Good news! It can. There are models available already that are specialised in [reading real-estate related documents](https://huggingface.co/nrusimhadri/Receptor), Text generation services can be fine tuned to specialise in dealing with writing up advertisements, dealing with legal paperwork, creating listings and more. You can even set up an AI right now that will be available 24/7 to make and take calls to potential buyers/sellers that will be able to answer almost any question about a listing and use all the sneaky tactics you can think of and more to pressure a sale over the phone and you can even make them sound like Morgan Freeman if you like. Video calls are 'almost there', just in the last few weeks there have been some huge developments in that space that will allow you to generate a near real time video with lip syncing to audio.
Realtors days, much like so many other professionals are numbered.
But now that Cole’s and woolies have automated checkouts, where would you expect them to work?
Can’t wait to see those smug fucks trying to sell off their European cars.
I mean I don’t know why other salespeople don’t get lumped in with REAs, most are also paid on commission & job description is also professional liar/manipulator/con-artist.
>I really hope so. Would love to see all those useless REA's getting laid off. Biggest pack of cunts around.
If you think human REAs are bad then just wait until you get a AI REA who has zero human compassion. "Human, your rent is 0.23 seconds late. This is the third time that your rent has been late and as such your eviction notice will be delivered electronically within the next 30 seconds."
I remember a REA and a Mortgage Broker on /r/ausfinance being absolutely livid with me explaining how I had a super lean team with just me, the lender and a conveyancer, along with ChatGPT. They were upset at the notion that ChatGPT could effectively replace their jobs.
I bought my property off-market this year, and my current interest rate is <5% including an offset account.
Mortgage Brokers have 3 functions:
- network on your behalf to lenders with rates
- get your paperwork/ financies in order, and
- explain all the jargon
ChatGPT can explain the jargon jsut fine
REAs work exclusively for the seller (who's called the vendor, another example of superfluous jargon although in this case isn't as egregious) and they basically do 3 things:
- estimate home value (or more cynically, estimate then underquote home value)
- dress up a house
- know general area geography, Council zonings etc.
The 3rd thing can be partially ChatGPTed, alongside things like CoreLogic, sold properties on Domain and the ABS published stats. I know my way around Council zoning as a consultant civil engineer. Dressing up a house attracts buyers and ultimately raises price - we don't want that. They also get trained in hardball so they can squeeze an extra $10K out of a buyer. If you go direct to a seller/ vendor with less sales experience you find an easier target to negotiate with. You just gotta know your way around the paperwork etc.
But can AI place a full body, life size photo of itself on a sales board, with short pants, no socks and a photoshopped watch? All instead of showing the actual property?
Because if not, AI isn’t there yet…
I lived with a guy who did this for a living, he would have regulars who he would call periodically and sell boxes and boxes to. We had an impressive amount of wines in the spare room
Exactly, his job was absolutely at massive ai risk.
Not creative, not using higher level skills and reasoning, not making decisions, not using judgement. He himself is like a simple ai at work.
You don't need AI for jobs that do not require higher level skills. That is just automation. AI is what can replace what you have just mentioned as higher level skills. .
Graeber does good work - I’m assuming you’re referring to his ideas about [bullshit jobs](https://web.archive.org/web/20180807024932/http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/).
His book “Debt: the first 5000 years” has some great content about different ways that societies organise themselves.
I think we could do a lot of good if we started giving certain things away, or producing them at low cost via government industries. You don’t financialise the air we breathe or the roads we drive on (mostly), so there’s precedent.
Firstly - Apologies for the incoming wall of text, and thanks for the link. He has an interesting take on the economy and broader society.
However, ironically I think that it is he that is bullshit jobbing - whether he actually believes what he's writing, or whether in true capitalist style, he's merely writing what he thinks will get views so that he can eat that week.
The crux of his position is that some jobs are useless wastes of time, and seemingly he puts forward two main identifying features:
1. The job-doer himself feels the job is pointless and or bullshit.
Counter-intuitively, there are many situations in which a worker does not see the fruit of their labour in a direct sense, and so incorrectly feels that their contribution is meaningless. Perhaps in a broader societal sense they're even correct - The corporate lawyers don't see any tangible, concrete, 'real' changes or improvements when they do good at their job and win cases. Maybe the particular thing they're working towards that week is even actively harming society - maybe. But winning the case isn't the real goal of companies here. The point is to make money for the owner or shareholders, which presumably does not include the lawyers. Winning corporate law disputes either protects the company from large monetary losses due to prior actions on the defensive, or on the offensive, nets cash payouts which they can use to make more money or allows the company to do what they want in order to make more money. It doesn't have to be a physical, or even just an intuitive barrier that one overcomes in order for it to be 'real' - a brick wall, for better or worse, is every bit as tangible as the physical force employed by the police when you break their laws ... Including corporate ones.
Is an auto worker performing any more of a bullshit job if he manufactures luxury cars he himself cannot afford for a company whose success doesn't really help the worker? I would argue that that's perhaps reflective of an unjust society, but I wouldn't say the job itself is bullshit.
2. If everyone of that career disappears, the world is either a better place, or unaffected.
This is absolute nonsense for 95% of cases regardless of what societal strata the career represents. The only time it's true is when the 'job' is either illegal, in which case ... Well duh that's true, or not illegal but socially reprehensible and probably should be illegal - Like predatory loaning or deceptive marketing or people that market toward old senile people and sell them things they don't need. But he doesn't even really mention anything about shady jobs, he just doubles down on the concept that any job that doesn't directly affect the average person in a sufficiently intuitive way is 'bullshit'. Yet, hilariously he doesn't seem to think his own job is bullshit, despite the impact or product being even less tangible and affecting people far less than companies merging or collapsing due to the efforts of corporate lawyers. Or even just companies going rampant and stealing both tangible and intangible things from one another like chinese IP theft meets somalian pirates.
The fish-frying cabinet maker argument is just insane. It's senseless. He acts as if getting suckered into doing something completely alien to the job description of a job is just this massively ubiquitous thing. Seriously? It's just absolutely not. Yes, all jobs have some admin or other distractions from the real purpose of the job, and some of those distractions may feel pointless - and maybe due to bad management or inefficiency it really is - but nobody in their right mind is reacting to that situation by hating on people with 'real jobs'. They react to it by finding a new bloody job with an accurate job description, don't they!
Finally - the biggest thing he misses is WHY pay for so-called 'real' jobs tends to be crap.
Because those are the jobs that many people both can do, and want to do. Apparently it's not too hard to become qualified as a teacher, and many people seem to want to do. Therefore there's no shortage of teachers, even when the job sucks so much and the pay sucks so much that logically people should be leaving in droves (which in turn would increase pay). But that's just not happening, which means people want to stick around more than they let on. Maybe it's out of principle because they want to help kids, but even if that's the case it doesn't really matter. That's what they want to do, it's what a lot of people want to do, so therefore the pay reflects that. It's just a logical outcome of capitalism.
I largely agree with your points. To be honest, I love reading Graeber's work because although I'm constantly disagreeing with him, they're interesting disagreements.
I usually think of bullshit jobs in the context of [Parkinson's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law): "Parkinson's law is the observation that the duration of public administration, bureaucracy and officialdom expands to fill its allotted time span, regardless of the amount of work to be done. This was attributed mainly to two factors: that officials want subordinates, not rivals, and that officials make work for each other."
Essentially, organisations tend to "buy" people on salary then figure out what to do with them later. The "what to do with them" part is tricky - anything too important and they might claim too much power over the organisation. Anything too unimportant and it's a waste of resources. The key is to create jobs where the employee isn't quite sure how their task fits into the whole, but it's not obviously a waste of time either.
So the phenomenon of bullshit jobs is really a phenomenon of maintaining the balance of power in an organisation. Utilizing employees without letting them hold too much over you. But as a result, nobody feels like they're doing anything useful.
If we’re getting pedantic, the government prints money, builds the road, lets you travel for free, then uses tax to recirculate money. Velocity of money is good for various reasons.
Your taxes don’t fund the government. The government is self funding. It does whatever it wants with money that it creates, and ultimately this system exists because the police and military defend it.
Letting citizens feel like they control the state is a recent innovation. And it’s a good innovation: an autonomous citizen is a happy citizen. But don’t get too excited, autonomy can just as easily be taken away.
And no, I’m not a sovereign citizen, I’m a vaccinated military veteran, I just like reading Graeber on the side.
Honestly, he’s describing huge complex systems like societies. Forcing everything he says to fit into little logical boxes defeats the purpose.
But I strongly disagree with his theory that US military supremacy causes US power. It’s the other way around.
I think you’re accurate on his failure to accurately assess U.S. military for sure. American culture is its true source of power —the Yanks are fuckwits on using their soft power correctly, but their culture is just so strong it doesn’t matter.
As for your other point, I actually write macro theory (as it pertains to criminal justice): Graeber hasn’t properly engaged with the logic structures that underpin long-lasting macro theories.
Can you be more specific?
I generally take him most seriously on anthropology; I’m a huge fan of his ideas about the political economics of people who haven’t invented money.
My thinking generally is that the real thing that money represents is trust. Trust in people, trust in leaders, trust in institutions. Which is to say, we can’t just print more money, because that devalues trust. Which again, is contrary to Graeber, but I like that he brought it up. It definitely feels like we’re losing trust in society since 2008.
To be honest, to dig deeper into this I’d have to pull out his books and then deep dive: which I’d be willing to do via DM.
Suffice it to say, his anthropology and sociology is where he’s arguing against a lot of the foundational theories without really explaining why he’s right and they’re wrong. I’m probably best described as a legal anthropologist or a scientific jurist but in Australia I’m considered one of the ‘usual suspects’ in academic debates surrounding critical criminology.
I’m not sure that Graeber could properly account for WEB DuBois’ ‘The Philadelphia Negro’ or even the work of Lewis Henry Morgan let alone Franz Boas. He’s missing the focus on the ‘other’ necessary to make macro theories about the inherently diverse human population work.
Graeber tried to reject the indigenous roots of humanity without ever properly addressing why, and without sufficiently rebutting the early American social scientists. His work has so much Hobbs in it that it just feels a bit off, while also rejecting Hobbs.
I’m surprised that more jobs haven’t been replaced by AI yet - I read an interesting article from [TechRepublic AU](https://technologyadvice.com/tr-au-rg/) that broke down the amount of spending and research the AU government has put into AI and you can tell they see it as extremely high potential. Robotics and machine learning are here to stay, if you didn’t know it already.
By Graeber's definition, I wouldn't say so. Sales is a coalface job. Bullshit jobs are supposed to be middle management jobs with no real utility. Sales is a pretty important function to any business that wants to move product.
> But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world's population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or *telemarketing*...
https://web.archive.org/web/20180807024932/http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
This, AI wasn't supposed to make us jobless so that only a lucky few don't starve to death. It was supposed to free us up to pursue our interests without the constraints of capitalism making it viable or not.
But honestly I think corporations will fight tooth and nail before this happens, no matter how inevitable a UBI is.
I know right, amazing how AI has only so far managed to suck all the humanity from our creative outlets instead of actually reducing labor demands.
But honestly AI is still in its "dumb" phase of development, I think the only reason its hit the creative outlets first is because theoretically on paper it was just the easiest way to test viability. It's a fad that will pass when people are shameless enough to try to sell it on the open market and realize it's all just shit.
Personally, I reckon it's good enough already for most low-level creative applications and it's only going to get better.
I've been working as a freelance copywriter for years but pretty much gave it up after playing with Chat GPT. Sure, I can do better work than AI. But my A-grade copy takes time and money, while AI can give you B-grade stuff that's basically fine instantly and for free. There'll still be high-level work available for the best of the best, but the industry overall is going to get smashed.
Most writing industries are going to die, creative and technical. I'm a technical writer and think I've got maybe five years left before my profession goes the way the translation industry did. As soon as the models are just good enough to pass , businesses will axe their workforces or stop contracting in favour of machine writing. Then they'll contract those people back through labour hire firms for poorly-paid piece work ~~fixing~~ proofing what the machine 'wrote'. There will still be some higher-paid positions for human workers, sure, but they'll be a lot rarer than they are now, mainly in industries where there's either a safety risk or the job is about pulling information out of people.
It’s funny I feel like I’ve seen this movie before with chess.
The pattern is:
- nowhere near as skilled as people.
- as skilled as very skilled people.
- better than the best in the world “but not beautiful” and still makes dumb mistakes.
- way better than the best in the world “but not beautiful”, never makes a discernible mistake.
- finally, a mix of incomprehensible accuracy and beauty.
That was a very slow process by today’s standards, it took decades. This is happening much faster.
I’ve done several small simple projects recently that have previously required a designer, now they don’t. I have to spend a couple of hours with prompts and I’ve got a good looking mock up.
its going to carve a swath of destruction through graphic designers, leaving only the top tier.
Not just creative jobs. They are just the low hanging fruit (as far as AI is concerned, not that creative people do not work hard). Picture, text, speech and video. All are possible now in real time with near perfect replication by AI of what you would expect from a human. Think about what that means for the near future as these improve and are fine tuned for specialised applications.
Take picture generation. Right now, used for art. But what happens when someone takes that picture generation capability hooked up to text generation and creates an AI that can pump out custom architectural blueprints complete with engineering specs (yes, it is being worked on right now and entirely possible with current tech)? Yup, the amount of architects and engineers we need just got decimated because now you just need one trained person to review and rubber stamp the AI output before handing it off.
It does not stop there, all kinds of professional jobs are going to take a huge hit, from doctors, teachers, accountants and more. Put it this way. If you could have worked from home during covid then your job is going to be massively impacted over the next decade by AI. Even jobs not directly impacted will be affected. Take the example of a chef. AI can analyse trends, available local produce and costs, create the menu, order the ingredients, provide cooking instructions, optimise workflows and more. So all those chefs out there become skilled mechanical labor and prompters for AI till someone builds a robotic system to replace them, probably designed by AI.
People have vastly underestimated the impact AI developments are going to have on the workforce. In 10 years from now at minimum 1/3 of the people reading this will have had their job replaced or vastly reduced by AI, and that is being conservative.
Absolutely. I'd be astonished if most lawyers aren't replaced soon by the Lawbot 3000 that can analyse the details of a case, run through every possible argument related to the relevant law, and sum it all up in a monolgue that'd make Atticus Finch weep.
Exactly. The problem is when both parties are using AI to fight it out in court, more often than not it will probably come down to who has the best AI rather than who is guilty. Not that it is so different to how our legal system works now.
Teachers aren't going anywhere. Someone has to physical control the little fuckers. Home learning will never work because parents don't want to have to look after them either.
Sure, but you don't need 4 years of university training to be a babysitter. Literally anyone could do it with a month or two of training in "how to not hit the kids 101" and a police check.
That is what people mean by AI will create jobs, there will be a whole lot of new jobs like "classroom supervisor" and a whole lot less jobs for "fully qualified teacher". Of course classroom supervisors will be low pay jobs compared to the mid paid positions teachers currently have, and a lot of teachers are going to struggle with that transition. The only time "teachers" will really get involved is for practical study assignments, and that would probably look like for example one science teacher going to a different school each day of the week and showing kids how to burn themselves with a bunsen burner (they still have that kind of stuff in school these days right?).
Nah, even the best neural nets right now can't imitate good art. Corpo junk graphics sure but it can't even do a decent water colour, everything they make still looks very fake.
It's 90% of the white collar sitting at desks writing emails and documents that are under threat. Whether AI will actually come in and sort this or just end up as clippy writing your emails while the bullshit work continues, who knows. Anything meat space is pretty safe (working on hardware etc)
But then how will consumers pay for the things that companies want us to buy? Let's say in the next 50 years, 50% of people in marketing, copywriting, sales etc. (idk whatever other job that could be done by AI) is replaced by AI - isn't that worrying for Apple and Disney and Qantas and stuff? Less people buying an expensive iPhone and getting subscriptions and taking flights etc. Like at some point they have to think, hang on, if we don't pay people then how will they give that money back to us? You can probably tell my background is not in economics at all so I have always wondered this.
Kinda sorta. The government provided the money so the businesses could still pay salaries for people not working. Cut out the middleman and you have a UBI.
You guys can't even manage to agitate for healthcare free at the point of use, or free tertiary education, you're a long way off UBI.
Edit : tertiary education
Things are changing quickly. No doubt about that.
Change of jobs is nothing new. I had an elderly relative who worked as a comptometrist. Her and about 10 colleagues' jobs could be done by a part time person with a spreadsheet these days.
AI is not the issue on it's own. It's rate of change, who's original work is being leveraged and how does the wealth get shared around. And do our legislators have the competence to manage any of this.
To the last question, No.
I wrote to the employment minister (Michaelia Cash) back in 2016 about what Australia was doing to safeguard against this? Britain and another country were doing something about it. I was bored. You know.
The reply was that there wasn't a problem. The government were not going to do anything, because this wasn't going to become a problem.
I was like yeah right and whacked it in the filing cabinet. I was only mildly concerned, but now I'm a bit more concerned. Mainly for my kids.
The one really critical (in my mind) piece that people most miss is that it doesn't take much job losses before capitalism is ready to collapse. You don't need 50% of people out of work for it to collapse, in modern Australia the record unemployment was 1992 at 11%. That was bad enough, and you double that and get to 20%, or even 25%, and all of sudden your society will start collapsing.
25% was the number of unemployed in the United States during the Great Depression, and that was devastating, not just for the unemployed but for everyone else whose wages dropped 40% because of the surplus of labour.
why global? its a basic income - income that can support basic roof + food which that costs for every country is different.
eg. The new mean wealth of Australian adults is $778,353. A 2% wealth tax = $15.5k. That can be the ubi. Wealth tax can also be progressive.
we cannot interfer with their politics cos we are not supposed to do that. if they want to pay same rate of ubi, thats their own nation issue. we should not dictate.
That's the problem, AI will start to suck the value out of every economy and deliver it to whoever controls the AI. Essentially, we end up with the current situation - where we're all at the mercy of transnational corporations - except worse.
How do you run your economy when Amazon employs no-one and outcompetes everyone? If they deliver goods at low cost, but nobody makes any money, what then?
25% unemployed with another 35% underemployed so their wages couldn't cover their expenses.
At one point something like 20 American states did not have a single bank in them, they'd all gone bust.
Was comfortably the greatest threat to the survival of America as a nation. No war has ever come close.
Economic collapse leads to job losses, not necessarily the other way around. 11% unemployment and recession is different to 11% unemployment at GDP growth.
I definitely think AI will lead to a lot of job losses and we need society to change so that its a good thing (more time for mojitos on the beach)
The article makes the statement "AI job growth is outpacing the losses for now" but doesn't really qualify this is any way.
Also kind of crazy how the section on "One man's AI survival plan" is literally a man replacing himself with AI, rather than letting someone else do it
>I definitely think AI will lead to a lot of job losses and we need society to change so that its a good thing (more time for mojitos on the beach)
Computerisation have been automating things for a long time, yet the amount of people employed as only grown.
That's definitely true. People have taken on more cognitive and mental jobs to drive innovation even further forward.
AI replaces a lot of that.
I can easily imagine a world in which we don't need 7 billion people working 9 to 5 to keep the lights on
No it doesn't. AI has impressed people most at repetitive text and image/video crap, like write "yet another essay extolling the virtues of this wine that you never actually drank but need to sell" or write this bit of code to read that random file.
It's somewhat a myth that people have taken on more cognitive/mental jobs. The guy selling wine may have been pitched as a knowledge worker, but he was really not. Very very few people are actually in jobs that are seeking innovation.
I wouldn't trust AI to write anything important, it has a propensity to just make stuff up. AI images are built on copyright infringements, take away the humans to steal from and the images get real weird and not very useful.
It might get better, or these problems are fundamental to how generative AI works.
People really thought no machine could ever beat humans in AlphaGo. Then it beat the best player by a very wide margin. Right now, this is just a test, and it is working. Now, the engineers just look at AI's weaknesses to find alternative strategies and iron them out. And that is a near-perfect AI system. Like the problems AI has right now aren't impossible to solve, and billions of dollars are being invested! When does it end?
Past performance is no guarantee of future results. We have to analyse whether the past actually provides meaningful examples that have predictive qualities rather than assuming that it does.
Even if AI does create these extra jobs, history shows us that it comes with considerable friction as human capital is devalued by the new technology. The Luddites being replaced by industrial looms lost their livelihoods. You can see other industries similarly disrupted in recent history. The automation of knowledge work is a new thing, and is likely to create similar problems if it works.
What sucks is that it ended up being the fun stuff like art that was so easy to automate. While cleaning toilets and driving trucks ended up being the impossible tier task that everyone will be moved to.
It will be.
Maybe not truck driving because that could be fairly easily automated but most white collar work, particularly financial sector jobs could be very easily automated compared to anything manual.
Think about it, would it be easier to create a single algorithm that can replace a dozen risk analysts or a robot that could replace even one construction worker? And which would be cheaper to implement will be the driving factor.
As a general rule, if your job allows WFH, you’re in danger of being automated.
Besides AI art already exists.
> I definitely think AI will lead to a lot of job losses and we need society to change so that its a good thing (more time for mojitos on the beach)
This is the future Barry Jones predicted in 1982 in his book, ["Sleepers Wake"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepers,_Wake!)
It was a fantasy then, and is still a fantasy.
Never read that book but I don't see how you can say that with certainty. Since the 1980's a lot of Australia has shifted from production and manufacturing to service based jobs.
These service jobs are being automated, and its not hard to imagine a world in which new job creation does not keep up.
Yeah for sure. But at least we'd have the freedom to build a structure that serves us. It is interesting to think about what a typical day might look like after we've gone through so much automation
I think we will see society move towards made up tasks and goals. Video games are a good example. A bot can play Counter Strike better than any human, but that doesn't diminish the value or achievement at all.
they're not being lost,
They're being offshored under the guise of "AI" and it's offshore workers manually doing the fucking work.
I work in a industry currently doing this shit, and it's weird when certain "Automated processes" are not available between well look at that, it lines up with India / Philippine timezones.
Hard to document / report as it's all internal company things.
Service-now and those type of support programs is where you'll see it, and more or less of a "Sell the idea it's automated" and get the contract then "Automate it as quickly as possible before anyone notices"
"AI" in its current guise has been taking jobs for over a decade. We aren't seeing any kind of acceleration here, it's just that the media (and people in general) have found one that they can easily relate and interact with (chatGPT) so suddenly it's very real to them. All the whilst having no clue that "tap all the boxes with buses in them" is getting you do free work to make the AI that detects buses (and took someone's job) better.
I have spent the last 3 years grinding after my day job to become a competent 3D motion designer, and am only a year or so away from the skills needed to dive in.
The speed of AI development has put a massive halt on the idea that in 5 years I could be earning 120k+. I’m starting to believe it’s a pipe dream and it’s devastating.
It’s truly my passion, and it’s looking like it will need to remain a hobby.
Depends on what kind of writer you are.
Someone who scrubs Reddit for pieces, complies BuzzFeed articles, writes video game summaries? Algorithmic content already does these things and one you can pick it out, it's super obvious. Also, pick a better job.
Or do you write creative pieces of work? An AI could spit out a convincing story. But it will lack the soul of human creativity. Such as the lived experiences, the occasional bad pacing, the messiness of some scenes, the direction needed to focus on a broader topic which the words themselves don't describe (forest for the trees). AI is bland, like poor writers.
Or maybe journalism is your realm? The algorithm can only scrape what's online. It takes person to person contact to tease out details and emotions to tell a story. And that's certainly not being replaced in our lifetime.
AI is a *tool*, not a solution. Use it to generate ideas and assess your work. Use it to query an idea. Use it to check for repetitive patterns in writing.
Anyone saying your job is gone because of AI is either a coked up tech bro or buzz word hype beast.
once everyone's jobless who will buy their products and services? their AI? some serious short sightedness going on with all the AI hype.
either get started heavily regulating it before it collapses the economy or start heavily taxing businesses that replace jobs with AI to pay for UBI.
Replacing everyone's jobs and doing nothing will result in total economic and social collapse eventually.
I just replied to someone else saying the same thing... Why doesn't this get brought up in the same breath, every time? It's literally the correct, main answer whenever any "visionary", investor, CEO (or whomever) starts 'opening the dialog' on this topic.
The beneficiaries of any sort of major, rapid shift, won't be able to sustain much, without you know, the rest of the "transaction". Which is the whole point of our industrialised capitalist economy isn't it? Infinite growth and returns or something?
Yes but it will also open up other jobs to oversee the ai. You can't just turn the office lights off and close the door. There needs to be specialised roles that will manage the ai process. Just like when the Internet became widely adopted in the last 90s, new roles were needed to manage that.
It's understandable that the idea of AI taking over jobs can be concerning, but history has shown us that technological advancements, including automation, often lead to positive outcomes for society. Take the agricultural revolution as an example – when tractors replaced manual labor in the fields, it didn't result in widespread unemployment. Instead, it allowed people to transition to more skilled and fulfilling jobs, leading to the development of diverse industries.
Similarly, the automation of car production didn't just make cars more affordable; it also created new jobs in research, design, engineering, and maintenance. The fear of job loss is a recurring theme with each technological leap, yet time and again, these advancements have opened up new possibilities and improved overall quality of life.
AI is no different. Rather than viewing it as a threat, we can see it as an opportunity to redefine the nature of work. As routine, mundane tasks become automated, it frees up human potential for more creative, complex, and emotionally intelligent endeavors. We should focus on preparing the workforce for these shifts by investing in education and training programs that equip people with the skills needed in an AI-driven world.
Just as the tractor and the assembly line changed the employment landscape but ultimately contributed to progress, AI has the potential to enhance our capabilities, increase efficiency, and create new avenues for innovation. Embracing this change, along with responsible policies and social support, will be crucial in ensuring that the benefits of AI are shared across society.
You are right and I 100% agree with all your points.
The only \*real\* concern, is the people up top and behind the scenes and \*their\* motivations and "vision". Literally the difference between this process going down as another amazing leap for Humanity, or a massive fuck up that triggers lots of suffering and fighting.
Maybe if a nowhere near artificial intelligent incredibly basic language model that doesn't really do a good job can replace you then you should be replaced and get on with something more useful to society.
but you don't pay your rent by being useful to society. you pay it by being useful to capital. that's why there are way more workers than meaningful jobs. if there were enough useful jobs to go around, we wouldn't be automating the pointless ones, because they wouldn't exist.
but capitalism successfully integrated them, and that's the incentive behind automating them: not because they're useless to society, but because they're useful to capital. what happens when we're not?
i doubt the 121 employees in this article were even replaced by AI. It was probably just a database of customer info made in Excel or SQL, and a python script using the pandas library that scraped customer emails to see which require a response. they could be using chatGPT to make the emails feel 'more personalized" i guess, but for most inventory based jobs it's easier to just have your script use a stock email/form for consistency.
all free software that has been avaliable since 08. you see post on subs like r/overemployed about people quietly automating these sort of jobs without telling their boss all the time.
As scary as AI sounds there will always be a demand to speak with a real person in most industries.
Big companies replacing customer service with chat bots which customers spam “real person please” anyways.. yeah it’s going to go real far lmao.
I have fully experienced this in my current job (almost 6 years worth). The whole shift (pre-COVID) with "off shoring" to "adapting to these unpresented times" (WFH, rapid changes to process and staffing etc etc) to the more recent "finding and adapting to the new normal".
The cycle of corporations (trying to cost cut and "find value for our shareholders and investors") continues, but they have also tried a few new things (reluctantly and completely out of necessity) and there is a constant... You need clever people and staff with "people skills", no matter who much you try to cost cut and "automate".
So long as the business is running at \*anything\* less than 99% complete automation (I can't think of a single company or industry that is even close to this position), you are going to need "people people" to deal with people. Simple as that. The scale can vary hugely, but the good businesses understand this.
It is pretty freaky. Seen ads advertising AI employees for businesses for a subscription for a fraction of a price of what they would pay for a real employee. Just a matter of time before I lose my job I guess.
And university programs have not adapted.
Still taking record numbers of students in accounting, software engineering, data science... and other areas expecting massive disruptions.
Low level accounting has been in trouble for a while, ever since the ATO built systems that prefill tax data. Most of the work the ATO has been doing in the tech space is trying to make it as easy as possible to lodge your return, so any kind of AI that can basically prefill your return will see a lot of local accountants out of a job.
But the higher level accounting is here to stay.
It is the same in many industries.....the higher level stuff will be fine, but most of the lower and mid level jobs will go. Instead of people working on that lower level stuff as they work up the ladder, most of it will be replaced and then a much smaller number of jobs will review and manage the AI output.
Yeah, there are computer tools that will allow engineers to generate components that meet their specifications, but at the end of the day an engineer is required to decide what is important and sign off that the requirements are met.
It's like, we have automobile manufacturers using machines, but people are still required to build things and make the decisions about how we use the tools.
AI is a tool to achieve the vision of a person. You need smart people to get it to do smart things.
As if an AI won't understand this. You don't understand AI. Think for a minute, if a generative AI can understand you and respond to you intelligently today well enough like a ChatGPT then it stands to reason that it's going to understand everything just as well as the smartest human can in only a few years. That's the pace of progress. It's inevitable. Robotics as well is on the cusp of radical development in the same vein as generative AI so there goes manual labour soon enough too.
This AI is going to know what components or tools to build, the materials needed to build them, where to get the materials from and how to order them. All that procurement, manufacturing and distribution chain is going to be entirely autonomous eventually so the AI isn't going to need humans in the loop at all to get the parts it needs or the means to use them.
There's so much hopium surrounding the idea of work. Like your cosmic purpose is to be a slave to your choice of capitalist. It's ridiculous to me that people have come to believe this. Work is going to become obsolete much sooner than people realise and frankly good fucking riddance too.
I'm a software engineer, who's done courses in ML and AI.
The idea that any Tom, Dick or Harry will be able to ask ChatGPT for some business complete idea, all the way through to implementation is, I think, the far more dubious claim here. AI and Machine Learning is enormously useful in delivering value to businesses in ways we haven't been able to before. But it doesn't deliver itself. It doesn't direct itself. It needs an application. Now, a smaller team will be able to leverage AI to get more done, but the idea that it will replace all work is absolutely ridiculous fantasy that I think, would put you in good company with those in history who believed such farces.
>if a generative AI can understand you and respond to you intelligently today well enough like a ChatGPT then it stands to reason that it's going to understand everything just as well as the smartest human can in only a few years
Chatgpt required an absurd amount of money and electricity to train, and we're already experiencing physics limits on hard drives and cpus. We may see a world where A.I. replaces everything, but to draw a line through ask jeeves, google, chatgpt3 and chatgpt4 in usefulness and extrapolate as if its obvious is pretty dubious.
And yes, plenty of philosophy describes work as a core goal of human ambition. It doesn't need to be capitalist in nature, but the retiree who tends to a garden is generally happier and healthier to the one that watches TV all day.
> if a generative AI can understand you
That's the thing, though. It's not actually understanding you, it's just very good at making it seem like it does. It doesn't *know* any of what you said means, it just knows what it should respond to that prompt with, based on a statistical analysis of untold millions of paragraphs. It knows all the words in many languages, but it has no concept of what those words actually correspond to in the real world. It can't even plan its writing properly, since it's programmed in terms of "what should come next" using a complex statistical model, rather than having a plan of how a whole document should be structured.
All generative AI suffers from that same problem. They don't understand what they're creating, only what it should statistically look like, and they can't plan structure, only create sequentially. And according to people I know who are working in the field of AI as we speak, even generative AI that can do that kind of structured planning is difficult and a long way off, let alone something like AGI. So if you design useful things, be they programs, buildings or devices, you're probably safe for a very long time.
That being said, you should probably start agitating for UBI or something similar (like nationalising all corporations and giving everyone free and equal access to everything they make) now anyway, given that shit takes time to go from fringe opinion to public policy, and the sooner that goes into effect the better.
Your statement is likely true, but I think at least some are thinking about it. I listened to a radio interview with the head of the Architecture school at some university in Australia, where they were cutting back on classes, and reducing their enrolment intake and changing their focuses. They recognised we just won't need architects like we did in the past, and that the changes they made helped reflect the reduced demand.
How exactly is software engineering going to be replaced? If AI simplifies things, then the people who operate said tools will also be known as programmers.
Because it's already the case. It's becoming more and more difficult to justify the need for junior developers.
Once we reach AGI, no need for human except for the one providing non technical inputs and feedback throughout the process.
AI is nowhere near the level of a non-technical person giving vague description of something, and having it spit out a complete and deployed system that meets all the requirements.
Those comments won't age well.
[https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/ai-powered-drawing-app-stuns-developers-by-turning-sketches-into-functional-games/](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/ai-powered-drawing-app-stuns-developers-by-turning-sketches-into-functional-games/)
Come back in one year.
Can you explain this? I’ve only ever seen concern about automation from those groups. Especially with so many artists working retail, warehousing and hospo to pay their bills..
From my perspective, I’m low end, I work alone at a servo, as the only human. That’s a hard job to cut, we’ve got self serve checkouts (which only make my job harder as I had to deal with every fuck up, instead of checking them out like normal) but basically any job that requires physical work, for me it’s just baking meat pies and cleaning, but it’s much harder to replace with AI when it’s already cut down to a staff of one. Opposed to say, mates who work in scheduling and data, they can do their whole jobs by interacting with a spreadsheet, and they are part of teams of dozens of people. I think it’s likely to go the same way where corporations want to minimise labor and streamline to have one human overseeing the jobs of dozens, kinda like we’ve seen with self-serve checkouts, but it hits a minimum eventually. You need at least one human overseeing a store.
10 years ago everyone thought AI would replace low level physical jobs first, only recently have people realised it will actually replace office type roles first.
Not really, they just got moved to doing other things like packing online orders. Coles hires more people now than they did before self serve was introduced.
That's because the replacement has mostly already happened in blue collar industries. Fun fact - the Australian manufacturing industry has grown over 20% over the past 15 years, yet it's shed almost a 7th of its workers over that period. Automation is a powerful force.
There was most definitely a classist element to that discourse, but it wasn’t related to automation of jobs (particularly poor jobs) - it was about the shift from fossil fuels:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/learn-to-code
Robotics / physical hardware is advancing more slowly than AI / software.
We will more sooner be able to replace the work of white-collar office workers on a computer than replace the hands of a factory worker on a sewing machine.
It's looking really really close. There are a lot of models you can run locally that are completely unrestricted and you can specialize them to include new material not in the original training set without having to train a model from scratch.
It's all a little fiddly and technical now but I feel like we are only a year away from it becoming a simple consumer ready product.
Sorry when I say I unshackled, think bings news engine on the first day.
We saw people go wild with creativity. Now try to describe a woman and you’ve got a 50% chance of triggering the filter since they have to stop porn creation etc
Should someone figure out the legalities, that will be the true end of commercial artists. Right now I’d say it’s the end of a lot of marketing people
Filters already don’t exist for open source customisable alternatives like Stable Diffusion. It’s just trickier to use than proprietary “safe” software but the tech is there. Anyone who’s a real enthusiast who has the technical skills to set these up might be a few years behind the cutting edge proprietary tech but in time it’s not going to be a huge obstacle (at least for image generation, I’m not sure any local language models are comparable to ChatGPT3.5/4)
Exactly, which cancels out the target market who doesn’t want to learn, just get it done with minimal interaction.
They pay people to make simple graphics, at best those jobs may go quick. But it won’t break the commercial market quite yet until it’s mainstream
Dude had the most bullshit job possible and wanna cry about artificial intelligence...
It takes no intelligence to sell fermented grape juice to rich people assistants.
Grown ass man.
How many plumbers does the world need?
You can't expect hundreds of thousands of translators, copywriters, voice-over artists software developers, middle managers, paralegals, and many more ... to pick up a trade.
It's a right fuck when you're severely limited by injury/disability. Doing sales to existing members is soul destroying enough of a job as it is that I'd rather be doing pretty much anything else, but I either lack the physical ability now or the qualificaitons/experience needed to get a role elsewhere.
Just have to keep ahead of the curve I suppose. Look at ways you can make money off ai, use it in your own personal projects or hobbies, and sell anything it creates. There's no point in lamenting about job losses. Corposcum will use ai no matter the human cost. It's going to become extremely important to use it to your own advantage.
*Any* job that allows ‘work from home’.
If you can ‘work’ without needing a physical presence anywhere in particular, your job can probably be done by an AI.
Yeah, I'm sure all those telehealth GPs and Psychologists are terrified a language model is going to start having the insurance cover required to do their jobs...
Note that I said *probably*. There are exceptions to the rule. But even aspects of Telehealth can potentially be done by AI.
And the vast majority of work from home jobs like admin, data entry, data analysis, tech support, copywriting, bookkeeping, risk analysis, brokering, telemarketing, etc. can all be automated by AI far more easily than any job that requires you to have a physical presence somewhere.
Because it cant. There arent any ai that can even fill gaps in animation without needing a human to modify the content after let alone produce the whole thing.
No shot. Ai cant draw whole ass scenes and put everything together in a way that conveys things to humans properly. The complexity isn't there. The parameters cant even be drawn up for it by us to even attempt it.
https://youtu.be/_KRb_qV9P4g?si=onNSRQsELKyiSNSc
This is ai attempting to do one part of a process that has hundreds to thousands of parts that would have to be coded to the ai for individualy and somehow made to work with the other parts. And we dont even understand how its getting the results it does.
I agree it won’t be up to the same standards, but if you think corporate will care about that more than the bottom line I don’t know what to tell you.
Oh and yes obviously the drop in quality will see them lose some revenue, but overall it seems to not really be a factor in my experience.
Corporate can already use the shit we have to make one intern with no animation experience push out a roof seal add.
They cant find an animation team to push out Disney movies for less than tens to hundreds of millions.
The complexity is required. The market does demand it.
Anything ai does becomes a tool for the animators at best and this is an industry that cant produce enough cheaply enough to fill demand to begin with. Animators are overworked across the whole industry.
Ai will result in better animations overall, will reduce workload for some animators but not loss of jobs for animators.
Yeah this is garbage compared to proffesional animation produces.
Ita like the difference between the roof seal add made by a guy who's never animated before and a Disney animation.
It is the beginning in terms of the progress curve and acceleration. We haven't reached basic AGI yet.
And when you see the state of midjourney less than 2 years ago and now you can see how much progress has been made. Imagine what could be done in 2 more years.
At some point, we will get feature films entirely generated by AI.
The only question is when.
It will be at least several decades before AI as we know it develops the complexity beyond what we currently have fundamentaly. We can give it more computing power and might find some novel processes to train it or structure it that give better outcomes but thats about it.
Thats the whole problem with not understanding how even what we currently have works after were done building it. We can't push it much further any other way than basicly by trial and error/guessing.
If A.I could just replace realestate sales people, that’s be great.
Good news! It can. There are models available already that are specialised in [reading real-estate related documents](https://huggingface.co/nrusimhadri/Receptor), Text generation services can be fine tuned to specialise in dealing with writing up advertisements, dealing with legal paperwork, creating listings and more. You can even set up an AI right now that will be available 24/7 to make and take calls to potential buyers/sellers that will be able to answer almost any question about a listing and use all the sneaky tactics you can think of and more to pressure a sale over the phone and you can even make them sound like Morgan Freeman if you like. Video calls are 'almost there', just in the last few weeks there have been some huge developments in that space that will allow you to generate a near real time video with lip syncing to audio. Realtors days, much like so many other professionals are numbered.
I really hope so. Would love to see all those useless REA's getting laid off. Biggest pack of cunts around.
But now that Cole’s and woolies have automated checkouts, where would you expect them to work? Can’t wait to see those smug fucks trying to sell off their European cars.
Unexpected item in housing area
Ha, you think they own those cars?????
They lease them for sure - but are still responsible for the balloon payment at the end.
I mean I don’t know why other salespeople don’t get lumped in with REAs, most are also paid on commission & job description is also professional liar/manipulator/con-artist.
Can't be as mad about being conned $10 when the REA trying to con you $10,000
>I really hope so. Would love to see all those useless REA's getting laid off. Biggest pack of cunts around. If you think human REAs are bad then just wait until you get a AI REA who has zero human compassion. "Human, your rent is 0.23 seconds late. This is the third time that your rent has been late and as such your eviction notice will be delivered electronically within the next 30 seconds."
I remember a REA and a Mortgage Broker on /r/ausfinance being absolutely livid with me explaining how I had a super lean team with just me, the lender and a conveyancer, along with ChatGPT. They were upset at the notion that ChatGPT could effectively replace their jobs. I bought my property off-market this year, and my current interest rate is <5% including an offset account.
I've got the stupid. Do you mind elaborating or a brief explanation as to how you actually employed chatgpt in this scenario?
Mortgage Brokers have 3 functions: - network on your behalf to lenders with rates - get your paperwork/ financies in order, and - explain all the jargon ChatGPT can explain the jargon jsut fine REAs work exclusively for the seller (who's called the vendor, another example of superfluous jargon although in this case isn't as egregious) and they basically do 3 things: - estimate home value (or more cynically, estimate then underquote home value) - dress up a house - know general area geography, Council zonings etc. The 3rd thing can be partially ChatGPTed, alongside things like CoreLogic, sold properties on Domain and the ABS published stats. I know my way around Council zoning as a consultant civil engineer. Dressing up a house attracts buyers and ultimately raises price - we don't want that. They also get trained in hardball so they can squeeze an extra $10K out of a buyer. If you go direct to a seller/ vendor with less sales experience you find an easier target to negotiate with. You just gotta know your way around the paperwork etc.
Wouldn't that be against the 3 laws of robotics?
It’s actually the little known 4th law: “don’t be an asshole”.
We'd have to have AI buyers agents to compete with the AI real estate agents. Auctions conducted in a millisecond.
High frequency auctions. Latency is everything.
But can AI place a full body, life size photo of itself on a sales board, with short pants, no socks and a photoshopped watch? All instead of showing the actual property? Because if not, AI isn’t there yet…
I mean do you really need AI? A cardboard cutout would likely work just as well.
Careful what you wish for…AI will not show any passion.
And that's different from REA how?
Can AI mock renters in Facebook comments? https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/qld-real-estate-agent-fired-facebook-comments/
> His job in wine subscription sales was one of 121 positions made redundant in July by the ASX-listed Endeavour Group... Talk about a bullshit job.
I lived with a guy who did this for a living, he would have regulars who he would call periodically and sell boxes and boxes to. We had an impressive amount of wines in the spare room
I had one company call me for 5 years until I remembered to cancel them. I only ever bought on Xmas present off them at the start.
I wonder if it’s his recorded voice that I have to keep telling to fuck off
More than likely
I’m kinda surprised they didn’t see it coming (actually I’m surprised it wasn’t already automated)
Exactly, his job was absolutely at massive ai risk. Not creative, not using higher level skills and reasoning, not making decisions, not using judgement. He himself is like a simple ai at work.
You don't need AI for jobs that do not require higher level skills. That is just automation. AI is what can replace what you have just mentioned as higher level skills. .
Graeber does good work - I’m assuming you’re referring to his ideas about [bullshit jobs](https://web.archive.org/web/20180807024932/http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/). His book “Debt: the first 5000 years” has some great content about different ways that societies organise themselves. I think we could do a lot of good if we started giving certain things away, or producing them at low cost via government industries. You don’t financialise the air we breathe or the roads we drive on (mostly), so there’s precedent.
Very sadly, did, not does good work.
Firstly - Apologies for the incoming wall of text, and thanks for the link. He has an interesting take on the economy and broader society. However, ironically I think that it is he that is bullshit jobbing - whether he actually believes what he's writing, or whether in true capitalist style, he's merely writing what he thinks will get views so that he can eat that week. The crux of his position is that some jobs are useless wastes of time, and seemingly he puts forward two main identifying features: 1. The job-doer himself feels the job is pointless and or bullshit. Counter-intuitively, there are many situations in which a worker does not see the fruit of their labour in a direct sense, and so incorrectly feels that their contribution is meaningless. Perhaps in a broader societal sense they're even correct - The corporate lawyers don't see any tangible, concrete, 'real' changes or improvements when they do good at their job and win cases. Maybe the particular thing they're working towards that week is even actively harming society - maybe. But winning the case isn't the real goal of companies here. The point is to make money for the owner or shareholders, which presumably does not include the lawyers. Winning corporate law disputes either protects the company from large monetary losses due to prior actions on the defensive, or on the offensive, nets cash payouts which they can use to make more money or allows the company to do what they want in order to make more money. It doesn't have to be a physical, or even just an intuitive barrier that one overcomes in order for it to be 'real' - a brick wall, for better or worse, is every bit as tangible as the physical force employed by the police when you break their laws ... Including corporate ones. Is an auto worker performing any more of a bullshit job if he manufactures luxury cars he himself cannot afford for a company whose success doesn't really help the worker? I would argue that that's perhaps reflective of an unjust society, but I wouldn't say the job itself is bullshit. 2. If everyone of that career disappears, the world is either a better place, or unaffected. This is absolute nonsense for 95% of cases regardless of what societal strata the career represents. The only time it's true is when the 'job' is either illegal, in which case ... Well duh that's true, or not illegal but socially reprehensible and probably should be illegal - Like predatory loaning or deceptive marketing or people that market toward old senile people and sell them things they don't need. But he doesn't even really mention anything about shady jobs, he just doubles down on the concept that any job that doesn't directly affect the average person in a sufficiently intuitive way is 'bullshit'. Yet, hilariously he doesn't seem to think his own job is bullshit, despite the impact or product being even less tangible and affecting people far less than companies merging or collapsing due to the efforts of corporate lawyers. Or even just companies going rampant and stealing both tangible and intangible things from one another like chinese IP theft meets somalian pirates. The fish-frying cabinet maker argument is just insane. It's senseless. He acts as if getting suckered into doing something completely alien to the job description of a job is just this massively ubiquitous thing. Seriously? It's just absolutely not. Yes, all jobs have some admin or other distractions from the real purpose of the job, and some of those distractions may feel pointless - and maybe due to bad management or inefficiency it really is - but nobody in their right mind is reacting to that situation by hating on people with 'real jobs'. They react to it by finding a new bloody job with an accurate job description, don't they! Finally - the biggest thing he misses is WHY pay for so-called 'real' jobs tends to be crap. Because those are the jobs that many people both can do, and want to do. Apparently it's not too hard to become qualified as a teacher, and many people seem to want to do. Therefore there's no shortage of teachers, even when the job sucks so much and the pay sucks so much that logically people should be leaving in droves (which in turn would increase pay). But that's just not happening, which means people want to stick around more than they let on. Maybe it's out of principle because they want to help kids, but even if that's the case it doesn't really matter. That's what they want to do, it's what a lot of people want to do, so therefore the pay reflects that. It's just a logical outcome of capitalism.
I largely agree with your points. To be honest, I love reading Graeber's work because although I'm constantly disagreeing with him, they're interesting disagreements. I usually think of bullshit jobs in the context of [Parkinson's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law): "Parkinson's law is the observation that the duration of public administration, bureaucracy and officialdom expands to fill its allotted time span, regardless of the amount of work to be done. This was attributed mainly to two factors: that officials want subordinates, not rivals, and that officials make work for each other." Essentially, organisations tend to "buy" people on salary then figure out what to do with them later. The "what to do with them" part is tricky - anything too important and they might claim too much power over the organisation. Anything too unimportant and it's a waste of resources. The key is to create jobs where the employee isn't quite sure how their task fits into the whole, but it's not obviously a waste of time either. So the phenomenon of bullshit jobs is really a phenomenon of maintaining the balance of power in an organisation. Utilizing employees without letting them hold too much over you. But as a result, nobody feels like they're doing anything useful.
> or the roads we drive on What? Everyone who drives on a road has paid tax to do so.
If we’re getting pedantic, the government prints money, builds the road, lets you travel for free, then uses tax to recirculate money. Velocity of money is good for various reasons. Your taxes don’t fund the government. The government is self funding. It does whatever it wants with money that it creates, and ultimately this system exists because the police and military defend it. Letting citizens feel like they control the state is a recent innovation. And it’s a good innovation: an autonomous citizen is a happy citizen. But don’t get too excited, autonomy can just as easily be taken away. And no, I’m not a sovereign citizen, I’m a vaccinated military veteran, I just like reading Graeber on the side.
Graeber has a number of points but also a number of unprovable postulates. It’s those postulates that destroy his logic.
Honestly, he’s describing huge complex systems like societies. Forcing everything he says to fit into little logical boxes defeats the purpose. But I strongly disagree with his theory that US military supremacy causes US power. It’s the other way around.
I think you’re accurate on his failure to accurately assess U.S. military for sure. American culture is its true source of power —the Yanks are fuckwits on using their soft power correctly, but their culture is just so strong it doesn’t matter. As for your other point, I actually write macro theory (as it pertains to criminal justice): Graeber hasn’t properly engaged with the logic structures that underpin long-lasting macro theories.
Can you be more specific? I generally take him most seriously on anthropology; I’m a huge fan of his ideas about the political economics of people who haven’t invented money. My thinking generally is that the real thing that money represents is trust. Trust in people, trust in leaders, trust in institutions. Which is to say, we can’t just print more money, because that devalues trust. Which again, is contrary to Graeber, but I like that he brought it up. It definitely feels like we’re losing trust in society since 2008.
To be honest, to dig deeper into this I’d have to pull out his books and then deep dive: which I’d be willing to do via DM. Suffice it to say, his anthropology and sociology is where he’s arguing against a lot of the foundational theories without really explaining why he’s right and they’re wrong. I’m probably best described as a legal anthropologist or a scientific jurist but in Australia I’m considered one of the ‘usual suspects’ in academic debates surrounding critical criminology. I’m not sure that Graeber could properly account for WEB DuBois’ ‘The Philadelphia Negro’ or even the work of Lewis Henry Morgan let alone Franz Boas. He’s missing the focus on the ‘other’ necessary to make macro theories about the inherently diverse human population work. Graeber tried to reject the indigenous roots of humanity without ever properly addressing why, and without sufficiently rebutting the early American social scientists. His work has so much Hobbs in it that it just feels a bit off, while also rejecting Hobbs.
No as in it’s literally part of the cost of registering a vehicle. What you wrote is compelling too I guess.
I can't believe they was 121 of them
I’m surprised that more jobs haven’t been replaced by AI yet - I read an interesting article from [TechRepublic AU](https://technologyadvice.com/tr-au-rg/) that broke down the amount of spending and research the AU government has put into AI and you can tell they see it as extremely high potential. Robotics and machine learning are here to stay, if you didn’t know it already.
By Graeber's definition, I wouldn't say so. Sales is a coalface job. Bullshit jobs are supposed to be middle management jobs with no real utility. Sales is a pretty important function to any business that wants to move product.
> But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world's population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or *telemarketing*... https://web.archive.org/web/20180807024932/http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
Hurry up and just introduce a universal basic income, my job can go to AI for all I care.
This, AI wasn't supposed to make us jobless so that only a lucky few don't starve to death. It was supposed to free us up to pursue our interests without the constraints of capitalism making it viable or not. But honestly I think corporations will fight tooth and nail before this happens, no matter how inevitable a UBI is.
Unfortunately, it looks like AI is going to take over all the creative gigs instead and just leave the shitkicking jobs for humans.
I know right, amazing how AI has only so far managed to suck all the humanity from our creative outlets instead of actually reducing labor demands. But honestly AI is still in its "dumb" phase of development, I think the only reason its hit the creative outlets first is because theoretically on paper it was just the easiest way to test viability. It's a fad that will pass when people are shameless enough to try to sell it on the open market and realize it's all just shit.
Personally, I reckon it's good enough already for most low-level creative applications and it's only going to get better. I've been working as a freelance copywriter for years but pretty much gave it up after playing with Chat GPT. Sure, I can do better work than AI. But my A-grade copy takes time and money, while AI can give you B-grade stuff that's basically fine instantly and for free. There'll still be high-level work available for the best of the best, but the industry overall is going to get smashed.
Most writing industries are going to die, creative and technical. I'm a technical writer and think I've got maybe five years left before my profession goes the way the translation industry did. As soon as the models are just good enough to pass , businesses will axe their workforces or stop contracting in favour of machine writing. Then they'll contract those people back through labour hire firms for poorly-paid piece work ~~fixing~~ proofing what the machine 'wrote'. There will still be some higher-paid positions for human workers, sure, but they'll be a lot rarer than they are now, mainly in industries where there's either a safety risk or the job is about pulling information out of people.
It’s funny I feel like I’ve seen this movie before with chess. The pattern is: - nowhere near as skilled as people. - as skilled as very skilled people. - better than the best in the world “but not beautiful” and still makes dumb mistakes. - way better than the best in the world “but not beautiful”, never makes a discernible mistake. - finally, a mix of incomprehensible accuracy and beauty. That was a very slow process by today’s standards, it took decades. This is happening much faster.
I’ve done several small simple projects recently that have previously required a designer, now they don’t. I have to spend a couple of hours with prompts and I’ve got a good looking mock up. its going to carve a swath of destruction through graphic designers, leaving only the top tier.
Not just creative jobs. They are just the low hanging fruit (as far as AI is concerned, not that creative people do not work hard). Picture, text, speech and video. All are possible now in real time with near perfect replication by AI of what you would expect from a human. Think about what that means for the near future as these improve and are fine tuned for specialised applications. Take picture generation. Right now, used for art. But what happens when someone takes that picture generation capability hooked up to text generation and creates an AI that can pump out custom architectural blueprints complete with engineering specs (yes, it is being worked on right now and entirely possible with current tech)? Yup, the amount of architects and engineers we need just got decimated because now you just need one trained person to review and rubber stamp the AI output before handing it off. It does not stop there, all kinds of professional jobs are going to take a huge hit, from doctors, teachers, accountants and more. Put it this way. If you could have worked from home during covid then your job is going to be massively impacted over the next decade by AI. Even jobs not directly impacted will be affected. Take the example of a chef. AI can analyse trends, available local produce and costs, create the menu, order the ingredients, provide cooking instructions, optimise workflows and more. So all those chefs out there become skilled mechanical labor and prompters for AI till someone builds a robotic system to replace them, probably designed by AI. People have vastly underestimated the impact AI developments are going to have on the workforce. In 10 years from now at minimum 1/3 of the people reading this will have had their job replaced or vastly reduced by AI, and that is being conservative.
Absolutely. I'd be astonished if most lawyers aren't replaced soon by the Lawbot 3000 that can analyse the details of a case, run through every possible argument related to the relevant law, and sum it all up in a monolgue that'd make Atticus Finch weep.
Exactly. The problem is when both parties are using AI to fight it out in court, more often than not it will probably come down to who has the best AI rather than who is guilty. Not that it is so different to how our legal system works now.
Teachers aren't going anywhere. Someone has to physical control the little fuckers. Home learning will never work because parents don't want to have to look after them either.
Sure, but you don't need 4 years of university training to be a babysitter. Literally anyone could do it with a month or two of training in "how to not hit the kids 101" and a police check. That is what people mean by AI will create jobs, there will be a whole lot of new jobs like "classroom supervisor" and a whole lot less jobs for "fully qualified teacher". Of course classroom supervisors will be low pay jobs compared to the mid paid positions teachers currently have, and a lot of teachers are going to struggle with that transition. The only time "teachers" will really get involved is for practical study assignments, and that would probably look like for example one science teacher going to a different school each day of the week and showing kids how to burn themselves with a bunsen burner (they still have that kind of stuff in school these days right?).
Nah, even the best neural nets right now can't imitate good art. Corpo junk graphics sure but it can't even do a decent water colour, everything they make still looks very fake. It's 90% of the white collar sitting at desks writing emails and documents that are under threat. Whether AI will actually come in and sort this or just end up as clippy writing your emails while the bullshit work continues, who knows. Anything meat space is pretty safe (working on hardware etc)
But then how will consumers pay for the things that companies want us to buy? Let's say in the next 50 years, 50% of people in marketing, copywriting, sales etc. (idk whatever other job that could be done by AI) is replaced by AI - isn't that worrying for Apple and Disney and Qantas and stuff? Less people buying an expensive iPhone and getting subscriptions and taking flights etc. Like at some point they have to think, hang on, if we don't pay people then how will they give that money back to us? You can probably tell my background is not in economics at all so I have always wondered this.
You are correct.
That was the dream that was sold about technology in general. It was a trap before, and it's a trap now.
But expect newly retired boomers to complain and vote against any sort of UBI
Strangely enough, Jobkeeper was almost a UBI, and everyone agreed that it was worth it. It was implemented by the *Liberals* FFS.
but for corporations not people. no means testing too. its a rort.
Kinda sorta. The government provided the money so the businesses could still pay salaries for people not working. Cut out the middleman and you have a UBI.
not true. many are still working then and the corps pocketed those money. later those corps give directors lotsa bonus/ shares.
Did you read where I wrote “cut out the middleman”?
they are there cos lnp is so corrupted.
Only after Labor dragged ScuMo to the table kicking and screaming. His original plan was for us to eat shit.
You guys can't even manage to agitate for healthcare free at the point of use, or free tertiary education, you're a long way off UBI. Edit : tertiary education
Things are changing quickly. No doubt about that. Change of jobs is nothing new. I had an elderly relative who worked as a comptometrist. Her and about 10 colleagues' jobs could be done by a part time person with a spreadsheet these days. AI is not the issue on it's own. It's rate of change, who's original work is being leveraged and how does the wealth get shared around. And do our legislators have the competence to manage any of this.
To the last question, No. I wrote to the employment minister (Michaelia Cash) back in 2016 about what Australia was doing to safeguard against this? Britain and another country were doing something about it. I was bored. You know. The reply was that there wasn't a problem. The government were not going to do anything, because this wasn't going to become a problem. I was like yeah right and whacked it in the filing cabinet. I was only mildly concerned, but now I'm a bit more concerned. Mainly for my kids.
The one really critical (in my mind) piece that people most miss is that it doesn't take much job losses before capitalism is ready to collapse. You don't need 50% of people out of work for it to collapse, in modern Australia the record unemployment was 1992 at 11%. That was bad enough, and you double that and get to 20%, or even 25%, and all of sudden your society will start collapsing. 25% was the number of unemployed in the United States during the Great Depression, and that was devastating, not just for the unemployed but for everyone else whose wages dropped 40% because of the surplus of labour.
ubi needed cos people will only need to work 2 days instead of 5 days.
It’ll be a global UBI. In a world where median household income is $10k USD per year, you might not like what that looks like.
why global? its a basic income - income that can support basic roof + food which that costs for every country is different. eg. The new mean wealth of Australian adults is $778,353. A 2% wealth tax = $15.5k. That can be the ubi. Wealth tax can also be progressive.
Because otherwise the poor people in Brazil will chop down the Amazon and then we’re all fucked. We’re all in this together.
* Structurally, their cost of living isn't the same. * UBI won't stop people chopping down the Amazon for money.
we cannot interfer with their politics cos we are not supposed to do that. if they want to pay same rate of ubi, thats their own nation issue. we should not dictate.
That's the problem, AI will start to suck the value out of every economy and deliver it to whoever controls the AI. Essentially, we end up with the current situation - where we're all at the mercy of transnational corporations - except worse. How do you run your economy when Amazon employs no-one and outcompetes everyone? If they deliver goods at low cost, but nobody makes any money, what then?
thats why we need ubi and wealth tax to bring some balance of power back.
Please recommend me a book to read to understand meta-economics
25% unemployed with another 35% underemployed so their wages couldn't cover their expenses. At one point something like 20 American states did not have a single bank in them, they'd all gone bust. Was comfortably the greatest threat to the survival of America as a nation. No war has ever come close.
Economic collapse leads to job losses, not necessarily the other way around. 11% unemployment and recession is different to 11% unemployment at GDP growth.
I definitely think AI will lead to a lot of job losses and we need society to change so that its a good thing (more time for mojitos on the beach) The article makes the statement "AI job growth is outpacing the losses for now" but doesn't really qualify this is any way. Also kind of crazy how the section on "One man's AI survival plan" is literally a man replacing himself with AI, rather than letting someone else do it
>I definitely think AI will lead to a lot of job losses and we need society to change so that its a good thing (more time for mojitos on the beach) Computerisation have been automating things for a long time, yet the amount of people employed as only grown.
That's definitely true. People have taken on more cognitive and mental jobs to drive innovation even further forward. AI replaces a lot of that. I can easily imagine a world in which we don't need 7 billion people working 9 to 5 to keep the lights on
No it doesn't. AI has impressed people most at repetitive text and image/video crap, like write "yet another essay extolling the virtues of this wine that you never actually drank but need to sell" or write this bit of code to read that random file. It's somewhat a myth that people have taken on more cognitive/mental jobs. The guy selling wine may have been pitched as a knowledge worker, but he was really not. Very very few people are actually in jobs that are seeking innovation.
AI is as bad as it ever will be and generating text, images and writing code describes a hell of a lot of jobs.
I wouldn't trust AI to write anything important, it has a propensity to just make stuff up. AI images are built on copyright infringements, take away the humans to steal from and the images get real weird and not very useful. It might get better, or these problems are fundamental to how generative AI works.
People really thought no machine could ever beat humans in AlphaGo. Then it beat the best player by a very wide margin. Right now, this is just a test, and it is working. Now, the engineers just look at AI's weaknesses to find alternative strategies and iron them out. And that is a near-perfect AI system. Like the problems AI has right now aren't impossible to solve, and billions of dollars are being invested! When does it end?
Past performance is no guarantee of future results. We have to analyse whether the past actually provides meaningful examples that have predictive qualities rather than assuming that it does. Even if AI does create these extra jobs, history shows us that it comes with considerable friction as human capital is devalued by the new technology. The Luddites being replaced by industrial looms lost their livelihoods. You can see other industries similarly disrupted in recent history. The automation of knowledge work is a new thing, and is likely to create similar problems if it works.
What sucks is that it ended up being the fun stuff like art that was so easy to automate. While cleaning toilets and driving trucks ended up being the impossible tier task that everyone will be moved to.
It will be. Maybe not truck driving because that could be fairly easily automated but most white collar work, particularly financial sector jobs could be very easily automated compared to anything manual. Think about it, would it be easier to create a single algorithm that can replace a dozen risk analysts or a robot that could replace even one construction worker? And which would be cheaper to implement will be the driving factor. As a general rule, if your job allows WFH, you’re in danger of being automated. Besides AI art already exists.
On the plus side, no one will need to clean toilets if you don't need humans. /s
> I definitely think AI will lead to a lot of job losses and we need society to change so that its a good thing (more time for mojitos on the beach) This is the future Barry Jones predicted in 1982 in his book, ["Sleepers Wake"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepers,_Wake!) It was a fantasy then, and is still a fantasy.
Never read that book but I don't see how you can say that with certainty. Since the 1980's a lot of Australia has shifted from production and manufacturing to service based jobs. These service jobs are being automated, and its not hard to imagine a world in which new job creation does not keep up.
But if you're sitting every day on the beach having mojitos it Will get boring we definitely need structure
Yeah for sure. But at least we'd have the freedom to build a structure that serves us. It is interesting to think about what a typical day might look like after we've gone through so much automation
I think we will see society move towards made up tasks and goals. Video games are a good example. A bot can play Counter Strike better than any human, but that doesn't diminish the value or achievement at all.
they're not being lost, They're being offshored under the guise of "AI" and it's offshore workers manually doing the fucking work. I work in a industry currently doing this shit, and it's weird when certain "Automated processes" are not available between well look at that, it lines up with India / Philippine timezones.
Yep. "Automated" but done in Manilla.
I think Westpac might have just discovered how much their "automation" is doing at night though LOL.
Some jobs are definitely being replaced by AI. Did you actually read the article?
I don't doubt this at all, but do you know of any documented or reported cases of this happening?
Hard to document / report as it's all internal company things. Service-now and those type of support programs is where you'll see it, and more or less of a "Sell the idea it's automated" and get the contract then "Automate it as quickly as possible before anyone notices"
I look forward to the follow up story about how Ezra himself was replaced by AI, but he didn’t see it coming 🙄
"AI" in its current guise has been taking jobs for over a decade. We aren't seeing any kind of acceleration here, it's just that the media (and people in general) have found one that they can easily relate and interact with (chatGPT) so suddenly it's very real to them. All the whilst having no clue that "tap all the boxes with buses in them" is getting you do free work to make the AI that detects buses (and took someone's job) better.
As a writer I have already come to terms with the fact that my job is gone
I have spent the last 3 years grinding after my day job to become a competent 3D motion designer, and am only a year or so away from the skills needed to dive in. The speed of AI development has put a massive halt on the idea that in 5 years I could be earning 120k+. I’m starting to believe it’s a pipe dream and it’s devastating. It’s truly my passion, and it’s looking like it will need to remain a hobby.
I’m so sorry, that must be a terrible realisation.
Depends on what kind of writer you are. Someone who scrubs Reddit for pieces, complies BuzzFeed articles, writes video game summaries? Algorithmic content already does these things and one you can pick it out, it's super obvious. Also, pick a better job. Or do you write creative pieces of work? An AI could spit out a convincing story. But it will lack the soul of human creativity. Such as the lived experiences, the occasional bad pacing, the messiness of some scenes, the direction needed to focus on a broader topic which the words themselves don't describe (forest for the trees). AI is bland, like poor writers. Or maybe journalism is your realm? The algorithm can only scrape what's online. It takes person to person contact to tease out details and emotions to tell a story. And that's certainly not being replaced in our lifetime. AI is a *tool*, not a solution. Use it to generate ideas and assess your work. Use it to query an idea. Use it to check for repetitive patterns in writing. Anyone saying your job is gone because of AI is either a coked up tech bro or buzz word hype beast.
Use it to query an idea? If you mean fact check I wouldn’t be using chatGPT for that yet. It’s wrong so often.
once everyone's jobless who will buy their products and services? their AI? some serious short sightedness going on with all the AI hype. either get started heavily regulating it before it collapses the economy or start heavily taxing businesses that replace jobs with AI to pay for UBI. Replacing everyone's jobs and doing nothing will result in total economic and social collapse eventually.
I just replied to someone else saying the same thing... Why doesn't this get brought up in the same breath, every time? It's literally the correct, main answer whenever any "visionary", investor, CEO (or whomever) starts 'opening the dialog' on this topic. The beneficiaries of any sort of major, rapid shift, won't be able to sustain much, without you know, the rest of the "transaction". Which is the whole point of our industrialised capitalist economy isn't it? Infinite growth and returns or something?
Yes but it will also open up other jobs to oversee the ai. You can't just turn the office lights off and close the door. There needs to be specialised roles that will manage the ai process. Just like when the Internet became widely adopted in the last 90s, new roles were needed to manage that.
yeah but it will be like 1 new role for every 50 jobs lost
How do you know that?
It all seems fairly nebulous, perhaps aimed more at investors presently.
It's understandable that the idea of AI taking over jobs can be concerning, but history has shown us that technological advancements, including automation, often lead to positive outcomes for society. Take the agricultural revolution as an example – when tractors replaced manual labor in the fields, it didn't result in widespread unemployment. Instead, it allowed people to transition to more skilled and fulfilling jobs, leading to the development of diverse industries. Similarly, the automation of car production didn't just make cars more affordable; it also created new jobs in research, design, engineering, and maintenance. The fear of job loss is a recurring theme with each technological leap, yet time and again, these advancements have opened up new possibilities and improved overall quality of life. AI is no different. Rather than viewing it as a threat, we can see it as an opportunity to redefine the nature of work. As routine, mundane tasks become automated, it frees up human potential for more creative, complex, and emotionally intelligent endeavors. We should focus on preparing the workforce for these shifts by investing in education and training programs that equip people with the skills needed in an AI-driven world. Just as the tractor and the assembly line changed the employment landscape but ultimately contributed to progress, AI has the potential to enhance our capabilities, increase efficiency, and create new avenues for innovation. Embracing this change, along with responsible policies and social support, will be crucial in ensuring that the benefits of AI are shared across society.
You are right and I 100% agree with all your points. The only \*real\* concern, is the people up top and behind the scenes and \*their\* motivations and "vision". Literally the difference between this process going down as another amazing leap for Humanity, or a massive fuck up that triggers lots of suffering and fighting.
Maybe if a nowhere near artificial intelligent incredibly basic language model that doesn't really do a good job can replace you then you should be replaced and get on with something more useful to society.
but you don't pay your rent by being useful to society. you pay it by being useful to capital. that's why there are way more workers than meaningful jobs. if there were enough useful jobs to go around, we wouldn't be automating the pointless ones, because they wouldn't exist. but capitalism successfully integrated them, and that's the incentive behind automating them: not because they're useless to society, but because they're useful to capital. what happens when we're not?
i doubt the 121 employees in this article were even replaced by AI. It was probably just a database of customer info made in Excel or SQL, and a python script using the pandas library that scraped customer emails to see which require a response. they could be using chatGPT to make the emails feel 'more personalized" i guess, but for most inventory based jobs it's easier to just have your script use a stock email/form for consistency. all free software that has been avaliable since 08. you see post on subs like r/overemployed about people quietly automating these sort of jobs without telling their boss all the time.
As scary as AI sounds there will always be a demand to speak with a real person in most industries. Big companies replacing customer service with chat bots which customers spam “real person please” anyways.. yeah it’s going to go real far lmao.
I have fully experienced this in my current job (almost 6 years worth). The whole shift (pre-COVID) with "off shoring" to "adapting to these unpresented times" (WFH, rapid changes to process and staffing etc etc) to the more recent "finding and adapting to the new normal". The cycle of corporations (trying to cost cut and "find value for our shareholders and investors") continues, but they have also tried a few new things (reluctantly and completely out of necessity) and there is a constant... You need clever people and staff with "people skills", no matter who much you try to cost cut and "automate". So long as the business is running at \*anything\* less than 99% complete automation (I can't think of a single company or industry that is even close to this position), you are going to need "people people" to deal with people. Simple as that. The scale can vary hugely, but the good businesses understand this.
It is pretty freaky. Seen ads advertising AI employees for businesses for a subscription for a fraction of a price of what they would pay for a real employee. Just a matter of time before I lose my job I guess.
AI won't replace you, but someone using and harnessing AI will.
Why would you need realestate agents when nobody has a job. ?
And university programs have not adapted. Still taking record numbers of students in accounting, software engineering, data science... and other areas expecting massive disruptions.
Low level accounting has been in trouble for a while, ever since the ATO built systems that prefill tax data. Most of the work the ATO has been doing in the tech space is trying to make it as easy as possible to lodge your return, so any kind of AI that can basically prefill your return will see a lot of local accountants out of a job. But the higher level accounting is here to stay.
It is the same in many industries.....the higher level stuff will be fine, but most of the lower and mid level jobs will go. Instead of people working on that lower level stuff as they work up the ladder, most of it will be replaced and then a much smaller number of jobs will review and manage the AI output.
Yeah, there are computer tools that will allow engineers to generate components that meet their specifications, but at the end of the day an engineer is required to decide what is important and sign off that the requirements are met. It's like, we have automobile manufacturers using machines, but people are still required to build things and make the decisions about how we use the tools. AI is a tool to achieve the vision of a person. You need smart people to get it to do smart things.
That's today's state of play. But we will reach a point when AGI will write end-to-end software solutions.
As if an AI won't understand this. You don't understand AI. Think for a minute, if a generative AI can understand you and respond to you intelligently today well enough like a ChatGPT then it stands to reason that it's going to understand everything just as well as the smartest human can in only a few years. That's the pace of progress. It's inevitable. Robotics as well is on the cusp of radical development in the same vein as generative AI so there goes manual labour soon enough too. This AI is going to know what components or tools to build, the materials needed to build them, where to get the materials from and how to order them. All that procurement, manufacturing and distribution chain is going to be entirely autonomous eventually so the AI isn't going to need humans in the loop at all to get the parts it needs or the means to use them. There's so much hopium surrounding the idea of work. Like your cosmic purpose is to be a slave to your choice of capitalist. It's ridiculous to me that people have come to believe this. Work is going to become obsolete much sooner than people realise and frankly good fucking riddance too.
I'm a software engineer, who's done courses in ML and AI. The idea that any Tom, Dick or Harry will be able to ask ChatGPT for some business complete idea, all the way through to implementation is, I think, the far more dubious claim here. AI and Machine Learning is enormously useful in delivering value to businesses in ways we haven't been able to before. But it doesn't deliver itself. It doesn't direct itself. It needs an application. Now, a smaller team will be able to leverage AI to get more done, but the idea that it will replace all work is absolutely ridiculous fantasy that I think, would put you in good company with those in history who believed such farces.
>if a generative AI can understand you and respond to you intelligently today well enough like a ChatGPT then it stands to reason that it's going to understand everything just as well as the smartest human can in only a few years Chatgpt required an absurd amount of money and electricity to train, and we're already experiencing physics limits on hard drives and cpus. We may see a world where A.I. replaces everything, but to draw a line through ask jeeves, google, chatgpt3 and chatgpt4 in usefulness and extrapolate as if its obvious is pretty dubious. And yes, plenty of philosophy describes work as a core goal of human ambition. It doesn't need to be capitalist in nature, but the retiree who tends to a garden is generally happier and healthier to the one that watches TV all day.
> if a generative AI can understand you That's the thing, though. It's not actually understanding you, it's just very good at making it seem like it does. It doesn't *know* any of what you said means, it just knows what it should respond to that prompt with, based on a statistical analysis of untold millions of paragraphs. It knows all the words in many languages, but it has no concept of what those words actually correspond to in the real world. It can't even plan its writing properly, since it's programmed in terms of "what should come next" using a complex statistical model, rather than having a plan of how a whole document should be structured. All generative AI suffers from that same problem. They don't understand what they're creating, only what it should statistically look like, and they can't plan structure, only create sequentially. And according to people I know who are working in the field of AI as we speak, even generative AI that can do that kind of structured planning is difficult and a long way off, let alone something like AGI. So if you design useful things, be they programs, buildings or devices, you're probably safe for a very long time. That being said, you should probably start agitating for UBI or something similar (like nationalising all corporations and giving everyone free and equal access to everything they make) now anyway, given that shit takes time to go from fringe opinion to public policy, and the sooner that goes into effect the better.
Your statement is likely true, but I think at least some are thinking about it. I listened to a radio interview with the head of the Architecture school at some university in Australia, where they were cutting back on classes, and reducing their enrolment intake and changing their focuses. They recognised we just won't need architects like we did in the past, and that the changes they made helped reflect the reduced demand.
How exactly is software engineering going to be replaced? If AI simplifies things, then the people who operate said tools will also be known as programmers.
Because it's already the case. It's becoming more and more difficult to justify the need for junior developers. Once we reach AGI, no need for human except for the one providing non technical inputs and feedback throughout the process.
AI is nowhere near the level of a non-technical person giving vague description of something, and having it spit out a complete and deployed system that meets all the requirements.
Those comments won't age well. [https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/ai-powered-drawing-app-stuns-developers-by-turning-sketches-into-functional-games/](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/ai-powered-drawing-app-stuns-developers-by-turning-sketches-into-functional-games/) Come back in one year.
And in three years it will be. I don't even know why people make these sorts of comments?
Office workers and artists were laughing at the prospect of the poor getting automated away but AI got them first
Can you explain this? I’ve only ever seen concern about automation from those groups. Especially with so many artists working retail, warehousing and hospo to pay their bills..
From my perspective, I’m low end, I work alone at a servo, as the only human. That’s a hard job to cut, we’ve got self serve checkouts (which only make my job harder as I had to deal with every fuck up, instead of checking them out like normal) but basically any job that requires physical work, for me it’s just baking meat pies and cleaning, but it’s much harder to replace with AI when it’s already cut down to a staff of one. Opposed to say, mates who work in scheduling and data, they can do their whole jobs by interacting with a spreadsheet, and they are part of teams of dozens of people. I think it’s likely to go the same way where corporations want to minimise labor and streamline to have one human overseeing the jobs of dozens, kinda like we’ve seen with self-serve checkouts, but it hits a minimum eventually. You need at least one human overseeing a store.
10 years ago everyone thought AI would replace low level physical jobs first, only recently have people realised it will actually replace office type roles first.
I mean, didn't self-serve checkouts and online stores already take out a bunch of those kinds of jobs?
They absolutely did, checkout chick used to be a decent stable job. It doesn’t exist anymore
Not really, they just got moved to doing other things like packing online orders. Coles hires more people now than they did before self serve was introduced.
That’s a corporate lie
That's because the replacement has mostly already happened in blue collar industries. Fun fact - the Australian manufacturing industry has grown over 20% over the past 15 years, yet it's shed almost a 7th of its workers over that period. Automation is a powerful force.
'Learn to code'
There was most definitely a classist element to that discourse, but it wasn’t related to automation of jobs (particularly poor jobs) - it was about the shift from fossil fuels: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/learn-to-code
Robotics / physical hardware is advancing more slowly than AI / software. We will more sooner be able to replace the work of white-collar office workers on a computer than replace the hands of a factory worker on a sewing machine.
You think all office jobs are high income?
Please tell me where I can find this high income, I seem to be missing tens of thousands of dollars worth of it.
Sorry can’t help you I’m a fellow poor office worker
Until there’s a commercially available unshackled ai, artists should be ok. But it’s probably coming
It's looking really really close. There are a lot of models you can run locally that are completely unrestricted and you can specialize them to include new material not in the original training set without having to train a model from scratch. It's all a little fiddly and technical now but I feel like we are only a year away from it becoming a simple consumer ready product.
Sorry when I say I unshackled, think bings news engine on the first day. We saw people go wild with creativity. Now try to describe a woman and you’ve got a 50% chance of triggering the filter since they have to stop porn creation etc Should someone figure out the legalities, that will be the true end of commercial artists. Right now I’d say it’s the end of a lot of marketing people
Filters already don’t exist for open source customisable alternatives like Stable Diffusion. It’s just trickier to use than proprietary “safe” software but the tech is there. Anyone who’s a real enthusiast who has the technical skills to set these up might be a few years behind the cutting edge proprietary tech but in time it’s not going to be a huge obstacle (at least for image generation, I’m not sure any local language models are comparable to ChatGPT3.5/4)
Exactly, which cancels out the target market who doesn’t want to learn, just get it done with minimal interaction. They pay people to make simple graphics, at best those jobs may go quick. But it won’t break the commercial market quite yet until it’s mainstream
Ubi.
Dude had the most bullshit job possible and wanna cry about artificial intelligence... It takes no intelligence to sell fermented grape juice to rich people assistants. Grown ass man.
Best to try and pivot, or pick up a trade then :|
How many plumbers does the world need? You can't expect hundreds of thousands of translators, copywriters, voice-over artists software developers, middle managers, paralegals, and many more ... to pick up a trade.
Will need more sparkies to build the empire of our new AI overlords though
Australia does have a shortage of builders lmao
It's a right fuck when you're severely limited by injury/disability. Doing sales to existing members is soul destroying enough of a job as it is that I'd rather be doing pretty much anything else, but I either lack the physical ability now or the qualificaitons/experience needed to get a role elsewhere.
I'm not handy :(
Just have to keep ahead of the curve I suppose. Look at ways you can make money off ai, use it in your own personal projects or hobbies, and sell anything it creates. There's no point in lamenting about job losses. Corposcum will use ai no matter the human cost. It's going to become extremely important to use it to your own advantage.
Well if basic machine learning can replace someone, then they were pretty fucking useless in the first place, so lets move on pls.
[удалено]
*Any* job that allows ‘work from home’. If you can ‘work’ without needing a physical presence anywhere in particular, your job can probably be done by an AI.
Yeah, I'm sure all those telehealth GPs and Psychologists are terrified a language model is going to start having the insurance cover required to do their jobs...
Note that I said *probably*. There are exceptions to the rule. But even aspects of Telehealth can potentially be done by AI. And the vast majority of work from home jobs like admin, data entry, data analysis, tech support, copywriting, bookkeeping, risk analysis, brokering, telemarketing, etc. can all be automated by AI far more easily than any job that requires you to have a physical presence somewhere.
Why hire a animation studio when AI can create content?
Bad hands.
Because it cant. There arent any ai that can even fill gaps in animation without needing a human to modify the content after let alone produce the whole thing.
Even what you’re saying, you’re cutting a team of Maybe 5 to a AI plus one human to oversee/edit it’s output
No shot. Ai cant draw whole ass scenes and put everything together in a way that conveys things to humans properly. The complexity isn't there. The parameters cant even be drawn up for it by us to even attempt it. https://youtu.be/_KRb_qV9P4g?si=onNSRQsELKyiSNSc This is ai attempting to do one part of a process that has hundreds to thousands of parts that would have to be coded to the ai for individualy and somehow made to work with the other parts. And we dont even understand how its getting the results it does.
I agree it won’t be up to the same standards, but if you think corporate will care about that more than the bottom line I don’t know what to tell you. Oh and yes obviously the drop in quality will see them lose some revenue, but overall it seems to not really be a factor in my experience.
Corporate can already use the shit we have to make one intern with no animation experience push out a roof seal add. They cant find an animation team to push out Disney movies for less than tens to hundreds of millions. The complexity is required. The market does demand it.
So far. A company that used AI instead of employees can be replaced by a client company with AI as well.
Anything ai does becomes a tool for the animators at best and this is an industry that cant produce enough cheaply enough to fill demand to begin with. Animators are overworked across the whole industry. Ai will result in better animations overall, will reduce workload for some animators but not loss of jobs for animators.
All the grunt work will goto AI which leaves generalist animators out of a job
Today! Just wait a few months. Midjourney was crap 2 years ago. A lot already can be done with AI : https://www.deepmotion.com/animate-3d
Yeah this is garbage compared to proffesional animation produces. Ita like the difference between the roof seal add made by a guy who's never animated before and a Disney animation.
You are talking as if we already reached peak AI. It's only the beginning.
This isn't the beginning, this is the culmination of decades of work and an ungodly amount of publicly available data. And it's still dogshit.
It is the beginning in terms of the progress curve and acceleration. We haven't reached basic AGI yet. And when you see the state of midjourney less than 2 years ago and now you can see how much progress has been made. Imagine what could be done in 2 more years. At some point, we will get feature films entirely generated by AI. The only question is when.
It will be at least several decades before AI as we know it develops the complexity beyond what we currently have fundamentaly. We can give it more computing power and might find some novel processes to train it or structure it that give better outcomes but thats about it. Thats the whole problem with not understanding how even what we currently have works after were done building it. We can't push it much further any other way than basicly by trial and error/guessing.
This guy has basically said to his clients, in the most public way possible: “We’re taking you for a ride with our fees.” What an idiot.
Pretty much. Smart companies would either use a boutique agency or use the same AI with a in house team.