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 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.
poison the data
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.
It’s going to happen anyways. You’re not complicit in what’s happening if you take advantage of this opportunity that’s presented itself to you.
This is a new industrial revolution, and it’s going to displace jobs like yours. It sucks, but it’s happening.
There’s a shit load of theft and awful stuff happening right now and that’s abhorrent, but paying you for data is 100% legit and how every author and artist etc should have been compensated for the training data that’s gone into the machine learning black hole.
At the end of the day it’s up to you, but I wouldn’t worry about this one. They’re paying you for legitimate use. Eventually folks like yourself will be much rarer/specialized.
Don’t say he won’t be complicit because he totally would be. He’d knowingly accept the job and lay the work. Saying it’s gonna happen anyway might be a cope for this decision, but it’s a decision he alone takes with conscience, wether it bothers him or not.
You should read Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut.
I have, and that is part of why I am mentally collapsing over this.
There’s huge instability in the market. So there’s no telling how long that position would even last
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.
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?
Stop that. You are on the same side and you’re both right. We need to fight as a group, not individually.
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.
All those ancient VCRs waking up to record static…
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.
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?
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.
If you do it right, they don’t have any basis to sue you. Just fake it.
Except for this public conversation.
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.
I’m over here wondering where things went sideways that renting a CNC with an operator costs less than $125 an hr. Taxis cost more.
Can you just program dumb tool paths and make the part accurately but inefficiently?
This is hard to describe, but I will try on this broken phone. I can’t turn on the machine for less than $75 per hour. This is due to the way things get quoted like my time, materials etc. Buy also since it is purely bid and contract based, good luck getting to pay yourself more than $20 an hour overall. The steady contracts simply will not pay you more. This also by the hour, fixed - not a quote per job and that is a massive difference.
This may perhaps be a deeply stupid question, but if you own your own CNC mill (I’m assuming it’s a mill), why are you seeking a position with an employer at all? Have you considered going into business for yourself instead? Or is that what you’re already doing and not making it?
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
Here’s one thing I think that protects machining is, the complexity of setups. Obviously simple round parts are easy to automate, but the complex multiple setup parts across multiple machines, is unlikely to ever be automated.
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.
