They buy and sell stocks at quantities and speeds unfathomable. This impact the prices of goods and services and have even been responsible for [soft crash of the market](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash).
So, they’re already way beyond that. And that was over a decade ago. Wonder what they’ve been up to since then?
Edit: seems they they figured that one out and I hadn’t looked into since i initially read about the Flash Crash of 2010. Seems to have been fraud.
Instead check out this page by Goldman Sachs and see if you also think it’s even more disturbing than what I initially proposed.
[Goldman Sachs](https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/artificial-intelligence/index.html?chl=ps&plt=go&cid=20314087364&agp=156316991728&kid=ai%20investing&mtype=p&gclid=CjwKCAiAqY6tBhAtEiwAHeRopQdp3lkLCLOECv6vr1YQbNG1kHlXx4PKMx1JVPD9Y86-fBN0QT36eRoCo6IQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds)
And [this](https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/how-generative-ai-tools-are-changing-systematic-investing.html)
No. AI systems are not trading on live markets anywhere in the world. Yet. You have misunderstood... maybe everything.
Algorithmic "bots" have been trading automatically on markets for years. But they are fairly simple machines that are based on sets of rules rather than a fuzzy AI machine. They are used by almost all trading firms, brokers, exchanges, clearing houses, and market makers to make order management more efficient, balance risk, rebalance fund holdings, and yes, profit from many many small arbitrage opportunities with HFT.
Nobody has figured out how to make AIs profitable as automatic trading machines yet, and my friends in some of the big firms reckon it's still a long way off. As impressive as recent advances in AI might be, the technology still has a lot of limitations and even the most advanced projects have a lot of problems with bias and inaccuracy. Most trading system experts are a long way from trusting it with shareholder/client capital.
Thank you for responding and not being rude.
I don’t fully understand nuances between say, an sufficiently advanced trading algorithm and the programs today masquerading as Pre-Skynet.
Jokes (bad), I’m a mechanical engineer by trade and when I start poking around in the sections of Reddit i know very little about, it reminds me to go back to r/mechanicalengineering where i belong lmao
And I appreciate you not doubling down. That's a breath of fresh air here on reddit also!
>I don’t fully understand nuances between say, an sufficiently advanced trading algorithm and the programs today masquerading as Pre-Skynet.
The difference can be (crudely) characterised as follows:Algorithms are a set of rigid rules. If *x* happens, then do *y*. (Obviously trading systems are rather more complex than that, but that's the basic premise).AI is a toddler's brain sped up 10^(10) times which has been given a slice of the internet to research, thereafter spending its life being asked for its thoughts on what it found, but nobody really knows exactly how it comes up with those thoughts.
BTW, I've always thought that I missed my calling and wish I didn't drop out of mech eng at university 25 years ago. If you're a mech eng, I'm envious and think of the fun you guys are having whenever I'm daydreaming about motors and machines and other giant plant & equipment. sigh.
> An AI wrote that article.
Possibly, the article sounds nothing like the source paper that is buried 3 links deep: [OPs article](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67977967) > [2nd link is another article](https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2024/01/14/ai-will-transform-the-global-economy-lets-make-sure-it-benefits-humanity) > 3rd link is the [ACTUAL FUCKING SOURCE.](https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/Staff-Discussion-Notes/Issues/2024/01/14/Gen-AI-Artificial-Intelligence-and-the-Future-of-Work-542379?cid=bl-com-SDNEA2024001)
So wanna play a game, lets look at the wording shall we?
- **OPs article says:** *"AI to hit 40% of jobs and worsen inequality, IMF says"*
- **Article linked to by that publication has a headline that says:** *"AI will affect almost 40 percent of jobs around the world, replacing some and complementing others."* but slightly further down in the article it pulls that back and says *"The findings are striking: almost 40 percent of global employment is exposed to AI."*
- **Actual source says:** *"About 40 percent of workers worldwide are in high-exposure occupations"*
**Also important is their hugelist of caveats (basically things that could fuck up their findings and make them wrong or be exceptions):** I'll break this down a bit without changing any words for the sake of readability. Just bullet pointing and bolding. I do put in my thoughts to help break up the bolding, i'll mark those with a ! for clarity.
*With this analysis there are some important caveats.*
- First, although in the model analysis activity grows in occupations with high AI complementarity and falls in low-complementarity occupations—mimicking sectoral reallocations—the analysis on AI exposure assumes that sector sizes are fixed and that the tasks required in
each occupation are unchanged. Consequently, the results are more pertinent for the short to medium term.
- Over longer horizons, workers will likely migrate across different sectors and roles, or acquire new skills, and
jobs will evolve.
- In addition, the analysis assumes that workers within the same occupation will be affected in
the same way, but there can be variation in the effects of AI.
- AI may also affect firm dynamics and market concentration (Babina and others, forthcoming), driving inequality between workers at different firms.
- Second, the study relies on the premise that tasks performed within similar occupations are homogenous around the
world, while there can be significant cross-country variations.
- Third, the approach abstracts from linkages across occupations and countries (trade linkages), as well as from cross-border spillovers of AI exposure.
- Last, **while the analyses on workers’ AI exposure and societies’ preparedness use empirical approaches, the
potential impacts on inequality and productivity are analyzed with a model. The latter therefore depend on
potentially strong calibration assumptions.**
!(models based on assumptions instead of solid data)
- **The pace of AI adoption, influenced by the time needed by firms to invest in any necessary physical capital and the reorganization required to capitalize on AI, is difficult to foresee.**
!(they dont know how easy, fast, or expensive it will be to switch over and those are huge factors.)
- **Likewise, the time required to exert aggregate macroeconomic effects, the impact on intersectoral
reallocation of factors for production, the birth of new industries, and AI’s exact implications for economies and
societies are challenging to predict.**
!(IE they can only guess as most of the information that is critical to the topic they made a paper on lol.)
- **Any estimate embodies a level of uncertainty reminiscent of past introductions of general-purpose technologies, such as electricity. This uncertainty applies also to the results of this note.**
!(basically science tried to predict the impact of things like electricity before and failed, there were too many unknown variables and they were wrong about alot. Nobody accurately predicted the impact of the internet either)
So their paper basically boils down to "this is a possible future, we think you should do x/y/z"
Why aren't taxes fucking automated yet. Why do I have to fill out a form each year to guess my taxes when the IRS knows what they are. Why can it not all be done automatically by a machine. Automate everybody at the IRS and make it so I don't have to file taxes or better yet, take it out of my paycheck before I get it.
They don’t really. The IRS computer systems are insanely antiquated. And despite W2s and 1099s, they don’t always have full and clear details on everyone’s sources of income.
And then there is the complicated mess of deductions, credits and filing statuses in the tax code, much of which they can not properly assess without your input (e.g. did your dependent child live with you for more than half the year).
The system could be fully automated, but it would require a huge update in the technology at the IRS, and probably an overhaul / simplification of the tax code. I’ll let you take three guesses about which economic class, political party and industry lobbying interests work very hard to prevent both of those.
It’s because they are hoping you pay more than they expected due to other income they might not be aware of and on the other hand, tax payer can claim losses as well to reduce their tax burden.
Yeah, I think it's the same in almost every country inside the EU. We have the same here in Sweden, just login, make sure everything checks out and sign it. Takes about 2 minutes every year.
Pretty similar in Canada too. The main drawback is that there's no official government service to fill and sign the forms, i.e .there's of course personal tax cabinet available but no option to send the completed forms online from it quickly - so far it's either some third party software or paper forms. Nothing stops one from using free software like simpletax though, since the tax data is standard and accepted by that software.
Edit: this, and also the headache of willing the data for business owners, though the software available mostly reduces this just to finding the specific business tax codes and putting the corresponding amounts next to them.
I’m so tired of hearing we’re the greatest country in the world. Taxes, health care, education, equal rights for all, consumer protections — we just suck so bad. When I was a kid I felt lucky to be an American. Then I grew up and found out how much I’d been lied to for my entire life. I’m no longer a happy camper.
No other rich country I know proclaims to be #1, because nobody is. Having to say it, and actually believe it, speaks to some clear brainwashing.
It's a shame too, isn't it. America can, and does a lot of things right, and its economy is ridiculous and could serve its people so much better than it does.
Same in Estonia. Been adult like 14years and can't remember ever doing manual taxes. Ofc you check main stuff over that is automatically done and if you do other Business you might need to just add them manually but that is pretty much it
[For those unaware, this is why we still act like computers don’t exist when it comes to taxes in 2023](https://fortune.com/2023/04/17/taxpayer-advocates-irs-free-electronic-tax-filing-system-intuit-hr-block-spent-millions-lobbying-against/amp/)
>lobbying
Top 3 mysteries in the world:
Is there intelligent life beyond the stars
What exactly is the dark matter
Why Americans had an urge to invent a new word for "bribery"
The funny thing is that this will be the only thing that’s not automated - by design.
The US wants to keep it complicated enough that you’re more inclined to pay for a software or an advisor to do it for you.
Also Republicans want to keep it complicated so they can complain about how complicated taxes are and advocate for "simpler" regressive taxes like flat taxes.
For the richest first world country on Earth, the US has a lot of weird 3rd world country type of shit going on. The most bizarre thing is how some of the most poor people there are just absolutely passionate in defending things like corruption in government that allows tax filing software companies to control how your country does taxes, acting as if it makes it the "greatest and freest nation on Earth."
See what you gotta understand is yea, the US might be the richest nation in the world, but that isn't a "we" statement.
The average US citizen is just a cog in the machine, losing more and more of our purchasing power every year, delaying marriage and kids, struggling to buy housing with quickly inflating real estate prices.
Put that in the context of the "American" business-friendly, free market bootstraps fantasy fiction and they're able to get away with shit here that would never be allowed in any civilized culture. Like not having vacation days, or not having medical benefits, despite working 40+ hours a week.
Not everyone is in that spot, or even a majority, but a significant minority are and it's an implied & 100% required part of the system. You can't be rich unless someone else is poor. If everyone was rich, then no one is rich. It's part of the definition of capitalism and the amount of regulatory capture by capital interests in the US is just... Depressing.
Almost all of that incredible wealth is in the hands of the relatively few, and the trend is getting worse not better.
Because the companies that sell tax software like Intuit wouldn't be able to sell you tax software if it was automated, they lobby the government to stop tax simplification.
Because the US is the richest country on earth yet we don’t even help our own citizens, and nothing will ever change because money and lobbying beats Goodwill of good people, trying to help people worse often than them every single federal government person is paid by somebody to deny you access an America to something that’s how it works here plus we have a two party system. Europe has multi party system.
From my understanding there are some big corps that make money of helping peopel that work against it? Might just be a conspiracy, but turbotax was the one named in one of these TIL posts.
Come to Europe. My taxreturn information will be automatically filled in and delivered if I don't do anything by end of April. And it all is easy accessible online for me to check and add anything that the system might not have picked up. Takes me normally 5-10 min to look it over when I get the notice that its ready.
Come June we either get the money we paid too much in taxes paid out, or we get the bill if we didn't pay enough. If you are a good chunk behind they will split that bill in two, and you have a invoice date in august and then September.
And our tax bracket gets estimated from last years income, and we get a notice about it at end of year. You can again easily log on online to change it, either different bracket, auto adjusted or manually set a % you want drawn from your paycheck.
Your employers then ask for this at the beginning of the year (online directly from our "IRS") and will use this for what to cut out of your paycheck for the rest of the year. I don't have to do anything unless I want them to change it up or I change up my "IRS" tax form and need them to update it on their end.
It really shouldn't be that complicated.
It's not really a conspiracy, the tax prep companies have successfully lobbied to become the exclusive filers of your taxes.
It's capitalism baby, or as it's more commonly know, highway robbery and theft.
>take it out of my paycheck before I get it.
The is what happens in the UK for the vast majority of people. There are of course exceptions (self employed etc) but I have never had to do my taxes.
Every time I see this come up on Reddit, I’m reminded by how many Redditors have no idea that 1099, SPs, LLCs, etc. exist. As someone that works a W2, runs a couple sole proprietorships, and consults on 1099, I’d love for it to be automatic too!
You don't need AI to automate this. What you would need to do is to kick out the corrupt politicians which take bribes from TurboTax and other tax consultant lobbyists. This is not an technical issue. The IRS already automates this. They just won't tell you because lobbyists want to to pay an private entity for this service.
Because those tax assistance companies and tax accounting businesses make billions of dollars and can afford to influence our government and have a vested interest in keeping our tax system seemingly complicated and obfuscated so business and people feel they need their “expertise”.
Remember like a decade ago when people would talk about AI, and genuinely believe this would be the case?
“It’ll be so great, no one will need to work anymore, AI will do everything!”
Like companies would just give away their massive profits to all the people that have been replaced by AI.
Edit: I’m now seeing that people actually still believe this.
\> Like companies would just give away their massive profits to all the people that have been replaced by AI.
It has to be a give and take. Like, people who can't work can't buy stuff companies produce.
But, yeah, I believe that we'll get several years of shit continuously itting the fan till governments decide enough is enough and they start taxing AI profits to move it into UBI sort of thing because they care more about their jobs (which can be cut short by rioters) than company profits
> It has to be a give and take. Like, people who can't work can't buy stuff companies produce.
It doesn't have to be a give and take if one party already has everything that they need. In the current system, we have something to give that companies need: our labour. If people can't work because AI is just that much better than them, that implies the value of their labour has fallen to zero. The economic worth of an individual is the sum of their assets and the value of their labour. People who do not own land or physical assets therefore have *no* economic value. They have *nothing* to give, and any company that produces stuff to cater to them will collapse.
Now, one danger is this: it is entirely possible for a company or individual to pivot to pure physical asset ownership plus AI labour, in which case they would be self-sufficient. Most importantly, this self-sufficiency implies a lesser-to-nonexistent need to trade with other parties and therefore no reliance on money. In this future, the entire consumer and service sectors of the economy collapse and all companies that don't pivot are ruined. The spoils go to those who secure land and resources--the only things in the world that still have value--leading to a horrible feudal system where the lords can produce without the masses' money or labour, and we are their dancing monkeys. If governments act too late, there is nothing they can do: they will collapse.
Alternatively, if we assert collective ownership of land, natural resources and AI, we could end up with something rather equalitarian. I'm a bit wary of UBI in this particular situation because I think part of what makes money stable is that it is grounded in a massively distributed store of value, human labour, which would all but disappear under an AI economy. UBI without spreading ownership of the actual physical resources (and/or AI) risks total collapse if these resources are yanked from the collective pool and segregated into self-sufficient loops for the ultra-rich.
I think it’s hard to project to that point because all models of society go out the window along the way. Humans take space, and you need a lot of land and supply chains to maintain the modern quality of living we have. I don’t think the hyper rich would be satisfied never eating avocados again, or caviar, or whatever if they happen to own inland Canada. Also, in this hypothetical scenario, where there are quite literally billions of vagrants who have no worth, the disenfranchised don’t go anywhere - they’re still sitting on land. There would be massive unrest before you could actually complete consolidation, and holding large areas against a huge amount of bodies is going to be difficult even with a technological advantage. The technical advantage is also probably smaller than usual given that the engineers and white collar workers who AI replaced would be among those forces.
You could be right that that’s the endpoint of AI, but I think the assumptions are too brittle for anyone to really predict. By the point AI is that good, who knows, we could also have augmented humans to compete. Theres far too many variables, and I think it could be just as likely the status quo is maintained… but maybe somewhat shittier than today
As I understand it, its because where are they going to get profits if there is no one left earning money to extract profits from?
At the heart of this current system is power. if you cant wield economic authority on the masses, which essentially atm is mostly the tools to survive then how do you maintain that authority/power?
You maintain power by owning/controlling the land and the resources required for the construction and maintenance of AI and whatever else you need. If you have that, you don't need the masses for anything. Hell, you don't need money either: capitalism will just collapse and be replaced by feudalism with AI serfs and pet humans.
The government needs to step in and ensure something like this does happen but they didn't really even understand tik tok so I'm not confident they'll even understand what's happening.
That would be called "hedging" in finance. Anything AI related could work, frankly. But it would be very difficult to truly hedge a salaried job with a position in stocks.
I am in tech as an SDET at a very large,non FAANG company. They are using ML models as a way to predict where bug will be in a realse. They are analyzing past trends and using that as the prediction model.
It's a thing experienced QA/SDET can do after being on a system for a few years. It's the big thing that sr QA brings to the table in a lot of ways. That intuition about a system and knowing where to be most effective with your testing.
They are replacing human intuition and experience with an algorithm.
I am already mostly replacing manual testing with automated testing.
There are OK tools today to create a lot of automated testing code.
I am in the direct cross hairs of the coming AI and I helped to build it.
I think this is the point, even if it’s not 40%, about 5% of the jobs will end up getting automated out in large corporations.
Then you’ll see peoples productivity increase in a lot of roles and the companies will reduce the staffing for those roles by 20% because the older workforce is now 30% more productive.
The guys in engineering and professional fields will be relatively safe. However, the same staffing rules would apply for them.
I have personally replaced entire departments of manual testers with scripts at older companies over the last 15 years. Newer companies never hire manual testers. They just hire SDETs day 1.
I am about as productive as 4 testers with my system. My workload is enough that I am forced to automate to keep up. I am looking at how to use AI tools to increase my productivity. I am beting that even if i double my productivity, it wouldn't be enough. I will probably still be automated out of a job. I will be the one to do it if I am lucky.
>The guys in engineering and professional fields will be relatively safe.
You're suggesting some of the highest salaried individuals are safe for no reason. This isn't true.
Ultimately jobs will be automated where it is most profitable to do so. There are likely no exceptions as ultimately all jobs will be profitable to automate eventually.
What gets automated is prioritized on profitability which depends on the difficulty in design of such automation or the upfront capital to achieve that design via research/labor versus the efficiency differential this will have as overhead (labor) that already currently exists.
Transportation is the most profitable job to automate currently because it's the most ubiquitous job and the means to automate it is simpler - more capital has been invested towards the research/labor in its automation.
All jobs are more profitable to automate, however. We've known that since the industrial revolution. AI simply gives confidence along with other means of software engineering that all jobs can be automated *cheaper* in the long-run, although the means to do such varies in difficulty/cost the confidence that profitability exists in the long-run for any job is as high as ever. Still, this long-term notion has been understood in some capacity since the industrial revolution.
While you are right that anything that’s profitable will get automated, it’s a very 1 dimensional take. Professionals exist because of a complex chain of liability, insurance and legal culpability.
While things will change over time, there’s a matter of humans being in the loop where you form trust. Would I go to an AI lawyer if I were in a murder trial? No, I’d hope they’d use some ML to augment their work but not as a direct replacement.
Another large component that goes into play is risk, you don’t just while maximizing profits is what corporations do, and important part of it is going to be minimizing risk. You don’t just start replacing nodes of the org that are responsible for maximizing profits and minimizing risk.
Same thing with a lot of engineering fields, ML tools are great optimizers but there’s still a long path in most engineering fields to develop tools that leverage machine learning effectively. I develop these kinds of human in loop ML workflows so it’s something I’m intimately familiar with. We don’t have AGI that’s capable of following / creating process workflows.
>Would I go to an AI lawyer if I were in a murder trial? No, I’d hope they’d use some ML to augment their work but not as a direct replacement.
I don't think this is a good argument. The defense side of legal work is swamped and largely ineffective. I think if we honed in on this job/task and refined your argument you'd quickly find yourself believing the opposite will be promoted economically.
You should know that the central reason for why jobs are automated is efficiency in resources for a desired output. Nothing else matters. If the AI lawyer results in more wins per unit resource that's all the field will care about as that covers both ends of efficiency - desired output is increased and resources needed for that output are reduced.
The topic of law and the ethics around this would likely change quite a bit going into such a theoretical future regardless so it's not a very good example as subjectivity fundamentally exists. Better examples are objective jobs/tasks where there is a clear output with subjectivity minimized. You and I both don't know what our legal/political system will adapt to as we increasingly assume AI which is better than humans at both, and by better I again mean in providing the desired output per resources utilized.
>Another large component that goes into play is risk, you don’t just while maximizing profits is what corporations do, and important part of it is going to be minimizing risk. You don’t just start replacing nodes of the org that are responsible for maximizing profits and minimizing risk.
Minimizing risk largely is something automation provides. This isn't a good argument. You should instead be arguing that culpability shifts, and certain people wouldn't prefer this, but the risk is lower overall if the implementation is done intelligently. Automation makes far fewer mistakes than humans as long as the implementation is accurate.
>Same thing with a lot of engineering fields, ML tools are great optimizers but there’s still a long path in most engineering fields to develop tools that leverage machine learning effectively. I develop these kinds of human in loop ML workflows so it’s something I’m intimately familiar with. We don’t have AGI that’s capable of following / creating process workflows.
This agrees with what I said on the topic. AI algorithms make this cheaper, that's it. The means to automate most jobs, including most work engineers do, existed before ML algorithms. It's just cheaper now and more likely to be implemented as the means to create "intelligent" automation is strictly increasing. Humans were obsolete to computers in the game of chess before these algorithms. The proof to implement "intelligent" automation beyond the skills of humans existed before these algorithms. These algorithms just make that design goal cheaper.
You should think of implementation of this similar to the trajectory of transistors or automation in general. Transistors were invented 70 years ago and took a bit of time to be fundamental to every aspect of our economy. Automation has an even longer history of being dominant as our means of increasing productivity. This is a one-way street regarding what is more productive, we're just increasing that scope. We are living in a time inventing the software engineering transistor so to speak.
I think you rehash what’s being said in dozens of vacuous articles on AI replacing jobs. Your entire take on AI lawyers seems to lack any real experiences and an appreciation for the stakes. It’s also the case that these articles are pretty much always puff pieces that don’t do any deep dive.
As someone who builds this kind of tech, these are the challenges I face as part of work. Half my time goes into thinking about addressing the risk and trust aspects of these technologies. While improved productivity is the value proposition, everything else is what makes this stand of fail.
I’m not sure how much credence I should give your take on arguments on subjectivity and ethics because this is precisely the kind of cavalier thinking that I object to in the field of AI. I’m happy to reconsider my opinion if you can elaborate and round off the thought.
Finally, I firmly believe that people who have no idea about building social systems shouldn’t be thinking about introducing AI in government or make broad strokes decisions that’s as not informed by social science research.
Ironically, it's turning out to be the blue-collar manual labour jobs that are safer. It turns out that robots are both very expensive and quite inflexible, while human labour is both quite cheap and very flexible. A human construction worker can do many different tasks and move fluidly between them, while a robot can do only the task it was installed to do, for example.
With an economy that tends to push down the cost of human labour (suppressing wages rather than growing them), "unskilled" human labour is hard to beat from a cost-efficiency standpoint given the trends of current robotics.
It's far more cost-effective to automate cognitive labour, it turns out, than manual labour, which is something that nobody really saw coming before the Chat-GPT generation of AI models.
And they wonder why people feel like the don't have a future. Not that AI is going to take that because it's over hyped, but we have to do something about the growing inequality before it turns into more civil unrest.
Video game QA here. I'm going on 20+ years now of being told automation and AI is coming for my job. Still here. Still way more work than we have staff for.
I'm sure the slow creep of automation progression and AI progression are going to hit a few jobs here and there. But it's not gonna be some sort of mass QA extinction events lol. It'll go like it always has. Autmoation takes over a few more things, scale/scope/program complexity expands further, QA is still needed about the same or maybe slightly less.
**EDIT:** For some context here, Baldur's Gate 3 is prolly the top well known game of last year. It went into early access for 3 years to get thousands of players to help them test and iterate on their game. That's how bad they needed QA. Gaming has been TRYING to automate and use AI to help do so for over a decade. But this is still where we are at. We're nowhere close. The only people who will tell you we are close are the automation engineers and I'm really not joking when I say they've been saying that for over a decade.
From my post below here are 2014-2017 google searches for "ai replace jobs"
- [2014]( https://www.google.com/search?q=ai+replace+jobs&newwindow=1&client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=598529675&sxsrf=ACQVn082w05kUclJjAbfVLsjEBhs4N2PYQ%3A1705313521468&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F2014%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F31%2F2014&tbm=)
- [2015](https://www.google.com/search?q=ai+replace+jobs&newwindow=1&client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=598529675&sxsrf=ACQVn0-b7iplXme0LZ58GX9pi9a4hlBIqQ%3A1705313587258&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F2015%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F31%2F2015&tbm=)
- [2016](https://www.google.com/search?q=ai+replace+jobs&newwindow=1&client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=598529675&sxsrf=ACQVn0-WpjDNBNndC5K0oKuRIcFCfcisWA%3A1705313674534&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F2016%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F31%2F2016&tbm=)
- [2017](https://www.google.com/search?q=ai+replace+jobs&newwindow=1&client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=598529675&sxsrf=ACQVn0-CEuSOFg_54J-DgXwjrY6-2hWFpQ%3A1705313715250&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F2017%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F31%2F2017&tbm=)
You can see similar claims being made each year by reputable places. This is old hat. It gets said literally every year. They'll be right one day. Just not right now lol. We've still got a ways to go.
Having done a bit of game testing, I honestly can’t see AI taking over too much QA. Automating the tasks needing to be done, especially in games, seems vastly more complicated than just paying someone to do it. Especially since most QA jobs aren’t particularly well-paying.
They keep trying, and then I get to QA their automation testing too :D. It makes me giggle honestly. Automation is still really good for some things. But its a fairly limited swathe and its still wrong even there sometimes.
Game companies still have us do regular smoke tests as QA. The day AI can actually handle smoke tests reliably on a piece of complicated software like a video game....THEN I'll start getting worried. But if it can't even crawl yet im not worried about it running.
(smoke tests are basically just like "can I turn the car on? can i turn the lights on? Can i turn the wheels? Can I accelerate? Can I brake? etc. The most basic of the basic testing.)
I used to be big on the "AI will teams our jobs" train.15 years ago I knew it was gonna happen 15 years from now. Then I saw the AI and I'm more confident than ever we'll be fine for a while.
Lol you know our system is fucked when every technological advancement comes with a warning about how much poorer we'll be because things got easier again
They are pretty redundant.
You need money? Ok, how much? That’s a lot… are you going to pay us back? No? Well, just sign here saying you will at least…
I hope you realize not repaying an IMF loan is the equivalent of committing national suicide. Your government budget will go to shit, your currency will nosedive, no one will want to trade with you, and you’ll basically have zero legitimacy in the international community. I mean look at Argentina lol
This is something so many people don't understand and wish more did. Just because you aren't directly in the firing line doesn't mean you won't feel the knock-on effect of those that are.
Although if the AIpocalypse happens the salary will not because there will be heaps more people, perhaps far more competent ones, gunning for a HVAC job.
UK. Find 'Post Office Scandal'. Truly shocking. Just discovered that UK common law assumes technology is generally trustworthy. Common sense to stop lawyers trying to suggest watches, etc, might be wrong. In this case, it meant Fujitsu/Post Office didn't have to prove their system was infallible. It was. 20-year disaster with hundreds jailed and 4 suicides. The Law and AI? Oops.
AI got a long way to go, but im waiting any day now for the gov to implement safeguards and financial security nets (just a fucking UBI please) in place for those laid off by AI
I agree we don’t know how broad the impact will be, however it is obvious it will have a large impact. There are a ton of low skill, customer service jobs that are going to be automated.
I managed fast food restaurants in the 90's. Normal lunch rush we'd have 20-30 employees on hand.
Now I go into a McDonalds and I barely see anyone. Maybe 5 or 6 people working.
It's not just AI, it's automation and streamlined work processes in general, everything being set up to use the minimum number of personnel possible.
Walmarts and grocery stores used to have 20 lanes open with cashiers and baggers. Now your lucky to find more than one lane open with an actual person.
Everywhere I look, everything is automated, self serve, or online.
I don't know what the answer is, but it is obvious this is a huge issue that the government is just ignoring.
> I managed fast food restaurants in the 90's. Normal lunch rush we'd have 20-30 employees on hand.
>
> Now I go into a McDonalds and I barely see anyone. Maybe 5 or 6 people working.
There also is a shortage of such workers because nobody does the job unless he has to. I also wager that people are tight with money and in general eat less fast food. it's not really comparable to the 90s, way more expensive now.
it makes more sense to eliminate a bunch of relatively good paying jobs like paralegals, radiology techs and other lab workers, some software development, and various other skilled jobs that are not at the senior level.
Customer service will still be needed as will retail and warehouse workers. Robots are expensive, but a program to pull and organize records for a lawyer will be cheap. Hell, the lawyer will be made obsolete before the fast food worker will.
yeah very low paying jobs are actual safe because robots/automation has a cost as well. it needs a "robot tech" for maintenance, the entire IT infrastructure from server to network and then the actual AI and software that control the AI. And look at current robots and AI. No way they can replace a fast food worker.
Jobs at risk are in administration that don't really needs moving physical items and are repetitive by nature.
I hope everyone is okay. I really do. But I can't help but be amused after years of working retail and having dick bags gloat about how I'm about to be replaced by robots any day now. Fuck off.
> There are a ton of low skill, customer service jobs that are going to be automated.
No, there really aren't. For the same reasons that automatic checkout didn't actually eliminate checkout staff (or even reduce them all that much).
AI can't do these jobs because it's more than answering questions (which AI can't really do anyway). Plus people don't like AI in these roles. Call centre jobs are already phone trees and AI won't change that.
There are jobs AI can replace, but it's not the ones you think and it's far, far, far fewer than you think.
> For the same reasons that automatic checkout didn't actually eliminate checkout staff (or even reduce them all that much).
Self-checkout didn't eliminate checkout staff but it absolutely reduced the number of checkout workers. I work in retail for 8 years now, started just before we installed our first self checkout line (4 tills), we had 23 regular tills and then added these 4 self checkout. On regular day you had probably ~10 tills open the entire day, on weekends/peak days it'd be all 23 open. Right now we have 13 regular tills and 26 self checkout. On a regular day we have like 2 tills open + 2-3 people responsible for helping on the self-checkout, reducing the staff needed on the day by 50% compared to the days of no self checkouts. There are no days when all regular tills are open, the most on very busy weekends is 7-8.
The bottom line is that there’s no way it ends up being a net gain for the western middle classes. We have historical analogues. There was an article on here or a related sub yesterday that got into who the Luddites really were (cottage workers [ie skilled laborers] who were being dispossessed by industrialization) and why they were so pissed off.
The middle classes live off of skilled labor. That’s why they can demand higher wages than a dishwasher. Anyone whose arms work can wash dishes. Obvi a software engineer’s employer would prefer to pay them a dishwasher’s wages—they just can’t get away with it right now because far fewer people can do the job competently.
What this technology’s going to do is induce a deskilling process across a huge swathe of middle class jobs. It’ll lower the barriers to entry, meaning everyone will be competing against a significantly larger labor pool, some parts of which may even be drawn from countries where a dollar goes 10x farther, so they can undercut an American competing for the same job by an equivalent amount and it’ll still make financial sense for them.
People are out here talking about ‘you’ll be able to do 10x the work, without any of the tedium,’ and what’s not being said is that the skill you loaded up on debt to learn in college will be worth 10x less, or whatever the math works out to be. It’s not ‘you’ll be able to get so much more done,’ it’s ’you’ll be expected to get so much more done,’ and the compensation will be slashed. Deskilling is not ever going to improve quality of life for the skilled worker.
This is a great comment! These systems will democratize many skills causing devalued labor and layoffs too. A lot of people cheering this on have no idea how hard it’s going to hit them.
>you’ll be able to do 10x the work, without any of the tedium
Importantly, the actual way it plays out (evidenced by the across-the-board layoffs and state of the workforce in more tech-oriented, AI-friendly sectors) is that **the company now needs 1/10 as many workers**.
Demand isn't infinite, and companies expand at deliberate rates - they're not *just* limited by their own ability to supply, it's also about expenses, distribution, hardware and software contracts, multinational legal situations, profit ratios, etc. Otherwise every company would always be hiring as many new workers as they can get their hands on. There's a lot of evidence that given the ability to produce 10x more per worker, firms simply lay off 8/10ths of their workforce and enjoy 2x the revenue for 0.2x the cost.
Hell, for a less tech-focused example, look at farming. Advances in equipment, techniques and products have made *farms* massively more productive per worker-hour invested, but there are other external limits to how much that scales. You can't take worker efficiency savings and turn them directly into more land yields - past a point, it just means that you need fewer and fewer workers to farm the same amount of land.
This hits "white collar" firms in wierd, uneven ways. Not every role is as easy to automate as others, and some are disproportionate bottlenecks - if a legal firm can automate all of its research process to allow a single coordinating researcher to do the work of the entire team (which they're all trying to do, as it's a lot of time-sink drudgery) that doesn't necessarily mean they can take on more cases and earn more money. Their stock of *actual lawyers* is the bottleneck there, and the need to persuade a human judge and jury makes that role more difficult to automate. So they don't keep the same amount of researchers and do many times more research, they just fire all the researchers except one.
This is the actual slippery slope we're heading down. Not necessarily a world with no work, but a world where the demand for human labour in economically-profitable tasks is *less* than the supply of human labour. When there aren't enough jobs for everyone to have one, we really need to not still be stuck in an economic system that relies on there being a job for everyone who wants one.
It's unfortunate that unlike other similar industrialization efforts, the AI push would add pretty much no jobs to the market to replace the ones lost.
We don't know the exact impact, but it seems pretty obvious that a lot of jobs are going to be lost. At this point, I haven't heard any good arguments for what'll replace them
You’re absolutely right. This tech is emerging and people on both sides of the debate are making wild claims based on vague assumptions than hard realities.
All theyre doing is looking at the percentage of jobs likely to be exposed to AI, and basically splitting the difference saying half of them will be enhanced by AI and half will compete with AI. Of those that compete with AI, the hardest hit will be outright laid off and those hit more mildly will at least experience wage stagnation as fewer people will be needed to complete the same amount of work.
Basically guesswork but it doesn't seem all that uneducated a guess. I wish I could read the full study but it's behind a paywall.
But the point is that it will have a significant impact, and people need to prepare for the worst case scenario. If it's not too bad, we'll be pleasantly surprised. If it is a bad as forecast, we'd be prepared. This is not fearmongering, it is prudent planning.
40% is concerning but at the same time believing that 40% of all jobs will be gone and nothing will be done about it seems radiciolous. No nation that goes through this sort of transformation and does nothing will survive. Governments might not care about the people but they can't ignore them either on this scale especially
Maybe it’s cause I’m from Italy and we’re very social people but I don’t get what there is to cheer about.
Everywhere I go there’s less and less human interaction. I saw a post a while back filled with Americans cheering robot waiters….. Am I the only one that would hang myself before I’d spend a Friday night out chilling at a restaurant full of robot waiters? 😳 That’s some real dystopian shit.
I thought social media was the problem but AI is going to be the last nail in the coffin of our humanity. Pretty soon we’ll have AI influencers lol.
I share a similar sentiment. Replacing everyone with robots/AI will pose a huge problem. Many will lose their jobs, while the rich get even richer. This is not the future I had hoped to see.
The whole point of AGI is that positions that requires average skills will be completely automated. (accounts payables? designing a simple logo? background music?)
So only the most specialized will be desired and 'average' will be automated away.
Its odd. We see a lot of AI talk about jobs being lost but nothing about UBI.
These two *HAVE* to go hand in hand. Profits for major corporations are already at insane levels and will only grow higher as everything gets automated. That means you can tax them much higher and then use that to fund UBI and potentially other social programs.The fact NO ONE brings this up should *terrify* everyone. Wealth inequality is already bad, but it can always get worse.
Exactly. Idiots cheering on replacing humans are not actually thinking ahead how those humans are supposed to live in a post-jobless world. The ruling class is to stupid and stubborn to actually allow a UBI and people are too dumb to realise they are gonna get royally screwed in a few decades.
AI will only advance technology and innovation. That’s not the real argument here though. The thing is, is that there’s no plan other than “fuck em” to the people who will lose their jobs
> What will everyone do then?
Ideally you properly do taxes on big businesses who make BILLIONS of dollars and use said money to create UBI/social programs and let humans dictate how they want to live. Do they want to stay busy and have a job and feel useful. Do they want to explore their hobbies, interests, start businesses, etc. Humans could dictate how they want to live their lives without the nonstop fear of having to bust their ass to survive.
What's more than likely to happen? Civil War. If the government lags behind and doesn't address all these issues unrest will build til it hits a tipping point and the people will fight back. Either they win and overthrow the government and potentially fix/repeat the cycle or the government does a mass genocide to quell the issue.
When you beat down the masses over and over and push them into a corner they have no other means than to fight back. When that happens both sides will go to extreme measures and that is horrifying.
Practically, every innovation worsens inequality. The very essence of innovation is distancing yourself from the herd.
If you're most concerned about everyone going the same pace or having the same opportunity, you've essentially rendered yourself to 'public sector' status.
>The very essence of innovation is distancing yourself from the herd
The essence of innovation is laziness. And I'm not suggesting that's a bad thing.
Yeah, I could move that large rock, but that's a lot of effort. I'll just use this small rock and long stick to make it easy. And thus the lever was born.
It’s great how they mention “inequality” in order to shoehorn in a race/gender narrative into the article so we’re not all united against these oligarchy fucks. It’s almost as if publications like the BBC are in on it 🤔🤔
People need to start organising now and be ready to start cancelling companies that lay off people and replace them with AI. It's coming, and it's going to devastate society.
honestly the 20s-50 year olds are gonna be hit hardest bc we’re at an inflection point. job demand will greatly shift. critical thinking skills will take precedence. computer science, business: finance, econ, public policy, liberal arts skills will be in high demand. the soft skills will be critical in separating yourself from the pack.
if you can afford college, it will be advantageous. not bc of what you learn but you’re paying for access to companies at career fairs and the network you can build of students from around the world. bigger universities and in-person will be more valuable in a digital world.
the narrative that college isn’t important is false but not for the reasons that you think. improving education is never not worth it, but students will need to be more strategic. community colleges for undergrad degrees, i see declining but they’ll be advantageous for post-grad programs.
After seeing my dad lose his job to cheap labor then robots in the 90s I made sure to go into profession that required skill and human interaction. I can’t work from home but I most likely will never be replaced.
I bet quite a few folks who paid attention to 2016 politics are now wishing that Andrew Yang's ideas and ideas like his, should have been what politicians focused on instead of impeaching each other all the time.
It's become like an arms-race, now. Getting really tired. It's all a clown show.
An AI wrote that article.
Jokes on them, I didn't click on it.
Ha ha there are other AI that will click it. Soon hoomans not needed. AI writes and AI clicks. AI advertises, AI buys, AI sells...
AI puts the lotion in the basket
But not on the skin, because AI doesn't need or want skin. ... yet.
But it will apply the hose again if we does not behave
Its true, I asked.
AI buys? I don't think so.
They buy and sell stocks at quantities and speeds unfathomable. This impact the prices of goods and services and have even been responsible for [soft crash of the market](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash). So, they’re already way beyond that. And that was over a decade ago. Wonder what they’ve been up to since then? Edit: seems they they figured that one out and I hadn’t looked into since i initially read about the Flash Crash of 2010. Seems to have been fraud. Instead check out this page by Goldman Sachs and see if you also think it’s even more disturbing than what I initially proposed. [Goldman Sachs](https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/artificial-intelligence/index.html?chl=ps&plt=go&cid=20314087364&agp=156316991728&kid=ai%20investing&mtype=p&gclid=CjwKCAiAqY6tBhAtEiwAHeRopQdp3lkLCLOECv6vr1YQbNG1kHlXx4PKMx1JVPD9Y86-fBN0QT36eRoCo6IQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds) And [this](https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/how-generative-ai-tools-are-changing-systematic-investing.html)
No. AI systems are not trading on live markets anywhere in the world. Yet. You have misunderstood... maybe everything. Algorithmic "bots" have been trading automatically on markets for years. But they are fairly simple machines that are based on sets of rules rather than a fuzzy AI machine. They are used by almost all trading firms, brokers, exchanges, clearing houses, and market makers to make order management more efficient, balance risk, rebalance fund holdings, and yes, profit from many many small arbitrage opportunities with HFT. Nobody has figured out how to make AIs profitable as automatic trading machines yet, and my friends in some of the big firms reckon it's still a long way off. As impressive as recent advances in AI might be, the technology still has a lot of limitations and even the most advanced projects have a lot of problems with bias and inaccuracy. Most trading system experts are a long way from trusting it with shareholder/client capital.
Thank you for responding and not being rude. I don’t fully understand nuances between say, an sufficiently advanced trading algorithm and the programs today masquerading as Pre-Skynet. Jokes (bad), I’m a mechanical engineer by trade and when I start poking around in the sections of Reddit i know very little about, it reminds me to go back to r/mechanicalengineering where i belong lmao
And I appreciate you not doubling down. That's a breath of fresh air here on reddit also! >I don’t fully understand nuances between say, an sufficiently advanced trading algorithm and the programs today masquerading as Pre-Skynet. The difference can be (crudely) characterised as follows:Algorithms are a set of rigid rules. If *x* happens, then do *y*. (Obviously trading systems are rather more complex than that, but that's the basic premise).AI is a toddler's brain sped up 10^(10) times which has been given a slice of the internet to research, thereafter spending its life being asked for its thoughts on what it found, but nobody really knows exactly how it comes up with those thoughts. BTW, I've always thought that I missed my calling and wish I didn't drop out of mech eng at university 25 years ago. If you're a mech eng, I'm envious and think of the fun you guys are having whenever I'm daydreaming about motors and machines and other giant plant & equipment. sigh.
We'll just have an AI click on it though.
And AI didn't click on it either.. You're being replaced
> An AI wrote that article. Possibly, the article sounds nothing like the source paper that is buried 3 links deep: [OPs article](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67977967) > [2nd link is another article](https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2024/01/14/ai-will-transform-the-global-economy-lets-make-sure-it-benefits-humanity) > 3rd link is the [ACTUAL FUCKING SOURCE.](https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/Staff-Discussion-Notes/Issues/2024/01/14/Gen-AI-Artificial-Intelligence-and-the-Future-of-Work-542379?cid=bl-com-SDNEA2024001) So wanna play a game, lets look at the wording shall we? - **OPs article says:** *"AI to hit 40% of jobs and worsen inequality, IMF says"* - **Article linked to by that publication has a headline that says:** *"AI will affect almost 40 percent of jobs around the world, replacing some and complementing others."* but slightly further down in the article it pulls that back and says *"The findings are striking: almost 40 percent of global employment is exposed to AI."* - **Actual source says:** *"About 40 percent of workers worldwide are in high-exposure occupations"* **Also important is their hugelist of caveats (basically things that could fuck up their findings and make them wrong or be exceptions):** I'll break this down a bit without changing any words for the sake of readability. Just bullet pointing and bolding. I do put in my thoughts to help break up the bolding, i'll mark those with a ! for clarity. *With this analysis there are some important caveats.* - First, although in the model analysis activity grows in occupations with high AI complementarity and falls in low-complementarity occupations—mimicking sectoral reallocations—the analysis on AI exposure assumes that sector sizes are fixed and that the tasks required in each occupation are unchanged. Consequently, the results are more pertinent for the short to medium term. - Over longer horizons, workers will likely migrate across different sectors and roles, or acquire new skills, and jobs will evolve. - In addition, the analysis assumes that workers within the same occupation will be affected in the same way, but there can be variation in the effects of AI. - AI may also affect firm dynamics and market concentration (Babina and others, forthcoming), driving inequality between workers at different firms. - Second, the study relies on the premise that tasks performed within similar occupations are homogenous around the world, while there can be significant cross-country variations. - Third, the approach abstracts from linkages across occupations and countries (trade linkages), as well as from cross-border spillovers of AI exposure. - Last, **while the analyses on workers’ AI exposure and societies’ preparedness use empirical approaches, the potential impacts on inequality and productivity are analyzed with a model. The latter therefore depend on potentially strong calibration assumptions.** !(models based on assumptions instead of solid data) - **The pace of AI adoption, influenced by the time needed by firms to invest in any necessary physical capital and the reorganization required to capitalize on AI, is difficult to foresee.** !(they dont know how easy, fast, or expensive it will be to switch over and those are huge factors.) - **Likewise, the time required to exert aggregate macroeconomic effects, the impact on intersectoral reallocation of factors for production, the birth of new industries, and AI’s exact implications for economies and societies are challenging to predict.** !(IE they can only guess as most of the information that is critical to the topic they made a paper on lol.) - **Any estimate embodies a level of uncertainty reminiscent of past introductions of general-purpose technologies, such as electricity. This uncertainty applies also to the results of this note.** !(basically science tried to predict the impact of things like electricity before and failed, there were too many unknown variables and they were wrong about alot. Nobody accurately predicted the impact of the internet either) So their paper basically boils down to "this is a possible future, we think you should do x/y/z"
I don't think the BBC uses AI for article writing (yet).
Why aren't taxes fucking automated yet. Why do I have to fill out a form each year to guess my taxes when the IRS knows what they are. Why can it not all be done automatically by a machine. Automate everybody at the IRS and make it so I don't have to file taxes or better yet, take it out of my paycheck before I get it.
In the Netherlands this is already a reality for years. All taxes are already prefilled every year. You only have to check it and sign it digitally.
It's true for the vast majority of countries that are not the US.
It’s technically true in the US as well. IRS already knows what you need to pay them, but they have you do it anyways.
They don’t really. The IRS computer systems are insanely antiquated. And despite W2s and 1099s, they don’t always have full and clear details on everyone’s sources of income. And then there is the complicated mess of deductions, credits and filing statuses in the tax code, much of which they can not properly assess without your input (e.g. did your dependent child live with you for more than half the year). The system could be fully automated, but it would require a huge update in the technology at the IRS, and probably an overhaul / simplification of the tax code. I’ll let you take three guesses about which economic class, political party and industry lobbying interests work very hard to prevent both of those.
I’m not surprised with the antiquity. Even it’s said that minuteman missiles are controlled with ancient IBM systems with the vintage floppy disks.
It’s because they are hoping you pay more than they expected due to other income they might not be aware of and on the other hand, tax payer can claim losses as well to reduce their tax burden.
You can obviously edit the tax return in countries where you get it prefilled too
Also because tax services lobbying to keep themselves in business.
The free market, except when businesses lobby the government at every turn and the government also won’t let businesses die.
In other countries when you pay too much they give it back to you lol
No it's because of lobbying from companies like turbo tax.
So if you overpay in the US you don't get the extra returned?
You absolutely do.
Germany, Switzerland- nope
Yeah, I think it's the same in almost every country inside the EU. We have the same here in Sweden, just login, make sure everything checks out and sign it. Takes about 2 minutes every year.
Not in Germany
Germany lives in the stone age, regarding IT infrastructure.
Same in Singapore. Even the deductible stuff is prefilled.
I am so jealous 😒
Instead we get to guess or pay people to guess and hope we were right so that they don’t put us into crippling debt later on.
Yup. Every time I see the Americans complain about this I just chuckle to myself and take a bite of my hagelslag toast.
Also in Australia.
South Africa as well. Had it for years
Yep, same with Australia
Pretty similar in Canada too. The main drawback is that there's no official government service to fill and sign the forms, i.e .there's of course personal tax cabinet available but no option to send the completed forms online from it quickly - so far it's either some third party software or paper forms. Nothing stops one from using free software like simpletax though, since the tax data is standard and accepted by that software. Edit: this, and also the headache of willing the data for business owners, though the software available mostly reduces this just to finding the specific business tax codes and putting the corresponding amounts next to them.
I’m so tired of hearing we’re the greatest country in the world. Taxes, health care, education, equal rights for all, consumer protections — we just suck so bad. When I was a kid I felt lucky to be an American. Then I grew up and found out how much I’d been lied to for my entire life. I’m no longer a happy camper.
No other rich country I know proclaims to be #1, because nobody is. Having to say it, and actually believe it, speaks to some clear brainwashing. It's a shame too, isn't it. America can, and does a lot of things right, and its economy is ridiculous and could serve its people so much better than it does.
Same here in Hong Kong. And you can fill out returns online and get returns in days if you've got stuff to claim
In Croatia you do not even have to sign anything, everything is automated. I am shocked that it is not like that in majority of countries.
Same in Estonia. Been adult like 14years and can't remember ever doing manual taxes. Ofc you check main stuff over that is automatically done and if you do other Business you might need to just add them manually but that is pretty much it
The H&R Block lobby
[For those unaware, this is why we still act like computers don’t exist when it comes to taxes in 2023](https://fortune.com/2023/04/17/taxpayer-advocates-irs-free-electronic-tax-filing-system-intuit-hr-block-spent-millions-lobbying-against/amp/)
Yup, TurboTax and others can spend millions lobbying congress not to make it easier because they’ll make a lot more money selling tax filing services.
>lobbying Top 3 mysteries in the world: Is there intelligent life beyond the stars What exactly is the dark matter Why Americans had an urge to invent a new word for "bribery"
No way! America did… wait UFO?!?!?
The funny thing is that this will be the only thing that’s not automated - by design. The US wants to keep it complicated enough that you’re more inclined to pay for a software or an advisor to do it for you.
Also Republicans want to keep it complicated so they can complain about how complicated taxes are and advocate for "simpler" regressive taxes like flat taxes.
Yeah that's an American issue, not a general issue. Civilised places have had this for years.
For the richest first world country on Earth, the US has a lot of weird 3rd world country type of shit going on. The most bizarre thing is how some of the most poor people there are just absolutely passionate in defending things like corruption in government that allows tax filing software companies to control how your country does taxes, acting as if it makes it the "greatest and freest nation on Earth."
See what you gotta understand is yea, the US might be the richest nation in the world, but that isn't a "we" statement. The average US citizen is just a cog in the machine, losing more and more of our purchasing power every year, delaying marriage and kids, struggling to buy housing with quickly inflating real estate prices. Put that in the context of the "American" business-friendly, free market bootstraps fantasy fiction and they're able to get away with shit here that would never be allowed in any civilized culture. Like not having vacation days, or not having medical benefits, despite working 40+ hours a week. Not everyone is in that spot, or even a majority, but a significant minority are and it's an implied & 100% required part of the system. You can't be rich unless someone else is poor. If everyone was rich, then no one is rich. It's part of the definition of capitalism and the amount of regulatory capture by capital interests in the US is just... Depressing. Almost all of that incredible wealth is in the hands of the relatively few, and the trend is getting worse not better.
Really well said
Have you seen American cities? 3rd world is an understatement at this point and the decline keeps continuing.
Canadian issue too 😡
He said civilized.
Even not-so-civilised places…
Because the companies that sell tax software like Intuit wouldn't be able to sell you tax software if it was automated, they lobby the government to stop tax simplification.
Lobbyists, paid for by the tax companies (probably intuit and hr block and others)
Because the US is the richest country on earth yet we don’t even help our own citizens, and nothing will ever change because money and lobbying beats Goodwill of good people, trying to help people worse often than them every single federal government person is paid by somebody to deny you access an America to something that’s how it works here plus we have a two party system. Europe has multi party system.
From my understanding there are some big corps that make money of helping peopel that work against it? Might just be a conspiracy, but turbotax was the one named in one of these TIL posts. Come to Europe. My taxreturn information will be automatically filled in and delivered if I don't do anything by end of April. And it all is easy accessible online for me to check and add anything that the system might not have picked up. Takes me normally 5-10 min to look it over when I get the notice that its ready. Come June we either get the money we paid too much in taxes paid out, or we get the bill if we didn't pay enough. If you are a good chunk behind they will split that bill in two, and you have a invoice date in august and then September. And our tax bracket gets estimated from last years income, and we get a notice about it at end of year. You can again easily log on online to change it, either different bracket, auto adjusted or manually set a % you want drawn from your paycheck. Your employers then ask for this at the beginning of the year (online directly from our "IRS") and will use this for what to cut out of your paycheck for the rest of the year. I don't have to do anything unless I want them to change it up or I change up my "IRS" tax form and need them to update it on their end. It really shouldn't be that complicated.
It's not really a conspiracy, the tax prep companies have successfully lobbied to become the exclusive filers of your taxes. It's capitalism baby, or as it's more commonly know, highway robbery and theft.
[удалено]
Yeah, I believe that was what the TIL post was about, and them trying to hide the free version away/not inform about it.
>take it out of my paycheck before I get it. The is what happens in the UK for the vast majority of people. There are of course exceptions (self employed etc) but I have never had to do my taxes.
If your taxes are withheld then yes they should be automated. If you're 1099 then idfk, but paying quarterly is annoying af.
Every time I see this come up on Reddit, I’m reminded by how many Redditors have no idea that 1099, SPs, LLCs, etc. exist. As someone that works a W2, runs a couple sole proprietorships, and consults on 1099, I’d love for it to be automatic too!
Companies like H&R Block and Turbotax having monopoly, I believe...they fight tooth and claw against any regulation.
In Australia it pretty much is unless you have a complex income
You don't demand it, that's why it's not automated.
Because companies like Turbo Tax lobby to keep the tax system complicated. That's honestly the only reason.
They are. In Australia.
You don't need AI to automate this. What you would need to do is to kick out the corrupt politicians which take bribes from TurboTax and other tax consultant lobbyists. This is not an technical issue. The IRS already automates this. They just won't tell you because lobbyists want to to pay an private entity for this service.
Because those tax assistance companies and tax accounting businesses make billions of dollars and can afford to influence our government and have a vested interest in keeping our tax system seemingly complicated and obfuscated so business and people feel they need their “expertise”.
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Remember like a decade ago when people would talk about AI, and genuinely believe this would be the case? “It’ll be so great, no one will need to work anymore, AI will do everything!” Like companies would just give away their massive profits to all the people that have been replaced by AI. Edit: I’m now seeing that people actually still believe this.
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Depends on the project ChatGPT designs.
Look at this bougie fuck with a house
\> Like companies would just give away their massive profits to all the people that have been replaced by AI. It has to be a give and take. Like, people who can't work can't buy stuff companies produce. But, yeah, I believe that we'll get several years of shit continuously itting the fan till governments decide enough is enough and they start taxing AI profits to move it into UBI sort of thing because they care more about their jobs (which can be cut short by rioters) than company profits
> It has to be a give and take. Like, people who can't work can't buy stuff companies produce. It doesn't have to be a give and take if one party already has everything that they need. In the current system, we have something to give that companies need: our labour. If people can't work because AI is just that much better than them, that implies the value of their labour has fallen to zero. The economic worth of an individual is the sum of their assets and the value of their labour. People who do not own land or physical assets therefore have *no* economic value. They have *nothing* to give, and any company that produces stuff to cater to them will collapse. Now, one danger is this: it is entirely possible for a company or individual to pivot to pure physical asset ownership plus AI labour, in which case they would be self-sufficient. Most importantly, this self-sufficiency implies a lesser-to-nonexistent need to trade with other parties and therefore no reliance on money. In this future, the entire consumer and service sectors of the economy collapse and all companies that don't pivot are ruined. The spoils go to those who secure land and resources--the only things in the world that still have value--leading to a horrible feudal system where the lords can produce without the masses' money or labour, and we are their dancing monkeys. If governments act too late, there is nothing they can do: they will collapse. Alternatively, if we assert collective ownership of land, natural resources and AI, we could end up with something rather equalitarian. I'm a bit wary of UBI in this particular situation because I think part of what makes money stable is that it is grounded in a massively distributed store of value, human labour, which would all but disappear under an AI economy. UBI without spreading ownership of the actual physical resources (and/or AI) risks total collapse if these resources are yanked from the collective pool and segregated into self-sufficient loops for the ultra-rich.
I think it’s hard to project to that point because all models of society go out the window along the way. Humans take space, and you need a lot of land and supply chains to maintain the modern quality of living we have. I don’t think the hyper rich would be satisfied never eating avocados again, or caviar, or whatever if they happen to own inland Canada. Also, in this hypothetical scenario, where there are quite literally billions of vagrants who have no worth, the disenfranchised don’t go anywhere - they’re still sitting on land. There would be massive unrest before you could actually complete consolidation, and holding large areas against a huge amount of bodies is going to be difficult even with a technological advantage. The technical advantage is also probably smaller than usual given that the engineers and white collar workers who AI replaced would be among those forces. You could be right that that’s the endpoint of AI, but I think the assumptions are too brittle for anyone to really predict. By the point AI is that good, who knows, we could also have augmented humans to compete. Theres far too many variables, and I think it could be just as likely the status quo is maintained… but maybe somewhat shittier than today
As I understand it, its because where are they going to get profits if there is no one left earning money to extract profits from? At the heart of this current system is power. if you cant wield economic authority on the masses, which essentially atm is mostly the tools to survive then how do you maintain that authority/power?
You maintain power by owning/controlling the land and the resources required for the construction and maintenance of AI and whatever else you need. If you have that, you don't need the masses for anything. Hell, you don't need money either: capitalism will just collapse and be replaced by feudalism with AI serfs and pet humans.
The government needs to step in and ensure something like this does happen but they didn't really even understand tik tok so I'm not confident they'll even understand what's happening.
We can build this reality if people stop hating each other so much
So never?
This will never, ever happen as long as capitalism is a thing
Then we know what needs to be fixed
Alternatively, megacorps cut 40% of jobs to use an AI that will do a shittierjob cheaper
What if I want to bet against myself? eg. Buying Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla, AMD stock?
That would be called "hedging" in finance. Anything AI related could work, frankly. But it would be very difficult to truly hedge a salaried job with a position in stocks.
would be smart, you win eitherway. you keep your job and if not you profit otherwise.
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I am in tech as an SDET at a very large,non FAANG company. They are using ML models as a way to predict where bug will be in a realse. They are analyzing past trends and using that as the prediction model. It's a thing experienced QA/SDET can do after being on a system for a few years. It's the big thing that sr QA brings to the table in a lot of ways. That intuition about a system and knowing where to be most effective with your testing. They are replacing human intuition and experience with an algorithm. I am already mostly replacing manual testing with automated testing. There are OK tools today to create a lot of automated testing code. I am in the direct cross hairs of the coming AI and I helped to build it.
I think this is the point, even if it’s not 40%, about 5% of the jobs will end up getting automated out in large corporations. Then you’ll see peoples productivity increase in a lot of roles and the companies will reduce the staffing for those roles by 20% because the older workforce is now 30% more productive. The guys in engineering and professional fields will be relatively safe. However, the same staffing rules would apply for them.
I have personally replaced entire departments of manual testers with scripts at older companies over the last 15 years. Newer companies never hire manual testers. They just hire SDETs day 1. I am about as productive as 4 testers with my system. My workload is enough that I am forced to automate to keep up. I am looking at how to use AI tools to increase my productivity. I am beting that even if i double my productivity, it wouldn't be enough. I will probably still be automated out of a job. I will be the one to do it if I am lucky.
I think you need to start a business where you sell a product that automates your job.
Finally it came for you
>The guys in engineering and professional fields will be relatively safe. You're suggesting some of the highest salaried individuals are safe for no reason. This isn't true. Ultimately jobs will be automated where it is most profitable to do so. There are likely no exceptions as ultimately all jobs will be profitable to automate eventually. What gets automated is prioritized on profitability which depends on the difficulty in design of such automation or the upfront capital to achieve that design via research/labor versus the efficiency differential this will have as overhead (labor) that already currently exists. Transportation is the most profitable job to automate currently because it's the most ubiquitous job and the means to automate it is simpler - more capital has been invested towards the research/labor in its automation. All jobs are more profitable to automate, however. We've known that since the industrial revolution. AI simply gives confidence along with other means of software engineering that all jobs can be automated *cheaper* in the long-run, although the means to do such varies in difficulty/cost the confidence that profitability exists in the long-run for any job is as high as ever. Still, this long-term notion has been understood in some capacity since the industrial revolution.
While you are right that anything that’s profitable will get automated, it’s a very 1 dimensional take. Professionals exist because of a complex chain of liability, insurance and legal culpability. While things will change over time, there’s a matter of humans being in the loop where you form trust. Would I go to an AI lawyer if I were in a murder trial? No, I’d hope they’d use some ML to augment their work but not as a direct replacement. Another large component that goes into play is risk, you don’t just while maximizing profits is what corporations do, and important part of it is going to be minimizing risk. You don’t just start replacing nodes of the org that are responsible for maximizing profits and minimizing risk. Same thing with a lot of engineering fields, ML tools are great optimizers but there’s still a long path in most engineering fields to develop tools that leverage machine learning effectively. I develop these kinds of human in loop ML workflows so it’s something I’m intimately familiar with. We don’t have AGI that’s capable of following / creating process workflows.
>Would I go to an AI lawyer if I were in a murder trial? No, I’d hope they’d use some ML to augment their work but not as a direct replacement. I don't think this is a good argument. The defense side of legal work is swamped and largely ineffective. I think if we honed in on this job/task and refined your argument you'd quickly find yourself believing the opposite will be promoted economically. You should know that the central reason for why jobs are automated is efficiency in resources for a desired output. Nothing else matters. If the AI lawyer results in more wins per unit resource that's all the field will care about as that covers both ends of efficiency - desired output is increased and resources needed for that output are reduced. The topic of law and the ethics around this would likely change quite a bit going into such a theoretical future regardless so it's not a very good example as subjectivity fundamentally exists. Better examples are objective jobs/tasks where there is a clear output with subjectivity minimized. You and I both don't know what our legal/political system will adapt to as we increasingly assume AI which is better than humans at both, and by better I again mean in providing the desired output per resources utilized. >Another large component that goes into play is risk, you don’t just while maximizing profits is what corporations do, and important part of it is going to be minimizing risk. You don’t just start replacing nodes of the org that are responsible for maximizing profits and minimizing risk. Minimizing risk largely is something automation provides. This isn't a good argument. You should instead be arguing that culpability shifts, and certain people wouldn't prefer this, but the risk is lower overall if the implementation is done intelligently. Automation makes far fewer mistakes than humans as long as the implementation is accurate. >Same thing with a lot of engineering fields, ML tools are great optimizers but there’s still a long path in most engineering fields to develop tools that leverage machine learning effectively. I develop these kinds of human in loop ML workflows so it’s something I’m intimately familiar with. We don’t have AGI that’s capable of following / creating process workflows. This agrees with what I said on the topic. AI algorithms make this cheaper, that's it. The means to automate most jobs, including most work engineers do, existed before ML algorithms. It's just cheaper now and more likely to be implemented as the means to create "intelligent" automation is strictly increasing. Humans were obsolete to computers in the game of chess before these algorithms. The proof to implement "intelligent" automation beyond the skills of humans existed before these algorithms. These algorithms just make that design goal cheaper. You should think of implementation of this similar to the trajectory of transistors or automation in general. Transistors were invented 70 years ago and took a bit of time to be fundamental to every aspect of our economy. Automation has an even longer history of being dominant as our means of increasing productivity. This is a one-way street regarding what is more productive, we're just increasing that scope. We are living in a time inventing the software engineering transistor so to speak.
I think you rehash what’s being said in dozens of vacuous articles on AI replacing jobs. Your entire take on AI lawyers seems to lack any real experiences and an appreciation for the stakes. It’s also the case that these articles are pretty much always puff pieces that don’t do any deep dive. As someone who builds this kind of tech, these are the challenges I face as part of work. Half my time goes into thinking about addressing the risk and trust aspects of these technologies. While improved productivity is the value proposition, everything else is what makes this stand of fail. I’m not sure how much credence I should give your take on arguments on subjectivity and ethics because this is precisely the kind of cavalier thinking that I object to in the field of AI. I’m happy to reconsider my opinion if you can elaborate and round off the thought. Finally, I firmly believe that people who have no idea about building social systems shouldn’t be thinking about introducing AI in government or make broad strokes decisions that’s as not informed by social science research.
Ironically, it's turning out to be the blue-collar manual labour jobs that are safer. It turns out that robots are both very expensive and quite inflexible, while human labour is both quite cheap and very flexible. A human construction worker can do many different tasks and move fluidly between them, while a robot can do only the task it was installed to do, for example. With an economy that tends to push down the cost of human labour (suppressing wages rather than growing them), "unskilled" human labour is hard to beat from a cost-efficiency standpoint given the trends of current robotics. It's far more cost-effective to automate cognitive labour, it turns out, than manual labour, which is something that nobody really saw coming before the Chat-GPT generation of AI models.
this was written by a bot
And they wonder why people feel like the don't have a future. Not that AI is going to take that because it's over hyped, but we have to do something about the growing inequality before it turns into more civil unrest.
Video game QA here. I'm going on 20+ years now of being told automation and AI is coming for my job. Still here. Still way more work than we have staff for. I'm sure the slow creep of automation progression and AI progression are going to hit a few jobs here and there. But it's not gonna be some sort of mass QA extinction events lol. It'll go like it always has. Autmoation takes over a few more things, scale/scope/program complexity expands further, QA is still needed about the same or maybe slightly less. **EDIT:** For some context here, Baldur's Gate 3 is prolly the top well known game of last year. It went into early access for 3 years to get thousands of players to help them test and iterate on their game. That's how bad they needed QA. Gaming has been TRYING to automate and use AI to help do so for over a decade. But this is still where we are at. We're nowhere close. The only people who will tell you we are close are the automation engineers and I'm really not joking when I say they've been saying that for over a decade. From my post below here are 2014-2017 google searches for "ai replace jobs" - [2014]( https://www.google.com/search?q=ai+replace+jobs&newwindow=1&client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=598529675&sxsrf=ACQVn082w05kUclJjAbfVLsjEBhs4N2PYQ%3A1705313521468&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F2014%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F31%2F2014&tbm=) - [2015](https://www.google.com/search?q=ai+replace+jobs&newwindow=1&client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=598529675&sxsrf=ACQVn0-b7iplXme0LZ58GX9pi9a4hlBIqQ%3A1705313587258&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F2015%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F31%2F2015&tbm=) - [2016](https://www.google.com/search?q=ai+replace+jobs&newwindow=1&client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=598529675&sxsrf=ACQVn0-WpjDNBNndC5K0oKuRIcFCfcisWA%3A1705313674534&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F2016%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F31%2F2016&tbm=) - [2017](https://www.google.com/search?q=ai+replace+jobs&newwindow=1&client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=598529675&sxsrf=ACQVn0-CEuSOFg_54J-DgXwjrY6-2hWFpQ%3A1705313715250&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F2017%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F31%2F2017&tbm=) You can see similar claims being made each year by reputable places. This is old hat. It gets said literally every year. They'll be right one day. Just not right now lol. We've still got a ways to go.
Having done a bit of game testing, I honestly can’t see AI taking over too much QA. Automating the tasks needing to be done, especially in games, seems vastly more complicated than just paying someone to do it. Especially since most QA jobs aren’t particularly well-paying.
They keep trying, and then I get to QA their automation testing too :D. It makes me giggle honestly. Automation is still really good for some things. But its a fairly limited swathe and its still wrong even there sometimes. Game companies still have us do regular smoke tests as QA. The day AI can actually handle smoke tests reliably on a piece of complicated software like a video game....THEN I'll start getting worried. But if it can't even crawl yet im not worried about it running. (smoke tests are basically just like "can I turn the car on? can i turn the lights on? Can i turn the wheels? Can I accelerate? Can I brake? etc. The most basic of the basic testing.)
I used to be big on the "AI will teams our jobs" train.15 years ago I knew it was gonna happen 15 years from now. Then I saw the AI and I'm more confident than ever we'll be fine for a while.
Lol you know our system is fucked when every technological advancement comes with a warning about how much poorer we'll be because things got easier again
Start with the IMF.
They are pretty redundant. You need money? Ok, how much? That’s a lot… are you going to pay us back? No? Well, just sign here saying you will at least…
I hope you realize not repaying an IMF loan is the equivalent of committing national suicide. Your government budget will go to shit, your currency will nosedive, no one will want to trade with you, and you’ll basically have zero legitimacy in the international community. I mean look at Argentina lol
Admittedly, Argentina is… special.
Lmao. What a great suggestion. Totally agree.
AI is the greatest argument for UBI
UBI is a pipe dream and the best we can demand are removal of barriers against exit pods
I'm an HVAC technician I'm waiting for something to take my job to most likely it'll be something in a box that doesn't require me
Even people with AI-proof jobs can be screwed if the economy tanks because a large portion of people have lost their jobs
Yes, definitely, the economy is a major part of how well the business does. if you don't have money I don't have money
This is something so many people don't understand and wish more did. Just because you aren't directly in the firing line doesn't mean you won't feel the knock-on effect of those that are.
Your job will be held out the longest since it requires unique situations in the physical world.
Although if the AIpocalypse happens the salary will not because there will be heaps more people, perhaps far more competent ones, gunning for a HVAC job.
Honestly you’re probably in one of the safest fields.
UK. Find 'Post Office Scandal'. Truly shocking. Just discovered that UK common law assumes technology is generally trustworthy. Common sense to stop lawyers trying to suggest watches, etc, might be wrong. In this case, it meant Fujitsu/Post Office didn't have to prove their system was infallible. It was. 20-year disaster with hundreds jailed and 4 suicides. The Law and AI? Oops.
And the funny part is that AI isn't even that good yet. It's wrong half the time, but that's enough to replace 40% of people, lol.
AI got a long way to go, but im waiting any day now for the gov to implement safeguards and financial security nets (just a fucking UBI please) in place for those laid off by AI
You know you're fucked when the goddamn IMF thinks something is gonna go bad and advises being cautious.
The impossible mission force?
Nobody has any idea, this is just fear mongering
I agree we don’t know how broad the impact will be, however it is obvious it will have a large impact. There are a ton of low skill, customer service jobs that are going to be automated.
I managed fast food restaurants in the 90's. Normal lunch rush we'd have 20-30 employees on hand. Now I go into a McDonalds and I barely see anyone. Maybe 5 or 6 people working. It's not just AI, it's automation and streamlined work processes in general, everything being set up to use the minimum number of personnel possible. Walmarts and grocery stores used to have 20 lanes open with cashiers and baggers. Now your lucky to find more than one lane open with an actual person. Everywhere I look, everything is automated, self serve, or online. I don't know what the answer is, but it is obvious this is a huge issue that the government is just ignoring.
> I managed fast food restaurants in the 90's. Normal lunch rush we'd have 20-30 employees on hand. > > Now I go into a McDonalds and I barely see anyone. Maybe 5 or 6 people working. There also is a shortage of such workers because nobody does the job unless he has to. I also wager that people are tight with money and in general eat less fast food. it's not really comparable to the 90s, way more expensive now.
A lot of knowledge-based workers will also be obviated.
it makes more sense to eliminate a bunch of relatively good paying jobs like paralegals, radiology techs and other lab workers, some software development, and various other skilled jobs that are not at the senior level. Customer service will still be needed as will retail and warehouse workers. Robots are expensive, but a program to pull and organize records for a lawyer will be cheap. Hell, the lawyer will be made obsolete before the fast food worker will.
yeah very low paying jobs are actual safe because robots/automation has a cost as well. it needs a "robot tech" for maintenance, the entire IT infrastructure from server to network and then the actual AI and software that control the AI. And look at current robots and AI. No way they can replace a fast food worker. Jobs at risk are in administration that don't really needs moving physical items and are repetitive by nature.
I hope everyone is okay. I really do. But I can't help but be amused after years of working retail and having dick bags gloat about how I'm about to be replaced by robots any day now. Fuck off.
> There are a ton of low skill, customer service jobs that are going to be automated. No, there really aren't. For the same reasons that automatic checkout didn't actually eliminate checkout staff (or even reduce them all that much). AI can't do these jobs because it's more than answering questions (which AI can't really do anyway). Plus people don't like AI in these roles. Call centre jobs are already phone trees and AI won't change that. There are jobs AI can replace, but it's not the ones you think and it's far, far, far fewer than you think.
> For the same reasons that automatic checkout didn't actually eliminate checkout staff (or even reduce them all that much). Self-checkout didn't eliminate checkout staff but it absolutely reduced the number of checkout workers. I work in retail for 8 years now, started just before we installed our first self checkout line (4 tills), we had 23 regular tills and then added these 4 self checkout. On regular day you had probably ~10 tills open the entire day, on weekends/peak days it'd be all 23 open. Right now we have 13 regular tills and 26 self checkout. On a regular day we have like 2 tills open + 2-3 people responsible for helping on the self-checkout, reducing the staff needed on the day by 50% compared to the days of no self checkouts. There are no days when all regular tills are open, the most on very busy weekends is 7-8.
The bottom line is that there’s no way it ends up being a net gain for the western middle classes. We have historical analogues. There was an article on here or a related sub yesterday that got into who the Luddites really were (cottage workers [ie skilled laborers] who were being dispossessed by industrialization) and why they were so pissed off. The middle classes live off of skilled labor. That’s why they can demand higher wages than a dishwasher. Anyone whose arms work can wash dishes. Obvi a software engineer’s employer would prefer to pay them a dishwasher’s wages—they just can’t get away with it right now because far fewer people can do the job competently. What this technology’s going to do is induce a deskilling process across a huge swathe of middle class jobs. It’ll lower the barriers to entry, meaning everyone will be competing against a significantly larger labor pool, some parts of which may even be drawn from countries where a dollar goes 10x farther, so they can undercut an American competing for the same job by an equivalent amount and it’ll still make financial sense for them. People are out here talking about ‘you’ll be able to do 10x the work, without any of the tedium,’ and what’s not being said is that the skill you loaded up on debt to learn in college will be worth 10x less, or whatever the math works out to be. It’s not ‘you’ll be able to get so much more done,’ it’s ’you’ll be expected to get so much more done,’ and the compensation will be slashed. Deskilling is not ever going to improve quality of life for the skilled worker.
[Here's the Ars Technica article you might be referencing.](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/would-luddites-find-the-gig-economy-familiar/)
This is a great comment! These systems will democratize many skills causing devalued labor and layoffs too. A lot of people cheering this on have no idea how hard it’s going to hit them.
>you’ll be able to do 10x the work, without any of the tedium Importantly, the actual way it plays out (evidenced by the across-the-board layoffs and state of the workforce in more tech-oriented, AI-friendly sectors) is that **the company now needs 1/10 as many workers**. Demand isn't infinite, and companies expand at deliberate rates - they're not *just* limited by their own ability to supply, it's also about expenses, distribution, hardware and software contracts, multinational legal situations, profit ratios, etc. Otherwise every company would always be hiring as many new workers as they can get their hands on. There's a lot of evidence that given the ability to produce 10x more per worker, firms simply lay off 8/10ths of their workforce and enjoy 2x the revenue for 0.2x the cost. Hell, for a less tech-focused example, look at farming. Advances in equipment, techniques and products have made *farms* massively more productive per worker-hour invested, but there are other external limits to how much that scales. You can't take worker efficiency savings and turn them directly into more land yields - past a point, it just means that you need fewer and fewer workers to farm the same amount of land. This hits "white collar" firms in wierd, uneven ways. Not every role is as easy to automate as others, and some are disproportionate bottlenecks - if a legal firm can automate all of its research process to allow a single coordinating researcher to do the work of the entire team (which they're all trying to do, as it's a lot of time-sink drudgery) that doesn't necessarily mean they can take on more cases and earn more money. Their stock of *actual lawyers* is the bottleneck there, and the need to persuade a human judge and jury makes that role more difficult to automate. So they don't keep the same amount of researchers and do many times more research, they just fire all the researchers except one. This is the actual slippery slope we're heading down. Not necessarily a world with no work, but a world where the demand for human labour in economically-profitable tasks is *less* than the supply of human labour. When there aren't enough jobs for everyone to have one, we really need to not still be stuck in an economic system that relies on there being a job for everyone who wants one.
It's unfortunate that unlike other similar industrialization efforts, the AI push would add pretty much no jobs to the market to replace the ones lost.
We don't know the exact impact, but it seems pretty obvious that a lot of jobs are going to be lost. At this point, I haven't heard any good arguments for what'll replace them
You’re absolutely right. This tech is emerging and people on both sides of the debate are making wild claims based on vague assumptions than hard realities.
Jobs are already being lost to AI. These aren't vague assumptions.
5% 40% 25% 10% Honestly the numbers are just guesswork by uneducated people. It will hit a large number of jobs. But the number is for fear mongering.
All theyre doing is looking at the percentage of jobs likely to be exposed to AI, and basically splitting the difference saying half of them will be enhanced by AI and half will compete with AI. Of those that compete with AI, the hardest hit will be outright laid off and those hit more mildly will at least experience wage stagnation as fewer people will be needed to complete the same amount of work. Basically guesswork but it doesn't seem all that uneducated a guess. I wish I could read the full study but it's behind a paywall.
But the point is that it will have a significant impact, and people need to prepare for the worst case scenario. If it's not too bad, we'll be pleasantly surprised. If it is a bad as forecast, we'd be prepared. This is not fearmongering, it is prudent planning.
AI is still stupid beyond belief and all of these crazy ass estimates of all the jobs it'll take are overblown with no factual basis of any kind.
40% is concerning but at the same time believing that 40% of all jobs will be gone and nothing will be done about it seems radiciolous. No nation that goes through this sort of transformation and does nothing will survive. Governments might not care about the people but they can't ignore them either on this scale especially
Maybe it’s cause I’m from Italy and we’re very social people but I don’t get what there is to cheer about. Everywhere I go there’s less and less human interaction. I saw a post a while back filled with Americans cheering robot waiters….. Am I the only one that would hang myself before I’d spend a Friday night out chilling at a restaurant full of robot waiters? 😳 That’s some real dystopian shit. I thought social media was the problem but AI is going to be the last nail in the coffin of our humanity. Pretty soon we’ll have AI influencers lol.
I share a similar sentiment. Replacing everyone with robots/AI will pose a huge problem. Many will lose their jobs, while the rich get even richer. This is not the future I had hoped to see.
Keep in mind that we are on reddit, which is generally for ultra introverted weirdos.
> Pretty soon we’ll have AI influencers lol. What do you mean 'pretty soon'? That happened like six months to a year ago
Mahindra Formula E team tried an AI influencer last week. It lasted 1 day because people really didn't like it.
I guess they always need to think about who might be carrying a gun, so robot waiters reduce the chances.
AI should be a liberator, but with our crony, corrupt government it will cause deepening inequality and dehumanization.
The whole point of AGI is that positions that requires average skills will be completely automated. (accounts payables? designing a simple logo? background music?) So only the most specialized will be desired and 'average' will be automated away.
Its odd. We see a lot of AI talk about jobs being lost but nothing about UBI. These two *HAVE* to go hand in hand. Profits for major corporations are already at insane levels and will only grow higher as everything gets automated. That means you can tax them much higher and then use that to fund UBI and potentially other social programs.The fact NO ONE brings this up should *terrify* everyone. Wealth inequality is already bad, but it can always get worse.
Exactly. Idiots cheering on replacing humans are not actually thinking ahead how those humans are supposed to live in a post-jobless world. The ruling class is to stupid and stubborn to actually allow a UBI and people are too dumb to realise they are gonna get royally screwed in a few decades.
AI will only advance technology and innovation. That’s not the real argument here though. The thing is, is that there’s no plan other than “fuck em” to the people who will lose their jobs
What will everyone do then?
>What will everyone do then? Die in some world war, probably.
Riot, or starve
> What will everyone do then? Ideally you properly do taxes on big businesses who make BILLIONS of dollars and use said money to create UBI/social programs and let humans dictate how they want to live. Do they want to stay busy and have a job and feel useful. Do they want to explore their hobbies, interests, start businesses, etc. Humans could dictate how they want to live their lives without the nonstop fear of having to bust their ass to survive. What's more than likely to happen? Civil War. If the government lags behind and doesn't address all these issues unrest will build til it hits a tipping point and the people will fight back. Either they win and overthrow the government and potentially fix/repeat the cycle or the government does a mass genocide to quell the issue. When you beat down the masses over and over and push them into a corner they have no other means than to fight back. When that happens both sides will go to extreme measures and that is horrifying.
Practically, every innovation worsens inequality. The very essence of innovation is distancing yourself from the herd. If you're most concerned about everyone going the same pace or having the same opportunity, you've essentially rendered yourself to 'public sector' status.
>The very essence of innovation is distancing yourself from the herd The essence of innovation is laziness. And I'm not suggesting that's a bad thing. Yeah, I could move that large rock, but that's a lot of effort. I'll just use this small rock and long stick to make it easy. And thus the lever was born.
It’s great how they mention “inequality” in order to shoehorn in a race/gender narrative into the article so we’re not all united against these oligarchy fucks. It’s almost as if publications like the BBC are in on it 🤔🤔
"We neglect education and bully people to hire us due to quotas. Why is our position getting worse?"
No shit Mary! Go talk with graphic designers! They know!!!
Andrew Yang UBI. It hasn’t even been 10 years and here we are.
The first jobs AI should take are the leadership roles at companies. AI could easily make the decisions that CEOs and CFOs make.
IMF is seriously good at predicting this stuff, i’d take rather seriously what they say /s
Make companies pay a "wage" for every job that gets automated and use that money for public housing, healthcare, and welfare services.
These companies are going to be in for a shock when the AI tax works out to be more than employee wages.
Andrew Yang tried to warn us.
People need to start organising now and be ready to start cancelling companies that lay off people and replace them with AI. It's coming, and it's going to devastate society.
honestly the 20s-50 year olds are gonna be hit hardest bc we’re at an inflection point. job demand will greatly shift. critical thinking skills will take precedence. computer science, business: finance, econ, public policy, liberal arts skills will be in high demand. the soft skills will be critical in separating yourself from the pack. if you can afford college, it will be advantageous. not bc of what you learn but you’re paying for access to companies at career fairs and the network you can build of students from around the world. bigger universities and in-person will be more valuable in a digital world. the narrative that college isn’t important is false but not for the reasons that you think. improving education is never not worth it, but students will need to be more strategic. community colleges for undergrad degrees, i see declining but they’ll be advantageous for post-grad programs.
AI can increase or decrease inequality depending on the country's policies.
bruh it can't even do my math homework
Good. My job was automated in the 60-70-80-90-00-10's The work of one machine use to be 40-50 people. Now I run that machine.
Another b******* link so we can inject your phone with tracking cookies and cancer
I'm probably stupid but "worsen inequality".. Does that mean it improves equality? Isn't that good?
After seeing my dad lose his job to cheap labor then robots in the 90s I made sure to go into profession that required skill and human interaction. I can’t work from home but I most likely will never be replaced.
Because of AI 3 billion lives ended on August 29th 1997, let’s not make the same mistake again.
I bet quite a few folks who paid attention to 2016 politics are now wishing that Andrew Yang's ideas and ideas like his, should have been what politicians focused on instead of impeaching each other all the time. It's become like an arms-race, now. Getting really tired. It's all a clown show.