I am ethically and morally opposed to gen AI as a concept. As far as the breaking point, let me explain. I’ve been a machinist for ~18 years. It’s been really bad for the last 9 years and I’ve more or less had to live off of savings from the good years (those savings are basically gone).
I’ve just recently gotten legitimate job offers for ~$125 an hour remote because I own a CNC. The catch is that I have to record all of the CAM programming and machine time in order to train an AI to replace potentially hundreds of thousands of jobs.
This fucking sucks. I’d love to sit on my ass forever at 43, but I absolutely fucking hate the potential that I could bring that would crush the working class and elevate the owning class.
I wish it wasn’t this hard, because I really do believe in socialism and have labored hard for a long time to make it happen - but there’s a chance I can put everything I have into true anarchism cause and make a legitimate difference.
Please help.
I’m not familiar with your profession, but if your skills and equipment are so sought after, could you maybe set up a small business and handle the orders/clients yourself without having to subject to these unethical requirements? You may earn less, but your conscience would be clean, which I think is pretty important for mental wellbeing.
Earning less is the problem here. I’ve had large contracts making literal nuclear power plant parts for GE for $75/hr - that’s just above machine/power cost. This would actually set me up to be a potential millionaire. I hate it.
Surely there are already generic CNC emulators? I had an internship 15 years ago for a CNC company that had an emulator for their tools. I also know it was leaked on the pirate bay, which everyone thought was hilarious. Pirating the emulator is worthless without the very expensive CNC machine.
I really doubt there is anything an AI can learn from your videos, and I suspect the AI company has no idea what they are doing. Take the job, get the money (in cash), and wait for them to crater. Dont be surprised if the job dries up long before the term though.
I ran a hard mill at one point and occasionally a cnc lathe. That was 20 years ago and there was a ton of automation. In fact, it was mostly automation. I’d indicate the die or punch into the machine, load the igis file, and then go sweep the floor for the next 8 hours. There were a few things that automation couldnt handle (it would leave sharp edges, for example), but I think most of that was the fault of the dude that built the igis file in CAD. So Id be curious as to what AI would do that it wasnt already doing way back then.
Anyhow, didn’t love that job and left quickly.
There are generic CNC emulators. They’ve been around for a long time (like 15 years, as you said). The difference is that that they will do the grunt work, but a human needs to make the tool paths actually viable. The difference is that with actual professional tools like MasterCAM, it has been cutting out that intern for just as long but a cost of thousands of dollars per seat. What this has the potential to do, if I do it correctly, is even push out those incredibly expensive MasterCAM seats. I could cost hundreds of thousands of jobs if I do this correctly.
Do you think you could do it in a way such that you introduce suboptimal patterns into the training data, to make the model less viable and less reliable? Because poisoning training data is something that a lot of people are starting to do in a lot of domains.
I don’t think so, because they want a viable physical product which can be measured accurately.
Someone is going to do it if you decline. I admire your principles but you have to eat… take the job, stay healthy, we’ll need you to help us fight the inevitable rise of the machines.
I really wanted to work the phrase G-Code Virus in there too, but I got nothing.
Someone else will be a Nazi if you decline. Does that sound reasonable?
It really sucks. I hate it, but you’re probably right. I have no family at all, and even if it is a 1 year contract I can live for years off of $300k
You can take the $125 and poison their data by making a few mistakes every time. Just do it as inefficiently as possible, as you’re billed by the hour. You’ll make more money and they’ll have more work and less useful data.
Sure, by an ethical/moral standpoint that works. From the legal standpoint, however, if I did that I’d be sued to the point where I have no option but to live out my life in prison. This kind of thing sounds great on paper. In practice? I’m not fucking going back.
Why are you so scared? Don’t sign a contract which tells you to do it as efficiently as possible. Just be incompetent. It’s not illegal to be incompetent. Mark Zuckerberg wasted 1 billion dollars with his Metaverse shit and he’s still one of the most powerful and wealthy CEOs.
That’s called “weaponised incompetence” or “malicious compliance”. If you do it right, they don’t have any basis to sue you. Just fake it. Imagine you’re just very bad at your job.
Capitalism often controls through fear. The fear of being sacked. The fear of being sued. In the end, the consequences for being bad are not as painful as you’d imagine.
No one said you’re a good machinist. So you take 0.005 passes rather than 0.020 passes and set your cutting speed lower. Your rational is it saves your tools. No on is saying cut every thing dry. But that would work too.
Way too easy to fix and way too obvious. A competent machinist will fix this by just changing a single value. You have to introduce less obvious and more insidious errors.
Do it. A lot of these AI companies are going to go bankrupt. Companies are paying a premium for data on the hope that it’ll make them lots of money, but real world applications do not always follow. A lot of these companies are ill equipped to deliver what they claim.
Even the big AI companies are struggling to match the promised gains versus their costs.
Someone will take the job, so take it. Its basically speculative investors money. Maybe they will succeed maybe they won’t, but you can have the money and need the money.
The models will survive those bankruptcies. The models will get bought up for nothing by the next wave of AI companies - companies that won’t waste money creating new models or planet-scale data centers, but will still let people outsource human, creative work to digital slaves.
If OP takes the job, they should thin about tactics to poison the data set. Systematically add useless moves to the tool paths. Home after every segment. Random speeds. Extra coordinate changes. I’m sure they can think of other bad-but-works processes.
My problem with that is that if I do this correctly, it could mean hundreds of thousands of jobs from people that have potentially spent decades making a trade. It’s harder than just me wanting money.
Then don’t do it correctly. You’re basically doing your peers a favor if you poison the data.
do they have any way of knowing 100% that the finished product is a result of the actual code you’ve sent?
losing CAM preparations to those thieves will be a blow to so many specialists all over the world
I would sing entirely different tune if they collected data and trained the models for the collective good, but it’s obvious that they don’t and that the hardware or data harvesting structures required to create them will always be in the domain of the obscenely rich
to add insult to injury, judging by fields where the models are currently deployed, they don’t even care if model output is good. all that matters to them is that the output is plausible to a degree, so your craft will at best fuel mediocrity replacing actual expertise
This video has a really good stance on AI and how to deal with it IMO: https://youtu.be/y85nqc2zm7M
I don’t think AI is going away by not using it.
Ok, thanks for that - but that’s an hour-long video. I’m busy trying to keep my laptop from melting. Is there a tl;dw?
For me the good points were about avoiding unhelpful purism and being compassionate with people who were pushed to using genAI for understandable reasons. I found it helpful for being patient with loved ones who aren’t quite the firebrand that I am.
As far as your problem is concerned, I’d say don’t bother. If you are forced to interact with AI for economic reasons, I think it’s healthier to be proper pissed about it rather than some forced conciliatory bullshit.
I agree in principle, but, wow I have to admit it’s hard. I hate this :(
I don’t think AI is going away by not using it.
I don’t agree this is what the video said. It’s about compassion and little steps to untangle people’s brains from LLMs. In no way does that imply, that not using LLMs yourself is not the superior option. (Notwithstanding economic pressures like OP was describing)
