Gen AI Used In Making Crazy Taxi World Tour

[Shadow1980]

Captain Explosion. Norion. Since the two of you can't get along, you need to stop interacting with each other. I don't care who gets in the final word in your exchange, because I'm getting the final word in. Disengage from each other. Find someone else to talk to. Hell, I'll volunteer myself, because I do have my own two cents to add to some of what you both said.

CaptainExplosion said:

You want a world where everybody loses their job to automation? You realize what a dystopian nightmare that is? People can't buy houses without jobs. And then robots will see humans as effectively useless and destroy us all.

Things are definitely going to suck big time if this "A.I." garbage isn't reigned in and soon, but I doubt it will result in any kind of Terminator-esque scenario where the machines become sentient and try to wipe us out. The idea of sentient A.I. gone rogue is great fodder for dystopian sci-fi, but I really doubt it's even remotely plausible. The real harm is far more banal yet no less terrifying. The already-emerging impacts on culture, the economy, and the environment are horrible enough to justify banning the stuff. Humanity is absolutely not prepared for a post-labor society that starts to emerge while capitalism is still the dominant economic system globally (even in nominally "communist" countries these days, since except maybe North Korea they've effectively adopted market systems).

It's like how the real eco-villains aren't the Saturday morning caricatures seen in shows like Captain Planet. They're just guys in suits looking over quarterly earnings and deciding the best way to make the line go up. They aren't destroying the environment for shits & giggles. They're doing it because that's just the cost of doing business. Their entire business model is predicated on the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels, just like how the entire business model of the tobacco industry is predicated on getting as many people smoking as many cigarettes as possible.

Real evil is far more boring yet far more insidious than your typical comic book villain. Gordon Gekko was probably one of the more realistic villains in a film. He just wanted to make a lot of money. The incentives of the economic system in which he operated made it to where he acted in not just unethical but flat-out illegal means, and to where he just didn't give a shit that he did so, and he dragged others down with him, all because, in his own words, "Greed is good." And so it goes in real-life with the motley assortment of billionaires in the Fortune 500 list. They're not out to hurt us. They just when their actions do cause harm they do not and cannot care because of the incentives of capitalism.

And even when someone is initially well-meaning, the pursuit of wealth can still harm people, and leads people to continue doing that harmful thing. John Hammond from Jurassic Park comes to mind as a notable fictional example. He and his scientists discovered they could clone dinosaurs, and the first thing Hammond sought to do with it was create a zoo. He didn't see anything profound. He saw a business opportunity and could not wait to profit off of this new technology instead of using it to make the world a better place. Because of his hubris, he got several people killed. InGen kept pursuing his work and that line of business anyway for over 20 years, predictably resulting in even more deaths. In real life, some things were invented in good faith to solve an actual problem, but when that solution was discovered to have its own problems, harming or killing thousands, they preferred inaction because to change course would harm the bottom line. Tetraethyllead and chlorofluorocarbons come to mind. The manufacturers made those things to solve real issues (engine knocking for TEL, replacing toxic gases used as early refrigerants for CFCs), it was found out that their solutions had their own problems (lead poisoning; ozone depletion), and instead of immediately finding something to replace those things fought tooth and nail to avoid any further changes to their business model. They basically had to be forced to phase those things out by governments. Those phase-outs are among the biggest public health and environmental protection success stories in my lifetime, and show that government can work for the people. The only thing needed is public pressure and political will by elected officials.

Norion said:

Thinking it'd be a dystopian nightmare cause people wouldn't be able to buy houses shows that you're unable to think beyond capitalism and envision a future world massively different than the present so no different than the people a long time ago who thought that feudalism was the best system there was ever gonna be. A future society where people are able to do whatever they want with their time cause robots are doing all required labour is a concept that has been thought about for a long time so equating envisioning that optimistic future with being paid off by AI companies is laughable. 

If you think humanity is thinking about post-labor without also thinking about a post-capitalism world, well, that's like saying you can get a good-quality brand-new 4-bedroom house in Boca Raton for only $50,000. It just ain't happening. The businesses pushing for "A.I." and other novel forms of automation (like fully-automated restaurants and retail stores) aren't concerned about the long-term consequences of a society where increasingly large portions of the population are permanently unemployable. What's going to happen when unemployment permanently stays over 10%? 20%? 50%? Who's going to take care of those people? "Oh, we'll just have a UBI!" Well, who's going to pay for it? The tax burden needed to finance a system where large swathes of the population are totally dependent on government money will have to fall increasingly on the wealthy people who enabled permanent mass unemployment in the first place. You really think they're going to agree to such a thing after spending decades successfully convincing governments around the world (esp. the U.S., where most of these countries are headquartered) to continually slash their taxes? This is to say nothing of the environmental impact of data centers, and the inflationary pressures they have on certain consumer goods.

The capitalist class, the people who own the means of production, are not going to do anything to abolish the very system that made them wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. In the process of accumulating their wealth, they often times took a lot of shortcuts and did a lot of exploitation, making bank on the suffering of others. They frequently got a big leg up from the state in the form of bailouts, subsidies, tax breaks, deregulation, and the occasional CIA-backed coup of a non-compliant foreign government ("socialism for me, but not for thee" might as well be the motto of Corporate America). In the 19th & early 20th centuries it was the banana republics, abusive company towns that paid their employees in scrip ("St. Peter, don't you call me because I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store."), horrifically unsafe working conditions, and literal murder of employees for daring to go on strike. Today it's fossil fuel companies ignoring the negative externalities of their products or tech giants unleashing and forcing upon everyone possibly one of the most existentially dangerous technologies since the invention of the atom bomb.

The amount of misery inflicted by the insatiable greed of wealthy business owners is incalculable. There just seems to be something about becoming ultra-wealthy that turns people into sociopaths. They seem to view the rest of humanity as disposable, expendable cogs in a big money-printing machine, and now they're trying to find ways of making those cogs unnecessary in the first place by automating as much as possible. They've always viewed every employee as a drain on the bottom line, and if they could find a way to not have any employees, they'd do it, damn the consequences to society and its future, because there's profit to be made this fiscal year. They aren't in the business of being "job creators." They're in the business of making the line go up. They've always looked for way to cut overhead. Layoffs. Slashing wages & benefits. Offshoring. The aforementioned company towns where workers weren't even paid actual money. Use of literal slave labor. And now various forms of automation that threaten to make most of humanity obsolete. Big Tech is constantly trying to find ways of inventing something to allow corporations around the world to at least implicitly say "We never wanted you in the first place. We hired you because we needed you, but now we don't need you or anyone else at all."

Before "A.I." hit, people were hopefully that automation might finally free us of the drudgery of most everyday grunt work, giving us more free time to do the jobs we actually want to do rather than the ones we need to do just to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. But one of the first things Silicon Valley did was create this "A.I." garbage, showing that even the jobs that people actually wanted to do aren't safe. Because the arts & entertainment have been fully commodified by the capitalist mode of production, there's probably plenty of execs in the film, TV, music, video game, and literature industries looking for ways to make "actor," "artist," "costume designer," "prop maker," "writer," "programmer," and all the various titles you see in the credits of every creative work to no longer be actual jobs people are paid money for. And Big Tech is coming for a bunch of other jobs, too, and lots of businesses will be glad to avail themselves of the latest job-destroying tech. They'll pat themselves on the back for being geniuses for cutting nearly all of their overhead, all while society collapses around them because we haven't moved past the capitalist mode of productions. Meanwhile, politicians and frauds will continue to produce fake bullshit with this "A.I." slop, because it vastly streamlines the process of creating propaganda and altering historical records (Stalin would cream his pants if he could see what authoritarian politicians are doing with "A.I."), and that's to say nothing of the other harms this technology can wreak upon us.

Humans are notoriously poor long-term planners, and nowhere is that more obvious than in corporate capitalism, where the only thing that matters is that this fiscal quarter is bigger than the last, and that everything gives as much ROI as quickly as possible. All other considerations are secondary. The rest of us are expendable in the face of the capitalists' overriding need to see the line go up. It's like they have this attitude of "We'll cross that bridge when we get to it, and if there's no bridge to cross because we burned it down, oh well. Tough shit. I'll either be dead of old age or can weather the collapse in my fully-automated billionaire bunker. But right now there's money to be made and the line will go up come hell or high water."

But you can only keep kicking people to the curb and treating the rest of society like shit under the attitude of "not my problem" for so long before it does in fact become your problem. That's the problem with any sort of unsustainable system. You can only kick the can down the road so far before you run into a dead end, and then everybody's wondering "Well, now what?" even though they were warned years if not decades earlier of the consequences, just like with climate change.

If we keep going down this path with this new technological terror Silicon Valley unleashed on us and is trying to force down our throats, this ain't going to end up like the "fully-automated space communism" of Star Trek. As long as capitalists and authoritarian governments have this tech at their disposal, the only outcome is dystopia, not utopia. Capitalism, at least in the form it exists in presently, must die for humanity to live. Small mom & pop businesses are fine, and what Smith had in mind when he wrote Wealth of Nations 250 years ago. They typically lack the same "growth at any cost" mindset of a publicly-traded corporation. Think of a local eatery or hair salon or hardware store that's been continually running the same singular location for decades, making good money with reliable clientele because the incentives are a bit different when your main source of accountability is the community, i.e., the owner and his customers having to look each other in the eye when doing business. It's a lot different than the owner being sequestered away in an executive suite and feeling his only accountability is towards the shareholders.

TL;DR: Fuck "A.I." It should be banned by law, the data centers torn down, and something useful like affordable housing or public parks put in their place, or just let nature reclaim the lot. I don't trust the people hawking this tech any further than I can throw them.