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Fails to make a prediction. Not even wrong!

What work DO you want the humans to do?

The endless complaining and goalposting shifting is exhausting


The people already doing this work today already do exactly that.

There's no goalpost shifting here - it's l'art pour l'art at its finest. It'd be introducing an agent where no additional agent agent is required in the first place, i.e. telling a farmer how to do their job, when they already now how to and do it in the first place.

No one needs an LLM if you can just lease some land and then tell some person to tend to it, (i.e. doing the actual work). It's baffling to me how out of touch with reality some people are.

Want to grow corn? Take some corn, put it in the ground in your backyard and harvest when it's ready. Been there, done that, not a challenge at all. Want to do it at scale? Lease some land, buy some corn, contract a farmer to till the land, sow the corn, and eventually harvest it. Done. No LLM required. No further knowledge required. Want to know when the best time for each step is? Just look at when other farmers in the area are doing it. Done.


You've told the humans:

"Stop staring at screens"

"Stop sitting at your desk all day"

"Stop loafing around contributing nothing just sending orders from behind a computer"

"Touch grass"

but now that the humans are finally gonna get out and DO something you're outraged


So the choice is either stare into screens the whole day or be bossed by an AI doing manual labor? Is that a serious argument?

"Can AI grow corn?"

Let's step back.

"there's a gap between digital and physical that AI can't cross"

Can intelligence of ANY kind, artificial or natural, grow corn? Do physical things?

Your brain is trapped in its skull. How does it do anything physical?

With nerves, of course. Connected to muscle. It's sending and receiving signals, that's all its doing! The brain isn't actually doing anything!

The history of humanity's last 300k years tells you that intelligence makes a difference, even though it isn't doing anything but receiving and sending signals.


I can't tell which side you're arguing here. But if the AI was strapped onto a roomba that rolled around and planted, watered and harvested the corn, I would count that.

It's extremely funny to me but this is basically the literal premise of season two of Person of Interest. Yeah d'uh it's just a computer how would it actually do anything? Well it just goes ahead and tells people to do stuff and wires them money. Easy.

Though a computer could also just control robots that actually plant, weed, water, and harvest the corn. That's a pretty big difference from just 'coordinating' the work.

An AI that can also plant corn itself (via robots it controls) is much more impressive to me than an AI just send emails.


Yes, absolutely. And further still, handle the assembly and manufacturing up the supply chain; like factorio.

Read all the comments in this thread from farmers or farm-adjacent people.

the corn seed is a program source file

Agreed, it was weird. They were like "yay Obama" and maybe trying to lock him in to doing peaceful things by giving him a pre-emptive prize.

They strayed from meaningful principles and now they are reaping what they've sown.


Came here to say this, I really appreciated "How to Fail At Almost Everything and Still Win Big".

I'm not here to judge the man or everything he did, I'm here to say thanks for the stuff I loved.


> Typically, before people are put in a leadership role directing humans, they will get a lot of leadership training teaching them the skills and tools needed to lead successfully.

I question this.


I wish this interesting story was related to the article.


Wow this is awesome, the AI discussion has the depth and flavor and variety of real discussions online I've seen about my product. https://news.ysimulator.run/item/154


i ask "what details does the piece offer about how to make the proposed alternative happen?"

===

i'm told "Almost none.

The only concrete mechanisms mentioned are:

Founding worker-owned cooperatives instead of equity-based startups.

Raising capital as loans rather than selling equity.

“Creative ways to solve the political problem of capitalists’ monopoly on capital.” This is referenced but not elaborated.

No operational steps, no policy proposals, no institutional models, no financing frameworks, no examples of working co-op ecosystems, no strategy for scaling co-ops, and no plan to change investor incentives."

===

Dear author, please come back with more specific recommendations. I'm curious what you think early stage startup founders and funders should be doing instead of what they're currently doing. I think you want founders and funders to effectively make massively unilateral economic concessions to early employees, since they are "labor". And then you want those early employees to in turn make massive unilateral concessions to later employees because those are "labor" too.

But what about the rest of labor in society?

Why not instead have massive tax rates on the gains, so that all of society's labor can get in on the fruits, rather than the startups relatively few employees?


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