The discussion is creating 3 groups:
First group is sure AI will be an enabler and it won't replace them;
The second group is saying AI won't replace them at least in the near future (1~10 years);
Then we have the third group, which is basically the sentiment the op is living rn: AI is taking away their hopes, dreams, and livelihood.
Now, I think we'll see the strongest counterculture in human history against AI and the biggest social unrest to date. I'm talking about massive protests , massive regulations, etc... just because no one, specially the government, is prepared for what's coming.
And then industrial revolution didn't take out jobs, rather created more.
So did computers in the 80s and 90s.
I remember typesetters in our locality were protesting in the 80s that computers were taking off their jobs. They started something like "burn the computers" movement.
More people were later employed as composers than there were typesetters.
Those typesetters were likely right, tho. Sure, Industrial Revolution and computer revolution ended up creating more jobs than they took out - but what everyone conveniently doesn't mention is, those new jobs went to different people.
These kinds of transitions are large scale wealth redistribution. Your random typesetter 20 years into their career, with experience, good pay, and whole life built around economic conditions they spent those decades working hard to achieve, is not going to jump into a role of senior offset printer specialist, or DTP team manager. They're going to become a junior designer at best, most likely fall out of industry and into a junior whatever role. With commensurate drop in salary.
If you're over 30, imagine dropping down to whatever you earned when you were 20, and tell me that people protesting automation don't have an argument. And remember: it's only your career that resets; your health and obligations and remaining years to live do not.
> And then industrial revolution didn't take out jobs
It absolutely did take jobs. It's just that the job loss in one area was compensated by the growth in other areas.
However hoping that it'll be the same with AI is incredible naive. The job shift in the industrial revolution was possible since there were still lots of tasks left that the machines couldn't do. The areas that can't be done by a machine now are dramatically shrinking with advanced AI. There is not much area left where jobs can shift too.
The creative jobs can be automated just the same as everything dealing with digital data. Skilled trades, carpenter, plumbers and electricians might still be safe for some years, as robots still struggle with climbing a ladder or even just stairs, but those are areas that don't seem to be destined for rapid growth. Whatever new job you can think of, will probably be automated away before a human ever get a chance to touch it.
The most impressive part with ChatGPT and friends after all isn't just that they are reasonably good at what they are doing, but how universal they are. ChatGPT didn't need to be meticulously programmed to do the things it does, it learned most of that by itself just from the data feed into it. Meaning there really isn't any domain that you can't automate with AI in the long run.
Exactly. The ramifications of this tech will brake the current system for sure. Why someone will spend 15 years of his/her life studying medicine if by that time AI will replace him/her?
The more we keep going down the rabbit hole, the more we can see there's no utopia at the end of the tunnel. This is no hyperbole, we don't know what to expect if you automate everything.
Just look for some answers here:
- "Blue collar jobs are safe". Really? What happens when everyone is an electrician, plumber, taxi driver, etc...?
- "I use it to amplify my productivity". What happens when AI is so good that it can literally swap you
- "Just create a business around it". There's no competitive edge anymore. Everyone can do "everything" and won't need any expertise at all when AI gets "there".
I'm a SWE but I'm trying to purchase land and invest in things that AI can't replace, like food production, hehe. Agriculture will make a strong comeback this decade. Forget airbnb, a farm is where the $$$$$ is going to be, if not, ask Gates why is he buying land and becoming the biggest "farmer" in the US.
I'm not a conspiracy person, but I can see the "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy" getting dangerously close to reality.
> I'm a SWE but I'm trying to purchase land and invest in things that AI can't replace, like food production, hehe. Agriculture will make a strong comeback this decade. Forget airbnb, a farm is where the $$$$$ is going to be, if not, ask Gates why is he buying land and becoming the biggest "farmer" in the US.
Farms in recent years have consolidated. There are exceptionally few farmers feeding all of us today. This will likely only get worse once all their farm equipment is operated by AI as one farmer will be able to manage far more acreage than they were previously able to.
Nothing is immune.
Of course, it's unlikely we replace plumbers anytime soon, but between the incredible DIY-friendly tools in that space (Shark-bite, PEX) and the fact that no one will have any money to pay for their services, they're probably screwed too.
Robotics is far from replacing carpenters, plumbers and etc. They maybe are showing acrobatics and may even replace soon soliders in some cases. But repairing something requires effort that will be magnitudes higher.
Sure, as a whole the industrial revolution might have created more jobs. But what about individuals? Are we expecting some dude in his fifties whose job is going to be taken away by AI to switch careers just like that? That stuff is hard enough when someone is in their thirties. And in my country the unemployment rate is already 13%, there’s hundreds of candidates for any decent job opening.
To those who are in our 20s and 30s they just answer "be a capitalist, become an entrepeneur, use GPT to build a business".
Never have seen what the answer to people in 40s and 50s with family who can't do a career reset. I guess they'll just have to take a huge pay cut and deal with it, I don't know.
Industrial revolution cities were famously a meat grinder though. Disease, poor quality accomodation, reckless safety considerations in early factories meant a lot of those displaced from rural artisan jobs to work in the cities literally died as a result.
Many of the new jobs' employees were from population growth, people that lived in the countryside thanks to the growth in food production that otherwise wouldn't have, then moved to the cities, etc, as sanitation improved a general fall in the death rate prior to the fall in the birth rate (but later than the initial migration to cities).
Nor was the city standard of living equivalent as people move from rural households (admittedly often multi generational ones, so more crowded than modern ones) to overcrowded tenements.
So the story people gloss over is that all the rural cobblers went to the city and became factory workers and everything is fine. But while it might be a reassuring story that _society_ survives and evolves, it's not at all clear that individuals did as well.
Ludditism has been around since at least the 18th century, probably much longer than that, and that’s exactly what this is. It’s not even the hyperbolic “grandpa doesn’t like iPads” type of ludditism, it’s the literal raging against technological innovation because you’re scared it’s going to take your job type of ludditism.
The guy in the OP didn’t even have his job taken, he just had to use a new tool that made his work far more efficient.
The thing is that if AI matches the hype around it, there won't be any more jobs left. The economy depends on the middle class working, earning a living, buying things. The government collect taxes from businesses and its citizens. At risk and low-income people depend on the government to assist them with basic things.
If AI destroys the middle class, then the whole system collapses. No middle class = no spending = less businesses = more low-income and at risk people, and the cycle continues.
We'll basically create a neofeudalist society where the rich will control everything and the people will work for them (food, housing, etc...).
It seems crazy, etc... but not improbable. I'm not a conspiracy person, but I can't stop thinking about this: These advancements align with "You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy" sentence from the WEF.
Yes I’m sure AI will be the very first technology to match its own hype. The technology that destroys the middle class has finally arrived. The days of falsely prophesying that a technology is about to destroy the middle class are over.
C'mon man. It's not that far fetched. I'm not saying that this will happen tomorrow but if ai gets "there", we don't want to see desperation on a global scale.
The idea that technological innovation is going to destroy the middle class isn’t exactly far fetched, it’s more just blatantly stupid. No economy has ever destroyed its middle class through technological innovation. This will never happen. Technological innovation is one of the primary factors that led to the rise of the middle class to begin with…
AI destroying the middle class will always be a political choice (i.e. the powerful have chosen some sort of hyper-extractive techno-feudalism). You could always tax the AI and redistribute the money back to the people affected.
What does have to be changed with the rise of AI is the tax laws. We basically should treat it the same as if an adversary was dumping product under cost (i.e. tax AI "work") and subsidize human workers; basically run a version of protectionism against AI - if we want human work in this post-AGI world to be viable.
There weren't exactly fewer jobs in textiles after the industrialization the original luddites were against. The jobs were just much, much crappier. (And more of them were filled by children).
They weren't "scared it's going to take their jobs" -- they were _seeing_ the jobs they had _actually disappear_ (not hypothetical future fear), replaced by worse-paying jobs with much worse conditions. They were exactly right that their actual lives were going to get a lot harder.
> Despite what you may have heard, the Luddites weren’t technophobes. They were skilled workers, expert high tech machine operators who supplied the world with fine textiles. Thanks to a high degree of labor organization through craft guilds, the workers received a fair share of the profit from their labors. They worked hard, but they earned enough through their labors to enjoy lives of dignity and comfort.
> Nineteenth century textile workers enjoyed a high degree of personal autonomy. Their machines were in their homes and they worked surrounded by family and friends, away from the oversight of the rich merchants who brought their goods to market. This was the original “cottage industry.”
> The factory owners who built their “dark, Satanic mills” weren’t interested in making life easier for textile workers by automating their labor. They wanted to make workers’ lives harder.
> Textile machines were valued because they were easier to operate than the hand-looms that preceded them, and that meant that workers who wanted a fair wage for a fair day’s work could be fired and replaced with new workers, without the logistical hassle of the multi-year apprenticeship demanded by the hand-loom and its brethren.
> As Brian Merchant documents in Blood in the Machine, his stunning, forthcoming history of the Luddites, the factory owners of the industrial revolution wanted machines so simple that children could work them, because that would let them pick over England’s orphanages, tricking young kids to come work in their factories for ten and twelve hour days.
> These children were indentured for a period of ten years, starved and mercilessly beaten when they missed quota. The machines routinely maimed or killed them. One of these children, Robert Blincoe, survived to write a bestselling memoir detailing the horrifying life of the factory owners’ child slaves, inspiring Dickens to write Oliver Twist.
Tech people so obviously loath creatives, its so sad.
> he just had to use a new tool that made his work far more efficient.
He had all satisfaction, creativity, and joy sapped out of his job. He was made alienated, made to feel pointless, in order to commodify a creative pursuit.
Technology is doing what it has always done, rob skilled people of purpose. From the luddites, to potters, shoemakers, etc. They had a skill that was important for other people. Automation made this cheaper, so these skilled laborers were no longer of use. But now everything we have is made out of cheap materials, nothing lasts. Sure its cheap, it has to be cheap for the out-of-the-job skilled worker who is now working a service job, to be able to afford this automated commodity.
This degrades our society, piece by piece, stone by stone. What is the end goal of this automation? The folks who are reaping the benefits of this efficiency will continue to hoard. They'll fight any effort to give back some of those profits robbed from the laborers. We're turning into a society where we just continuously exchange cheap pointless pieces of plastic just to survive. Zero meaning left except for the psychopaths at the top, they're the only ones allowed to derive meaning from their work.
> Tech people so obviously loath creatives, its so sad.
This isn’t what I’m saying at all. His job changed. You know who else has their job change sometimes? Everybody. I remember going to work one day and being told that I was going to be using Angular from now on. On that day all satisfaction, creativity, and joy was sapped out of my job. But I didn’t go and cry about it on Reddit.
> Zero meaning left except for the psychopaths at the top, they're the only ones allowed to derive meaning from their work.
Luddites say this about every single technological innovation that they whinge about.
Perhaps you should have. I think people deserve to feel loss. Alienation is a real issue. Automation breeds Alienation. I much rather feel meaning at work than have a cheaper TV or yet another data mining website that requires yet another account for little benefit.
> Luddites say this about every single technological innovation that they whinge about.
Possibly because it should be concerning that any meaning found in work is being optimized away for someone else's benefit. The weird lack of empathy to admit it happened to you and to decide someone else should feel it to, sorta worries me.
Especially in a creative field. Who does the cookie cutter AI models benefit? It doesn't benefit the consumer who wasted money on a lazy product, it doesn't benefit the people working on the project, as now their working hours are cut due to the soulless optimization. It benefits the boss, the guy extracting this value and selling a lesser product.
Ah, the alienation of labor, I wonder where I’ve heard about that silly idea before…
Having a job isn’t about finding the ultimate fulfilment in life. It’s about two parties exchanging value, that’s it. If you’d prefer to go back to a time before technological innovation made the necessities of life so cheap to produce that they’re accessible to basically everybody, then I’m sure you could find a country that hasn’t yet gone through that stage of development to live in. I’m almost certain that you don’t actually want that though…
> Ah you can afford TVs and corn based foods. Why don't you go back in time so you don't have to do pointless activities for most of your waking hours until you retire and die 10 years later
>And then industrial revolution didn't take out jobs, rather created more.
This is your thinking: "Because all previous technological revolutions created more jobs, it follows that the AI technological revolution will create more jobs."
However there is an obvious difference between all previous revolutions and this one: previous revolutions replaced labor. The AI revolution replaces thought. Even the computer revolution replaced labor, such as "typing things onto paper" or "updating a ledger".
For me, the whole ChatGPT debacle just showed me that 99% (or 100%) of humans are, themselves, just autocompletion generators, with the training model being a religious text, a political manifesto or propaganda masquerading as a school system.
Created more jobs, sure but what kind of jobs? More complicated, mind draining jobs that many, many people are simply not capable of. The general human intelligent cannot catch up with the rate that the market is asking for.
If you take one look at the demographics of developed countries, the reality is that we absolutely need to replace the majority of human labor in order to maintain any sustainable material standard of living. Old age entitlements are a ticking time bomb, with fewer workers in each generation to support the growing share of longer and longer lived retirees. You want social unrest, take a look at France, which is on fire at the moment because the government had the temerity to try and raise the legal retirement age to 64.
Firstly, we are talking in this thread about intellectual, not physical labour. There's no AI or robot forthcoming that will replace (already brutally underpaid) personal support workers or nurses in nursing homes. Instead it's the higher paying or more satisfying intellectual, artisan, and creative work done by those senior's children that are on the chopping block.
Secondly, even if jobs are automated to support the aging population, the economic model we have doesn't facilitate this leading to an improved life. The incentives to automate in our market economy are strong, and produce amazing efficiencies. Unfortunately that incentive is to reduce labour costs, and there's always a period of unemployment and reskilling afterwards. And in places like the US, unemployment = no health care, among other insecurities.
And in the past a lucky few reskilled towards more intellectual, creative, or informational-managerial jobs. Turns out those will be easier to automate than we thought.
Building a robot is expensive. Automating a factory a huge capital investment.
But once the R&D phase is done, reproducing and distributing software is dirt cheap. Machine automation of intellectual tasks will happen far more rapidly and with more brutal results than factory automation ever has.
The Alvin Toffler fantasy of information age prosperity looks more preposterous every day.
> Firstly, we are talking in this thread about intellectual, not physical labour. There's no AI or robot forthcoming that will replace (already brutally underpaid) personal support workers or nurses in nursing homes. Instead it's the higher paying or more satisfying intellectual, artisan, and creative work done by those senior's children that are on the chopping block.
Cool, then we can free up a lot of those workers to do other work.
And it’s not just a matter of nurses and the like. Retirees need food, energy, goods and services just like everyone else; it’s just that they no longer participate in the process of producing those goods and services. Plus, a ton of health care is knowledge work too.
> And in the past a lucky few reskilled towards more intellectual, creative, or informational-managerial jobs. Turns out those will be easier to automate than we thought.
Which is good. Half of the population has an IQ under 100, and there are just as many people with an IQ below 80 as there are above 120. Which means most people can’t reskill to knowledge work. However, the use of AI will allow these people to reskill to productive work just as POS systems allowed people to work as cashiers without the ability to do arithmetic.
The only actual problem you’ve identified is a threat to the egos of knowledge workers whose sense of self-worth lies in their self-perception of having above average intelligence, or perhaps in not having to do any sort of physical labor. Just like the myth of John Henry, we’re going to feel compelled to eulogize the email jobs. Our grandchildren probably won’t pine for the days of open offices and daily standups though.
My concern is around the class/income composition of the groups specifically in your group 3, and what kind of political forces their disillusionment and anger unleashes.
There are maybe parallels here to the 20s and early 30s in Europe, an era when there was a similar mass disenfranchisement of professional middle classes ("petit bourgeois"), artisans, and specialists... a corresponding mass anger and disillusionment.
And it was in large part those people who formed the base of the rising authoritarian right-wing / fascist movements in Europe.
It's not the most working class people who will lose the most jobs. There's no AIs coming to take away people's jobs cleaning cafeteria trays and mopping floors. It's paradoxically more expensive to automate manual labour or jobs with a high physical component. Competent meatspace robotics are hard and expensive. For now.
Instead it's people like us, used to a higher-privilege lifestyle, who have withstood the wave of previous automation and de-skilling. We're very expensive. And the people signing our paycheques I'm sure are salivating at the opportunity to de-skill and automate us away.
I hope I'm wrong, but I fear what could happen politically.
Well, I can tell you that the first time I see some sufficiently advanced AI walking in the streets between the public, I will grab my baseball bat and smash it to pieces.
I find it curious that even here there are people who conflate a robot body with an artificial mind.
Sure, you can put the computer running the mind that controls the body into the body itself, and there might even be good reasons to given spotty wifi or mobile data, but you don't have to.
> Well, I can tell you that the first time I see some sufficiently advanced AI walking in the streets between the public, I will grab my baseball bat and smash it to pieces.
Describing an AI walking the streets, or smashing it to pieces, necessarily carries with it the implication that the AI is located within a physical body that moves on legs.
And those words you used are very explicitly about destroying an actual machine.
But if you wish to claim that was merely a linguistic turn of phrase not meant to be taken as an implied literal belief of the location of thought? Ok, but it remains the case that what you propose against a "sufficiently advanced" AI, is somewhere between petty vandalism and a pogrom, depending on questions of if "sufficiently advanced" comes as a package deal with "sentience".
Which is a totally different, and in the latter case much more severe, problem.
Huh? Of course I understand that they have a backup somewhere. Whether I destroy the CPU or the actuators or some other hardware is not relevant as long as my statement is clear.
Yeah, but what if it's just a little canister scrubbing public toilets,trash cans, or something similar. Do you really want to destroy that? Will you even realize what you're seeing?
You know what's interesting: Your take is somewhat similar to a part of animatrix and even crazier is that I'll vouch for you just because of the sense of tribalism within me, hehe.
Maybe, but a pre-requisite to doing that right, is that we must first understand what this mysterious "consciousness" thing even is.
I can play word games like saying "consciousness" is the opposite of "unconsciousness" (or alternatively and IMO not entirely compatibility that it is the opposite of "subconsciousness"), but every time I've looked at this, it's either ended with (1) circular definitions, (2) definitions that accidentally include VHS players connected to TV set, or (3) things that humans regularly fail at.
None of that actually helps figure out whether or not a machine does or doesn't have that which makes us have the experience of being.
Getting it wrong, in either direction, is a Bad Ending.
That's how I see it too. Big neo-luddite movement, anti-AI unions, "AI Free" labeling with corresponding certification, registries of AI users (and witch hunts of course), AIs being weaponized to destroy or corrupt other AIs.
AI providers need to be at the forefront of lobbying for reasonable AI control laws, or they are up for a rude awakening.
Now, I think we'll see the strongest counterculture in human history against AI and the biggest social unrest to date. I'm talking about massive protests , massive regulations, etc... just because no one, specially the government, is prepared for what's coming.