muldvarp

You're arguing against a point I never made. I agree that AI will be an important technology. I also think that it'll affect people that have to work for a living negatively (both in the short-term and assuming there is no foundational change in the structure of society, also in the long-term).

By that definition gasoline would not classify as a consequential technology as it's almost exclusively used in a single application (transportation).

It also already assumes that the technology is more often benefical than harmful.

Fear is not usually a voluntary response. Telling people that they should not fear something (especially without an argument why there is no danger) is wasted effort.

The printing press, automobile and calculator didn't threaten the employability of a large part of the population, so no, that sentence was probably not uttered by anyone at that time.

The problem with AI isn't that it's threating software development. It's that it's _also_ threating pretty much any other job that I could reasonably be retrained for.

Also, I'm pretty conflicted about the overall impact of automobiles.

Leaded gasoline to me is a very consequential technology given how much toxic lead it put into our environment.

Do you have an argument why "normal" technology can be good or bad, but "consequential" technology is always good?

Unions only work because their members have leverage because the wealthy still need their labour. Unions will do absolutely nothing against full replacement by AI.

> How will it destroy your life?

By taking away my ability to earn a living.

> There are so many great and useful things it can and will do to improve humanity.

What great things and why would I get access to those things?

> The ability to create software accelerates technological progress, which has direct and indirect benefits for everyone.

It has benefits for people with enough leverage (money and formerly labour) to obtain those benefits.

> It is true that competition could have short-term negative effect on people who sustain themselves by creating software, though.

I'm guessing that even if the unlikeliest of all unlikely things does happen and we all live off of some UBI some day, the short-term negative effects won't be "short-term" in the context of a human life.

The fact a technology is still in use does not imply that it is not negative for humanity.

I don't consider myself as part of a "laptop class", I don't live in the US and I'm anti-immigration.

I suspect your reasoning is circular if you only consider "great" technologies.

There are many technologies that have not been a net positive for humanity. Leaded gasoline comes to mind immediately. For many other technologies it is also hard to determine because counterfactuals are hard to reason about.

Even then past performance is not an indicator of future results. Just because you think internal combustion engines were a great invention, doesn't mean AI cannot be bad for humanity.

Because the ability to create software has little inherent value to me and is only valuable to me because it allows me to earn enough to make this life somewhat bearable.

LLMs that can build a computer vision pipeline are a direct threat to my ability to sustain myself. At the same time, being able to prompt an LLM to build a computer vision pipeline doesn't really positively affect my life at all, because personally I don't care that much about computer vision pipelines (or frankly, any software).

Why should I be amazed at something that promises to destroy my life?

I genuinely don't understand why people who have to work for their living are amazed at this. It will have a vast negative impact on your life unless you already live off of your wealth.

Okay? We have information that Anthropic sucked up all of the internet for the development of Fable.