#Post-Labor

[realcleverscience]

The End (of work) is Nigh!

It takes human a long time to become workers, especially trained professionals. We're looking at 20-30 years to accumulate the necessary knowledge, wisdom, and skills.

Meanwhile, AI's abilities are growing incredibly quickly.

I don't know how to do a 1:1 comparison, but it seems like AIs are roughly doubling their abilities every 6 months or so. This is one reason why many in the field believe we are close to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), and then it'll be just a matter of months till we start to hit ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence).

No-one knows for certain how long this will take. It could be this year; it could be 10 years. But it's quickly on the way.

And most significantly, I personally don't think it'll take 20-30 years to reach AGI, which means that anyone being born today is, seemingly, unlikely to have any jobs to do when they're 25 in the year 2050, as the AIs should pretty much have everything covered by then.

Again, I'm not a prophet. I don't know this for certain, but it certainly seems to be where we're heading, and I find it a fascinating thought.

[politijohn]

Source

Source

[outer-space-youtube]

Learn to Use AI?

Julia shows us how to be ready for a Post-Labor Society. Basically you should learn how to use AI Agents to advance your abilities, be it your EQ or extraordinary quarks. The one thing you need is not to be afraid to learn how to use ANI. Use app.vectorshift.ai to learn how to create custom pipelines with a “free try” pipeline that lets you use to find how to, before buying in to gain access to…

[violetheart77]

that time of year again

[renthony]

I know people love "Waffle House Index" jokes, but please remember that Waffle House workers have talked about the company's blatant disregard for their safety. Waffle House SHOULD be closed when a storm is coming, just like everything else non-essential. Waffle House refusing to close until the last minute is a genuine labor rights issue.

This article from last year talks a little about the ways Waffle House workers have tried to organize to protect themselves from the company. Waffle House being open in a dangerous storm means that the workers can't evacuate or prioritize their own safety. And that's really, really fucked.

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[hashtagloveloses]

NEW UNION JUST DROPPED

LET'S GOOOOOOO

[maigetheplatypus57]

Do you think Evbo learned how to do those jumps and thought "oh this is so sick what's the best way I can show off my parkour skills"

[felassan]

SAG AFTRA news update:

"SAG-AFTRA Members Who Work on Video Games Go on Strike July 25th A.I. Protections Remain the Sticking Point SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director & Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, acting under the authority delegated by the SAG-AFTRA National Board, and with the unanimous advice and counsel of the Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Committee, called a strike of the Interactive Media Agreement, effective July 26 at 12:01 a.m. Today’s vote to strike comes after more than a year and a half of negotiations without a deal. The convenience bargaining group with whom SAG-AFTRA is negotiating includes Activision Productions Inc., Blindlight LLC, Disney Character Voices Inc., Electronic Arts Productions Inc., Formosa Interactive LLC, Insomniac Games Inc., Llama Productions LLC, Take 2 Productions Inc., VoiceWorks Productions Inc., and WB Games Inc. Any game looking to employ SAG-AFTRA talent to perform covered work must sign on to the new Tiered-Budget Independent Interactive Media Agreement, the Interim Interactive Media Agreement or the Interim Interactive Localization Agreement. These agreements offer critical A.I. protections for members. Negotiations began in October 2022 and on Sept. 24, 2023, SAG-AFTRA members approved a video game strike authorization with a 98.32% yes vote. Although agreements have been reached on many issues important to SAG-AFTRA members, the employers refuse to plainly affirm, in clear and enforceable language, that they will protect all performers covered by this contract in their A.I. language. “We’re not going to consent to a contract that allows companies to abuse A.I. to the detriment of our members. Enough is enough. When these companies get serious about offering an agreement our members can live — and work — with, we will be here, ready to negotiate,” stated SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher.   “The video game industry generates billions of dollars in profit annually. The driving force behind that success is the creative people who design and create those games. That includes the SAG-AFTRA members who bring memorable and beloved game characters to life, and they deserve and demand the same fundamental protections as performers in film, television, streaming, and music: fair compensation and the right of informed consent for the A.I. use of their faces, voices, and bodies. Frankly, it’s stunning that these video game studios haven’t learned anything from the lessons of last year - that our members can and will stand up and demand fair and equitable treatment with respect to A.I., and the public supports us in that,” said Crabtree-Ireland. “Eighteen months of negotiations have shown us that our employers are not interested in fair, reasonable A.I. protections, but rather flagrant exploitation. We refuse this paradigm – we will not leave any of our members behind, nor will we wait for sufficient protection any longer. We look forward to collaborating with teams on our Interim and Independent contracts, which provide A.I. transparency, consent and compensation to all performers, and to continuing to negotiate in good faith with this bargaining group when they are ready to join us in the world we all deserve." said Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Committee Chair Sarah Elmaleh.  For more information and to search whether a video game is struck, please visit sagaftra.org/videogamestrike."

[source]

[captainjonnitkessler]

Do you guys notice how when Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers union, started planning a general strike, he did it by a) targeting his messaging towards unions with the ability to safely and effectively strike in large numbers, b) laid out a clear, actionable plan for those unions to follow (setting contracts to all expire at the same time, since many unions cannot strike while under contract), c) is using union contracts to set clear, actionable demands that can be met in order to gauge success and provide an end goal, and d) started organizing FOUR YEARS before the proposed strike date to give people the chance to plan accordingly, because it takes a really freaking long time to get tens of millions of people organized?

You notice how he didn't do it by slapping a message on Twitter saying 'hey nobody go to work on Monday, that'll really show 'em'?

[realcleverscience]

Unitree's latest robot really showing off the advancements in humanoid walking abilities for robots. This is a really big deal, since our environments are built for walking, this ability will make robots a LOT more versatile. That said, there are still improvements to be made, and more challenging tasks, such as climbing a ladder or managing on ice, but I'm pretty sure those will be solved soon as well.

Of course, there's also a ton of progress being made on vision abilities, both physically (e.g. lidar) and "mentally" (with ai).

It seems the last major piece to solve is hands. The dexterity of human hands is remarkable and has always been challenging for general purpose robots. Amazon briefly hosted a competition to improve grasping abilities, and since then we've seen a lot of improvement, but nothing that seems ready for prime time on the level of human hands. That said, with recent advancements in physical tech and ai, that domino may soon fall as well.

Personally, this is kinda shocking. I figured robotics would lag behind ai for at least a few years, but it seems it's catching up quickly, in part by piggybacking on recent ai successes, both in upgrading robots' abilities and equally important, in researching solutions to current robotics challenges. (e.g. training robots in ai powered digital environments.)

I know a lot of people in blue collar jobs laugh at the notion of a robot doing their work professionally. I think this is in part rooted in the public's perception of robots as still being extremely stupid and clunky and not remotely as dextrous as humans. And that was true for a very long time. But that is very quickly changing. And robots don't need to be as dextrous as humans to start taking jobs; they just need to be able to do it at an economically viable cost. (e.g. it may take twice as long to hammer a nail, but if it costs half as much to "hire" them, it's still economical.) Lastly, once robots have the *physical* ability to do a job, they'll largely be limited by their "cognitive" abilities, but those are likely to improve at the rate of ai improvement, which is basically doubling every 6 months. So even without upgrading them physically, the robots are likely to improve their skills at exponential rates.

Buckle up.

[politijohn]

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

anyone else have multiple traumatic memories associated specifically with holidays/family vacations? because that is a topic I never see discussed in all the So You Had A Shitty Childhood, Now What? self-help books i've been reading. but for me, it was a significant thing. and the more i think about it the more it seems like this would be an (unfortunately) common experience. would be grateful to hear if this matches other peoples' experiences...

[waitineedaname]

now that i've finished tgcf i can make memes about all three books! i was tempted to put binghe at the absolute center because he could easily go into any quadrant at different points in his life, and both lwj and hua cheng could swing jock, but i think the most important thing is that wei wuxian is all four at once. somehow.

[fixing-bad-posts]

mail carriers are skilled workers. union mentality babyyy.