This is not the only recent Jon Stewart video that rings a little hollow to me. It is the nature of productivity - if you can do more with less effort, then fewer workers are required to...
This is not the only recent Jon Stewart video that rings a little hollow to me. It is the nature of productivity - if you can do more with less effort, then fewer workers are required to accomplish the same objectives. This is not inherently a bad thing. Progress has always been about that, and there's no reason (nor is there a chance in hell anyway) to roll back progress when that can mean a better life for the average person.
The problem is that this increase in value creation doesn't go directly to the worker. People need money to live, which means they need jobs - even when they aren't strictly necessary - which in turn means market forces funnel the vast majority of the additional value that was created to a select few. So we end up with massive inequality, lots of pointless jobs, and frustrated, depressed workers. Society needs to shift to a paradigm that's more accomodating of the reality that we are much more efficient at sustaining ourselves and creating value than we used to be (and will keep getting even better), and that allows everyone to live with dignity even as jobs become obsolete.
It's stupid that the main thing we're using recent AI models for is creative output, but it's also only important that AI can recombine existing creative work into new creative work if you assign that creative work mainly a monetary value. Break away from that paradigm where the feedback loop seems increasingly designed to exclude the vast majority of people and we can enjoy creating and engaging with art regardless of what AIs did or didn't do. As someone who mainly creates intangible stuff, it just doesn't matter. When I program, or write, or make a video, I don't care about AI, and never will; I do it because I like to create, and I consume these things because I enjoy engaging with the work of others.
This is more about capitalism than it is about AI. Historically, gains in productivity lead to unemployment and worse working conditions for those that remain employed. There's no reason to think...
This is more about capitalism than it is about AI. Historically, gains in productivity lead to unemployment and worse working conditions for those that remain employed. There's no reason to think that won't happen again.
When a perverse system becomes more efficient it also becomes more efficiently perverse.
Yes, I absolutely agree. So it's disingenuous for Jon Stewart to present it as something specifically about AI. Some of the snippets he mocks are not - context aside - wrong. And I do appreciate...
Yes, I absolutely agree. So it's disingenuous for Jon Stewart to present it as something specifically about AI. Some of the snippets he mocks are not - context aside - wrong. And I do appreciate when politicians can admit they don't know something!
My impression of the video is that he was way more critical of those in a position to profit from AI than he was of AI itself. I am also not anti AI, my distrust is targeted at CEOs and...
My impression of the video is that he was way more critical of those in a position to profit from AI than he was of AI itself. I am also not anti AI, my distrust is targeted at CEOs and capitalists using a "better world" discourse to hide the fact that, while AI is new, corporations are the same and we shouldn't trust them.
To me it felt more of the "AI take our jobs, AI bad" tripe. And I love John Stewart. This episode felt like poorly thought out filler. Worse, that this mind set gets an enormous amount of people...
To me it felt more of the "AI take our jobs, AI bad" tripe. And I love John Stewart. This episode felt like poorly thought out filler. Worse, that this mind set gets an enormous amount of people to focus on the wrong problem to their own detriment.
Would have loved him to bend the narrative arc to the real enemy - the exploitive rich. Focus on our need to decouple human value from profit generation - perhaps even shed light on Sander's 4-day work week, something our tech advancements should have allowed decades ago. Lots of opportunity that was just left on the table...
Stewart’s interview later that episode was with FTC Chair, Lina Khan, where he lays into Big Tech and consolidation of corporate powers to the consumer-antagonistic oligopolies we see today. He...
Stewart’s interview later that episode was with FTC Chair, Lina Khan, where he lays into Big Tech and consolidation of corporate powers to the consumer-antagonistic oligopolies we see today. He links this to his earlier segment by claiming that the AI being let run rampant and acquired by the same Big Tech players today will only entrench their power over us as they realize the gains of productivity while using anti-competitive behavior to squeeze consumers and businesses alike.
Ultimately he does point a finger at Bezos, but in a comedic comparison to Lex Luthor, rather than the main focus of his ire.
I do think he’s aware of worker exploitation, but on such a broad topic of anti-trust enforcement there’s only so much he could cover in the interview timed-bound for TV. He even admits that he wishes he could keep Lina Khan as a permanent guest to continue the conversation.
In his past comments on similar matters (the future of work, UBI to name a few--though I can't recall specific examples so feel free to take this with a grain of salt) he's echoed the sentiment of...
In his past comments on similar matters (the future of work, UBI to name a few--though I can't recall specific examples so feel free to take this with a grain of salt) he's echoed the sentiment of people simply not trusting the powers that be to actually follow through on a person-positive alternative to a dwindling job count due to increased productivity. I took his omission of those as alternatives as a tacit acknowledgement or even acceptance that massive companies and at the very least, the US, will not be able or willing to implement something that makes less jobs being available a good thing. Realism perhaps bordering on pessimism, but certainly understandable.
I recently listened to an episode of Stay Tuned with Preet where he interviewed prominent investor and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, and to me Khosla's perspective was fairly grounded. AI is going to be revolutionary, it will shutter entire professions, and there will need to be an alternative that is not 'more makework jobs' to handle the sudden glut of workers with obsolete training and a lack of opportunity to actually work for a living. It's definitely not a perspective I've heard by many of his financial caliber, or a political equivalent in the US.
It seems that we are constantly inventing things that increase productivity and efficiency, so why is unemployment not constantly increasing? Instead, we have unemployment at near historic lows...
It seems that we are constantly inventing things that increase productivity and efficiency, so why is unemployment not constantly increasing? Instead, we have unemployment at near historic lows and prime working-age labor force participation at near historic highs.
I feel like the segment on retraining represented a really conservative viewpoint. I don't think jobs should necessarily continue to exist just because it's someone's "way of life." If we want to switch to new energy sources and don't need as much coal and oil, we shouldn't keep coal mining and oil drilling jobs around just because people are used to doing that. If computer efficiencies like electronic spreadsheets are invented we shouldn't keep unnecessary rooms of people filling out large paper accounting tables by hand. If AI changes the number of people needed for certain jobs, the workers need to adapt. If the world moves on, people need to move on as well.
I can understand not wanting to preserve something you didn't really even want in the first place. But I feel that's a minority viewpoint. I think something like AI art is a more accessible...
I can understand not wanting to preserve something you didn't really even want in the first place. But I feel that's a minority viewpoint.
I think something like AI art is a more accessible example. There are of course lots of different reasons you might not be in favor of AI generated artwork, but at least a part of that conversation involves the idea that if AI provides you with this instant free half decent artwork, then that will detract from the jobs available to human artists. Which is something people are opposed to because they want artists to be able to make a living off their craft.
Which in a way is kind of like wishing to preserve this hypothetical way of life for some people to continue to exist. But artists are more distributed throughout the population than coal miners.
Respectfully, I feel you're putting words in the mouth of the parent commenter. I don't interpret their comment as saying that things are great because unemployment is low. Rather, they're asking...
let me ask you this; if things are going so great for the American worker...
Respectfully, I feel you're putting words in the mouth of the parent commenter. I don't interpret their comment as saying that things are great because unemployment is low. Rather, they're asking why unemployment is so low when new technologies should be alleviating work.
The microwave may have saved us hours in the kitchen, but for most that didn't translate into free time. More responsibilities were added instead. If those responsibilities result in more productivity, then that at least makes sense. But if people are given meaningless jobs simply because jobs are necessary for living, then that doesn't seem like a very long-term solution. New technologies will continue to be developed that save time, increase productivity, and obviate human jobs. And that should be a good thing.
So the question becomes: how do we transition into an economy where not everybody has to work? And that's a very complex and deep topic. But some form of Universal Basic Income does seem like the first step towards making things liveable without an additional income stream. Medical coverage without insurance is also a big requirement, and one that the United States is sorely behind on. Job programs are only a stopgap measure.
I don't know what the best path forward is to that future, but I'm sure that it's just as much a policy problem as a technology problem. In fact I'm afraid that we're blaming technology for taking away our creative freedoms, when what it could be doing is allowing us the time to pursue them.
Considering that other countries with a similar level of development as the US do not have those problems (or not nearly to that degree), the root cause of those issues is unlikely to be within...
Considering that other countries with a similar level of development as the US do not have those problems (or not nearly to that degree), the root cause of those issues is unlikely to be within increasing productivity and efficiency.
If a comment starts with a premise that I think has not been substantiated, I don't think the discussion following will be that productive. If the premise is that productivity increases lead to...
If a comment starts with a premise that I think has not been substantiated, I don't think the discussion following will be that productive.
If the premise is that productivity increases lead to unemployment increases, when history has not shown any such correlation, we might get off track on trying to assign cause to things we would like to fix.
If the premise is that I think everything is going great for all Americans, when I definitely have not said anything of the sort, we will not have any kind of productive discussion.
I feel like my takeaway from this video wasn't "AI bad", it was more calling out that the people who are championing AI as this seemingly amazing productivity tool to help out workers almost...
I feel like my takeaway from this video wasn't "AI bad", it was more calling out that the people who are championing AI as this seemingly amazing productivity tool to help out workers almost always intentionally leave out the fact that it's going to actually displace and replace a lot of their workforce and they are just doing it to save a buck. Meanwhile, as a consequence, the same "solution" gets championed over and over again by politicians, that these workers will be "retrained" to different fields. It's the same story that's been going on from Bush to Biden. That was the point.
Hell I've seen it at my work place. A department was championing how they can use AI now to "assist" our customer service agents, and they went into details about how it will be able to make the agents more productive and where it can save time and money. They specifically left out the part about how they will eventually go through layoffs and then not replace these workers because "AI has given us better efficiencies".
And to be clear, needing less people to do the work is great, if the quality comes out the same or better. Oftentimes though that isn't the case, and it tends to be just an increase on a company's bottom line at the expense of the human element. Someone else pointed out how this more about capitalism rather than AI and I think I agree, which was also kinda the point of why they had the clip of "retraining employees" spouted by all the presidents since Bush. It's the same cycle of "efficiency gain improved, people get laid off and need to go into different fields" we've been seeing for decades. And I think that's the point of the video. It's not as simple as "AI bad", its more about the cycle as a whole and how disingenuous the people at the top are about how great they are trying to sell it as.
We're all saying the same thing about capitalism. I gather @lou has the same opinion as you do about the video's intent to call out people like that, which seems very possible. Really, Jon uses a...
We're all saying the same thing about capitalism. I gather @lou has the same opinion as you do about the video's intent to call out people like that, which seems very possible. Really, Jon uses a lot of play clip, stare meaningfully at the camera while people laugh moments which leave some room for interpretation, so we can all be right. I'm more used to John Oliver's verbose sarcasm when it comes to this type of video!
I would venture that this essentially means that you are not a fan of The Daily Show. By its very nature, The Daily Show is quicker commentary on what is relevant on a much shorter news cycle....
I would venture that this essentially means that you are not a fan of The Daily Show. By its very nature, The Daily Show is quicker commentary on what is relevant on a much shorter news cycle. It's opinion, and highly editorialized. Last Week Tonight used to make 30 shows a year. There were 21 in the last season. In 2023, The Daily Show did 86 shows. In 2022, they did 133 shows. In 2019, there were 159.
So yeah, those are very different shows, and it is perfectly fine to like one over the other because what they seek out to do, and the conditions in which they do it, are markedly different.
To me, Stewart seems to feel more at ease leaning on the comedic aspects of his persona, while Oliver's comedy these days is noticeably dimmer and passionless. To the point that I genuinely wish he just dropped the comedy at this point. His reporting remains mostly good, the humor is pretty much gone.
You nailed it. Remove the incentive driving the problem. Anti-AI tech will just be an eternal arms race. Generative AI isn't a problem if it doesn't drive artists out of a job with a flood of...
You nailed it. Remove the incentive driving the problem. Anti-AI tech will just be an eternal arms race. Generative AI isn't a problem if it doesn't drive artists out of a job with a flood of high-volume low-quality work.
My only comment is - keep it out of things where humans show their artistic or creative flair. Artwork. Music. Books (how many dreadful AI created books need to show up on amazon for example).
My only comment is - keep it out of things where humans show their artistic or creative flair. Artwork. Music. Books (how many dreadful AI created books need to show up on amazon for example).
This is not the only recent Jon Stewart video that rings a little hollow to me. It is the nature of productivity - if you can do more with less effort, then fewer workers are required to accomplish the same objectives. This is not inherently a bad thing. Progress has always been about that, and there's no reason (nor is there a chance in hell anyway) to roll back progress when that can mean a better life for the average person.
The problem is that this increase in value creation doesn't go directly to the worker. People need money to live, which means they need jobs - even when they aren't strictly necessary - which in turn means market forces funnel the vast majority of the additional value that was created to a select few. So we end up with massive inequality, lots of pointless jobs, and frustrated, depressed workers. Society needs to shift to a paradigm that's more accomodating of the reality that we are much more efficient at sustaining ourselves and creating value than we used to be (and will keep getting even better), and that allows everyone to live with dignity even as jobs become obsolete.
It's stupid that the main thing we're using recent AI models for is creative output, but it's also only important that AI can recombine existing creative work into new creative work if you assign that creative work mainly a monetary value. Break away from that paradigm where the feedback loop seems increasingly designed to exclude the vast majority of people and we can enjoy creating and engaging with art regardless of what AIs did or didn't do. As someone who mainly creates intangible stuff, it just doesn't matter. When I program, or write, or make a video, I don't care about AI, and never will; I do it because I like to create, and I consume these things because I enjoy engaging with the work of others.
(Sorry to be such a starry-eyed idealist.)
This is more about capitalism than it is about AI. Historically, gains in productivity lead to unemployment and worse working conditions for those that remain employed. There's no reason to think that won't happen again.
When a perverse system becomes more efficient it also becomes more efficiently perverse.
Yes, I absolutely agree. So it's disingenuous for Jon Stewart to present it as something specifically about AI. Some of the snippets he mocks are not - context aside - wrong. And I do appreciate when politicians can admit they don't know something!
My impression of the video is that he was way more critical of those in a position to profit from AI than he was of AI itself. I am also not anti AI, my distrust is targeted at CEOs and capitalists using a "better world" discourse to hide the fact that, while AI is new, corporations are the same and we shouldn't trust them.
To me it felt more of the "AI take our jobs, AI bad" tripe. And I love John Stewart. This episode felt like poorly thought out filler. Worse, that this mind set gets an enormous amount of people to focus on the wrong problem to their own detriment.
Would have loved him to bend the narrative arc to the real enemy - the exploitive rich. Focus on our need to decouple human value from profit generation - perhaps even shed light on Sander's 4-day work week, something our tech advancements should have allowed decades ago. Lots of opportunity that was just left on the table...
Stewart’s interview later that episode was with FTC Chair, Lina Khan, where he lays into Big Tech and consolidation of corporate powers to the consumer-antagonistic oligopolies we see today. He links this to his earlier segment by claiming that the AI being let run rampant and acquired by the same Big Tech players today will only entrench their power over us as they realize the gains of productivity while using anti-competitive behavior to squeeze consumers and businesses alike.
Ultimately he does point a finger at Bezos, but in a comedic comparison to Lex Luthor, rather than the main focus of his ire.
I do think he’s aware of worker exploitation, but on such a broad topic of anti-trust enforcement there’s only so much he could cover in the interview timed-bound for TV. He even admits that he wishes he could keep Lina Khan as a permanent guest to continue the conversation.
In his past comments on similar matters (the future of work, UBI to name a few--though I can't recall specific examples so feel free to take this with a grain of salt) he's echoed the sentiment of people simply not trusting the powers that be to actually follow through on a person-positive alternative to a dwindling job count due to increased productivity. I took his omission of those as alternatives as a tacit acknowledgement or even acceptance that massive companies and at the very least, the US, will not be able or willing to implement something that makes less jobs being available a good thing. Realism perhaps bordering on pessimism, but certainly understandable.
I recently listened to an episode of Stay Tuned with Preet where he interviewed prominent investor and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, and to me Khosla's perspective was fairly grounded. AI is going to be revolutionary, it will shutter entire professions, and there will need to be an alternative that is not 'more makework jobs' to handle the sudden glut of workers with obsolete training and a lack of opportunity to actually work for a living. It's definitely not a perspective I've heard by many of his financial caliber, or a political equivalent in the US.
It seems that we are constantly inventing things that increase productivity and efficiency, so why is unemployment not constantly increasing? Instead, we have unemployment at near historic lows and prime working-age labor force participation at near historic highs.
I feel like the segment on retraining represented a really conservative viewpoint. I don't think jobs should necessarily continue to exist just because it's someone's "way of life." If we want to switch to new energy sources and don't need as much coal and oil, we shouldn't keep coal mining and oil drilling jobs around just because people are used to doing that. If computer efficiencies like electronic spreadsheets are invented we shouldn't keep unnecessary rooms of people filling out large paper accounting tables by hand. If AI changes the number of people needed for certain jobs, the workers need to adapt. If the world moves on, people need to move on as well.
I can understand not wanting to preserve something you didn't really even want in the first place. But I feel that's a minority viewpoint.
I think something like AI art is a more accessible example. There are of course lots of different reasons you might not be in favor of AI generated artwork, but at least a part of that conversation involves the idea that if AI provides you with this instant free half decent artwork, then that will detract from the jobs available to human artists. Which is something people are opposed to because they want artists to be able to make a living off their craft.
Which in a way is kind of like wishing to preserve this hypothetical way of life for some people to continue to exist. But artists are more distributed throughout the population than coal miners.
Respectfully, I feel you're putting words in the mouth of the parent commenter. I don't interpret their comment as saying that things are great because unemployment is low. Rather, they're asking why unemployment is so low when new technologies should be alleviating work.
The microwave may have saved us hours in the kitchen, but for most that didn't translate into free time. More responsibilities were added instead. If those responsibilities result in more productivity, then that at least makes sense. But if people are given meaningless jobs simply because jobs are necessary for living, then that doesn't seem like a very long-term solution. New technologies will continue to be developed that save time, increase productivity, and obviate human jobs. And that should be a good thing.
So the question becomes: how do we transition into an economy where not everybody has to work? And that's a very complex and deep topic. But some form of Universal Basic Income does seem like the first step towards making things liveable without an additional income stream. Medical coverage without insurance is also a big requirement, and one that the United States is sorely behind on. Job programs are only a stopgap measure.
I don't know what the best path forward is to that future, but I'm sure that it's just as much a policy problem as a technology problem. In fact I'm afraid that we're blaming technology for taking away our creative freedoms, when what it could be doing is allowing us the time to pursue them.
Considering that other countries with a similar level of development as the US do not have those problems (or not nearly to that degree), the root cause of those issues is unlikely to be within increasing productivity and efficiency.
If a comment starts with a premise that I think has not been substantiated, I don't think the discussion following will be that productive.
If the premise is that productivity increases lead to unemployment increases, when history has not shown any such correlation, we might get off track on trying to assign cause to things we would like to fix.
If the premise is that I think everything is going great for all Americans, when I definitely have not said anything of the sort, we will not have any kind of productive discussion.
I feel like my takeaway from this video wasn't "AI bad", it was more calling out that the people who are championing AI as this seemingly amazing productivity tool to help out workers almost always intentionally leave out the fact that it's going to actually displace and replace a lot of their workforce and they are just doing it to save a buck. Meanwhile, as a consequence, the same "solution" gets championed over and over again by politicians, that these workers will be "retrained" to different fields. It's the same story that's been going on from Bush to Biden. That was the point.
Hell I've seen it at my work place. A department was championing how they can use AI now to "assist" our customer service agents, and they went into details about how it will be able to make the agents more productive and where it can save time and money. They specifically left out the part about how they will eventually go through layoffs and then not replace these workers because "AI has given us better efficiencies".
And to be clear, needing less people to do the work is great, if the quality comes out the same or better. Oftentimes though that isn't the case, and it tends to be just an increase on a company's bottom line at the expense of the human element. Someone else pointed out how this more about capitalism rather than AI and I think I agree, which was also kinda the point of why they had the clip of "retraining employees" spouted by all the presidents since Bush. It's the same cycle of "efficiency gain improved, people get laid off and need to go into different fields" we've been seeing for decades. And I think that's the point of the video. It's not as simple as "AI bad", its more about the cycle as a whole and how disingenuous the people at the top are about how great they are trying to sell it as.
We're all saying the same thing about capitalism. I gather @lou has the same opinion as you do about the video's intent to call out people like that, which seems very possible. Really, Jon uses a lot of play clip, stare meaningfully at the camera while people laugh moments which leave some room for interpretation, so we can all be right. I'm more used to John Oliver's verbose sarcasm when it comes to this type of video!
I would venture that this essentially means that you are not a fan of The Daily Show. By its very nature, The Daily Show is quicker commentary on what is relevant on a much shorter news cycle. It's opinion, and highly editorialized. Last Week Tonight used to make 30 shows a year. There were 21 in the last season. In 2023, The Daily Show did 86 shows. In 2022, they did 133 shows. In 2019, there were 159.
So yeah, those are very different shows, and it is perfectly fine to like one over the other because what they seek out to do, and the conditions in which they do it, are markedly different.
To me, Stewart seems to feel more at ease leaning on the comedic aspects of his persona, while Oliver's comedy these days is noticeably dimmer and passionless. To the point that I genuinely wish he just dropped the comedy at this point. His reporting remains mostly good, the humor is pretty much gone.
You nailed it. Remove the incentive driving the problem. Anti-AI tech will just be an eternal arms race. Generative AI isn't a problem if it doesn't drive artists out of a job with a flood of high-volume low-quality work.
My only comment is - keep it out of things where humans show their artistic or creative flair. Artwork. Music. Books (how many dreadful AI created books need to show up on amazon for example).