i think i can survive without a overrated assistant who hallucinates a good chunk of the time and dries hydric sources…
i think i can get a book and still be able to code or taking a pencil or tablet and being able to draw
Focusing on AI is really a distraction. LLMs are just a tool, and it’s a tool that can clearly do a lot of useful work. The problem is the capitalist system of relations, and how this tool is being developed and applied within this system. As Marxists, we should be able to do at least this basic level of analysis here instead of devolving into reactionary thinking.
Yes exactly
yeah, well…that’s why i posted this in memes instead on another place
haha fair
bro out here acting like AI is indoor plumbing or smth
“how will I live without this thing that’s only existed for like 2-3 years?”
Not even 5 years old, has not revolutionized human living in any significant way, poorly optimized and prone to error, pushed on the public instead of voluntary mass adoption, and is little more than a glorified calculator/search engine.
Yet these clowns want us to treat it like it’s the next Internet. And you know what? It could be! But we ain’t there yet and got a long way to go before we are.
Even worse it has degraded the quality of search machines rapidly.
Whether you can personally do with or without AI is hardly a Marxist analysis.
Imagine if AI was suddenly banned
I’m a butcher. I do not use AI as part of my daily workflow. Claude cannot yet trim a steak.
whats it like working as a butcher
Meaty.
The working hours must blow though.
How in depth do you want me to go?
In a lot of ways it’s like any other retail job, except instead of putting boxes on shelves you’re cutting meat into smaller pieces of meat.
Since you’re a little harder to replace you can generally get away with a little bit more. You can goof around, tell inappropriate jokes. There’s less turnover. It’s harder to get in trouble for, like, saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. For better or worse, the Union favors you and at least at my job the meat department is under a separate, better contract. I make $18/hr which is alright for Ohio without a college degree and good job security.
Everywhere is a little different, but the general workflow looks like - wake up at 3:30 AM, shower, leave home at 3:45 to get into work at 4. Public transportation is not an option that early (buses start at 7 AM) so I drive. Depending on the sales of the store, you might be the only cutter or there might be a team of 3 or so. Unless you work in an exceptionally busy store you’ll have one person on beef, one person on grinds and pork, one person on “mainline” (pre-packaged stuff) and value-added product (kabobs, meatballs, sausage, stuffed chicken, bacon, depends on the company and time of year). At very slow (or just penny-pinching) stores they’ll have one opener who does beef, a closer who does pork, and hire “clerks” (employees paid less and not trained in knife use or heavy machinery like grinders and saws) to do prepackaged and value added product. Your job is generally to make product to fill the service case and holes in the shelf by some arbitrary time (at my current job it’s 10 AM) and then cut some backup. Sales are unpredictable so it’s a balancing act between underproduction (leading to product outages) and overproduction (leading to spoilage). At very slow or bad stores they’ll just have one meat cutter and either have floaters cover their days off or just have them cut backup and hope for the best.
They do try to use AI to control production but management can never decide whether they want to maximize short-term profit (minimize shrink) or guarantee product availability (increasing shrink) so we generally just ignore the printout we get in the morning telling us what to cut and just follow the literal thousands of years of institutional wisdom on balancing production.
There’s a general shift in the industry over the past 20-odd years towards treating meat as a luxury good rather than a staple. Lower-income areas are having their meat counters closed and are increasingly getting rid of in-store butchers for pre-packaged product stocked by clerks; Specialists are being let go and having their regions consolidated; many stores are no longer carrying sub-par offerings (select grade, non-natural, and uncertified meats, less prestigious cuts, etc.) to focus on getting high-paying customers to shell out for prime filet mignon, rib steaks and imported wagyu; natural, organic chicken breasts; and pre-packaged product with a 200% markup. Stores in regions without high-paying customers either go out of business or are only kept around due to deals/for the optics/because (and I know some people might not like hearing this one) a lot of these local grocery chains are locally, family-owned by people who, while they want to make a profit, do actually care about poor communities having affordable food to eat - which is why they lose ground to more corporate, non-union stores like Walmart and Target infiltrating the grocery industry every year.
i appreciate ur comment and i read it whole. do u eat meat? or do u think about animal rights? curious on your view on that
I eat meat, and while I would consider myself generally politically anti-meat, it is on ecological and economic grounds rather than animal rights grounds. Animals don’t have rights. That’s what makes us people and them animals. I believe strict political veganism is an ultra-leftist position.
Whenever I say that, people always jump down my throat and talk about how animal abuse hurts people too - how it leads to lower-quality food, spreads disease, takes up energy and land and requires enormous subsidies. I agree with all that. End the subsidies, implement agricultural requirements to protect the health and safety of meat consumers and the general public. I also have empathy for animals - I have a pet cat I love very much. I sometimes struggle to deal with live shellfish; it makes me nauseous to sort through and pick out the dead ones. None of that has anything to do with moral or legal rights.
I believe that moral veganism is an idealist, and not scientific, position because animals lack the capacity for literacy and political solidarity.
Unfortunately, though, if you don’t want to become management, there is generally only one union retail position with real job security and good pay, and it’s meat cutters. Cake decorators and produce trimmers are increasingly being phased out of retail. Hell, they’re trying to phase out meat cutters too, but I think I got in under the wire and will at least get a nice buyout when they replace me with an underpaid clerk who just puts beef packaged in a Mexican packing plant on a shelf.
“are you hopelessly reliant on our product enough to not be able to think yet?”
i think i can get a rock and still be able to mill grain
I work at a rural animal hospital. We do not have a computer. Or a fax machine. Our filing system was invented some time in the late 18th century. All our records are hand written in physical filing cabinets. I think I will be fine.
It’s a goofy premise to begin with cause there are plenty of inventions that can be lived without. You can, for example, go live on a farm with minimal use of tech and it will mainly only become a problem when you need modern medicine. Now if you have options in that way and so are cosplaying at being pre-tech, that’s more like tourism than it is actually living in the era before stuff was made or living in a region where access to the stuff is minimal.
Furthermore, gen AI (cause that’s usually what people mean when they are anti) is not yet integrated into society as essential, so naturally it will be relatively easy for people to say “yeah I can live without it.” If you asked the same about cars when cars are still a rare thing, you’d probably get a lot who say the same. And considering the environmental consequences of tons of people having individual gas guzzling cars, you could probably argue from an ecosystem-protecting standpoint that they never should have proliferated. But they did and by this point, they are, for many, integrated as essential for getting around (they shouldn’t have to be when high speed trains are an option to build, but capitalism keeps holding society back).
So sometimes it’s less about the technology itself and more about how society has developed around the technology - or in this case, has not really done yet beyond superficial application, making the concept of giving it up seem trivial. This doesn’t on its own say to what extent the given tech is helpful or harmful, it just means it hasn’t been integrated much. People are more willing to defend something they take for granted as normal, especially if they grew up with it.
Yeah. I work a dumb low end white collar job, the thing it’s suppose to help with, and I don’t use it for work. I tried. It sucks even at writing emails cuz it lacks intentionality.
At most, I’ve used to ask for an Excel formula cuz they’ve shittified search engines
cuz they’ve shittified search engines
I think this is the only reason people think chatbots are useful. Internet search has gotten so bad that it’s sometimes better to just have the hallucination machine do it for you, because otherwise you’ll be wading through SEO spam garbage to find what you want.
I suspect if searching was as good as it was back in 2010 they wouldn’t even bother with chatbots.
The last time I used AI was to generate an image like 4 years ago, chuck it in the bin.
I rember when dall-e mini or whatever came out and I generated a few ridiculous images and that was the extent of my use of AI.
Tbh it became much better in the last 4 years.
All the people who are anti-crack or want to slow the flow of crack, I have one question:
If crack disappeared tomorrow, could you still get through am entire workday without crack, cocain or any other stimulant?
Imagine crack was suddenly banned. Would you be willing to give it up?
I work in the advertising industry as a designer and a lot of people constantly use it. I do use it sometimes but pretty rarely for video generation, if ai just disappeared i would actually be happy because now we are just producing slop after slop and nobody cares about it here its crazy, not the employees or the customers, the managment loves it obviously. I feel like im the only one in my country that is anti ai
You all are just the Silesian weavers and don’t realize it yet. Any new technology will be used to harm the working class and increase the capacity of the state to enforce the dictate of the ruling class.
LLM’s are not evil in itself.
It’s the biggest MLM scheme as far as I can tell. People join this bandwagon for free.
