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bluefirebrand 3 hours ago

Maybe they see the random AI art on the bus and they realize that meant a real human artist probably didn't get paid to make it so society is worse off. Maybe those poll respondents have empathy, in that they are worried about their jobs and feel bad for other people who have lost work to AI too

orangecat 2 hours ago | parent [-]

they realize that meant a real human artist probably didn't get paid to make it so society is worse off

This is a form of the broken window fallacy. Society is not worse off when production requires less labor, any more than it's worse off when someone uses an open source library rather than paying someone to reimplement it.

Chance-Device an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> This is a form of the broken window fallacy.

I’m not sure I see it, can you elaborate?

orangecat an hour ago | parent [-]

The broken window fallacy is the idea that it's good when your window gets broken because you have to pay someone to fix it and it increases their income. If that were true, then it would be bad if you could easily repair windows without spending time or money. It's false because we're better off if we can spend our resources on things we actually want rather than constantly maintaining our windows, even if that means some window repairmen need to find other jobs.

Chance-Device 39 minutes ago | parent [-]

Sure, but if we run AI all the way to its endpoint, it’s not just about window repairmen anymore. Our current notions about economics assume there’s always another job class for people to move to, here eventually there won’t be.

So here you never have to pay anyone to fix your windows, because they fix themselves, but conversely nobody will give you money to fix their windows! And then you have to pay your self-fixing windows a rent in tokens without an income.

bluefirebrand an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> Society is not worse off when production requires less labor

Society is definitely worse off when people who exchange their labor for capital have no opportunities to do so