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.
Do it, and then after you get paid, release all the programming and machine time recordings online into the public domain. Then at the very least, it might be used to train an open-source AI model that anyone can use. Or better yet, collaborate with the folks working on the FreeCAD CAM workbench and get the ball rolling yourself if you think this sort of AI CAM thing is feasible.
The irony is that CNC did this to the guys who manually worked milling machines and turned lathes.
People will tell you don’t do it but you can’t completely isolate yourself from contributing to damages of aggressive capitalism unless you live in a cave. You buy detergent? Some of that money likely goes to a shareholder who also has AI stocks or invests money in military technologies that are sold to Israel for genocide. Anyone who says don’t do it haven’t really thought this through. Many people here likely curse Jeff Bezos but use amazon for the convenience of it or curse google and use google maps etc. Yours is atleast a genuine survival issue. If you can keep doing this for a year with some subtle level of malicious compliance you might feel better about it. Just make sure they will hold their end of the bargain.
It is like the anti car people. That is great if you live in a dense city with public transportation but the majority of the people are looking at struggles to do basic tasks, like buying food, and getting to work without a car.
This person is the devil on your shoulder. I quit doing things like applying to corporate slums and my life improved drastically. Like an unreal amount within months my mental health has skyrocketed. Trust me, it’s better to just quit your job and support the people you like. A LOT of people will be mad but it will get easier to let it fall right off your back.
If a person says they have been having a very hard time for almost a decade because of job difficulties, you should perhaps consider the situation in that context and point of view rather than the black and white holier than thou approaches. I agree that the ideal point to go to is to isolate your-self from aggressive capitalism as much as possible but for each person the sensible steps to get closer to this is different.
I’ve been unemployed since 2022, respectively fuck off with an argument that bad faith.
I am sorry, I hope you find an occupation that is to your liking and holds up to your standards. Give everyone who choose to step away from aggressive capitalism the chance to contribute in their own way and do not try push the “I did it like this so should you”. Because then someone else will come and find ways they do better than you which you won’t be able to really fix in your context. It is not that black and white. For people who are brave enough to give up a majority of their life and go through major difficulties I feel respect but that won’t work wonders on everyone. So better they stay sane and contribute less but in their own way.
Their catch is they’ll say your footage isn’t suitable for training and will only pay for a small portion that they claim can be used for training
Someone asks when I’m already broke and supporting a friend. Try a GoFund me, what can I say, ask mods to let you link your GoFund me here.
Just do it wrong. Half ass the fuck out of it and milk it for what you can before they catch on. Fuck those pigs
I remember when copywriters went through this exact same scenario like a year and a half ago.
poison the data
This is the way. Contaminate it all. If AI will kill us all, better it be born of our own contaminated hatred for the owners of the means of production.
My thoughts exactly.
My dad was a machinist. I know automation for their jobs is highly desired. In an ideal socialist world, we would need experts to automate everything for us anyway, so the work you do is laying the ground work for that future to exist; we know it’s going to be misused, I would say do it, document things as best you can for the next generation in a common book you keep to yourself.
Additionally, we know AI is pretty shit, Its more likely there will be a robotics breakthrough that will get people there. I think if you go in and get paid, and keep your eyes open for ways to sabotage the data set. (Being inefficient or bad at your job is a way to keep the gig going as long as possible)… there’s hope.
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.
AI video editor is still needed for the podcast I turned down. You would do it because you are a shill but that’s not provable.
Show me the data!!
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
Someone else will be a Nazi if you decline. Does that sound reasonable?
That other person will be a Nazi if you accept, too. The job only goes to a finite number of people.
Stop that. You are on the same side and you’re both right. We need to fight as a group, not individually.
Yes and fighting is not “you might as well do it tbh”
Telling a man not to put food on his table is not a winning strategy.
Selling your values to the money-havers is not a winning strategy.
So you do not use up any fossil fuels? Only buying from anarchist co-ops? No Supermarkets for you? Only second hand clothing? O course your vegan too? And i really hope you don’t pay rent to anyone!
EVERYONE is aiding the 1% there is no way not to. How convinient that YOUR support is morally fine and you are wise enough to judge others without actually knowing a damn thing.
This is NOT how to build community, this is not how you get enough people to vote left(you know the thing that we ACTUALLY need to change something) this is one major reason why peoole think the left is a joke.
Automation is coming no matter what and it isn’t a problem when we manage to make left wing policies popular enough to run on and win, so we can tax the shit out of these companies and give the money back to the people in various forms.
Just stop with the blame game, ops decision does not make a difference at all for AI but he will not be more useful living on the street .
Is your dream for the future that everyone keeps being a wage slave ? Why not bring down all automation we had so far than?
Genuinely working on all of those things yeah! About to upgrade to an electric car actually lol. It’s not perfect but me and my partner do try. I think you personally value your comfort a lot more than the safety and happiness of other people. There is in fact plenty of survival out there for the jobless and underemployed, in fact life improves!
lol good one
No, i will not stop. Building community wont fix this disaster world and everyone who perpetuates it should be relentlessly bullied.
Also: you’re not working to build community with me so now I’m going to actively work against your interests 🥺🥺🥺 LOL
Godwin’s Law in record time. Principles mean nothing if you’re starving to death on the street. Better to get your piece and put it to good work.
They’re not starving though
Burning through savings and 43 equals food insecurity coming around the corner, or doing other shitty odd jobs.
They’re using Uber and door dash data to train ai too.
It wouldn’t be the internet if someone didn’t pull this one off the shelf. 👏
All those ancient VCRs waking up to record static…
Clocks still blinking 12:00 😉
I think its important to consider: what does doing the job to you.
If you feel miserable all the time, then you may burn out or fall into a depression and may burn through your potential $ 300k fast. This means you need to consider that you can do this job without harming yourself. Like getting in “work mode” and forgetting about the negative implications that you think may happen to others during work hours.
Thanks for sharing your dilemma so openly and for caring about others.
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.
Iwish I could bring myself to this, but I actually rely give a fuck and have some pride in what I do. I wish I wasn’t principled, but I spent years as an apprentice to get to where I am at and I’ll be damned if I put my name on shoddy work.
I’ll be damned if I put my name on shoddy work.
It’s good work, though.
If you do it right, they don’t have any basis to sue you. Just fake it.
Except for this public conversation.
We’re just clowns doing clown things. That’s a different guy they sent the offer to. Why would it be their account?
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.
But its not to train competent machinists. Odds are good it will be run by minimum wage slaves who know almost nothing about machining. Tfats what the ai is for afterall.
Yes, but if they find out the data is shit, an LLM or another competent machinist can fix it easily. I’d add errors LLMs can’t spot, and humans take long to find.
Data is data. Mistakes are valuable training data.
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.
I might get grilled for this point of view…
The car dramatically reduced the demand for horse shoe makers. Perhaps you’re lucky to be on the car side of the equation? Horses are still great, but most people prefer cars.
It’s a good analogy because cars enabled globalism, more exploitation and poisoned billions of people with nitrous oxides, lead and particulates. Cars lead to cancer. We should be on the train side of the equation…
There is no side to be on, people will do the more convinient thing and cars were not obviously that dangerous and there are OBVIOUSLY positives to car use over horses.
Is your argument we should have forsaken any modernity since the first humans?
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.
When I worked my CNC job there was lots of talk of light out manufacturing. Factories with busy machines, and no humans, so no need for lighting for the useless squishy humans. Its always been something that engineering has been working towards, it was just a lot more gradual until recently.
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.
The emulator in had could do tool path correction, and tell you when you would crash. And they were working on lights out automation when I left, albeit classical programming, not AI. Was easier for us given we only supported a very limited number of machine models though.
I suspect, and you’ll know better, but these guys dont know shit about machining, which is why they are coming to you. I suspect that they have no idea how large the problem space actually is, and they are just going to try to brute force an AI solution.
And I dont think that is viable for machining.
Whether you do this correctly or not won’t change that they dont know what they are doing. My guess is you can give them exactly what they ask for, and after a month or 2 it won’t work, and theyll ask you to redo it all slightly differently, and youll go through that cycle until they run out of money.
You may as well take their money. And be smart about it. You need a top end dSLR camera to record accurate footage, get them to send you one. You need a top end PC and a high res and high framerate monitor to process the footage.
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.
Make it twice, record the bad one, ship the good one.
… Until ArtCraft clones it for free?
Automation and socialism are not opposing concepts. They are arguably quite complimentary. I think your real issue is in finding business partners with interests and values you are aligned with. Keep looking, and good luck.
I don’t disagree at all, but things start to feel weird when you potentially send 600,000 people to near revolution to enrich yourself.
If you’re not an accelerationist, you don’t have to do accelerationist things. It’s just an option.
