Here in the USA, you have to be afraid for your job these days. Layoffs are rampant everywhere due to outsourcing, and now we have AI on the horizon promising to make things more efficient, but we really know what it is actually going to be used for. They want automate out everything. People packaging up goods for shipping, white collar jobs like analytics, business intelligence, customer service, chat support. Any sort of job that takes a low or moderate amount of effort or intellectual ability is threatened by AI. But once AI takes all these jobs away and shrinks the amount of labor required, what are all these people going to do for work? It’s not like you can train someone who’s a business intelligence engineer easily to go do something else like HVAC, or be a nurse. So you have the entire tech industry basically folding in on itself trying to win the rat race and get the few remaining jobs left over…
But it should be pretty obvious that you can’t run an entire society with no jobs. Because then people can’t buy groceries, groceries don’t sell so grocery stores start hurting and then they can’t afford to employ cashiers and stockers, and the entire thing starts crumbling. This is the future of AI, basically. The more we automate, the less people can do, so they don’t have jobs and no income, not able to survive…
Like, how long until we realize how detrimental AI is to society? 10 years? 15?
Also, this recent classic: I will fucking piledrive you if you mention AI again was really illuminating.
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Society can exist without jobs, not everything has to be capital, in fact reaching a post scarcity world is needed for communism.
AI hype is also overblown as fuck, I remember watching the CGP grey video Humans Need not Apply, like what, 8 years ago? Haven’t really achieved some epic breakthrough did we?
For me from a software engineers perspective, “AI” is nothing but a productivity tool, it reduces the amount of mundane work I have to do, but then so does the IDE I use.
as humans we have been automatic tasks for a long time, just think about your washing machine, you have any idea how hard it would be to have clean clothes without them? Do you think we would be better off if we needed cleaning services that clean our clothes for us using human labour just so people have jobs? Or is it better to use that effort elsewhere?
This is the part of the AI conversation that always bugs me. People have just concluded that the hype is real and we’ve reached the point that people fear in movies. They don’t understand that it’s mostly bullshit. Sure, the fancy autocomplete can toss up some boilerplate code and it’s mostly ok. Sure, it saves me time scrolling through StackOverflow search results.
But it’s simply not this all-knowing miracle replacement for everything. I think everyone has been conditioned by entertainment to fear the worst. When that bubble bursts, IT will be the part which wreaks havoc on the economy.
“AI” returns mathematically plausible results from its tokenized training data. That is the ONLY thing it does. It doesn’t consider, it doesn’t fact check itself. “AI” in its current state is a party trick.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying it isn’t useful, I’m just tired of hearing people say that the code “thinks”.
Replace AI in your argument with industrial machinery, and you’ll get your answer. People have always had similar concerns about automation. There are some problems, but it isn’t with the technology itself.
The first problem is the concentration of wealth. Societal automation efforts need to start to be viewed as something belonging to everyone, and the profits generated need to go back in to supporting society. This’ll need to be solved to move forward peacefully.
The second problem is failure to deal with externalities. The true cost of automation needs to be accounted for from cradle to grave including all externalities. This means the pollution caused by LLM energy use needs to be a part of the cost of running the LLM, for example.
You may be in the younger side, or just not remember, but this happens almost every 20 years like clockwork.
In the 80’s it was the PC and computers at large.
In the 00’s it was robotic automation that was going to be the end of manual labor.
Now it’s this.
The sooner people realize that all of things are just about the small number of wealthy people who control resources making more money at the expense of the majority of all other humans, maybe something will get done. It’s been tried before in various movements with little to show for it, but maybe I’m just cynical.
There will need to be a major shift in how economic flow works in order to support an existing or expanding population regardless.
What do you think happened to building full of engineers designing plans and making stress load calculations? What do you think happened to switchboard operators?
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Yup.
Some guys I know who worked at a developer contracting house (that I briefly worked for as well) all lost their jobs over the course of a year or so, as the company started rapidly downsizing because “Copilot means we don’t need as many developers anymore, we can fill orders with a skeleton crew.”
I’m excited to see that company fail for their bullshit.
People had the same fears about cars, the internet, computers, telephones, the printing press, and even just books and reading/writing.
I can answer that. We won’t.
We’ll keep iterating and redesigning until we have actual working general intelligence AI. Once we’ve created a general intelligence it will be a matter of months or years before it’s a super intelligence that far outshines human capabilities. Then you have a whole new set of dilemmas. We’ll struggle with those ethical and social dilemmas for some amount of time until the situation flips and the real ethical dilemmas will be shouldered by the AIs: how long do we keep these humans around? Do we let them continue to go to war with each other? do they own this planet? Etc.
Assuming we can get AGI. So far there’s been little proof we’re any closer to getting an AI that can actually apply logic to problems that aren’t popular enough to be spelled out a dozen times in the dataset it’s trained on. Ya know, the whole perfect scores on well known and respected collage tests, but failing to solve slightly altered riddles for children? It being literally incapable of learning new concepts is a pretty major pitfall if you ask me.
I’m really sick and tired of this “we just gotta make a machine that can learn and then we can teach it anything” line. It’s nothing new, people were saying this shit since fucking 1950 when Alan Turing wrote it in a paper. A machine looking at an unholy amount of text and evaluation based on a new prompt, what is the most likely word to follow, IS NOT LEARNING!!! I was sick of this dilema before LLMs were a thing, but now it’s just mind numbing.
AI developers are like the modern version of alchemists. If they can just turn this lead into gold, this one simple task, they’ll be rich and powerful for the rest of their lives!
Transmutation isn’t really possible, not the way they were trying to do it. Perhaps AI isn’t possible the way we’re trying to do it now, but I doubt that will stop many people from trying. And I do expect that it will be possible somehow, we’ll likely get there someday, just not soon.
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Not AI TV’s with Bluetooth connection to your phone! Those will be totally fine! Go ahead and say things about Trump and then go to Amazon and search for the grass trimmer you love. Go ahead and talk about the truck you like or the computer ram you need. So you work for Costco? Hmmm tells us more? Are you at the executive level? You wouldn’t be a purchaser maybe 🤔? Or what?
Depends on your definition of “we”…
Distracted by media and a market of commodities
We’re just resources, units for their economy
And they want technology that’ll make us obsolete
I mean why pay for workers when you can automate machines
yeah we’re being ruled by other human beings
who seem to have forgotten what that means
we’re hamsters on a wheel we’re a human fucking farm
And they’ve worked us to the bone we’re all weathered and wornhttps://ludlowpdx.bandcamp.com/track/times-new-roman
Every Empire on this Earth has fallen…and Floating very much is not flying. 🎵
And so as to not leave you with a Gordion Knot:
The structures of our state economies are going to matter in terms of protecting democracies, and by that I mean if you look at economies that were based in the kind of small producer economies like New England was vs states like the South and the American West that were always built on the idea of very high capital using extractive methods to get resources out of the land either cotton or mining or oil or water or agri business, those economies always depend on a few people with a lot of money, and then a whole bunch of people who are poor and doing the work for those Rich guys – and that I’m not sure is compatible in terms of governance without addressing the reality that you know if people have more of a foothold in their own communities, they are then more likely to support the kinds of legislation that Community [Education, Healthcare, …] and that may be the future of democracy, if not a national democracy.”
^ https://youtu.be/D7cKOaBdFWo?t=2139 Heather Cox Richardson, professor of American history
“Practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectually and morally.”
Mutual Aid By Pëtr Kropotkin https://thereitis.org/kropotkins-mutual-aid/ https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarcho-mutual-aid-an-introduction-and-evaluation
Solidarity Economies, and Mutualism, will be the way forward.
To follow Corporate and their bought-out state institutions is to to walk willing into one’s own ruin.
Once it stops making money.
With a couple niche exceptions, AI hasn’t started making money. What it has done is attract venture capital investment.
Venture capitalists are driven by a fear of missing out on the next big thing. A billion dollar score pays for a thousand bad million dollar bets, and AI that lives up to the hype could be worth trillions. This is also why every existing tech company is scrambling to add an AI thing to its products even where it makes no sense.
My theory is that it will never stop making money because they want less people in society in general, it’s a way of trying to kill people off without actually having to do it yourself. As the number of people shrinks due to poverty and being unable to feed themselves, basically mass homelessness, and only the elite few surviving, those elite few won’t have to do anything because they already had tons of money, and now AI can do all the hard work that they were too proud to do before. So I think it’ll always be profitable. Just not for everyone.
I think social media provides a good reference to start speculating an answer to your question.
Look at all the beneficial change that realization has brought on too!
Realizing this doesn’t mean anything is going to happen.
they can’t afford to employ cashiers
They’ve already removed most of the ones in the UK, it seems. Really worrying stuff when you realise how much they crept in during covid.
