I'm really curious to read your opinions on advancements in AI considering the recent news on AI programs like ChatGPT upending writing in basically all forms, and DALL-E/Midjourney/Lensa/Stable Diffusion producing tons of high quality art in seconds. Many artists have already started losing commissions because of automation, while basically everyone working in any job has begun to worry about robots replacing them. This has obviously triggered much anti-AI sentiment because of its short term disruptions to the economy and the livelihoods of millions of people.
Since this sub is against the concept of work, especially work as defined within the present day neoliberal capitalist paradigm, do you all have positive views of AI? Some people claim that AI will eventually become so advanced that its intelligence will far surpass humans, causing all work will be automated, and thus leading to a post-scarcity, post-work society of abundance and overproduction (the Technological Singularity).
r/Singularity is full of people who think the coming AI revolution will culminate in a technological utopia where no one will ever have to work anymore, all problems will be solved, money will cease to exist, and most people will be able to spend their days in comfort and leisure, pursuing their hobbies with the large amount of free time a lack of work will create. Basically, AI communism.
Conversely, others claim AI will only exacerbate existing socioeconomic inequality between rich and poor (AI owners vs. plebs who will be forced to depend on UBI/the government to survive in a post-work world), and lead to social unrest and disruption due to the millions of people who will lose their jobs via technological displacement, and have no where to turn to. A lot of people who may or may not have seen their jobs as a source of meaning and purpose in their lives will be existentially traumatized by AI and be left behind with nothing to do.
There are also countless existential risks AI poses, which have been discussed in books, films, and conferences in real life– from the spread of misinformation to people using AI for malicious purposes, to AI takeover or grey goo scenarios, to paperclip maximizers. Right now, students are already using ChatGPT to cheat on writing assignments in school, and art AIs are being used to scam people or otherwise generate images from real CP. AIs could, in theory, easily be hacked as well to cause havoc in society. Pair that with nanobots and things could get out of hand very quickly.
Humans for now are still in control, but all it will take is one wrong move or one oversight for AI to develop past the point in which we can control it, and render us obsolete. If a machine can do everything a human can but better, and is better than a human in basically everything, why should we stick around? Why would it need us?
If current trends are any indicator, technological displacement will be the least of our worries decades from now. Sure, no one having to work in a moneyless system sounds fantastic, but what if AI makes things worse? The genie's out of the bottle, and Pandora's Box has been opened. There's very little we can do to reverse that process. The question now is if what we're doing will turn out well for us, or whether we're headed down a truly dark future.