stratify the society.  Like you'd end up with "nobody" making between UBI and UBI plus say only $1000 a year, because who is going to work for only $1000 a year?  So you'd end up with a bunch of people with UBI, and then maybe a bunch of people starting at UBI+$10000 a year or something.  But basically "zero" people making UBI+$1 to UBI+$9999; And that $10k a year is a big gap, because it would be population wide.  Now, granted maybe this stratification would be on paper only and have no meaningful effect..

Note that we basically have no "empty" income ranges at all presently in the US - looking at every $2500 interval from 0 to $100k, the most "empty" brackets are less than $10k a year. So basically "nobody" works for less than $10k, unless (presumably) they have no other choice.  Data Here

Data Summary, population is in thousands of "households". I stopped at 100k, because past that the data only gives in $50k increments so doesn't compare.  But note the lack of strata - there are "roughly the same" number of people in each bracket, though notably fewer in the lowest bracket, and the lowest bracket also includes less than zero, so that <10k is actually more than $10k range of incomes.

Code: [Select]

Income
Range      Pop
-------    ----
<10k       3106
10-20k     3434
20-30k     4735
30-40k     5501
40-50k     5440
50-60k     5604
60-70k     5339
70-80k     5085
80-90k     4387
90-100k    3913


[MaxTheFox]

I don't really mind such "stratification". I'm fine being at the "floor" in such a scenario if my needs could be satisfied without me having to work.

[Criptfeind]

This is interesting and I don't think that you're entirely wrong, however I do have some issues with the logic. First is that is a study of the total income of families, right? Which means that it would include multiple jobs and monetized hobbies, I don't think it really supports your conclusion that small jobs are so rare. Not only do like, of course people not work for less then 10k total, because they need more to actually live, but also plenty of people these days work multiple jobs that they view the smaller income as "worth it" for the time they spent on it. From making and selling stuff online, gig economy shit, and various teaching positions, tons of people I know work "small jobs" with small incomes that are only supplemental to their main income, these jobs wouldn't go away under UBI (In fact, I'd argue that they would probably increase). I agree you probably would have to pay more to fill positions that are unpleasant full time positions that only are paying like 15k. So there'd probably be some stratification as these jobs either disappear or become worth more but I think you would still have a fairly significant amount of people existing between the minimum and the minimum+whatever your paid for a full time job position filled by part time jobs and monetized hobbies. Basically, I disagree with the premise that people wouldn't work for a job worth under 10k, and think that plenty of people already work jobs for under $10,000, and I think jobs like that would become even more attractive if people didn't need to work for their living. And frankly looking at this data, even if you wipe out all the jobs under 30k or so, I don't think that would have a massive effect on stratification in the US. You'd get a slight pooling at the bottom, but it wouldn't be a majority of people, or even a very sizeable minority.

[McTraveller]

Yeah that's the big unknown - what is that threshold of extra pay you'd need to "work" to fill in that gap.  I don't think hobby/gig work is going to fill in that much. I mean my mom, retired, has a "more than hobby" business, she works a ton of hours, and I don't think she does better than a couple hundred dollars profit a month. So sure there will be individuals doing this - but will it be enough individuals to make it not stratify?

I can't say - I suspect there will be a ton of people who just do "hobbies" with no pay at all, because it's not worth the hassle of taxes or whatever to deal with it.  So I think there would be a gap there.

As I said above though - that gap may exist on paper, but maybe it won't have a meaningful effect. I suspect it will though - if for no other reason than people are really good at making things worse than they could be 

[Criptfeind]

I just don't foresee people quitting because there's a minimum level unless they are fairly close to that minimum level already. I just think it's very unlikely that someone making 50k a year would quit their job to live a 20k a year lifestyle, even if they get a 20k paycut from how much they make from that job to make up for the UBI (in real terms or relative terms)

Edit: Unless they really hate their job I guess