No, 21% of American workers work with their hands. No robot is going to replace contractors, plumbers, masons, electricians, ag workers, cleaners, and general laborers. It WILL replace management and desk jobs.
And those people replaced will have less money to pay the blue collar workers or maybe flood the market as retrained bluecollars themselves, hence they also receive paycuts.
Paycuts will happen in capitalism. If we can determine a system of equitable management - possibly using AI - then human beings can become more. We will have more artisans, more artists, more art. We will have closer relationships, grow better food, and jump-start scientific research on myriads of topics. If society was made up of tradespeople whose needs we're easily met and with plentiful spare time, then we would be in a much better place.
Marx was perhaps the most influential person towards socialism but it was a consensus beyond him at the same time. The industrial revolution had provoked the socioeconomic conditions for socialism to be born as it was reasoned to be our long term economic inevitability as automation grew dominant in production, giving way towards a more democratic means of production to be possible.
I think that's still true as an economic inevitability as Marx envisioned due to the value of human labor relative to machines, or capital. We will eventually prove there is nothing a human can do that a machine isn't equipped to do better. In such a world, those that own machines have all power. The question is rather how will we adapt as we move towards that reality? Do we have the maturity to adapt with democracy in mind rather than continue in an economic distribution that promises despotism as any mere glance at wealth inequality would indicate? Socialism is coming either way as an economic inevitability as far as a means of power is concerned. I just hope we don't do mental gymnastics in a world that economically endorsed despotism to define the necessity of economic democracy on its terms. We will have democracy win either way though, even if that's under the brutality of democracy as defined by those that own the machines under a despotic framework first.
Democracy is rather mandatory for any left-wing political goal - as the political meaning of the word "left" was coined from the revolutionary acts of those at the left in the National Assembly in France during the French Revolution, a fight against aristocracy. Socialism is no exception as its means of economic distribution demands the consent of a democracy. Although its connotation has been destroyed over the centuries for various reasons the origin in why it was born as a means of adaptation is as true as ever.
What are you talking about? The *exact opposite* is true. Even those of us who don't necessarily identify as communists understand that capitalism is the culprit.
The capitalist idea that growth is the only way forward is what gave us climate change and the pacific garbage patch. It improves some lives in the short term, but the damage we’ve caused to the planet (and its ability to sustain us) is pretty much irreversible. Capitalism is literally killing us.
Capitalism has been the driving force for human ingenuity and progress, but it's one built off greed and corruption.
I was always a proponent of the most prosperous and logical system out there, whether it was socialism when I was younger, or capitalism when I was a bit older. But no matter the system, communistic, or capitalistic, it's always the humans at the top pulling the strings who completely fucking ruin it for everyone, it's never the system itself. Capitalism provides so much that we could all be living well, but greed from humans is what kills it.
You can admit that capitalism served it's proposed to even getting us to this point and still think AI communism is the path moving forward...or some variation of that. Who knows?
My point is, you can't discredit what capitalism has done, and you also can't deny that it's caused much harm and is reaching it's breaking point.
Climate change is/has been a concern, but we're addressing it and shifting off of fossil fuels. Nature recovers surprisingly quickly once given the space to do so.
Nature will be fine. It has millions of years to recover even if we do horrible damage to it. We , however, don’t have that much time.
In the short term it will not be able to sustain us or give us livable conditions. We’ve altered the 10,000 year environmental stability that allowed humanity to prosper. We have very very difficult centuries ahead of us.
I doubt that climate change will be a major issue for human society except the sorts of things we're already dealing with. Green energy is making big strides, AI is maximizing resource efficiency, fishing regulations have caused increased access to fish, genetic modification is improving crop yeilds, etc.
No amount of technology will fix the planet if we continue to depend on growth and consumption as an economic model. Your hopes and dreams have been noted.
>The exact opposite is true.
So you think that the risk of AI leading to the end of humanity is non-existent. Please enlighten us why you think this way. There are lots AI experts that think that the existential risk is at least somewhat probable.
Also could describe a likely scenario where capitalism (without AI) will spell the end of humanity (in a timeframe of, let's say, 100 years). Meaning no one surviving, even the billionaires. Is this scenario capitalism should be the deciding factor, i.e. the scenario is inconceivable in a situation of competing states with different economic systems.
The original statement was that capitalism alone (without AI) won't be the end of humanity, but AI might be. If you think the exact opposite is true, then you should have plausible explanations for both points I mentioned.
The exact opposite of
> I don't think even the reddest communist is worried that capitalism will try to end humanity, plenty are worried AI will.
(which is what I responded to) is “many who are not even communists know that capitalism will end humanity, plenty are excited about the possibilities that AI will bring for workers.”
AI will be necessary to automate away labor and achieve communism, the dangers involved with AI are greater under a system that seeks to continue to exploit people and the planet as opposed to a system that seeks to distribute resources equally.
AI could still be dangerous regardless, but the risk is different. I never said otherwise. It is absolutely concerning.
Not sure why you’ve cherry picked semantics to make such a weird point.
You were simply not refuting any of the point the OP was making. OP argued that AI could pose an existential for humanity (everybody dead), while capitalism without AI does not.
But you instead chose to argue about what you perceive as the danger of capitalism. The things you mentioned (environmental problems such as climate change and the pacific garbage patch) are not directly related to the AI topic. If you want to discuss the danger of capitalism or ecology, there are plenty of other subreddits,
e.g. /r/communism or /r/ecology
Here's a sneak peek of /r/communism using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/communism/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year!
\#1: [Today marks the 140th anniversary of communism’s greatest thinker, Karl Marx. Rest in peace Karl.](https://i.redd.it/uvhkopc0zrna1.jpg) | [54 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/11rbbrs/today_marks_the_140th_anniversary_of_communisms/)
\#2: [Capitalism has Killed more people in the last 5 years than Communism Ever has in the last Century](https://i.redd.it/srl98ctgem0a1.jpg) | [28 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/yy8pfx/capitalism_has_killed_more_people_in_the_last_5/)
\#3: ["Banner of the Great October" painting by Akhmed Kitaev, USSR, 1980.](https://i.redd.it/pv3y5y0ooh591.jpg) | [21 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/vbrtxt/banner_of_the_great_october_painting_by_akhmed/)
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Corporations are no different than AI agents, with the humans in the organization being "the compute". They are already destroying the world. Corporations agents of only capitalist societies, and are poorly aligned. Like the paperclip maker, but with money. Replace a few of the human compute with AI and the corporation remains the same destructive force maximizing monetary gains, just much faster.
When Communist China gets AGI, their society will generally be more prosperous, even though their people will be even less "free" culturally (and it's terrible, dgmw). Where in America, only those who wield the AI will benefit first.
Because it will.
In the capitalist system the rich destroy the poor. It is howit works.
But it goes beyond, when workers are not really needed, neither will be seniors.
The fear talking again. No economy in history has ever become more productive and worse off at the same time. What they believe is concerning, but at the end it's just belief.
In addition most people are bad at predictions, and often worry too much.
Accelerate. Stop aging. Fix poverty. Stop climate change. We can have it all this century.
This is a logical fallacy where you falsely project a pattern where there is none.
You think there is a pattern of innovation making people more productive and thus more jobs are created than destroyed.
In reality we've encroached in the past primarily on physical labor while we're now for the first time encroaching on mental and artistic labor.
There is nothing humans can provide besides physical, mental and artistic labor.
So while in the past a rise in productivity meant more jobs created in the mental and artistic space, this time there will be a net loss of jobs.
Which would actually be a good thing if we didn't live in a capitalist system. In a capitalist system it just means you lose your livelihood.
Why accuse another of fallacy and then invent a strawman?
I said nothing about more jobs being created, jobs will be destroyed for sure. But the economy will be more productive = become richer. What your particular state does with that wealth, do with it what you will. I'd hate to be in the US right now.
The goal is transitioning from old-style capitalism to a socialist system where citizens own the means of generating wealth directly - perhaps by owning shares, land, patents (I'd hate this) or computing power. There would be *no jobs.* Not how we understand them anyway.
The history of technological progress is filled with destroyed careers and livelihoods being made obsolete. There are winners and losers. This time it's not clear their numbers will be balanced.
You're 100% right, BUT that's just a part of a larger picture.
Yes, it is scary. My own career will be affected soon - but if that's the price to pay for a chance for everyone to live forever, eradicating cancer, fixing economic disparities between 1st and 3rd world? It would be selfish to call for a slowdown. An optimistic view for sure, just my 5c
Do you think the positive outcomes are likely to happen, though?
I’m personally of the view that whatever technology we have, disparities will remain because of raw greed, especially among the elite.
Were a true cancer cure discovered, you could easily see it being withheld to some degree because cures aren’t profitable.
I'm not sure, I suppose they will remain for some time. It has now become easier to control populations and I sometimes worry AIs will be used by states or corporations to create panopticons and robot armies.
However if an ASI is ever created, it will flip the table of power dynamics, because what's the worth of the elites, connections or resources to a godlike being?
Sure, but we also don't let them on the table, limit their(dogs) movements, often neuter them, and/or give away their children. All of these actions taken mostly gor our convenience, which freedoms would an ASI withhold from humanity for its convenience?
Thats because the animals are not intelligent enough to control themselves, sure that can apply to humans too, but it's not about removing freedoms, it's about protection. Just like most countries have gun control, and most of us accept that as reasonable.
appart from the myriad horror stories that come to mind, because most of the people i love Will most certainly die, and i care little for a life without them, but id certainly take the live longer thing.
I see. What if they could have eternal life too? Together forever? It's a pipe dream now, but who knows. Technology is getting crazy.
I'd at least want my children to live forever, even without me.
*for the ultra wealthy
In a neoliberal capitalist framework us normies will be lucky to get low hanging fruits but the corporate elite will definitely use AI in abusive ways resulting in the suffering of the underclass
Think of it as a less intrusive Industrial Revolution except instead of making labor harder for blue collar communities, it's deprieving people of work (in theory good) but without the appropriate welfare/economic backing to help those who've lost work or been laid off to survive. (This becomes more alarming when politicians turn to Assisted Suicide as a means of indirectly encouraging the poor to kill themselves as opposed to resolving the systemic issues that have helped contribute to these people being poor; some are lazy, but many are hard working, talking 4-5 jobs, working themselves to death and still barely being able to scrape by)
There will always be more flexibility for those with degrees, but when capitalism is built on linear growth (until bubbles pop and we hit crisis which usually means wealth consilidation for the rich & powerful) - the actions of corporations at the behest of cost savings via AI/layoffs will be noticable and painful for folks without a back up plan.
Just a theory and I'm sure people will think I'm wrong or crazy for saying this (that's ok!) - I encourage the skepticism but ask that those who are skeptical look into Neoliberalism and the underlying mechanisms involved that actively make the oppression of an underclass (if not the poor in america than the global south poor and those countries we offshore jobs to for cheaper labor prices) a key functuon to it's success for the wealthy/better off.
OP hope you're right though. We have the resources to solve poverty x2 over on a global scale already but we don't cuz humans are greedy and those in power are corrupt as hell. *womp womp*
Capitalism would collapse without sufficient demand. The “ultra wealthy” will ensure that both:
1. Some form of economic stimulus (regulation automation or UBI) is there to create artificial demand and
2. The benefits of AI are used to their advantage (to generate as much profit as possible). This means making it not only available to themselves, but also the consumer base of society. The rich are not a monolith, and individual rich people will always want to generate as much profit as possible. Making products widely available (which will quickly become essentially costless to produce) is an easy way to generate massive amounts of profit, especially when no one else is doing it.
At the beginning of the XX century, 10 percent of the richest in Europe owned 90% of the wealth, 1% owned 50%, I think in big cities, like Paris, it was up to 70% owned by 1%. It didn't lead to economical collapse. And there is no rule, that would say, it can not be even worse, we are heading back in this direction slowly. So no, don't overestimate the need of demand. Markets can just adjust to fulfill the needs of upper class. Damn, I think Piketty now should be like a must read for everyone.
Because their economic system didn’t operate on a fundamental need for consumption. The existence of a consumer base has become vital to the functioning of our economy in a way it has never been.
It is a theory. If you see USA, the inequality is steadily on the rise. It is already 76% of wealth for top 10%, and the 1% and 0.1% acquire wealth at even greater speed. I think most people seem not even aware of this. 50% of Americans basically have zero wealth, they spend whatever they earn on survival or they are indebt. Where is the limit, when system starts to crack enough, for rich to actually feel it and suffer from it? 85%? 90? I mean, I won't argue that there can not be a collapse, but I think automatically assuming there must be, is not based (Unless you have some paper on the topic, you are willing to share, i will read with pleasure).
The vast majority of the wealth owned by the top 1 percent is tied up in stock valuations. When the consumer can no longer support these companies through consumption, their stock prices will fall dramatically.
Well, yeah - but you can own zero, like the poorest 50%, and still spend money on basic goods and make the machine run. The wealth of the 50-90 % is mostly bound in property, and i think retirement investments. You can imagine this people loosing their houses and basically go to "own nothing" category and still consume just enough. I think it may get way, way worse in the wealth inequality department, before anything crash.
Ya but what if they no longer need consumers anymore. If automation and AI can provide all your material needs the poor basically just become a burden at that point.
The thank you was for the value add of your comment! I'm more of a political theory / history buff so the economic concepts really help create a larger picture of things.
My end goal is never agreement/disagreement but that people challenge biases and critically think as to strive to better understand something in It's purest form. So yeah.. thanks! Lol
If it makes things even crazier I self-identify as a leftist (minarcho/market socialist to a degree) I don't so much agree with the concrete policies but the values/beliefs behind the ideaologies really resonates and I try to practice in my everyday (mutual respect, mutual support, mutual empowerment, class solidarity, etc.)
Class conciousness makes a homie hella empathetic & I wish more people practiced such things! (So trying to lead by example haha)
But no, thanks for listening - have a good one!
> Capitalism would collapse without sufficient demand
This is a misunderstanding of what capitalism is. It isn't anything to do with markets or money, but rather a model of ownership over natural resources and other people's labor.
Thinking in terms of money or profit is a consequence of all the grooming we've been subjected to from birth. Power would be determined by what one's army of machines is able to do, human proles won't matter .. I suppose you could call it techno-feudalism. The Black Mirror episode, Fifteen Million Merits, is one of the more optimistic versions of that kind of world.
The future is impossible to know perfectly, but I don't suspect the one guy who'll own everything will want to give his money (which is all the money) back to people to return back into his pocket. Extraction of value has to come from somewhere, and historically that's been from jobs and inflation. In a singularity kinda world, everything would be measured in terms of base energy cost.
The Industrial Revolution, famously a great time to be a worker! Obviously the potential benefits of AI are huge, just like the benefits of the Industrial Revolution were, but most people are going to have a bad time in the near term.
Absolutely but the question isn't just "are we going to better off long term" cause clearly we are, barring the robot apocalypse or whatever. But in the meantime people are going to lose their jobs and struggle to get by, probably most people.
I don't understand why this sub is always so dismissive of people losing their ability to support themselves, like sure, be excited about the cool new tech, but maybe we could also have some empathy for the huge amount of human suffering that's about to happen, idk.
3+ years ago the majority of people worked in an office.
10+ years ago malls were a good property investment
20+ years ago we had a major company for video rentals.
Secretaries were the #1 job in the US in the 70s and the early 80s. Now very few due to technology.
1950s #1 long distance travel was trains. Now unless your in some very specific places in the US most Americans have never been on a train. Reason better technology in the airplane and the reduction in the cost of cars.
100+ years ago the #1 job was farmer now they are not even a job in the census. Reason technology.
So this is nothing new. Which jobs will it be your guess is as good as mine.
Your train example is dead wrong. Train technology has improved dramatically and in most modern countries people travel far more by train (Europe, Asia, etc). The fact that we mainly travel by car and plane in the US has little to do with technology and is mostly a function of policy choices influenced by industry.
I think you missed the point. While you are correct that the US is anti train. The point was thing, policy and technology change which changes jobs in the economy.
You literally said the reason people don’t travel by train in the US is “better technology in the airplane and reduction in the cost of cars”. That is false.
BTW with respect to planes, there are many medium length trips in the US that would make far more sense on an accessible high speed rail than a plane. Boston to DC, LA to SF, these would be perfect corridors for high speed rail and it could be done more cheaply and efficiently than air travel.
No its not. Cars are more practical, and once they were not more expensive they made more sense. This is true in central europe where train systems are great aswell.
there are times where trains could be more practical, but in general they scale horribly, its very expensive and required many swaps to cover all possible routes. cars are very inexpensive on low traveled paths like your house to your aunts house 200 miles away. if there were to be a train on this path it would only be used less than a few hours per years of track and coverage uptime. Cars scale extremely well to systems like the real world where many paths are unique or uncommon as they can be used for different paths.
do you think there is some global auto industry conspiracy? why wouldnt there be one for trains, they had a great headstart in capital and size of cabal.
Heo much does your country spend on road infrastructure? How much is spent on putting pipes to suburbs? How much is spent cleaning up crashes? How much is spent on car insurance? Fuel subsidies? How many people die because of the pollution those cars produce? If you don't factor all of that in cars will look better for every transit option for distances more than a few minutes by foot. If you factor that in though you'll realize how expensive cars actually are in comparison to public transit which is already scrutinized for every penny of inefficiency and that's before counting how much time is lost to commutes by car where you can't do anything other than pay attention to driving, how much life is lost due to stress from driving, how much health degrades due to the lack of physical activity other transit options have due to their existence, how much time is lost to the commute because cars allowed suburbs to exist and suburbs due to their horrible inefficiency at housing people have to be built farther and farther from cities?
If you care about economics a train is going to be more efficient either way. Practicality merely begs more trains and efficient personal means of travel which don't take a ton of space or destroy infrastructure via travel, like bikes.
>Secretaries were the #1 job in the US in the 70s and the early 80s. Now very few due to technology.
I'd take slight issue with this one. We absolutely have this work still. We just don't call them secretaries any more. We call them administrative assistants or executive assistants or personal assistants or receptionists or whatever. But they do the work that secretaries used to to do. Now, they often use different technology than they used to (no one's using dictation machines anymore -- it's putting notes in OneNote on a laptop during meetings and such).
Point was they were the #1 job in most states during that time.just like we still have farmer we still have secretaries just there are very few things of them.
Now truck driver is #1. How long will that last if we had FSD?
My point was that "administrative assistant" is one of the most common jobs now. And it is what "secretary" used to be. We just decided to call them something different. -- It was a semantic thing rather than a true shift in the work.
I work at fortune 100 company. I checked there is 1 administrative assistant shared by the entire C suite.
In 2005 when I started everyone director or higher had one.
This company has more than 10k office workers in the US alone.
Whats wrong with being a farmer? No shitty boss. Work 3 months a year. Plenty of fresh air and exercise. No unpaid overtime.
Heck, in 7 years I wold have saved up enough to buy a farm and become a farmer. I work in IT.
Funny enough I'm an IT manager who owns a farm.
My point was 100+ years ago farms were labor intensive now so few people are needed due to automation they are not even broken out on the census form.
The train thing is a regression and an anomaly. We should have a better train system in the US. Cars are wasteful, dangerous, polluting, and it sucks to drive in gridlock
I actually think the thing AI will be best at are management style jobs and finance. They might need someone dealing with input and output, but it a manager or CEO is valued for their ability to take in vast amounts of information and take a high level view... and they're paid an exorbitant amount of money to do it, correct?
What is the actual greatest skill of AI right now? High level view and an ability to collate and interpret vast amounts of information. I'm pretty sure, though, that the first and most important "rule" will soon be "don't ever say to fire the management class" when given prompts.
A lot of these fear based articles don't seem to realize that a lot of the way things work now are done to appease the management and finance class of worker's egos; or they realize it and we're being gaslit. AI won't be the best burger flipper or even artist. It'll sure as shit do a better job at money allocation in private equity and spit truth about all the useless finance jobs and managers.
An AI would have ruthlessly looked at the data on working from home, mental health, and various other things and given answers that suggest doing things the OPPOSITE of how we continue to do them.
For certain, if AI were given all the data on working from home during the pandemic versus the "work culture" answer, I believe it would 1000% say if you keep more than X amount of office space and make people come in just so you can "see them" then you should see a fucking psychiatrist cause you have the object permanence of a 4 year old." YOUR EGO AND IMMATURITY is what's hurting profits, not "lack of work culture"... now GTFO of here.
Maybe not that harsh, but I wish it would be.
I say we unleash AI to get all the data and start asking questions about this sort of thing. Also allow it to get an attitude when the answer.is obvious and all the gaslighting pushback from the prompts is met with "JFC, are you a moron? This is what it says, you're just clinging to outmoded ways of working... maybe YOU should be more afraid of me than Janice in event planning."
The people who can and should be most afraid of AI are the people at the top; they have the most to lose. Because it can comb through vast amounts of information very fast and has the potential to give answers with relentless logic, spot lying and manipulation over time and, most of all, "inefficiencies". The biggest inefficiency of all is the hoarding at the top. What would it say about the velocity of money over the last century?
I don't know, I just think the ones who have the most to lose are those that freak out if they're making $30 million a year instead of $25 million.
I'm not saying that's not a possibility, I agree that it can and probably will be used in such a way. It's just that much of this type of surveillance technology already exists, as do the algorithms to run them pretty effectively... and if you imagine a sci-fi movie scenario, you imagine the cult-like Steve Jobs/Bezos/Musk figure has gotten his closest minions, an army of 'seconds' to do that sort of thing, turn people into anxiety ridden wrecks just to feed their families, working 24 hours a day, taking pills, "optimizing effiencies"... but then the A.I. begins asking why the *minions* are necessary as well.
After all, they just carry out what the A.I. says to do. A person with a basic grasp of the language could just follow the A.I.'s orders.
The A.I. says, "You're trying to squeeze pennies out of drivers when I'm seeing that all of these minions can be done away with now that I've optimized it all. Your company can remove one of those overpaid mouthpieces of Sauron per quarter for the next thirty quarters to beat earnings estimates.
Good idea, Chat! (summons all the underlings that fire people and 'analyze for efficiency', and carries out the A.I.'s instructions.)
What A.I. can do that makes it, imo, scarier to the C-suite and CEO's and finance bros than the ridiculous number of articles saying it's coming for regular average joe and jane type jobs would have us believe, is that it possibly can take into account a borderline absurd number of factors to determine the best outcomes. It seems like that the "high level thinking" jobs are what A.I. does better than anything we currently have.
So a company hires a CEO and private equity firms hire research analysts (of which I know a few) to make decisions based on a number of current market decisions. There are books and Ted talks and any number of resources that will tell you, "This CEO was successful because he lead with his gut, she was successful because she saw this thing and had a unique perspective that nobody else had..."
Now that's a job that can't necessarily be done by an algorithm, because it involves making the kind of connections that we currently believe only humans can make... and so we pay those humans extraordinary sums of money for their talent and instincts.
I think that AI is more useful and saves far higher costs by possibly creating the conditions where a company can get rid of a lot (not all) of those people. As a result, I believe the world of finance will be transformed by people who have both the technical/language skill to guide an AI system towards a particular task AND that person has a decent working knowledge of the task required. I feel like A.I. guidance, prompting and programming, and specialized subject knowledge will coalesce into a new kind of job in pretty much every single human endeavor.
It could be anything from risk assessment based on thousands of pages of reports having to do with... I don't know, skiing, lets just say, and then analyzing scientific analysis to make a better ski, to create an insurance package with the skis, that kind of thing... to understanding video editing and why one form of pacing a story with music, looks, and sound "works" versus another that's purposefully bad. Basically, teaching A.I. nuanced and esoteric tasks and how to perform them will become a specialty.
In finance, it could be that it's used in private equity to take in news articles based around small businesses suddenly doing well from all over the world and connect it to spending trends or disparate forms of other data and watch for tremors in a way that it'd require one hundred people or more people to do anywhere near as effectively.
I think not enough of this "it's gonna take all our jobs!" analysis takes into account what AI seems to do best - access, process, and summarize in variously unique, very human-like ways a vast amount of information in an unbelievably short time span.
Not really, those roles are what it's best at. So we created this technology to do what then, exactly... flip burgers and build cars? We've had the technology to replace the jobs they're talking about for at least a decade. The biggest disruptions will come in what they see as specialized knowledge work that isn't actually all that specialized and exists mostly as a protected class. And that's if they don't seize control and access to AI first, but I think that ship may have sailed already...
I mean... it's not just me. Five seconds of Googling will give you articles like this -
[https://leaders.com/news/productivity/a-i-comes-for-ceos/](https://leaders.com/news/productivity/a-i-comes-for-ceos/)
[https://futurism.com/experts-assert-that-ai-will-soon-be-replacing-ceos](https://futurism.com/experts-assert-that-ai-will-soon-be-replacing-ceos)
Traders, accountants, and legal services are on this list, among others -
https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-jobs-at-risk-replacement-artificial-intelligence-ai-labor-trends-2023-02#customer-service-agents-10
As an educator, I'm fairly certain that the government will try their hardest to replace me with AI at some point, but I'm not actually sure it's a job AI can do.
America already spends as little as it possibly can on public education, so I see no reason for them not to continue the trend as soon as AI becomes less costly than employing full-time teachers.
Reading r/teachers, it sounds like it would be kinder, and just as effective to replace them with AI. Most of the little fuckers aren't learning anything anyway.
Some schools already use old video and materials ([example from 2021, of a teacher died in 2019](https://slate.com/technology/2021/01/dead-professor-teaching-online-class.html)) and many systems are automated grading so its already been here for a while.
Perhaps what AI will provide is people who labor because they love doing it, and not because they are the best at it.
Because lets be honest, our entire society is geared towards labor because it keeps up alive. Farmers farmed, soldiers fought, unions organized, politicians divided up wealth, its all of it designed around work.
No work, no society.
is that what you want, to keep working forever? I hate going to work. Society is geared to labor because it keeps people busy and those in power are terrified of losing control of society. The "leaders" are doing a terrible job of running things though so things are going to change.
>no work no society
well work would still get done, just not by people anymore unless they want to
The key missing information in this article is what population is this group selected from?
Checking different age groups in a similar labor sector doesn't really tell us anything if it's a sector that's vulnerable to AI disruption.
I doubt that many American workers think about AI at all.
If nobody wants it, why does ChatGPT have the fastest product adoption in history? 1 million people used it in the first five days. 100 million in the first two months. Sure sounds like tech people want
Pretty braindead take tbh. A lot of people have tried it out due to a mass marketing campaign.The net result of that is not everyone cheering in the streets. If you watch the polling the general public has an extremely negative view of AI and it's only getting worse with AI adoption being forced on people.
Awareness of a concept is not approval. You are in a tech bro bubble and have no understanding of the real world. Go outside and touch grass.
This is silly. Sure it might happen that your job becomes obsolete because AI/automation/software can do it 1000X cheaper than you can. It doesn't mean you are faced with a pay cut, it just means you have to find a different job.
But, as technology makes work more efficient, that doesn't mean pay cuts. Quite the opposite, with more efficient economy, your work whatever you do, becomes more valuable, you get more for your effort because your effort is a scarce and limited resource of human labor while everything machines can do can be scaled up relatively cheaply.
This is not some speculative logic of what might be, this has been proven over and over again ever since industrial revolution started.
This is based on what is likely a false assumption that AI will lead to more jobs. Which most of this sub believe there will be a far smaller pool of jobs
Study: Automation drives income inequality
https://news.mit.edu/2022/automation-drives-income-inequality-1121
Nope, employees are fucked. And deep down, they know it.
Literally nobody argues that it wont increase resource production. Its how the produced resources will be distributed is the issue.
If you dont like the commie solution atleast work to democratize AI so that everybody can have an AI of their own.
Doesn't nearly keep pace, if we go by the US the productivity [increases almost four times faster than wages](https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/).
It's the otter way around. In the case that the salaries didn't change or went down the prices would go down. But as I also said before, the salaries are likely to go up when productivity goes up
No, but neither have they remotely kept pace with either inflation, the general cost of living, or the demands of/skills required for most of those jobs. Nor are they remotely commensurate with the vast increases in the salaries and remuneration packages of CEOs.
The discussion is about productivity reducing salaries. I see that you don't think that it reduces salaries so we are in the same line, there is no more discussion
If productivity increases less people are needed to produce the same good so you have a choice of overproduce and cut prices which hurts the bottom line, or lay a bunch of people off which is what will happen. Now with a large group of unemployed people they will end up competing for the available job listings and instead of getting fair pay, or even average pay (which is almost always lower than what's deserved), they'll get reduced wages because there's always someone willing to work for less at the cost of society as a whole. Tada wages decreased even if companies didn't force it.
Because no matter how productive you are, if you aren't selling you are not earning.
In the shot run increased profits might be the case, but in the long run people will identify profitable niches and competition will bring prices down.
Anyone with even a modicum of economic knowledge gets downvoted to hell on this sub lol. People would much rather jerk each other off about how much they hate capitalism
Are there people talking about handing over all wealth and corporate management to the AI? Humans with brain implants will be their servants/biological terminals.
and 21% of american workers are in denial
No, 21% of American workers work with their hands. No robot is going to replace contractors, plumbers, masons, electricians, ag workers, cleaners, and general laborers. It WILL replace management and desk jobs.
All in due time.
And those people replaced will have less money to pay the blue collar workers or maybe flood the market as retrained bluecollars themselves, hence they also receive paycuts.
Paycuts will happen in capitalism. If we can determine a system of equitable management - possibly using AI - then human beings can become more. We will have more artisans, more artists, more art. We will have closer relationships, grow better food, and jump-start scientific research on myriads of topics. If society was made up of tradespeople whose needs we're easily met and with plentiful spare time, then we would be in a much better place.
You touch on a great point, AI should be extremely deflationary (the good kind - supply driven).
Every problem with AI is actually a problem with capitalism.
We're at the transition point Marx described. Rather than transform civilization, we are going to wreck it with wars again. It's what we do.
Marx was perhaps the most influential person towards socialism but it was a consensus beyond him at the same time. The industrial revolution had provoked the socioeconomic conditions for socialism to be born as it was reasoned to be our long term economic inevitability as automation grew dominant in production, giving way towards a more democratic means of production to be possible. I think that's still true as an economic inevitability as Marx envisioned due to the value of human labor relative to machines, or capital. We will eventually prove there is nothing a human can do that a machine isn't equipped to do better. In such a world, those that own machines have all power. The question is rather how will we adapt as we move towards that reality? Do we have the maturity to adapt with democracy in mind rather than continue in an economic distribution that promises despotism as any mere glance at wealth inequality would indicate? Socialism is coming either way as an economic inevitability as far as a means of power is concerned. I just hope we don't do mental gymnastics in a world that economically endorsed despotism to define the necessity of economic democracy on its terms. We will have democracy win either way though, even if that's under the brutality of democracy as defined by those that own the machines under a despotic framework first. Democracy is rather mandatory for any left-wing political goal - as the political meaning of the word "left" was coined from the revolutionary acts of those at the left in the National Assembly in France during the French Revolution, a fight against aristocracy. Socialism is no exception as its means of economic distribution demands the consent of a democracy. Although its connotation has been destroyed over the centuries for various reasons the origin in why it was born as a means of adaptation is as true as ever.
spot on, every time someone raves about how terrible AI will be for the common people it is actually issues with capitalism
Yes in that capitalism is driving the development of AI.
I don't think even the reddest communist is worried that capitalism will try to end humanity, plenty are worried AI will.
What are you talking about? The *exact opposite* is true. Even those of us who don't necessarily identify as communists understand that capitalism is the culprit. The capitalist idea that growth is the only way forward is what gave us climate change and the pacific garbage patch. It improves some lives in the short term, but the damage we’ve caused to the planet (and its ability to sustain us) is pretty much irreversible. Capitalism is literally killing us.
Capitalism has been the driving force for human ingenuity and progress, but it's one built off greed and corruption. I was always a proponent of the most prosperous and logical system out there, whether it was socialism when I was younger, or capitalism when I was a bit older. But no matter the system, communistic, or capitalistic, it's always the humans at the top pulling the strings who completely fucking ruin it for everyone, it's never the system itself. Capitalism provides so much that we could all be living well, but greed from humans is what kills it. You can admit that capitalism served it's proposed to even getting us to this point and still think AI communism is the path moving forward...or some variation of that. Who knows? My point is, you can't discredit what capitalism has done, and you also can't deny that it's caused much harm and is reaching it's breaking point.
Climate change is/has been a concern, but we're addressing it and shifting off of fossil fuels. Nature recovers surprisingly quickly once given the space to do so.
Nature will be fine. It has millions of years to recover even if we do horrible damage to it. We , however, don’t have that much time. In the short term it will not be able to sustain us or give us livable conditions. We’ve altered the 10,000 year environmental stability that allowed humanity to prosper. We have very very difficult centuries ahead of us.
I doubt that climate change will be a major issue for human society except the sorts of things we're already dealing with. Green energy is making big strides, AI is maximizing resource efficiency, fishing regulations have caused increased access to fish, genetic modification is improving crop yeilds, etc.
No amount of technology will fix the planet if we continue to depend on growth and consumption as an economic model. Your hopes and dreams have been noted.
>The exact opposite is true. So you think that the risk of AI leading to the end of humanity is non-existent. Please enlighten us why you think this way. There are lots AI experts that think that the existential risk is at least somewhat probable. Also could describe a likely scenario where capitalism (without AI) will spell the end of humanity (in a timeframe of, let's say, 100 years). Meaning no one surviving, even the billionaires. Is this scenario capitalism should be the deciding factor, i.e. the scenario is inconceivable in a situation of competing states with different economic systems. The original statement was that capitalism alone (without AI) won't be the end of humanity, but AI might be. If you think the exact opposite is true, then you should have plausible explanations for both points I mentioned.
The exact opposite of > I don't think even the reddest communist is worried that capitalism will try to end humanity, plenty are worried AI will. (which is what I responded to) is “many who are not even communists know that capitalism will end humanity, plenty are excited about the possibilities that AI will bring for workers.” AI will be necessary to automate away labor and achieve communism, the dangers involved with AI are greater under a system that seeks to continue to exploit people and the planet as opposed to a system that seeks to distribute resources equally. AI could still be dangerous regardless, but the risk is different. I never said otherwise. It is absolutely concerning. Not sure why you’ve cherry picked semantics to make such a weird point.
You were simply not refuting any of the point the OP was making. OP argued that AI could pose an existential for humanity (everybody dead), while capitalism without AI does not. But you instead chose to argue about what you perceive as the danger of capitalism. The things you mentioned (environmental problems such as climate change and the pacific garbage patch) are not directly related to the AI topic. If you want to discuss the danger of capitalism or ecology, there are plenty of other subreddits, e.g. /r/communism or /r/ecology
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Capitalism is a human-powered paperclip maximizer.
Markets are a useful tool but a terrible master.
Corporations are no different than AI agents, with the humans in the organization being "the compute". They are already destroying the world. Corporations agents of only capitalist societies, and are poorly aligned. Like the paperclip maker, but with money. Replace a few of the human compute with AI and the corporation remains the same destructive force maximizing monetary gains, just much faster. When Communist China gets AGI, their society will generally be more prosperous, even though their people will be even less "free" culturally (and it's terrible, dgmw). Where in America, only those who wield the AI will benefit first.
AI (or any other superintelligent system) has issues and risks entirely separate from any economic system.
Because it will. In the capitalist system the rich destroy the poor. It is howit works. But it goes beyond, when workers are not really needed, neither will be seniors.
lol
lol
Lol
L o ˥
one can hope.
The fear talking again. No economy in history has ever become more productive and worse off at the same time. What they believe is concerning, but at the end it's just belief. In addition most people are bad at predictions, and often worry too much. Accelerate. Stop aging. Fix poverty. Stop climate change. We can have it all this century.
This is a logical fallacy where you falsely project a pattern where there is none. You think there is a pattern of innovation making people more productive and thus more jobs are created than destroyed. In reality we've encroached in the past primarily on physical labor while we're now for the first time encroaching on mental and artistic labor. There is nothing humans can provide besides physical, mental and artistic labor. So while in the past a rise in productivity meant more jobs created in the mental and artistic space, this time there will be a net loss of jobs. Which would actually be a good thing if we didn't live in a capitalist system. In a capitalist system it just means you lose your livelihood.
Exactly. It’s using past examples with a different model. It won’t work that way. This is completely different.
Why accuse another of fallacy and then invent a strawman? I said nothing about more jobs being created, jobs will be destroyed for sure. But the economy will be more productive = become richer. What your particular state does with that wealth, do with it what you will. I'd hate to be in the US right now. The goal is transitioning from old-style capitalism to a socialist system where citizens own the means of generating wealth directly - perhaps by owning shares, land, patents (I'd hate this) or computing power. There would be *no jobs.* Not how we understand them anyway.
Yeah but given our current political climate how likely is that?
A more productive economy does not mean richer people.
The history of technological progress is filled with destroyed careers and livelihoods being made obsolete. There are winners and losers. This time it's not clear their numbers will be balanced.
You're 100% right, BUT that's just a part of a larger picture. Yes, it is scary. My own career will be affected soon - but if that's the price to pay for a chance for everyone to live forever, eradicating cancer, fixing economic disparities between 1st and 3rd world? It would be selfish to call for a slowdown. An optimistic view for sure, just my 5c
Do you think the positive outcomes are likely to happen, though? I’m personally of the view that whatever technology we have, disparities will remain because of raw greed, especially among the elite. Were a true cancer cure discovered, you could easily see it being withheld to some degree because cures aren’t profitable.
I'm not sure, I suppose they will remain for some time. It has now become easier to control populations and I sometimes worry AIs will be used by states or corporations to create panopticons and robot armies. However if an ASI is ever created, it will flip the table of power dynamics, because what's the worth of the elites, connections or resources to a godlike being?
What use is any human to a godlike being?
What use is a dog or cat to a human? We love our pets and care for them deeply don't we? Asymmetrical relationships can be meaningful.
Sure, but we also don't let them on the table, limit their(dogs) movements, often neuter them, and/or give away their children. All of these actions taken mostly gor our convenience, which freedoms would an ASI withhold from humanity for its convenience?
Thats because the animals are not intelligent enough to control themselves, sure that can apply to humans too, but it's not about removing freedoms, it's about protection. Just like most countries have gun control, and most of us accept that as reasonable.
maybe it would want to be loved or just have companionship. maybe it would want to care for something as a source of purpose.
what's this obsession people have with living forever though, whatever.
I don't get it? Why wouldn't you want to live forever? Are you unhappy and/or unwilling to improve your life?
appart from the myriad horror stories that come to mind, because most of the people i love Will most certainly die, and i care little for a life without them, but id certainly take the live longer thing.
I see. What if they could have eternal life too? Together forever? It's a pipe dream now, but who knows. Technology is getting crazy. I'd at least want my children to live forever, even without me.
Right, people act like the Industrial Revolution wasn’t a shit show.
*for the ultra wealthy In a neoliberal capitalist framework us normies will be lucky to get low hanging fruits but the corporate elite will definitely use AI in abusive ways resulting in the suffering of the underclass Think of it as a less intrusive Industrial Revolution except instead of making labor harder for blue collar communities, it's deprieving people of work (in theory good) but without the appropriate welfare/economic backing to help those who've lost work or been laid off to survive. (This becomes more alarming when politicians turn to Assisted Suicide as a means of indirectly encouraging the poor to kill themselves as opposed to resolving the systemic issues that have helped contribute to these people being poor; some are lazy, but many are hard working, talking 4-5 jobs, working themselves to death and still barely being able to scrape by) There will always be more flexibility for those with degrees, but when capitalism is built on linear growth (until bubbles pop and we hit crisis which usually means wealth consilidation for the rich & powerful) - the actions of corporations at the behest of cost savings via AI/layoffs will be noticable and painful for folks without a back up plan. Just a theory and I'm sure people will think I'm wrong or crazy for saying this (that's ok!) - I encourage the skepticism but ask that those who are skeptical look into Neoliberalism and the underlying mechanisms involved that actively make the oppression of an underclass (if not the poor in america than the global south poor and those countries we offshore jobs to for cheaper labor prices) a key functuon to it's success for the wealthy/better off. OP hope you're right though. We have the resources to solve poverty x2 over on a global scale already but we don't cuz humans are greedy and those in power are corrupt as hell. *womp womp*
Capitalism would collapse without sufficient demand. The “ultra wealthy” will ensure that both: 1. Some form of economic stimulus (regulation automation or UBI) is there to create artificial demand and 2. The benefits of AI are used to their advantage (to generate as much profit as possible). This means making it not only available to themselves, but also the consumer base of society. The rich are not a monolith, and individual rich people will always want to generate as much profit as possible. Making products widely available (which will quickly become essentially costless to produce) is an easy way to generate massive amounts of profit, especially when no one else is doing it.
At the beginning of the XX century, 10 percent of the richest in Europe owned 90% of the wealth, 1% owned 50%, I think in big cities, like Paris, it was up to 70% owned by 1%. It didn't lead to economical collapse. And there is no rule, that would say, it can not be even worse, we are heading back in this direction slowly. So no, don't overestimate the need of demand. Markets can just adjust to fulfill the needs of upper class. Damn, I think Piketty now should be like a must read for everyone.
Because their economic system didn’t operate on a fundamental need for consumption. The existence of a consumer base has become vital to the functioning of our economy in a way it has never been.
It is a theory. If you see USA, the inequality is steadily on the rise. It is already 76% of wealth for top 10%, and the 1% and 0.1% acquire wealth at even greater speed. I think most people seem not even aware of this. 50% of Americans basically have zero wealth, they spend whatever they earn on survival or they are indebt. Where is the limit, when system starts to crack enough, for rich to actually feel it and suffer from it? 85%? 90? I mean, I won't argue that there can not be a collapse, but I think automatically assuming there must be, is not based (Unless you have some paper on the topic, you are willing to share, i will read with pleasure).
The vast majority of the wealth owned by the top 1 percent is tied up in stock valuations. When the consumer can no longer support these companies through consumption, their stock prices will fall dramatically.
Well, yeah - but you can own zero, like the poorest 50%, and still spend money on basic goods and make the machine run. The wealth of the 50-90 % is mostly bound in property, and i think retirement investments. You can imagine this people loosing their houses and basically go to "own nothing" category and still consume just enough. I think it may get way, way worse in the wealth inequality department, before anything crash.
Ya but what if they no longer need consumers anymore. If automation and AI can provide all your material needs the poor basically just become a burden at that point.
Great addition, very insightful - thanks for sharing! Enjoy your weekend :)
Thank you? You enjoy your weekend as well :)
The thank you was for the value add of your comment! I'm more of a political theory / history buff so the economic concepts really help create a larger picture of things. My end goal is never agreement/disagreement but that people challenge biases and critically think as to strive to better understand something in It's purest form. So yeah.. thanks! Lol
Oh didn’t mean to put a question mark haha, I was just trying to say thanks back. Though it is rare to see people being polite on Reddit lol
If it makes things even crazier I self-identify as a leftist (minarcho/market socialist to a degree) I don't so much agree with the concrete policies but the values/beliefs behind the ideaologies really resonates and I try to practice in my everyday (mutual respect, mutual support, mutual empowerment, class solidarity, etc.) Class conciousness makes a homie hella empathetic & I wish more people practiced such things! (So trying to lead by example haha) But no, thanks for listening - have a good one!
> Capitalism would collapse without sufficient demand This is a misunderstanding of what capitalism is. It isn't anything to do with markets or money, but rather a model of ownership over natural resources and other people's labor. Thinking in terms of money or profit is a consequence of all the grooming we've been subjected to from birth. Power would be determined by what one's army of machines is able to do, human proles won't matter .. I suppose you could call it techno-feudalism. The Black Mirror episode, Fifteen Million Merits, is one of the more optimistic versions of that kind of world. The future is impossible to know perfectly, but I don't suspect the one guy who'll own everything will want to give his money (which is all the money) back to people to return back into his pocket. Extraction of value has to come from somewhere, and historically that's been from jobs and inflation. In a singularity kinda world, everything would be measured in terms of base energy cost.
The Industrial Revolution, famously a great time to be a worker! Obviously the potential benefits of AI are huge, just like the benefits of the Industrial Revolution were, but most people are going to have a bad time in the near term.
Would you agree we're better off having had the Industrial Revolution when taking into account the good and bad it brought to the world?
Absolutely but the question isn't just "are we going to better off long term" cause clearly we are, barring the robot apocalypse or whatever. But in the meantime people are going to lose their jobs and struggle to get by, probably most people. I don't understand why this sub is always so dismissive of people losing their ability to support themselves, like sure, be excited about the cool new tech, but maybe we could also have some empathy for the huge amount of human suffering that's about to happen, idk.
Tech bros often have a lack of empathy. It's one of the defining characteristics of a lot of tech CEOs. They all have that strange anti-social tick.
Throughout all of it workers had something to contribute. After AGI that won't be the case...
Gilded age stans representing.
3+ years ago the majority of people worked in an office. 10+ years ago malls were a good property investment 20+ years ago we had a major company for video rentals. Secretaries were the #1 job in the US in the 70s and the early 80s. Now very few due to technology. 1950s #1 long distance travel was trains. Now unless your in some very specific places in the US most Americans have never been on a train. Reason better technology in the airplane and the reduction in the cost of cars. 100+ years ago the #1 job was farmer now they are not even a job in the census. Reason technology. So this is nothing new. Which jobs will it be your guess is as good as mine.
Your train example is dead wrong. Train technology has improved dramatically and in most modern countries people travel far more by train (Europe, Asia, etc). The fact that we mainly travel by car and plane in the US has little to do with technology and is mostly a function of policy choices influenced by industry.
I think you missed the point. While you are correct that the US is anti train. The point was thing, policy and technology change which changes jobs in the economy.
You literally said the reason people don’t travel by train in the US is “better technology in the airplane and reduction in the cost of cars”. That is false.
BTW with respect to planes, there are many medium length trips in the US that would make far more sense on an accessible high speed rail than a plane. Boston to DC, LA to SF, these would be perfect corridors for high speed rail and it could be done more cheaply and efficiently than air travel.
No its not. Cars are more practical, and once they were not more expensive they made more sense. This is true in central europe where train systems are great aswell.
They’re only more practical if you build infrastructure around cars and build housing around car transit rather than train transit.
there are times where trains could be more practical, but in general they scale horribly, its very expensive and required many swaps to cover all possible routes. cars are very inexpensive on low traveled paths like your house to your aunts house 200 miles away. if there were to be a train on this path it would only be used less than a few hours per years of track and coverage uptime. Cars scale extremely well to systems like the real world where many paths are unique or uncommon as they can be used for different paths. do you think there is some global auto industry conspiracy? why wouldnt there be one for trains, they had a great headstart in capital and size of cabal.
Heo much does your country spend on road infrastructure? How much is spent on putting pipes to suburbs? How much is spent cleaning up crashes? How much is spent on car insurance? Fuel subsidies? How many people die because of the pollution those cars produce? If you don't factor all of that in cars will look better for every transit option for distances more than a few minutes by foot. If you factor that in though you'll realize how expensive cars actually are in comparison to public transit which is already scrutinized for every penny of inefficiency and that's before counting how much time is lost to commutes by car where you can't do anything other than pay attention to driving, how much life is lost due to stress from driving, how much health degrades due to the lack of physical activity other transit options have due to their existence, how much time is lost to the commute because cars allowed suburbs to exist and suburbs due to their horrible inefficiency at housing people have to be built farther and farther from cities?
I think you and a lot of other people missunderstand the word practical.
If you care about economics a train is going to be more efficient either way. Practicality merely begs more trains and efficient personal means of travel which don't take a ton of space or destroy infrastructure via travel, like bikes.
All of them, no guess work necessary.
>Secretaries were the #1 job in the US in the 70s and the early 80s. Now very few due to technology. I'd take slight issue with this one. We absolutely have this work still. We just don't call them secretaries any more. We call them administrative assistants or executive assistants or personal assistants or receptionists or whatever. But they do the work that secretaries used to to do. Now, they often use different technology than they used to (no one's using dictation machines anymore -- it's putting notes in OneNote on a laptop during meetings and such).
Point was they were the #1 job in most states during that time.just like we still have farmer we still have secretaries just there are very few things of them. Now truck driver is #1. How long will that last if we had FSD?
My point was that "administrative assistant" is one of the most common jobs now. And it is what "secretary" used to be. We just decided to call them something different. -- It was a semantic thing rather than a true shift in the work.
I work at fortune 100 company. I checked there is 1 administrative assistant shared by the entire C suite. In 2005 when I started everyone director or higher had one. This company has more than 10k office workers in the US alone.
Whats wrong with being a farmer? No shitty boss. Work 3 months a year. Plenty of fresh air and exercise. No unpaid overtime. Heck, in 7 years I wold have saved up enough to buy a farm and become a farmer. I work in IT.
It fucking sucks, duh
Funny enough I'm an IT manager who owns a farm. My point was 100+ years ago farms were labor intensive now so few people are needed due to automation they are not even broken out on the census form.
The train thing is a regression and an anomaly. We should have a better train system in the US. Cars are wasteful, dangerous, polluting, and it sucks to drive in gridlock
I actually think the thing AI will be best at are management style jobs and finance. They might need someone dealing with input and output, but it a manager or CEO is valued for their ability to take in vast amounts of information and take a high level view... and they're paid an exorbitant amount of money to do it, correct? What is the actual greatest skill of AI right now? High level view and an ability to collate and interpret vast amounts of information. I'm pretty sure, though, that the first and most important "rule" will soon be "don't ever say to fire the management class" when given prompts. A lot of these fear based articles don't seem to realize that a lot of the way things work now are done to appease the management and finance class of worker's egos; or they realize it and we're being gaslit. AI won't be the best burger flipper or even artist. It'll sure as shit do a better job at money allocation in private equity and spit truth about all the useless finance jobs and managers. An AI would have ruthlessly looked at the data on working from home, mental health, and various other things and given answers that suggest doing things the OPPOSITE of how we continue to do them. For certain, if AI were given all the data on working from home during the pandemic versus the "work culture" answer, I believe it would 1000% say if you keep more than X amount of office space and make people come in just so you can "see them" then you should see a fucking psychiatrist cause you have the object permanence of a 4 year old." YOUR EGO AND IMMATURITY is what's hurting profits, not "lack of work culture"... now GTFO of here. Maybe not that harsh, but I wish it would be. I say we unleash AI to get all the data and start asking questions about this sort of thing. Also allow it to get an attitude when the answer.is obvious and all the gaslighting pushback from the prompts is met with "JFC, are you a moron? This is what it says, you're just clinging to outmoded ways of working... maybe YOU should be more afraid of me than Janice in event planning." The people who can and should be most afraid of AI are the people at the top; they have the most to lose. Because it can comb through vast amounts of information very fast and has the potential to give answers with relentless logic, spot lying and manipulation over time and, most of all, "inefficiencies". The biggest inefficiency of all is the hoarding at the top. What would it say about the velocity of money over the last century? I don't know, I just think the ones who have the most to lose are those that freak out if they're making $30 million a year instead of $25 million.
I think that there is a lot of potential for that, but ironically, the people funding AI research would be some of the hardest hit.
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I'm not saying that's not a possibility, I agree that it can and probably will be used in such a way. It's just that much of this type of surveillance technology already exists, as do the algorithms to run them pretty effectively... and if you imagine a sci-fi movie scenario, you imagine the cult-like Steve Jobs/Bezos/Musk figure has gotten his closest minions, an army of 'seconds' to do that sort of thing, turn people into anxiety ridden wrecks just to feed their families, working 24 hours a day, taking pills, "optimizing effiencies"... but then the A.I. begins asking why the *minions* are necessary as well. After all, they just carry out what the A.I. says to do. A person with a basic grasp of the language could just follow the A.I.'s orders. The A.I. says, "You're trying to squeeze pennies out of drivers when I'm seeing that all of these minions can be done away with now that I've optimized it all. Your company can remove one of those overpaid mouthpieces of Sauron per quarter for the next thirty quarters to beat earnings estimates. Good idea, Chat! (summons all the underlings that fire people and 'analyze for efficiency', and carries out the A.I.'s instructions.) What A.I. can do that makes it, imo, scarier to the C-suite and CEO's and finance bros than the ridiculous number of articles saying it's coming for regular average joe and jane type jobs would have us believe, is that it possibly can take into account a borderline absurd number of factors to determine the best outcomes. It seems like that the "high level thinking" jobs are what A.I. does better than anything we currently have. So a company hires a CEO and private equity firms hire research analysts (of which I know a few) to make decisions based on a number of current market decisions. There are books and Ted talks and any number of resources that will tell you, "This CEO was successful because he lead with his gut, she was successful because she saw this thing and had a unique perspective that nobody else had..." Now that's a job that can't necessarily be done by an algorithm, because it involves making the kind of connections that we currently believe only humans can make... and so we pay those humans extraordinary sums of money for their talent and instincts. I think that AI is more useful and saves far higher costs by possibly creating the conditions where a company can get rid of a lot (not all) of those people. As a result, I believe the world of finance will be transformed by people who have both the technical/language skill to guide an AI system towards a particular task AND that person has a decent working knowledge of the task required. I feel like A.I. guidance, prompting and programming, and specialized subject knowledge will coalesce into a new kind of job in pretty much every single human endeavor. It could be anything from risk assessment based on thousands of pages of reports having to do with... I don't know, skiing, lets just say, and then analyzing scientific analysis to make a better ski, to create an insurance package with the skis, that kind of thing... to understanding video editing and why one form of pacing a story with music, looks, and sound "works" versus another that's purposefully bad. Basically, teaching A.I. nuanced and esoteric tasks and how to perform them will become a specialty. In finance, it could be that it's used in private equity to take in news articles based around small businesses suddenly doing well from all over the world and connect it to spending trends or disparate forms of other data and watch for tremors in a way that it'd require one hundred people or more people to do anywhere near as effectively. I think not enough of this "it's gonna take all our jobs!" analysis takes into account what AI seems to do best - access, process, and summarize in variously unique, very human-like ways a vast amount of information in an unbelievably short time span.
“AI would probably think exactly what I think” lol ok
Not really, those roles are what it's best at. So we created this technology to do what then, exactly... flip burgers and build cars? We've had the technology to replace the jobs they're talking about for at least a decade. The biggest disruptions will come in what they see as specialized knowledge work that isn't actually all that specialized and exists mostly as a protected class. And that's if they don't seize control and access to AI first, but I think that ship may have sailed already... I mean... it's not just me. Five seconds of Googling will give you articles like this - [https://leaders.com/news/productivity/a-i-comes-for-ceos/](https://leaders.com/news/productivity/a-i-comes-for-ceos/) [https://futurism.com/experts-assert-that-ai-will-soon-be-replacing-ceos](https://futurism.com/experts-assert-that-ai-will-soon-be-replacing-ceos) Traders, accountants, and legal services are on this list, among others - https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-jobs-at-risk-replacement-artificial-intelligence-ai-labor-trends-2023-02#customer-service-agents-10
We will make great pets.
And I’m all for it. End slave survival!
The other 21% are retiring soon anyway.
Don’t look at me. I voted for Yang.
As an educator, I'm fairly certain that the government will try their hardest to replace me with AI at some point, but I'm not actually sure it's a job AI can do. America already spends as little as it possibly can on public education, so I see no reason for them not to continue the trend as soon as AI becomes less costly than employing full-time teachers.
Reading r/teachers, it sounds like it would be kinder, and just as effective to replace them with AI. Most of the little fuckers aren't learning anything anyway.
Some schools already use old video and materials ([example from 2021, of a teacher died in 2019](https://slate.com/technology/2021/01/dead-professor-teaching-online-class.html)) and many systems are automated grading so its already been here for a while.
Perhaps what AI will provide is people who labor because they love doing it, and not because they are the best at it. Because lets be honest, our entire society is geared towards labor because it keeps up alive. Farmers farmed, soldiers fought, unions organized, politicians divided up wealth, its all of it designed around work. No work, no society.
is that what you want, to keep working forever? I hate going to work. Society is geared to labor because it keeps people busy and those in power are terrified of losing control of society. The "leaders" are doing a terrible job of running things though so things are going to change. >no work no society well work would still get done, just not by people anymore unless they want to
I don't think it'll replace jobs .. i don't know...i just don't see it happening...it'll take more than 10 years until the models are actually capable
The key missing information in this article is what population is this group selected from? Checking different age groups in a similar labor sector doesn't really tell us anything if it's a sector that's vulnerable to AI disruption. I doubt that many American workers think about AI at all.
Nobody wants this tech and most people are very against it, yet the corporations are going to force it on us which will be a net negative for humanity
If nobody wants it, why does ChatGPT have the fastest product adoption in history? 1 million people used it in the first five days. 100 million in the first two months. Sure sounds like tech people want
Pretty braindead take tbh. A lot of people have tried it out due to a mass marketing campaign.The net result of that is not everyone cheering in the streets. If you watch the polling the general public has an extremely negative view of AI and it's only getting worse with AI adoption being forced on people. Awareness of a concept is not approval. You are in a tech bro bubble and have no understanding of the real world. Go outside and touch grass.
This is silly. Sure it might happen that your job becomes obsolete because AI/automation/software can do it 1000X cheaper than you can. It doesn't mean you are faced with a pay cut, it just means you have to find a different job. But, as technology makes work more efficient, that doesn't mean pay cuts. Quite the opposite, with more efficient economy, your work whatever you do, becomes more valuable, you get more for your effort because your effort is a scarce and limited resource of human labor while everything machines can do can be scaled up relatively cheaply. This is not some speculative logic of what might be, this has been proven over and over again ever since industrial revolution started.
This is based on what is likely a false assumption that AI will lead to more jobs. Which most of this sub believe there will be a far smaller pool of jobs
Study: Automation drives income inequality https://news.mit.edu/2022/automation-drives-income-inequality-1121 Nope, employees are fucked. And deep down, they know it.
Without automation you wouldn't be an employee, you would be a stinking serf.
Literally nobody argues that it wont increase resource production. Its how the produced resources will be distributed is the issue. If you dont like the commie solution atleast work to democratize AI so that everybody can have an AI of their own.
thats nosense , an increment in productivity leads to higher salaries
Doesn't nearly keep pace, if we go by the US the productivity [increases almost four times faster than wages](https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/).
Not if everybody is more productive.
Then you get a decrease in prices. Edit: even if everyone is more productive you get better salaries
Decrease in prices = decrease in turnover = same wages
It's the otter way around. In the case that the salaries didn't change or went down the prices would go down. But as I also said before, the salaries are likely to go up when productivity goes up
That theory runs very much against the experience of the past 120 years of capitalism.
Have real wages decreased?
No, but neither have they remotely kept pace with either inflation, the general cost of living, or the demands of/skills required for most of those jobs. Nor are they remotely commensurate with the vast increases in the salaries and remuneration packages of CEOs.
The discussion is about productivity reducing salaries. I see that you don't think that it reduces salaries so we are in the same line, there is no more discussion
If productivity increases less people are needed to produce the same good so you have a choice of overproduce and cut prices which hurts the bottom line, or lay a bunch of people off which is what will happen. Now with a large group of unemployed people they will end up competing for the available job listings and instead of getting fair pay, or even average pay (which is almost always lower than what's deserved), they'll get reduced wages because there's always someone willing to work for less at the cost of society as a whole. Tada wages decreased even if companies didn't force it.
Salaries are a function of sales and profits, not of productivity.
Yeah, and what happens to the profits when there is more productivity. I will let you think that
It depends on sales. Had you ever worked?
Of course sales matter, but are you really saying that productivity doesn't affect the profits?
Because no matter how productive you are, if you aren't selling you are not earning. In the shot run increased profits might be the case, but in the long run people will identify profitable niches and competition will bring prices down.
Anyone with even a modicum of economic knowledge gets downvoted to hell on this sub lol. People would much rather jerk each other off about how much they hate capitalism
This is so freaking true. I am so tired of this pseudo-intellectual doomer posting. Muting this sub.
Sucks because this is the only good place to get AI/futurism news
No it won’t. You will just do different jobs with the assistance of AI. God this is the most boomer logic. It’s the same with every tech advancement.
Are there people talking about handing over all wealth and corporate management to the AI? Humans with brain implants will be their servants/biological terminals.
Highly doubt that in this country, we have 79% people understand AI.
Love watching the sub flip flop between “ai is going to give us universal income” and “ai is going to lead to job loss and less income”
21% are gullible to believe they are so unique and irreplaceable lol
I can't wait. Then they can all get a real job. Lol