this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
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Fuck AI
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Tools have always been used to replace humans. Is anyone using a calculator a shitty person? What about storing my milk in the fridge instead of getting it from the milk man?
I don't have an issue with the argument, but unless they're claiming that any tool which replaced human jobs were unethical then their argument is not self consistent and thus lacks any merit.
Edit: ~~notice how no one has tried to argue against this~~
People have begun discussing it, although i suppose it was an unfair expectation to have this discussion here. Regardless, after i originally edited this, you guys did have tons of discussions with me. I do appreciate it, and it seems that most of us support the same things. It kinda just seems like an issue with framing and looking at things in the now vs the mid term future.
This may come as a shock to you, but nobody was working as a refrigerator. Refrigerators didn't replace the milk man, the stores did. Which was fine at first since those stores were supposed to buy the milk from the milkman and just make it more readily accessible. Then human greed took over, the stores or big name brands started to fuck over the milk man, and conspired with other big name stores to artificially increase the price of bread while blaming covid and inflation, and now some, although few people are trying to buy it back from the milk man if they can afford / access it.
Those tools that did replace humans, did not steal human work and effort, in order to train themselves. Those tools did not try to replace human creativity with some soulless steaming pile of slop.
You see, I believe open source, ethically trained AI models can exist and they can accomplish some amazing things, especially when it comes to making things accessible to people with disabilities for an example. But Edd Coates' is specifically talking about art, design and generative AI. So, maybe, don't come to a community called "Fuck AI", change the original argument and then expect people argue against you with a good will.
The "milkman" is a delivery person who works for milk producers. The company that produces milk still exists, the role of the milkman was just made unnecessary due to advances in commercial refrigeration - milk did not have to be delivered fresh, it could be stored and then bought on-demand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_delivery
"Human greed" didn't take over to fuck over the milkman, they just didn't need a delivery person any more because milk could be stored on site safely between shipments.
I would argue it wasn't just the refrigeration, but also the suburbanization of living and the cost effectiveness of delivering the milk from the farm to the store, which (in theory) made milk cheaper. You would still need the milkmen if stores and supermarkets didn't exist. In an alternative world where we didn't invent commercial / household refrigerators, you could still buy milk from stores daily without the need of a milkmen, becaue ultra-pasteurization exists.
I guess thats the problem with analogies and I don't think either of us will get anywhere by further arguing about this one specific example.
Sure. What I mean to say is that the milkman didn't disappear as a result of corporate greed conspiring to artifically increase the price of bread or whatever. Like you said, suburbanization and the supermarkets just made it so milk delivery was no longer necessary. The alternative is to continue paying milk deliverers... because that's what they've always done, regardless of the fact that people can just pick up milk with the rest of their groceries.