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i think a core beef that i have with a lot of this "automation is bad" sentiment lately is that there is no inherent moral good in laboring the story of humanity is one of invention, where we improve our conditions by building things that help us do more things more easily

sort of along my recent repost, the issue at hand has been the same since the dawn of capitalism: when automation increases productivity, who gets to capture the value of that productivity increase? the beef is not with the productivity. it's with the value capture

gonna just fully lean into being a stereotypical leftist here: yinz claim to have read marx yet clearly haven't read marx or internalized the ideas within bsky.app/profile/segy...

a thing i've been thinking about posting for a long time is "back in those days, the workers didn't say "eww factories were created by capitalists to enrich capitalists, we should abandon factories" they said "we should seize them and direct their output for the good of humanity"

I understand where you're coming from, but I also think it's worth thinking about the fact that the split in tone here is along the lines of people who are currently financially stable and the people whose livelihoods are *presently* being eroded by these technologies with no upside in sight.

If you think there's an upside to building this technology so it can be captured by labour, I think there needs to be an actual story being told about how that can actually be accomplished. Because otherwise, people whose careers are being destroyed today are just being told to stop resenting it!

Again, I don't think your intentions are bad here - but I think to change minds here, people would need to hear something practical about how things could actually change *in this instance* instead of the same cycle continuing where capital captures all value while eroding labour's share.

yeah, i fully agree that presenting a good future is important, just like, for any political project generally. i think that i struggle to have *any* conversation about these things at all because it immediately gets so heated

i think it's also tough because when i'm not online, 99% of the conversations i have about this, *especially* with non-programmers, are positive and curious and excited about the future with these tools. the only real negativity i come across is devs, people online, and some minor IRL concerns

It may well depend on what kinds of people you're talking to, yeah. The filter bubble isn't just an online thing huh? Haha. People I talk to IRL tend to be ambivalent to negative, which it sounds like is pretty different from your experience!

That said you know, a lot of the people I know are artists, people working in the arts in related careers &c. So I think it's not *super* surprising that people in that position have a very different opinion. At least in my life, it's mostly devs, people in management/business owners who're positive

But of course I don't know how that reflects the kinds of conversations you've been having! "No one I know voted for Reagan" &c.

For sure! For me, non-devs are mostly a combo of slightly annoyed that it’s shoved into everything, but interested in the actual chat tool products themselves. A lot of devs I know don’t like non determinism and hallucinations but to non-devs, computer use is already that way, so it’s not as much

Of a downside. Another variant of this sort of thing I’m interested in is the global view, like the guardian said earlier this year that anxiety around this stuff is way higher in English speaking countries specifically. I want to know more about that too.

(And yeah, the folks I know who do art don’t do it on the computer and do it as a hobby and so ai doesn’t really directly affect them in the same way as the people you’re talking to)

Mmm, yeah. Which I think sort of gets at something I'm thinking of, which - you're talking about the effects of automation basically as an abstract concept here, and I guess what's hitting me is that it's more concretely hitting some people *right now*, and that's affecting how people are reacting.

So I think it's not really surprising you're seeing people who react highly negatively to a small number of centralized, US-based cloud services looking to automate everything! (Not trying to be aggressive here - we obviously disagree on this but I know you're coming from sincere good faith here.)

i think there's a lot of uncertainty, but you're still getting at one thing, which is like... i was also not trying to say that 'fear of automation' is the only reason people don't like llms. the "I can't trust the us and don't want to rely on a cloud service" thing? extremely reasonable!