You don’t have to read the entire text before answering. It’s just the background to why I’m asking this question. My worries about AI: There are two human needs that I believe are as important to us as food and sleep. (Maybe not AS important, but you know what I mean.) -The feeling of “I’m doing something that makes other people’s lives better.” That can be something as simple as taking out the garbage so that other people don’t have to do it, programming software so that others can’t use it, solving math problems, teaching, creating art, etc. That feeling doesn’t have to come from your job, it can also come from hanging out with friends or parenting children, etc. Psychologists for the longest time didn’t believe that we have a need like that. They believed the reason we do our job is only because of our need for money and status. That’s because until now every human society was organized in a way that this feeling was always fulfilled in some way. We always needed each other. -The feeling of comparing ourselves to others. I wish we could remove that from human nature, but I don’t think we can. Again that feeling doesn’t have to come from being rich. It can also come from being nice to hang around or being a great artist even though you don’t do it for money. I know this idea that even human interaction is about being better than others sounds weird. But consider this: If someone were to tell you “You are always fun to be around” or “That is a great painting you made” would that elicit a positive emotional reaction? When we say “You are always fun to be around” what we actually mean “You are always fun to be around compared to the median fun-to-be-aroundness of humans”. If everybody is equally as fun to be around with, there would be no reason to say it. The reason you’re happy when you hear those words is because of your competitive instincts. -I am hopeful that in a world of AI we will find a solution to those feelings no longer being fullfilled. HOWEVER the solution might be that we ban AI in certain areas. We might find out that the feeling of being needed by others is so useful that we have to artificially recreate it. -I have heard from multiple programmers irl and online that they’re job today feels dower and depressing. They didn’t lose their job, (except one who said he didn’t lose his job because of AI, but because he didn’t have passion for it anymore) so why do they hate it. In the last years their job went from “Use AI to do parts of your code, but do the most complicated parts yourself” to “Use AI to write code, then test, debug and perfect it” to “Use AI to write code. You’re done. It barely needs debugging anymore.” What they lost is the feeling of “I’m doing something that makes other people’s lives better.” They’re not actually doing anything useful anymore. And they also lost the feeling to be able to say “I am a great programmer.” If you don’t do any programming, and just ask ChatGPT what to do and then copy-paste the answer, can you really call yourself a programmer? Would that be an accurate job description? -My experience matches scientific literature. When somebody uses AI to do part of their work, they enjoy their job more than before. When they use AI to do their entire job for them, and just copy-paste the answer they enjoy their lob less. -I keep telling AI bros “What’s happening to programmers now is going to happen to you in the future.” When you say “AI is built to imitate the human brain” people think you only talk about professions we consider “brainy” like math, programming and physics. But everything you do is your brain. When you tell someone you love them, when you get a genius idea, when a CEO runs a company. All of that is your brain. -I asked AI bros “If what happens to programming would happen to human interaction, would you be happy? If an AI is so much better at human interaction than any human could ever be?” It’s not far off that one day there will be an earpiece connected to an AI. That AI can tell you exactly what to say and do. You then have the choice: Do I listen to it, or do I accept that people consider me less fun to be around. And that gap between humans gets wider and wider and soon nobody will want to be your friend if you don’t use that earpiece. They usually say yes that would make them happy. -But when we talk a bit more, I realize they only say that because they assume this is never going to happen anyway. They all believe the things they care about are something special. THEY need the “human touch” that can never be replicated with machines. They even apply that their own job. AI bros often believe that their job is the ONE job that can’t be done by machines. So they think: “If I call mathematicians and artists whiners, but I admit I’d hate it if that happened to me, I’d be a hypocrite. So I just say I’d be okay with it. It’s never gonna happen anyway.” Except one person. He told me he’d be fine with just doing what AI tells you all day, and the justification he gave was “I come from china. It’s a culture where we don’t care that much about individuality?” And surveys show that in China and a lot of surrounding countries people feel more positive towards AI? -My question is: Was he right or is it something he came up with in order to win the debate? Is another cultural background the reason people from different countries feel differently about AI? There is a long history of psychologists only making tests on college students in western countries, and then finding that those can’t easily be applied to the rest of the world. Does cultural background make a difference? -Also: The two human needs I mentioned, do you think they are universal or a result of our cultural upbringing? I heard that in other countries people are more likely to admit AI will be better at these human domains. Is that true? My overarching question: Is the only way to be happy about AI if you believe “Everybody elses job is going to be automated so that I can do MY job more easily. But if MY job would be automated I’d hate that.”? (Replace job in this with “anything you care about.”) Or is it possible to accept your own obsolescence and be happy about ti? submitted by /u/ForgotMyParachute
Originally posted by u/ForgotMyParachute on r/ArtificialInteligence