"The irony that we are automating the production of art, instead of the jobs everybody hates shouldn't be lost on us." Clickbaity title, but a good video regardless about currents state of machine...
"The irony that we are automating the production of art, instead of the jobs everybody hates shouldn't be lost on us."
Clickbaity title, but a good video regardless about currents state of machine learning and its downsides.
In my opinion worth the time to watch.
Ironically it popped up because of Youtubes recommendation algorithm.
He was able to put some of my unordered thoughts and ideas about current ML into a more cohesive video.
I mostly care about the workers and human rights parts, especially how they were and are violated to make ML grow commercially, and what the "AI Apocalypse" will more likely be. - Mostly a boring and mundane narrowing down of human life and behavior into numbers, statistics and cost centers.
There is other interesting info in it. I don't agree with everything, but I found it to be a good opinion in general and it gave some food for thought.
Always hilarious to me when people finally freak out about automation because now "it's taking jobs that actually matter!!!" I'm sure all the millions of people who have lost their jobs or career...
Always hilarious to me when people finally freak out about automation because now "it's taking jobs that actually matter!!!" I'm sure all the millions of people who have lost their jobs or career growth opportunities to AI or other computer automations are very interested to hear that only their boring jobs should be replaced, not the super important artists. Fuck anyone who doesn't want to be a creative and just enjoys their mundane job I guess
I think the difference is a bit more nuanced than "jobs that matter". People aspire to draw, people don't necessarily aspire to man a cash register. Robots are good a automating the mundane stuff,...
I think the difference is a bit more nuanced than "jobs that matter". People aspire to draw, people don't necessarily aspire to man a cash register. Robots are good a automating the mundane stuff, but don't aspire to be creative.
There is certainly some gray areas like truck driving (most don't really LIKE driving, but then again many do in fact enjoy it) but I think there is a much more interesting conversation to have about aspirational values here that is lost when we boil it down to "first they came for the cashiers..."
I can tell you from first hand experience there's a lot of jobs between cashier and artist that got lost to AI/Computers already. Besides, there are many people who have no creative talent or...
I can tell you from first hand experience there's a lot of jobs between cashier and artist that got lost to AI/Computers already. Besides, there are many people who have no creative talent or aspirations who don't have much of a chance to do anything in a creative field
Indeed. that's why I listed one gray area. It's a spectrum and we should treat it as such. Sure, that again is just one aspect on the extreme end of the spectrum. Some want to do sports, some want...
Indeed. that's why I listed one gray area. It's a spectrum and we should treat it as such.
there are many people who have no creative talent or aspirations who don't have much of a chance to do anything in a creative field
Sure, that again is just one aspect on the extreme end of the spectrum. Some want to do sports, some want to travel, some want to be otherwise extraordinary in society. I feel It doesn't take away from my point to not have an exhaustive list of every career aspect.
Is there some specific field you wanted me to talk about?
I think most artists would prefer that artist wasn’t a job at all, that people could pursue art as much as they wanted without fear of having to make conformist commercial product to live off it....
I think most artists would prefer that artist wasn’t a job at all, that people could pursue art as much as they wanted without fear of having to make conformist commercial product to live off it. But that’s not the world we live in.
That's been my biggest noticeable bone of contention with the "AI revolution". We've automated (or were trying to) the very means of what it actually means to be human. Yeah yeah, we're always...
That's been my biggest noticeable bone of contention with the "AI revolution". We've automated (or were trying to) the very means of what it actually means to be human.
Yeah yeah, we're always going to make music... Art... What have you, but so much is actually reliant in making money with that.
We should be automating the inane, boring, pointless jobs we all have and actual exist and live better lives.
But apparently that doesn't fit the needs of the aristocratic/tech bro class who want you to work to the bone.
We’re doing both. The industry term for automating office tasks is RPA (robotic process automation). There are various companies already selling primitive versions of this. But within a few years...
We’re doing both. The industry term for automating office tasks is RPA (robotic process automation). There are various companies already selling primitive versions of this. But within a few years I’m sure we’ll have a pretty robust solution to most data entry tasks and other relatively thoughtless jobs.
Also I’m convinced that making compelling art requires more than just matching a prompt. You’d need AGI to produce Into the Spiderverse with computers. But the class of work of “Please give me a photo/cartoon of X for my small business” is already dying.
I'm aware of RPA. We're not even close to using that in so many businesses. We automate such fucking pointless piece when we do! Most businesses don't even understand their own processes, nor do...
I'm aware of RPA. We're not even close to using that in so many businesses. We automate such fucking pointless piece when we do!
Most businesses don't even understand their own processes, nor do they want data and tech teams to decode them. Despite the fact that they could liberate us all from boring nonsense work. Granted said work only profits the top dogs anyway, so we really need some governance that now says RPA/GAI/Automation needs to scale back hours and not jobs. At least until we get sorted.
As for the GAI notion? Nah. If you can run a graphDB against an ontology of terms combined with GenAi, I reckon you could augment some serious prompt engineering against it.
Granted. Much of the AI debate is fictional at the moment. Most organisations are barely in any state to use basic structured data, let alone complex AI/ML products.
I'm pretty sure this is being done quite a lot, but people just find the art and text generation stuff a lot more interesting to talk about, so the topic is in the news more. Also, there's the...
We should be automating the inane, boring, pointless jobs we all have and actual exist and live better lives.
I'm pretty sure this is being done quite a lot, but people just find the art and text generation stuff a lot more interesting to talk about, so the topic is in the news more.
Also, there's the idea that things that are possible for computers to do don't necessarily line up with our expectations. There are things we humans would intuit should have been automated before art, but it turns out that art and prose are more doable by computers than many of us expected.
I don't think the rich or the tech bros are deliberately focusing on less useful technologies, just what is possible given the current tech. There's a huge financial incentive to being able to replace human workers. I don't think rich corps would avoid developing those technologies just to keep people at work.
I personally see it as humbling. We though chess was uniquely human, to complex for anything less, till we made a machine that could beat a chess grandmaster. We thought the same of go, till...
I personally see it as humbling. We though chess was uniquely human, to complex for anything less, till we made a machine that could beat a chess grandmaster. We thought the same of go, till computers started winning tourneys.
Now, we are seeing the very beginnings of prose and art, what we thought to be the ultimate in uniquely human experiences, being done by computers. I think its showing that perhaps us humans are not quite as irreducibly complex as our pride would like us to believe, and I think that upsets a lot of people.
That's a part of it. The other part of it is a bit more insidious than programming centuries of Chess strategies to process. I am very interested in how the copyright is going to treat the source...
That's a part of it. The other part of it is a bit more insidious than programming centuries of Chess strategies to process. I am very interested in how the copyright is going to treat the source of how many of these machines are generating their art. Tracing was always frowned upon in the art community unless you were learning, but machines are already trying to commercialize a very advanced version of this "tracing".
Yah, I have a bit of a different view of this to the art community, in that Im a bit of a copyright abolitionist/drastic reformist, and I think dont think there's anything morally wrong with it...
Yah, I have a bit of a different view of this to the art community, in that Im a bit of a copyright abolitionist/drastic reformist, and I think dont think there's anything morally wrong with it unless its a near-exact reproduction without attribution. Even in our current copyright framework, style is not copyrightable, and thats the only thing that diffusion AIs are copying in the first place, pretty much everything but the style is in the prompt.
Dont get me wrong, I still abhor the likes of openAI, but more because they are being, well, the opposite of open, and are locking this behind their own copyright and trade secrets. I also still dont trust 'fuzzy' programs for anything outside of the arts, and anyone who suggests using an LLM to do anything in the physical world needs to be reminded that LLM is a language model, and shouldn't be used for anything outside of that.
But I still think they are interesting and cool projects, and I really need to mess around with stable diffusion on my own rig one of these days. (the only AIs that I really care about are the open, locally runnable ones.) I just dont think copyright even comes into the picture, unless we want to extend copyright to the right to view and learn from something as well.
I see. I believe I'm just more on the artist side here, and the copyright serves to defend that. Artists are historically exploited for low wages despite dedicating a lifetime on the craft and...
I see. I believe I'm just more on the artist side here, and the copyright serves to defend that. Artists are historically exploited for low wages despite dedicating a lifetime on the craft and they end with the worst of both worlds. Value is produced but the payoff is taken by distributors and publishers. Creators shouldn't starve while the corporate machine (becoming more literal by the year) up top sucks all the money out of the backs of their borderline free labor.
In an ideal world, every artist being sampled gets some royalty based a a variety of factors in the training model and I'd have no particular objection. There are definitely complications (some I can think of, many I can't) that can arise from this arrangement, but at the end of the day everyone that is a willing actor benefits (as opposed to one actor taking all thr benefit).
I just dont think copyright even comes into the picture, unless we want to extend copyright to the right to view and learn from something as well.
Copyright doesn't really extend into personal use very well. Very hard and impractical to enforce. So if that cuts into the commission culture there's not much to be done there. Money is technically lost but money is not gained off their work.
Copyright really only comes into play once money is involved. So I don't really have much moral issue unless you opened a store of art to sell without due diligence on the underlying data. In theory this can be sorted out if all art being trained has the appropriate license, but we are still very much in the heat of the storm right now.
Unfortunately, copyright in its current form doesnt actually care whether money is involved or not, but it is a common misconception because copyright suits are only 'worth it' when money is...
Unfortunately, copyright in its current form doesnt actually care whether money is involved or not, but it is a common misconception because copyright suits are only 'worth it' when money is involved, and other infringements get resolved via DMCA requests. Copying something for strictly personal use is absolutely a copyright violation, even taking a picture of a copyrighted work (even one publicly acessible, like a public mural) is illegal, it just probably wont be litigated. Its only by a copyright holders good graces that we are allowed to do basically anything with a copyrighted work. Ever took a pic of a book page? thats piracy, even if you didnt do anything with it.
Creators shouldn't starve while the corporate machine (becoming more literal by the year) up top sucks all the money out of the backs of their borderline free labor.
I agree, but I think the current state of copyright exacerbates this, not helps. Given copyright has a term well over a human lifetime, it only helps corporations who hoard IP, never letting it enter into the public domain for artists to make derivative works of. The ease of rights transfer means that almost the default career for creatives is to create IP for their employers, never having any rights to the work they make (I say this as a programmer, where the model is the same. I never have any rights to anything I create on the job). Everything about copyright law benefits corporations, and any benefit to independent artists is incidental at best. Copyright, in my view, needs to be completely thrown away and reworked from scratch, focused on shorter terms (just enough to make some money on, not enough to hoard), greater protections for personal and noncommercial use, and a greater eye towards copyrights original goal: to incentivize people to create, so that their creations may end up part of the Commons.
One thing I've noticed is how much people dislike it when a robot is doing a boring job for them. A lot of people get really upset over things like self checkouts, automated ordering kiosks, and...
One thing I've noticed is how much people dislike it when a robot is doing a boring job for them. A lot of people get really upset over things like self checkouts, automated ordering kiosks, and so on.
Its because everyone who isn't a grocery store owner isn't reaping any of the benefits. Store workers didnt get a pay bump because they now need fewer cashiers, shoppers aren't getting a price...
Its because everyone who isn't a grocery store owner isn't reaping any of the benefits. Store workers didnt get a pay bump because they now need fewer cashiers, shoppers aren't getting a price break because store overhead was reduced. It all gets funneled into the pockets of the bourgeoisie.
Because people figured out that stores were being so lazy that they could just steal stuff and no one would do anything about it. Now that genie is out of the bag, and you know the underpaid store...
Because people figured out that stores were being so lazy that they could just steal stuff and no one would do anything about it. Now that genie is out of the bag, and you know the underpaid store employees aren't gonna say anything if they see you only ring up half your groceries.
It was profitable until they got greedy and people took advantage of their greed
citation needed. even assuming the prevalence of self-checkout theft incidents has increased (citation also needed), half the reasons cited in the story have nothing to do with theft.
It was profitable
citation needed.
even assuming the prevalence of self-checkout theft incidents has increased (citation also needed), half the reasons cited in the story have nothing to do with theft.
Nearly every other reason given in the article (even though stealing was mentioned like 8 times) is basically just stealing as well. Customers not scanning items properly due to confusing barcodes...
Nearly every other reason given in the article (even though stealing was mentioned like 8 times) is basically just stealing as well. Customers not scanning items properly due to confusing barcodes or improperly ringing up fruits/veg leading to product loss and inventory management issues.
yeah, are we reading the same article?? non-theft reasons in the article, in order of mention: slow unreliable impersonal mis-ID product age check process is slow/wonky multiple bar codes on a...
yeah, are we reading the same article??
non-theft reasons in the article, in order of mention:
slow
unreliable
impersonal
mis-ID product
age check process is slow/wonky
multiple bar codes on a product
bar codes that don't scan
customers not hearing the beep
accidental PLU code entry mistakes
these arent theft (though they may count as shrinkage). these are errors in process
Reasons listed in order of frequency: Theft/Shrink/Stealing/Loss: 15 Customer Error (Leading to inventory loss): 5 Impersonal: 1 Unreliable: 1 Slow: 1 The above 3 are only listed once in the same...
Reasons listed in order of frequency:
Theft/Shrink/Stealing/Loss: 15
Customer Error (Leading to inventory loss): 5
Impersonal: 1
Unreliable: 1
Slow: 1
The above 3 are only listed once in the same sentence from a quoted executive of a small British exclusive chain of only 27 stores, as opposed to the thousands of locations of Walmarts, Walgreens, Costco, etc who all blame shrinkage.
With you on this one. To the business, it doesn't matter why they weren't paid for an item. Retail's dirty secret: If they're not paid security, they'll get fired if they try to stop you. Anything...
With you on this one. To the business, it doesn't matter why they weren't paid for an item.
Retail's dirty secret: If they're not paid security, they'll get fired if they try to stop you. Anything short of hiring paid security is psychological tricks.
It's also financial. Why would a minimum wage receipt checker put their neck out (literally) to stop someone from taking $20 of food? They aren't getting promoted for their valor, they aren't...
It's also financial. Why would a minimum wage receipt checker put their neck out (literally) to stop someone from taking $20 of food? They aren't getting promoted for their valor, they aren't going to be punished that much for what's a security issue (This could be a law based on jurisdiction, though. IANAL and YMMV), and the worst case is they end up dead or with a medical bill from a fight that may as well have killed them.
Simple game theory: if there's a huge risk with no payoff, you take no action.
That, and imagine the cost for the company if the employee gets injured. It's cheaper to let a car get stolen than pay workmans comp for a bullet wound, let alone anything at an average store....
That, and imagine the cost for the company if the employee gets injured.
It's cheaper to let a car get stolen than pay workmans comp for a bullet wound, let alone anything at an average store.
Every retail outlet I or any friends ever worked all explicity instructed "give a thief whatever they want, and by no means try to stop anyone."
They are being removed because ownership got caught with their pants down. Their greed, as is often the case, made them shortsighted and they are always looking for a quick buck. So they thought...
They are being removed because ownership got caught with their pants down. Their greed, as is often the case, made them shortsighted and they are always looking for a quick buck. So they thought they could implement these self-checkouts, reduce staff and pocket the difference. But if you read the article you linked to, it's not that simple. People quickly figured out how to game the system. So now that it blew up in their faces, they're changing course.
I've got to point out that Booths, which is the main supermarket mentioned in the article, is a very niche, regional, high-end chain of supermarkets from the UK. It does not represent the...
I've got to point out that Booths, which is the main supermarket mentioned in the article, is a very niche, regional, high-end chain of supermarkets from the UK. It does not represent the direction that most British supermarkets are going, which seems to mostly be in the other direction.
I feel like that’s a perhaps overly online view of it. From just noticing the difference in lines, when store setup kiosks or self checkout, they get way more people than traditional cashiers. I...
I feel like that’s a perhaps overly online view of it. From just noticing the difference in lines, when store setup kiosks or self checkout, they get way more people than traditional cashiers. I was in a target a few days ago and there was a whole line for the self checkout when there was 2 normal checkouts completely empty - either people just don’t even look at those anymore, or talking to someone is that much of a demerit.
Because you're having to do the job for free generally. Also, the quality of robotic process has meant actual human interaction fucking sucks now. Been to a Maccas lately? You're waiting 10+...
Because you're having to do the job for free generally. Also, the quality of robotic process has meant actual human interaction fucking sucks now. Been to a Maccas lately? You're waiting 10+ minutes for anything.
You get it a lot in orgs when you do data modelling. It's really complicated, until you remove the human element and they hate that.
If it works I don't mind it. The main downside is that those self checkouts are crazy rigid and humans have some flex room, or at worst points of escalation. You can't really ask to see a...
If it works I don't mind it. The main downside is that those self checkouts are crazy rigid and humans have some flex room, or at worst points of escalation. You can't really ask to see a computer's manager if you're wronged.
That's why it's annoying to be put on a teleprompter if your need isn't the exact dozen things a machine was programmed to do. The most obvious example atm is double scanning. the machine scans too fast and that still required human inervention to solve. Not necessarily from a technical POV, just more of a CYA point.
Looking forward to watching this later. As someone with anticapitalist leanings, I have serious concerns about how AI will be used to further the commercial and political interests of the...
Looking forward to watching this later. As someone with anticapitalist leanings, I have serious concerns about how AI will be used to further the commercial and political interests of the bourgeoisie. AI, in my eyes has a huge potential for misuse and abuse to push the material conditons of the average person into a more fraught and oppressive situation. This will happen in 2 ways. First, by AI manipulation of public sentiment though social media. Second, as we just saw in the SAG-AFTRA strike, by using AI generated entities to directly replace working people.
So long as the capitalists control this technology, it will be used ruthlessly to further their interests.
"The irony that we are automating the production of art, instead of the jobs everybody hates shouldn't be lost on us."
Clickbaity title, but a good video regardless about currents state of machine learning and its downsides.
In my opinion worth the time to watch.
Ironically it popped up because of Youtubes recommendation algorithm.
He was able to put some of my unordered thoughts and ideas about current ML into a more cohesive video.
I mostly care about the workers and human rights parts, especially how they were and are violated to make ML grow commercially, and what the "AI Apocalypse" will more likely be. - Mostly a boring and mundane narrowing down of human life and behavior into numbers, statistics and cost centers.
There is other interesting info in it. I don't agree with everything, but I found it to be a good opinion in general and it gave some food for thought.
Always hilarious to me when people finally freak out about automation because now "it's taking jobs that actually matter!!!" I'm sure all the millions of people who have lost their jobs or career growth opportunities to AI or other computer automations are very interested to hear that only their boring jobs should be replaced, not the super important artists. Fuck anyone who doesn't want to be a creative and just enjoys their mundane job I guess
I think the difference is a bit more nuanced than "jobs that matter". People aspire to draw, people don't necessarily aspire to man a cash register. Robots are good a automating the mundane stuff, but don't aspire to be creative.
There is certainly some gray areas like truck driving (most don't really LIKE driving, but then again many do in fact enjoy it) but I think there is a much more interesting conversation to have about aspirational values here that is lost when we boil it down to "first they came for the cashiers..."
I can tell you from first hand experience there's a lot of jobs between cashier and artist that got lost to AI/Computers already. Besides, there are many people who have no creative talent or aspirations who don't have much of a chance to do anything in a creative field
Indeed. that's why I listed one gray area. It's a spectrum and we should treat it as such.
Sure, that again is just one aspect on the extreme end of the spectrum. Some want to do sports, some want to travel, some want to be otherwise extraordinary in society. I feel It doesn't take away from my point to not have an exhaustive list of every career aspect.
Is there some specific field you wanted me to talk about?
I think most artists would prefer that artist wasn’t a job at all, that people could pursue art as much as they wanted without fear of having to make conformist commercial product to live off it. But that’s not the world we live in.
That's been my biggest noticeable bone of contention with the "AI revolution". We've automated (or were trying to) the very means of what it actually means to be human.
Yeah yeah, we're always going to make music... Art... What have you, but so much is actually reliant in making money with that.
We should be automating the inane, boring, pointless jobs we all have and actual exist and live better lives.
But apparently that doesn't fit the needs of the aristocratic/tech bro class who want you to work to the bone.
We’re doing both. The industry term for automating office tasks is RPA (robotic process automation). There are various companies already selling primitive versions of this. But within a few years I’m sure we’ll have a pretty robust solution to most data entry tasks and other relatively thoughtless jobs.
Also I’m convinced that making compelling art requires more than just matching a prompt. You’d need AGI to produce Into the Spiderverse with computers. But the class of work of “Please give me a photo/cartoon of X for my small business” is already dying.
I'm aware of RPA. We're not even close to using that in so many businesses. We automate such fucking pointless piece when we do!
Most businesses don't even understand their own processes, nor do they want data and tech teams to decode them. Despite the fact that they could liberate us all from boring nonsense work. Granted said work only profits the top dogs anyway, so we really need some governance that now says RPA/GAI/Automation needs to scale back hours and not jobs. At least until we get sorted.
As for the GAI notion? Nah. If you can run a graphDB against an ontology of terms combined with GenAi, I reckon you could augment some serious prompt engineering against it.
Granted. Much of the AI debate is fictional at the moment. Most organisations are barely in any state to use basic structured data, let alone complex AI/ML products.
I'm pretty sure this is being done quite a lot, but people just find the art and text generation stuff a lot more interesting to talk about, so the topic is in the news more.
Also, there's the idea that things that are possible for computers to do don't necessarily line up with our expectations. There are things we humans would intuit should have been automated before art, but it turns out that art and prose are more doable by computers than many of us expected.
I don't think the rich or the tech bros are deliberately focusing on less useful technologies, just what is possible given the current tech. There's a huge financial incentive to being able to replace human workers. I don't think rich corps would avoid developing those technologies just to keep people at work.
I personally see it as humbling. We though chess was uniquely human, to complex for anything less, till we made a machine that could beat a chess grandmaster. We thought the same of go, till computers started winning tourneys.
Now, we are seeing the very beginnings of prose and art, what we thought to be the ultimate in uniquely human experiences, being done by computers. I think its showing that perhaps us humans are not quite as irreducibly complex as our pride would like us to believe, and I think that upsets a lot of people.
That's a part of it. The other part of it is a bit more insidious than programming centuries of Chess strategies to process. I am very interested in how the copyright is going to treat the source of how many of these machines are generating their art. Tracing was always frowned upon in the art community unless you were learning, but machines are already trying to commercialize a very advanced version of this "tracing".
Yah, I have a bit of a different view of this to the art community, in that Im a bit of a copyright abolitionist/drastic reformist, and I think dont think there's anything morally wrong with it unless its a near-exact reproduction without attribution. Even in our current copyright framework, style is not copyrightable, and thats the only thing that diffusion AIs are copying in the first place, pretty much everything but the style is in the prompt.
Dont get me wrong, I still abhor the likes of openAI, but more because they are being, well, the opposite of open, and are locking this behind their own copyright and trade secrets. I also still dont trust 'fuzzy' programs for anything outside of the arts, and anyone who suggests using an LLM to do anything in the physical world needs to be reminded that LLM is a language model, and shouldn't be used for anything outside of that.
But I still think they are interesting and cool projects, and I really need to mess around with stable diffusion on my own rig one of these days. (the only AIs that I really care about are the open, locally runnable ones.) I just dont think copyright even comes into the picture, unless we want to extend copyright to the right to view and learn from something as well.
I see. I believe I'm just more on the artist side here, and the copyright serves to defend that. Artists are historically exploited for low wages despite dedicating a lifetime on the craft and they end with the worst of both worlds. Value is produced but the payoff is taken by distributors and publishers. Creators shouldn't starve while the corporate machine (becoming more literal by the year) up top sucks all the money out of the backs of their borderline free labor.
In an ideal world, every artist being sampled gets some royalty based a a variety of factors in the training model and I'd have no particular objection. There are definitely complications (some I can think of, many I can't) that can arise from this arrangement, but at the end of the day everyone that is a willing actor benefits (as opposed to one actor taking all thr benefit).
Copyright doesn't really extend into personal use very well. Very hard and impractical to enforce. So if that cuts into the commission culture there's not much to be done there. Money is technically lost but money is not gained off their work.
Copyright really only comes into play once money is involved. So I don't really have much moral issue unless you opened a store of art to sell without due diligence on the underlying data. In theory this can be sorted out if all art being trained has the appropriate license, but we are still very much in the heat of the storm right now.
Unfortunately, copyright in its current form doesnt actually care whether money is involved or not, but it is a common misconception because copyright suits are only 'worth it' when money is involved, and other infringements get resolved via DMCA requests. Copying something for strictly personal use is absolutely a copyright violation, even taking a picture of a copyrighted work (even one publicly acessible, like a public mural) is illegal, it just probably wont be litigated. Its only by a copyright holders good graces that we are allowed to do basically anything with a copyrighted work. Ever took a pic of a book page? thats piracy, even if you didnt do anything with it.
I agree, but I think the current state of copyright exacerbates this, not helps. Given copyright has a term well over a human lifetime, it only helps corporations who hoard IP, never letting it enter into the public domain for artists to make derivative works of. The ease of rights transfer means that almost the default career for creatives is to create IP for their employers, never having any rights to the work they make (I say this as a programmer, where the model is the same. I never have any rights to anything I create on the job). Everything about copyright law benefits corporations, and any benefit to independent artists is incidental at best. Copyright, in my view, needs to be completely thrown away and reworked from scratch, focused on shorter terms (just enough to make some money on, not enough to hoard), greater protections for personal and noncommercial use, and a greater eye towards copyrights original goal: to incentivize people to create, so that their creations may end up part of the Commons.
One thing I've noticed is how much people dislike it when a robot is doing a boring job for them. A lot of people get really upset over things like self checkouts, automated ordering kiosks, and so on.
Its because everyone who isn't a grocery store owner isn't reaping any of the benefits. Store workers didnt get a pay bump because they now need fewer cashiers, shoppers aren't getting a price break because store overhead was reduced. It all gets funneled into the pockets of the bourgeoisie.
if it's such a boon for profits, why are we seeing a movement to remove self-checkout kiosks?
Because people figured out that stores were being so lazy that they could just steal stuff and no one would do anything about it. Now that genie is out of the bag, and you know the underpaid store employees aren't gonna say anything if they see you only ring up half your groceries.
It was profitable until they got greedy and people took advantage of their greed
citation needed.
even assuming the prevalence of self-checkout theft incidents has increased (citation also needed), half the reasons cited in the story have nothing to do with theft.
Nearly every other reason given in the article (even though stealing was mentioned like 8 times) is basically just stealing as well. Customers not scanning items properly due to confusing barcodes or improperly ringing up fruits/veg leading to product loss and inventory management issues.
I'm not sure if you read the same article I did.
yeah, are we reading the same article??
non-theft reasons in the article, in order of mention:
these arent theft (though they may count as shrinkage). these are errors in process
Reasons listed in order of frequency:
The above 3 are only listed once in the same sentence from a quoted executive of a small British exclusive chain of only 27 stores, as opposed to the thousands of locations of Walmarts, Walgreens, Costco, etc who all blame shrinkage.
With you on this one. To the business, it doesn't matter why they weren't paid for an item.
Retail's dirty secret: If they're not paid security, they'll get fired if they try to stop you. Anything short of hiring paid security is psychological tricks.
It's also financial. Why would a minimum wage receipt checker put their neck out (literally) to stop someone from taking $20 of food? They aren't getting promoted for their valor, they aren't going to be punished that much for what's a security issue (This could be a law based on jurisdiction, though. IANAL and YMMV), and the worst case is they end up dead or with a medical bill from a fight that may as well have killed them.
Simple game theory: if there's a huge risk with no payoff, you take no action.
That, and imagine the cost for the company if the employee gets injured.
It's cheaper to let a car get stolen than pay workmans comp for a bullet wound, let alone anything at an average store.
Every retail outlet I or any friends ever worked all explicity instructed "give a thief whatever they want, and by no means try to stop anyone."
They are being removed because ownership got caught with their pants down. Their greed, as is often the case, made them shortsighted and they are always looking for a quick buck. So they thought they could implement these self-checkouts, reduce staff and pocket the difference. But if you read the article you linked to, it's not that simple. People quickly figured out how to game the system. So now that it blew up in their faces, they're changing course.
I've got to point out that Booths, which is the main supermarket mentioned in the article, is a very niche, regional, high-end chain of supermarkets from the UK. It does not represent the direction that most British supermarkets are going, which seems to mostly be in the other direction.
Tax the rich!
Out of existence!
I feel like that’s a perhaps overly online view of it. From just noticing the difference in lines, when store setup kiosks or self checkout, they get way more people than traditional cashiers. I was in a target a few days ago and there was a whole line for the self checkout when there was 2 normal checkouts completely empty - either people just don’t even look at those anymore, or talking to someone is that much of a demerit.
Because you're having to do the job for free generally. Also, the quality of robotic process has meant actual human interaction fucking sucks now. Been to a Maccas lately? You're waiting 10+ minutes for anything.
You get it a lot in orgs when you do data modelling. It's really complicated, until you remove the human element and they hate that.
If it works I don't mind it. The main downside is that those self checkouts are crazy rigid and humans have some flex room, or at worst points of escalation. You can't really ask to see a computer's manager if you're wronged.
That's why it's annoying to be put on a teleprompter if your need isn't the exact dozen things a machine was programmed to do. The most obvious example atm is double scanning. the machine scans too fast and that still required human inervention to solve. Not necessarily from a technical POV, just more of a CYA point.
Looking forward to watching this later. As someone with anticapitalist leanings, I have serious concerns about how AI will be used to further the commercial and political interests of the bourgeoisie. AI, in my eyes has a huge potential for misuse and abuse to push the material conditons of the average person into a more fraught and oppressive situation. This will happen in 2 ways. First, by AI manipulation of public sentiment though social media. Second, as we just saw in the SAG-AFTRA strike, by using AI generated entities to directly replace working people.
So long as the capitalists control this technology, it will be used ruthlessly to further their interests.