Co-worker: I'm sure AI can do XYZ. It's all well documented. How hard could it be?
Me: I'm not convinced. I'm happy to be proven wrong but I'm not going to take it on faith.
Co-worker: 😶
... two minutes later ...
Co-worker: If only it could write my statement of work for me. That's my least favorite part of my job.
Me: So why do you want that to be your whole job?
Co-worker: ...
It's really not that hard, people. 🙄
Ya'know what else really bugs me?
After staring at me for a few seconds dumbfounded, struggling to find an answer to the question, he said something like, "I like talking to people." Then, realizing that talking to people wasn't a job, he clarified, "I like talking to people about what my AI will do."
Y'all... These people just want to be slaveholders. They want to have this amazing AI servant that just does whatever they want and they want their job to be to sit around with the other white AI guys and talk about what their AIs are doing. They want to live like a southern plantation holder.
It's not because we've created this great thing that helps people get work done. We haven't. It's because we've created this hype and propaganda machine that's giving white dude with dreams of power a technoboner.
@faithisleaping Yeah, well, they always wanted to replace women with docile somethings as well:
https://abiawomosu.substack.com/p/they-built-stepford-ai-and-called
@ics Yeah, I'm getting very very tired of it.
I'm sure I'll survive. At the end of this apocalypse, people with actual skills will be able to take those skills to the bank. But it's gonna be rough in the mean time.
@ics Yup!
And, honestly, this is nothing new. I've been dealing with managers with unrealistic expectations and asshole white guy engineers with skills the size of a pea and an ego the size of the moon my entire career. They're all feeling incredibly empowered by the AI hype but it's nothing new.
You know what's absolutely delicious? Watching those pea-brained engineers come crawling back years later.
Sometimes the tastiest dishes take the longest and the most heat to prepare.
@JessTheUnstill @faithisleaping @ics
Oh hai. Coming up on two years, pretty sure I’m going to cut and run on the whole getting paid to write software thing. Cause I need to get paid period.
@faithisleaping
I have the same thoughts about why so many of them are so invested in "humanoid robots" - which are by far the worst solution to any problem.
I think it really does boil down to a desire to be a slave owner
I definitely think feelings of power and dominance factor into the #HumanoidRobots craze, especially amongst the type of people who tend to be billionaires.
However, playing devil's advocate, our houses and all the other spaces we create are designed with the human form in mind, and a robot that is shaped and moves like a human requires no changes to those spaces to operate within them, so they are definitely not the worst idea in many (entirely hypothetical) cases.
I would just like to point out that the autopilot in an aircraft isn't shaped like a human, but like a box to fit in an avionics rack, your dishwasher is a robot and shaped like a box that fits under the counter, and your floor-cleaning robot is flat and shaped to get under furniture
We have centuries of "robots" doing work, and have never needed them to be shaped like us in order to do their job effectively. Other than sex-worker, I have never seen a use case
@screwturn @faithisleaping How well is your Roomba vacuuming the stairs?
And yes, if houses are built with robots in mind, they will not need to be humanoid. They will have a track along the ceiling to move between rooms, but it will be a while before the majority of houses will support that.
And again, I do not think humanoid robots are a good idea, especially when the main use case is replacing human workers because you don't like the color of their skin or the country they are from.
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