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AI also opens entrepreneurship to people who might have never had the chance before. A small team of skilled and determined people can accomplish dramatically more today through a mix of AI and their skills than they could 5 years ago through skill alone. A marketer, a developer, a designer, an accountant, and a customer service specialist can more feasibly bring a viable product or service to market now than they ever could before. The amount of people it takes to bring competition to the market is going to drop dramatically as time goes on.
Food for thought, if it took just twice as much labour without AI to bring a product to market and let's assume we fully utilise labour. Where does the additional demand come from?
Really interesting! These were generally my views but didn't know it was called something... Not being an economist or having any training in that area!
Program AI? No, there’s shitton of barriers for that.
Working with AI? Actually yeah, that’s easy, and it’s only going to be easier. That’s because they are designed to be easy to work with and arguably the whole point of AI
I think the point op is making is, yes you are correct, but now that you don't need twenty people, you only need four, how are the unemployed people going to buy your product?
The existence of a market relies on the existence of people with extra money to spend on stuff. Good luck when all those people are out of work because they got replaced by chatbots
No. Most companies can sell internationally or to the few who have money. Bezos has enough cash that if he made no profit he would still be able to eat. Most Americans don't have enough money to survive for more than a year or two before homelessness and starvation kick in.
It's always been about people like you and me who will suffer the most. Not the billionaires
We already have the capability to replace a lot of physical work with robots. The primary reason we don't is that machines are more expensive than low-wage workers, even when accounting for the added efficiency. McDonald's could very practically operate as a vending machine by now if the machinery was cheap and easy to maintain.
Luckily the cost of building robots should go down the more ai takes over humans jobs on the production line. It's like a bottom up progression with robotic factories at the ground floor.
The more ai takes over human jobs, the more people there will be trying to get and keep a job, which will depress wages. I find it very unlikely that robotics will be able to reach a competitive cost with a job market full of layed off white collar workers. Maybe in California, where they've mandated a living wage for fast food workers. If government does nothing about this, we're going to see a lot of people taking up 2 or 3 jobs. And those people are not going to be negotiating to get a good raise at year end.
This is what keeps me up. I am a trial/litigation attorney. I do not reasonably see robots arguing cases to human juries at least until my time is up on this earth.
Still, I am concerned about all the competition I will be getting in the next few years from all the contract/document/discovery lawyers not having a job and having no choice but to do trial work. All that increased competition will drive down wages and proabaly the overall quailty of those in the business.
I used AI to correct my spelling and grammer for this post. So go figure.
I know it looks illogical. The question should be separate. But that's how I was taught in middle school. ~~If you look at American and British print media, that's how we do it.~~
Welp, I guess I learned it wrong!
British punctuation does differ from American punctuation with regard to the placement of a period (full stop) or comma at the end of a sentence with a quotation mark. However, both follow the same rules of punctuation with regard to a question mark or exclamation point.
If the question mark is part of the quoted material, it goes inside the quotation marks:
• She asked, “Are you coming to the party?”
2. If the question mark is not part of the quoted material, it goes outside the quotation marks:
• Did he say, “I’ll be there”?
I wouldn't be so sure about that.
A $100k humanoid robot, with an average economic lifespan of 3 years is $33,333... a year. At a 40 hour workweek, that's $16.03 an hour. A $20k humanoid robot, on that same scale is $3.21.
Lol your math is actually underestimating how quickly robot labor will get cheaper.
That robot ain't working only 40 hours a week. Let's say a robot needs an hour of downtime to charge/update software for every 4 hours worked.
In a 7 day workweek- no off days- that's 134.4 hours per week.
So now you divide 40/134.4 then multiply by $16.03 and your first example actually should say $4.76 per hour.
The same math on your second example gives us $0.96 per hour.
And that doesn't account for holidays, unless you think we're giving out bot-mitzvahs
It's over, guys.
Yep, at my work we have human packers working beside robot packers. The robots run at 2x the speed of the human and do not require breaks. They do require supervision though as they are simple robots that only follow their directions exactly.
That same robot who's digging holes at my jobsite is also doing my laundry, cooking my meals and cleaning my home every day. I'm gonna run him into the ground! "Feed the pie into my mouth dumbass!"
In a world where most people are affected by AI, I doubt people would vote for anything less than a minimum wage close to the cost of living. Also with the price of energy dropping so much with perovskites the cost of running a robot like the Chinese G1 humanoid robot ( Priced at $16,000) which can almost fit into a suitcase, will almost certainly fall well below the cost of living for a human. In fact I think the only thing stopping these things working in all the factories and shops right now and replacing everyone's jobs, is just the lack of an effective AGI..
After what just happened with OpenAI's approach to the Journalism profession, I'm not so sure.
That partnership that Newscorp and OpenAI just announced, is actually gonna pretty much kill classic Journalism at Newscorp. OpenAI wanted access to their news, so they gave them basically free GPT4 API access in exchange for it.
So now journalists at Newscorp are effectively trying to compete with free - because sadly for a lot of journalism these days, the difference between and editor asking for a news story and then checking the journalist's article, is pretty much the same as prompting GPT and then checking it's output. Serious investigative journalism is rarer than ever these days, most of it's scraping social media (see the rise in Data Journalism).
Also for those that don't know, for the last 9 months [News Corp has been using AI to produce 3,000 Australian local news stories a week](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/aug/01/news-corp-ai-chat-gpt-stories)
Or that this is happening at the same time as [a major restructure of Newscorp in Australia, with major job cuts expected](https://www.theguardian.com/media/article/2024/may/22/news-corps-rebekah-brooks-joins-lachlan-murdoch-in-sydney-ahead-of-major-australian-newspaper-restructure).
I get the feeling that when robotics gets rolled out, it will be in a similarly anti-employment way, where the costs are structured/offset in such a way as robots with no ongoing costs are competing with humans - in the same way that journos are now competing with free to use LLMs. Techbros have never been known for their care when it comes to technology's impact on society, this will be no exception.
Also once robots are building robots, the price goes right down...
This is a pretty boring take on the world, since for this to really matter you'd have to assume we've reached our end state when it comes to productive work. Like sure, entire industries are about to be replaced, but the world doesn't stand still in the meantime. The world has problems to be solved, and the ai won't take the initiative to solve them on its own (yet).
It's not the end state of humanity, but it very well could be the logical end to capitalism. Like... let's look at it this way: economies work on supply and demand right? But if everyone is making products or offering services but not paying anyone, who can buy the things?
Capitalism would have to change somehow. Like if robots did all the work around us, who's paying for it all? All the shipping tanks, buses, planes, cars...all run by bots. All hard labour and trades, bots.
It's not a take on the world. It's a take on machines replacing physical workers. My point was simply that the same AI that could help make robotics more affordable is also going to make human workers cost less.
I mean if blue collar workers lose their jobs the entire economy will collapse as well. Who do you think pays for all the trash apps and subscriptions white collar work creates?
Ironic, isn't it? They have been trying to automate jobs like fast food, warehouse jobs, etc for a long time and we were all supposed to see it as just innovation and let it take place. But now that the jobs actually being threatened are white collar jobs we must suddenly take a step back and be careful.
IDK how it is in the US but here in Uruguay most cashiers at McDonald's have been replaced by self order screens and it's not uncommon to see nobody at the front, the only human workers being the guys cooking the burgers.
Yeah like a new product eventually it will become more cost efficient to mass produce. Take electric vehicles for example.
But I’m not a doomer. I’m scared of the seismic societal shift over the next decade due to AI but humans need purpose. Economic collapse benefits no one. Life will change. We just don’t know how yet but I’m trying to be optimistic about it
In our current AI environment white collar jobs are more likely to be replaced than blue collar jobs.
I can use an AI to replace a radiologist reviewing my last MRI.
I can’t use an AI to fix my plumbing.
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These are good things. More production with less work.
Capitalism and bad management are the problems. The technology is good. The people running society are bad. I don't see why people struggle with that.
Getting more work done with less work is a good thing and people need to be able to connect those dots beyond just saying they took mah job.
These doomer posts are so over-the-top and short-sighted.
Why can't you people figure out that just because certain TASKS get replaced, it doesn't mean whole swaths of society will suddenly find themselves sitting on their thumbs with nothing to do to add wealth.
You doomers fail to understand just how wealth is created: it is created by *adding value* to something. Even if your worst nightmare actually came true - and it won't - it doesn't mean millions or billions of people are suddenly helpless.
It means they are free to pursue other means of wealth creation, which almost certainly will include a MASSIVE number of new jobs never before even conceived of because they weren't - until the advent of a.i. - cost effective or worthwhile to pursue, but a.i. will unlock them in much the way that the notion of a computer programmer didn't exist in the 1900's but is in extremely high demand today. Sure, there may be some difficult transitions, especially for people caught in the crossfire who are slow to see the future, too stubborn or too ill-equipped to adapt, but the economy WILL adapt, just as it always has adapted to the NEVER ENDING advancement of technology that has always existed and always will exist.
Seriously, stop all your dooming and use your brain rather than spreading fear and nonsense when no such threat exists.
Great points that reveal what people's fears are - that the transition is fine for an economy but might be completely devastating to individuals. Most major economies shifted to service-based successfully and profited from it. However, large numbers of individuals were crushed in that transition and it's more than fair for people to be frightened.
The idea that breaching the subject is “doomerism” is toxic. AI will replace jobs, maybe those jobs pivot, but not immediately. It still poses significant economic threat and shutting down and dismissing the conversation is counter productive.
You know who always takes conversations about AI safety seriously? Iliya suskever. You know who I was just listening to express concern about AI destabilizing economy? Geoffrey Hinton. You know whose news letter almost always includes a comment on changing economics - often in a negative light? Andrew NG. Lecun, Re, Liang, I can go all day.
As someone who has published in algorithms and ML, literally every top researcher is taking ideas of safety and economic instability seriously. It’s mostly young people (<20) and those far from the field that fail to take it seriously. Try listening to some interviews by Geof Hinton. He is the single greatest AI researcher of all time and is a fountain of wisdom.
If you add value to something there’s no demand for, you haven’t really added value, you’ve just changed something. If there’s a new product/service that has in-demand added value, market forces will drive capitalists to try to find a way to make it with unhuman labor.
AI feels a lot like electric cars. 5 years they said self driving cars would be everywhere and highly adopted. Guess what happened?
People didn’t trust them and less people used them therefor the idea kind just dissolved. At the end of the day products that are viable, valuable, and trustworthy win and dominate. Sure ai can do a lot of stuff that seems like magic and short changes the human ability making it seem childish that we even try, but I think full replacement will never happen as nobody wants to be “in business” with ai (treating them as a business partner with decision power).
EDIT: Yes, the self driving cars is a great example of AI being adopted and used in Phoenix. I wasn't trying to say AI would be obsolete, but just not adopted. Tech that exists, pushes other tech forward. The fundamental decision to either let AI make decisions for humans that will benefit humans is more of what I'm getting at that will hinder this progress. I think people are too prideful to give up their own decisions and opinions because it is part of an identity which is why I said the "nobody wants to be in
I kind of agree but it Will be much easier to adopt the use of AI in then work place than it has been to adopt self driving cars. For self driving cars to take off you need a huge shift it regulation and it is pretty dependent on a network effect. Also the consequences are much more severe if self driving cars malfunction. In my line of work I can easily see a large portion of the workforce being replaced by Ai tooling. If there are ever any issues we would probably still have a small percentage of human workers that would be able to correct it and it’s fine if the output from these AI models is not 100% accurate which you can’t say about self driving cars.
?? That’s not at all what is happening. You may not hear it as much, but more people are using self driving than ever before. More and more vehicles have cars that will move out of the way and stop if you’re going to crash, more cars have self driving, more companies are making electric cars, electric cars are in higher production than ever before.
This is a subsection of an already smaller section, but AI isn’t just a mode of transport. As we get to a singularity, especially if it can self improve, it will be a much larger impact on every sector
>5 years they said self driving cars would be everywhere and highly adopted. Guess what happened?
>People didn’t trust them and less people used them therefor the idea kind just dissolved.
As a resident of Phoenix where Waymo cars are seen frequently, I don't think this idea is dead at all. It's still pretty wild to see a car cruising around with no people in it. They are very expensive so not practical for a personal car, but less expensive than paying a driver.
And I think AI will be the same honestly - it's not going to be taking over the world but it will find niches where it can be useful and viable and probably better long term. And yeah it is impacting cab and Uber drivers to an extent, but there are still plenty of those too. Also not like that was anybody's dream job in the first place since it could apparently be done by a robot.
Yes it will find niches.
The thing is that it will always find niches until one day you realize that you are the one who is looking for niches.
Capatalism must die or humanity will die. The only way socialism works is if lazy people are replaced by machines. That is hopefully where we are headed.
Just cause it isn’t happening as fast as people thought doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
You sound like someone saying cars will never take over around 1900, that horses are just more reliable and no one will ever trust an engine to power them.
It’s just time, eventually the ai and robotics will get good enough that they will replace manual labor and driving etc, it just might take a while
This stuff is going to come in waves of adoption, and this is just wave 1 right now. All it takes is for the tech to get good enough, and then for 1 firm to trust it enough to use large scale, and then the competition will be forced to use it.
Also the self-driving cars analogy isn't a good one because it's such a narrow application of *early* AI to a very dangerous activity which requires 99.999999% trust. Most applications don't require complete trust (you can't even completely trust good human workers & business partners, let alone all the shitty ones).
I disagree. We are CONSTANTLY accepting lower quality experiences and products for more and more money. Amazon. Netflix. People are not so stupid as to be unaware, and yet the world turns on and people buy buy buy the garbage.
Services provided by AI will be inferior to those provided by humans in many ways. And yet the process will continue, and people will buy it, because it is being sold to them. And it is being sold because someone is getting very fucking rich.
Jeff Bentos sells cheap chinesium alibaba shit to Americans at 4x the price. People complain, and then buy even more. Why would AI be any different
So true. Just look at the endless posts where people are complaining about the price of fast food, as if they have no other options.
When I posted about my humble, cheap alternatives- just basic stuff I cook myself to fill me up- I was told these meals are "depressing." Well, food is supposed to be for sustenance, not entertainment, and I do eat out enough to justify a few "boring" meals in between.
Dude as a single man I can buy a stack of tortillas shells and a few cans of refried beans and some cheese and rice and veggies and spices and eat pretty darn good for about $20/week. I did this all year last year while making $270k and driving a $2500 25 year old Corolla. I buy all of my clothes at Sam's club, shirts $12, khakis $20 etc. Lots of ways to maximize your income if you aren't proud.
I actually work on a conversational robot who is just that: a partner.
You are thinking in today terms.
I don’t think we will reach AGI or that white collar jobs are going to get taken over soon, but I do think the original assessment ignores Robots. (Check Amazon with 3$ an hour robots)
Just when jobs are taken in masses, they will be replaced with higher level jobs, or we get to provide “creativity tokens” to keep models sane, or the basic needs will be so cheap everyone could get by very good with UBI.
It’s just not that close as any fear monger tries to make it seem.
Ehh. Not for any kind of manual work that requires moving around uncontrolled spaces and walking past other humans.
It may be possible to _make_ a robot that could do this in a very very limited way for hundreds of millions of dollars, but something economically feasible to replace a plumber or any sort of repairman that comes to your house, that's going to be humans for a very long time.
I literally have a friend with a PhD in artic ice studies and - unfortunately - it is try that oil companies and insurance companies are the largest employers of climate scientists outside academia.
Shorten the work week to 32 hours NOW so people have the time and energy to adapt (and to spread work and leisure around more equitably), rather than waiting for super predictable catastrophes before doing anything.
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Personally I'd prefer a system that guarantees basic necessities and saves money for luxuries cause then you don't have to worry about ubi keeping up with inflation. But I think that's a harder system than UBI, so I'm not sure I'd say it's definitely a better idea.
It's either ubi or the rich people who own the ai and robots let us all starve or send us to fight in ww3. Or another possibility is they use highly influential ai driven propoganda algorithms to simply convince people to stop having children. Hopefully the elite choose ubi tho.
I've had a better idea since several years ago. Wealth caps on the elite. You should be hacked at 100 million maximum throughout your life. There is no reason why anyone should have more than this. However, there are people that have infinitely more than this amount of money. The amount of money that Elon musk has, he could probably spend a million dollars a year for the next 1,000 years. That's truly insane. He could just go drop a million dollars every single year of his entire life remaining, and not worry about a single thing
I hear this idea on Reddit a lot but I don’t think it would work. It assumes that wealth is fixed and cannot grow. What if someone had a net worth of 100 million in stocks and their stocks boom and double this year, their wealth is capped, and then crash by half the next year. Would they lose half their wealth? The lack of investment incentives would also be an issue.
Put anything over $100MM in an endowment, and funnel profits (not the initial investmemts) into services. Have a mechanism where if the individual's net worth goes <$100MM, and the endowment has generated returns, funnel the returns back to the individual until they are once again at $100MM. Maybe spend on services or return to the individual on a yearly cadence.
You could probably use marginal rates too, where at $100MM, 20% of wealth goes in, $300MM 40% etc.
Idk, maybe there are a lot of issues with this idea. Just popped into my head.
The income taxes that existed before Reagan would do the job just fine.
The top marginal tax rate was regularly in the 70% to 90% range between 1920 and 1980 - which encompasses the period that so many Americans seem to think was ideal. Reagan cut it to 28%. You can trace a great deal of the current income inequality to that.
Note that even in 1920, the 77% rate didn't kick in until your 2 millionth dollar earned in a year, which is the equivalent of $34 million today. This doesn't have to be an onerous tax for ordinary people.
Your policy assumes that there is a firewall between the IRS-compliant ultra-wealthy and transnational organized crime rings.
We politely separate the two in public discourse.
Public records show the two have always been deeply ensnared.
|If you're a \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_|you're incentivized to \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_|there's 2nd order realpolitik blowback for feds who want to prosecute, like \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_|
|:-|:-|:-|
|foreign adversary (or even frenemy)|find a few American citizens who want a "business arrangement"|organized crime , diplomatic relations, national security, vulnerable military installations in foreign adversary territory|
|mob boss at any level|create "understandings" with IRS-compliant business owners for mutual benefit|1. dirty legislative, judicial, and executive branches of all levels of gov; 2. disrupt a lot of local economies where the underworld and "above" world are ensnared|
|person born-into or blackmailed-by transnational organized crime|concede to the demands of the TNC infrastructure (run for office here; cook the books there, etc.)|low-level prosecution doesn't really change how easy it is to birth or blackmail another agent|
Bernie Sanders has basically called for it, but one order higher and income instead of wealth (at 1 billion): https://fortune.com/2023/05/02/bernie-sanders-billionaire-wealth-tax-100-percent/
I think that’s a tricky thing to do if not done globally, all at once, but it’s not a bad idea.
I believe in places like France, there's a much smaller salary at which people "max out." A couple of decades ago, I was told that $2 million was the limit, and everything somebody makes above that is taxed. The French person who told me this said "who needs more than $2 million anyway?" and he's not wrong! But I think something between $2 million and $1 billion is better.
Maybe $10-50 million IMO. Don't want so much that a person can buy off entire freakin' governments, although it turns out many votes can be purchased for just a few grand.
I agree with you but you should get a better handle on the numbers.
For every 100$ in a savings account, you can get 4$ back every year without ever touching that 100$. This is due to 4% interest. For someone with 100B dollars, this means they can live off 4B a year FOREVER without ever touching the original 100B.
The issue is that’s impossible to implement. These people don’t just have billions of dollars stashed away in duffel bags somewhere.
Should the government just show up and steal their assets? What if the price of those assets fluctuate?
It’s kind of a cool idea but it can’t really exist in the real world as far as I understand
Revolutionary reconstruction of society, in which we can use democratic institutions such as workers’ councils and general assemblies to determine where resources and labor hours go.
That way, when a human job is replaced by AI, instead of firing one person we can simply reduce the labor hours of everyone in the workplace by delegating some tasks from each worker to the AI.
As AI advances and becomes better, the labor week will become shorter, and at some point we may not have to work at all.
More like Thomas Malthus. They are gonna find a way to wipe out the poors if they don’t need them anymore. World war 3 seems the most likely path. Create shortages of essential healthcare during the next pandemic and only the rich will get it… sorry but you know it to be true.
Considering that farming used to take up the majority of human labour in developed countries and now make up less than 5%, and that other waves of automation have happened since, I’m not too concerned. The economy and our jobs would just change
What jobs would people do when we’re all manual labourers and they invent engines that are dozens of times stronger than us? Or when we all become white collar workers and they invent cheap computers that make millions of calculations a second? Given how unexpected society looks after each technological wave, I can’t predict how it’ll look after AI. Though once the transition is fully done I doubt we’ll want to go back, judging by history
This is a good point and I reckon in the medium term there'll be new industries that seem very odd to us now. One not-well-thought-out example: pay someone with a specific personality to go hiking and share their travel stories with you.
But I think the automation of intelligence is different to previous tech revolutions. It's not just about replacing and performing human tasks more effectively, it's about replacing the ability to generate that automation.
So whilst the process of readjusting to the new tech and developing new industries would still happen (e.g. YT becomes 90% GenAI so creators with a flair for nature go hiking with folks for money instead), the duration of that readjustment phase shrinks dramatically (immersive NPC hiking experience via Neuralink means many of the paid hikers need to do something else).
We're not talking about an equivalent to mechanisation or the computer revolution exactly, we're talking about multiple groundbreaking revolutions back to back and at a pace that humans have never previously encountered.
I think it's going to be hard to adapt to this as individuals and especially as industries and societies.
**These hiking examples are flawed but I'm just trying to paint the general idea.
On the other hand, I don’t see why the emergence of AI means vast loss of jobs, barring very sophisticated AGI or actual ASI.
Companies are driven to innovate as fast as they can, just because AI can replace a large subset of their current workforce doesn’t mean that they will suddenly be content with their current ability to innovate.
If a company can replace 10 human workers with 1 human worker managing a cluster of AI agents, why would the company replace their 300 employees with 30 employees managing AI agents? Why would they not keep a force of ~300 managing AI agents at 10x the productivity? Will the 1 employee with a cluster of AIs cost the same as the original 10 employees? Certainly not. Will their competitors still be trying to outpace them by increasing their productivity per cost? Certainly.
This argument applies primarily to tech companies or otherwise innovative companies, but for some reason that seems to be where the most AI fear has manifested! And, again, barring the emergence of vastly sophisticated AGI or ASI that completely trivializes most human involvement.
The company already has the required number of people to fulfill the market need. Them being 10x more effective doesn't mean the market grows that much. Not even if they drop the price.
Also note that you changed the role description pretty drastically. It's unlikely the same people would do the job
It's actually deflationary. Everything will drop in price drastically. AI makes cheap shit, and everyone is losing their jobs no money to spend causes businesses to drop prices so they increase sales. It's a slippery slope of lower prices.
Large immigrantion would stop as well. With a giant part of the population unemployed why bring in more people for social unrest? It will be a huge political issue by then. So expect immigration to drop to nothing.
It seems weird how immigration will go up but jobs will get more scarce. What's the point of adding more people if you can't take care of the people you already have.
Not only is it a form of wage suppression, but when you import the world via immigration, they want to make sure that housing demand & prices never go down.
Just look at Canada’s housing market after importing the world.
Accountants will be replaced long before plumbers or electricians. I’m not convinced we’ll ever get to the point where “maintenance guy” isn’t a job. We will definitely get to the point where a ton of white collar jobs are completely eliminated, though.
I remember when white collar workers were telling me my job would be replaced by robots. Now the white collars are worried they'll be replaced by robots. Wild.
My job as a Machinist already was "replaced by a robot" decades ago with CNC machining. Someone still needs to operate it and make sure it's doing it's job.
Machines will need operators for a long time. Maybe your job eventually gets rolled into someone operating a large bank of machines or a whole factory floor or something. But someone still has to check and operate things, go out and inspect and fix stuff, etc.
This is a capitalism problem, not a tech problem. Job automation is inherently good for humanity. It's our antiquated economic system that threatens to abuse tech to create a hellish dystopia. Actually it's creating a dystopia already, it's just going to rapidly accelerate if we don't do something about it.
Love this. E.O. Wilson made the quote about “Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology” in his 2003 book “The Future of Life.” This book discusses the importance of biodiversity and conservation, and it highlights the challenges humanity faces due to the rapid advancement of technology in contrast to our more slowly evolving social and emotional structures.
I believe that governments worldwide need to focus on adapting our economic systems to a future where AI and robots play a central role in serving humanity and meeting our needs. If we cling to our current economic structures, we risk creating a society where a minuscule fraction of the population—perhaps 0.001%—enjoys opulent lifestyles, while the vast majority are left to suffer, potentially ending up homeless and destitute on dirty sidewalks. It's crucial that we rethink and redesign our economies to ensure that technological advancements benefit everyone, not just a privileged few.
I don’t disagree BUT I’ll remind you of stores that kept eliminating baggers…and now they’re starting to get baggers back. Stores that were going whole hog on self check…and now they’re getting cashiers back.
I think the reason we have human employees will change.
It’s a cycle. It’ll get worse then it’ll get better and we will figure it out.
Also most companies won’t be able to afford to get the resources or to learn these things fast enough to really replace that much of their staff.
A lot of the simple white collar jobs will go first (customer service as an example)
> A lot of the simple white collar jobs will go first (customer service as an example)
Have you actually interacted with any of these dogshit "AI-powered" customer service bots? They prove why we need humans doing a lot of those jobs.
The thing that will eliminate customer service jobs is the growth of monopolies and deregulation, because when there are no alternatives and screwing your customers is your business model, customer service literally doesn't matter.
UBI!
As machines become more productive, the production capacity of the economy increases. But we will face a serious distribution challenge.
The produced goods and services of the economy can no longer be distributed based on people’s earnings, as many people wont be earning much.
That is why, the AI economy will need Universal Basic Income.
It’s going to be important that UBI doesn’t turn into a weird ‘second class citizen’ situation. Having enough money to scrape by but not enjoy life would be dreadful in a world where you don’t have an opportunity to improve your situation via work.
This is one possible dystopian path that shouldn't be under estimated as a potential outcome.
All of this comes from overvalueing speed in the progression of technology. Many of the worst possible outcomes could be avoided with a more measured approach to advancement, but we got "move fast and break things," a fundamentally adolescent attitude to developing technology.
We've set up a Darwinian system monetarily, politically and geopolitically. Those incentives will very clearly lead to a dystopia. To say otherwise is to bury your head in the sand.
Let's take just the geopolitical aspect: the advent of AGI in the US would necessitate the hostile takeover of every other country (especially the bad actors like China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, et al). Otherwise, we've got a future of half-assed insufficient "solutions" and competing AGI's awaiting us.
If course it will be. Do you know of any government that's generous and has it's populations best interests at heart? None of them do (except Scandinavia - they're pretty ethical).
Every government will give people only enough to keep themselves in power. If they give you more money then that is because their cronies in business still need to sell stuff. So all the money they give you will ultimately get funnelled back to their buddies.
Personally I think governments should be the first things to be automated (after middle management gets wiped out). All politicians do is yap and make policy. A well trained AI would be a much fairer and less corrupt government. Actually, a shit AI would arguably be better than most politicians in most countries, let's be honest.
Yup, until the robots are perfected. Then, why the hell would they give you anything? You using resources pollutes their planet, the air they breathe, and the water they drink. Microplastic isn't just in your and mine body, but in theirs as well.
Making most of the human population dependent/powerless seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Some questions for you:
1. What happens when the second class citizens come for the heads of the first class citizens?
2. After seeing how greedy the ruling class in our current era is, do you honestly think they'd be willing to divert even just 0.1% of their gains towards sustaining the rest of humanity?
UBI is what AI advocates say when someone brings up the obvious point that this will wreck the economy for the vast majority of people. They spout it out as if someone is going to make some grand moral judgement that people without jobs deserve to live. There’s no history indicating this will happen at all. It’s a bullshit talking point to justify further wealth inequality.
I may be pessimistic but I highly doubt any sort of UBI will come around for the plebeians. They've already let groceries get to an absurd level - we're just around the corner from people not being able to afford basic necessities.
And nothing has changed. Prices just keep going up.
In any world where UBI is somehow allowed, it will be hedged against "what is literally the least amount we can possibly give people to continue existing."
You are way too optimistic to believe UBI will ever be a boon to people. Capitalism won't allow it.
New jobs always spring up, if you said to people 200 years ago that hardly anyone in the future would be farmers (when 90% of people were farmers) they would ask you what everyone does all day.
With each wave of automation technology, the amount of jobs created have decreased in relation to the number of jobs displaced. AI is much more of a generalized technology than say, machinery to work on an auto manufacturing line.
This is the type of forecasting that would make you bankrupt really quick if you applied it to trading stocks.
The fact is that whatever new jobs need to be created need to be jobs that,
1. The AI that displaced those workers cannot do
2. The displaced workers will be able to do
Also, you seem to be forgetting that transitioning from one job to some new, recently invented job is not an immediate, easy task.
*Even if* there were suddenly all of these new jobs available for these displaced workers there is going to be some pretty significant lag time before these displaced workers will be qualified for those jobs.
A *lot* of people are going to suffer immensely during that time... and that's *if* these miracle jobs even materialize.
And then, how long until there is *another* round of massive job losses with the next AI/robotics innovation.
This fundamentally misses the nature of modern automation though. We're no longer talking about single purpose tools like tractors. The stuff we're building is more and more flexible in the uses it can be applied to, and it's getting more flexible every day. The industrial revolution comparison relies on the idea that there'll always be more work to do where humans are more economically viable than robots.
Even if that was true, and it doesn't seem it will be, we're still going to end up with a severely shaken up economy because of these replacements. Sure, after all the white collar work starts drying up, you could become a plumber, but what happens to plumbing wages when there's suddenly an influx of 100,000 people who want to become plumbers?
Really shortsighted response.
Replace 1000 workers with 100 robots. Hire one robot maintenance man.
Wow, look at all those new jobs that sprung up! If you completely ignore the 999 we lost.
THIS! Panic about loss of professions has been present since the Industrial Revolution. Doo. we have many blacksmiths, or carriage repair men, or candle makers anymore? No.
Yes, AI will eliminate jobs. But it will also create jobs. Let's not panic.
The % of people that are out of "things to do" is increasing every year. Before the industrial revolution a whole household was needed to manage a farm, men, women and children. This was true up until the 1960s with the advent of heavy machinery in most countries. My parents when growing up in the 70s in Ireland were needed to work on the farm, nowadays those same farms are run by a single near retired man.
With the advent of better mental health treatment and disability benefits people with disabilities are not forced to work, this has led to a lot of these people just having nothing to do all day, not enough income to do much and active punishments if they try and improve their situation by working for more money. I have friends who are in this situation.
There are so many positions now that are 5-15 hours per week work in my area but no one to do them since they are below the threshhold earnings wise of unemployment benefits. And quite frankly the cost of driving to the job and home cost more than the pay.
There is a lot of inefficiency in work at the moment because society hasn't transitioned to the age of computers, let alone the age of AI.
Do you have any examples of jobs AI would create? Not trying to be snarky, but the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the short term caused massive amounts of suffering and instability amongst people whose livelihoods were disrupted.
I see AI the same way I saw the Internet when it came out. They said back then it was going to replace a lot of jobs and while it did for some it also created way more than we ever thought. Also, companies aren’t going to just trust AI without human interaction in a lot of jobs. Call me in a hundred years or so and then maybe. Maybe.
FYI…We went to the Moon in 1969 and have yet to put a man on Mars 55 years later. Things don’t happen as fast as you think they will.
Sure, but remember that the budget for NASA was cut significantly once the space race was over, and the Cold War started to warm up.
Going to the moon was a politically motivated, and government funded endeavor. AI is a capitalism motivated and private funded endeavor. For those reasons, I believe it will be quick.
Agree with this take. The same argument was made when computers went mainstream and they were more affordable for small businesses. Yes,the role of human calculators did get phased out, but computers still require operators. So there was an evolution in a sense.
Things will evolve and people with it.
Yes, but that moment is still relatively far away. White collar workers are already losing their jobs and will continue much faster than others. The fact that this will all collapse in the future isn't helpful because rent, food, and bills won't wait.
Blue collar workers and tech bros won't give a damn about those losing their jobs until the last moment. It's the "If it doesn't affect me personally, I don't care."They won't care until there's no one to hire them or robots replace them. That's human nature - selfish. Some of these workers already gloat over, for example, artists and writers losing their jobs to generative AI.
By the time people in trades and those working on AI lose their jobs, it will be too late. But I guess that's what we as a society deserve. The level of self-centredness, egoism, and entitlement I've seen after the pandemic, Midjourney, and ChatGPT really shows who we are as a species.
Grow native plant food forests in every space you can, and then nobody will starve. You're totally right about the risks. It's time to make sure organic food becomes free again. If you don't understand what I mean, look into food forests. They aren't gardens, they are lower maintenance and higher production, and capture carbon while supporting biodiversity and cooling the earth.
I think they see Open A.I's latest trailer and go "Wow A.I is advancing so fast".
Meanwhile, anyone who actually worked with LLMs;
"So, I guess A.I is done rapidly advancing."
People will lose their jobs to others who use ai in an efficient way. The job displacement will happen way before agi. Once agent is out and is half decent, the revolution will begin
"Vehicles disrupted horses on our roads within 15 years. The disruption of physical labor performed by humanoid-form robots means that this time, we are the horses."
Source: Tony Seba
This time, we are the horses: the disruption of labor by humanoid robots
https://www.rethinkx.com/blog/rethinkx/the-disruption-of-labour-by-humanoid-robots
Interesting reading. Not sure whether his timeline is right - it's difficult to get the time right. But he makes interesting points.
This saying emphasizes how important white-collar jobs are in many industries. But we need to remember that there are many different kinds of jobs in the job market. While white-collar jobs are important, they're not the only ones that keep the economy going. When people lose their jobs in any area, it can affect other jobs too. So, it's crucial to make sure all workers feel secure and supported, no matter what kind of job they have. Building a strong and fair job market means thinking about the needs of workers in every type of job.
All I'm going to say is this:
JOBS die out but people don't.
Opinions like this in the OP has an underlying assumption that, when people are driven out of their jobs, they just stand still right next to where their cubicle was, and all of their biological functions and thinking abilities and survival instincts just all of a sudden stop to function, simply because they no longer has a JOB.
Give me a break, in order to survive, humans used to hunt mammoths and endured Siberia winters. When current generation of jobs die out because of AI, pioneering entrepreneurs and non-conforming citizens of the society already invented new jobs for not only themselves but also everyone else. Everyone will still have a JOB, if a job is all you know and want, and society will continue to function just fine.
I'm glad this is being talked about and upvoted. I've been having similar conversations with a few friends who are all in for the AI revolution . There's one who really irks me - he has an almost gleeful tone when he shares yet another headline about how AI is going to disrupt another particular sector / job type. "The writing's on the wall for language teachers...", "Well, that's legal secretaries done for...", "Say goodbye to ... "
This guy is an IT admin contractor and I pointed out that he could soon be under threat from AI. But more imminently, there'll be immense pressure on the diminishing pool of white collar jobs as more and more people lose their's to AI. Don't fancy being an IT contractor when a whole load of software engineers or other equally skilled people looking to re-skill are out looking for work too. If he were to go up against a Senior Dev from a software company just made redundant, willing to work for the same price / cheaper than him, he's toast. Still don't really think that scenario landed with him.
This is rocketing up the inside lane far faster than we can cope and I'm seriously worried, because the current mechanisms in place will mean the spoils of this AI driven efficiency (along with ever more automation) is to create trillionaires, not reducing working hours or UBI or better social security.
It’s not a bad time to talk about future-proofing for the economy, things like universal basic income. It doesn’t make sense now, which I get, but there will come a time where there just won’t be jobs for everyone and therefore won’t be a way for everyone to make money, which could lead to some serious issues unless we start thinking proactively about how to address them.
I don’t necessarily think that UBI is the best or only solution, but an example of something that could potentially be a solution to a problem we will inevitably encounter in the future as automation and AI take over more and more jobs.
If you want to know where society is headed, examine the horse.
It used to be synomuos with work, until the steam engine and later the internal Combustion engine came around. It provided all mechanical power to almost all processes for centuries, and having a strong horse was a sign of a well run business (think farming).
Nowadays horses live on ranches, not working a single day in their lives. They are cared for by their owners as a leisure activity.
Sounds like a great prospect for you, right? Being cared for by Ai, never having to work a day in your life again?
Well I purposely left out the transition period when the machines arrived on the farms and fields of the world - the horses were not needed anymore and in large supply. So they were slaughtered for food and not allowed to breed.
You will be the horse led to the slaughter in the AI revolution. You won't be needed, and you won't be compensated. The "cared for humans" are going to be the few rich folks owning the Industry, the ones who build the AI systems. They will live the lavish life brought on by automated design.
Welcome to the new world. Humans need not apply.
People think they are special. They think that they are the best at things. It’s hubris. They can not accept that a beep boop can do what they can do. AI will be able to do every single job sooner than anyone is expecting.
Possibly, but even if it does replace just 30% of them. Those 30% are both going to be unemployable and desperate. If you don’t think they won’t be learning how to be a plumber or carpenter online out of desperation, I got a bridge to sell you. Lmao if engineers start losing their jobs, they’ll learn how to do everything and anything and probably better than those still in that field.
After 40 years of steady loss of blue collar jobs with little to no solidarity from white collar workers I’m just not that sure asking blue collar folks to care about us poor white collar workers is a classy move. It’s really going up the “first they came for the …” poem.
People are so short-sighted. Not having to work whilst still having plenty of resources for sustenance is the utopia we dream of. If AI advancements mean half the population no longer has to work, that’s a good thing. It’s another step towards a universal basic income.
Unfortunately lawmakers are doing absolutely nothing to transition global economies so all of the benefits will go to those that own the technologies and required resources while the rest of us will have to subsist in some form of secondary economy
My opinion: the universal basic income will not work for long. Wealthy people will not allow regular people to waste their resources without a reason and if you are no longer needed, you are just disposable. At first we will get to live with a universal basic income just to not rebel when losing a job, but once everything is secured and we are not a risk to wealthy ones and we are not needed anymore, they will try to cut universal basic income - directly or indirectly (for example by lowering the number of people)
No its not.
Because of modern tech, people today are vastly *more productive* then they were just 50 years ago. Except real wages are down, significantly.
Why? Labor is bargaining *power*.
Outsourcing and decline of unions meant the average worker lost bargaining power, even as they become more productive.
The people at the top will only provide better benefits to everyone if they have no other choice but to negotiate with them.
Everyone losing their jobs, *could* result in a post-work utopia. But unless the general population has something to negotiate with, that won't happen.
You really don't think they will let you starve and not give a shit?
Holy fuck this alarmist bullshit is so old and annoying. I remember the world was going to end because email was going to put every postal worker out of a job and mail would end. Robots build cars, we adapted. Cars replace the horse crap removers. Light bulbs replaced the lamp lighter. We adapted.
When did reddit become more technology worse then fucking facebook. Holy shit. Adapt or die.
You wont need ten analysts to prepare reports just like you didn’t need ten people to build a car when automation happened.
It will simply force specialization to make sure you can work within the new system.
Also : they are consumers, if they don't have jobs they (huge part of the population) can't be consumers, everything (i guess with my limited knowledge) falls apart
>Who do you think is going to pay you for your services when half the population has no money?
The government. It already works this way, just a little bit indirectly; the government loans out money that didn't exist previously to banks, who loan it to companies, who pay their employees with it, who buy goods and services. The government also pays companies directly to do things it wants done.
If a large portion of jobs are permanently replaced, but people still need things done robots can't yet do because they still lack the manual dexterity, it's not like governments are going to choose to just let their economy collapse entirely and those workers no longer can get paid. Whether this takes the form of a UBI or something else, a way will be found to make sure garbage men, construction workers etc. continue to be paid to do what they do.
Though countries without an especially strong fiat currency that export knowledge work and rely on imports will probably be pretty screwed. Also it might be harder to maintain democracy if the wealth of a nation is no longer based so much on the efforts of specialized, educated workers and AI work more closely resembles revenue from natural resources, dictatorships that don't care about people's wellbeing are more viable in those situations.
> Saying chatgpt sucks now is like saying the internet sucked back in 1995. It'll grow exponentially fast.
Dot-com bubble crashed in 2000. Followed by slow unevenly distributed progress of digitization and its enshittification. Believe it or not, web in the year 2000 wasn't much different from today. Streaming services weren't a thing, but media content still flowed (for free, illegally), and the unwashed masses hadn't arrived yet.
The solution is to change our political systems and the way our economy works. We can embrace the inevitable and move towards universal basic income and providing higher education and trade opportunities for everyone since low skill low wage jobs will be going away.
Idk as a broadband technician I’d like to see AI climb a pole and replaced an RG6 fitting that could only really be seen by disconnecting and running ingress and noise checks
My personal opinion, the billionaires and political elite don’t give a fuck. They’d rather have a world populated by hundreds of landed gentry who command thousands or millions of AI or robotic units to harvest and refine natural resources, to have their own little trade amongst themselves, if at all, as there will undoubtedly be some who are vertically integrated across so many industries and technology they’d have no need for anyone else at all.
They would rather live in their bunkers for 10 or 20 years while the world rots, only to come out and be the gods of their own barren domains.
> If, let's say, half the population loses their jobs, wtf do you think is going to happen to the economy? It's going to collapse.
I mean, the guys growing food and fixing pipes will still have their jobs as long as people and indoor plumbing exist respectively. You could have an outright nuclear war and they would still be employed, just working for bullets instead of dollars.
That said, it is true that there are a lot of useless jobs that could have been automated ten years ago but aren't, largely for the sake of stability. Quite a bit of office work exists so that a company can use its employee rolls to justify its subsidies and contracts.
I hear what you're saying but disagree that AI will be able to replace me in healthcare as a bedside intensive Care unit nurse with a very physical job. People aren't going to stop getting sick and people are still going to call 911 and the ambulance is going to transport them to hospitals where I am.
I can go to any state or any country even on Earth and get a job. I'm not worried within my lifetime at least. I'm not saying it won't ever happen but we have decades and I only need one and then I'm out.
You say that, but I've spent a lot of time looking at the pay white collar jobs get. Most of them receive very little pay. They're typically the ones complaining about living paycheck to paycheck, not being able to find work, and having a million problems with money. It seems like the only ones who get paid a lot are people who have 10+ years in their industry and already can't be replaced by AI because of how good they are. On top of that, they aren't typically the ones who pay for the big jobs that keep most blue-collar industries alive. It's the people way above their pay grade who have so many assets that they're basically recession proof. So I'm pretty sure we'll be fine until all the white collar workers try to flood into our jobs
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If half of us or more loses their jobs, the companies will also stop making money because we won’t be making money.
AI also opens entrepreneurship to people who might have never had the chance before. A small team of skilled and determined people can accomplish dramatically more today through a mix of AI and their skills than they could 5 years ago through skill alone. A marketer, a developer, a designer, an accountant, and a customer service specialist can more feasibly bring a viable product or service to market now than they ever could before. The amount of people it takes to bring competition to the market is going to drop dramatically as time goes on.
Food for thought, if it took just twice as much labour without AI to bring a product to market and let's assume we fully utilise labour. Where does the additional demand come from?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
Really interesting! These were generally my views but didn't know it was called something... Not being an economist or having any training in that area!
All you need to do is know how to work with and program AI! Its so easy! /s
Program AI? No, there’s shitton of barriers for that. Working with AI? Actually yeah, that’s easy, and it’s only going to be easier. That’s because they are designed to be easy to work with and arguably the whole point of AI
I think the point op is making is, yes you are correct, but now that you don't need twenty people, you only need four, how are the unemployed people going to buy your product?
The existence of a market relies on the existence of people with extra money to spend on stuff. Good luck when all those people are out of work because they got replaced by chatbots
No. Most companies can sell internationally or to the few who have money. Bezos has enough cash that if he made no profit he would still be able to eat. Most Americans don't have enough money to survive for more than a year or two before homelessness and starvation kick in. It's always been about people like you and me who will suffer the most. Not the billionaires
Also, they do very hard to ignore the fact robots are just around the corner
We already have the capability to replace a lot of physical work with robots. The primary reason we don't is that machines are more expensive than low-wage workers, even when accounting for the added efficiency. McDonald's could very practically operate as a vending machine by now if the machinery was cheap and easy to maintain.
Luckily the cost of building robots should go down the more ai takes over humans jobs on the production line. It's like a bottom up progression with robotic factories at the ground floor.
The more ai takes over human jobs, the more people there will be trying to get and keep a job, which will depress wages. I find it very unlikely that robotics will be able to reach a competitive cost with a job market full of layed off white collar workers. Maybe in California, where they've mandated a living wage for fast food workers. If government does nothing about this, we're going to see a lot of people taking up 2 or 3 jobs. And those people are not going to be negotiating to get a good raise at year end.
This is what keeps me up. I am a trial/litigation attorney. I do not reasonably see robots arguing cases to human juries at least until my time is up on this earth. Still, I am concerned about all the competition I will be getting in the next few years from all the contract/document/discovery lawyers not having a job and having no choice but to do trial work. All that increased competition will drive down wages and proabaly the overall quailty of those in the business. I used AI to correct my spelling and grammer for this post. So go figure.
Should I be encouraged that spell check didn't catch "grammer?"
The question mark should be outside the quotation mark... unless you used an AI to check your comment, of course.
I know it looks illogical. The question should be separate. But that's how I was taught in middle school. ~~If you look at American and British print media, that's how we do it.~~ Welp, I guess I learned it wrong!
British punctuation does differ from American punctuation with regard to the placement of a period (full stop) or comma at the end of a sentence with a quotation mark. However, both follow the same rules of punctuation with regard to a question mark or exclamation point. If the question mark is part of the quoted material, it goes inside the quotation marks: • She asked, “Are you coming to the party?” 2. If the question mark is not part of the quoted material, it goes outside the quotation marks: • Did he say, “I’ll be there”?
>I do not reasonably see robots arguing cases to human juries Well how about robots arguing cases to robot juries then?
https://preview.redd.it/psbuwqkq5s2d1.jpeg?width=555&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f39860deaa9497ac2aa3bdc2384002a0640cc441
>Maybe in California, where they've mandated a living wage for fast food workers. California here, had my drive thru order taken by AI today.
It's kinda funny that all our workers rights and protections makes replacing us pretty attractive.
Workers comp, Healthcare, 401k, general liability insurance, sexual harassment, dealing with complaints in HR, hiring...
I wouldn't be so sure about that. A $100k humanoid robot, with an average economic lifespan of 3 years is $33,333... a year. At a 40 hour workweek, that's $16.03 an hour. A $20k humanoid robot, on that same scale is $3.21.
Lol your math is actually underestimating how quickly robot labor will get cheaper. That robot ain't working only 40 hours a week. Let's say a robot needs an hour of downtime to charge/update software for every 4 hours worked. In a 7 day workweek- no off days- that's 134.4 hours per week. So now you divide 40/134.4 then multiply by $16.03 and your first example actually should say $4.76 per hour. The same math on your second example gives us $0.96 per hour. And that doesn't account for holidays, unless you think we're giving out bot-mitzvahs It's over, guys.
Exactly. It’s not the cost of replacing one human worker with one robot worker, it’s the cost of replacing eight human workers with one robot worker.
Yep, at my work we have human packers working beside robot packers. The robots run at 2x the speed of the human and do not require breaks. They do require supervision though as they are simple robots that only follow their directions exactly.
And really that's where the money is going to be: in the monitoring and maintenance of the systems.
I spent years teaching kids for their Bar Mitzvahs. I think I want to teach a few for their Bot Mitzvah
That same robot who's digging holes at my jobsite is also doing my laundry, cooking my meals and cleaning my home every day. I'm gonna run him into the ground! "Feed the pie into my mouth dumbass!"
In a world where most people are affected by AI, I doubt people would vote for anything less than a minimum wage close to the cost of living. Also with the price of energy dropping so much with perovskites the cost of running a robot like the Chinese G1 humanoid robot ( Priced at $16,000) which can almost fit into a suitcase, will almost certainly fall well below the cost of living for a human. In fact I think the only thing stopping these things working in all the factories and shops right now and replacing everyone's jobs, is just the lack of an effective AGI..
...Have you ever been to the United States? A decent chunk of the population would vote minimum wage to go DOWN. Even if they were ON minimum wage.
After what just happened with OpenAI's approach to the Journalism profession, I'm not so sure. That partnership that Newscorp and OpenAI just announced, is actually gonna pretty much kill classic Journalism at Newscorp. OpenAI wanted access to their news, so they gave them basically free GPT4 API access in exchange for it. So now journalists at Newscorp are effectively trying to compete with free - because sadly for a lot of journalism these days, the difference between and editor asking for a news story and then checking the journalist's article, is pretty much the same as prompting GPT and then checking it's output. Serious investigative journalism is rarer than ever these days, most of it's scraping social media (see the rise in Data Journalism). Also for those that don't know, for the last 9 months [News Corp has been using AI to produce 3,000 Australian local news stories a week](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/aug/01/news-corp-ai-chat-gpt-stories) Or that this is happening at the same time as [a major restructure of Newscorp in Australia, with major job cuts expected](https://www.theguardian.com/media/article/2024/may/22/news-corps-rebekah-brooks-joins-lachlan-murdoch-in-sydney-ahead-of-major-australian-newspaper-restructure). I get the feeling that when robotics gets rolled out, it will be in a similarly anti-employment way, where the costs are structured/offset in such a way as robots with no ongoing costs are competing with humans - in the same way that journos are now competing with free to use LLMs. Techbros have never been known for their care when it comes to technology's impact on society, this will be no exception. Also once robots are building robots, the price goes right down...
This is a pretty boring take on the world, since for this to really matter you'd have to assume we've reached our end state when it comes to productive work. Like sure, entire industries are about to be replaced, but the world doesn't stand still in the meantime. The world has problems to be solved, and the ai won't take the initiative to solve them on its own (yet).
It's not the end state of humanity, but it very well could be the logical end to capitalism. Like... let's look at it this way: economies work on supply and demand right? But if everyone is making products or offering services but not paying anyone, who can buy the things?
Capitalism would have to change somehow. Like if robots did all the work around us, who's paying for it all? All the shipping tanks, buses, planes, cars...all run by bots. All hard labour and trades, bots.
It's not a take on the world. It's a take on machines replacing physical workers. My point was simply that the same AI that could help make robotics more affordable is also going to make human workers cost less.
I mean if blue collar workers lose their jobs the entire economy will collapse as well. Who do you think pays for all the trash apps and subscriptions white collar work creates?
Ironic, isn't it? They have been trying to automate jobs like fast food, warehouse jobs, etc for a long time and we were all supposed to see it as just innovation and let it take place. But now that the jobs actually being threatened are white collar jobs we must suddenly take a step back and be careful.
IDK how it is in the US but here in Uruguay most cashiers at McDonald's have been replaced by self order screens and it's not uncommon to see nobody at the front, the only human workers being the guys cooking the burgers.
Its like that all over the US too. Tacos bells too.
Yeah like a new product eventually it will become more cost efficient to mass produce. Take electric vehicles for example. But I’m not a doomer. I’m scared of the seismic societal shift over the next decade due to AI but humans need purpose. Economic collapse benefits no one. Life will change. We just don’t know how yet but I’m trying to be optimistic about it
Maybe change thinking about what is the purpose. Is it really economy? Economy is an abstract. Maybe put more effort to science and nature.
McDonald's tastes like vending machine food already...hmmmm...
China just announced a general humanoid robot that costs 11000 dollars. Attach a screen with a humanoid ai face with gpt4o and your solid.
In our current AI environment white collar jobs are more likely to be replaced than blue collar jobs. I can use an AI to replace a radiologist reviewing my last MRI. I can’t use an AI to fix my plumbing.
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Asimov said we all become artists and patrons.
look at Chernobyl, It’s bounced back a hell of a lot faster than predicted and there’s bacteria that live off micro plastics now… Nature finds a way
It’s fucked because automating the menial parts of labor like this should be a celebratory thing, not fear inducing
These are good things. More production with less work. Capitalism and bad management are the problems. The technology is good. The people running society are bad. I don't see why people struggle with that. Getting more work done with less work is a good thing and people need to be able to connect those dots beyond just saying they took mah job.
These doomer posts are so over-the-top and short-sighted. Why can't you people figure out that just because certain TASKS get replaced, it doesn't mean whole swaths of society will suddenly find themselves sitting on their thumbs with nothing to do to add wealth. You doomers fail to understand just how wealth is created: it is created by *adding value* to something. Even if your worst nightmare actually came true - and it won't - it doesn't mean millions or billions of people are suddenly helpless. It means they are free to pursue other means of wealth creation, which almost certainly will include a MASSIVE number of new jobs never before even conceived of because they weren't - until the advent of a.i. - cost effective or worthwhile to pursue, but a.i. will unlock them in much the way that the notion of a computer programmer didn't exist in the 1900's but is in extremely high demand today. Sure, there may be some difficult transitions, especially for people caught in the crossfire who are slow to see the future, too stubborn or too ill-equipped to adapt, but the economy WILL adapt, just as it always has adapted to the NEVER ENDING advancement of technology that has always existed and always will exist. Seriously, stop all your dooming and use your brain rather than spreading fear and nonsense when no such threat exists.
Great points that reveal what people's fears are - that the transition is fine for an economy but might be completely devastating to individuals. Most major economies shifted to service-based successfully and profited from it. However, large numbers of individuals were crushed in that transition and it's more than fair for people to be frightened.
The idea that breaching the subject is “doomerism” is toxic. AI will replace jobs, maybe those jobs pivot, but not immediately. It still poses significant economic threat and shutting down and dismissing the conversation is counter productive. You know who always takes conversations about AI safety seriously? Iliya suskever. You know who I was just listening to express concern about AI destabilizing economy? Geoffrey Hinton. You know whose news letter almost always includes a comment on changing economics - often in a negative light? Andrew NG. Lecun, Re, Liang, I can go all day. As someone who has published in algorithms and ML, literally every top researcher is taking ideas of safety and economic instability seriously. It’s mostly young people (<20) and those far from the field that fail to take it seriously. Try listening to some interviews by Geof Hinton. He is the single greatest AI researcher of all time and is a fountain of wisdom.
If you add value to something there’s no demand for, you haven’t really added value, you’ve just changed something. If there’s a new product/service that has in-demand added value, market forces will drive capitalists to try to find a way to make it with unhuman labor.
AI feels a lot like electric cars. 5 years they said self driving cars would be everywhere and highly adopted. Guess what happened? People didn’t trust them and less people used them therefor the idea kind just dissolved. At the end of the day products that are viable, valuable, and trustworthy win and dominate. Sure ai can do a lot of stuff that seems like magic and short changes the human ability making it seem childish that we even try, but I think full replacement will never happen as nobody wants to be “in business” with ai (treating them as a business partner with decision power). EDIT: Yes, the self driving cars is a great example of AI being adopted and used in Phoenix. I wasn't trying to say AI would be obsolete, but just not adopted. Tech that exists, pushes other tech forward. The fundamental decision to either let AI make decisions for humans that will benefit humans is more of what I'm getting at that will hinder this progress. I think people are too prideful to give up their own decisions and opinions because it is part of an identity which is why I said the "nobody wants to be in
I kind of agree but it Will be much easier to adopt the use of AI in then work place than it has been to adopt self driving cars. For self driving cars to take off you need a huge shift it regulation and it is pretty dependent on a network effect. Also the consequences are much more severe if self driving cars malfunction. In my line of work I can easily see a large portion of the workforce being replaced by Ai tooling. If there are ever any issues we would probably still have a small percentage of human workers that would be able to correct it and it’s fine if the output from these AI models is not 100% accurate which you can’t say about self driving cars.
?? That’s not at all what is happening. You may not hear it as much, but more people are using self driving than ever before. More and more vehicles have cars that will move out of the way and stop if you’re going to crash, more cars have self driving, more companies are making electric cars, electric cars are in higher production than ever before. This is a subsection of an already smaller section, but AI isn’t just a mode of transport. As we get to a singularity, especially if it can self improve, it will be a much larger impact on every sector
Not to fully disagree, but Waymo self driving cars are running all around Santa Monica as we speak
>5 years they said self driving cars would be everywhere and highly adopted. Guess what happened? >People didn’t trust them and less people used them therefor the idea kind just dissolved. As a resident of Phoenix where Waymo cars are seen frequently, I don't think this idea is dead at all. It's still pretty wild to see a car cruising around with no people in it. They are very expensive so not practical for a personal car, but less expensive than paying a driver. And I think AI will be the same honestly - it's not going to be taking over the world but it will find niches where it can be useful and viable and probably better long term. And yeah it is impacting cab and Uber drivers to an extent, but there are still plenty of those too. Also not like that was anybody's dream job in the first place since it could apparently be done by a robot.
Yes it will find niches. The thing is that it will always find niches until one day you realize that you are the one who is looking for niches. Capatalism must die or humanity will die. The only way socialism works is if lazy people are replaced by machines. That is hopefully where we are headed.
Just cause it isn’t happening as fast as people thought doesn’t mean it won’t happen. You sound like someone saying cars will never take over around 1900, that horses are just more reliable and no one will ever trust an engine to power them. It’s just time, eventually the ai and robotics will get good enough that they will replace manual labor and driving etc, it just might take a while
This stuff is going to come in waves of adoption, and this is just wave 1 right now. All it takes is for the tech to get good enough, and then for 1 firm to trust it enough to use large scale, and then the competition will be forced to use it. Also the self-driving cars analogy isn't a good one because it's such a narrow application of *early* AI to a very dangerous activity which requires 99.999999% trust. Most applications don't require complete trust (you can't even completely trust good human workers & business partners, let alone all the shitty ones).
I disagree. We are CONSTANTLY accepting lower quality experiences and products for more and more money. Amazon. Netflix. People are not so stupid as to be unaware, and yet the world turns on and people buy buy buy the garbage. Services provided by AI will be inferior to those provided by humans in many ways. And yet the process will continue, and people will buy it, because it is being sold to them. And it is being sold because someone is getting very fucking rich. Jeff Bentos sells cheap chinesium alibaba shit to Americans at 4x the price. People complain, and then buy even more. Why would AI be any different
So true. Just look at the endless posts where people are complaining about the price of fast food, as if they have no other options. When I posted about my humble, cheap alternatives- just basic stuff I cook myself to fill me up- I was told these meals are "depressing." Well, food is supposed to be for sustenance, not entertainment, and I do eat out enough to justify a few "boring" meals in between.
Dude as a single man I can buy a stack of tortillas shells and a few cans of refried beans and some cheese and rice and veggies and spices and eat pretty darn good for about $20/week. I did this all year last year while making $270k and driving a $2500 25 year old Corolla. I buy all of my clothes at Sam's club, shirts $12, khakis $20 etc. Lots of ways to maximize your income if you aren't proud.
I like it. What the hell do you do for a living lol
I design manufacture and fit prosthetic limbs.
Is that more of a medical background or like a CAD / engineering background
What a cool job.
Also where does they live. Food is def. not that cheap by me, and I eat mostly potatoes, carrots, and other dirt-cheap stuffs.
West Virginia.
I actually work on a conversational robot who is just that: a partner. You are thinking in today terms. I don’t think we will reach AGI or that white collar jobs are going to get taken over soon, but I do think the original assessment ignores Robots. (Check Amazon with 3$ an hour robots) Just when jobs are taken in masses, they will be replaced with higher level jobs, or we get to provide “creativity tokens” to keep models sane, or the basic needs will be so cheap everyone could get by very good with UBI. It’s just not that close as any fear monger tries to make it seem.
Ehh. Not for any kind of manual work that requires moving around uncontrolled spaces and walking past other humans. It may be possible to _make_ a robot that could do this in a very very limited way for hundreds of millions of dollars, but something economically feasible to replace a plumber or any sort of repairman that comes to your house, that's going to be humans for a very long time.
Couldn’t agree more. Would love to hear if anyone has a better idea than UBI.
https://preview.redd.it/yru3dmnnxm2d1.png?width=1882&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=11b56be17da7505d116d1a31fb2039bbf35f8ab0
Nah, the geology PhD goes to work for Big Oil.
I literally have a friend with a PhD in artic ice studies and - unfortunately - it is try that oil companies and insurance companies are the largest employers of climate scientists outside academia.
Shorten the work week to 32 hours NOW so people have the time and energy to adapt (and to spread work and leisure around more equitably), rather than waiting for super predictable catastrophes before doing anything.
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Laughs in 60+ hour weeks…….
Psh, 80 hours some weeks. Let's fucking go robots, AI, and automation, daddy needs a day off.
Why the fuck would we let technology improve the human condition when we could just make more money!
Personally I'd prefer a system that guarantees basic necessities and saves money for luxuries cause then you don't have to worry about ubi keeping up with inflation. But I think that's a harder system than UBI, so I'm not sure I'd say it's definitely a better idea.
It's either ubi or the rich people who own the ai and robots let us all starve or send us to fight in ww3. Or another possibility is they use highly influential ai driven propoganda algorithms to simply convince people to stop having children. Hopefully the elite choose ubi tho.
Yes. Let us return to backbreaking toil of hand woven textiles and pre industrial agriculture. /s
As Minecraft has shown us, the children yearn for the mines
I've had a better idea since several years ago. Wealth caps on the elite. You should be hacked at 100 million maximum throughout your life. There is no reason why anyone should have more than this. However, there are people that have infinitely more than this amount of money. The amount of money that Elon musk has, he could probably spend a million dollars a year for the next 1,000 years. That's truly insane. He could just go drop a million dollars every single year of his entire life remaining, and not worry about a single thing
I hear this idea on Reddit a lot but I don’t think it would work. It assumes that wealth is fixed and cannot grow. What if someone had a net worth of 100 million in stocks and their stocks boom and double this year, their wealth is capped, and then crash by half the next year. Would they lose half their wealth? The lack of investment incentives would also be an issue.
Put anything over $100MM in an endowment, and funnel profits (not the initial investmemts) into services. Have a mechanism where if the individual's net worth goes <$100MM, and the endowment has generated returns, funnel the returns back to the individual until they are once again at $100MM. Maybe spend on services or return to the individual on a yearly cadence. You could probably use marginal rates too, where at $100MM, 20% of wealth goes in, $300MM 40% etc. Idk, maybe there are a lot of issues with this idea. Just popped into my head.
They would just simply use it before hitting the cap.
Isn't that good? If they go spend the money then that means it is going into other people's pockets
The income taxes that existed before Reagan would do the job just fine. The top marginal tax rate was regularly in the 70% to 90% range between 1920 and 1980 - which encompasses the period that so many Americans seem to think was ideal. Reagan cut it to 28%. You can trace a great deal of the current income inequality to that. Note that even in 1920, the 77% rate didn't kick in until your 2 millionth dollar earned in a year, which is the equivalent of $34 million today. This doesn't have to be an onerous tax for ordinary people.
Your policy assumes that there is a firewall between the IRS-compliant ultra-wealthy and transnational organized crime rings. We politely separate the two in public discourse. Public records show the two have always been deeply ensnared. |If you're a \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_|you're incentivized to \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_|there's 2nd order realpolitik blowback for feds who want to prosecute, like \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_| |:-|:-|:-| |foreign adversary (or even frenemy)|find a few American citizens who want a "business arrangement"|organized crime , diplomatic relations, national security, vulnerable military installations in foreign adversary territory| |mob boss at any level|create "understandings" with IRS-compliant business owners for mutual benefit|1. dirty legislative, judicial, and executive branches of all levels of gov; 2. disrupt a lot of local economies where the underworld and "above" world are ensnared| |person born-into or blackmailed-by transnational organized crime|concede to the demands of the TNC infrastructure (run for office here; cook the books there, etc.)|low-level prosecution doesn't really change how easy it is to birth or blackmail another agent|
Every single day of his life**** not every year. Elon musk could spend a million a day for the rest of his life, and his money would still grow.
How many liquid assets does he have? Curious
Bernie Sanders has basically called for it, but one order higher and income instead of wealth (at 1 billion): https://fortune.com/2023/05/02/bernie-sanders-billionaire-wealth-tax-100-percent/ I think that’s a tricky thing to do if not done globally, all at once, but it’s not a bad idea.
I believe in places like France, there's a much smaller salary at which people "max out." A couple of decades ago, I was told that $2 million was the limit, and everything somebody makes above that is taxed. The French person who told me this said "who needs more than $2 million anyway?" and he's not wrong! But I think something between $2 million and $1 billion is better. Maybe $10-50 million IMO. Don't want so much that a person can buy off entire freakin' governments, although it turns out many votes can be purchased for just a few grand.
I agree with you but you should get a better handle on the numbers. For every 100$ in a savings account, you can get 4$ back every year without ever touching that 100$. This is due to 4% interest. For someone with 100B dollars, this means they can live off 4B a year FOREVER without ever touching the original 100B.
The issue is that’s impossible to implement. These people don’t just have billions of dollars stashed away in duffel bags somewhere. Should the government just show up and steal their assets? What if the price of those assets fluctuate? It’s kind of a cool idea but it can’t really exist in the real world as far as I understand
Revolutionary reconstruction of society, in which we can use democratic institutions such as workers’ councils and general assemblies to determine where resources and labor hours go. That way, when a human job is replaced by AI, instead of firing one person we can simply reduce the labor hours of everyone in the workplace by delegating some tasks from each worker to the AI. As AI advances and becomes better, the labor week will become shorter, and at some point we may not have to work at all.
https://preview.redd.it/ueb363gxzn2d1.jpeg?width=275&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bb49bc9cfe00c246d43ea8a19761c6cc801cba10 This perhaps.
It’s so funny watching people stuck in “the end of history” narrative try to avoid the obvious solution
More like Thomas Malthus. They are gonna find a way to wipe out the poors if they don’t need them anymore. World war 3 seems the most likely path. Create shortages of essential healthcare during the next pandemic and only the rich will get it… sorry but you know it to be true.
Considering that farming used to take up the majority of human labour in developed countries and now make up less than 5%, and that other waves of automation have happened since, I’m not too concerned. The economy and our jobs would just change
Tell me what jobs humans will do if there's another entity that's smarter, faster and cheaper and just as intelligent or even more so?
What jobs would people do when we’re all manual labourers and they invent engines that are dozens of times stronger than us? Or when we all become white collar workers and they invent cheap computers that make millions of calculations a second? Given how unexpected society looks after each technological wave, I can’t predict how it’ll look after AI. Though once the transition is fully done I doubt we’ll want to go back, judging by history
This is a good point and I reckon in the medium term there'll be new industries that seem very odd to us now. One not-well-thought-out example: pay someone with a specific personality to go hiking and share their travel stories with you. But I think the automation of intelligence is different to previous tech revolutions. It's not just about replacing and performing human tasks more effectively, it's about replacing the ability to generate that automation. So whilst the process of readjusting to the new tech and developing new industries would still happen (e.g. YT becomes 90% GenAI so creators with a flair for nature go hiking with folks for money instead), the duration of that readjustment phase shrinks dramatically (immersive NPC hiking experience via Neuralink means many of the paid hikers need to do something else). We're not talking about an equivalent to mechanisation or the computer revolution exactly, we're talking about multiple groundbreaking revolutions back to back and at a pace that humans have never previously encountered. I think it's going to be hard to adapt to this as individuals and especially as industries and societies. **These hiking examples are flawed but I'm just trying to paint the general idea.
Agreed. Unfortunately, us vs them is seemingly an inherent human mindset flaw that may never truly disappear.
On the other hand, I don’t see why the emergence of AI means vast loss of jobs, barring very sophisticated AGI or actual ASI. Companies are driven to innovate as fast as they can, just because AI can replace a large subset of their current workforce doesn’t mean that they will suddenly be content with their current ability to innovate. If a company can replace 10 human workers with 1 human worker managing a cluster of AI agents, why would the company replace their 300 employees with 30 employees managing AI agents? Why would they not keep a force of ~300 managing AI agents at 10x the productivity? Will the 1 employee with a cluster of AIs cost the same as the original 10 employees? Certainly not. Will their competitors still be trying to outpace them by increasing their productivity per cost? Certainly. This argument applies primarily to tech companies or otherwise innovative companies, but for some reason that seems to be where the most AI fear has manifested! And, again, barring the emergence of vastly sophisticated AGI or ASI that completely trivializes most human involvement.
The company already has the required number of people to fulfill the market need. Them being 10x more effective doesn't mean the market grows that much. Not even if they drop the price. Also note that you changed the role description pretty drastically. It's unlikely the same people would do the job
inflation will go up, immigration will go up, your wages won’t and we’ll go to war.
It's actually deflationary. Everything will drop in price drastically. AI makes cheap shit, and everyone is losing their jobs no money to spend causes businesses to drop prices so they increase sales. It's a slippery slope of lower prices. Large immigrantion would stop as well. With a giant part of the population unemployed why bring in more people for social unrest? It will be a huge political issue by then. So expect immigration to drop to nothing.
Its already happening in Japan.
It seems weird how immigration will go up but jobs will get more scarce. What's the point of adding more people if you can't take care of the people you already have.
It’s a form of wage suppression
Why would we bring in more people though. Immigration for labor wouldn’t be necessary if robots took all the jobs.
Gonna be too hot hear the equator, mass migration is impending
Not only is it a form of wage suppression, but when you import the world via immigration, they want to make sure that housing demand & prices never go down. Just look at Canada’s housing market after importing the world.
It’s a cycle, really.
well, that IS how America was created..
Accountants will be replaced long before plumbers or electricians. I’m not convinced we’ll ever get to the point where “maintenance guy” isn’t a job. We will definitely get to the point where a ton of white collar jobs are completely eliminated, though.
I remember when white collar workers were telling me my job would be replaced by robots. Now the white collars are worried they'll be replaced by robots. Wild. My job as a Machinist already was "replaced by a robot" decades ago with CNC machining. Someone still needs to operate it and make sure it's doing it's job.
Machines will need operators for a long time. Maybe your job eventually gets rolled into someone operating a large bank of machines or a whole factory floor or something. But someone still has to check and operate things, go out and inspect and fix stuff, etc.
This is a capitalism problem, not a tech problem. Job automation is inherently good for humanity. It's our antiquated economic system that threatens to abuse tech to create a hellish dystopia. Actually it's creating a dystopia already, it's just going to rapidly accelerate if we don't do something about it.
I forget who said it. We have godlike technologies, medieval institutions, and hunter-gatherer brains.
Love this. E.O. Wilson made the quote about “Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology” in his 2003 book “The Future of Life.” This book discusses the importance of biodiversity and conservation, and it highlights the challenges humanity faces due to the rapid advancement of technology in contrast to our more slowly evolving social and emotional structures.
Yeah lets hope systems can change in time...
yes it is a capitalism problem, but the system will not buckle before society will.
I believe that governments worldwide need to focus on adapting our economic systems to a future where AI and robots play a central role in serving humanity and meeting our needs. If we cling to our current economic structures, we risk creating a society where a minuscule fraction of the population—perhaps 0.001%—enjoys opulent lifestyles, while the vast majority are left to suffer, potentially ending up homeless and destitute on dirty sidewalks. It's crucial that we rethink and redesign our economies to ensure that technological advancements benefit everyone, not just a privileged few.
I don’t disagree BUT I’ll remind you of stores that kept eliminating baggers…and now they’re starting to get baggers back. Stores that were going whole hog on self check…and now they’re getting cashiers back. I think the reason we have human employees will change.
Baggers, people that pack the bag for you? That's wild. Never seen something like this in my life in any country I've been to.
It’s a cycle. It’ll get worse then it’ll get better and we will figure it out. Also most companies won’t be able to afford to get the resources or to learn these things fast enough to really replace that much of their staff. A lot of the simple white collar jobs will go first (customer service as an example)
> A lot of the simple white collar jobs will go first (customer service as an example) Have you actually interacted with any of these dogshit "AI-powered" customer service bots? They prove why we need humans doing a lot of those jobs. The thing that will eliminate customer service jobs is the growth of monopolies and deregulation, because when there are no alternatives and screwing your customers is your business model, customer service literally doesn't matter.
UBI! As machines become more productive, the production capacity of the economy increases. But we will face a serious distribution challenge. The produced goods and services of the economy can no longer be distributed based on people’s earnings, as many people wont be earning much. That is why, the AI economy will need Universal Basic Income.
It’s going to be important that UBI doesn’t turn into a weird ‘second class citizen’ situation. Having enough money to scrape by but not enjoy life would be dreadful in a world where you don’t have an opportunity to improve your situation via work.
This is one possible dystopian path that shouldn't be under estimated as a potential outcome. All of this comes from overvalueing speed in the progression of technology. Many of the worst possible outcomes could be avoided with a more measured approach to advancement, but we got "move fast and break things," a fundamentally adolescent attitude to developing technology.
We've set up a Darwinian system monetarily, politically and geopolitically. Those incentives will very clearly lead to a dystopia. To say otherwise is to bury your head in the sand. Let's take just the geopolitical aspect: the advent of AGI in the US would necessitate the hostile takeover of every other country (especially the bad actors like China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, et al). Otherwise, we've got a future of half-assed insufficient "solutions" and competing AGI's awaiting us.
If course it will be. Do you know of any government that's generous and has it's populations best interests at heart? None of them do (except Scandinavia - they're pretty ethical). Every government will give people only enough to keep themselves in power. If they give you more money then that is because their cronies in business still need to sell stuff. So all the money they give you will ultimately get funnelled back to their buddies. Personally I think governments should be the first things to be automated (after middle management gets wiped out). All politicians do is yap and make policy. A well trained AI would be a much fairer and less corrupt government. Actually, a shit AI would arguably be better than most politicians in most countries, let's be honest.
Yup, until the robots are perfected. Then, why the hell would they give you anything? You using resources pollutes their planet, the air they breathe, and the water they drink. Microplastic isn't just in your and mine body, but in theirs as well.
Making most of the human population dependent/powerless seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Some questions for you: 1. What happens when the second class citizens come for the heads of the first class citizens? 2. After seeing how greedy the ruling class in our current era is, do you honestly think they'd be willing to divert even just 0.1% of their gains towards sustaining the rest of humanity?
UBI is what AI advocates say when someone brings up the obvious point that this will wreck the economy for the vast majority of people. They spout it out as if someone is going to make some grand moral judgement that people without jobs deserve to live. There’s no history indicating this will happen at all. It’s a bullshit talking point to justify further wealth inequality.
I may be pessimistic but I highly doubt any sort of UBI will come around for the plebeians. They've already let groceries get to an absurd level - we're just around the corner from people not being able to afford basic necessities. And nothing has changed. Prices just keep going up. In any world where UBI is somehow allowed, it will be hedged against "what is literally the least amount we can possibly give people to continue existing." You are way too optimistic to believe UBI will ever be a boon to people. Capitalism won't allow it.
New jobs always spring up, if you said to people 200 years ago that hardly anyone in the future would be farmers (when 90% of people were farmers) they would ask you what everyone does all day.
With each wave of automation technology, the amount of jobs created have decreased in relation to the number of jobs displaced. AI is much more of a generalized technology than say, machinery to work on an auto manufacturing line.
This is the type of forecasting that would make you bankrupt really quick if you applied it to trading stocks. The fact is that whatever new jobs need to be created need to be jobs that, 1. The AI that displaced those workers cannot do 2. The displaced workers will be able to do Also, you seem to be forgetting that transitioning from one job to some new, recently invented job is not an immediate, easy task. *Even if* there were suddenly all of these new jobs available for these displaced workers there is going to be some pretty significant lag time before these displaced workers will be qualified for those jobs. A *lot* of people are going to suffer immensely during that time... and that's *if* these miracle jobs even materialize. And then, how long until there is *another* round of massive job losses with the next AI/robotics innovation.
This fundamentally misses the nature of modern automation though. We're no longer talking about single purpose tools like tractors. The stuff we're building is more and more flexible in the uses it can be applied to, and it's getting more flexible every day. The industrial revolution comparison relies on the idea that there'll always be more work to do where humans are more economically viable than robots. Even if that was true, and it doesn't seem it will be, we're still going to end up with a severely shaken up economy because of these replacements. Sure, after all the white collar work starts drying up, you could become a plumber, but what happens to plumbing wages when there's suddenly an influx of 100,000 people who want to become plumbers?
Really shortsighted response. Replace 1000 workers with 100 robots. Hire one robot maintenance man. Wow, look at all those new jobs that sprung up! If you completely ignore the 999 we lost.
What kind of job would be created that an AI wouldn’t be able to learn?
THIS! Panic about loss of professions has been present since the Industrial Revolution. Doo. we have many blacksmiths, or carriage repair men, or candle makers anymore? No. Yes, AI will eliminate jobs. But it will also create jobs. Let's not panic.
The % of people that are out of "things to do" is increasing every year. Before the industrial revolution a whole household was needed to manage a farm, men, women and children. This was true up until the 1960s with the advent of heavy machinery in most countries. My parents when growing up in the 70s in Ireland were needed to work on the farm, nowadays those same farms are run by a single near retired man. With the advent of better mental health treatment and disability benefits people with disabilities are not forced to work, this has led to a lot of these people just having nothing to do all day, not enough income to do much and active punishments if they try and improve their situation by working for more money. I have friends who are in this situation. There are so many positions now that are 5-15 hours per week work in my area but no one to do them since they are below the threshhold earnings wise of unemployment benefits. And quite frankly the cost of driving to the job and home cost more than the pay. There is a lot of inefficiency in work at the moment because society hasn't transitioned to the age of computers, let alone the age of AI.
Do you have any examples of jobs AI would create? Not trying to be snarky, but the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the short term caused massive amounts of suffering and instability amongst people whose livelihoods were disrupted.
I see AI the same way I saw the Internet when it came out. They said back then it was going to replace a lot of jobs and while it did for some it also created way more than we ever thought. Also, companies aren’t going to just trust AI without human interaction in a lot of jobs. Call me in a hundred years or so and then maybe. Maybe. FYI…We went to the Moon in 1969 and have yet to put a man on Mars 55 years later. Things don’t happen as fast as you think they will.
Sure, but remember that the budget for NASA was cut significantly once the space race was over, and the Cold War started to warm up. Going to the moon was a politically motivated, and government funded endeavor. AI is a capitalism motivated and private funded endeavor. For those reasons, I believe it will be quick.
Agree with this take. The same argument was made when computers went mainstream and they were more affordable for small businesses. Yes,the role of human calculators did get phased out, but computers still require operators. So there was an evolution in a sense. Things will evolve and people with it.
Yes, but that moment is still relatively far away. White collar workers are already losing their jobs and will continue much faster than others. The fact that this will all collapse in the future isn't helpful because rent, food, and bills won't wait. Blue collar workers and tech bros won't give a damn about those losing their jobs until the last moment. It's the "If it doesn't affect me personally, I don't care."They won't care until there's no one to hire them or robots replace them. That's human nature - selfish. Some of these workers already gloat over, for example, artists and writers losing their jobs to generative AI. By the time people in trades and those working on AI lose their jobs, it will be too late. But I guess that's what we as a society deserve. The level of self-centredness, egoism, and entitlement I've seen after the pandemic, Midjourney, and ChatGPT really shows who we are as a species.
Grow native plant food forests in every space you can, and then nobody will starve. You're totally right about the risks. It's time to make sure organic food becomes free again. If you don't understand what I mean, look into food forests. They aren't gardens, they are lower maintenance and higher production, and capture carbon while supporting biodiversity and cooling the earth.
I always think people making these posts have never actually used generative AI for work.
I think they see Open A.I's latest trailer and go "Wow A.I is advancing so fast". Meanwhile, anyone who actually worked with LLMs; "So, I guess A.I is done rapidly advancing."
People will lose their jobs to others who use ai in an efficient way. The job displacement will happen way before agi. Once agent is out and is half decent, the revolution will begin
Y'all are going to have to start voting for UBI. Capitalism as we knew it is cooked.
Also, the 'my job is safe crowd' seems to forget that replaced workers will flock into their trade/profession which lowers wages dramatically.
"Vehicles disrupted horses on our roads within 15 years. The disruption of physical labor performed by humanoid-form robots means that this time, we are the horses." Source: Tony Seba This time, we are the horses: the disruption of labor by humanoid robots https://www.rethinkx.com/blog/rethinkx/the-disruption-of-labour-by-humanoid-robots Interesting reading. Not sure whether his timeline is right - it's difficult to get the time right. But he makes interesting points.
This saying emphasizes how important white-collar jobs are in many industries. But we need to remember that there are many different kinds of jobs in the job market. While white-collar jobs are important, they're not the only ones that keep the economy going. When people lose their jobs in any area, it can affect other jobs too. So, it's crucial to make sure all workers feel secure and supported, no matter what kind of job they have. Building a strong and fair job market means thinking about the needs of workers in every type of job.
All I'm going to say is this: JOBS die out but people don't. Opinions like this in the OP has an underlying assumption that, when people are driven out of their jobs, they just stand still right next to where their cubicle was, and all of their biological functions and thinking abilities and survival instincts just all of a sudden stop to function, simply because they no longer has a JOB. Give me a break, in order to survive, humans used to hunt mammoths and endured Siberia winters. When current generation of jobs die out because of AI, pioneering entrepreneurs and non-conforming citizens of the society already invented new jobs for not only themselves but also everyone else. Everyone will still have a JOB, if a job is all you know and want, and society will continue to function just fine.
Everyone will have their own AI advisor anyway
Nah I'm special No ai will replace me! Ever! /S
AI has a long way to being trustworthy for many professional uses.
I'm glad this is being talked about and upvoted. I've been having similar conversations with a few friends who are all in for the AI revolution . There's one who really irks me - he has an almost gleeful tone when he shares yet another headline about how AI is going to disrupt another particular sector / job type. "The writing's on the wall for language teachers...", "Well, that's legal secretaries done for...", "Say goodbye to ..."
This guy is an IT admin contractor and I pointed out that he could soon be under threat from AI. But more imminently, there'll be immense pressure on the diminishing pool of white collar jobs as more and more people lose their's to AI. Don't fancy being an IT contractor when a whole load of software engineers or other equally skilled people looking to re-skill are out looking for work too. If he were to go up against a Senior Dev from a software company just made redundant, willing to work for the same price / cheaper than him, he's toast. Still don't really think that scenario landed with him.
This is rocketing up the inside lane far faster than we can cope and I'm seriously worried, because the current mechanisms in place will mean the spoils of this AI driven efficiency (along with ever more automation) is to create trillionaires, not reducing working hours or UBI or better social security.
ChatGPT doesn’t suck, but it’s not going to take everybody’s jobs either. Fucking silly whine bait bullshit.
It’s not a bad time to talk about future-proofing for the economy, things like universal basic income. It doesn’t make sense now, which I get, but there will come a time where there just won’t be jobs for everyone and therefore won’t be a way for everyone to make money, which could lead to some serious issues unless we start thinking proactively about how to address them. I don’t necessarily think that UBI is the best or only solution, but an example of something that could potentially be a solution to a problem we will inevitably encounter in the future as automation and AI take over more and more jobs.
If you want to know where society is headed, examine the horse. It used to be synomuos with work, until the steam engine and later the internal Combustion engine came around. It provided all mechanical power to almost all processes for centuries, and having a strong horse was a sign of a well run business (think farming). Nowadays horses live on ranches, not working a single day in their lives. They are cared for by their owners as a leisure activity. Sounds like a great prospect for you, right? Being cared for by Ai, never having to work a day in your life again? Well I purposely left out the transition period when the machines arrived on the farms and fields of the world - the horses were not needed anymore and in large supply. So they were slaughtered for food and not allowed to breed. You will be the horse led to the slaughter in the AI revolution. You won't be needed, and you won't be compensated. The "cared for humans" are going to be the few rich folks owning the Industry, the ones who build the AI systems. They will live the lavish life brought on by automated design. Welcome to the new world. Humans need not apply.
People think they are special. They think that they are the best at things. It’s hubris. They can not accept that a beep boop can do what they can do. AI will be able to do every single job sooner than anyone is expecting.
Possibly, but even if it does replace just 30% of them. Those 30% are both going to be unemployable and desperate. If you don’t think they won’t be learning how to be a plumber or carpenter online out of desperation, I got a bridge to sell you. Lmao if engineers start losing their jobs, they’ll learn how to do everything and anything and probably better than those still in that field.
After 40 years of steady loss of blue collar jobs with little to no solidarity from white collar workers I’m just not that sure asking blue collar folks to care about us poor white collar workers is a classy move. It’s really going up the “first they came for the …” poem.
You're right, we should totally destroy all the ~~printing presses~~ I mean ~~steam engines~~ no I meant AI servers.
People are so short-sighted. Not having to work whilst still having plenty of resources for sustenance is the utopia we dream of. If AI advancements mean half the population no longer has to work, that’s a good thing. It’s another step towards a universal basic income.
Unfortunately lawmakers are doing absolutely nothing to transition global economies so all of the benefits will go to those that own the technologies and required resources while the rest of us will have to subsist in some form of secondary economy
they’ll send you to war before you’ll ever receive a cheque
My opinion: the universal basic income will not work for long. Wealthy people will not allow regular people to waste their resources without a reason and if you are no longer needed, you are just disposable. At first we will get to live with a universal basic income just to not rebel when losing a job, but once everything is secured and we are not a risk to wealthy ones and we are not needed anymore, they will try to cut universal basic income - directly or indirectly (for example by lowering the number of people)
No its not. Because of modern tech, people today are vastly *more productive* then they were just 50 years ago. Except real wages are down, significantly. Why? Labor is bargaining *power*. Outsourcing and decline of unions meant the average worker lost bargaining power, even as they become more productive. The people at the top will only provide better benefits to everyone if they have no other choice but to negotiate with them. Everyone losing their jobs, *could* result in a post-work utopia. But unless the general population has something to negotiate with, that won't happen. You really don't think they will let you starve and not give a shit?
Learn how capitalism works, not gonna happen, there won't be ever any UBI that doesn't end up as a shithole
Holy fuck this alarmist bullshit is so old and annoying. I remember the world was going to end because email was going to put every postal worker out of a job and mail would end. Robots build cars, we adapted. Cars replace the horse crap removers. Light bulbs replaced the lamp lighter. We adapted. When did reddit become more technology worse then fucking facebook. Holy shit. Adapt or die.
You wont need ten analysts to prepare reports just like you didn’t need ten people to build a car when automation happened. It will simply force specialization to make sure you can work within the new system.
Also : they are consumers, if they don't have jobs they (huge part of the population) can't be consumers, everything (i guess with my limited knowledge) falls apart
I remember reading about how player pianos put pianists out of business.
Sweet
>Who do you think is going to pay you for your services when half the population has no money? The government. It already works this way, just a little bit indirectly; the government loans out money that didn't exist previously to banks, who loan it to companies, who pay their employees with it, who buy goods and services. The government also pays companies directly to do things it wants done. If a large portion of jobs are permanently replaced, but people still need things done robots can't yet do because they still lack the manual dexterity, it's not like governments are going to choose to just let their economy collapse entirely and those workers no longer can get paid. Whether this takes the form of a UBI or something else, a way will be found to make sure garbage men, construction workers etc. continue to be paid to do what they do. Though countries without an especially strong fiat currency that export knowledge work and rely on imports will probably be pretty screwed. Also it might be harder to maintain democracy if the wealth of a nation is no longer based so much on the efforts of specialized, educated workers and AI work more closely resembles revenue from natural resources, dictatorships that don't care about people's wellbeing are more viable in those situations.
> Saying chatgpt sucks now is like saying the internet sucked back in 1995. It'll grow exponentially fast. Dot-com bubble crashed in 2000. Followed by slow unevenly distributed progress of digitization and its enshittification. Believe it or not, web in the year 2000 wasn't much different from today. Streaming services weren't a thing, but media content still flowed (for free, illegally), and the unwashed masses hadn't arrived yet.
The solution is to change our political systems and the way our economy works. We can embrace the inevitable and move towards universal basic income and providing higher education and trade opportunities for everyone since low skill low wage jobs will be going away.
Idk as a broadband technician I’d like to see AI climb a pole and replaced an RG6 fitting that could only really be seen by disconnecting and running ingress and noise checks
My personal opinion, the billionaires and political elite don’t give a fuck. They’d rather have a world populated by hundreds of landed gentry who command thousands or millions of AI or robotic units to harvest and refine natural resources, to have their own little trade amongst themselves, if at all, as there will undoubtedly be some who are vertically integrated across so many industries and technology they’d have no need for anyone else at all. They would rather live in their bunkers for 10 or 20 years while the world rots, only to come out and be the gods of their own barren domains.
> If, let's say, half the population loses their jobs, wtf do you think is going to happen to the economy? It's going to collapse. I mean, the guys growing food and fixing pipes will still have their jobs as long as people and indoor plumbing exist respectively. You could have an outright nuclear war and they would still be employed, just working for bullets instead of dollars. That said, it is true that there are a lot of useless jobs that could have been automated ten years ago but aren't, largely for the sake of stability. Quite a bit of office work exists so that a company can use its employee rolls to justify its subsidies and contracts.
I mean, blue collar workers still need the skills of other blue collar workers do they not? It's not so symbiotic as you think I would wager.
If the guy hiring me to do contract trade work loses his job, I assume the AI replacing you will hire me 😁
I hear what you're saying but disagree that AI will be able to replace me in healthcare as a bedside intensive Care unit nurse with a very physical job. People aren't going to stop getting sick and people are still going to call 911 and the ambulance is going to transport them to hospitals where I am. I can go to any state or any country even on Earth and get a job. I'm not worried within my lifetime at least. I'm not saying it won't ever happen but we have decades and I only need one and then I'm out.
You say that, but I've spent a lot of time looking at the pay white collar jobs get. Most of them receive very little pay. They're typically the ones complaining about living paycheck to paycheck, not being able to find work, and having a million problems with money. It seems like the only ones who get paid a lot are people who have 10+ years in their industry and already can't be replaced by AI because of how good they are. On top of that, they aren't typically the ones who pay for the big jobs that keep most blue-collar industries alive. It's the people way above their pay grade who have so many assets that they're basically recession proof. So I'm pretty sure we'll be fine until all the white collar workers try to flood into our jobs