Post by mid in Are AI Assets Controversial on Itch io?

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I think I do understand your point, but if you had the convenience of making GTA V effortlessly, then you will have replaced hundreds of people’s jobs, and yourself put in 0 effort (by definition) in return for some gain. Hence that convenience would give you profit.

Somebody profits pretty much anywhere when convenience is involved, irregardless of the kind of society. This is why I equate the two – they’re identical in meaning but are applied in different areas of life. Any time you make use of a convenience, somebody suffers. Could be you, or somebody else. The question isn’t that, but whether that suffering worth it.

I think it’s useful to look deeper into the meaning of convenience. If you don’t then we’ll have to agree to disagree.

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FearCode2 years ago (2 edits) (+2)

" if you had the convenience of making GTA V effortlessly, then you will have replaced hundreds of people’s jobs"

Type of jobs die and new are borns, the same professional can upgrade his skills to keep up with the changes, the problem here is people losing their means of income due to how fast these changes happen and the main point of it all: profit driven society.

If a programming language becomes obsolete, the programmer may learn a new language, like how it happened with 16 bit IBM ASM almost no body code that anymore to make games nowadays (differently then how it used to be 30 years ago). Making a complex game effortlessly is already happening for quite a while, if you use an existing game engine you are part of it, the engine itself replaces a lot of people that would be required for you to build a complete game, one like you would say, "it's bad to create a 3D game effortlessly" 30 years ago, and now we can create an FPS game yourself solo in less than a week in unreal.

"Somebody profits pretty much anywhere when convenience is involved"

Yes, I never said profit is bad or unavoidable, someone making profit for a good game is always a good thing. I said if profit is needed for survival, then that is bad.

"I have seen little to no evidence that more automation generally leads to higher life satisfaction"

Do you use a car? or the internet? supermarkets? Online shopping? Aren't these leading to better quality of life?

A car, aka AUTOmobile, like an automated carriage? or on-line dictionaries like wikipedia? Like an automated free dictionary? Even the food you buy at your groceries store is a product of automation.

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mid2 years ago (3 edits) (+2)

Type of jobs die and new are borns, the same professional can upgrade his skills to keep up with the changes, the problem here is people losing their means of income due to how fast these changes happen and the main point of it all: profit driven society.

Those same professionals shouldn’t have to upgrade their skills to support the degeneracy of humankind. If millions of people wish to drive trucks, they have that right. Likewise with art.

Wait, “upgrade”? Lol.

Do you use a car? or the internet? supermarkets? Online shopping? Aren’t these leading to better quality of life?

Yes, and people have never felt like they had an emptier life. Only in a very naive, short-term view are these technologies improving quality of life. All technologies attempt to isolate us from eachother, the real world, and dumben us to the point we cannot live without them. That is nothing to glorify, and especially nothing to enforce upon all of us.

And for the record, all of your examples I in fact strive to use minimally. Furthermore, I haven’t used a smartphone since 2017.

It’s the typical technophile rhetoric to suggest that if technology A was replaced by technology B, then it justifies technology C in doing the same, without any regard for all intricacies involved. This fundamental assumption is ridiculous, and has no basis.

Technology is great when it lets us stay sharp and grow sharper, not revert into fetuses. As that technology grows more advanced, the less does that apply.

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FearCode2 years ago (7 edits) (+1)

Technology is like knowledge, none of it is bad, the way you use may be the problem (like knowledge). Internet was created for war purposes, and now it's way for people around the world to learn, interact and know new cultures, so something that began with a "bad" purpose becomes good just because we use it differently now.

"Those same professionals shouldn’t have to upgrade their skills to support the degeneracy of humankind. If millions of people wish to drive trucks, they have that right. Likewise with art."

Two things here, professionally speaking if a doctor about to perform a surgery on you refused to upgrade his skills about using new technologies that make the operation a lot less aggressive with way higher chances of success rate to you would you still let him do the surgery on you?

Second, "If millions of people wish to drive trucks" of course, nobody is saying you can't drive trucks, you don't use a smartphone right? And you're happy, so we are all good, but professionally speaking that's not the case, as I said in the doctor situation, if there's a new technology that prevents accident a lot more than driving your own truck and it's way more friendly to the environment, then it's undoubtedly better than professionally hiring a truck driver, but if one still wants to drive his truck, that's up to him to decide.

You are confusing the technology with the use of it. Blaming the technology is the same thing as blaming the car for a drunk driving car accident. If we create a technology that allows us to do clean and sustainable energy, but people use it to make nukes that can destroy the whole planet, it's not the scientists nor the technology to blame, but the way that people that are using.

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mid2 years ago (4 edits)

Technology being neutral doesn’t make it harmless. I don’t hate technology. I even said in my last post when technology should be used. But if it is used solely as a convenience, its users will inevitably devolve.

if there’s a new technology that prevents accident a lot more than driving your own truck and it’s way more friendly to the environment, then it’s undoubtedly better than professionally hiring a truck driver,

Disagreed, other than the environment part, which has nothing to do with this.

Of course I meant professionally. That’s what we’re talking about in the first place. Skill and labor should be rewarded, not stripped away. If a producer minimizes all labor and his own effort, that just shows me how little he cares about his product.

A driving accident means a skill deficit, which is solved by improving, not the reverse.

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FearCode2 years ago(+1)

"But if it is used solely as a convenience..."

No technology may be used solely as a convenience (and almost no technology is created not for certain level of convenience), even the ones you may classify as such. Maybe you consider smartphones purely convenience, since you don't use them, the technology behind them is what allows us to reduce the size of our computers to a micro scale, if was not for them we may have never evolved so much on that front.

Now, some technology will (un)fortunately and have already replaced humans, like the aircraft listeners I said in the original post.

However! If you are worried about creative professions like cook, artists, writers... I'd say that will never be replaced any time soon, as machines are very bad at stochastic artistic inference, i.e., they can do deterministic procedures better than human (like math) but only mimic a fraction of what we can do in classifying how we perceive emotions and senses (the human brain was evolved for that, not exactly for doing straight up math equations), for instance, try talking sarcastically with chat GPT you will see how hard it will be for it to understand you.

Now, you are still attacking technology as the cause of devaluation of human work, as I said in the original post: that's not technology to blame, but how we define labour in our current, i.e., our current system already devaluates labour, if you love your work but produces less than another worker you will be the first one in line to be fired when the company wants, regardless if the other worker is a robot or not.

Truck driving was a good example. First, truck drivers already replaced other means of transportation of goods, so you defending truck driving as a professional already obfuscates the other professions replaced by it before.

"A driving accident means a skill deficit".

This is naively incomplete to say at least, humans make mistakes, it doesn't matter how experience we are, if we are in tired, depressed, or just in a bad mood we can make errors and some of them can result in accidents. Machines on the other hands only make mistakes due to lack of proper training (they don't get tired or distracted), so yes your affirmation would actually defend machine driving a truck rather than humans.

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FearCode2 years ago(+1)

btw, thanks for the discussion, so far this has been very interesting.

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