fiala__

One of the most powerful (and dangerous) aspects of dogma is the tendency of its followers to promote it to a universal pattern.

I, for one, am horrified at the prospect of a future where any kind of non-managerial labour is viewed as "summarising" and automated out of our collective skillset. GPT output may often be equivalent to human writing/thinking as a commodity, but human writing & thinking is not a commodity in its essence.

To me this is not the end of knowledge economy. This is a metastasis of the same capitalist disease that attacked the traditional crafts sector more than 100 years ago, attempting to replace it with a mix of industrially exploited labour in the Global North, colonial/slave labour in the Global South, and eventually mechanisation + automation. This brought about fantastic levels of productivity and wealth, along with insane amounts of pollution, the climate crisis and growing inequality. In sectors such as fashion the market is flooded with low-quality goods with a lifetime of a few months, which has led to astronomical amounts of waste.

The difference with AI is, now the Western creative middle class is affected, and due to the shadowy nature of the industry, it is not yet completely clear who is getting exploited (though we are starting to find out[1]). The good thing is, traditional crafts have not disappeared, in fact, their products are increasingly more prized and appreciated. I firmly believe generative AI's onslaught can also be withstood, and a better world is still possible - one where artisan labour, attention and connectedness prevail over whatever hellish future generative AI would create.

(side note: IMO high-quality code is much, much more than a StackOverflow summary)

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