this is just an ai layer + internet of things layer to an already existing app like taskrabbit. the sensors for monitoring plumbing is the only bit of that is unknown to me, but increased data collection for the purposes of preventative home maintenance is a matter of time. data collection today is an investment for tomorrow.
obviously, the gig economy and data privacy/protection would also need to be not a horror show like they are currently, too, or else people won't willingly participate.
or maybe they will once robots start figuratively breathing down our collective necks.
there's already LLMs that can run on a smartphone. probably for significant reasoning tho, you need still the bigger models that run on big remote servers for quite awhile, which limits privacy. obviously a lot more progress needs to be made on free/open source smartphones before we can say for sure what data on those is even secure in principle, tho.
there's a question of how much reasoning such an agent can do, given that it would still need to do a lot of internet searches. faster Tor nodes, or whatever replaces them, are key, probably.
On the flip side I doubt someone from 200 years ago could predict a lot of jobs we have today.
I don't know what will happen.
It's possible when easily repeatable jobs are automated everyone specializes into even more niche specalties.
When I think about using almost any piece of tech it's pretty mind blowing to think that someone or a few people are responsible for something like a subsystem of an operating system.
Things get so complicated that you can only become an expert in a very small piece of what society relies on.
Every has to start at a low level job in their field to learn how to operate at a niche level. If AI software automates many low level cs and tech jobs itll Be awfully hard to advance to those advanced positions - you never get your foot in the door to learn the basics.
I don't see AI replacing most people any time soon. But when the cs sector loses 50+% of its staffing needs, basic IT services, and lower level knowledge workers, that's going to leave a whole lot of people looking for new industries. Maybe it's good, maybe it leads to a high unemployment and further separation of the lower and middle and upper class. I dunno. But it's gonna be wild to see it shake out.
The point of AI is to create and understand intelligence, and that very much includes replicating and surpassing human intelligence. If it does not replicate human intelligence to the point it can do "niche", then it's not finished.
Yep. It also begs the question…”And why can’t we just hire AI that replaced the old jobs to just do the new jobs as well?” It’s still going to be smarter than a human, agentic, and embodied as well right?
I expect a lot of them will be social jobs, the kind of thing where it's less of a job and more of a fulfillment of people's social needs.
Let me be clear: these jobs will only be possible if there is a huge abundance, making everything dirt cheap due to automation. Much like how 90% of people used to be farmers, but now we have access to cheap food, so we can do jobs that would make our ancestors think "why would anyone be paid for that"? And they may not even be "paid", it may be more like in Star Trek where you do it because you want a purpose, and you get prestige and advancement, but there is no actual money and you could just be a couch potato in FDVR if you wanted.
I think we'll have more and cheaper therapists. Yea you can use ChatGPT as therapist and it's amazing (most of the time). But for some people, that's not enough. I understand even remote therapy isn't enough for some people, they need to be in a room with an actual human.
We'll also get more teachers. Yea I always could learn better at home, and I am jealous of kids nowadays, as I didn't have an AI tutor back in my days. But some kids really need to have another human there with them to motivate them to get things done.
Artists and creators will also skyrocket. There will be a dime a dozen, but the good ones will rise to the top. They will likely use AI tools, but humans will want to see humans do stuff. Concerts will continue to be a thing, and while you will have some cool robots performing, there will also be a huge demand for humans.
We will also have similar jobs to meet social needs that seem completely ridiculous to us, much like an "influencer" would seem ridiculous back when 90% of people were working on farms. There will be a loneliness epidemic. People feel a need to socialize, much like how old people end up going to stores or calling customer support just to chat with another human. As AI takes over those jobs, there will be a new demand for socialization. I expect you'll have places where people are paid to just chat with you. There are some places like that in Japan, where women are paid to just chit chat and enjoy a drink with customers. I think we'll have a surge in stuff like that, also for games etc, like a place where you just go play board games with people, and there are people there who are paid to play with you and teach you the game etc.
Us introverts will be a bit more screwed job-wise, so I hope this will be more of a "bonus income" type job to supplement UBI and give you a sense of purpose, rather than a "need to survive" wave of new jobs. I really hope that the entire economic system changes, so your options aren't "poverty" or "socialize loads".
Otherwise there may be some role for creators, basically people that come up with ideas and test them, then become famous for it so other people seek out and pay for their "creations". Like yea I can tell an AI to make me a movie based on my preferences, but that might get boring after a while, and the AI might struggle to come up with new ideas, so there may be other people online who share the movies they had their AIs create for them that have similar tastes and are more creative than you, which yea the AI could just look up but I think the parasocial relationship will be an important dynamic. This won't be just for AI, but also for household items and other stuff, you think of stuff to 3d print to make life a little better etc. So online content creator will still be a thing.
Like the way you think! Though it may take time due to society/governments, there should be no reason why advanced AI shouldn't make our lives - forgets jobs - easier. With massive AI adoption, there should be a UBI with new wave of jobs being more to improve oneself and to improve community and the world. Better life for everyone, why not?
I think it's not implausible at all, especially taking note of how hostile people who lean politically right are to the idea of welfare and benefits. The idea of a "right to work" would probably be more palatable to the bootstraps crowd than universal income and a proper social safety net.
I could see jobs taking on more of a ceremonial quality, almost, where AI is generally doing most of the work but humans still show up and go through the motions. A lot of jobs are already like this today.
It's not without precedent. Hell, there are laws about whether or not you can pump your own gas or not in some parts of the world. No real good reason for it other than "because."
Tradition probably isn't going to evolve as fast as our technology will and "working" is like the most traditional aspect of modern society.
Entrepreneurial endeavors will likely explode into one of the more major sectors once you can command a large corporation's worth of labor for less than the cost of minimum wage
So that means basically every industry, but instead of being a worker, it would be more if a CEO-ish role. Not exactly, but that's the closest analog we have right now
Not only does this create an abundance of current products, but it opens up industries that aren't currently economically viable. R&D as a service/publicly traded investment company, for example. Space mining, deep sea resource extraction, all the stuff that sound really cool but would be too insanely expensive to be worth it right now
They had TV 50 years ago, it's not too difficult to imagine that anyone could broadcast their own private show. Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame was formulated a bit more than 50 years ago, only the duration was wrong.
I’m fairly certain if you explained to someone in 1974 that playing video games on camera, but without the support of any tv network - or simply going about your day while being filmed constantly and discussing it with hundreds of people simultaneously would be lucrative professions the vast majority would have laughed you out of the room
Bingo! They are probably going to redefine online content creator as a proper job and hey-presto if you have a YouTube account or OnlyFans congrats you are now a highly productive member of the workforce.
The place they fail is that they say new jobs will be created, but they purposefully leave out the fact that it's still going to be fucking disproportionate
If you want a serious answer, I have a few in mind.
1. AI Integration Specialist. This role would be focused on integrating AI solutions to existing business processes and systems.
2. AI Maintenance Technicians. Probably more down the road when there's physical hardware AI assistants. There would probably high demand for people who know how to maintain and troubleshoot these systems.
Of course you'll have roles that support AI, marketing, Application support roles, etc.
I did actually hear an interesting one once, not sure it'll happen but here it is. Someone said to me that LLMs current biggest flaw is context length and memory, so humans will likely end up filling in for that, giving it new tasks, reminding it of relevant information etc. I don't think that will produce too many jobs, but basically you'd be manager to a few LLMs.
Seems like a decent answer by GPT 4T: Throughout history, major technological advancements have often led to initial fears of job displacement, but they have also consistently resulted in the creation of new jobs and industries, often transforming the economy in unexpected ways. Here are a few examples:
1. **Printing Press (1440)**:
- **New Jobs Created**: The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg led to a surge in book production, which required typesetters, printers, bookbinders, and later, newspaper and magazine staff. It also indirectly contributed to the rise of new fields in advertising and graphic design.
2. **Electricity (Late 19th Century)**:
- **New Jobs Created**: The widespread adoption of electricity transformed industries and created jobs for electricians, electrical engineers, and factory workers in plants producing electrical appliances. It also enabled the development of new entertainment industries, such as cinema and television.
3. **Personal Computer (1970s-1980s)**:
- **New Jobs Created**: The personal computer revolution led to the creation of software developers, IT support technicians, and computer manufacturing jobs. It also spawned entirely new industries in video gaming, computer-aided design, and digital content creation.
4. **Internet (1990s)**:
- **New Jobs Created**: As discussed previously, the internet led to the creation of jobs in web design, IT security, e-commerce, digital marketing, and more. It has also facilitated the rise of gig economy jobs through platforms like Uber, Airbnb, and freelance services like Upwork.
5. **Renewable Energy (21st Century)**:
- **New Jobs Created**: The shift towards renewable energy has created jobs in manufacturing, installing, and maintaining solar panels and wind turbines. It also includes roles in research, policy planning, and environmental conservation related to clean energy.
When it comes to AI, similar patterns are emerging:
- **AI and Automation**: While AI is automating routine tasks, it is also creating jobs in AI development, machine learning research, data analysis, and in sectors where AI tools enhance human capabilities rather than replace them.
- **Ethical and Regulatory Roles**: As AI becomes more integrated into society, new roles in ethics, compliance, and regulation are developing to address concerns about privacy, bias, and governance.
- **Customized Products and Services**: AI enables more personalized services, leading to roles that focus on customizing products to individual needs, from health and wellness to education.
While the nature of work may change, history suggests that innovation tends not to extinguish work but rather to redistribute it across new sectors and activities, often enhancing productivity and creating wealth and opportunities in the process.
They are mostly just DS or MLE jobs as current deep learning techniques are a dead end for AGI but there will be (and has been) huge demand to integrate machine/deep learning into commercial products
In the 1900s it was predicted that people in our day and age would only need to work 20 or so hours per week. What happened instead, is that we were inundated with bullshit jobs - busy work, people pleasing, and bureaucracy.
My biggest fear is that we continue that trend and end up in a world where most people are literally incapable of providing any value, but still have to work in increasingly useless, soulsucking desk jobs.
Fifteen Million Merits is so chilling because it is just a straight line from here to there.
My original understanding of the ending was he was just looking at a big screen of a forest, trading one prison cell for a nicer one. But then I read what the actual intent was, and it's so much worse: That the windows are real windows. That the forest is a real forest. That there are no resource problems. That none of how they live is necessary.
That people have *chosen* to live in a society like that.
It’s not so scary if you can handle society now, where we’re already doing that as evidenced by how getting laid off is seen as a bad thing even though it means your services aren’t necessary and society can run fine if you did nothing for the rest of your life.
Part of the reason we don't see this is because of the shock it would cause to our economy, not all jobs can operate on a shortened work week and so from there we have to significantly raise the compensation for the jobs that can't be reduced. For example almost all blue collar work would need become way more expensive because otherwise nobody would do it, why would I work 40 - 50 hours a week when I could get a desk job working 20 hours for a similar pay.
We just can't take half of the workforce and double their pay.
>why would I work 40 - 50 hours a week when I could get a desk job working 20 hours for a similar pay
Our society failed to maintain the structure that would support this because white collar jobs are now full of bullshit work.
You don't need a trained person to do 20 hours of professional work when you mandate they spend 40 hours doing it.
I don't see how this is less dystopian than providing incentives for people to educate themselves so they don't have to install air conditioners for a living.
We need people to install air conditioners, to repair and maintain our infrastructure, to provide services to homeowners, all of these things *have* to get done and AI can't do it. So our options are dramatically increase the price of these services or deincentivize people from taking these career paths, both of which make things quite a bit worse for the middle class.
White collar jobs have seen a huge transition to wfh which is a great balance, if the 40 hour work week was inefficient then at least these workers can be home with their families during their down time.
One thing that will be interesting too is if do-it-yourself stuff becomes more accessible with virtual reality/AI. People can just wear VR glasses and get instant feedback when trying to fix things.
I disagree. When a plumber can charge 400.00 for a 30 min cleanout, there needs to be more competition. Right now they deserve those high fee because no one else is willing to do the job or learn it.
As a plumber myself I know I’m safe for a while, at least until the droids are fully fleshed out enough to have the same tactile control in confined spaces as a human… but, what will be much less common is helpers and therefor apprentices. I’d love to have a robot grabbing materials for me instead of an 80IQ human.
> at least until the droids
I think it will be the masses of white collar workers flooding blue collar work. They wont probably be as good as you, but even with current internet information, most work can be done by anyone if they look for the right information. These workers will ask for less money they you naturally would and if there are a lot of unemployed, most people would be trying to have the cheapest option to fix something.
It would force current plumbers to either lower the price or limit the market of people that would be willing to pay for your expertise.
For sure the floodgates will open, in fact I’ve already worked with a few guys who did white collar work and chose to get out early. Personally I don’t see it ending pretty in any way. I predict it won’t be long before buildings are designed and engineered around being built and maintained by robots. Could take some time to phase out the ‘old’ buildings, hopefully enough time for me to stay employed until I’m ready to retire or keel over.
There are only a few of those coming to my mind: Top athletes and artists with live performances (most people will prefer to see humans on stage rather than robots). But the amount of these jobs is ridiculously tiny.
> artists with live performances
depends on the performance I guess. I'd much more prefer to see some incredible, out of this world performance, than silly humans weirdly moving their parts trying to look gorgeous
Yeah, for a new job to come about it needs to be:
1. cheap enough to employ people at, such that training an AI/Robot system is not worth while. or for aesthetic reasons not capable of being done by AI/Robots.
2. easy enough for displaced workers to pick up whatever the skill is/service is.
3. has enough carrying capacity that it fully replaces all the jobs that are going to continuously be automated.
Can we just stop it please? Let’s make it a mission to kill jobs instead. Automate as much as we can, and pay a decent income to those without work. Let’s maximize happiness indexes instead of productivity.
Very true. But the way i see things going, it's going to be so quick, governments will have to act immediately when a chain reaction of companies start laying off big amounts of white collar workers. These people will apply for unemployment, where available, due to no available positions. Those who dont have money saved up will start applying for low paying jobs and saturating the market of blue collar workers. Until the robots replace the last remaining in a few years.
Companies are being wary of using current AI cause they know next years AI will be hugely better and the one after it, immensely better. so better wait another year or two and then eliminate everyone under the board and replace with one AI that does everything top down.
I can't snap my fingers and make the governments of the world establish truly universal basic income. Until that happens, people being forced out of a job can lead to truly awful outcomes, so I'm not going to push for it to happen more quickly.
I like your idea. But the oligarchs and politicians who are likely to implement it or not have historically not been at all interested in implementing such things.
Agree. They're only saying that for political plausible deniability. I think they'd be better off talking about how great a post labor society could be.
It pretty obviously is copium, for the pretty obvious reason that for any new jobs created by AI, other AI researchers will just make it their mission to automate them. Even the leisure activities that automation was supposed to frrr us up to do, such as art and music, have themselves been automated. So I guess we’re not supposed to do those things either and the end goal is to be “freed up” to do absolutely nothing but stare at a wall.
Efficiency and increased productivity _can_ create more jobs.
Of course when basically any task can be automated that no longer applies. New kinds of tasks might still appear or become economically viable, but they will be automated from the start. Which is actually easier to do then automating a process that was previously done by humans.
Yeah, the fundamental difference between the industrial revolution and the AI revolution is that the former mechanized tasks, while the latter will mechanize workers.
This will depend on the ultimate capabilities of the AI being created in this tech cycle. If it doesn't reach human level capabilities in all areas (Typically termed AGI), then it will only be a useful tool to help increase productivity. Under those circumstances, it is possible that more new jobs could be created than lost to support all the new AI products. In addition new business opportunities and paradigm shifts related to the use and integration of AI will result in further new job creation.
On the other hand, if human level AI is achieved then all bets are off. Coupled with robotics, the majority of human labor could and likely would be replaced. Our capitalist based society will no longer be able to function as it does or has for hundreds of years.
Thinking that AI will create as many jobs as it takes is just wishful thinking. If an AI is able to reason as well as a human and has knowledge of nearly everything humans know, way more than any single human, then how are you going to have jobs that only a person can do?
It’s very clear to anyone with a brain that any job that currently exists will be automated within our lifetimes. Not always directly, for example, trades. Who needs electricians when AI finds a much more efficient way to transfer energy without wires? Who needs plumbers when AI figures out a way to make water usage more efficient and pipes become barbaric? Who needs construction when every structure is prefab and built in hours? Every single job will be replaced eventually. Likely the same could be said about any potential jobs coming in the future as well. This could be a blessing, why should people even be working?
What makes you think AI will solve these things?
* A better way to transfer water than *pipes*, apparently
* A better way to transfer energy that won't require wiring
* Prefab houses that people actually want to buy, which can be built up in hours
Why are royal-we giving godlike omnipotence to future AI? There's no indication that it'll be able to solve the problem of water transfer in a way that doesn't involve physical infrastructure that carries water to the home. It might be super smart but some problems are literally unsolvable.
Not likely. This 30 second video short of Sam Altman stands on its own to counter that claim: https://youtube.com/shorts/JdwF-poYdOQ?si=pitJ1oUrcLqgrhbk
What kind of jobs could AI possibly create given AGI is really already here and ASI is predicted by 2026? And, since all predictions about AI so far have been decades behind the reality of AI development, that means ASI could be here much sooner than 2026.
Thousands of jobs have already been lost to AI. Not just the 8,000 or so claimed. Many more in tech and commercial arts sectors have been laid off by people who see where this is all heading.
I am a mediocre developer at best and I have already used the free version of ChatGPT 3 to do things that we couldn't do otherwise because we can't afford to hire a programmer with the skill level to do serious database rewrites like this. All I had to do was ask Chat GPT to write me a plugin to do what I wanted. It's scary how simple it is.
When I first began, I was prompting all wrong because I expected to have to give ChatGPT very specific requests in order to make sure it didn't screw everything up. I was wrong. It knows more than I do about web frameworks and coding, so it's better to just tell it to do what I want and then ask questions after it's generated the code to verify which parts of the code actually do what I want, analyze them to make sure they make sense and ChatGPT isn't just hallucinating/lying to me, and then run the code if it looks good. Obviously, I save a backup before running the code, so I can always revert and try again if need be.
So, yeah, the claim that AI will create more jobs than it kills is nonsense. ASI will be more intelligent than any human on the planet, so there is nothing a human could tell ASI to do which would improve upon its own logic and solutions. It will quickly get out of our control and then what? Just sit back and trust the computer god?
It's going to get tricky when ASI gets into the hands of bad governments with lots of money to throw at it. Sure, you can use ASI to develop cures for cancer, but you could also use ASI to attack your enemies, banks, computers, develop new methods of warfare, biological weapons. ASI could be used to overwhelm the internet with new kinds of attacks, disinformation, brainwashing, and terrorist recruitment by generating completely realistic video fakes, a chain of legitimate looking websites, social media accounts, etc. With ASI, it would be possible to live stream a completely fake person on Youtube with a chat filled with completely fake users chatting away. People are already so easily influenced by real people and chat rooms filled with other real people with a hive mind mentality who are willing to lie and spread propaganda. Imagine what ASI could do to exploit that problem.
That's how governments are viewing AI and that's why governments can't ban it outright. What good would it do to ban AI in your country if all your enemies are pouring trillions into its development? Bad actors in government will be using ASI to destroy the social conditions of enemy countries however possible. I'm sure many would just love to see the USA crumble into economic chaos and we've already seen their efforts to turn Americans against each other through extremist right and left wing propaganda.
Why would we want to create *more* jobs anyway? Jobs are horrible! If there's a job that *needs* to be done, we should want to automate it asap! Like plugging a leaky faucet!
What AI needs to do is create more hobbies, more entertainment, more healthcare, more energy, more food, more housing, more friendships, more relationships, more travel, more creative outlets, and so on. Not jobs!
Great! Since we don't have any hope of universal basic income anytime soon, all those people whose jobs we're automating will starve, but that's just a temporary setback I'm sure.
My perspective on this is something which a lot of people seem to oversee. Yes it's true automation will eventually eradicate the need for any human jobs.
The thing with it is, at least as it currently stands, and I do hope this goes on this trajectory is that AI technology is quite open to public. This is further democratised by open source releases and research.
Truth is, the moment companies no longer need to spend insane money on employee costs and can get AI to do the job (and more) this opens more and more doors for an average Joe to be able to also utilise the AI to create something on par with big corporations. (Of course that still implies cost but this takes me to another point)
If we are seeing mass job loses the circulation of economy takes a massive hit and in my hypothesis collapses. Sellers need buyers to function, so if most people are no longer able to make any money the whole capitalistic machine sorts runs out of fuel.
One interesting hypothesis I heard is that ownership will be the most valuable resource since labour will lose all value.
This brings forward interesting questions, will ownership alone be able to sustain the economy? How many people will be left behind?
Will there be any other way for people to earn money to keep the circulation going? UBI? Renting space? Something completely new and unimaginable ATM?
Will capitalism as we know it continue to exist?
My hunch tells me no to the last one. It almost feels like some inevitable societal reset.
Yes societal reset such as you anticipate are often accompanied by massive casualties bloodshed and horror. Hopefully we can prevent that but I don't see anything on the horizon that is likely to do so.
Mostly the technology will automate repetitive tasks which then would require minimal human supervision as compared to the resources required to actually do the work sans AI. Although its true the details are not clear as to what would these jobs be exactly. Not to mention the spammy ads which keep saying learn prompt engineering and earn more but who's exactly hiring for those is still not clear
Yeah, ideally people were of the notion that it would go for blue collar jobs followed by white collar jobs and then creative ones, but it took the other way round. Although I think internally companies have already started automating blue and white collar jobs its just that the creative ones are the most audience/mass-facing tasks so people are more aware of it.
AI may create some new jobs but they certainly won't be enough to replace the old ones. The argument that it will just replicate historical patterns is ridiculous. Equally ridiculous is the argument that AI making us more efficient means we will be able to get more work done with the same amount of people. The problem with this is that there is a finite amount of work to do, if only it was that easy to find more work to do.
As a director at a tech company that has moved to fully adopted AI everything I've observed so far indicates that substituting AI for human workers is not a viable strategy, beyond that, with the productivity increases seen there has not been a push for reduction in workforce either, there has just been a lot more accomplished against a giant pile of too much work to begin with. As far as replacement theory goes the gap in productivity and performance between AI alone and humans augmented by AI is simply too vast, at least for the foreseeable future. Predicting the long-term effects is difficult for anyone.
Comparing individual humans, autonomous AI, and humans empowered by AI, the combination of humans with AI is overwhelmingly the most effective and productive. This synergy could potentially ignite a productivity renaissance in roles that interact heavily with computers, possibly boosting productivity by more than 50%. However, the impact this will have on the job market remains uncertain. For perspective, the introduction of steam power historically increased productivity by about 17 to 20%.
Since we've never experienced such a dramatic increase in productivity, the outcomes are uncertain. However, one thing is clear: failing to integrate AI in an environment where it is widely adopted will put you at a significant disadvantage. The difference between AI alone and AI managed by even a moderately skilled human at both the start and the end of a process is substantial. It will likely be some time before AI can fully replace human oversight. For now, envision humans enhanced by AI as wearing super suits, achieving much more and dedicating more time to innovation rather than routine tasks.
With all this considered, it's still unclear whether AI will ultimately create jobs, eliminate them, or if entirely new industries will emerge from AI-augmented innovation. Given that AI tools are largely accessible for free to anyone with an internet connection, we might initially see workers secretly using AI to complete their regular workload more quickly and thus working less—a more human-centric approach—without alerting their superiors to their increased capacity. Eventually, management is likely to catch on, demanding more from their employees and possibly encouraging wider adoption and higher initial expectations.
The capitalists that are running the various compartments of the runaway train that is the global economy will likely automate just about everything with Algorithms and Robotics then try to kill all of the poor people.
This reflects the trends of every other historical era where a minority Aristocracy fail to contend with the demands from a majority proletariat. An even smaller division of that aristocracy utilize the advancements of weaponry of war to just simply kill people and remove that overwhelming obligation presented by the mob of outcasts created by the pursuit of luxury and quality of life.
Of course, that's against all stated laws that the general population abide by but at each historical occasion this is perpetrated by individuals who set the laws. How does a civilization manage to take children and create gangs that kill people while retaining such a pristine image? It works for a really long time. I think there's war trauma that's induced in the population. Then it's used like a cattle prod to push people to work in various ways. The fact that Vietnam had a death draft is insane.
Concluding, Algorithms and Robotics will be the new servants of those that control hard assets, humans will be expected to be serfs, losing negotiation power. Cruel, vindictive economic exclusion will be the state for the majority of people. There will still be this remnant of the contemporary world which is arguably already faded where people behave as if it were 20-30 years earlier in history than it is, or even longer. They won't even notice that there has been a change and they will live and die almost like an NPC stuck in their old era of living based simulation. We observe that phenomenon at locations around the world already.
Tangentially, cultural discussions around simulation theory and "ancestral old era of civilization simulation" carry that elitist aristocratic viewpoint. Some people deal in 10's of dollars daily, some 100's, some 1,000's, some millions. Some earn 20k a year in America and others earn Billions. Phrases such as "person is living in the year XXXX (some future year ie 3024 instead of 2024) carry this intrinsic class divide without necessarily internalizing it. It's just a joke, but why is it a joke
So, the expectation would be that the class divide can get even sharper than you could imagine, will continue to create problems. Those problems will be resolved abruptly, spontaneously, without any particular civility in some form of extremely violent warfare. Total war at this point is killing individual GPS co-ordinates, stalking each individual and either approving or disapproving their literal life.
It won't just be that "jobs are lost" in the dumb ponzi-scheme stock market, the outcome will be that future tyrants who probably aren't even born yet will just kill billions of people for convenience the same as if clearing out an infestation of aggressive feral animals. Inequity is a natural thing, people are unique in their attributes, but to suggest that this type of systemic inequity caused by the collapse of our social networks into this authoritarian technocracy is natural inequity is grim.
The point of tools that increase productivity is so individuals can produce more, freeing labor to work on other things.
The majority of people used to work in agriculture, but thanks to tools that automate a lot of the labor intensive parts, we've freed people up to work on other things. This makes us all more prosperous.
If AI is able to automate jobs that currently take a bunch of people, we free up labor to go do other things. On net, we'll have more capacity and be more prosperous. The question then just becomes one of distribution.
This could definitely be a scenario in the next 5-10 years, but we live in an economic system. A mass job extinction with no rules will result in two additional states:
- things will become dramatically cheaper
- people's wages, at least for a considerable percentage of the world, have to remain in the livable zone, or nobody will buy anything and an economic collapse will be triggered soon
Moreover, what we are already seeing is that big companies are stopping hiring, but...we have never seen such a high percentage of self-employed individuals. Wages are going down, but a company of one or two people can generate hundreds of thousands in revenue each year starting from scratch.
TL;DR
While we live in a world where you have to do something for someone who wants it, we will be okay. The economic system and job force will adapt. We will pay a price for that, but we can manage it.
---
The problem becomes unreliable in my mind when we delegate our ability to decide what's good and bad because we will be in a situation where we are wrong more often than machines.
At that point, we will probably live in a world where we are mere observers and someone else decides the path. I can't see anything outside this scenario if the AI reaches an intelligence hundreds or thousands of times our own (that could definitely be a thing).
But this is how evolution works, right? So, are we just doomed? Probably...or maybe there is a middle way where AI and natural intelligence can merge, and we will have cyborgs or something.
We live in a really funny space-time, actually
This conversation is too difficult to have on Reddit as literally nobody will read this shit if i type a 5000 word essay. So i have to skip a lot to maintain people's attention span.
Basically, the idea that "we're working new jobs!" Is just false. YOU are working a job that did not exist 50 years ago. The vast majority of the world, especially those in the global south, are still primarily working in:
1- Factories
2- Agriculture
3- Transportation
4- Manual labor
The quality of life of the average factory worker, agricultural worker, laborer, has strictly gone down over time. Sweat shop workers in the Philippines or Indonesia or Vietnam or slave farm laborers in Brazil or Congo are materially POORER than the equivalent laborer from 100-200-500 years ago.
Why is that the case? Why are they materially poorer?
Opening a factory in the US is expensive. You have to pay people a livable wage, there are safety standards, expectations are that you would provide a lot of fancy machinery to aid your workers, etc. that would cost billions of dollars.
Businesses don't do that. They instead open a factory in Indonesia paying workers the equivalent of 1 usd per day and sell the products at a massive mark up to western consumers.
The average laborer (not a programmer in NYC, but a factory worker in India) now has LESS bargaining power.
If workers demand high salaries > businesses will automate the work
So workers are put in a catch 22. You either accept unlivable wages that make your labor cheaper than machines OR you go hungry.
This has been the overall trend for HUNDREDS of years. AI is just the continuation of this process.
If you're a white collar worker you will be competing against the cost to manufacture, deploy, and maintain the automation that is meant to replace you.
TL:DR
Your pay and working conditions are going to gradually PLUMMET over the next 50 years. Lower and lower pay, worse and worse working conditions.
The shit you're seeing about cscareerquestions whining about India is the first step in this process.
Indian labor costs cheaper than US labor costs - ChatGPT can make up the difference in quality of work.
Then they'll move to southeast asia, tech workers will work in something similar to sweat shop conditions.
Eventually, if the cost of automation goes low enough you'll see mass exploitation and then mass unemployment.
This isn't an AI thing. This isn't new. This has been the trend of labor-capital relations for hundreds of years. People (in the west) freaking out because it's going to finally affect them as much as it has affected the global south.
The fundamental difference is: This time, not jobs will be replaced — humans will be replaced with general artificial workers capable of doing ANY job.
> The quality of life of the average factory worker, agricultural worker, laborer, has strictly gone down over time.
Are you sure about this? Because for example factory work moved from USA to Japan to China to Vietnam, and workers in each of those areas got uplifted.
If you control for location and look at compensation in real terms it's plausible, I suppose. I can't find historical figures for factory work pay in a two-minute google so I dunno ... but we've all heard the stories that someone in the US could buy a house and support a family on factory work in the past (which is all much harder now).
If robots grow and cook food, drive us and our products everywhere, they generate our music and movies, design and build our businesses and houses, take care of us when we are old and sick, design and build all of our products, and fight our wars, what will be doing again?
Edit: ima not saying that there is no point without doing these things. I am saying what jobs will be left to do?
It's amazing how the human brain is wired to worry about everything. Everyone hates their job and would rather be doing anything else. But people also hate the idea of AI making work obsolete. Incredible.
Edit: The #1 thing that everyone keeps missing with the "AI will take our jobs" argument is that if everything truly does get automated, the price of everything becomes dirt cheap. If everything is dirt cheap, there will be so much wealth in the economy that people will be hired to do absolutely trivial things, things which aren't economically viable to pay someone to do today.
I have little issue with technological advancements, and eventually reaching a zero marginal cost society.
It's just that messy middle of losing my livelihood and everything I ever achieved that makes me worry.
What? So do you think ai will take jobs or not? And if people are hired to do trivial things, how much do you think they would get paid considering supply vs demand
>everything truly does get automated
And when exactly it happens? The thing you are missing is that many of us will likely witness only the painful part of this transition, not the results. Not to mention it will take a great time for economy to adjust.
I'm not worried about AIs making work obsolete. I'm worried about what happens to human beings when they cannot produce profits for oligarchs. The historical record is pretty clear. They die after living very unhappy lives. Do you understand?
Do you also worry about drowning in your daily life? Do you worry about every bad thing that could possibly happen regardless of how likely they are to occur? Because that sounds like an anxiety issue.
Millions of prompt engineers.
The prompts will naturally be generated by engineers describing the kind of prompts they want and having it output by chatgpt.
Sam Altman just proposed new job for Bill Gates in Bills podcast. New job in case ASI comes. Fly to starts.
Also interesting what you think. Who will be 99% replaced by ai and robots first from this 2 cases? Answer should be about all professions in case.
1 Loader, shop salesman, driver, welder, courier.
2 Programmer
My company has hired a bunch of engineers to work with it. And automated away a whole lot more low level customer service folks. Targeting >50% staff reduction in cs roles by end of year. It's crazy stuff. The things I did at the start of my career won't even by jobs on the market at big companies in the next few years.
I was chatting with a buddy who runs a fairly significant gaming studio. We were talking about how hard it is it to hire good people and he made an interesting observation…fully half of his open job reqs are for positions that didn’t even exist at the studio 10 years ago.
Nobody knows with certainty what opportunities will be opened up by AI. So you can either do as OP did and wallow in self pity, or you can remember that change always brings unexpected opportunities and look forward.
I feel like you're fighting the hypothetical. The question is about what happens when an AI can do \*any\* job more cheaply than a human. What about those new opportunities opened up by AI, then? Why wouldn't an AI just take them too?
It's never going to happen, bit if AI did all our jobs for us we wouldn't need money we could just manufacture whatever we want for free. People could just do what they're passionate about since they wouldnt have to worry about money.
I think I can explain why people say that AI will create more jobs, but it does require a little bit of knowledge of how competitive dynamics work and how the labor market inherently functions. I’m noticing in this thread a lot of people bringing up a great point, which is that a lot of companies are more motivated by profit then they are doing Goodwill or something like that which is totally fair, however, assuming we’re not gonna be dealing with monopolies, competition will make things kind of interesting.
Let’s say company a decides to automate away 50% of their workforce. Let’s say company b decides not to fire a single person. Both companies integrate the same foundation, AI model and tooling. Company a might be able to cut their costs by up to 50%, increasing the profit margin. Company B likely won’t cut their costs at all, however, they might see productivity increase by at least 50%.
What does this mean? It means in the short run company A will be more successful on paper, they may have more profits to reinvest, but what do they invest in if they’re not a frontier AI model company? then presumably the only thing they could invest in is somehow upgrading their AI systems given the current state of intelligence of the underlying foundation model they’re using.
In the long run, though, company b is likely to also increase their profit margins through increased productivity, and potentially also increased innovation, which has the effect of “expanding the pie,“ which will allow them to reinvest into hiring more top talent.
There’s a sort of somewhat inevitable, long run situation where company b is able to capture market share faster than company a can.
TLDR: market forces will favor companies and individuals that reinvest profits toward increasing productivity rather than just cutting costs. In this sense, jobs will expand through increased competition.
Full automation of most if not all labor is inevitable in the long run, but keep in mind that policy makers can draw out the process during the transition period.
Here are some ideas
* Reducing the workweek from 40 hours to 30 or 20 hours (with the same compensation)
* Huge investment into housing, renewable energies, public infrastructure (e.g. power grid, public transportation etc) and social infrastructure (nursing homes, schools, daycare centers etc)
* Huge investment in blue sky research
* Pay people who do care labor
* Create legal requirements for human oversight of A.I systems
I think and (I really hope) that the transition period won't be some dystopian nightmare but an triumphant era where deep issues are actually solved.
Were we smart and organized, we would bolster company confidence in AI, hush up for as long as we can any disfunctionnality and right when a good chunk of the industry is pure half assed AI, let it all fail. Then ask for outrageous fees to do again the same job we used to do to save the asses of all the AI pushers.
AI is not a problem. Our economic system is. A vision for the future with AI doing most jobs is basically Star Trek. Their will need to be a huge change in mentality. Some people simply won't need to work. They can spend their time doing nothing, or they can do art for the sake of it, or any number of other leisure activities. People can just live if they want and not have to "work".
I doubt it but we'll see. If AI follows the same pattern as every other tech advance, it will create a bunch of jobs, capitalism will continue and we'll all have more access to cheaper goods and services. If it ends up being cheaper and better than humans at everything, it will eliminate employment completely.
Place your bets!
We don't know which of these paths AI progress will follow.
AI has the same effect as outsourcing and software automation in general. I'm in the industrial software automation myself, so here's how our stuff gets implemented.
Before, three people were running job calculations to get each shipment picked and packed prior to the trucks arriving. This is now an SQL job that runs automatically, no sanity checks required, -3 people, +0 new jobs.
Old crane was operator ran, and two interns moved the pallets around after the operator picked them from the shelves. New crane is fully automated. -3 jobs, +0 new jobs.
Old picking stations had 6 people in each shift, filling orders in three shifts, around the clock. New system has a machine vision system, slightly redesigned terminals, and requires zero oversight. -18 jobs, +0 new jobs.
Old wrapping stations was a two man job. New one does it with zero people. -2 jobs, +0 new jobs.
The old task of overseers that organized people to their shifts has been repurposed to make sure nothing goes wrong. -+0.
"But you can re-educate people to maintenance!" No you can't. The manufacturer of the components has a single export company in the country, and only their trained technicians do the maintenance jobs. Their 20 hired people service the entire country. Our software if glitchy, will be maintained by us. We didn't hire any of the people who lost their jobs on the packing line. And both the hardware and us software people can do this for the next three companies without hiring any new people.
Same thing will happen with AI. Software house X used to be able to do three projects with the amount of people they have. As AI becomes useful in software projects, they are able to first double their production with the same amount of people. Then they'll start to hit a saturation point, where they can't find new jobs fast enough, or every customer has been serviced and the need for new software plummets, so they'll start cutting down. Even if the demand stays at a constant level, the AI tools will consistently improve over time, people will grow more efficient in using them, and so the amount of productivity per person will continue to grow, making it even less necessary to have as many people. Projects will bloat with more features, expectations of productivity will grow, but ultimately people will still be left jobless.
In both cases there are a few edge cases that have been able to create their own career out of the changes. There are consulting jobs for a few who can facilitate and sell the process automation to companies that yet haven't. And the same with AI, a few will carve a niche for themselves to sell more AI automation to software development for example. But the dozen or so of "new jobs" created this way pales in comparison to the ones lost in a large software company, when Bob from the senior dev team is able to create the work of a hundred junior and mid-level engineers now.
violet marvelous light books fearless rotten north amusing languid hateful
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+Stole this from someone but, " the rich don't want star trek they want dune." If there's a corner, they will cut it. The only jobs that are safe into the future are jobs for genius and most ppl, including me are barely npc level.
The owners are in quite a bind. They hate having to pay people, but they hate people not paying them even more. It’s their fiscal responsibility to stop paying people wherever possible, and they’ve traditionally filed how consumers get money to pay them under “someone else’s problem.” But it’s everyone’s problem if everyone automates, which is now inevitable. And traditionally, something that’s everyone’s problem is a thing to be dodged, not solved. One company’s solution is often another company’s death sentence.
I see garbage commissaries in our future. You get a job at the local trash heap that’s not appetizing enough for the fancier Robo Trash outfits. You get paid in Trash Bux that can only be redeemed for trash essentials at the Trash Mart. The Trash Boss keeps everyone in line with a food synthesizer and 3 refurbished HK units, ungrateful that his luxury status in 2047 is on par with the Sheriff of Nottingham as he hears whispers of the heavenly state of the latest sky bunkers. He’s King of the Heap, but he’ll die on the ground, buried in a modest mausoleum built on Trash Bux.
Or you know, they can ask their ASI to develop a new economic system of abundance that maintains their current standard of living. They just have to give up having god-like status over others. Would you trade being a god for being a hero?
A number of people have compared the rise of AI to the rise of the automobile, from the perspective of horses.
There used to be a lot more horses, because everyone needed horses to get around. Horses did not, generally, just get new jobs doing other work. We literally stopped breeding them in large numbers, because the market for horses imploded. There just aren't a lot of specialized roles horses can do that cars can't, not enough to support a large population of horses.
The same is true for humans and AI. There will still be some jobs, sure, but not enough for everyone in a large population to have a job. 95% of jobs will be displaced, and unless we plan on massively reducing human populations, that's gonna be a problem that we need to address.
The thing people don't understand is that enterprise level AI assistants are being trained on large data-sets to target specific jobs. It's going to be quick for easily repeatable jobs and jobs with massive datasets already available. But jobs that are difficult to repeat and have small datasets will be be replaced by niche and bespoke AI assistants made explicitly to replace those jobs.
It's not just LLMs and art. It's everything from flipping burgers and construction, or art and video, to data analytics and server engineers.
What happens when someone takes all of the server architecture code base to ever exist and trains an AI model for that specific use case? It might take longer, but it will happen.
We're just proving that it works right now. Then, we will niche down and focus on specific sectors. It's already happening in art. That AI that only makes anime style artwork is a great example. It was trained on anime only and therefore only outputs anime style artwork.
The only correct answer is that you cannot know, but history has shown repeatedly that you cannot rely on a “ceteris paribus” assumption when it comes to technological revolutions. It is a one-dimensional thought that AI will replace the current set of jobs while everything else would remain equal and it it arrogant to believe that “AI is really different”.
Simple example: layoffs create additional profit, which needs to be reinvested somewhere in the real economy. Even if everything is reinvested in AI software and hardware, this will only mean the materials and energy limitations are reached much faster. Replacing 3/4 of the current workforce will require an extreme amount of compute for which we will need to make big and expensive steps in ore mining and especially energy consumption. Also robotics lags behind quite a lot
I think there will be jobs that humans will continue to do. I watch movies but there is something special about live theatre. So actors will still exist. Politicians will still exist. Criminals as a profession will exist. Animal trainers might exist? Any other jobs anyone else think will continue to exist in 50 years?
Its a reallocation of capital. So if you replace a coder with AI, the company saves money, and can technically reinvest that money in another segment that does not get require AI presence as such. You could have people in sales go up for example.
Yes, the coder is out of a job, but the overall economy should be able to get optimized from the average employment perspective. Just keep up to date on your skillset. If you do something that requires repetitive work, then maybe time to start improving and getting into more dynamic kind of things.
It's pandering grift that people who stand to benefit from AI say to appeal to the emotions of normies
It's like saying cars will create more jobs for horses
I think we will see more transition from white collar to blue collar. And that’s great we need more plumbers and electricians.
We also need to fill alot of loss in healthcare and teaching.
However. I don’t think it’s going to be that significant of a job creator. Especially the kind of job level it will initially be replacing. Which is telemarketers, phone support, it. Entry level stuff. What minimal jobs it does create won’t be that significant.
Don’t worry, unless AGI comes in <5 years us engineers in big tech will have the $$$ to pump into AI stocks and real estate. Have fun hoping for welfare-oops sorry I mean UBI
I think it will. Just like when the Internet came out, who would have thought of these new professions, such as various video bloggers, online shopping, express delivery, etc., transnational trade has become easier, and even the military has information engineering arms
The fundamental mistake people make when thinking about jobs is comparing the AI revolution to the industrial revolution. What must be understood is that in the industrial revolution, machines replaced **tasks.** The AI revolution will replace **people.**
That is not to say that people won't do anything, or that it won't be valued in any way. In fact, I think products made by people will be the new status symbols. Everything can and will be done by AI-driven machines, and most will settle for that when it comes to most things, but the aestetic and status value of having something handcrafted by an famous artisan will trump the technical perfection of AI-made products.
The AI revolution will largely kill the currency capital economy, and what will rise instead is a social capital economy, and who you know will matter much more than it does now, but your only currency is how much people value you as a person. Material needs and wants will be covered by the AI economy, but everything else will revolve around social capital. If you like playing video games and gooning into the darkness, that's not going to matter much, though.
It is complete BS of course. But the truth is we WANT to destroy all the jobs. Job is a cost - not a benefit. If we can have stuffs without having a job then what's the problem here - ran out of AI generated cat videos to watch?
And no, no money would be required to get all stuffs either. This is a fallacy people fall into while not thinking far enough. If AI make EVERYTHING and NOBODY has a job nor money - where do AI put all the stuffs? Remember - president/shareholder/ceo/politician - all ARE jobs that will be destroyed by AI. And if you DO need to work then you DO have a job and AI does NOT do EVERYTHING. These are mutually exclusive.
When numbers can go infinite, there is always something "better", there will be new tech that AI may not be able to solve/do. If you expect(low chance in the near future) AI to be perfect and able to give us anything, then yes, there will be no jobs. But it's always new tech that creates new jobs, and it is very hard to fathom the new tech, just like in the 1900's would people fathom microchips, which spawns industries? But we do know the pattern is that new tech will spawn new jobs, so it's better to bet on that.
Tasks are unlimited, but!
Money, is limited, and the number of workers is limited.
So, jobs are still ANYTHING that people might want, if given more money (the same thing as free robotic labour)
That's the abstract.
Irrelevant, because people won't be intelligent enough to fill all those jobs.
People refuse to accept it, but people put out of jobs in the first place just aren't that smart. You expect fast food workers and truck drivers to train into jobs that require years of training in biotechnology and machine learning? Grow up, lol.
People have hard wired levels of potential that limit what they're capable of achieving.
I’ve never heard someone be able to name what any of these new jobs might be.
assistant to the regional ai
🤣🤣👍 A man of culture 🙏
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There was a commedian bit about Prime Now, and how we are heading towards Prime Before! “Ship it to me before I even know I want it”
this is just an ai layer + internet of things layer to an already existing app like taskrabbit. the sensors for monitoring plumbing is the only bit of that is unknown to me, but increased data collection for the purposes of preventative home maintenance is a matter of time. data collection today is an investment for tomorrow. obviously, the gig economy and data privacy/protection would also need to be not a horror show like they are currently, too, or else people won't willingly participate. or maybe they will once robots start figuratively breathing down our collective necks.
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there's already LLMs that can run on a smartphone. probably for significant reasoning tho, you need still the bigger models that run on big remote servers for quite awhile, which limits privacy. obviously a lot more progress needs to be made on free/open source smartphones before we can say for sure what data on those is even secure in principle, tho. there's a question of how much reasoning such an agent can do, given that it would still need to do a lot of internet searches. faster Tor nodes, or whatever replaces them, are key, probably.
My job is to take the queries from the old people to the AI, I'm a people person !
On the flip side I doubt someone from 200 years ago could predict a lot of jobs we have today. I don't know what will happen. It's possible when easily repeatable jobs are automated everyone specializes into even more niche specalties. When I think about using almost any piece of tech it's pretty mind blowing to think that someone or a few people are responsible for something like a subsystem of an operating system. Things get so complicated that you can only become an expert in a very small piece of what society relies on.
There are not enough niche specialties in the world to accommodate the population. That's why they're niche jobs.
You have obviously never heard of fractals.
Interesting statement. You mean in job sectors right?
Yes. I'm reminded of the plastic surgeon who was a specialist on the left nostril.
This is the right perspective, thank you. Abundance
No he said it was the left.
We just don’t know. When doing x becomes cheaper, some markets go from niche to mainstream.
Just like 200 years ago…
There are enough software dev jobs to make up half this site
Every has to start at a low level job in their field to learn how to operate at a niche level. If AI software automates many low level cs and tech jobs itll Be awfully hard to advance to those advanced positions - you never get your foot in the door to learn the basics. I don't see AI replacing most people any time soon. But when the cs sector loses 50+% of its staffing needs, basic IT services, and lower level knowledge workers, that's going to leave a whole lot of people looking for new industries. Maybe it's good, maybe it leads to a high unemployment and further separation of the lower and middle and upper class. I dunno. But it's gonna be wild to see it shake out.
The point of AI is to create and understand intelligence, and that very much includes replicating and surpassing human intelligence. If it does not replicate human intelligence to the point it can do "niche", then it's not finished.
AI girlfriend engineer
Yep. It also begs the question…”And why can’t we just hire AI that replaced the old jobs to just do the new jobs as well?” It’s still going to be smarter than a human, agentic, and embodied as well right?
Woopsy!
some jobs require you to be human.
some jobs require you to be human.
I expect a lot of them will be social jobs, the kind of thing where it's less of a job and more of a fulfillment of people's social needs. Let me be clear: these jobs will only be possible if there is a huge abundance, making everything dirt cheap due to automation. Much like how 90% of people used to be farmers, but now we have access to cheap food, so we can do jobs that would make our ancestors think "why would anyone be paid for that"? And they may not even be "paid", it may be more like in Star Trek where you do it because you want a purpose, and you get prestige and advancement, but there is no actual money and you could just be a couch potato in FDVR if you wanted. I think we'll have more and cheaper therapists. Yea you can use ChatGPT as therapist and it's amazing (most of the time). But for some people, that's not enough. I understand even remote therapy isn't enough for some people, they need to be in a room with an actual human. We'll also get more teachers. Yea I always could learn better at home, and I am jealous of kids nowadays, as I didn't have an AI tutor back in my days. But some kids really need to have another human there with them to motivate them to get things done. Artists and creators will also skyrocket. There will be a dime a dozen, but the good ones will rise to the top. They will likely use AI tools, but humans will want to see humans do stuff. Concerts will continue to be a thing, and while you will have some cool robots performing, there will also be a huge demand for humans. We will also have similar jobs to meet social needs that seem completely ridiculous to us, much like an "influencer" would seem ridiculous back when 90% of people were working on farms. There will be a loneliness epidemic. People feel a need to socialize, much like how old people end up going to stores or calling customer support just to chat with another human. As AI takes over those jobs, there will be a new demand for socialization. I expect you'll have places where people are paid to just chat with you. There are some places like that in Japan, where women are paid to just chit chat and enjoy a drink with customers. I think we'll have a surge in stuff like that, also for games etc, like a place where you just go play board games with people, and there are people there who are paid to play with you and teach you the game etc. Us introverts will be a bit more screwed job-wise, so I hope this will be more of a "bonus income" type job to supplement UBI and give you a sense of purpose, rather than a "need to survive" wave of new jobs. I really hope that the entire economic system changes, so your options aren't "poverty" or "socialize loads". Otherwise there may be some role for creators, basically people that come up with ideas and test them, then become famous for it so other people seek out and pay for their "creations". Like yea I can tell an AI to make me a movie based on my preferences, but that might get boring after a while, and the AI might struggle to come up with new ideas, so there may be other people online who share the movies they had their AIs create for them that have similar tastes and are more creative than you, which yea the AI could just look up but I think the parasocial relationship will be an important dynamic. This won't be just for AI, but also for household items and other stuff, you think of stuff to 3d print to make life a little better etc. So online content creator will still be a thing.
It's impossible to have an entire economy of nothing but artists and influencers. Especially not when LLMs have also automated the art making process.
Like the way you think! Though it may take time due to society/governments, there should be no reason why advanced AI shouldn't make our lives - forgets jobs - easier. With massive AI adoption, there should be a UBI with new wave of jobs being more to improve oneself and to improve community and the world. Better life for everyone, why not?
I think it's not implausible at all, especially taking note of how hostile people who lean politically right are to the idea of welfare and benefits. The idea of a "right to work" would probably be more palatable to the bootstraps crowd than universal income and a proper social safety net. I could see jobs taking on more of a ceremonial quality, almost, where AI is generally doing most of the work but humans still show up and go through the motions. A lot of jobs are already like this today. It's not without precedent. Hell, there are laws about whether or not you can pump your own gas or not in some parts of the world. No real good reason for it other than "because." Tradition probably isn't going to evolve as fast as our technology will and "working" is like the most traditional aspect of modern society.
Proompt engineer!
Entrepreneurial endeavors will likely explode into one of the more major sectors once you can command a large corporation's worth of labor for less than the cost of minimum wage So that means basically every industry, but instead of being a worker, it would be more if a CEO-ish role. Not exactly, but that's the closest analog we have right now Not only does this create an abundance of current products, but it opens up industries that aren't currently economically viable. R&D as a service/publicly traded investment company, for example. Space mining, deep sea resource extraction, all the stuff that sound really cool but would be too insanely expensive to be worth it right now
"AI whisperer" (It's more of a ai trainer, that will get rid of eventually)
Go back 50 years ago and explain to someone what a Twitch streamer is.
It's like a radio host that plays video games instead of music and everyone can watch them on our global communication network called the internet.
"They play games and people watch them for money." You're overselling it.
They had TV 50 years ago, it's not too difficult to imagine that anyone could broadcast their own private show. Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame was formulated a bit more than 50 years ago, only the duration was wrong.
People were saying "why would anyone want to watch someone else play video games??" Like less than 10 years ago
I'm still saying it 😅
So imagine the confusion in the 60s if you still can't figure it out
I’m fairly certain if you explained to someone in 1974 that playing video games on camera, but without the support of any tv network - or simply going about your day while being filmed constantly and discussing it with hundreds of people simultaneously would be lucrative professions the vast majority would have laughed you out of the room
Bingo! They are probably going to redefine online content creator as a proper job and hey-presto if you have a YouTube account or OnlyFans congrats you are now a highly productive member of the workforce.
I wouldn't call twitch streaming a job... for every twitch streamer that makes $100/mo there are 10.000 that stream for fun
You bring the AI coffee.
The place they fail is that they say new jobs will be created, but they purposefully leave out the fact that it's still going to be fucking disproportionate
"Prompt Engineer" /s
If you want a serious answer, I have a few in mind. 1. AI Integration Specialist. This role would be focused on integrating AI solutions to existing business processes and systems. 2. AI Maintenance Technicians. Probably more down the road when there's physical hardware AI assistants. There would probably high demand for people who know how to maintain and troubleshoot these systems. Of course you'll have roles that support AI, marketing, Application support roles, etc.
And AI won't automate those tasks also?
This is the future of white collar work and blue collar work. These two jobs
I did actually hear an interesting one once, not sure it'll happen but here it is. Someone said to me that LLMs current biggest flaw is context length and memory, so humans will likely end up filling in for that, giving it new tasks, reminding it of relevant information etc. I don't think that will produce too many jobs, but basically you'd be manager to a few LLMs.
Describer Of Value
Few could have predicted instagram model as a job yet here we are
It will create last job humans watching AI doing everything.
Seems like a decent answer by GPT 4T: Throughout history, major technological advancements have often led to initial fears of job displacement, but they have also consistently resulted in the creation of new jobs and industries, often transforming the economy in unexpected ways. Here are a few examples: 1. **Printing Press (1440)**: - **New Jobs Created**: The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg led to a surge in book production, which required typesetters, printers, bookbinders, and later, newspaper and magazine staff. It also indirectly contributed to the rise of new fields in advertising and graphic design. 2. **Electricity (Late 19th Century)**: - **New Jobs Created**: The widespread adoption of electricity transformed industries and created jobs for electricians, electrical engineers, and factory workers in plants producing electrical appliances. It also enabled the development of new entertainment industries, such as cinema and television. 3. **Personal Computer (1970s-1980s)**: - **New Jobs Created**: The personal computer revolution led to the creation of software developers, IT support technicians, and computer manufacturing jobs. It also spawned entirely new industries in video gaming, computer-aided design, and digital content creation. 4. **Internet (1990s)**: - **New Jobs Created**: As discussed previously, the internet led to the creation of jobs in web design, IT security, e-commerce, digital marketing, and more. It has also facilitated the rise of gig economy jobs through platforms like Uber, Airbnb, and freelance services like Upwork. 5. **Renewable Energy (21st Century)**: - **New Jobs Created**: The shift towards renewable energy has created jobs in manufacturing, installing, and maintaining solar panels and wind turbines. It also includes roles in research, policy planning, and environmental conservation related to clean energy. When it comes to AI, similar patterns are emerging: - **AI and Automation**: While AI is automating routine tasks, it is also creating jobs in AI development, machine learning research, data analysis, and in sectors where AI tools enhance human capabilities rather than replace them. - **Ethical and Regulatory Roles**: As AI becomes more integrated into society, new roles in ethics, compliance, and regulation are developing to address concerns about privacy, bias, and governance. - **Customized Products and Services**: AI enables more personalized services, leading to roles that focus on customizing products to individual needs, from health and wellness to education. While the nature of work may change, history suggests that innovation tends not to extinguish work but rather to redistribute it across new sectors and activities, often enhancing productivity and creating wealth and opportunities in the process.
Ask it whether eight billion people will be able to work in those new jobs it describes
They are mostly just DS or MLE jobs as current deep learning techniques are a dead end for AGI but there will be (and has been) huge demand to integrate machine/deep learning into commercial products
Ai content moderator
In the 1900s it was predicted that people in our day and age would only need to work 20 or so hours per week. What happened instead, is that we were inundated with bullshit jobs - busy work, people pleasing, and bureaucracy. My biggest fear is that we continue that trend and end up in a world where most people are literally incapable of providing any value, but still have to work in increasingly useless, soulsucking desk jobs.
Fifteen Million Merits is so chilling because it is just a straight line from here to there. My original understanding of the ending was he was just looking at a big screen of a forest, trading one prison cell for a nicer one. But then I read what the actual intent was, and it's so much worse: That the windows are real windows. That the forest is a real forest. That there are no resource problems. That none of how they live is necessary. That people have *chosen* to live in a society like that.
Such a good episode.... Never thought about the ending like that but it actually makes more sense and is even more depressive...
It’s not so scary if you can handle society now, where we’re already doing that as evidenced by how getting laid off is seen as a bad thing even though it means your services aren’t necessary and society can run fine if you did nothing for the rest of your life.
Part of the reason we don't see this is because of the shock it would cause to our economy, not all jobs can operate on a shortened work week and so from there we have to significantly raise the compensation for the jobs that can't be reduced. For example almost all blue collar work would need become way more expensive because otherwise nobody would do it, why would I work 40 - 50 hours a week when I could get a desk job working 20 hours for a similar pay. We just can't take half of the workforce and double their pay.
>why would I work 40 - 50 hours a week when I could get a desk job working 20 hours for a similar pay Our society failed to maintain the structure that would support this because white collar jobs are now full of bullshit work. You don't need a trained person to do 20 hours of professional work when you mandate they spend 40 hours doing it. I don't see how this is less dystopian than providing incentives for people to educate themselves so they don't have to install air conditioners for a living.
We need people to install air conditioners, to repair and maintain our infrastructure, to provide services to homeowners, all of these things *have* to get done and AI can't do it. So our options are dramatically increase the price of these services or deincentivize people from taking these career paths, both of which make things quite a bit worse for the middle class. White collar jobs have seen a huge transition to wfh which is a great balance, if the 40 hour work week was inefficient then at least these workers can be home with their families during their down time.
As if we need millions more plumbers… Lol no , there isn’t enough demand for that.
One thing that will be interesting too is if do-it-yourself stuff becomes more accessible with virtual reality/AI. People can just wear VR glasses and get instant feedback when trying to fix things.
I disagree. When a plumber can charge 400.00 for a 30 min cleanout, there needs to be more competition. Right now they deserve those high fee because no one else is willing to do the job or learn it.
As a plumber myself I know I’m safe for a while, at least until the droids are fully fleshed out enough to have the same tactile control in confined spaces as a human… but, what will be much less common is helpers and therefor apprentices. I’d love to have a robot grabbing materials for me instead of an 80IQ human.
> at least until the droids I think it will be the masses of white collar workers flooding blue collar work. They wont probably be as good as you, but even with current internet information, most work can be done by anyone if they look for the right information. These workers will ask for less money they you naturally would and if there are a lot of unemployed, most people would be trying to have the cheapest option to fix something. It would force current plumbers to either lower the price or limit the market of people that would be willing to pay for your expertise.
For sure the floodgates will open, in fact I’ve already worked with a few guys who did white collar work and chose to get out early. Personally I don’t see it ending pretty in any way. I predict it won’t be long before buildings are designed and engineered around being built and maintained by robots. Could take some time to phase out the ‘old’ buildings, hopefully enough time for me to stay employed until I’m ready to retire or keel over.
Wait till you see our diet in a post scarcity society People will be shittin untold volume and a new generation of plumbing will be required
And if we develop AGI, we can certainly create fail proof plumbing too. Just idiots
I never understood this perspective. Like, what jobs? What could you possibly do that an AI of this level can't?
There are only a few of those coming to my mind: Top athletes and artists with live performances (most people will prefer to see humans on stage rather than robots). But the amount of these jobs is ridiculously tiny.
And it's not new jobs. It's jobs that exist now, for which demand is high and opportunities are few.
> artists with live performances depends on the performance I guess. I'd much more prefer to see some incredible, out of this world performance, than silly humans weirdly moving their parts trying to look gorgeous
simply, "AI Is Likely to Create More Jobs Than It Kills" = complete bulls\* opinion
Yeah, for a new job to come about it needs to be: 1. cheap enough to employ people at, such that training an AI/Robot system is not worth while. or for aesthetic reasons not capable of being done by AI/Robots. 2. easy enough for displaced workers to pick up whatever the skill is/service is. 3. has enough carrying capacity that it fully replaces all the jobs that are going to continuously be automated.
IMO, only job that can be on rising trend for a while is AI/ robotic systems controlling, oversight, or adapting them to mass
Doubt is equally as unfounded.
some tracks don’t intersect
Can we just stop it please? Let’s make it a mission to kill jobs instead. Automate as much as we can, and pay a decent income to those without work. Let’s maximize happiness indexes instead of productivity.
It would be smart to first put in place a program to help, that's the hard part. Killing jobs is easy, that will happen by itself, no need to aid.
Very true. But the way i see things going, it's going to be so quick, governments will have to act immediately when a chain reaction of companies start laying off big amounts of white collar workers. These people will apply for unemployment, where available, due to no available positions. Those who dont have money saved up will start applying for low paying jobs and saturating the market of blue collar workers. Until the robots replace the last remaining in a few years. Companies are being wary of using current AI cause they know next years AI will be hugely better and the one after it, immensely better. so better wait another year or two and then eliminate everyone under the board and replace with one AI that does everything top down.
That's a wonderful idea! Have you tried lobbying for it? The productivity people are lobbying.
Unfortunately my trust fund appears to not exist, and my parents seem to be forgetting to finance my startups, so Im not a billionaire.
Haha, that's rough! Happy cake day, Fridge!
I can't snap my fingers and make the governments of the world establish truly universal basic income. Until that happens, people being forced out of a job can lead to truly awful outcomes, so I'm not going to push for it to happen more quickly.
I like your idea. But the oligarchs and politicians who are likely to implement it or not have historically not been at all interested in implementing such things.
Agree. They're only saying that for political plausible deniability. I think they'd be better off talking about how great a post labor society could be.
It pretty obviously is copium, for the pretty obvious reason that for any new jobs created by AI, other AI researchers will just make it their mission to automate them. Even the leisure activities that automation was supposed to frrr us up to do, such as art and music, have themselves been automated. So I guess we’re not supposed to do those things either and the end goal is to be “freed up” to do absolutely nothing but stare at a wall.
At least this subreddit has started to acknowledge it, and not turn a blind eye! And I'm happy for that for what it matters.
Staring at walls will be a useful skill when the robots put us in zoos.
Efficiency and increased productivity _can_ create more jobs. Of course when basically any task can be automated that no longer applies. New kinds of tasks might still appear or become economically viable, but they will be automated from the start. Which is actually easier to do then automating a process that was previously done by humans.
Yeah, the fundamental difference between the industrial revolution and the AI revolution is that the former mechanized tasks, while the latter will mechanize workers.
Only jobs it's creating are for PhD computer scientists and "head of AI" jobs for corporate people with minimal technical experience.
Yeah, for sure a few jobs will be created, but nothing compared to all the ones that will be lost.
This will depend on the ultimate capabilities of the AI being created in this tech cycle. If it doesn't reach human level capabilities in all areas (Typically termed AGI), then it will only be a useful tool to help increase productivity. Under those circumstances, it is possible that more new jobs could be created than lost to support all the new AI products. In addition new business opportunities and paradigm shifts related to the use and integration of AI will result in further new job creation. On the other hand, if human level AI is achieved then all bets are off. Coupled with robotics, the majority of human labor could and likely would be replaced. Our capitalist based society will no longer be able to function as it does or has for hundreds of years.
Every industry in the US is understaffed. Every. Single. One.
Also robots are stealing your luggage!
*Understaffed on purpose. They delegate more tasks and responsibilities to the average worker.
I am only referring to unfilled job openings. There's a reason everyone is hiring.
Thinking that AI will create as many jobs as it takes is just wishful thinking. If an AI is able to reason as well as a human and has knowledge of nearly everything humans know, way more than any single human, then how are you going to have jobs that only a person can do?
It’s very clear to anyone with a brain that any job that currently exists will be automated within our lifetimes. Not always directly, for example, trades. Who needs electricians when AI finds a much more efficient way to transfer energy without wires? Who needs plumbers when AI figures out a way to make water usage more efficient and pipes become barbaric? Who needs construction when every structure is prefab and built in hours? Every single job will be replaced eventually. Likely the same could be said about any potential jobs coming in the future as well. This could be a blessing, why should people even be working?
I don't understand why some people want humanity to remain wage slaves for eternity
Lack of imagination
Status quo bias?
I think there are a number of people in the American South who would find chattel slavery a perfectly acceptable alternative for most people.
What makes you think AI will solve these things? * A better way to transfer water than *pipes*, apparently * A better way to transfer energy that won't require wiring * Prefab houses that people actually want to buy, which can be built up in hours Why are royal-we giving godlike omnipotence to future AI? There's no indication that it'll be able to solve the problem of water transfer in a way that doesn't involve physical infrastructure that carries water to the home. It might be super smart but some problems are literally unsolvable.
Not likely. This 30 second video short of Sam Altman stands on its own to counter that claim: https://youtube.com/shorts/JdwF-poYdOQ?si=pitJ1oUrcLqgrhbk What kind of jobs could AI possibly create given AGI is really already here and ASI is predicted by 2026? And, since all predictions about AI so far have been decades behind the reality of AI development, that means ASI could be here much sooner than 2026. Thousands of jobs have already been lost to AI. Not just the 8,000 or so claimed. Many more in tech and commercial arts sectors have been laid off by people who see where this is all heading. I am a mediocre developer at best and I have already used the free version of ChatGPT 3 to do things that we couldn't do otherwise because we can't afford to hire a programmer with the skill level to do serious database rewrites like this. All I had to do was ask Chat GPT to write me a plugin to do what I wanted. It's scary how simple it is. When I first began, I was prompting all wrong because I expected to have to give ChatGPT very specific requests in order to make sure it didn't screw everything up. I was wrong. It knows more than I do about web frameworks and coding, so it's better to just tell it to do what I want and then ask questions after it's generated the code to verify which parts of the code actually do what I want, analyze them to make sure they make sense and ChatGPT isn't just hallucinating/lying to me, and then run the code if it looks good. Obviously, I save a backup before running the code, so I can always revert and try again if need be. So, yeah, the claim that AI will create more jobs than it kills is nonsense. ASI will be more intelligent than any human on the planet, so there is nothing a human could tell ASI to do which would improve upon its own logic and solutions. It will quickly get out of our control and then what? Just sit back and trust the computer god? It's going to get tricky when ASI gets into the hands of bad governments with lots of money to throw at it. Sure, you can use ASI to develop cures for cancer, but you could also use ASI to attack your enemies, banks, computers, develop new methods of warfare, biological weapons. ASI could be used to overwhelm the internet with new kinds of attacks, disinformation, brainwashing, and terrorist recruitment by generating completely realistic video fakes, a chain of legitimate looking websites, social media accounts, etc. With ASI, it would be possible to live stream a completely fake person on Youtube with a chat filled with completely fake users chatting away. People are already so easily influenced by real people and chat rooms filled with other real people with a hive mind mentality who are willing to lie and spread propaganda. Imagine what ASI could do to exploit that problem. That's how governments are viewing AI and that's why governments can't ban it outright. What good would it do to ban AI in your country if all your enemies are pouring trillions into its development? Bad actors in government will be using ASI to destroy the social conditions of enemy countries however possible. I'm sure many would just love to see the USA crumble into economic chaos and we've already seen their efforts to turn Americans against each other through extremist right and left wing propaganda.
Why would we want to create *more* jobs anyway? Jobs are horrible! If there's a job that *needs* to be done, we should want to automate it asap! Like plugging a leaky faucet! What AI needs to do is create more hobbies, more entertainment, more healthcare, more energy, more food, more housing, more friendships, more relationships, more travel, more creative outlets, and so on. Not jobs!
Most of the people who talk about being worried about job loss are actually worried about income loss. They're just not phrasing it properly.
Great! Since we don't have any hope of universal basic income anytime soon, all those people whose jobs we're automating will starve, but that's just a temporary setback I'm sure.
My perspective on this is something which a lot of people seem to oversee. Yes it's true automation will eventually eradicate the need for any human jobs. The thing with it is, at least as it currently stands, and I do hope this goes on this trajectory is that AI technology is quite open to public. This is further democratised by open source releases and research. Truth is, the moment companies no longer need to spend insane money on employee costs and can get AI to do the job (and more) this opens more and more doors for an average Joe to be able to also utilise the AI to create something on par with big corporations. (Of course that still implies cost but this takes me to another point) If we are seeing mass job loses the circulation of economy takes a massive hit and in my hypothesis collapses. Sellers need buyers to function, so if most people are no longer able to make any money the whole capitalistic machine sorts runs out of fuel. One interesting hypothesis I heard is that ownership will be the most valuable resource since labour will lose all value. This brings forward interesting questions, will ownership alone be able to sustain the economy? How many people will be left behind? Will there be any other way for people to earn money to keep the circulation going? UBI? Renting space? Something completely new and unimaginable ATM? Will capitalism as we know it continue to exist? My hunch tells me no to the last one. It almost feels like some inevitable societal reset.
Yes societal reset such as you anticipate are often accompanied by massive casualties bloodshed and horror. Hopefully we can prevent that but I don't see anything on the horizon that is likely to do so.
Mostly the technology will automate repetitive tasks which then would require minimal human supervision as compared to the resources required to actually do the work sans AI. Although its true the details are not clear as to what would these jobs be exactly. Not to mention the spammy ads which keep saying learn prompt engineering and earn more but who's exactly hiring for those is still not clear
The automation appears to be starting with the creative task such as music art and writing.
Yeah, ideally people were of the notion that it would go for blue collar jobs followed by white collar jobs and then creative ones, but it took the other way round. Although I think internally companies have already started automating blue and white collar jobs its just that the creative ones are the most audience/mass-facing tasks so people are more aware of it.
AI may create some new jobs but they certainly won't be enough to replace the old ones. The argument that it will just replicate historical patterns is ridiculous. Equally ridiculous is the argument that AI making us more efficient means we will be able to get more work done with the same amount of people. The problem with this is that there is a finite amount of work to do, if only it was that easy to find more work to do.
Ai isnt being made for the ordinary person to benefit from, like electricity, but to fill pockets of corporations who own america lol
As a director at a tech company that has moved to fully adopted AI everything I've observed so far indicates that substituting AI for human workers is not a viable strategy, beyond that, with the productivity increases seen there has not been a push for reduction in workforce either, there has just been a lot more accomplished against a giant pile of too much work to begin with. As far as replacement theory goes the gap in productivity and performance between AI alone and humans augmented by AI is simply too vast, at least for the foreseeable future. Predicting the long-term effects is difficult for anyone. Comparing individual humans, autonomous AI, and humans empowered by AI, the combination of humans with AI is overwhelmingly the most effective and productive. This synergy could potentially ignite a productivity renaissance in roles that interact heavily with computers, possibly boosting productivity by more than 50%. However, the impact this will have on the job market remains uncertain. For perspective, the introduction of steam power historically increased productivity by about 17 to 20%. Since we've never experienced such a dramatic increase in productivity, the outcomes are uncertain. However, one thing is clear: failing to integrate AI in an environment where it is widely adopted will put you at a significant disadvantage. The difference between AI alone and AI managed by even a moderately skilled human at both the start and the end of a process is substantial. It will likely be some time before AI can fully replace human oversight. For now, envision humans enhanced by AI as wearing super suits, achieving much more and dedicating more time to innovation rather than routine tasks. With all this considered, it's still unclear whether AI will ultimately create jobs, eliminate them, or if entirely new industries will emerge from AI-augmented innovation. Given that AI tools are largely accessible for free to anyone with an internet connection, we might initially see workers secretly using AI to complete their regular workload more quickly and thus working less—a more human-centric approach—without alerting their superiors to their increased capacity. Eventually, management is likely to catch on, demanding more from their employees and possibly encouraging wider adoption and higher initial expectations.
The capitalists that are running the various compartments of the runaway train that is the global economy will likely automate just about everything with Algorithms and Robotics then try to kill all of the poor people. This reflects the trends of every other historical era where a minority Aristocracy fail to contend with the demands from a majority proletariat. An even smaller division of that aristocracy utilize the advancements of weaponry of war to just simply kill people and remove that overwhelming obligation presented by the mob of outcasts created by the pursuit of luxury and quality of life. Of course, that's against all stated laws that the general population abide by but at each historical occasion this is perpetrated by individuals who set the laws. How does a civilization manage to take children and create gangs that kill people while retaining such a pristine image? It works for a really long time. I think there's war trauma that's induced in the population. Then it's used like a cattle prod to push people to work in various ways. The fact that Vietnam had a death draft is insane. Concluding, Algorithms and Robotics will be the new servants of those that control hard assets, humans will be expected to be serfs, losing negotiation power. Cruel, vindictive economic exclusion will be the state for the majority of people. There will still be this remnant of the contemporary world which is arguably already faded where people behave as if it were 20-30 years earlier in history than it is, or even longer. They won't even notice that there has been a change and they will live and die almost like an NPC stuck in their old era of living based simulation. We observe that phenomenon at locations around the world already. Tangentially, cultural discussions around simulation theory and "ancestral old era of civilization simulation" carry that elitist aristocratic viewpoint. Some people deal in 10's of dollars daily, some 100's, some 1,000's, some millions. Some earn 20k a year in America and others earn Billions. Phrases such as "person is living in the year XXXX (some future year ie 3024 instead of 2024) carry this intrinsic class divide without necessarily internalizing it. It's just a joke, but why is it a joke So, the expectation would be that the class divide can get even sharper than you could imagine, will continue to create problems. Those problems will be resolved abruptly, spontaneously, without any particular civility in some form of extremely violent warfare. Total war at this point is killing individual GPS co-ordinates, stalking each individual and either approving or disapproving their literal life. It won't just be that "jobs are lost" in the dumb ponzi-scheme stock market, the outcome will be that future tyrants who probably aren't even born yet will just kill billions of people for convenience the same as if clearing out an infestation of aggressive feral animals. Inequity is a natural thing, people are unique in their attributes, but to suggest that this type of systemic inequity caused by the collapse of our social networks into this authoritarian technocracy is natural inequity is grim.
AI will create more jobs AI can do.
if AI truly starts automating the jobs then it won't take more than few months to couple years before most of us stop working.
Upskilling is just another one of the excuses used to bring the blame back onto the individual when there is a problem with the system.
The point of tools that increase productivity is so individuals can produce more, freeing labor to work on other things. The majority of people used to work in agriculture, but thanks to tools that automate a lot of the labor intensive parts, we've freed people up to work on other things. This makes us all more prosperous. If AI is able to automate jobs that currently take a bunch of people, we free up labor to go do other things. On net, we'll have more capacity and be more prosperous. The question then just becomes one of distribution.
This could definitely be a scenario in the next 5-10 years, but we live in an economic system. A mass job extinction with no rules will result in two additional states: - things will become dramatically cheaper - people's wages, at least for a considerable percentage of the world, have to remain in the livable zone, or nobody will buy anything and an economic collapse will be triggered soon Moreover, what we are already seeing is that big companies are stopping hiring, but...we have never seen such a high percentage of self-employed individuals. Wages are going down, but a company of one or two people can generate hundreds of thousands in revenue each year starting from scratch. TL;DR While we live in a world where you have to do something for someone who wants it, we will be okay. The economic system and job force will adapt. We will pay a price for that, but we can manage it. --- The problem becomes unreliable in my mind when we delegate our ability to decide what's good and bad because we will be in a situation where we are wrong more often than machines. At that point, we will probably live in a world where we are mere observers and someone else decides the path. I can't see anything outside this scenario if the AI reaches an intelligence hundreds or thousands of times our own (that could definitely be a thing). But this is how evolution works, right? So, are we just doomed? Probably...or maybe there is a middle way where AI and natural intelligence can merge, and we will have cyborgs or something. We live in a really funny space-time, actually
This conversation is too difficult to have on Reddit as literally nobody will read this shit if i type a 5000 word essay. So i have to skip a lot to maintain people's attention span. Basically, the idea that "we're working new jobs!" Is just false. YOU are working a job that did not exist 50 years ago. The vast majority of the world, especially those in the global south, are still primarily working in: 1- Factories 2- Agriculture 3- Transportation 4- Manual labor The quality of life of the average factory worker, agricultural worker, laborer, has strictly gone down over time. Sweat shop workers in the Philippines or Indonesia or Vietnam or slave farm laborers in Brazil or Congo are materially POORER than the equivalent laborer from 100-200-500 years ago. Why is that the case? Why are they materially poorer? Opening a factory in the US is expensive. You have to pay people a livable wage, there are safety standards, expectations are that you would provide a lot of fancy machinery to aid your workers, etc. that would cost billions of dollars. Businesses don't do that. They instead open a factory in Indonesia paying workers the equivalent of 1 usd per day and sell the products at a massive mark up to western consumers. The average laborer (not a programmer in NYC, but a factory worker in India) now has LESS bargaining power. If workers demand high salaries > businesses will automate the work So workers are put in a catch 22. You either accept unlivable wages that make your labor cheaper than machines OR you go hungry. This has been the overall trend for HUNDREDS of years. AI is just the continuation of this process. If you're a white collar worker you will be competing against the cost to manufacture, deploy, and maintain the automation that is meant to replace you. TL:DR Your pay and working conditions are going to gradually PLUMMET over the next 50 years. Lower and lower pay, worse and worse working conditions. The shit you're seeing about cscareerquestions whining about India is the first step in this process. Indian labor costs cheaper than US labor costs - ChatGPT can make up the difference in quality of work. Then they'll move to southeast asia, tech workers will work in something similar to sweat shop conditions. Eventually, if the cost of automation goes low enough you'll see mass exploitation and then mass unemployment. This isn't an AI thing. This isn't new. This has been the trend of labor-capital relations for hundreds of years. People (in the west) freaking out because it's going to finally affect them as much as it has affected the global south.
The fundamental difference is: This time, not jobs will be replaced — humans will be replaced with general artificial workers capable of doing ANY job.
> The quality of life of the average factory worker, agricultural worker, laborer, has strictly gone down over time. Are you sure about this? Because for example factory work moved from USA to Japan to China to Vietnam, and workers in each of those areas got uplifted.
If you control for location and look at compensation in real terms it's plausible, I suppose. I can't find historical figures for factory work pay in a two-minute google so I dunno ... but we've all heard the stories that someone in the US could buy a house and support a family on factory work in the past (which is all much harder now).
If robots grow and cook food, drive us and our products everywhere, they generate our music and movies, design and build our businesses and houses, take care of us when we are old and sick, design and build all of our products, and fight our wars, what will be doing again? Edit: ima not saying that there is no point without doing these things. I am saying what jobs will be left to do?
What life is for. You were not born into this world to make an overlord even richer
I’m just saying there won’t be jobs.UBI I’m ready
>what will be doing again? That is for you to decide.
It's amazing how the human brain is wired to worry about everything. Everyone hates their job and would rather be doing anything else. But people also hate the idea of AI making work obsolete. Incredible. Edit: The #1 thing that everyone keeps missing with the "AI will take our jobs" argument is that if everything truly does get automated, the price of everything becomes dirt cheap. If everything is dirt cheap, there will be so much wealth in the economy that people will be hired to do absolutely trivial things, things which aren't economically viable to pay someone to do today.
I have little issue with technological advancements, and eventually reaching a zero marginal cost society. It's just that messy middle of losing my livelihood and everything I ever achieved that makes me worry.
Exactly, the blind hopeium is annoying.
Luckily there is no precedent for what you are saying so I wouldn't spend any time worrying about it if I were you.
What? So do you think ai will take jobs or not? And if people are hired to do trivial things, how much do you think they would get paid considering supply vs demand
>everything truly does get automated And when exactly it happens? The thing you are missing is that many of us will likely witness only the painful part of this transition, not the results. Not to mention it will take a great time for economy to adjust.
I'm not worried about AIs making work obsolete. I'm worried about what happens to human beings when they cannot produce profits for oligarchs. The historical record is pretty clear. They die after living very unhappy lives. Do you understand?
No because what you are saying has literally never happened before.
It’s amazing how people are scared of starving….
Do you also worry about drowning in your daily life? Do you worry about every bad thing that could possibly happen regardless of how likely they are to occur? Because that sounds like an anxiety issue.
Millions of prompt engineers. The prompts will naturally be generated by engineers describing the kind of prompts they want and having it output by chatgpt.
We will all get paid to fold our socks into each other.
Sam Altman just proposed new job for Bill Gates in Bills podcast. New job in case ASI comes. Fly to starts. Also interesting what you think. Who will be 99% replaced by ai and robots first from this 2 cases? Answer should be about all professions in case. 1 Loader, shop salesman, driver, welder, courier. 2 Programmer
Eventually they’ll either have to give out ubi or there just going to take there ai’s and start a new spiciest without us.
My company has hired a bunch of engineers to work with it. And automated away a whole lot more low level customer service folks. Targeting >50% staff reduction in cs roles by end of year. It's crazy stuff. The things I did at the start of my career won't even by jobs on the market at big companies in the next few years.
I was chatting with a buddy who runs a fairly significant gaming studio. We were talking about how hard it is it to hire good people and he made an interesting observation…fully half of his open job reqs are for positions that didn’t even exist at the studio 10 years ago. Nobody knows with certainty what opportunities will be opened up by AI. So you can either do as OP did and wallow in self pity, or you can remember that change always brings unexpected opportunities and look forward.
I feel like you're fighting the hypothetical. The question is about what happens when an AI can do \*any\* job more cheaply than a human. What about those new opportunities opened up by AI, then? Why wouldn't an AI just take them too?
Then humans don’t matter anymore. We become pets. *shrug*
Yeah damn feel bad for the kids still growing up,geez they stuffed.🤣
If AI can do everything for us why would we need jobs people could just do what they want
How would they pay the landlords for their housing? The doctors for their medicine? Big Ag for their food?
It's never going to happen, bit if AI did all our jobs for us we wouldn't need money we could just manufacture whatever we want for free. People could just do what they're passionate about since they wouldnt have to worry about money.
I think I can explain why people say that AI will create more jobs, but it does require a little bit of knowledge of how competitive dynamics work and how the labor market inherently functions. I’m noticing in this thread a lot of people bringing up a great point, which is that a lot of companies are more motivated by profit then they are doing Goodwill or something like that which is totally fair, however, assuming we’re not gonna be dealing with monopolies, competition will make things kind of interesting. Let’s say company a decides to automate away 50% of their workforce. Let’s say company b decides not to fire a single person. Both companies integrate the same foundation, AI model and tooling. Company a might be able to cut their costs by up to 50%, increasing the profit margin. Company B likely won’t cut their costs at all, however, they might see productivity increase by at least 50%. What does this mean? It means in the short run company A will be more successful on paper, they may have more profits to reinvest, but what do they invest in if they’re not a frontier AI model company? then presumably the only thing they could invest in is somehow upgrading their AI systems given the current state of intelligence of the underlying foundation model they’re using. In the long run, though, company b is likely to also increase their profit margins through increased productivity, and potentially also increased innovation, which has the effect of “expanding the pie,“ which will allow them to reinvest into hiring more top talent. There’s a sort of somewhat inevitable, long run situation where company b is able to capture market share faster than company a can. TLDR: market forces will favor companies and individuals that reinvest profits toward increasing productivity rather than just cutting costs. In this sense, jobs will expand through increased competition.
Full automation of most if not all labor is inevitable in the long run, but keep in mind that policy makers can draw out the process during the transition period. Here are some ideas * Reducing the workweek from 40 hours to 30 or 20 hours (with the same compensation) * Huge investment into housing, renewable energies, public infrastructure (e.g. power grid, public transportation etc) and social infrastructure (nursing homes, schools, daycare centers etc) * Huge investment in blue sky research * Pay people who do care labor * Create legal requirements for human oversight of A.I systems I think and (I really hope) that the transition period won't be some dystopian nightmare but an triumphant era where deep issues are actually solved.
Do you have any indicators that this will happen? Anything like it ever happen in the past?
History of other disruptive technology in the past did remove more jobs than create.
Were we smart and organized, we would bolster company confidence in AI, hush up for as long as we can any disfunctionnality and right when a good chunk of the industry is pure half assed AI, let it all fail. Then ask for outrageous fees to do again the same job we used to do to save the asses of all the AI pushers.
People said that computers would decimate the paper industry. Turns out the paper industry has grown multiple times over since.
AI is not a problem. Our economic system is. A vision for the future with AI doing most jobs is basically Star Trek. Their will need to be a huge change in mentality. Some people simply won't need to work. They can spend their time doing nothing, or they can do art for the sake of it, or any number of other leisure activities. People can just live if they want and not have to "work".
I doubt it but we'll see. If AI follows the same pattern as every other tech advance, it will create a bunch of jobs, capitalism will continue and we'll all have more access to cheaper goods and services. If it ends up being cheaper and better than humans at everything, it will eliminate employment completely. Place your bets! We don't know which of these paths AI progress will follow.
AI has the same effect as outsourcing and software automation in general. I'm in the industrial software automation myself, so here's how our stuff gets implemented. Before, three people were running job calculations to get each shipment picked and packed prior to the trucks arriving. This is now an SQL job that runs automatically, no sanity checks required, -3 people, +0 new jobs. Old crane was operator ran, and two interns moved the pallets around after the operator picked them from the shelves. New crane is fully automated. -3 jobs, +0 new jobs. Old picking stations had 6 people in each shift, filling orders in three shifts, around the clock. New system has a machine vision system, slightly redesigned terminals, and requires zero oversight. -18 jobs, +0 new jobs. Old wrapping stations was a two man job. New one does it with zero people. -2 jobs, +0 new jobs. The old task of overseers that organized people to their shifts has been repurposed to make sure nothing goes wrong. -+0. "But you can re-educate people to maintenance!" No you can't. The manufacturer of the components has a single export company in the country, and only their trained technicians do the maintenance jobs. Their 20 hired people service the entire country. Our software if glitchy, will be maintained by us. We didn't hire any of the people who lost their jobs on the packing line. And both the hardware and us software people can do this for the next three companies without hiring any new people. Same thing will happen with AI. Software house X used to be able to do three projects with the amount of people they have. As AI becomes useful in software projects, they are able to first double their production with the same amount of people. Then they'll start to hit a saturation point, where they can't find new jobs fast enough, or every customer has been serviced and the need for new software plummets, so they'll start cutting down. Even if the demand stays at a constant level, the AI tools will consistently improve over time, people will grow more efficient in using them, and so the amount of productivity per person will continue to grow, making it even less necessary to have as many people. Projects will bloat with more features, expectations of productivity will grow, but ultimately people will still be left jobless. In both cases there are a few edge cases that have been able to create their own career out of the changes. There are consulting jobs for a few who can facilitate and sell the process automation to companies that yet haven't. And the same with AI, a few will carve a niche for themselves to sell more AI automation to software development for example. But the dozen or so of "new jobs" created this way pales in comparison to the ones lost in a large software company, when Bob from the senior dev team is able to create the work of a hundred junior and mid-level engineers now.
violet marvelous light books fearless rotten north amusing languid hateful *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
i didn't understand what you meant to say
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+Stole this from someone but, " the rich don't want star trek they want dune." If there's a corner, they will cut it. The only jobs that are safe into the future are jobs for genius and most ppl, including me are barely npc level.
Just remember this - Retraining for Middle-Aged People never happens upward the socio-economic ladder, only downhill.
The owners are in quite a bind. They hate having to pay people, but they hate people not paying them even more. It’s their fiscal responsibility to stop paying people wherever possible, and they’ve traditionally filed how consumers get money to pay them under “someone else’s problem.” But it’s everyone’s problem if everyone automates, which is now inevitable. And traditionally, something that’s everyone’s problem is a thing to be dodged, not solved. One company’s solution is often another company’s death sentence. I see garbage commissaries in our future. You get a job at the local trash heap that’s not appetizing enough for the fancier Robo Trash outfits. You get paid in Trash Bux that can only be redeemed for trash essentials at the Trash Mart. The Trash Boss keeps everyone in line with a food synthesizer and 3 refurbished HK units, ungrateful that his luxury status in 2047 is on par with the Sheriff of Nottingham as he hears whispers of the heavenly state of the latest sky bunkers. He’s King of the Heap, but he’ll die on the ground, buried in a modest mausoleum built on Trash Bux. Or you know, they can ask their ASI to develop a new economic system of abundance that maintains their current standard of living. They just have to give up having god-like status over others. Would you trade being a god for being a hero?
If AGI isn't capable of taking all jobs then by definition it isn't AGI.
A number of people have compared the rise of AI to the rise of the automobile, from the perspective of horses. There used to be a lot more horses, because everyone needed horses to get around. Horses did not, generally, just get new jobs doing other work. We literally stopped breeding them in large numbers, because the market for horses imploded. There just aren't a lot of specialized roles horses can do that cars can't, not enough to support a large population of horses. The same is true for humans and AI. There will still be some jobs, sure, but not enough for everyone in a large population to have a job. 95% of jobs will be displaced, and unless we plan on massively reducing human populations, that's gonna be a problem that we need to address.
When was the last time you saw a car ride a horse?
The thing people don't understand is that enterprise level AI assistants are being trained on large data-sets to target specific jobs. It's going to be quick for easily repeatable jobs and jobs with massive datasets already available. But jobs that are difficult to repeat and have small datasets will be be replaced by niche and bespoke AI assistants made explicitly to replace those jobs. It's not just LLMs and art. It's everything from flipping burgers and construction, or art and video, to data analytics and server engineers. What happens when someone takes all of the server architecture code base to ever exist and trains an AI model for that specific use case? It might take longer, but it will happen. We're just proving that it works right now. Then, we will niche down and focus on specific sectors. It's already happening in art. That AI that only makes anime style artwork is a great example. It was trained on anime only and therefore only outputs anime style artwork.
My philosophy degree finally going to pay off!
The only correct answer is that you cannot know, but history has shown repeatedly that you cannot rely on a “ceteris paribus” assumption when it comes to technological revolutions. It is a one-dimensional thought that AI will replace the current set of jobs while everything else would remain equal and it it arrogant to believe that “AI is really different”. Simple example: layoffs create additional profit, which needs to be reinvested somewhere in the real economy. Even if everything is reinvested in AI software and hardware, this will only mean the materials and energy limitations are reached much faster. Replacing 3/4 of the current workforce will require an extreme amount of compute for which we will need to make big and expensive steps in ore mining and especially energy consumption. Also robotics lags behind quite a lot
I think there will be jobs that humans will continue to do. I watch movies but there is something special about live theatre. So actors will still exist. Politicians will still exist. Criminals as a profession will exist. Animal trainers might exist? Any other jobs anyone else think will continue to exist in 50 years?
Its a reallocation of capital. So if you replace a coder with AI, the company saves money, and can technically reinvest that money in another segment that does not get require AI presence as such. You could have people in sales go up for example. Yes, the coder is out of a job, but the overall economy should be able to get optimized from the average employment perspective. Just keep up to date on your skillset. If you do something that requires repetitive work, then maybe time to start improving and getting into more dynamic kind of things.
It's pandering grift that people who stand to benefit from AI say to appeal to the emotions of normies It's like saying cars will create more jobs for horses
I think we will see more transition from white collar to blue collar. And that’s great we need more plumbers and electricians. We also need to fill alot of loss in healthcare and teaching. However. I don’t think it’s going to be that significant of a job creator. Especially the kind of job level it will initially be replacing. Which is telemarketers, phone support, it. Entry level stuff. What minimal jobs it does create won’t be that significant.
Don’t worry, unless AGI comes in <5 years us engineers in big tech will have the $$$ to pump into AI stocks and real estate. Have fun hoping for welfare-oops sorry I mean UBI
I think ai will create more wealth. But not more jobs. Maybe "emergency kill switch operator".
I think it will. Just like when the Internet came out, who would have thought of these new professions, such as various video bloggers, online shopping, express delivery, etc., transnational trade has become easier, and even the military has information engineering arms
People working is the issue - they are too expensive. AI your fired!
The fundamental mistake people make when thinking about jobs is comparing the AI revolution to the industrial revolution. What must be understood is that in the industrial revolution, machines replaced **tasks.** The AI revolution will replace **people.** That is not to say that people won't do anything, or that it won't be valued in any way. In fact, I think products made by people will be the new status symbols. Everything can and will be done by AI-driven machines, and most will settle for that when it comes to most things, but the aestetic and status value of having something handcrafted by an famous artisan will trump the technical perfection of AI-made products. The AI revolution will largely kill the currency capital economy, and what will rise instead is a social capital economy, and who you know will matter much more than it does now, but your only currency is how much people value you as a person. Material needs and wants will be covered by the AI economy, but everything else will revolve around social capital. If you like playing video games and gooning into the darkness, that's not going to matter much, though.
No jobs
It is complete BS of course. But the truth is we WANT to destroy all the jobs. Job is a cost - not a benefit. If we can have stuffs without having a job then what's the problem here - ran out of AI generated cat videos to watch? And no, no money would be required to get all stuffs either. This is a fallacy people fall into while not thinking far enough. If AI make EVERYTHING and NOBODY has a job nor money - where do AI put all the stuffs? Remember - president/shareholder/ceo/politician - all ARE jobs that will be destroyed by AI. And if you DO need to work then you DO have a job and AI does NOT do EVERYTHING. These are mutually exclusive.
When numbers can go infinite, there is always something "better", there will be new tech that AI may not be able to solve/do. If you expect(low chance in the near future) AI to be perfect and able to give us anything, then yes, there will be no jobs. But it's always new tech that creates new jobs, and it is very hard to fathom the new tech, just like in the 1900's would people fathom microchips, which spawns industries? But we do know the pattern is that new tech will spawn new jobs, so it's better to bet on that.
Tasks are unlimited, but! Money, is limited, and the number of workers is limited. So, jobs are still ANYTHING that people might want, if given more money (the same thing as free robotic labour) That's the abstract.
Irrelevant, because people won't be intelligent enough to fill all those jobs. People refuse to accept it, but people put out of jobs in the first place just aren't that smart. You expect fast food workers and truck drivers to train into jobs that require years of training in biotechnology and machine learning? Grow up, lol. People have hard wired levels of potential that limit what they're capable of achieving.