The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Increasingly clear that (at least in the first world) the future of human civilization, (barring collapse / elysium / manna scenarios) is living the lifestyles currently enjoyed by aimless funemployed rich kids. As someone who knows many, it’s not a bad life, but it is often an unfulfilling one.
I suppose CGI animators are next in line for the chopping block, we’re only a year of two from full Pixar movies being created with (AI-assisted) prompt engineering by one to two people.
Don’t you think it’s more likely that for the jobs that AI appears to be capable of automating right now (a lot of things, but basically any job where you sit at a computer all day) we’ll increasingly just turn our jobs into makework? Email and excel have already made us 100x more productive at white collar work, but that’s only created more of it, and people often point out that there are tons of e-mail jobs where nobody is really sure exactly what these people are doing, right now. I don’t see why that trend won’t continue, we’ll create project managers who oversee the AI’s work output, we’ll need people to interpret what’s needed and figure out how to ask the AI for it. We’ll have AI audits and compliance. We’ll create professional licenses to use certain AIs. We’ll have companies employing a bunch of people to have meetings all day about nothing. I think you work in high finance?, if so you’d be well aware there are boomer MDs who don’t know how to use excel and dick around on phone calls all day making million dollar salaries. There are people who work from home for 5 hours a week making 200k in tech. Theres millions of people in low level admin roles making $50k who do approximately nothing all day.
Until we see really impressive AI robotics which automate manual labor (it’s fair to extrapolate capabilities, but we’re not there yet), I don’t think it will fundamentally alter our economy that much. There will be various disruptions, but ultimately I think there is way too much status and people’s self worth tied up in their jobs to fully do away with them. The market is competitive and in theory incentivizes companies to automate away as many employees as possible, but we’ve all seen with our own eyes that lots of companies are very bad at this and employ thousands of people who don’t help the business at all (see Elon firings at Twitter). Plus already a substantial number of white collar employees work for government or non-profits.
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Gosh, I hope so. But I must admit I'm skeptical. Stable Diffusion was released to the public in August 2022, about 1.5 years ago, and though the progress in those roughly 18 months have been amazing, it's still nowhere near the level of being able to create an image equivalent of a Pixar movie (I dunno, maybe a 30 page comic book with coherent characters and a plot that loosely follows the 3-act structure?) just with prompt engineering. I do think we'll see even faster progression in the next 2 years, but going from even the impressive stuff we have now to a full coherent 90-minute film seems sufficiently difficult that it would still need a lot of actual industry experts making edits and putting them together.
My prediction in 2 years would be that an amateur studio with 1/10-1/100 (but probably not a smaller fraction?) the manpower and resources that Pixar has today could make the equivalent of a Pixar film. Highly speculative, of course. But I really do hope you're right, and we enter a world where a couple of professionals could just use prompts to generate Pixar-equivalent films - and ideally this would imply that amateur individuals with little expertise could generate 10-20-minute videos with professional, if not necessarily Pixar-level, production values (though in the realm of AI, the way "production values" manifest themselves will be different, since AI is really good at some things that CGI has trouble with, and vice versa).
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