Cars turned us—one of the best species in long distance running into couch potatoes.
Now llms are attacking our brains and making us stupid and insane. A species of slopheads if you will.
Cars turned us—one of the best species in long distance running into couch potatoes.
Now llms are attacking our brains and making us stupid and insane. A species of slopheads if you will.
The non-evil version unfortunately depends on nobody involved having any profit motive.
The Industrial Revolution should have been a turning point where our ability to build advanced tools meant the workload on humans was reduced. Instead of liberating people from the demands of hard labor sunup to sundown just to survive, it kept them toiling the same amount of hours but with ever increasing output demands. A person with a combine can clear exponentially more acres of wheat in a day than a team of people with sickles, but they still have to spend all day doing it just to survive. There was no gain for the worker, only the maximizing of profits for the bourgeoisie. If in their spare time the worker is a couch potato it’s because they’re too exhausted to pursue self-actualizing hobbies and still to close to broke to pursue them in the first place.
AI is coming in as more of an assault on the upper half of the workforce. I’m sure eventually it could find ways to eliminate construction workers, utility/infrastructure maintenance, mechanics, ag workers, but first they’re pushing out the jobs that require more mental labor than physical. It’s a double win. A programmer who loses their job to AI doesn’t cease to exist, they still need to work to survive in this system. If the only jobs available to humans are physical labor they’ll eventually compete to take the job, and that competition for dwindling jobs means employers can lower wages. If people are pushed to the point where their only option for income is a $7.25/hr job at McDonalds, they’ll either take it or accept poverty. I doubt they even want to use AI to takeover manual labor jobs because there’s no point in wasting the natural human resource that exists to exploit. That’s all we are to them, a resource to exploit, and unlike Artifical Intelligence, Human Intelligence has its own mechanical interface built in. You don’t even have to build them, they self replicate.
Until we start demanding that technology and advancements (physical or digital) are not output multipliers but tools that reduce the labor humans must expend to produce sufficient output to meet the needs of society, we will be exploited.