If I was an industry titan, and I could choose between buying more compute or hiring humans, i would probably buy 90% compute and 10% human to watch over them.
Productivity in lines of code is just so much higher for machines. Humans are only needed for troubleshooting.
And what changes in society as the friendly nerd’s skillset is not needed? This is the question we should ask of ourselves.
Tech bros already replaced a lot of the art in tech. Now less and less humanists will be present.
More power in programming without having to go through people like me, who care for humanist values, is a very scary concept for me.
I’ve been in the tech industry most of my life and it has too many motherf****s. Evil sonsabitches who 1-up each other and play goddam games with everyone they meet.
These people will win when they don’t have to convince people like me to write code for them anyone.
Perhaps off-topic, but some days ago I had a discussion where the other person stated how for example studying engineering didn't just teach how to calculate (for example) structural tolerances, but also logical thinking, implication being that this was a skill that humanist studies lacked.
Afterwards I started wondering what exactly is "logical thinking" and how does it differ from the more holistic approach taught in the sciences, humanities, and arts?
@iju What you might have encountered is ”rationalism” in the modern Silicon Valley definition of the word.
Yudkowsky’s rationalism argues for things like longtermism in which future humans are more important than present humans, dismissing the moral implications of such thinking out of hand.
It’s my opinion that Silicon Valley has made a religion of it’s moral choices & ideals. But without enough humanists in the fold, they’re not capable of seeing they’re acting out of faith.
To sum up my first experience with #aianxiety, I’m not anxious for myself. I’ll be safe, my experience will be necessary to judge when the #ai is being stupid.
I will retire comfortably, I think. But the kind of tech sector that comes after me will be very different.
There will be new gatekeepers to being successfull: They will be able to grant and take away powers equalling magic or even godhood eventually.
Material resources, compute, will bestow power like never before in human history.
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