People have objected to training their replacements since forever. Younger people, foreigners, now machines. What else is new?<p>I don't think you are under any moral or ethical obligation to train your replacement. But I don't think the decision makes much of a difference one way or another in the grand scheme of things.<p>> You may ask: Why would anyone agree to train an AI model in the very skills they took years to acquire?<p>If they could actually do it, I would be all over it! If you can save humanity from having to spend years acquiring these skills and judgements, they can do something else with their lives.
Just like how the car gave us back so many more hours to spend actually living instead of working. And the washing machine. And the computer. And the Internet.
>actually living...<p>Watching TV...Or consuming social media..
The washing machine and dishwasher definitely did.<p>I don't own a car, so I can't comment on that.
> they can do something else with their lives.<p>Let them eat cake.
I don't want to attack your good faith in humanity, so I will ask another way - if a system was reliant on workers, what reason would there be for those workers to exist , after their work became automated?
Unfortunately, the mass of people, in general, have very little self determination or descretion. People go with trends and crowds. That's a low resistance path, which does not require you to support your decisions. The trend will support your decisions.<p>So, the phenomenon will continue. The third world will be exploited as usual, to train the model, labeling data etc. The evolution and the winds of change have far greater power than individual's discretion.
Even if you think you don't have enough impact, reflecting on these issues is better than blindly jumping into the trend.<p>Reminds me a bit of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Job-Went-India-Pragmatic-Programmers/dp/0976694018" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Job-Went-India-Pragmatic-Programmers/...</a> tbh (look when that came out), not nearly the same scale but similar questions...
If it is that or starve, the I would probably have taken the job. But yeah, if there where alternatives, no thanks.
Hasn’t that always been the case? Companies have replaced their labour with cheaper alternatives from the other part of the world for decades.<p>Now the only difference is that they replace you with a machine instead of a human.
I believe the people currently at the frontier for ai training as either one of 2 types. First who are genuine freaks of nature and have an obsession to see the epitome of this technology, the other is people who have genuine malicious intent and probably hope that the ai replaces human. The former usually don't mean to do this, but in their obsession it results in the outcome of ai replace skills workers
It's nice, but it won't change anything, there will be always someone willing to do it. It's not exactly trolley problem, where maybe significant majority could agree on not training AI.<p>> Traditionally, this decision was made by humans, but now AI has taken over, and decides who gets hired<p>Btw. this would be illegal in EU, you have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing.
I dissent from the comments currently here, and give the author kudos for doing what's right even to his detriment, which is much more than can be said for anyone taking a corporate job
I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think it's an effective orientation to a future world where the AI will be trained anyway.<p>Also, I don't think a PHD of Industrial Sociology is really a job anyone needs to have done, so it's unlikely anyone will bother training an AI to do it. That doesn't mean I think studying Industrial Sociology is worthless, I just think it's unlikely anyone will fund training an AI to do it. Besides, is that even how AI's are trained? By some professor somewhere teaching them how to do his/her job before being replaced? That's like how it worked in Player Piano by Vonnegut, but it's not how they actually work.
Here's a very strong take on the situation, more for discussion than a true representation of my own beliefs:<p>The ML models will be trained as long as we as the human society in charge allow them to be trained. Progress only happens if society allows it to happen. The commercial AI proponents are trying to do an end-run around societal adjustments, forcing change at a speed that is to fast for proper responses. It could be interpreted as a malicious attack. We, the people, could collectively decide to slow them down or to make them stop. Their hope is to confront us with a done deal before any opposition has found the resolve and organization to do anything meaningful about it.<p>We, collectively, need to decide where to draw the lines on this technology and we need to decide fast.
Pretty naive take.<p>EU and US are slowing down while China doesn't slow down. In fact, they are pushing harder after gathering so much info from workers, and facial recognitions set in place for half a decade.
I don't think society has enough power to control what billionaires spend their money on. The promise of AI is such an attractive nuisance for power seekers that trying to crack down on it will just force it underground, where it will be developed with even less care and oversight than it is now.<p>Our institutions aren't even able to control what dirt-poor pirates do on hardware they own. How in the heck are they going to be able to control what incomprehensibly-rich people do? They can purchase political favors from whichever nations are selling them.
Is society in charge of them? Or is it a small collective of people?<p>Edit: Typo
> We, collectively, need to decide where to draw the lines on this technology and we need to decide fast.<p>I hope you, collectively, don't start deciding what deodorants I can wear. (Like Bernie Sanders infamously brought up.) Or what toys my daughter can play with. (As Donald Trump wanted.)
Based on <a href="https://annas-archive.pk/blog/physical-destruction.html" rel="nofollow">https://annas-archive.pk/blog/physical-destruction.html</a> I wouldn't assume being in a niche is enough.
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