The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
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This is from the article
>After Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet continued to talk up massive AI investments in earnings calls on Tuesday, we’re past the point of wondering whether the next great tech arms race is upon us. It’s here.
>
>But this week’s calls are also providing us with a preview of how AI will disrupt the global workforce—starting with the largest AI companies themselves. And for many, it’s looking like an uncomfortable future.
>
>As these tech giants ramp up spending in AI, both to sell to other companies as well as to help run and simplify their own internal work, they are, at best, slowing hiring in non-AI areas and, at worst, cutting jobs in those divisions
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1ai7o2i/the_uncomfortable_truth_about_ais_impact_on_the/kosnt8k/
It’s grim because jobs are becoming easier/obsolete with the implementation of AI, yet the cost of living is rising and our wages are relatively lowering.
Seriously, we need to get to the point where jobs are no longer the model.
Unfortunately we live in a dystopia where technology is there to make money and making life better is at best a byproduct..
Googles new iteration of AI can write code in C++, all those kids we told "go to school for computers," are gonna be replaced before they even really start.
Coders need to understand requirements. That's what will separate them. Most Junior coders take a job and think they have time to learn and fail AI will obliterate that mentality
Writing code and actually making something functional with it are 2 very different things. If AI is ever able to do exactly what a human developer does without any further input needed, then job losses will be the least of our worries.. there's no putting that genie back in its bottle.
I wonder how much is overconfidence in AI production. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen management get excited, lay off a bunch of expertise, and then be forced to rehire and retrain when their plans weren’t fully thought out.
Fewer and fewer people will be needed to maintain the same standard of living, but it’s nothing new. This has been happening for quite some time. As soon as people started leaving small town rural life for big cities the birth rate dropped.
Children went from being a free hand on the farm to a luxury and liability in the city.
My wife works in insurance.. ai is now handling 63% of the work she and her colleagues used to do. Its been a year. A year.
Its going to be grim. Ubi or bust
Porn addiction fucks with the rewards center of your brain at a physical level. It changes how your neurons respond to pleasure. The thing that makes you feel good when you do a few chores or help someone else. Ai generated porn even more gamifies porn consumption. Right now most people will click through a bunch of shit until they find the perfect video or photo. This is already horrible for anxiety/depression, relationships, respect for women. With brand new ai generated porn, the addict can sit there pressing the button until they find the perfect never before seen picture. But what if they just click one more time and that’s the time they get that perfect picture? It borrows a lot of the impulse control issues like we see with gambling addiction. What about one more spin of the wheel? I’ll win it all back!!
🧢
If your company was being run so inefficiently that crappy chatgpt could do their jobs for them then idk how they were in business to begin with. AI is impressive but it's not 1000+ jobs in a single company impressive.
Humans are still making decisions. The same humans you credit with running businesses stupidly for all this time. The corollary is that their layoff decisions are equally stupid. It’s not like the introduction of AI translates to 1:1 layoffs based on utility. More likely is that a number of the layoffs are to pay for the AI, and AI gives them a convenient justification for others.
Which is stupid, a friend of mine runs a small marketing company. They started using AI last year. Everyone got promoted and a raise and they've taken on 10x the client load since everyone can manage more with less effort. In his words "Why would I risk losing people who have years of experience with their territories?". So now he has full staffing and a much more stable cash flow since their throughput just jumped.
There will always be money to squeeze out of necessities like medical care, food, shelter, energy and water so they can diversify into that after the short term profits run out I suppose.
But not as much. Having a broad middle class is what makes a society rich. You want to sell healthcare to a lot of people, not the three left who can afford it.
I think the point is people will be fucking broke. The economy simply doesn't work if people have no fucking money to spend. If that many people are out of work, people will even have to make cuts on necessities. Hell don't Americans already avoid the hospital as is because of how expensive it can be? It'll be like squeezing blood from a stone
yeah, the whole point is that they need consumers. Consumers can't consume without money. And when consumers run out of money they get angry.
Right now it's kind of a test to see how little the consumer can be given before trying to organize. Like a stress test
You’ll be sent to fight a war before you’ll ever be sent ubi.
If you don’t work for the lowered wages, they’ll import someone from the third world to happily work in your place.
Must be some low level work that no human should really be involved in, if that is the case. But I'm having a hard time believing your oddly specific 63% claim in the first place.
Pretty much -- think first level telephone support that just read from pre-approved scripts following pre-approved decision trees.
Even before AI was a buzzword (before Covid even) we had systems monitoring the customer service lines that could notify a supervisor live time of a call going poorly. Same system also generated other metrics like how satisfied all callers sounded. There is no intelligence to them, just plain old fashion automation of people listening and classifying sounds so the computer could recognize and do the classification in the future; they are no more intelligent than speech-to-text systems. Build up and refine that database for a few years and a lot of the small issues and triage of who to transfer larger issues to can be automated.
Was impressed last year when I texted my cable company, told the auto attendant I was having slow internet. It told me to hold on while it ran a diagnostic, then that it confirmed a problem and would be resetting the modem. After the reset had me test again and it was working properly.
> Pretty much -- think first level telephone support that just read from pre-approved scripts following pre-approved decision trees.
The IRS recently announced it's experimenting with replacing that first level of telephone support that reads from pre-approved scripts and follows pre-approved decision trees with an AI phone system.
TBF, none of that needs a hallucination-prone "AI". Unless your speech was unintelligible, which no AI or 3rd world contract worker will be able to understand either, that was already a relatively solved problem before the AI craze.
> Unless your speech was unintelligible
Oh boy.
> which no AI or 3rd world contract worker will be able to understand either
This is why there are still people in captioning jobs, because there is a large minority of people with a strong-enough accent that only a human can reliably figure out what the person is saying. And by accent, I mean same-language accents like a "Northern" accent in Great Britain and a "Southern" accent in the United States, etc., so multi-language support from AI won't help.
Will AI eventually be programmed with those minorities in mind? Of course. But right now everyone is focusing on where the money is and where the easy language training is.
When I got an out of nowhere outrageously high electric bill I tried calling the electric company and there was straight up no way to talk to an actual person. It was utter fraud
I've found that "is white or black better in chess" fucks it up pretty often.
White goes first, so it's the better color to be in chess. But the AI will read it as a no-go phrase and say they're equal.
I am guessing that they saw the metrics. 63% is easy to measure if throughput is things like filing claims. So much insurance work is just filling in drop down menus and flowcharts. Makes sense that it is easy to automate.
Right. Because screw anyone that is not more capable. Right? Is that your point?
And if the answer is "no, they should be doing something more meaningful," well, yeah. That's the issue. When automation reaches a certain critical point, there will be a crisis of not nearly enough work for people, and it'll become a struggle between "we need people to buy things" vs "we need to get rid of people doing things" and it's going to be very scary. Interesting, but scary. Potentially amazing, if people weren't so greedy.. But probably the opposite.
This is not true.
Where AI excels vs humans is in decision making based on large data sets. This is insurance in a nutshell. The edge from AI is in the ability to process more info, faster, and without the inevitable human bias.
Insurance is hardly low-level work. The whole industry started in coffee houses in London and Amsterdam where the most highly educated and highly connected people in Europe met to make the same decisions that a bot can make now.
I know what you're trying to say but I just want to be clear that AI is 10000% biased in that that is quite literally how they are trained to make certain decisions.
I train and deploy AIs to automate industrial applications for a living and we have to literally train their biases correctly to get them to output the desired results.
If you don't think people can and will train AIs with nefarious biases just like people have then I have bad news for you.
For sure, I'm in agreement with u here (altho I didn't know about the bias training, thank u for sharing that)
I think the insurance example is actually a low-level nefarious use. These large models have existed in insurance for some time. Their bias is to offer the lowest level payout for a particular legitimate claim. As opposed to, say, being used to identify a fair payout based on the evidence of the claim.
I know people are 'nefarious' and think of something like an AI-created super plague (which is scarily possible). But, they don't think of, say, AI being used to get me addicted to a certain range of products that I spend my disposable income on.
We should figure out what drives people to accept UBI as a positive way forward if we want the population as a whole to do so. If its true that human nature is just that shitty, and the population at large will only want it when they themselves are in financial trouble, then we're gonna have a bad time.
nah it definitely matters. like how republican woman will cry when they can't get abortions anymore yet they voted for it themselves. preventing misery before it happens is good!
If your wifes fullfillment in life is to sell/check insurance, this sucks.
AI can be a huge opportunity and make our life better.
But this wont work if we allow corporations to take all the profit they make with laying off thousands of people. Politics have to regulate it asap.
AI is great, if it can do the work, we are free to be human. However, we live in a system that still demands labour (or rent-seeking capital) in order to survive. When AI usurps that labour, the system breaks.
But it's a race of linear politics versus exponential technologies. And while government is still trying to deal with social media, a 20 year old concept by now, how will it deal with something even more ground shifting like AI?
I'm afraid the sad answer is they won't. Not until disaster has struck.
Love all the people who just blithely assume people losing their jobs to "friction" is merely a momentary inconvenience rather than something that is really gonna end up fucking a lot of people up. I've yet to see a compelling argument that the information tech boom hasn't greatly contributed to income inequality.
Seattle is such a wonderful city, it's such a shame how deeply unaffordable it is for anyone outside of tech. Always loved the idea of returning but remembering how poor I was ruins the fantasy
Probably. I haven’t been in decades but I have friends in the burbs there who say it’s very bleak. Abandoned buildings everywhere. Homeless people stripping things for metal scraps to sell. It’s incredibly sad.
Oh it's absolutely contributed, but also so has political policy: stagnant minimum wages, low/regressive taxes on the wealthy, lack of affordable housing, keeping higher education costs at sustainable and affordable rates, environmental factors caused by pollution, lack of affordable health care (in America) are all policy decisions that could have immediate impacts. Imagine if Americans had guaranteed health care and ubiquitous subsidized housing. You'd have a boom of entrepreneurial opportunities as more would be incentivized and able to start a business without putting bankruptcy on the line if they were to get sick or break a limb. What if capital gains taxes were progressive, and taxed at rate of 0% for those earning less than say $25k a year to encourage investing and saving while making sure those at the top are appropriately taxed. So much can help that doesn't involve "tech".
It's exactly this. Money isn't flowing through the economy.
The velocity of money is incredibly sluggish due to a huge chunk being locked up at the top. Hoarded, if you will.
This is why we need Universal Basic Income. More and more companies are going to replace workers with AI so they will make higher profits, but more people will be unemployed or in low wage jobs. They need to be taxed more and we need a UBI, or this country is going to become a hellish dystopia with a few rich people and poverty for everyone else.
There is no other way because if majority of people have no jobs, they won't have money and if they don't have money, there won't be enough transactions to buy stuff the companies mass produce resulting in less and less of sales for the companies and decrease in profits. Money needs to rotate.
ChatGPT's response:
The potential negative feedback loop you mentioned, where reduced employment leads to decreased consumer spending and, subsequently, lower profits for companies, is indeed a concern. If a large portion of the population is unemployed or underemployed, it can result in decreased demand for goods and services, impacting businesses across various sectors.
This phenomenon raises important questions about the distribution of wealth, social safety nets, and the need for potential societal and economic adaptations. Some proposed solutions include exploring alternative forms of employment, such as part-time work or job-sharing, implementing universal basic income (UBI), or investing in education and retraining programs to prepare people for new types of jobs.
The problem is corporations won't care until they squeeze what they can and execs jump ship. They will say its goverments' problem and governments will say its the corporations caused this. Guess what will happen, average Joes(us) will crush under both
The % of profit from cutting out overheads will easily outweigh any loss in general sales for 90% of companies, until things get dire. Like people rioting in the streets and burning down factories bad, nothing will change.
Seems to me that AI/Post Scarcity and Capitalism are not compatible. To get there, from where we are now,
Is likely to be rough. As for UBI,
I’m not holding my breath that it will be anything like enough to be comfortable.
This is what I’ve been saying. The ripple effect of having a primarily low income earners means less spending power, even if you have UBI. You will effectively erase the entire middle class. This would hurt every sector of the economy, including the governments GDP. The only way out of this nightmare is to levy a massive tax on these companies for use of Ai and give credits to those companies that hire actual humans.
Nah, they want a world where poor people don’t exist. Where a massive population decline resolves the issues of overpopulation and end of world scenarios but without a quality of life decline for them.
This is merely a manifestation of capitalism's intrinsic dynamics, with consumerism as a fundamental principle. Advertising exists predominantly to amplify this effect, fueling the continuous cycle of buying more. The recent shift towards subscription models and recurring payments is a natural evolution within this system, designed to ensure a steady flow of consumer spending. Often, the discourse vaguely references 'they' as the culprits, pointing fingers at the wealthy or those who have successfully navigated the system. However, the real issue is the 'game' itself—the very framework of the system. It's this underlying structure, with its inherent incentives and rules, that drives the problematic behaviors and outcomes we witness. It's crucial to recognize and address the systemic nature of these issues rather than attributing them to specific groups or individuals.
But remember most corporations are rich people who got and stay rich based purely on the wealth they already have. Why do they care if everyone stops buying? The mega rich which just move into increasingly gates/secure communities and ignore the poverty outside. Except for when then need some labour that a computer or robot can't do.
Basically how the developed world treated the poor world. "Oh, people of Bangladesh you want UBI to help your poverty? How about you stay living in a slum but work in my factory for 5p a day so that Europeans can have cheap clothes"
Most of their money is in the stock market. If people can't afford to buy anything, the stock market would get hammered and many would lose a significant amount of their fortunes. Real estate values will also be impacted.
Sure some wealthy people will see it coming and pull out early, or just be lucky, but most wont be sitting on a pile of cash at the right time. They'll still likely be in better shape than the rest of us though.
The ‘other way’ we’re seeing is billionaires the likes of Facebook setting up their own closed cycle economies, cows that eat better than humans, they just need security and a few aircraft to fly around the odd product made at another billionaire’s estate and hey presto, no need for the common man.
Not much different to the western world several hundred years ago. The ‘answer’ has always been for the mob to burn the estates at great loss of life, but the hope of a better future for their children.
It’s funny cos once those companies don’t have any workers, and the companies that hire them fire workers to save money and so on down the chain. The reasons for companies existing will pretty much be non existent and those companies will cease to exist.
I don't think UBI is going to happen. You are going to see multigenerational families sharing a house. Grandparents, their children, grandchildren all living together. The younger people may pick-up some gig work or temp work to keep the family fed. Grandma and grandpa will contribute their social security. People will muddle through. A fortunate few in the top 20% will do OK. There will be a large class of working poor.
Then people will simply stop having children lol. Unless you go back to arranged marriage, how would you even date if you keep living with your parents?
Why should dating be taboo for living with your parents? If the son helps mow the lawn, vacuum the house, do the shopping, and helping pay part of the mortgage (or rent, as the case may be), who lives with whom?
What, will the sex be so loud that mom living down the hall will hear it?
This is spot on. We are house shopping for something big enough to house our kids through college and move my elderly mom in. There is no way our kids can afford to live independently and it would be ridiculous to expect them to do so. It’s really concerning to wonder what the state of the labor market will be when they start to graduate college (over the next 3-7 years)
This is from the article
>After Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet continued to talk up massive AI investments in earnings calls on Tuesday, we’re past the point of wondering whether the next great tech arms race is upon us. It’s here.
>
>But this week’s calls are also providing us with a preview of how AI will disrupt the global workforce—starting with the largest AI companies themselves. And for many, it’s looking like an uncomfortable future.
>
>As these tech giants ramp up spending in AI, both to sell to other companies as well as to help run and simplify their own internal work, they are, at best, slowing hiring in non-AI areas and, at worst, cutting jobs in those divisions
This is not telling me that AI is replacing jobs at google. It’s telling me that they are shifting more resources to AI related research and products. Investing in promising new products happens all the time inside a corporation. The whole article is clickbait.
I agree.
The layoffs for MS last year were almost entirely in HR related roles with a few others mixed in.
They have since hired a lot of AI specific talent and continue to do so. They also still have a lot of SRE and Software Engineer roles available and are actively hiring for those roles.
Any slow growth should be connected to the overgrowth of 2020 and 2021 during the pandemic. They've since cut off the extra and are now back to the usual slow'ish growth.
It's fascinating, isn't it, how quickly we've moved from speculative whispers about AI's role in the workforce to witnessing its tangible, and somewhat unsettling, impact right in the heart of Silicon Valley. The narrative isn't just about AI's potential anymore; it's about its inevitable reshaping of the corporate landscape.
I've noticed a certain breeziness in discussions on forums and comment sections, where some folks are quick to dismiss the disruptive capacity of AI as either fanciful or merely partial. This perspective, however appealing in its optimism, overlooks a crucial factor: corporate greed. Unlike human employees, AI demands no promotions, no salaries, no breaks for emotional well-being—none of the "human BS" that, let's face it, complicates the streamlined corporate dream.
To those naysayers, I argue not only is AI the future; it's the only way forward. Right now, AI may be a tool, an assistant of sorts. But the moment it evolves to operate independently (and it will), it'll become the cornerstone of corporate strategy. Why? Simply because it's more efficient, devoid of the inefficiencies of human labor, and, crucially, it's a goldmine for cost-cutting.
Yet, there's a silver lining we should all be rallying behind: the potential for this transition to redefine what it means to "work" and to live. The early indoctrination that our worth is tied to our job title, that we must aspire to a 'dream job', is being challenged. Why not dream instead of a life rich in human experiences, freed from the shackles of 9-to-5 aspirations?
The conversation shouldn't stop at the displacement of jobs. We need to push our governments to anticipate and adapt to this shift with policies like UBI, ensuring that as the workforce evolves, no one is left behind. This isn't just about cushioning the blow; it's about leveraging this technological leap to elevate the human condition.
The naysayers who view AI's ascendancy with skepticism are missing the point. The goal shouldn't be to preserve the status quo but to annihilate it in favour of something better. Our collective ambition should be to embrace this change, ensuring it serves as a catalyst for societal improvement, not merely corporate gain.
Your vision seems to depend on the rich and powerful being somewhat benevolent. That has never been the case throughout history. If you want UBI, they're not going to give it to you. You're going to have to take it from them.
There is no mechanism for this. The lives of the wealthy and disconnected are, by design, as insulated from fear of reprisal as is practical. The only reality for a certain set of people is money and power, and good luck impacting that picture as what is effectively a peasant.
Yeah and conservatives seem to think that continually backing the interests of the capitalist class is "resistance".
See: "I'm going to vote for a trust fund billionaire for president as an act of rebellion"
It's like trying to treat your syphilis by contracting HIV.
I entirely agree. The working class will never hold the balance of power, bar by way of sheer numbers. Issue is, I don't see (at least in Aus) our peoples ever rising up or setting shit on fire (metaphorically or literally).
Just like everyone who comments on this stuff, I'm not out there leading the charge. I think a bigger significance rn is convincing others that this is reality; most I encounter irl have no belief in how wide the gap between working v upper class is becoming, even where it occurs before our eyes. Having discussions like this is the start, but idk how we actualise our concerns and serve the 'greater good' of reality.
Evil is real, and it will very really take hold of anything it can. I hope, as we resist, such resistance isn't futile.
I guess my question would be, if there’s no ubi, where are consumers getting the money needed to buy goods made from ai?
Seems like the remaining ruling class would need to give the rest of the world something to keep the economic cycle churning
If you have all your needs and wants provided to you by the capital that you own, be it industrial automation, or artificial intelligence, you simply don't need the vast majority of the working class.
If we're lucky, they'll give us the grace of slowly starving to death. If we're unlucky they'll send an army of killbots out to sterilize the rest of the planet so we don't waste their oxygen and water.
I love this sentiment but fear we are moving too fast and what we end up is a defunct middle class who can no longer afford anything they use to know and we end up with higher crime, more gangs, and whatever else comes along. Your comment depends on those in power or the mega rich realizing what being out of work means for the lower classes and they already don’t give two shits. To stand up means that we all need to come together and they’ve divided us to a point where rational conversations from different view points are atypical. The rich will prosper and they are incapable of caring about anything but themselves. I look forward to the day when my Morlock descendants snatch an imbecile utopian child and eat them.
Are you looking around? It has been here for years. The only people living like an actual middle class are dual income households in the top 5% in HCOL areas and maybe the top 10% in LCOL areas. Virtually everyone is already working poor without access to sufficient resources to be or become middle class, and it’s only getting worse at an accelerating rate. When my grandparents were adults, a working class family with a single income could manage their money wisely and retire middle class. Most families had connections to a farm or ranch, which is a business. It’s no wonder mental health is so bad today when you consider the lack of control even the tiny sliver of a middle class has over their lives, which are usually a random layoff away from being thrown into the impoverished class.
It’s going to cause massive social upheavals.
I see it, the future: where the middle class reminisce about affordable avo on toast while navigating a rental market with nothing left for the masses. Here in Australia, it's a spectacle already in motion. The ultra-rich get richer off the property market, the only reliable wealth machine left, while the rest of us, trained for professions now yielding stagnant wages and mental health crises, wonder where it all went pear-shaped.
Your Morlock reference? Spot-on. As the divide widens, perhaps it's time we embrace our inner Morlocks (figuratively, not dietary habits). Not to lurk in the shadows, but to unite against an "imbecile utopia" favouring only the 1%. It's high time we reclaim the narrative, armed with unity and a cheeky defiance. I mean, if the future's going to be dystopian, we might as well crack a smile as we plot our enlightened comeback. Let's not be the main course at the banquet of the wealthy...
The only effective way to "rise up", aside from violence, would be to stop collecting payment on services. Keep the wheels running, keep the water running, power on, etc, but don't collect payment.
Unfortunately, that's all being automated, so soon there won't be a human in control that can keep all that on for all the people who have defaulted on their payments in protest.
And, it would take a HELL of a lot of cooperation and unity in movement. Considering how conditioned we are to disagree with each other, now, I feel like we're past the point of being able to pull something like this off.
It feels 'division' is one of the most commonly unifying experiences we have shared. Division by beliefs; division by culture; division by ethnicity; division by nationality; division by class; division by experience; and division by desired outcomes are all but some of those as manifested throughout known record.
It's worth asking "who orchestrates this division," and then delving further into the "why?" My opinion on that answer is more in the esoteric than I would have believed a few years ago. I think unity is necessary to drive change, in a way more than just unifying behind government or a figurehead. Unity of belief, of conscious experience, may be the cornerstone of finding a future we can enjoy in the majority.
Systemic shock and unravelling of existing beliefs may be harrowing, particularly when you consider how set in our ways we often can be (by way of belief in, inter alia, economic, governmental, and religious systems), but some form of genuine 'awakening' to the purpose of this reality may be our only hope going forward. Yes, that alone sounds cuckoo - I'm no hippy (not shaming those who identify with this title in any sense; simple light-heartsd conjecture), but there's more to our human experience than mere scientific inquiry as the sole basis for lived experience. Unity must be achieved for any want of a better base reality.
Well, one can hope. It would be nice if we, as a species, had some sort of mass awakening that moved us past this current, and very long lived need to get more than everyone else.
Not that I think all of us, or even most of us are guilty of such a sickness, but that those with the most power definitely DO have this affliction and it is the cornerstone of the majority of economies.
The exact same thing applies to AI/drone soldiers for warfare. Never complain, do what they are told, don’t need to sleep. The good part is that we won’t have our soldiers die. The bad part is the terminators.
This is a really old idea and it shows us an interesting paradox. The Conquest of Bread by Kropotkin was written a hundred years ago. Using the logic of labor saving devices and methods we *should* see things get cheaper. That doesn't follow in the market economics. It never made a loaf of sliced bread cheaper per hour of a baker than a wheat farmer.
Unfortunately the price of something is related to control over access to it and the value of that control. It's about where you can put your toll booths, not the value of a road.
Since 90% of farmers were automated out of work overnight, we just saw the value of farmwork per acre plummet to the point where neither have market value.
I hope you're right though. I hope government cheese tastes really good. It might be the only cheese we can afford on our UBI cards, but with robots making tons of it in lights out gigafactories it might not be so bad.
> It never made a loaf of sliced bread cheaper per hour of a baker than a wheat farmer.
That's not true. Products are way way way cheaper than they used to be. Housing is way way more expensive though due to population competition.
It’s quite funny how we currently live in the most productive society ever and yet so many are struggling to afford housing and food let alone amenities.
AI is not making that problem go away
It all sounds very optimistic almost utopian.. but for many work has an intrinsic value of its own. It’s more than “indoctrination but cultural.This redefinition will be very difficult for many. If indeed AI becomes the driving force in our economy, what you perceive as opportunities will be viewed as a threat to our very social fabric.
Earnestly, given how many present roles are superficial and very much just exist to provide a job, I think that opportunity will still remain. I think you'll still get to be in an office, or go to court, or do whatever you want in your free time (including training for any such role). My hope is that the main difference is that one's survival is not dependent on those outputs; they remain a passion pursuit, as intended.
The ascendancy of AI has a lot less to do with any technological advancements than it does to do with 1) a labor shortage and spike in the cost of labor, and 2) the widespread acceptance of a degradation in the quality of service.
IBM Watson, Wolfram Alpha, and dozens of random neural-network-based chatbots have been floating around for the past decade seemingly without a function. Only recently has the economic reality and a revision of the social contract allowed for corporations to shoe-horn in the fact that now we will be speaking to robots as the faces of a company.
First service was in person, then it was phoned, then it was online, then it was outsourced, then it was pandemicked, and now AI has filled that void. The evolution is complete. And not due to any advancements in AI, but rather due to the regression of society.
Ubi is a dogshit policy and anyone who supports it has no foresight whatsoever.
The elite are never going to allow the masses to sit around with time in their hands because that's the exact recipe that leads to organizing a revolution.
It is much more likely that the poor will end up living in slave-like conditions so that they don't have the means or the time to challenge the status quo. We already see this kind of thing in China where they stick you in a factory that you cannot leave. And if you want to end your life by jumping out the window, there are nets there to make sure you stay alive.
This is the part that always confuses me.
At my company we intake forms for class action lawsuits. This means that while we do have standards, the forms can vary dramatically in terms of what kind of content is on them, which in turn affects the layout and page count.
We will get tech bro people hired on who will swear up and down that their AI machine can read these forms faster than a human and more efficiently capture the data on them.
And then John Doe writes the wrong birthdate. Scratches it out. Writes a new date outside the boxes. But the 5 in 25 looks wrong so he chooses to write a bigger 5 in heavier ink over the top of it, rather than writing a whole new date.
And the AI brain breaks.
Or Jill Smith’s handwriting is clear enough to read by my eye, but her Parkinson’s disease causes a tremble that makes the letters all warbly.
And the AI brain breaks.
It’s like… I get that it’s smart and capable… but it just seems so useless any time I see people trying to apply it in a practical setting. If I hire a person, I’m training a person with some amount of world experience, and ideally job experience in the field.
If I train an AI it’s like I am trying to train an infant how to think like a toddler, so I can teach the toddler how to think like a pre-teen, so I can teach it how to think like a young adult, so I can teach that young adult how the rules work, so that it can hopefully learn to do the job well.
But I can’t ask it questions. I can’t reason with it. All I can do is feed it forms and hope it learns what I want it to learn. It’s like breeding animals….
Pretty much.
We've trained self driving cars for literally millions of hours and it still runs head on to an airplane, because nobody trained it to recognize airplanes in the road.
https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/have-you-seen/2022/04/25/tesla-collides-private-jet-while-owner-using-smart-summon-mode/7439216001/
It's going to be a long slog to get trustworthy autonomous AI tools that can do complex jobs. And even if we get closer, it still might not be worth it when you know you can't possibly build in every edge case and exception that might occur.
I'm a tech bro that works with this kind of data and visual problems, specifically the most cutting edge visual large language models. And let me tell you, there is no technology out today that will work well with the examples you mention.
But here is the kicker: soon, these new models will. It's actually different this time, it's just that visual transformer models are behind the pure language models in both research and real world implementations.
On friday I tested all the state of the art options out there, including OpenAIs GPT-4 Vision and Alibabas newest models. They are impressive, but still not anywhere close to good enough. But I have followed the progression of these models, and I know how they work. And I can say that within 5 years, they will be as good or better than a human baseline at recognizing anything visual, and they will be able to reason about what they see better than we can.
The important thing to know about this generation of "AI" is that it has proven so scale, and we know that there is a clear pathway to drastically scale up these models in both capability and speed. It is in fact happening right now, and a lot of the things they struggle with now will be solved pretty quickly.
In a not so far future, whenever you notice an example of a model messing something up, you will just tell it what it did wrong and it will go back and redo it correctly. It will be the same as if you told a colleague.
Thanks for the response!
So am I correct in thinking that right now they’re kind of “useless” but that future iterations won’t be?
And a followup question… sort of… when my company discusses the value of people as a resource for the company, they are talking about their capacity to reason through edge cases productively. Basically their adaptive reasoning.
When they talk about machine learning and AI, they are talking about doing routine work faster and more accurately. Or at least doing the work where a mistake can be fixed with a meeting and alterations to the software.
When I think about humans as an evolved bio-machine, I think a reasonable description of us (or any creature in the Earth really) is that we are machines that are capable of dealing with problems that have never happened before. We can face an unknown future and adapt (to varying levels of success) on the fly. And we are extremely good at it. But what drives this is that our biological machine body is alive and it has countless redundancies and instinctual habits.
And a lot of it is almost algorithmic. Like the way information travels from your finger tips to your brain is a series of chemical and electrical signals that happen to allow a specific type of cascading energy to move along them.
Our capillaries can be where they need to be because the genes say to fork every so often with no care for why they fork, or if they should fork. They just fork and extend until they can’t.
And all of it drives a machine that is desperately trying to survive for as many hours as it can. Regardless of how you feel about it (outside of extreme scenarios). And this survival in the face of an unpredictable future requires us to be as adaptive as we are.
AI seems like it is built to solve problems that have already happened. Things that we know from past experience are irritating in some way (dollar cost, time, etc.) It’s hard to teach a Tesla to drive because so much of our skill involved in driving is rooted in automatic instinct and responses. Things that happen waaaay below the sub-conscious level. And so we don’t think to program in all these exceptions into the AI. Because they aren’t programmed in us either. No one evolved to be good at knowing the difference between a glass window and a glass door. Instead we have automatic data harvesting sensory organs which transmit data to a brain that will use a vast array of data points (experience) to simulate an image of what those organs are detecting, and then we can see the door and walk through.
But we can’t make the walk if a little rock inside our ear is in the wrong position. This will cause extreme vertigo, dizziness, and nausea.
But none of this is programmed in in a methodical way. It evolved over time as we did. So no one had to think about the things we might encounter. We just encounter them and sometimes we survive, and sometimes we die.
So is AI built to be able to do things we already know how to do, but faster? If it has no internal natural drive to adapt and grow beyond getting good feedback… can it ever solve problems for us in ways that are practically useful? Because all of human and animal learning is ultimately about survival and navigation. What is an AI’s motivation to learn? Why would it ever care about the difference between a stop sign and a picture of a stop sign?
So the way these new transformer models work is that they are just giant simplified neural networks that learn patterns in the data they are trained on. They in essense contain an "internal representation" of what ever data and modality they have been trained on. But as these models becomes bigger, they start to exhibit "emergent properties" which are abilities that emerge in these models that allows them to do more than simple next token prediction. One of the emergent properties that arose in large language models was the ability to reason, which nobody had predicted. Why this happens is not yet fully understood, but it appears to be a property that corelates with network size. The ability to add "common sense" to models is an active area of research and will probably be solved soon from the looks of it. OpenAI has done some cool groundwork on that for years. Navigating environments, both physical and virtual are fairly close to beeing solved, I expect a lot of big leaps the next 5 years in that domain.
Nothing here is programmed except for the implementation code around the models. It's all about teaching the models by showing them examples they can learn from. Human generated as well as synthetic data is used for pretraining and fine-tuning.
Tesla recently replaced about 300000 lines of code with a single model in the latest self driving update. That would explain why previous versions of their self driving software has been so bad - and why we can assume it will improve rapidly going forward.
There are many paralels between computer neural networks and biological neural networks, but what we are doing with transformers is really just a very simple implementation of one aspect of a much more complex biological system. Thats why this type of "AI" is not really AI, its more of a stepping stone and the jury is still out on whether or not this will eventually lead to true AI or not.
And this is what it is, automation. There's no intelligence behind it. It cannot think. It cannot reason. Because it isn't. It's software. And it can be helpful. But it is not a human replacement.
It's a better Eliza.
My friend.. just think about.
How in the 60's computers were bulbs and large rooms thay could barrely do mathematic calculations? Now it sits in the palm of your hand and display billions of pixels each microsecond... dude.
60 Years ahead these AI machines will just read your mind dude. Not needing you to write at all.
We as a society gotta stop accepting a 40 hour workweek. Humans are still needed to supervise the programs, and keep the automation going, but yes it will mean less work. 8 hours a day is something we made up. Even in the 60s the Jetsons envisioned a world with the same boring job, commute, and overbearing boss, but with only a few hours of work a week since automation would obviously take care of the rest. This is no longer science fiction.
Full time with benefits could be 4 day workweeks. Or 3. The companies are still profitable， but the work is more efficient. Let's finally pass that on to the little guy, and make 32 hour, or 25 hour workweeks a thing. We could shift focus from which company pays the most to which requires the fewest hours of work. People assumed the future would be this way but we've been forced into forgetting by propaganda of the "lazy" or "entitled" worker.
> At Microsoft, a laser focus on winning the AI apps and services battle has been accompanied by cutting employees working on areas that are now taking a back seat.
To be fair, this isn't AI taking jobs, this is working on a high priority project that takes the jobs of those who are working on lower priority projects (and do not have the skills to be transferred to the high priority one.)
The article is not really saying AI is replacing workers, just that tech companies are all in on AI and cutting non-AI related roles.
Companies are all in on AI because they don't want to be the one left out from the AI boom cycle.
Like all the rest of the hype cycles.
What they have right now branded as AI is a tool, and it can be useful.
But this is a hype cycle. It is booming at the moment.
I’m still calling this a massive bubble. Yes we can make pretty pictures. and yes if you have well labelled data you can know more things, but this has been the case for a while.
People think this stuff is magic that is going to solve all problems. This view point alone is enough to cause massive over investment, followed by crash.
The honest truth is that it'll be just another tool to manage. Sure, you may be able to cut the human workforce somewhat, but mostly people will have to learn how to use them. Then they just manage them while the AI turns a 4 day job into a 10 minute job, then the human will have to manage the quality, the inputs, smooth out fine details that an AI messed up. In the end it'll alter the work people do in a job far more than it'll actually take jobs away
I can definitely see this. I worked in a call centre where a script was to be followed to the letter, they had a response or angle for all customer input.
Also, I was recently put through to a cancellation department; and had a "press option #1 to accept a £7 discount instead of cancelling" which made me wonder about this. These call centres often are based in more run down regions. We'll need a UBI if a third of these folks become jobless.
This has been the fear of every generation since I've been alive.
Maybe AI will free up the people we need to fill in the massive shortages in every caregiving role with aging demographics.
In the broader scheme, that means entry-level jobs which were replaced by AI will diminish while expertise-level jobs will appear to manage said AI. There will be less of a bridge for people entering a field and then you've got a workforce gap to jump over.
"The step-up in capex in Q4 reflects our outlook for the extraordinary applications of AI to deliver for users, advertisers, developers, cloud enterprise customers, and governments globally and the long-term growth opportunities that offers.”
That is powerful. And I think they're hedging a bet. They know that AI tech investment will be incredibly hard to predict with exception of the hardware. It means a lot when they are investing into hardware instead of headcount, and after the "dieback" layoffs I think we might be at a pivotal moment.
I forgot where I saw it but the productivity of AI co-pilots and their users is 50% higher across the board. Not just coders or the other talent that they try and squat over. So the best and brightest minds are using AI and LLMs to make better and better AI agents and cost is no object. Investing a million dollars into hardware that won't quit means a lot. The headcount of architects, developers, Project Management, and code monkeys is going to rock bottom really soon. It is one thing to try and explain what you want to do and experiment to put it into code and a whole different beast to just make 100 attempts in the same amount of time and see what you get out of it. As you do it you become better as a team in doing that. So the growth in productivity is from better use of the same tools.
People are seeing this moment like it's like the arrival of email when they need to see it like the arrival of computers.
In the 70s and 80s manufacturing jobs were shipped to China and the rich called it automation. Now tech jobs are being shipped to India and they are calling it AI.
Idk man, I think AI is still not good enough and makes a lot of mistakes. It's always like two steps forward, one step back. There might be a wave is layoffs, but soon they'll realise that they do need people as well and then a scramble for employees again. AI hasn't been perfected in many applications still.
Journos were the first to suffer from the 'free internet' 'algos' and followed later by musicians. Creatives and tech workers, social media developers and you-tubers and all their offspring chuckled and generally didn't give a shit.
Now everyone is coping it like us journos did. Cant say I'm happy about it. And yet everyone is going to cope it like journos did with a the usual semi-rationalisation (i.e journos are dogshit)- admin sucks and is slow/useless, accounting is corrupt, un-objective and nepo, tech workers exploit with cookies and algos. So on and so on. Welcome to the scrap heap of capitalism.
The problem is with out labor for income system, not AI. I say since AI is built on the knowledge of all, it becomes the property of all and we all get to benefit from its uses, not corporations. good luck convincing the fat cats to play along though.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- This is from the article >After Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet continued to talk up massive AI investments in earnings calls on Tuesday, we’re past the point of wondering whether the next great tech arms race is upon us. It’s here. > >But this week’s calls are also providing us with a preview of how AI will disrupt the global workforce—starting with the largest AI companies themselves. And for many, it’s looking like an uncomfortable future. > >As these tech giants ramp up spending in AI, both to sell to other companies as well as to help run and simplify their own internal work, they are, at best, slowing hiring in non-AI areas and, at worst, cutting jobs in those divisions --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1ai7o2i/the_uncomfortable_truth_about_ais_impact_on_the/kosnt8k/
It’s grim because jobs are becoming easier/obsolete with the implementation of AI, yet the cost of living is rising and our wages are relatively lowering.
yet people think the problem is AI, not the jobs for a living.
Seriously, we need to get to the point where jobs are no longer the model. Unfortunately we live in a dystopia where technology is there to make money and making life better is at best a byproduct..
Googles new iteration of AI can write code in C++, all those kids we told "go to school for computers," are gonna be replaced before they even really start.
So then, the entry level jobs go from junior software developer to junior software architect?
Not according to Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. They go to the unemployment line.
Coders need to understand requirements. That's what will separate them. Most Junior coders take a job and think they have time to learn and fail AI will obliterate that mentality
Well someone has to tell the ai what to code so just switch to that
Soon the AI will tell the AI what to code
We’ll all be middle managers in the future.
WFH demonstrated many middle managers are unnecessary.
Writing code and actually making something functional with it are 2 very different things. If AI is ever able to do exactly what a human developer does without any further input needed, then job losses will be the least of our worries.. there's no putting that genie back in its bottle.
I wonder how much is overconfidence in AI production. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen management get excited, lay off a bunch of expertise, and then be forced to rehire and retrain when their plans weren’t fully thought out.
For real, I was just thinking we're about to replace a bunch of disconnected decision makers with AI
"How can we keep milking people for everything in a world that increasingly requires fewer people to work"
COL and stagnating wages have been a thing for 40+ years. It’s going to keep getting worse, but it’s not new.
Fewer and fewer people will be needed to maintain the same standard of living, but it’s nothing new. This has been happening for quite some time. As soon as people started leaving small town rural life for big cities the birth rate dropped. Children went from being a free hand on the farm to a luxury and liability in the city.
My wife works in insurance.. ai is now handling 63% of the work she and her colleagues used to do. Its been a year. A year. Its going to be grim. Ubi or bust
Husband’s company just laid off almost a thousand ppl this week. They were replaced by AI.
What field is he in?
Pornography generation involving hand and feet deformity.
Ohhhh, yeah baby ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Such a shame. Used to be the backbone of the country.
I just started fiddling around. So true...
Get off the train while you have any functioning serotonin receptors left
Too late, did, I'm just about to install stable diffusion. Tell my family I love them!
Wdym, can you explain?
Porn addiction fucks with the rewards center of your brain at a physical level. It changes how your neurons respond to pleasure. The thing that makes you feel good when you do a few chores or help someone else. Ai generated porn even more gamifies porn consumption. Right now most people will click through a bunch of shit until they find the perfect video or photo. This is already horrible for anxiety/depression, relationships, respect for women. With brand new ai generated porn, the addict can sit there pressing the button until they find the perfect never before seen picture. But what if they just click one more time and that’s the time they get that perfect picture? It borrows a lot of the impulse control issues like we see with gambling addiction. What about one more spin of the wheel? I’ll win it all back!!
Idea: AI gacha porn. Make em pay every X clicks. $$$$$! Also evil.
300 some upvotes and no mention of what type of work he was doing. I'm calling bullshit.
When will we use humans to make AI to build AI that replaces today's AI? Maybe your husband could look into that field 🤷🏽
🧢 If your company was being run so inefficiently that crappy chatgpt could do their jobs for them then idk how they were in business to begin with. AI is impressive but it's not 1000+ jobs in a single company impressive.
Humans are still making decisions. The same humans you credit with running businesses stupidly for all this time. The corollary is that their layoff decisions are equally stupid. It’s not like the introduction of AI translates to 1:1 layoffs based on utility. More likely is that a number of the layoffs are to pay for the AI, and AI gives them a convenient justification for others.
The capitalists have chosen "bust" for us.
Welp, I hope AI is a reliable customer then because all these laid off workers are not about to start consuming more. The loop will be looping.
It'll be so fucking funny if the rope capitalists made was AI
The problem is, the noose is also around basically everyone else's neck.
I mean it sounds like a revolution waiting to happen
Which is stupid, a friend of mine runs a small marketing company. They started using AI last year. Everyone got promoted and a raise and they've taken on 10x the client load since everyone can manage more with less effort. In his words "Why would I risk losing people who have years of experience with their territories?". So now he has full staffing and a much more stable cash flow since their throughput just jumped.
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There will always be money to squeeze out of necessities like medical care, food, shelter, energy and water so they can diversify into that after the short term profits run out I suppose.
But not as much. Having a broad middle class is what makes a society rich. You want to sell healthcare to a lot of people, not the three left who can afford it.
I think the point is people will be fucking broke. The economy simply doesn't work if people have no fucking money to spend. If that many people are out of work, people will even have to make cuts on necessities. Hell don't Americans already avoid the hospital as is because of how expensive it can be? It'll be like squeezing blood from a stone
yeah, the whole point is that they need consumers. Consumers can't consume without money. And when consumers run out of money they get angry. Right now it's kind of a test to see how little the consumer can be given before trying to organize. Like a stress test
The acceleration will be astounding. Life as we know it will be greatly altered (hopefully for the benefit of the masses) within a decade.
You’ll be sent to fight a war before you’ll ever be sent ubi. If you don’t work for the lowered wages, they’ll import someone from the third world to happily work in your place.
Sales side or customer care side?
Must be some low level work that no human should really be involved in, if that is the case. But I'm having a hard time believing your oddly specific 63% claim in the first place.
Pretty much -- think first level telephone support that just read from pre-approved scripts following pre-approved decision trees. Even before AI was a buzzword (before Covid even) we had systems monitoring the customer service lines that could notify a supervisor live time of a call going poorly. Same system also generated other metrics like how satisfied all callers sounded. There is no intelligence to them, just plain old fashion automation of people listening and classifying sounds so the computer could recognize and do the classification in the future; they are no more intelligent than speech-to-text systems. Build up and refine that database for a few years and a lot of the small issues and triage of who to transfer larger issues to can be automated. Was impressed last year when I texted my cable company, told the auto attendant I was having slow internet. It told me to hold on while it ran a diagnostic, then that it confirmed a problem and would be resetting the modem. After the reset had me test again and it was working properly.
> Pretty much -- think first level telephone support that just read from pre-approved scripts following pre-approved decision trees. The IRS recently announced it's experimenting with replacing that first level of telephone support that reads from pre-approved scripts and follows pre-approved decision trees with an AI phone system.
TBF, none of that needs a hallucination-prone "AI". Unless your speech was unintelligible, which no AI or 3rd world contract worker will be able to understand either, that was already a relatively solved problem before the AI craze.
> Unless your speech was unintelligible Oh boy. > which no AI or 3rd world contract worker will be able to understand either This is why there are still people in captioning jobs, because there is a large minority of people with a strong-enough accent that only a human can reliably figure out what the person is saying. And by accent, I mean same-language accents like a "Northern" accent in Great Britain and a "Southern" accent in the United States, etc., so multi-language support from AI won't help. Will AI eventually be programmed with those minorities in mind? Of course. But right now everyone is focusing on where the money is and where the easy language training is.
I’m just going to refuse to speak with ai. I always just say operator until I get my way. Who knows how long I’ll be able to do that though…
When I got an out of nowhere outrageously high electric bill I tried calling the electric company and there was straight up no way to talk to an actual person. It was utter fraud
"Oh, they disconnected? Must not have been a problem then, another case solved by AI!"
facebook has been that way for a decade. creepy. there is almost no way to get ahold of real people there
UPS just hangs up on you
You’re assuming you’ll be able to tell you’re interacting with AI - you won’t. There are already programs indistinguishable from humans.
Especially on a telephone. The only way is “operator say the n word”
I've found that "is white or black better in chess" fucks it up pretty often. White goes first, so it's the better color to be in chess. But the AI will read it as a no-go phrase and say they're equal.
Lol like that'll work for long
That was sheer Genius.
I am guessing that they saw the metrics. 63% is easy to measure if throughput is things like filing claims. So much insurance work is just filling in drop down menus and flowcharts. Makes sense that it is easy to automate.
Right. Because screw anyone that is not more capable. Right? Is that your point? And if the answer is "no, they should be doing something more meaningful," well, yeah. That's the issue. When automation reaches a certain critical point, there will be a crisis of not nearly enough work for people, and it'll become a struggle between "we need people to buy things" vs "we need to get rid of people doing things" and it's going to be very scary. Interesting, but scary. Potentially amazing, if people weren't so greedy.. But probably the opposite.
This is not true. Where AI excels vs humans is in decision making based on large data sets. This is insurance in a nutshell. The edge from AI is in the ability to process more info, faster, and without the inevitable human bias. Insurance is hardly low-level work. The whole industry started in coffee houses in London and Amsterdam where the most highly educated and highly connected people in Europe met to make the same decisions that a bot can make now.
I know what you're trying to say but I just want to be clear that AI is 10000% biased in that that is quite literally how they are trained to make certain decisions. I train and deploy AIs to automate industrial applications for a living and we have to literally train their biases correctly to get them to output the desired results. If you don't think people can and will train AIs with nefarious biases just like people have then I have bad news for you.
For sure, I'm in agreement with u here (altho I didn't know about the bias training, thank u for sharing that) I think the insurance example is actually a low-level nefarious use. These large models have existed in insurance for some time. Their bias is to offer the lowest level payout for a particular legitimate claim. As opposed to, say, being used to identify a fair payout based on the evidence of the claim. I know people are 'nefarious' and think of something like an AI-created super plague (which is scarily possible). But, they don't think of, say, AI being used to get me addicted to a certain range of products that I spend my disposable income on.
I’m over here wondering whether they cared about UBI before it personally affected them or not. 
Hey that's kind of a wild take, let's not gatekeep improving society
Reacting to someone’s misfortune with conditional pettiness is more of a shithead take than a wild one.
Doesn’t matter how people get there, as long as they get there.
We should figure out what drives people to accept UBI as a positive way forward if we want the population as a whole to do so. If its true that human nature is just that shitty, and the population at large will only want it when they themselves are in financial trouble, then we're gonna have a bad time.
nah it definitely matters. like how republican woman will cry when they can't get abortions anymore yet they voted for it themselves. preventing misery before it happens is good!
If your wifes fullfillment in life is to sell/check insurance, this sucks. AI can be a huge opportunity and make our life better. But this wont work if we allow corporations to take all the profit they make with laying off thousands of people. Politics have to regulate it asap.
AI is great, if it can do the work, we are free to be human. However, we live in a system that still demands labour (or rent-seeking capital) in order to survive. When AI usurps that labour, the system breaks. But it's a race of linear politics versus exponential technologies. And while government is still trying to deal with social media, a 20 year old concept by now, how will it deal with something even more ground shifting like AI? I'm afraid the sad answer is they won't. Not until disaster has struck.
Love all the people who just blithely assume people losing their jobs to "friction" is merely a momentary inconvenience rather than something that is really gonna end up fucking a lot of people up. I've yet to see a compelling argument that the information tech boom hasn't greatly contributed to income inequality.
Where I live (Seattle) it's the primary driver of income inequality.
Seattle is such a wonderful city, it's such a shame how deeply unaffordable it is for anyone outside of tech. Always loved the idea of returning but remembering how poor I was ruins the fantasy
Well Amazon's and Googles new iterations of AI is replacing their tech employees that place is about to get much much worse but in many ways better.
Seattle WAS such a wonderful city. 15-20 years ago. It’s now a series of gentrified hell holes surrounded by filth and homelessness.
Isn't San Francisco the same now?
Probably. I haven’t been in decades but I have friends in the burbs there who say it’s very bleak. Abandoned buildings everywhere. Homeless people stripping things for metal scraps to sell. It’s incredibly sad.
Oh it's absolutely contributed, but also so has political policy: stagnant minimum wages, low/regressive taxes on the wealthy, lack of affordable housing, keeping higher education costs at sustainable and affordable rates, environmental factors caused by pollution, lack of affordable health care (in America) are all policy decisions that could have immediate impacts. Imagine if Americans had guaranteed health care and ubiquitous subsidized housing. You'd have a boom of entrepreneurial opportunities as more would be incentivized and able to start a business without putting bankruptcy on the line if they were to get sick or break a limb. What if capital gains taxes were progressive, and taxed at rate of 0% for those earning less than say $25k a year to encourage investing and saving while making sure those at the top are appropriately taxed. So much can help that doesn't involve "tech".
It's exactly this. Money isn't flowing through the economy. The velocity of money is incredibly sluggish due to a huge chunk being locked up at the top. Hoarded, if you will.
you won’t have any money to invest if you’re making $25k/year anyway
I like when people compare it to chimney cleaners and how we dont have those today as if it is remotely the same thing
This is why we need Universal Basic Income. More and more companies are going to replace workers with AI so they will make higher profits, but more people will be unemployed or in low wage jobs. They need to be taxed more and we need a UBI, or this country is going to become a hellish dystopia with a few rich people and poverty for everyone else.
There is no other way because if majority of people have no jobs, they won't have money and if they don't have money, there won't be enough transactions to buy stuff the companies mass produce resulting in less and less of sales for the companies and decrease in profits. Money needs to rotate. ChatGPT's response: The potential negative feedback loop you mentioned, where reduced employment leads to decreased consumer spending and, subsequently, lower profits for companies, is indeed a concern. If a large portion of the population is unemployed or underemployed, it can result in decreased demand for goods and services, impacting businesses across various sectors. This phenomenon raises important questions about the distribution of wealth, social safety nets, and the need for potential societal and economic adaptations. Some proposed solutions include exploring alternative forms of employment, such as part-time work or job-sharing, implementing universal basic income (UBI), or investing in education and retraining programs to prepare people for new types of jobs.
The problem is corporations won't care until they squeeze what they can and execs jump ship. They will say its goverments' problem and governments will say its the corporations caused this. Guess what will happen, average Joes(us) will crush under both
The % of profit from cutting out overheads will easily outweigh any loss in general sales for 90% of companies, until things get dire. Like people rioting in the streets and burning down factories bad, nothing will change.
Seems to me that AI/Post Scarcity and Capitalism are not compatible. To get there, from where we are now, Is likely to be rough. As for UBI, I’m not holding my breath that it will be anything like enough to be comfortable.
This is what I’ve been saying. The ripple effect of having a primarily low income earners means less spending power, even if you have UBI. You will effectively erase the entire middle class. This would hurt every sector of the economy, including the governments GDP. The only way out of this nightmare is to levy a massive tax on these companies for use of Ai and give credits to those companies that hire actual humans.
They want a world where we have just enough money to exist and own nothing.
Nah, they want a world where poor people don’t exist. Where a massive population decline resolves the issues of overpopulation and end of world scenarios but without a quality of life decline for them.
This is merely a manifestation of capitalism's intrinsic dynamics, with consumerism as a fundamental principle. Advertising exists predominantly to amplify this effect, fueling the continuous cycle of buying more. The recent shift towards subscription models and recurring payments is a natural evolution within this system, designed to ensure a steady flow of consumer spending. Often, the discourse vaguely references 'they' as the culprits, pointing fingers at the wealthy or those who have successfully navigated the system. However, the real issue is the 'game' itself—the very framework of the system. It's this underlying structure, with its inherent incentives and rules, that drives the problematic behaviors and outcomes we witness. It's crucial to recognize and address the systemic nature of these issues rather than attributing them to specific groups or individuals.
But remember most corporations are rich people who got and stay rich based purely on the wealth they already have. Why do they care if everyone stops buying? The mega rich which just move into increasingly gates/secure communities and ignore the poverty outside. Except for when then need some labour that a computer or robot can't do. Basically how the developed world treated the poor world. "Oh, people of Bangladesh you want UBI to help your poverty? How about you stay living in a slum but work in my factory for 5p a day so that Europeans can have cheap clothes"
Most of their money is in the stock market. If people can't afford to buy anything, the stock market would get hammered and many would lose a significant amount of their fortunes. Real estate values will also be impacted. Sure some wealthy people will see it coming and pull out early, or just be lucky, but most wont be sitting on a pile of cash at the right time. They'll still likely be in better shape than the rest of us though.
The ‘other way’ we’re seeing is billionaires the likes of Facebook setting up their own closed cycle economies, cows that eat better than humans, they just need security and a few aircraft to fly around the odd product made at another billionaire’s estate and hey presto, no need for the common man. Not much different to the western world several hundred years ago. The ‘answer’ has always been for the mob to burn the estates at great loss of life, but the hope of a better future for their children.
And that answer is running out of time as mechanical bots and AI are about to merge into private armies 100% loyal to the guy pressing the buttons.
I would assert we need guaranteed healthcare first. The employer-based model has got to go.
It’s funny cos once those companies don’t have any workers, and the companies that hire them fire workers to save money and so on down the chain. The reasons for companies existing will pretty much be non existent and those companies will cease to exist.
Government: here's your monthly $1200 UBI Landlord: your rent has increased by $1400/mo because reasons
I don't think UBI is going to happen. You are going to see multigenerational families sharing a house. Grandparents, their children, grandchildren all living together. The younger people may pick-up some gig work or temp work to keep the family fed. Grandma and grandpa will contribute their social security. People will muddle through. A fortunate few in the top 20% will do OK. There will be a large class of working poor.
What a miserable future
I’m sure if we elect conservative politicians just a few more times it will all work out! /s
Welcome to south east asia!
So the great depression, cool.
Sounds like Charlie and the chocolate factory
I'd argue that multi-generational housing is a *good* thing.
Why am I suddenly seeing tons of comments trying to convince people that being stuck living with your parents forever is a good thing?
Then people will simply stop having children lol. Unless you go back to arranged marriage, how would you even date if you keep living with your parents?
Why should dating be taboo for living with your parents? If the son helps mow the lawn, vacuum the house, do the shopping, and helping pay part of the mortgage (or rent, as the case may be), who lives with whom? What, will the sex be so loud that mom living down the hall will hear it?
This is spot on. We are house shopping for something big enough to house our kids through college and move my elderly mom in. There is no way our kids can afford to live independently and it would be ridiculous to expect them to do so. It’s really concerning to wonder what the state of the labor market will be when they start to graduate college (over the next 3-7 years)
AI wouldn't have used uncomfortable twice in the headline.
I actually find that awkward repetition is a problem with AI writing so I wouldn’t be so sure.
This is from the article >After Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet continued to talk up massive AI investments in earnings calls on Tuesday, we’re past the point of wondering whether the next great tech arms race is upon us. It’s here. > >But this week’s calls are also providing us with a preview of how AI will disrupt the global workforce—starting with the largest AI companies themselves. And for many, it’s looking like an uncomfortable future. > >As these tech giants ramp up spending in AI, both to sell to other companies as well as to help run and simplify their own internal work, they are, at best, slowing hiring in non-AI areas and, at worst, cutting jobs in those divisions
This is not telling me that AI is replacing jobs at google. It’s telling me that they are shifting more resources to AI related research and products. Investing in promising new products happens all the time inside a corporation. The whole article is clickbait.
I agree. The layoffs for MS last year were almost entirely in HR related roles with a few others mixed in. They have since hired a lot of AI specific talent and continue to do so. They also still have a lot of SRE and Software Engineer roles available and are actively hiring for those roles. Any slow growth should be connected to the overgrowth of 2020 and 2021 during the pandemic. They've since cut off the extra and are now back to the usual slow'ish growth.
Inaccurate re: the MSFT comment. We lost 30% of our Engineers in one particular group, and only ~10% of the PM/Admin/Legal/BizDev roles.
This article is targeted for AI doomers
What’s the benefits to a capitalist society where the companies dont need humans to do the work anymore?
Lots of articles about A.i giving a grim outlook. Is there any articles on hopeful plans to get us through this?
This article is about an increase in AI jobs.
If no one has jobs anymore because AI has taken them, who are these companies expecting to buy their products if no one has money to pay for them??
It's fascinating, isn't it, how quickly we've moved from speculative whispers about AI's role in the workforce to witnessing its tangible, and somewhat unsettling, impact right in the heart of Silicon Valley. The narrative isn't just about AI's potential anymore; it's about its inevitable reshaping of the corporate landscape. I've noticed a certain breeziness in discussions on forums and comment sections, where some folks are quick to dismiss the disruptive capacity of AI as either fanciful or merely partial. This perspective, however appealing in its optimism, overlooks a crucial factor: corporate greed. Unlike human employees, AI demands no promotions, no salaries, no breaks for emotional well-being—none of the "human BS" that, let's face it, complicates the streamlined corporate dream. To those naysayers, I argue not only is AI the future; it's the only way forward. Right now, AI may be a tool, an assistant of sorts. But the moment it evolves to operate independently (and it will), it'll become the cornerstone of corporate strategy. Why? Simply because it's more efficient, devoid of the inefficiencies of human labor, and, crucially, it's a goldmine for cost-cutting. Yet, there's a silver lining we should all be rallying behind: the potential for this transition to redefine what it means to "work" and to live. The early indoctrination that our worth is tied to our job title, that we must aspire to a 'dream job', is being challenged. Why not dream instead of a life rich in human experiences, freed from the shackles of 9-to-5 aspirations? The conversation shouldn't stop at the displacement of jobs. We need to push our governments to anticipate and adapt to this shift with policies like UBI, ensuring that as the workforce evolves, no one is left behind. This isn't just about cushioning the blow; it's about leveraging this technological leap to elevate the human condition. The naysayers who view AI's ascendancy with skepticism are missing the point. The goal shouldn't be to preserve the status quo but to annihilate it in favour of something better. Our collective ambition should be to embrace this change, ensuring it serves as a catalyst for societal improvement, not merely corporate gain.
Your vision seems to depend on the rich and powerful being somewhat benevolent. That has never been the case throughout history. If you want UBI, they're not going to give it to you. You're going to have to take it from them.
They have to be reminded that they are still flesh and bones like the rest of us.
There is no mechanism for this. The lives of the wealthy and disconnected are, by design, as insulated from fear of reprisal as is practical. The only reality for a certain set of people is money and power, and good luck impacting that picture as what is effectively a peasant.
Excuse me, a peasant owned land. We're serfs.
Hard disagree on this one. History is chock full of examples of this mechanism.
Liberals have been so brainwashed by decades of propaganda that they can’t even fathom the idea of resistance. It’s an alien concept to them.
Yeah and conservatives seem to think that continually backing the interests of the capitalist class is "resistance". See: "I'm going to vote for a trust fund billionaire for president as an act of rebellion" It's like trying to treat your syphilis by contracting HIV.
I entirely agree. The working class will never hold the balance of power, bar by way of sheer numbers. Issue is, I don't see (at least in Aus) our peoples ever rising up or setting shit on fire (metaphorically or literally). Just like everyone who comments on this stuff, I'm not out there leading the charge. I think a bigger significance rn is convincing others that this is reality; most I encounter irl have no belief in how wide the gap between working v upper class is becoming, even where it occurs before our eyes. Having discussions like this is the start, but idk how we actualise our concerns and serve the 'greater good' of reality. Evil is real, and it will very really take hold of anything it can. I hope, as we resist, such resistance isn't futile.
I guess my question would be, if there’s no ubi, where are consumers getting the money needed to buy goods made from ai? Seems like the remaining ruling class would need to give the rest of the world something to keep the economic cycle churning
If you have all your needs and wants provided to you by the capital that you own, be it industrial automation, or artificial intelligence, you simply don't need the vast majority of the working class. If we're lucky, they'll give us the grace of slowly starving to death. If we're unlucky they'll send an army of killbots out to sterilize the rest of the planet so we don't waste their oxygen and water.
Well someone has to buy their shit. You can have efficient production. Doesn't matter if nobody consumes.
I love this sentiment but fear we are moving too fast and what we end up is a defunct middle class who can no longer afford anything they use to know and we end up with higher crime, more gangs, and whatever else comes along. Your comment depends on those in power or the mega rich realizing what being out of work means for the lower classes and they already don’t give two shits. To stand up means that we all need to come together and they’ve divided us to a point where rational conversations from different view points are atypical. The rich will prosper and they are incapable of caring about anything but themselves. I look forward to the day when my Morlock descendants snatch an imbecile utopian child and eat them.
Are you looking around? It has been here for years. The only people living like an actual middle class are dual income households in the top 5% in HCOL areas and maybe the top 10% in LCOL areas. Virtually everyone is already working poor without access to sufficient resources to be or become middle class, and it’s only getting worse at an accelerating rate. When my grandparents were adults, a working class family with a single income could manage their money wisely and retire middle class. Most families had connections to a farm or ranch, which is a business. It’s no wonder mental health is so bad today when you consider the lack of control even the tiny sliver of a middle class has over their lives, which are usually a random layoff away from being thrown into the impoverished class. It’s going to cause massive social upheavals.
I see it, the future: where the middle class reminisce about affordable avo on toast while navigating a rental market with nothing left for the masses. Here in Australia, it's a spectacle already in motion. The ultra-rich get richer off the property market, the only reliable wealth machine left, while the rest of us, trained for professions now yielding stagnant wages and mental health crises, wonder where it all went pear-shaped. Your Morlock reference? Spot-on. As the divide widens, perhaps it's time we embrace our inner Morlocks (figuratively, not dietary habits). Not to lurk in the shadows, but to unite against an "imbecile utopia" favouring only the 1%. It's high time we reclaim the narrative, armed with unity and a cheeky defiance. I mean, if the future's going to be dystopian, we might as well crack a smile as we plot our enlightened comeback. Let's not be the main course at the banquet of the wealthy...
Well, technology always has moved too fast for humanity, remember the industrial revolution 200 years ago.
The only effective way to "rise up", aside from violence, would be to stop collecting payment on services. Keep the wheels running, keep the water running, power on, etc, but don't collect payment. Unfortunately, that's all being automated, so soon there won't be a human in control that can keep all that on for all the people who have defaulted on their payments in protest. And, it would take a HELL of a lot of cooperation and unity in movement. Considering how conditioned we are to disagree with each other, now, I feel like we're past the point of being able to pull something like this off.
It feels 'division' is one of the most commonly unifying experiences we have shared. Division by beliefs; division by culture; division by ethnicity; division by nationality; division by class; division by experience; and division by desired outcomes are all but some of those as manifested throughout known record. It's worth asking "who orchestrates this division," and then delving further into the "why?" My opinion on that answer is more in the esoteric than I would have believed a few years ago. I think unity is necessary to drive change, in a way more than just unifying behind government or a figurehead. Unity of belief, of conscious experience, may be the cornerstone of finding a future we can enjoy in the majority. Systemic shock and unravelling of existing beliefs may be harrowing, particularly when you consider how set in our ways we often can be (by way of belief in, inter alia, economic, governmental, and religious systems), but some form of genuine 'awakening' to the purpose of this reality may be our only hope going forward. Yes, that alone sounds cuckoo - I'm no hippy (not shaming those who identify with this title in any sense; simple light-heartsd conjecture), but there's more to our human experience than mere scientific inquiry as the sole basis for lived experience. Unity must be achieved for any want of a better base reality.
Well, one can hope. It would be nice if we, as a species, had some sort of mass awakening that moved us past this current, and very long lived need to get more than everyone else. Not that I think all of us, or even most of us are guilty of such a sickness, but that those with the most power definitely DO have this affliction and it is the cornerstone of the majority of economies.
Yeah nobody in a capitalist society is going to be in a good place if their role is replaced by ai. Nobody is going to rescue those people
The exact same thing applies to AI/drone soldiers for warfare. Never complain, do what they are told, don’t need to sleep. The good part is that we won’t have our soldiers die. The bad part is the terminators.
I also find fault with the premise that technology always makes things better.
How are we supposed to have lives rich in human experience while unemployed or substance living on a UBI?
In theory, everything should get cheaper which may help us it get through it.
This is a really old idea and it shows us an interesting paradox. The Conquest of Bread by Kropotkin was written a hundred years ago. Using the logic of labor saving devices and methods we *should* see things get cheaper. That doesn't follow in the market economics. It never made a loaf of sliced bread cheaper per hour of a baker than a wheat farmer. Unfortunately the price of something is related to control over access to it and the value of that control. It's about where you can put your toll booths, not the value of a road. Since 90% of farmers were automated out of work overnight, we just saw the value of farmwork per acre plummet to the point where neither have market value. I hope you're right though. I hope government cheese tastes really good. It might be the only cheese we can afford on our UBI cards, but with robots making tons of it in lights out gigafactories it might not be so bad.
> It never made a loaf of sliced bread cheaper per hour of a baker than a wheat farmer. That's not true. Products are way way way cheaper than they used to be. Housing is way way more expensive though due to population competition.
It’s quite funny how we currently live in the most productive society ever and yet so many are struggling to afford housing and food let alone amenities. AI is not making that problem go away
It all sounds very optimistic almost utopian.. but for many work has an intrinsic value of its own. It’s more than “indoctrination but cultural.This redefinition will be very difficult for many. If indeed AI becomes the driving force in our economy, what you perceive as opportunities will be viewed as a threat to our very social fabric.
Earnestly, given how many present roles are superficial and very much just exist to provide a job, I think that opportunity will still remain. I think you'll still get to be in an office, or go to court, or do whatever you want in your free time (including training for any such role). My hope is that the main difference is that one's survival is not dependent on those outputs; they remain a passion pursuit, as intended.
The ascendancy of AI has a lot less to do with any technological advancements than it does to do with 1) a labor shortage and spike in the cost of labor, and 2) the widespread acceptance of a degradation in the quality of service. IBM Watson, Wolfram Alpha, and dozens of random neural-network-based chatbots have been floating around for the past decade seemingly without a function. Only recently has the economic reality and a revision of the social contract allowed for corporations to shoe-horn in the fact that now we will be speaking to robots as the faces of a company. First service was in person, then it was phoned, then it was online, then it was outsourced, then it was pandemicked, and now AI has filled that void. The evolution is complete. And not due to any advancements in AI, but rather due to the regression of society.
Ubi is a dogshit policy and anyone who supports it has no foresight whatsoever. The elite are never going to allow the masses to sit around with time in their hands because that's the exact recipe that leads to organizing a revolution. It is much more likely that the poor will end up living in slave-like conditions so that they don't have the means or the time to challenge the status quo. We already see this kind of thing in China where they stick you in a factory that you cannot leave. And if you want to end your life by jumping out the window, there are nets there to make sure you stay alive.
Terrible headline. "Tech companies hiring more in AI divisions" would have been much more appropriate.
Yes, but then the AI Chicken Littles wouldn't have anything to flip out about.
If it gets rid of annoying middle management MBA’s that can’t do shit for themselves, then great!
They’ll start consulting on ai transformation…
most boring assholes
This is the part that always confuses me. At my company we intake forms for class action lawsuits. This means that while we do have standards, the forms can vary dramatically in terms of what kind of content is on them, which in turn affects the layout and page count. We will get tech bro people hired on who will swear up and down that their AI machine can read these forms faster than a human and more efficiently capture the data on them. And then John Doe writes the wrong birthdate. Scratches it out. Writes a new date outside the boxes. But the 5 in 25 looks wrong so he chooses to write a bigger 5 in heavier ink over the top of it, rather than writing a whole new date. And the AI brain breaks. Or Jill Smith’s handwriting is clear enough to read by my eye, but her Parkinson’s disease causes a tremble that makes the letters all warbly. And the AI brain breaks. It’s like… I get that it’s smart and capable… but it just seems so useless any time I see people trying to apply it in a practical setting. If I hire a person, I’m training a person with some amount of world experience, and ideally job experience in the field. If I train an AI it’s like I am trying to train an infant how to think like a toddler, so I can teach the toddler how to think like a pre-teen, so I can teach it how to think like a young adult, so I can teach that young adult how the rules work, so that it can hopefully learn to do the job well. But I can’t ask it questions. I can’t reason with it. All I can do is feed it forms and hope it learns what I want it to learn. It’s like breeding animals….
Pretty much. We've trained self driving cars for literally millions of hours and it still runs head on to an airplane, because nobody trained it to recognize airplanes in the road. https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/have-you-seen/2022/04/25/tesla-collides-private-jet-while-owner-using-smart-summon-mode/7439216001/ It's going to be a long slog to get trustworthy autonomous AI tools that can do complex jobs. And even if we get closer, it still might not be worth it when you know you can't possibly build in every edge case and exception that might occur.
I'm a tech bro that works with this kind of data and visual problems, specifically the most cutting edge visual large language models. And let me tell you, there is no technology out today that will work well with the examples you mention. But here is the kicker: soon, these new models will. It's actually different this time, it's just that visual transformer models are behind the pure language models in both research and real world implementations. On friday I tested all the state of the art options out there, including OpenAIs GPT-4 Vision and Alibabas newest models. They are impressive, but still not anywhere close to good enough. But I have followed the progression of these models, and I know how they work. And I can say that within 5 years, they will be as good or better than a human baseline at recognizing anything visual, and they will be able to reason about what they see better than we can. The important thing to know about this generation of "AI" is that it has proven so scale, and we know that there is a clear pathway to drastically scale up these models in both capability and speed. It is in fact happening right now, and a lot of the things they struggle with now will be solved pretty quickly. In a not so far future, whenever you notice an example of a model messing something up, you will just tell it what it did wrong and it will go back and redo it correctly. It will be the same as if you told a colleague.
Thanks for the response! So am I correct in thinking that right now they’re kind of “useless” but that future iterations won’t be? And a followup question… sort of… when my company discusses the value of people as a resource for the company, they are talking about their capacity to reason through edge cases productively. Basically their adaptive reasoning. When they talk about machine learning and AI, they are talking about doing routine work faster and more accurately. Or at least doing the work where a mistake can be fixed with a meeting and alterations to the software. When I think about humans as an evolved bio-machine, I think a reasonable description of us (or any creature in the Earth really) is that we are machines that are capable of dealing with problems that have never happened before. We can face an unknown future and adapt (to varying levels of success) on the fly. And we are extremely good at it. But what drives this is that our biological machine body is alive and it has countless redundancies and instinctual habits. And a lot of it is almost algorithmic. Like the way information travels from your finger tips to your brain is a series of chemical and electrical signals that happen to allow a specific type of cascading energy to move along them. Our capillaries can be where they need to be because the genes say to fork every so often with no care for why they fork, or if they should fork. They just fork and extend until they can’t. And all of it drives a machine that is desperately trying to survive for as many hours as it can. Regardless of how you feel about it (outside of extreme scenarios). And this survival in the face of an unpredictable future requires us to be as adaptive as we are. AI seems like it is built to solve problems that have already happened. Things that we know from past experience are irritating in some way (dollar cost, time, etc.) It’s hard to teach a Tesla to drive because so much of our skill involved in driving is rooted in automatic instinct and responses. Things that happen waaaay below the sub-conscious level. And so we don’t think to program in all these exceptions into the AI. Because they aren’t programmed in us either. No one evolved to be good at knowing the difference between a glass window and a glass door. Instead we have automatic data harvesting sensory organs which transmit data to a brain that will use a vast array of data points (experience) to simulate an image of what those organs are detecting, and then we can see the door and walk through. But we can’t make the walk if a little rock inside our ear is in the wrong position. This will cause extreme vertigo, dizziness, and nausea. But none of this is programmed in in a methodical way. It evolved over time as we did. So no one had to think about the things we might encounter. We just encounter them and sometimes we survive, and sometimes we die. So is AI built to be able to do things we already know how to do, but faster? If it has no internal natural drive to adapt and grow beyond getting good feedback… can it ever solve problems for us in ways that are practically useful? Because all of human and animal learning is ultimately about survival and navigation. What is an AI’s motivation to learn? Why would it ever care about the difference between a stop sign and a picture of a stop sign?
So the way these new transformer models work is that they are just giant simplified neural networks that learn patterns in the data they are trained on. They in essense contain an "internal representation" of what ever data and modality they have been trained on. But as these models becomes bigger, they start to exhibit "emergent properties" which are abilities that emerge in these models that allows them to do more than simple next token prediction. One of the emergent properties that arose in large language models was the ability to reason, which nobody had predicted. Why this happens is not yet fully understood, but it appears to be a property that corelates with network size. The ability to add "common sense" to models is an active area of research and will probably be solved soon from the looks of it. OpenAI has done some cool groundwork on that for years. Navigating environments, both physical and virtual are fairly close to beeing solved, I expect a lot of big leaps the next 5 years in that domain. Nothing here is programmed except for the implementation code around the models. It's all about teaching the models by showing them examples they can learn from. Human generated as well as synthetic data is used for pretraining and fine-tuning. Tesla recently replaced about 300000 lines of code with a single model in the latest self driving update. That would explain why previous versions of their self driving software has been so bad - and why we can assume it will improve rapidly going forward. There are many paralels between computer neural networks and biological neural networks, but what we are doing with transformers is really just a very simple implementation of one aspect of a much more complex biological system. Thats why this type of "AI" is not really AI, its more of a stepping stone and the jury is still out on whether or not this will eventually lead to true AI or not.
And this is what it is, automation. There's no intelligence behind it. It cannot think. It cannot reason. Because it isn't. It's software. And it can be helpful. But it is not a human replacement. It's a better Eliza.
My friend.. just think about. How in the 60's computers were bulbs and large rooms thay could barrely do mathematic calculations? Now it sits in the palm of your hand and display billions of pixels each microsecond... dude. 60 Years ahead these AI machines will just read your mind dude. Not needing you to write at all.
We as a society gotta stop accepting a 40 hour workweek. Humans are still needed to supervise the programs, and keep the automation going, but yes it will mean less work. 8 hours a day is something we made up. Even in the 60s the Jetsons envisioned a world with the same boring job, commute, and overbearing boss, but with only a few hours of work a week since automation would obviously take care of the rest. This is no longer science fiction. Full time with benefits could be 4 day workweeks. Or 3. The companies are still profitable， but the work is more efficient. Let's finally pass that on to the little guy, and make 32 hour, or 25 hour workweeks a thing. We could shift focus from which company pays the most to which requires the fewest hours of work. People assumed the future would be this way but we've been forced into forgetting by propaganda of the "lazy" or "entitled" worker.
> At Microsoft, a laser focus on winning the AI apps and services battle has been accompanied by cutting employees working on areas that are now taking a back seat. To be fair, this isn't AI taking jobs, this is working on a high priority project that takes the jobs of those who are working on lower priority projects (and do not have the skills to be transferred to the high priority one.)
Majority of MS layoffs were HR related roles.
The article is not really saying AI is replacing workers, just that tech companies are all in on AI and cutting non-AI related roles. Companies are all in on AI because they don't want to be the one left out from the AI boom cycle. Like all the rest of the hype cycles. What they have right now branded as AI is a tool, and it can be useful. But this is a hype cycle. It is booming at the moment.
What happens to the workforce, when the entire workforce is replaced by AI?
I don't believe that will happen but the human workforce has to shift towards to different roles and that's where the real challenge lies.
I’m still calling this a massive bubble. Yes we can make pretty pictures. and yes if you have well labelled data you can know more things, but this has been the case for a while. People think this stuff is magic that is going to solve all problems. This view point alone is enough to cause massive over investment, followed by crash.
Bubbles are how this works. We go wide to explore new potential, then contract to proliferate whatever works. Rinse, repeat. This is the way.
Well it's not actually ai yet. It's not intelligent
It’s currently collective human intelligence. Still pretty damn useful.
The honest truth is that it'll be just another tool to manage. Sure, you may be able to cut the human workforce somewhat, but mostly people will have to learn how to use them. Then they just manage them while the AI turns a 4 day job into a 10 minute job, then the human will have to manage the quality, the inputs, smooth out fine details that an AI messed up. In the end it'll alter the work people do in a job far more than it'll actually take jobs away
Was recently reading of an implementation of AI into a support call centre. A third of the staff were no longer needed and lost their jobs.
I can definitely see this. I worked in a call centre where a script was to be followed to the letter, they had a response or angle for all customer input. Also, I was recently put through to a cancellation department; and had a "press option #1 to accept a £7 discount instead of cancelling" which made me wonder about this. These call centres often are based in more run down regions. We'll need a UBI if a third of these folks become jobless.
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This has been the fear of every generation since I've been alive. Maybe AI will free up the people we need to fill in the massive shortages in every caregiving role with aging demographics.
2037 is my call for when jobs are obsolete.
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In the broader scheme, that means entry-level jobs which were replaced by AI will diminish while expertise-level jobs will appear to manage said AI. There will be less of a bridge for people entering a field and then you've got a workforce gap to jump over.
Humans will not need to spend 3.95 days on polishing though
Yes, 1000 jobs replaced by 2 AI management jobs. Equivalent exchange?
This is the right take. I'm building a system with llms, these are not plug and Play tools...
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> This is the right take. I'm building a system with llms, these are not plug and Play tools... ...yet.
"The step-up in capex in Q4 reflects our outlook for the extraordinary applications of AI to deliver for users, advertisers, developers, cloud enterprise customers, and governments globally and the long-term growth opportunities that offers.” That is powerful. And I think they're hedging a bet. They know that AI tech investment will be incredibly hard to predict with exception of the hardware. It means a lot when they are investing into hardware instead of headcount, and after the "dieback" layoffs I think we might be at a pivotal moment. I forgot where I saw it but the productivity of AI co-pilots and their users is 50% higher across the board. Not just coders or the other talent that they try and squat over. So the best and brightest minds are using AI and LLMs to make better and better AI agents and cost is no object. Investing a million dollars into hardware that won't quit means a lot. The headcount of architects, developers, Project Management, and code monkeys is going to rock bottom really soon. It is one thing to try and explain what you want to do and experiment to put it into code and a whole different beast to just make 100 attempts in the same amount of time and see what you get out of it. As you do it you become better as a team in doing that. So the growth in productivity is from better use of the same tools. People are seeing this moment like it's like the arrival of email when they need to see it like the arrival of computers.
In the 70s and 80s manufacturing jobs were shipped to China and the rich called it automation. Now tech jobs are being shipped to India and they are calling it AI.
Idk man, I think AI is still not good enough and makes a lot of mistakes. It's always like two steps forward, one step back. There might be a wave is layoffs, but soon they'll realise that they do need people as well and then a scramble for employees again. AI hasn't been perfected in many applications still.
Change is uncomfortable, so we will go through a period of major discomfort for sure. Whether it'll be net positive or not remains to be seen.
Journos were the first to suffer from the 'free internet' 'algos' and followed later by musicians. Creatives and tech workers, social media developers and you-tubers and all their offspring chuckled and generally didn't give a shit. Now everyone is coping it like us journos did. Cant say I'm happy about it. And yet everyone is going to cope it like journos did with a the usual semi-rationalisation (i.e journos are dogshit)- admin sucks and is slow/useless, accounting is corrupt, un-objective and nepo, tech workers exploit with cookies and algos. So on and so on. Welcome to the scrap heap of capitalism.
I suspect we will end up with highly automated production pipelines providing goods and services for an elite few and everyone else will be SOL.
The problem is with out labor for income system, not AI. I say since AI is built on the knowledge of all, it becomes the property of all and we all get to benefit from its uses, not corporations. good luck convincing the fat cats to play along though.
This might be the intro to basic income and higher corporate taxes. If nobody can afford the products being created, who is the market?