10/20/2023 0 Comments Hype machine memeThe history of capitalism is marked by a constant revolution in the nature and organization of work. The anxiety over automation and the transformation of work is nothing particularly new. But beyond the technophile narratives and splashy headlines the reality of automation and its impact on the labour market is a lot more complicated and a lot less dire for workers than it seems. On the surface this all looks quite grim for workers. Rather than pay increased wages to workers they will invest their profits in labour-saving technology, such as self-checkout machines.īut what, if any, truth is there to this? Are all workers destined to be replaced by machines? Does raising the minimum wage simply result in increased job loss due to automation? ![]() Since the Ontario Liberal government announced it would raise the minimum wage to $15/h by 2019, a number of high profile companies like Loblaw, Metro and Dollarama have announced they plan to increase the use of automation in response. Being replaced by robots it appears is the inevitable outcome of wage increases for workers. We have all seen the slew of news stories, headlines and internet memes saying a bump in the minimum wage will result in mass unemployment due to automation. I think we’re going to spend a while digesting it as a society.The reality of automation and its impact on the labour market is a lot less dire for workers than it seems “But it’s moved so fast that your initial impressions are being updated before you even get used to the idea. “The shock and awe of this technology is amazing-and it’s fun, it’s what new technology should be,” says Mike Cook, an AI researcher at King’s College London who studies computational creativity. In just a few months, the technology has inspired hundreds of newspaper headlines and magazine covers, filled social media with memes, kicked a hype machine into overdrive-and set off an intense backlash. The pace of development has been breathtaking. Instead of just generating still images, these can create short video clips, animations, and 3D pictures. (Emad Mostaque, Stability AI’s founder, says he’s aiming for a billion users.)Īnd then in October we had Round Two: a spate of text-to- video models from Google, Meta, and others. More than a million people started using Stable Diffusion via its paid-for service Dream Studio in less than half that time many more used Stable Diffusion through third-party apps or installed the free version on their own computers. OpenAI signed up a million users in just 2.5 months. ![]() ![]() And August brought Stable Diffusion, an open-source model that the UK-based startup Stability AI has released to the public for free. Then came Midjourney, a text-to-image model made for artists. In May, Google announced (but did not release) two text-to-image models of its own, Imagen and Parti. “This is the first AI technology that has caught fire with regular people,” says Altman.ĭALL-E 2 dropped in April 2022. We never even had a meeting about it.”īut nobody-not Altman, not the DALL-E team-could have predicted just how big a splash this product was going to make. “It was very clear that this was it-this was the product,” says Altman. As they tinkered with the model, everyone involved realized this was something special. “We try to figure out what it’s going to be, what it’s going to be used for.” “Almost always, we build something and then we all have to use it for a while,” Sam Altman, OpenAI’s cofounder and CEO, tells MIT Technology Review. ![]() Now they just had to figure out what to do with it. They’d built a new version of OpenAI’s text-to-image model, DALL-E, an AI that converts short written descriptions into pictures: a fox painted by Van Gogh, perhaps, or a corgi made of pizza. In late 2021, a small team of researchers was playing around with an idea at the company’s San Francisco office. It was clear that OpenAI was on to something.
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