Almost free isn’t free. There will still be real capital costs building those factories and mining equipment and harvesting equipment, even if we magick away substantially 100% of the costs that traditionally went to labor in all its forms from CEOs down to janitors.
But what is the incentive to build this marvelous all-capital-no-labor economic system if you have no customers because there is no money distributed to anyone but the capital-owning and hence ruling 0.001% coterie and their immediate manservants (and womanservants :leer:)?
A future that needs no workers has no need of those mouths to feed and will simply eliminate them. By attrition or by more active means. IMO the idea the oligarchs will deign to feed, house, and entertain the masses just to be nice is fanciful. Just as the oligarchs in e.g. the Phillipines or Brazil today ignore the masses in the hillside cardboard shanty towns, so shall the 99.999% be treated in this marvelous workerless future.
I’ve told this story before about a possibly apochryphal event …
In the 1970s Henry Ford is touring one of his plants to show off the very first robotic car assembly devices. Along with him is the then-president of the UAW.
Mr. Ford: Well there, Mr. UAW Prez, good luck getting these robots to join your union. Mr. UAW Prez: Well Sir, good luck getting these robots to buy your cars.
Unless everyone owns the means of production, a labor vs capital war amounts to the animals trying to kill off all the plants or vice versa. It’s a symbiotic relationship that must be maintained or both sides die, just not simultaneously.
Agreed. Lots of people love it and want it is a valid answer, if true, and it may be, despite how much the OP and some others are annoyed by it. If huge portions of customers love burgers served with pickles and are happier to buy burgers with pickles than without, then the fast food place will have pickles as standard. Even if some people pick them off and go bleh.
And yes if you’ve invested lots to make tons of pickles, based on expectations that once people taste pickles they will want them all day every day, then you are invested in making that prediction come to pass. They have a lot riding on gen AI (and their versions of it) quickly becoming as knee jerk to use as “we” use calculators (on our phones) instead of paper and pencil to do anything more than the most simple math.
That is not an answer to any of the questions posed by to o.p., to wit:
“What I don’t understand is why Google, Apple, etc. want me to use these.”
“What are they getting out of constantly irritating me with unwanted, and often unwarranted, correction?”
“Why do they make it so difficult to avoid or disable?”
Whether you think it is petey-keen to generate bad art and ‘hallucinate’ explanations which provide confidently wring answers and manufactured citations is not relevant to the question of ‘Why are these companies so motivated to jam barely functional and frequently error-prone ‘AI’ into every product snd service at a cost of billions of dollars and not even permit users to opt out or switch it off?’
The only reason I can see for the “no off switch” is that they are also using the AI features to capture whatever I’m working on for their own reasons. Presumably more training data.
“I hate AI and it uses too much power and I’m mad about IP rights” doesn’t answer any of those questions either yet you haven’t started lecturing any of those posters on how one must only address the OP or else.
Google, Apple, et al want you to use it because they would like to make money off your usage of it. They have invested a lot of money into it and would like to turn that into a revenue stream.
They feel they will get more usage and thus eventually more money out of prompting you to use it. You, as an individual, may feel irritated by it but they feel that, in aggregate, it will increase usage and therefore eventually money.
See Answer #2. Also, in many cases they have a pretty captive audience. Most people aren’t going to switch off using Google/Gmail/etc or Windows/Office/etc or iOS because they don’t like the prompt to have AI answer their question or assist in writing their letter. People get locked into their tech ecosystems via inertia, lack of knowledge or most alternatives doing the same thing. So the cost to these companies to aggressively push the use of their AI services is minimal because they know you’re not really going anywhere.
So there ya go. Now people can once again give opinions in IMHO
As this is In My Humble Opinion I’m just going to ask all of you to stop the back and forth over who should be posting what. None of the answers were out of line.
@Stranger_On_A_Train, you seem to have set off this back and forth with this post, and @Darren_Garrison took it up a notch with the reply. So, both of you, please refrain.
The reason Google, Apple, etc want you to use these things is the same reason any media or source of content wants you to use stuff. To draw your attention so they can sell ads.
To be fair the OP complaint included tools of the last 30 years including autocorrect for spelling and grammar and word completion. They don’t like it. My phone is doing those to me right now. Sometimes accurately, sometimes making errors, and sometimes just allowing me to blame my error on the autocorrect!
Beyond that, they expect that AI will have at something akin to network effects, or at least tech lock-in effects. They also hope that something akin to Kurzwiel’s singularity is out there, at least for raw AI capabilities, if not for Kurzweil’s rather nutty predictions on the resulting prompt impact on the rest of society.
So e.g. Google is not only wanting to get some ROI on its AI investment just like e.g. Peacock wants ROI on their streaming video investments.
They are also firmly of the belief that just one of e.g. themselves, MSFT, Apple, or a couple of others that we laymen don’t recognize, will suddenly and unpredictably pull ahead on mindshare and/or pull ahead on tech capability. At which point they will absolutely run away with the burgeoning market. So they’ll be Facebook to the other guys’ MySpace.
They are totally in an arms race with each other where they’re each pushing as hard as possible as long as possible for more usage share until they emerge victorious or collapse in exhaustion.
“The Revolution” won’t be the workers rising up against the capitalist class; it will be the mass of humanity seizing ownership of the cornucopia machines from the stockholders.
Unless it fails. In which case we will have a scenario out of a science-fiction movie: on the one hand some people living in imperial luxury in their mile-high skyscraper arcologies with their flying cars and robot butlers; while down on the ground beyond the minefield and sentry gun perimeter will be the scavengers scrabbling through the rubble for rats to eat.
I think it is even more intrusive than that. The dirty open secret about advertising is that it is mostly ineffective except in very particular cases, and the kind of scattershot advertising—even the more targeted ads that sites get by collecting your data and tracking what you click on or purchase—is largely a waste of time, and end up becoming background noise or ‘content’ that users learn to skip over or mute away. What advertisers really desire, and want to be able to sell to their customers, is engagement; that is, the ability to actively persuade viewers to go out and buy the products or services they are advertising such that they can statistically guarantee a yield in more sales for their customer.
The end goal of AI agents (for this purpose) is that it can actually interpret your emotional state and proclivities and target a particular product/service with a a catch that you impulsively respond to without rational though or consideration. An agent that can have a dialogue with you and ‘read’ your responses based upon a statistical model of your behavior can sell you ice cream on a winter day. And of course, this is what the ‘algorithms’ on social media platforms like Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X, Instagram, et cetera are doing, just at a more aggregated level. Of course, this can be—and quite evidently has been—used for nefarious purposes beyond emptying your bank account on useless purchases that give you a fleeting sense of fulfillment.
That is why people are spending tens of billions on AI. Although some may have utopian dreams about perfect computer-governed worlds free of unsatisfied needs or resource conflicts (as if ‘AI’ can just create new resources instead of being more efficient at gobbling up and utilizing the limited energy and material resources of the physical world), the fiscal goal of these companies is to enslave people by impulse into buying shit and otherwise creating ‘economic value’ for these companies and those using their services. Their ideal is to have an AI agent with the smooth calming tones of Jon Hamm directly addressing you with the message, “Everything will be alright…if you buy this product/service” and leave you teary-eyed and thankful for its insight.
And if you have a dozen companies making pickles, each with revenue forecasts which assume that not only will everyone buy their pickles and hamburger consumption will rise to support it, companies will push burger consumption, but someday people will figure out that the consumer won’t eat five burgers a day to support the forecasts. And pickle stock prices will be in a pickle.
I saw all this happening in 1999 and 2000. I heard a VP from Intel make incredible serve sales forecasts. My company made servers, and we were selling them as fast as we could make them. Then it stopped. AI will follow the same trajectory, and lots of people will lose a lot of money from being overly optimistic.
Or maybe it is less pickles and more junk food: somehow the more cheap sweeteners are available the more people eat. They are trying to follow the path Apple took several times: creating a demand for something that never existed before and ending with people not being able to go without.
Adobe (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc) has already incorporated AI into virtually all its products. Their stock repository has AI-generated images, created subject to Adobe’s self-governing algorithms: no gory/bloody imagery, no child porn, no trademarked imagery such as Einstein’s face, etc.
I use generative fills to edit images frequently. My company’s branding guidelines specify what type of hero (model) to use in our marketing campaigns. If I find an image that satisfies most but not all of our requirements, I can make adjustments with AI. For instance, if a campaign wants to target a more casual audience, I can have the hero wear an open-collar shirt instead of a tie.
AI is also used to trace plagiarism much more extensively than before. It can even determine if text is AI-generated.
The OP is grousing because they felt they were doing their own quality control just fine, but they’re sounding like old timers who didn’t see any reason to switch from typewriters to computers. Your own personal projects may suit you just fine, but if you’re looking for work in today’s technological environment, you’re going to have to get used to AI or be left far behind.
I am wondering however: given that you’ve posted that, does your conscious insight into this process immunize you against such manipulation, or are you saying that even knowing that this is what’s happening, you’re helpless to resist it?
Very much this. Someone is going to get there first, wherever ‘there’ is (Could be domination of the market. Could be the destruction of the human race. We’re not sure), but they fear there is no prize for second place, and now they have all piled huge resource and cost into the race, they have to run it.
Another angle, from the creative side of things. One of the big issues in the actors strike last year was the use of AI, which studios are keen to exploit. Actors are being asked to sign away likeness rights: get a body scan, put in in the hard drive and then HAL can stick them in any movie without the pesky little problem of paying them.
If we’re not there already, we’re within a few years, I’m sure, of going to a website, and clicking a bunch of boxes to say “I want to see a romantic comedy set in San Francisco in the 1940s starring 1974 James Coburn, 2003 Dwayne Johnson and today’s Natalie Portman, the score sounds like it’s by Hans Zimmer, and there’s a monkey for comedic relief somewhere in the plot.” then punch in your credit card number, and sit back to watch that movie. No actors, directors, writers, cinematographers or background players have been paid, and aside from the processing power, it’s all profit. The studios are desperate for this to happen.
