BearStorms

BearStorms t1_is2gjah wrote

I think that well regulated capitalism with very strong welfare system as we see in the Nordic countries is still the best real world economic system to date and it would be a good start to go from there, adding UBI once AI driven unemployment will warrant this soon. Eventually once we are approaching true post-scarcity economy capitalism will be probably basically obsolete even before true Singularity.

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BearStorms t1_is2fs88 wrote

What about the bottleneck of natural resources and environmental damage though? Although I expect we will have much better recycling systems with more advanced AI and robotics and I've even heard about proposals to "mine" existing landfills, etc. But it will still be a bottleneck.

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BearStorms t1_is2feti wrote

But even with just a bit more advanced specialized AIs but not anywhere close to AGI we could see massive AI driven productivity gains and also unemployment. This is pretty much guaranteed to come soon and could take us by surprise. How many illustrator jobs are there gonna be in a couple of years? Drivers are hopefully going to be a history within 10 years. Most journalism too. Etc., etc. There will be MASSIVE effects way before Singularity. It will be a continuum. By the time actual Singularity event comes the world will be completely different from ours.

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BearStorms t1_is2eorn wrote

I would hope than the early solution to massive AI driven unemployment will be some kind of Universal Basic Income (UBI) scheme that would allow to afford a dignified living. And then society will evolve from there. Singularity will mean post-scarcity in most goods and the current economic system will be probably obsolete by then.

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BearStorms t1_irg7t8p wrote

I mean let me ask you a question - you want to write a small series children's book and need 20 illustrations. Do you commission a regular artist who will charge you $2000 and deliver in a month or do you contract an artist that will utilize txt2img, charge you $200 and deliver in 3 days provided the results are comparable quality and meet you vision? And as the tools get better this contrast will be even more stark... Lower tier illustration market may be completely self-serve and the cost will be virtually 0.

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BearStorms t1_irfu02c wrote

>It would be difficult to get a model to output the same specific teddybear protagonist in a children's book.

Isn't this exactly what Dreambooth is for?

But yeah, the tools are still immature but remember it really only blew up few months ago and the progress has been insane. "Within the next few years" is way too generous. I bet the crunch already started for some and in a year it's going to be a bloodbath for the ones who are not firmly established yet. I'm talking about stuff like concept artists, illustrators, stock photography, gamedev artists, basically all kinds of "visual artist tradesmen". But lot of other visual artists are gonna be just fine, high art, conceptual art is not going anywhere (but many of these artists will adopt these tools as well of course).

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BearStorms t1_irfmgeu wrote

It is, but it is a much harder problem to solve. Art that is 98% correct (and we are not there yet) is nearly perfect but code that is 98% correct is utter garbage less valuable than nothing (since debugging and fixing automatically generated code with ton bugs will probably be more work than writing it again from scratch).

But tools that will help you out like Copilot are already here and they are pretty decent. But when tools like DALL-E or SD could mean a productivity multiplier of let's say 100x for a certain kind of artist, Copilot multiplier is perhaps 1.2 at best. Especially since gathering requirements is usually more than half of the battle in a typical software project.

But yeah, I'm a software engineer and always thought that this will be the last job to go - well, I'm not so certain about that now. But not too worried in the short to mid term yet. However concept artists and illustrators - they're already fucked.

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BearStorms t1_irfl7mn wrote

Honestly what's weird is that physical jobs, especially irregular ones, may be the hardest to automate. Stuff like a contractor remodeling your kitchen or plumber fixing your clogged sink. Hard problem for an AI to begin with and the need for very complex robotics make me think that trades like these are safe for quite a while...

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