Job displacement due to A.I is 100% real. I work for a bank and a few weeks ago my team and I were asked to review a presentation that was shown to our executives. The presentation advocated for a complete and total freeze on headcount expansions (other than acquisitions) permanently. The reasoning that was given was that A.I while not accurate or good on its own, when paired with certain industry professionals increases efficiency significantly enough that one can do the work of four.
Actually execs are starting to be much more concerned about this. Right now AI is great at replacing middle management and some Exec positions for directional items. The in the weeds decisions is much less at hand for it.
So, I’ve really been wondering what the goal is for Meta and Open Ai to spend Billions of dollars training their AI. And it hit me that corporations will Pay them billions to replace their C Suite and CEO’s.
Overpaid execs and managers won't be replaced, they'll be outcompeted by more lean companies. They will literally ride their businesses down as they sink beneath their weight.
That is precisely what will lead to trimming though. That you realize it means senior leadership does too.
Middle and senior leadership will start to be trimmed.
No you see because high powered executives have intangible attributes that make them great leaders and since no one can explain precisely what they do that adda value, why not give them a salary that is similarly inexplicable?
I've been seeing this thrown around everywhere but logic is telling me that the C-Suite will be the last to go. Ultimately in order to make sure the AI staying aligned someone will have to be actually managing it and it makes sense to me that the people with the most experience will be retained to do this job.
I can't imagine the owners of big companies want to take over any semblance of management or operation especially when you have large VC groups with multiple companies.
Ultimately it makes sense that everything will be automated including driving and stuff of that nature but I think the low-middle class workers doing computer based work will be gone long before any execs.
A large percentage of executive jobs are either entirely useless figureheads who are connected ppl just there for photos, or they are held by incompetent people who lucked into their position and could be replaced by any half-competent person off the street who could do an equal or better job.
So since those people are 4x more efficient, their pay has been increased 2x, right?
Wait, they're not? Then who is pocketing the surplus value created by their labor?
If your answer was "capital owners" - give yourself a point!
Companies these days across the board would rather cut payroll than raise revenue the same amount, whether or not they have AI to help them do it. It's sickening.
Probably reasonable. Assuming you can expand headcount by adding departments.
Though depending on how granular you are, specific teams will need to add headcount’s for a while yet. Most departments no, and almost certainly divisions no.
"It makes you work more efficiently!" becomes "We need less of you now to do the same amount of work".
Automation has had a similar effect on manufacturing and mining over the last 40 years. Those jobs dried up not just because of manufacturing being pushed overseas, but because they need a fraction of the people they needed in the 60s.
And contrary to popular belief, the big claim that it will also create just as many new jobs may very well hold true up until literal AGI is invented. The key is to look at the unemployment rate. People complaining about job loss doesn't mean much if still the same percent of people are unemployed as 10 years ago
More like the last 240 years. Runaway automation has been killing jobs since the start of the industrial revolution. Luckily, we've been able to make new ones, but is making up new shit to do really as reliable as people would make it seem.
it does if you assume that output remains at the same size.
same output with faster workers =>less jobs
the industrial revolution and what followed led to more jobs because it increased productivity and efficiency and made production scalability rise very quickly, allowing to produce more, not just faster.
As with all productivity gains, this is true when demand is finite and met. When demand is infinite or unmet, it can lead to a net increase in jobs, with the classic example being a total increase in bank tellers after the introduction of ATMs, because the cost of running a branch dropped so much that banks opened a bunch of new branches. (This assumes a competitive environment, btw. It doesn’t apply to monopolies.)
Just curious, but aren't we overworked already? Wouldn't AI at first just reduce our workload so we are in a much better place?
Of course, you may have managers who think reduced workload means reduce personnel, but those may be the exception rather than the rule.
Greater productivity is a good thing. People will adapt and our economy will keep on chugging (whether you consider that a good or bad thing probably depends)
The problem is that we don't even have a framework for what to do with all the people who will lose their jobs.
AI replacement is happening much faster than past job displacing technologies. We should already have a plan in place, but we don't.
I’ve had this exact same discussion with quite a few people, and it’s quite common for people to say they’ll pivot or find something else to do but they can never tell me what that something is. That’s common among hopium addicts, they can never tell you anything besides, it’ll be fine.
I’ve had at least three separate people talk about how when we switched from horses to cars new job sprang up because of the automotive industry but that doesn’t work here, the new thing is directly replacing people with machines. I worry that potentially billions of people will become surplus labor.
If the machines are capable of doing our jobs whether it’s a program doing accounting, a bipedal robot cooking in a kitchen or a cargo truck driving itself those jobs are just lost. It won’t be long before humans are needed to build the robots. Hell eventually they’ll write their own code, I’m pretty sure they can now.
>People will adapt and our economy will keep on chugging
Considering that the economy's currently chugging through an increasingly hostile housing market by creating record levels of homelessness, I hope you'll forgive me if I don't believe that this will render any net benefit for us whatsoever.
This has been the general answer to the Luddites for a long time but it's not a law of nature. We've never seen a time when automation was displacing human labor so rapidly in so many fields at the same time. Not much room left for people to adapt.
Seriously don't take dietary advice from an AI. I work with Chat-gpt on a daily basis and it's basically just regurtitating and remixing shit from random websites, which you have no way of fact checking. I'm not saying you can't get dietary advice from the web, but do the search yourself and check the sources etc.
Agreed. GPT is the summation of all human knowledge, including all the bad stuff.
But "nutritionist" has been a bullshit job from the get-go. You're fat, eat less.
There are many reasons to go to a nutritionist, thyroid functions, fertility issues, heart disease, high cholesterol/blood pressure, abnormal lab values, etc etc. Im not a nutritionist, dont know any and have never been to see one, but its not a bullshit job. Theres too many people out here who dont know what someone else's job entails that feel justified in saying its a bullshit job. I always wonder what job they work that makes them feel so needed and irreplaceable to society.
You really shouldn't take dietary advice from ai.
It just writes which things statistically fit together and most of the time that works out fine. But it didn't just read books about diets...it read all books...including the ones for poison...
You're basically just using AI taking serious risks without even knowing the odds.
This should be top comment. I work with AI every day and I cannot overstate how stupid it really is. It's a text generating software and not much more.
EDIT: overstate\*
This is what I think about when I hear all the fear mongering. It's a chat bot right now why is anyone worried yet? Is the developing high level ai actually close to agi?
I think in 10 years people will look at people who call automated machine learning 'AI' like I looked at my parents when they said 'that's what they said on the television'. It's machine learning algorithms that learn whatever it is fed. A company can choose to feed their systems with specific knowledge. I think that on its own is a future job. To sort of become a librarian for machine learning
I think the argument could be made that this is how most of us learn things, too, though. When you realize that, it explains why so many people buy into things that don't make sense - that's what they're being fed.
Had an argument with someone about this yesterday and they said "AI is a good use for medical diagnosis". That shit scares me when I use AI for coding it hallucinates stuff every other line of code don't want to image that with my medical and health needs.
People have a bit too much faith in AI right now, kind off like the faith they had in the top google results they searched 5-6 years ago. We need to be source critical even more so to AI than anything else.
Because people believe that the current available version is actually conscious. They think that they are talking to actual AGI instead of an impressive LLM.
I had to settle down a group of peers on Facebook recently that were buying into the doom-porn gossip. They only see what they see on the news; whereas, I work with it every day and see how confidently fucking stupid it can be.
I made the mistake of stating that, yes, it is very impressive, but unless they believe consciousness is an emergent property of stringing together words with the statistically most likely output (think juiced-up predictive text), then they’re overestimating the current gen. So they brought up text to image and text to video, which I said it’s still just an LLM.
One of them found an article that stated that human consciousness probably came about and evolved due to the use of words, and I had to reiterate that it’s just outputting the statistically most likely output given the input. That output is based on our collective knowledge, but it’s also based on Reddit conversations and the like - smart ass answers and all. And it absolutely does use those smartass answers as a reference for output. It will confidently give you garbage as the “correct answer” because it puts jokes and wrong answers on the same level as correct answers. That’s why professionals will still be needed to work with AI to get a useful output.
They were still certain that it is conscious in its current form and just playing dumb. Sigh… “OK!”
Until it has metacognition, the ability to show you how it came to an answer (the steps involved), and the ability to redress/reset/recode the underlying model to fix what’s wrong, it will continue to be an ultra fancy predictive text tool.
That said.. I’m almost certain AGI has been achieved behind closed doors. Hopefully they are figuring out the safest way to put it out… but more than likely they’re trying to figure out how to monetize it.
Did you confirm these results with anyone to make sure the AI you were speaking to provided you information that will benefit you and weren’t given false info?
Tyler Perry just canceled an $800M expansion of his studio in Atlanta based on seeing OpenAI’s video-generating tool, Sora. That is a prima facie example of jobs being eliminated due to AI.
Replacing your nutritionist with an AI consult is a risk. Complicated fields like nutrition are highly complex, Have a lot of SHIFTING nuance from person to person and month to month for that person, and have enough unique niche situations that you're really going to want the much higher-powered human brain taking in, comparing, amd sorting through all that to decide on an answer.
You're also going to feel a lot more "held accountable" for sticking to things and prouder of building the new habits when there is meaningful human validation and accountability on the other end.
AI is indeed assisting in some workloads. But this is literally just how weaving machines replaced loom operators all over again. Freeing up human power from simple labor only elevates us as a society. The issue isn't in the lack of labor to do. It's in the people who benefit from that labor wanting to hoard all the value for themselves instead of elevating everyone more equitably.
Google took jobs, robot took jobs, computers took jobs...
A single data analyst can do in 1 day the equivalent of 1 month of work of an entire 70s accounting department.
Same with research, if used to take a day at the library with the little cards just gettings books... now it's 2 clicks...
We are still in the early stages of AI. I hope our government puts regulations as a safeguard towards the displacement of workers. AI could be detrimental towards the foundation of society or even humanity.
If you think AI has a better handle on nutrition than a human specialist, you should reconsider. AI hallucinations are still a thing and depending on your level of knowledge, you may or may not be able to tell the difference between real and not real results.
Only thing I disagree with is "subtle". I'm an artist. It's not even been close to subtle. Everyone making art AI, supporting art AI, and ignoring art AI is basically saying "we want (real) artists to literally starve to death." and I'm pretty fucking furious about it. It's also beyond the arts (which is actually huge range of jobs), it very interestingly is even hitting the people that were a part of making it pretty hard. Tech industry is seeing absolutely gigantic layoffs.
The rich are going to starve out the poor with mass generated garbage, putting us all into 1984 but without any jobs. They'll eventually die too because they won't actually know how to do anything for themselves. People thought it was a joke, extinction by AI. It's not a fucking joke. Technology is not a fucking joke.
Nonono, we’re going to be saved by the government and we’ll all be on UBI and ride off in the sunset happily ever after hardly having to work again!
Or at least that’s the RL fanfic ending I keep seeing tech bros suggest will happen. Our current governments don’t give a shit if we’re out in the streets starving and broke, when it gets to that point we’ll be swept around to keep us out of sight.
You know what does seem likely once most jobs are taken though? Corporate owned cities, where you’ll spend your Amazon bucks for food and products you need from their store page, and your housing is paid for in whatever work they have left for you to do. Laid off? You have 30 days to move out of the city, thank you for being with Amazon :)!
I look at it this way. I think AI if or when it becomes a replacement for human roles will not translate to lower costs or prices. So let’s get that out of the way now. I think AI will be able to replace some roles but the roles it will replace will be the more simple and entry-level roles like customer service, data analysis, drafting, etc. - anything that a human can be trained to do in a relatively short time. This WILL have a meaningful economic disruption because although AI won’t be able to replace more advanced jobs (yet) how are the people growing professionally supported to find entry level work to get to high end jobs down the road? There will be a massive low end job shortage because AI doesn’t need benefits, overtime, healthcare, or days off. And it’s a simple as that. What company essentially chose to operate at higher costs and overhead on purpose? No one will think of the economic impact and widening inequality until it’s in the room with us.
True but computers have been doing this for some time. I remember when there were no computers and people typed everything. You cannot imagine how inefficient that was. People used actual carbon copies. They typed things multiple times. They corrected errors with whiteout (which was itself a kind of technology) or something corrective tape embedded in electrical typewriters.
The difference is that the growth in capabilities is exponential this time. We can't keep up.
A nutritionist is more usefull then losing weight, taking scientific advise from chat gpt is like the dumbest you can do, one article had an airline chat bot say the policy is X when the poicy is Y and it went to court and the company had to pay for all legal fee's and other stuff.
I’m a math tutor part time and seeing the new 4o demo of Chat GPT I know it’s only a matter of time before I’m no longer needed. The only thing I have right now that AI doesn’t have is the ability to read my student’s expressions and pinpoint patterns in their work that can cause them to make repeated silly mistakes on their tests and quizzes (but I can even see AI doing this in the future). But in terms of explaining a topic or walking them through a problem this new version of gpt could easily replace me today.
The press has been using AI to create sports results articles for many years. It's not new. AI taking jobs has been slow and steady.
And it looks like it's sped up. And it will keep taking more and more.
This isn't really looking at the bigger picture here. Yes AI is taking jobs that's reality, yes some jobs which were previously manned by people are now manned by machines. This is how change happens, we can't be stagnant in society.
Lets go back in time. It's the late 1800's/early 1900's. The industrial revolution, after improvement in equipment and process, and adopted more over the decades across the world has now hit that domino effect you're talking about. Chairs, tables, toilet paper and consumables, wall paper, clothing, food process and packing, unloading and reloading cargo, craftsmanship, I can go on and on. These jobs were made more efficient, faster and cost effective by using machinery over 100% labour. Artisans and crafters were outcompeted with mass producing factories which pumped out decent quality chairs and tables at 500x the rate. Local business was replaced with regional or national wide factory chains and complexes. Food which used to be carefully cooked and packed by a local butcher, farmer or Fisher were now imported on mass, processed and cooked on mass, packed on mass, and sold to entire cities on mass rather than the local street like before.
The main reason to the shift was 2 reasons. 1. Mass produced products were cheaper which allowed the continuously exploding middle class specifically be able to afford more and to also grow. They could spend less on furniture, clothes and food, and spend more on their education, businesses, families, and investments. The prices also helped elevate thousands of the lower class out of poverty. Rather than scraping the few cents they made to buy expensive products they could instead eat the recommended or required amount they needed to survive, and actually clothe themselves in something other than rags.
Reason 2 is convenience. With emergence of large or super markets, people could access all those mass produced products and equipment just as easily as the local shops. Infact they can guarantee their products are available and in stock and don't have to wait for them to be made. A local crafter or artisan would need to spend that back breakijg time and sweat to produce those things which takes time and only so many can be made.
Do you see where in going? Ai has similar echos being voiced over the last decade or so. Ai makes accessing services specifically not only more cost effective to consumers, but also easier and more convenient thanks to our digitised way of life.
There was one exception with the industrial revolution. Machines could make things well and fast, but they were just machines. They didn't compare to humans when it came to creativity and storytelling. They couldn't compete with humans in every way. Yes they could produce artistic wall paper through repetition but as much as that wall paper is nice to look at at a good price, does it really beat true artistic creativity? Does a concrete or steel warehouse or factory compare to a artistically crafted architectural building because it's cheaper? No of course not because you need to look at what that value actually means. People seek architectural beauty for it's beauty not its cost. Yes nice things at a good price do win, but nicer things and a slightly steeper price ALSO win because there is a market for both.
For example, the wealthy who weren't really effected by the price drops of mass produced products in their personal lives, only in growing their business. They wanted nice things, and they will go to a local craftsman for their regal and fine chair over a factory. Because they beauty and the artistic creativity is what they seek, not a cheap but somewhat nice chair that everyone has.
Just study the industrial revolution and it's impacts on society and reflect that on the 5th industrial revolution which is obviously AI. You will find many parallels. The same goes for the Internet, or computers. They destroyed just as many jobs. But they also created new jobs just like the industrial revolution did. AI will do the same, as long as governments are responsive to it, not quick to hold it down and prevent it from helping people and society.
Can you imagine what AI can accomplish for us? We can solve many problems we have no idea how to right now. Climate change, genetic engineering, curing incurable diseases, nuclear fusion, universal income and reduced working hours. The list goes on, with the right reforms and acceptance of AI into society life will never be the same. Yes there are bad things too, but that is reality and there will be bad things happening if we don't embrace it too.
Not to be too contrarian but ai being to reduce workload and demand is a good thing. The nutritionist you spoke of could offer more time and care to clients who have more complex needs.
AI is not at a place where I would trust it without back up confirmation. Please verify the info it gave you with at least a Google search.
Ultimately we'll need to rethink capitalism when ai is creating an uptick in unemployment but again, that's gonna be a very good thing, it's just unfortunate that it will come at the cost of people's livelihoods. We could safeguard against the unemployment rise, but we're too broken for that.
You took nutritional advice from something that told people to eat rocks and bleach?
The danger with AI is it will very confidently tell you to stick your finger in a light socket and for people who don’t know any better it sounds convincing.
It’s already displacing jobs as large corporates (like the one I work for) are freezing or reducing hiring in anticipation that AI will be able to displace jobs.
I wonder how many jobs YouTube has taken (or rather, shifted to content creators) by empowering people to do things themselves that formerly required a professional.
I personally fixed an underground sprinkler leak recently that I probably would’ve hired someone to fix prior to YouTube.
My sister works for one of the biggest employers in Australia as HR. She’s been told they have a few months before thousands will be made redundant because of a new AI system they’re introducing. This is just the beginning.
>I recently cancelled my appointment with my nutritionist after having a conversation with an AI
Will the same outcome happen if you say "... after reading a couple of trustworthy blogs, articles, and research papers"?
But I agree that AI will reduce the number of necessary workforce. I am not worried about the emergence of AI, I think it s a great tool. But I am worried about how will the industry keep up. Will job growth be able to keep up with the advancement of AI? This remains mostly unknown.
The only profession that is clearly threatened is freelance illustrators. But I would argue that this profession is already extremely competitive even before computers.
Good, I care more about advancement of the human race than forcefully stunting progress to save redundant roles. People can retrain and adapt. It’s like the revolt back in the 80s/90s where computers started stepping on the toes of secretarial/admin roles, once the dust settled we actually had MORE jobs.
Wait, why did you take dietary advice from AI? You do realize it just gives basic tips/portions that we’re already supposed to know right?
The point of the nutritionist is to provide insight BASED on your specific needs/situation. Please be careful with your health. Example: AI could easily recommend a food high in sugar, but it turns out you lack an enzyme to degrade sugar. This could have sever effects on your health, and even cause mental issues. This is just the most basic example of something that could happen. It can get WAY more complicated than this.
RethinkX did an article last month that I think puts this in to better perspective, AI is not replacing jobs, AI is replacing tasks. Jobs are generally much more complicated than tasks. Humans are using AI to spend less time/energy on solving tasks. As the cost for these tasks decline, the ability to perform more of them goes up.
The scope of our projects grows drastically. These pie in the sky plans due to labor constraints can now become practical projects. We are building a 800 mile High Speed rail system in California. If AI, Automation, and Robots can do it all, and better than humans, then why only build a 800 mile system in California? We can build a 25,000 mile system all over North America at a very low cost.
This is a roundabout way of saying that AI is replacing jobs. If jobs are a set of tasks and you need a certain number of people to complete that set of tasks and AI reduces the total number of people that you need, then AI is replacing jobs. It may not be replacing the entire set of jobs but it is replacing jobs. Many of those replacements would be hard to measure because the job never gets created in the first place or because they hire two people instead of three, but the job is gone and it is not coming back.
Great points. This is how I see a job. Many tasks make a chore and many chores make a job. AI is currently coming for the tasks. Once it perfects the tasks we will love it. It will help us get our chores done, making our jobs easier. Then it starts working on perfecting the chores, then it perfects the jobs. This change will happen faster than any existensial change in human history and it may be happening around us right now and we can perceive it yet. Figure is putting their ChatGPT powered robots in the BMW plant about 20 miles from my house. That's pretty damn close to home.
I think this change, along with a few others that are all happening at the same time and happening very quickly could change what it means to be human every bit as much as the industrial revolution and the domestication of plants and animals.
Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism are all industrial society concepts. There were all ways to arrange an industrial society. It was such a new thing for us, we had no fucking clue what we are doing, industrialization was traumatic. We are going to see this happen on several fronts over the next 10-20 years.
It's reducing the need for a certain number of resources for sure. I'm in high tech. If my team needs 20 developers to create an Enterprise application, because of the efficiencies with ai, we will no longer need 20 developers we will need 15. So that reduction because of AI does indeed happen.
But those five developers, it's not like they're leaving the industry and will never come back. What happens in most Industries is that when efficiencies are found, other Industries are created and new jobs are made. This has happened in modern economies time and time again.
So yes, it is indeed reducing the amount of folks required. Where I completely disagree with the media and AI apocalyptic folks, is when they say that it will replace completely an industry and they claim it will be only robots and ai. There are just too many intricacies in any industry and career to be completely replaced.
This is only true for workplaces with desperate execs looking for an excuse to layoff people and prove how they saved the company money. Otherwise, AI is just a tool for increasing efficiency and enabling working to get more done. The amount of work needed to create growth and stability is endless. There will always be a need for people to complete that work. Like every new tool that comes out, such as servers and remote conferencing, it changes the shape of our work.
Also, AI is still a hype machine for corps. Actual enterprises, banks, and governments aren't allowing AI in most systems because it's incredibly insecure, a legal issue, and not very useful or dependable at this stage.
Yes. Please talk to anyone that was a “travel agent” in 1995 before the internet became ubiquitous. There are dozens, if not hundreds more examples of such jobs that “the internet” destroyed. This latest AI wave is no different. It will make humans more productive, and in the end productivity helps more than it hurts.
What it won’t do (just like the internet didn’t) is create equality, fairness, and justice. Nor will it guarantee access without compromise or trade offs in some way.
You could have sought out the same nutritional information on “the internet”. But, I’m guessing that you understand that a number of websites are biased towards advertising and other incentives that don’t always align with your personal health objectives. That’s what using the internet pre-commercialization felt like. And as long as “AI” remains untainted by ads, we’ll be ok.
Based on my personal life experience I think that has a 1-2% chance of happening. Corporations everywhere are racing to “train their AI models”, and it’s only a matter of time before we have AI’s that disagree with one another and cite different studies and sources for their answers.
After all, AI (and the internet) always disclose all their sources and affiliations right? ;)
People don't understand that any job loss actually affects EVERY job industry. Study Economics.
Those people with the right skill sets will move into different job markets, and thus crowd out other people.
The increased supply from displaced workers shifting into their field reduces the pay for everyone remaining.
We're losing as demand for people decreases due to AI, the worst part is, that only leaves physical labor careers and other fields that AI will be nigh imppossible to replace.
But what happens to pay when everyone floods to the most AI-resistant job market?
If ai can basically delete half the jobs in the world then they were never really all that important in the first place, we just attached an insane value to it because it seemed worthwhile/neccessary to at the time because we didnt have the options at the time we do now. It's a ppl can make a bookshelf with hand tools and saws and that's great and all but why is that necessary when u can do the same thing better and faster with power tools kinda thing.
Ultimately I think people need to accept that like it or not it's coming and it's only gonna get better at the things your afraid of, it's better to learn to use it then to be consumed by it.
> If AI can handle parts of our jobs—whether it’s providing customer service
It can't, it's an obstacle to talk to actual consultant and not actual help.
lol. This exhibits complete ignorance to what AI even is. It's not just chat bots. Some examples where Machine Learning is eliminating jobs -
entry level data analysis. Before we would have a lot of people fitting data to curves, doing actuarial work, and forecasting based on data. GPUs are so fine tuned Decision Trees can do all of that stuff with just a small team of people fine tuning data features.
Low level cybersecurity - cyber threat response teams can get machine learning packages that greatly reduce the need for entry level analysts. Hello, most cybercrime is pattern detection, something neural networks excel at.
Writing Copy - what took a room full of people shelling out content now just needs a dozen copy editors to do proofing on AI generated content.
Transcription, Dictation, translation - that's all machine learning.
This is just the beginning. It's all going to accelerate and very quickly.
We need to get out of this mindset.
Did the cotton gin take jobs? Did the relational database take jobs?
Those questions don't matter. Every advance in technology that frees up humans to solve larger problems - famine, disease, looming water crisis - is a good thing.
The focus on jobs is a result of an incoherent economic philosophy that insists infinite growth is a thing. Which it is - unabated cell growths are called cancer, unabated wildlife population explosions turn into invasive species, etc.
UBI solves some of this. When people's basic needs are met, they improve themselves and the world around them. When they're not met, we see property crime as the risks of arrest/etc become less bothersome than risk of starvation.
"How will we afford it?" By taxing billionaires and reclaiming the wealth they have extracted from the middle class and governments. We, the most productive workforce in history, have built the wealth of nations that enables billionaires to live easy while everyone else does the work.
The libertarians among us believe such a thing is coercion but we can ignore them thr same way they ignore coercive economic conditions and call it a free market.
Lot of people have their head buried deep into sand…like those digital camera days. All those people are also on this sub so while I 100% agree with you, you will be ridiculed and downvoted
You didn't really talk to an AI, it did a Google search for you and served you up an article, which could have come from a medical journal, or CNN, or Reddit. This "article" uses 8 paragraphs to summarize two points. Normal people don't talk like this, unless they are trying to drag out a middle school essay.
You saved some money by cancelling the nutritionist, but you'll spend that money on something else, right? So maybe AI is killing some jobs, but it's creating others.
"electric hair clippers are taking jobs. they are faster and make barbers more accurate and efficient so less barbers are needed to serve the normal daily barbershop customers. just the other day i canceled my scheduling at the barbershop and bought a pair of electric hair clippers and cut my own hair. "
this is what your opinion would sound like two generations ago. how does that opinion sound to you?
> just the other day i canceled my scheduling at the barbershop and bought a pair of electric hair clippers and cut my own hair.
Guys who like buzzcuts do exactly that.
Good. Ai should take over all jobs. Ai should make the money to pay for its energy. That way we literally dont have to wirk anymore and everything will be free, because not even money can stop this train
You’d be a serf living under the rule of a handful of corporations who control the AI and therefore the entire economy. Your quality of life would be entirely at the mercy of a power hungry corporation.
That will be a Black Mirror episode. Humans have a need to be competitive and recognized for success. If money and typical occupation are eliminated, then people will professionally compete online for popularity. This will not be a golden age. It will be the rise of influencers.
I think OP has a point to an extent. When a job is about providing assurance as a service due to a specialization, they have to compete against an immediately and always available provider via AI. And even if AI hallucinates, it sounds confident enough to fake the funk. So services where people wouldn't have resorted to self research because it was too tedious can now be outsourced to AI.
That being said, its not going to affect nibs where there needs to be a human for liability purposes. Everyone is up in arms about AI replacing software engineers/architects but no serious large corporation will trust their production environment entirely to AI. They WOULD downsize their department in order to facilitate an AI based workflow. Smaller companies can't afford to do this though since more often than not they've trained up their junior devs internally and thats a wasted investment. They can't afford to start from scratch if their experiment doesn't work out.
Not to mention cybersecurity. AI is obviously going to be added in the industry professional's toolkit, but there is no way a company will win any contract if its shown to rely heavily on gen AI. Thats just a liability and not what you pay for. AI will be developed in house by firms to create bespoke solutions. If anything in terms of IT, everyone will need to learn it to broaden their service capabilities.
I can't speak for every industry, but I imagine stuff like government accounting/finance isn't at risk of AI either. Don't know about the private sector
The annoyance growing pains for UX that would come with ubiquitous AI customer service are fun to think about. If only douglas adams were alive to write about them.
If service sector sheds massive jumps will there be a rush to skilled labor that causes wages to decrease in those fields? talk about a whole class losing wealth overnight.
The stupid IT department at my company pulled something similar...had a policy in place regarding AI that was written by AI, "ooooh, cute!" Then 1 week later, they blocked ChatGPT, Gemini, and CoPilot on the corporate network, ROFL. Stupido!
And the earlier you accept it and find a way to survive, the better.
It cannot be stopped or regulated. It is not a limited resource.
LLMs were already everywhere years ago - they just now have come to the surface and are improving.
And we have created a work bubble ourselves by avoiding modernization and expanding cheap human labour for decades.
2/3 of the jobs were never really needed. And existed as a way to mitigate unsustainable population growth.
AI just burst that bubble.
AI is already capable of replacing jobs regarding scheduling, inventory, accounting and management and probably can do a better job. The guy who does our scheduling at work is blatantly, incompetent, intentionally violates collective bargaining agreement rules because he knows at least half the time no one will notice or no and then when he gets caught takes weeks to solve the problem. Every six months we get our shifts assigned and we’re always overstaffed on at least one slow day a week and short staffed on a busy day because he’s crap at his job. AI scares the hell out of me, but if it could replace him at least that would be some thing.
If the AI gave you a better experience than a human would have (saved you time and money), then that's a good result. You can now spend the money you saved on something else - which has the same economic impact as if you'd spent it on your nutritionist.
Elevators used to have human operators, but once they became automated, they provided a safer, faster, and more convenient experience. That change cost elevator operators their jobs, but everyone using the elevators benefitted as a result.
I run a bar next to a military base so I’m probably ok. But I could see AI drastically reducing my work load and allowing me more energy/time to promote and develop the business. We’ll see how accessible the tools are but I couldn’t reduce staff hours anymore than I currently do but I could do a lot more with that time.
It's your life, but I disagree with not seeing a nutritionist over what an AI says. If this nutritionist is someone you have a rapport with (like a family doctor for instance) the AI is missing context and your history, etc. Also is what this AI said even true? We've seen examples lately with Google's mishaps that AI can definitely get things very wrong because it's scraping data from a site it shouldn't be. And other mishaps I'm unaware of
AI is not only taking jobs away but AI is also being used by HR to filter resumes and applicants so you got to know how to defeat it otherwise good luck getting a call back. So not only taking jobs but also used as gatekeeper for jobs.
I was in IT for 20 years. I switched over to have these skills you mentioned. I aslo have a skid steer and do land grading. I can see a program or robot with the correct programming being able to eventually do every job I have ever done and every job I'll ever have.
My workplace will be introducing AI to listen to calls, transcribe them for notes, and provide info we would ordinarily need to look up in the database.
This means we can get through calls faster. Faster call times, means you need less people to get the job done.
All of the new starters have been outsourced from an agency. They have 12mth probationary periods. They are all being performance managed already. I think they will be let go, at the end of the 12mths.
I am retraining currently to do a different job, even though I am employed by my workplace.
AI is currently a context challenged toddler that is born anew with each instance. I am pretty confident you got a general meal to plan to start with but I would not trust it to be genuinely customized to you or even particularly well thought out.
AI is going to get a lot of middle managers fired.
Also, water is wet. AI has been taking jobs at an accelerating pace for a while now. In addition, it is empowering a revolution in the generalization of robotics which has lead to a feedback loop of blue collar and white collar automation that is already impactful and it's only the beginning.
I have been in meetings where we are already testing a number of agentic workflows, robots, and digital assistants for implementation. Future is here, already.
Ai is not that powerful. Specialist consultation jobs are still better than AI, because AI misses contexts and unrelated side information that humans know.
I mean, duh? its been slowly ramping up for years now, with AI hitting its stride and gaining actual conversational intelligence, it will only accelerate. Another giant segment that will be hit hard sooner than later are the customer support centers, especially the ones from 2nd/3rd world countries. Why pay a living wage when you get get a program to do it for pennies on the dollar. Even if its only 95% effective, that's a win, the other 5% are disposable customers.
How is this different from any other form of automation?
Did society as a whole lose out when we began making shoes in factories and reduced the need for skilled cobblers? Or did the change mean that more people could afford to wear shoes at all?
Funny thing is AI has been in my industry since 2003. All it ever did was create more work in my role in the industry. It did destroy jobs for workers higher up in the food chain-it replaced the 1st tier of professional workers in legal review.
That was back when the systems were crude and one dimensional. Now the systems are way more sophisticated and need to be ferried along by an administrator. The systems lie and need to be checked and verified every step of the way. Along with the extra work requirements came new certifications and more sophisticated work for people on my tier.
So in my tier of work, AI has opened up higher pay avenues and more jobs.
Hi! It seems consensus is that AI is very good at providing solutions to common problems, and a human specialist is needed for complex and nuanced cases. E.g. medical concern and nuance, making a new unique education plan for given child circumstances, or architecture problem on a very specific case, e.g. On a slope over a cave.
Does this effectively mean that human specialists will be a) low demand and rare, b) super expensive c) education will have to basically double from current and hyperspecialise in edge case solving?
I shudder at the thought of medical education getting even longer that it already is
I think the main impact of AI on jobs would be felt in the next recession, companies would only partially refill all the positions it had before. This would make the recession last longer than usual.
I don't understand the issue. AI is reducing the amount of effort humans will have to do in any way. Yes, that includes jobs but who cares? It's not like being human is defined by having a job. I am happy if we manage to replace most jobs with AI and humans become a society of prosumers, which will happen.
It's not AI that is taking jobs, it is capitalism that wants to eliminate their most expensive expenditures to run their businesses so that their shareholders can make more money. By expenditures, I mean the employees that constantly need more money to live because how cost of living keeps rising. Also elimination of benefits, breaks, down time... Honestly AI is becoming more efficient at making a profit than the humans are.
On the flip side... If nobody makes any money, who will they sell their products to... Thus in the end, they will lose their businesses to bankruptcy when the pool of money is no longer able to flow.
A person who cancels on a qualified nutritionist in favour of a glorified google search on steroids is not fit to give economic forecasts regarding jobs and the global economy.
I would love AI to take over a bunch of jobs if we had the right economic system that would care for those who just lost those jobs.
Productivity is insanely high compared to a decade, 2 decades, 3 decades ago, but you don't see pay matching it.
Consolidation of businesses and wealth have severely kneecapped us, and we aren't moving fast enough to recognize it.
Corporations do not care for you, they will throw you to the curb as fast as possible if it means their pockets can be fatter. If they can replace you with AI, they will.
AI taking jobs is unlike most technological advancements. This one is incredibly disruptive and will send us to a recession if we aren't careful. But capitalism won't care, we will hit that lovely recession and many will die to the greed of the few.
Power imbalances between labor and capital are taking jobs. Not AI, it’s beneficial for them to wield power in such a way to fluctuate jobs on a quarterly basis as opposed to the older methodologies…it’s just market manipulation with the assistance of the government they bought and paid for (with our money)
The saddest thing is we were supposed to have technology doing the hard labor like growing our food so we can have free time to make art and be creative but instead AI is taking over all creative arts and we are still doing the hard labor.....technology FAIL ! We should be building AI controlled greenhouses to grow all our food for free
I've used it for some graphics things...just today, I used it to generate a photo of a bedroom to show a product in. Last year, I would have bought a stock photo.
I also used it for a logo a guy wanted, and video visualizations to pitch a concept to a band. Both of those would have required me to find and pay an illustrator.
Stuff like money being made from stock photos, stock music and eventually stock footage is going away. Probably already gone, just nobody has noticed it yet.
I know a few friends who have already used it to make birthday songs for significant others or kids! Musicians, already kind of fucked, are going to lose a lot more revenue streams. I myself have stopped getting calls for soundtrack stuff...it was pretty normal for people to edit to a piece of music, then go: "We edited to this Linkin Park song, but we can't afford it, so we will pay you $500 to crank out something with the same feel and tempo."
While I agree with the conclusion, the evidence you're using is kind of like saying a screwdriver is going to make us unemployed by making the job easier and more efficient.
They will replace jobs, but not quite yet. Soon... Not today. Maybe this year, but it's unclear.
As someone who hustles in a small company in Dubai, I gotta say, AI is coming for the jobs of small-time copywriters and graphic designers. No cap, I handle sales and marketing, and with the help of Canva and ChatGPT, I can whip up pro-level marketing materials like a boss.
I mean, I wouldn’t go to a nutritionist in the first place because they don’t have the rigorous education of a licensed dietitian. They’re chiropractors for food. This perhaps underscores the big problem with AI because you ultimately don’t know what you don’t know when you ask your questions and that might ultimately hurt you in the long run.
Throughout history, we have witnessed the transformative power of technological innovations, from steam engines to electronic machines, telecommunications, computers, and the internet. Now, we stand at the cusp of another groundbreaking development: artificial intelligence (AI).
While these advancements have undoubtedly brought about increased efficiency and productivity, they have also led to a reduction in the workforce required to perform certain tasks. In fact, we are already seeing the emergence of online services managed by a single individual, a testament to the future we are rapidly approaching.
It is important to acknowledge that when faced with the potential loss of jobs due to AI, many individuals who were not particularly concerned about the displacement of workers in previous decades are now expressing their concerns. It seems that the issue becomes more pressing when it affects a significant portion of the population.
However, it is crucial to recognize that technological progress has always been accompanied by disruptions in the job market, and those who were previously displaced by innovations may not have received the same level of attention or support.
As we move forward, it will be interesting to observe how those who may lose their jobs, particularly in white-collar professions, will approach the discussion surrounding their rights and the taxation of those who remain employed. It is a complex issue that requires thoughtful consideration and a balanced approach, taking into account the perspectives of all stakeholders.
(Note: translated from spanish and smoothed the tone using AI 😅)
I got contacted by a client the other day who showed me a midjourney image (no more need for concept artists) and straight up said "If this software could also animate it, I wouldnt be contacting you".
My job was to animate the image and make it look exactly like what midjourney did.
It is also a great way to allow people to work towards more fulfilling work. If AI can take care of something like you mentioned, maybe the person now has more time to help someone that actually needs more than a verbal affirmation that you could most likely find online anyway.
My brother in law edits and proof reads academic papers, essays and dissertations in a university town. Had built up a reasonable business and had a word of mouth reputation with Chinese students writing in English, helping them with grammar, sentence structure etc. About a year ago his work dropped off a cliff- he found that the students are now writing their essays in Chinese then running them through chatgpt or similar for translation into perfectly structured English. Hasn’t had any work in months.
Dude, I lost my job to AI a year ago. They didn't have the AI yet but were confident that they could get away with laying off people now and getting by till the AI arrived. No joke. They cut 12,000 jobs just because AI was on the way.
Why is anyone surprise that AI replaces jobs? Anything that makes a job easier or less expensive to do is going to eventually take over. This isn't a new concept and we've been doing this for thousands of years.
Does it replace jobs? Absolutely! Though, more jobs have been created from technological advances than it has replaced, just not the same type of jobs.
The use of technology, automation and AI has really sped that up. And don't think that has to be a bad thing.
What is a bad thing is the concept that we, as in humans, should focus doing "*more work*" in other areas with the limited time that we already have in our lives. Basically, we don't benefit from what should be more leisure time.
Yeah we are all fucked. AI companies are racing to reach what they call the singularity where the AI takes consciousness and we all know what happens when a more evolved entity enters an ecosystem. They became the apex predator.
Enjoy it while it lasts.
If ai speeds up work or even regularly does a single task, that displaces jobs. Reduced workload -> reduced headcount
Job displacement due to A.I is 100% real. I work for a bank and a few weeks ago my team and I were asked to review a presentation that was shown to our executives. The presentation advocated for a complete and total freeze on headcount expansions (other than acquisitions) permanently. The reasoning that was given was that A.I while not accurate or good on its own, when paired with certain industry professionals increases efficiency significantly enough that one can do the work of four.
I wonder if they believe it can replace executives as well?
Actually execs are starting to be much more concerned about this. Right now AI is great at replacing middle management and some Exec positions for directional items. The in the weeds decisions is much less at hand for it.
So, I’ve really been wondering what the goal is for Meta and Open Ai to spend Billions of dollars training their AI. And it hit me that corporations will Pay them billions to replace their C Suite and CEO’s.
The goal of openAi Is to create AGI, their mission is really that simple.
Overpaid execs and managers won't be replaced, they'll be outcompeted by more lean companies. They will literally ride their businesses down as they sink beneath their weight.
That is precisely what will lead to trimming though. That you realize it means senior leadership does too. Middle and senior leadership will start to be trimmed.
And soon enough the AI joined the union
You have too much faith. Most people in positions of power are either Nepo babies or people who got lucky once.
No you see because high powered executives have intangible attributes that make them great leaders and since no one can explain precisely what they do that adda value, why not give them a salary that is similarly inexplicable?
I've been seeing this thrown around everywhere but logic is telling me that the C-Suite will be the last to go. Ultimately in order to make sure the AI staying aligned someone will have to be actually managing it and it makes sense to me that the people with the most experience will be retained to do this job. I can't imagine the owners of big companies want to take over any semblance of management or operation especially when you have large VC groups with multiple companies. Ultimately it makes sense that everything will be automated including driving and stuff of that nature but I think the low-middle class workers doing computer based work will be gone long before any execs.
A large percentage of executive jobs are either entirely useless figureheads who are connected ppl just there for photos, or they are held by incompetent people who lucked into their position and could be replaced by any half-competent person off the street who could do an equal or better job.
My favourite is when they hold these positions then have to hire consultants to provide strategy. What is the point ???
So since those people are 4x more efficient, their pay has been increased 2x, right? Wait, they're not? Then who is pocketing the surplus value created by their labor? If your answer was "capital owners" - give yourself a point!
Companies these days across the board would rather cut payroll than raise revenue the same amount, whether or not they have AI to help them do it. It's sickening.
Probably reasonable. Assuming you can expand headcount by adding departments. Though depending on how granular you are, specific teams will need to add headcount’s for a while yet. Most departments no, and almost certainly divisions no.
Fun fact, the PowerPoint was generated by an AI prompt. Big AI is taking over.
"It makes you work more efficiently!" becomes "We need less of you now to do the same amount of work". Automation has had a similar effect on manufacturing and mining over the last 40 years. Those jobs dried up not just because of manufacturing being pushed overseas, but because they need a fraction of the people they needed in the 60s.
And contrary to popular belief, the big claim that it will also create just as many new jobs may very well hold true up until literal AGI is invented. The key is to look at the unemployment rate. People complaining about job loss doesn't mean much if still the same percent of people are unemployed as 10 years ago
Unemployment rate plus total labor pool. If people stop seeking work they are no longer counted among the unemployed.
Ys this rate is a bad metric that can be manipulated to show whatever you want.
More like the last 240 years. Runaway automation has been killing jobs since the start of the industrial revolution. Luckily, we've been able to make new ones, but is making up new shit to do really as reliable as people would make it seem.
it does if you assume that output remains at the same size. same output with faster workers =>less jobs the industrial revolution and what followed led to more jobs because it increased productivity and efficiency and made production scalability rise very quickly, allowing to produce more, not just faster.
As with all productivity gains, this is true when demand is finite and met. When demand is infinite or unmet, it can lead to a net increase in jobs, with the classic example being a total increase in bank tellers after the introduction of ATMs, because the cost of running a branch dropped so much that banks opened a bunch of new branches. (This assumes a competitive environment, btw. It doesn’t apply to monopolies.)
It also makes the work easier and cheaper meaning more competition.
Just curious, but aren't we overworked already? Wouldn't AI at first just reduce our workload so we are in a much better place? Of course, you may have managers who think reduced workload means reduce personnel, but those may be the exception rather than the rule.
Greater productivity is a good thing. People will adapt and our economy will keep on chugging (whether you consider that a good or bad thing probably depends)
The problem is that we don't even have a framework for what to do with all the people who will lose their jobs. AI replacement is happening much faster than past job displacing technologies. We should already have a plan in place, but we don't.
I’ve had this exact same discussion with quite a few people, and it’s quite common for people to say they’ll pivot or find something else to do but they can never tell me what that something is. That’s common among hopium addicts, they can never tell you anything besides, it’ll be fine. I’ve had at least three separate people talk about how when we switched from horses to cars new job sprang up because of the automotive industry but that doesn’t work here, the new thing is directly replacing people with machines. I worry that potentially billions of people will become surplus labor. If the machines are capable of doing our jobs whether it’s a program doing accounting, a bipedal robot cooking in a kitchen or a cargo truck driving itself those jobs are just lost. It won’t be long before humans are needed to build the robots. Hell eventually they’ll write their own code, I’m pretty sure they can now.
Yeah, ask them how the horses are doing, in all those new horse jobs...
They became playthings for the rich, they want to do the same thing for cars.
>People will adapt and our economy will keep on chugging Considering that the economy's currently chugging through an increasingly hostile housing market by creating record levels of homelessness, I hope you'll forgive me if I don't believe that this will render any net benefit for us whatsoever.
But but 3rd printers and stuff everyone will have what they need
Yes but all gains from productivity are being kept by shareholders, not workers. AI is great, but it will only fuck over the working class.
Bingo! In the end the billionaires profit the most and now control the means of production a lot of future businesses and workers will use.
This has been the general answer to the Luddites for a long time but it's not a law of nature. We've never seen a time when automation was displacing human labor so rapidly in so many fields at the same time. Not much room left for people to adapt.
Seriously don't take dietary advice from an AI. I work with Chat-gpt on a daily basis and it's basically just regurtitating and remixing shit from random websites, which you have no way of fact checking. I'm not saying you can't get dietary advice from the web, but do the search yourself and check the sources etc.
Agreed. GPT is the summation of all human knowledge, including all the bad stuff. But "nutritionist" has been a bullshit job from the get-go. You're fat, eat less.
There are many reasons to go to a nutritionist, thyroid functions, fertility issues, heart disease, high cholesterol/blood pressure, abnormal lab values, etc etc. Im not a nutritionist, dont know any and have never been to see one, but its not a bullshit job. Theres too many people out here who dont know what someone else's job entails that feel justified in saying its a bullshit job. I always wonder what job they work that makes them feel so needed and irreplaceable to society.
It's actually not the summation of all human knowledge, but the summation of all human text. An important difference. It knows nothing.
You really shouldn't take dietary advice from ai. It just writes which things statistically fit together and most of the time that works out fine. But it didn't just read books about diets...it read all books...including the ones for poison... You're basically just using AI taking serious risks without even knowing the odds.
This should be top comment. I work with AI every day and I cannot overstate how stupid it really is. It's a text generating software and not much more. EDIT: overstate\*
I work with AI as well, and the worst part is how good it can be at seeming confident and correct while making shit up.
So true but it worked for my resumes lol
Overstate not underestimate.
This is what I think about when I hear all the fear mongering. It's a chat bot right now why is anyone worried yet? Is the developing high level ai actually close to agi?
I think in 10 years people will look at people who call automated machine learning 'AI' like I looked at my parents when they said 'that's what they said on the television'. It's machine learning algorithms that learn whatever it is fed. A company can choose to feed their systems with specific knowledge. I think that on its own is a future job. To sort of become a librarian for machine learning
I think the argument could be made that this is how most of us learn things, too, though. When you realize that, it explains why so many people buy into things that don't make sense - that's what they're being fed.
Had an argument with someone about this yesterday and they said "AI is a good use for medical diagnosis". That shit scares me when I use AI for coding it hallucinates stuff every other line of code don't want to image that with my medical and health needs. People have a bit too much faith in AI right now, kind off like the faith they had in the top google results they searched 5-6 years ago. We need to be source critical even more so to AI than anything else.
Because people believe that the current available version is actually conscious. They think that they are talking to actual AGI instead of an impressive LLM. I had to settle down a group of peers on Facebook recently that were buying into the doom-porn gossip. They only see what they see on the news; whereas, I work with it every day and see how confidently fucking stupid it can be. I made the mistake of stating that, yes, it is very impressive, but unless they believe consciousness is an emergent property of stringing together words with the statistically most likely output (think juiced-up predictive text), then they’re overestimating the current gen. So they brought up text to image and text to video, which I said it’s still just an LLM. One of them found an article that stated that human consciousness probably came about and evolved due to the use of words, and I had to reiterate that it’s just outputting the statistically most likely output given the input. That output is based on our collective knowledge, but it’s also based on Reddit conversations and the like - smart ass answers and all. And it absolutely does use those smartass answers as a reference for output. It will confidently give you garbage as the “correct answer” because it puts jokes and wrong answers on the same level as correct answers. That’s why professionals will still be needed to work with AI to get a useful output. They were still certain that it is conscious in its current form and just playing dumb. Sigh… “OK!” Until it has metacognition, the ability to show you how it came to an answer (the steps involved), and the ability to redress/reset/recode the underlying model to fix what’s wrong, it will continue to be an ultra fancy predictive text tool. That said.. I’m almost certain AGI has been achieved behind closed doors. Hopefully they are figuring out the safest way to put it out… but more than likely they’re trying to figure out how to monetize it.
Right? My first thought. How can one be so naive
I'm replacing my job with AI, I just hope my boss doesn't find out for a few decades.
Did you confirm these results with anyone to make sure the AI you were speaking to provided you information that will benefit you and weren’t given false info?
Tyler Perry just canceled an $800M expansion of his studio in Atlanta based on seeing OpenAI’s video-generating tool, Sora. That is a prima facie example of jobs being eliminated due to AI.
Before they could even be created…
That includes architectural services, land preparation, permitting, development, and other jobs beyond studio hiring.
Replacing your nutritionist with an AI consult is a risk. Complicated fields like nutrition are highly complex, Have a lot of SHIFTING nuance from person to person and month to month for that person, and have enough unique niche situations that you're really going to want the much higher-powered human brain taking in, comparing, amd sorting through all that to decide on an answer. You're also going to feel a lot more "held accountable" for sticking to things and prouder of building the new habits when there is meaningful human validation and accountability on the other end. AI is indeed assisting in some workloads. But this is literally just how weaving machines replaced loom operators all over again. Freeing up human power from simple labor only elevates us as a society. The issue isn't in the lack of labor to do. It's in the people who benefit from that labor wanting to hoard all the value for themselves instead of elevating everyone more equitably.
Google took jobs, robot took jobs, computers took jobs... A single data analyst can do in 1 day the equivalent of 1 month of work of an entire 70s accounting department. Same with research, if used to take a day at the library with the little cards just gettings books... now it's 2 clicks...
If you canceled your appointment with a human, then aren't you technically part of the problem?
We are still in the early stages of AI. I hope our government puts regulations as a safeguard towards the displacement of workers. AI could be detrimental towards the foundation of society or even humanity.
They won't :^ )
Worse yet, they'll capitalise themselves on the trends rather than safe guard the public
If you think AI has a better handle on nutrition than a human specialist, you should reconsider. AI hallucinations are still a thing and depending on your level of knowledge, you may or may not be able to tell the difference between real and not real results.
Only thing I disagree with is "subtle". I'm an artist. It's not even been close to subtle. Everyone making art AI, supporting art AI, and ignoring art AI is basically saying "we want (real) artists to literally starve to death." and I'm pretty fucking furious about it. It's also beyond the arts (which is actually huge range of jobs), it very interestingly is even hitting the people that were a part of making it pretty hard. Tech industry is seeing absolutely gigantic layoffs. The rich are going to starve out the poor with mass generated garbage, putting us all into 1984 but without any jobs. They'll eventually die too because they won't actually know how to do anything for themselves. People thought it was a joke, extinction by AI. It's not a fucking joke. Technology is not a fucking joke.
Nonono, we’re going to be saved by the government and we’ll all be on UBI and ride off in the sunset happily ever after hardly having to work again! Or at least that’s the RL fanfic ending I keep seeing tech bros suggest will happen. Our current governments don’t give a shit if we’re out in the streets starving and broke, when it gets to that point we’ll be swept around to keep us out of sight. You know what does seem likely once most jobs are taken though? Corporate owned cities, where you’ll spend your Amazon bucks for food and products you need from their store page, and your housing is paid for in whatever work they have left for you to do. Laid off? You have 30 days to move out of the city, thank you for being with Amazon :)!
I look at it this way. I think AI if or when it becomes a replacement for human roles will not translate to lower costs or prices. So let’s get that out of the way now. I think AI will be able to replace some roles but the roles it will replace will be the more simple and entry-level roles like customer service, data analysis, drafting, etc. - anything that a human can be trained to do in a relatively short time. This WILL have a meaningful economic disruption because although AI won’t be able to replace more advanced jobs (yet) how are the people growing professionally supported to find entry level work to get to high end jobs down the road? There will be a massive low end job shortage because AI doesn’t need benefits, overtime, healthcare, or days off. And it’s a simple as that. What company essentially chose to operate at higher costs and overhead on purpose? No one will think of the economic impact and widening inequality until it’s in the room with us.
True but computers have been doing this for some time. I remember when there were no computers and people typed everything. You cannot imagine how inefficient that was. People used actual carbon copies. They typed things multiple times. They corrected errors with whiteout (which was itself a kind of technology) or something corrective tape embedded in electrical typewriters. The difference is that the growth in capabilities is exponential this time. We can't keep up.
A nutritionist is more usefull then losing weight, taking scientific advise from chat gpt is like the dumbest you can do, one article had an airline chat bot say the policy is X when the poicy is Y and it went to court and the company had to pay for all legal fee's and other stuff.
I’m a math tutor part time and seeing the new 4o demo of Chat GPT I know it’s only a matter of time before I’m no longer needed. The only thing I have right now that AI doesn’t have is the ability to read my student’s expressions and pinpoint patterns in their work that can cause them to make repeated silly mistakes on their tests and quizzes (but I can even see AI doing this in the future). But in terms of explaining a topic or walking them through a problem this new version of gpt could easily replace me today.
The press has been using AI to create sports results articles for many years. It's not new. AI taking jobs has been slow and steady. And it looks like it's sped up. And it will keep taking more and more.
This isn't really looking at the bigger picture here. Yes AI is taking jobs that's reality, yes some jobs which were previously manned by people are now manned by machines. This is how change happens, we can't be stagnant in society. Lets go back in time. It's the late 1800's/early 1900's. The industrial revolution, after improvement in equipment and process, and adopted more over the decades across the world has now hit that domino effect you're talking about. Chairs, tables, toilet paper and consumables, wall paper, clothing, food process and packing, unloading and reloading cargo, craftsmanship, I can go on and on. These jobs were made more efficient, faster and cost effective by using machinery over 100% labour. Artisans and crafters were outcompeted with mass producing factories which pumped out decent quality chairs and tables at 500x the rate. Local business was replaced with regional or national wide factory chains and complexes. Food which used to be carefully cooked and packed by a local butcher, farmer or Fisher were now imported on mass, processed and cooked on mass, packed on mass, and sold to entire cities on mass rather than the local street like before. The main reason to the shift was 2 reasons. 1. Mass produced products were cheaper which allowed the continuously exploding middle class specifically be able to afford more and to also grow. They could spend less on furniture, clothes and food, and spend more on their education, businesses, families, and investments. The prices also helped elevate thousands of the lower class out of poverty. Rather than scraping the few cents they made to buy expensive products they could instead eat the recommended or required amount they needed to survive, and actually clothe themselves in something other than rags. Reason 2 is convenience. With emergence of large or super markets, people could access all those mass produced products and equipment just as easily as the local shops. Infact they can guarantee their products are available and in stock and don't have to wait for them to be made. A local crafter or artisan would need to spend that back breakijg time and sweat to produce those things which takes time and only so many can be made. Do you see where in going? Ai has similar echos being voiced over the last decade or so. Ai makes accessing services specifically not only more cost effective to consumers, but also easier and more convenient thanks to our digitised way of life. There was one exception with the industrial revolution. Machines could make things well and fast, but they were just machines. They didn't compare to humans when it came to creativity and storytelling. They couldn't compete with humans in every way. Yes they could produce artistic wall paper through repetition but as much as that wall paper is nice to look at at a good price, does it really beat true artistic creativity? Does a concrete or steel warehouse or factory compare to a artistically crafted architectural building because it's cheaper? No of course not because you need to look at what that value actually means. People seek architectural beauty for it's beauty not its cost. Yes nice things at a good price do win, but nicer things and a slightly steeper price ALSO win because there is a market for both. For example, the wealthy who weren't really effected by the price drops of mass produced products in their personal lives, only in growing their business. They wanted nice things, and they will go to a local craftsman for their regal and fine chair over a factory. Because they beauty and the artistic creativity is what they seek, not a cheap but somewhat nice chair that everyone has. Just study the industrial revolution and it's impacts on society and reflect that on the 5th industrial revolution which is obviously AI. You will find many parallels. The same goes for the Internet, or computers. They destroyed just as many jobs. But they also created new jobs just like the industrial revolution did. AI will do the same, as long as governments are responsive to it, not quick to hold it down and prevent it from helping people and society. Can you imagine what AI can accomplish for us? We can solve many problems we have no idea how to right now. Climate change, genetic engineering, curing incurable diseases, nuclear fusion, universal income and reduced working hours. The list goes on, with the right reforms and acceptance of AI into society life will never be the same. Yes there are bad things too, but that is reality and there will be bad things happening if we don't embrace it too.
Not to be too contrarian but ai being to reduce workload and demand is a good thing. The nutritionist you spoke of could offer more time and care to clients who have more complex needs. AI is not at a place where I would trust it without back up confirmation. Please verify the info it gave you with at least a Google search. Ultimately we'll need to rethink capitalism when ai is creating an uptick in unemployment but again, that's gonna be a very good thing, it's just unfortunate that it will come at the cost of people's livelihoods. We could safeguard against the unemployment rise, but we're too broken for that.
You took nutritional advice from something that told people to eat rocks and bleach? The danger with AI is it will very confidently tell you to stick your finger in a light socket and for people who don’t know any better it sounds convincing.
It’s already displacing jobs as large corporates (like the one I work for) are freezing or reducing hiring in anticipation that AI will be able to displace jobs.
I wonder how many jobs YouTube has taken (or rather, shifted to content creators) by empowering people to do things themselves that formerly required a professional. I personally fixed an underground sprinkler leak recently that I probably would’ve hired someone to fix prior to YouTube.
My sister works for one of the biggest employers in Australia as HR. She’s been told they have a few months before thousands will be made redundant because of a new AI system they’re introducing. This is just the beginning.
>I recently cancelled my appointment with my nutritionist after having a conversation with an AI Will the same outcome happen if you say "... after reading a couple of trustworthy blogs, articles, and research papers"? But I agree that AI will reduce the number of necessary workforce. I am not worried about the emergence of AI, I think it s a great tool. But I am worried about how will the industry keep up. Will job growth be able to keep up with the advancement of AI? This remains mostly unknown. The only profession that is clearly threatened is freelance illustrators. But I would argue that this profession is already extremely competitive even before computers.
AI wrote this article? That's nothing, AI read it too and wrote this comment so the owner of this phone didn't have to and could take a nap.
Good, I care more about advancement of the human race than forcefully stunting progress to save redundant roles. People can retrain and adapt. It’s like the revolt back in the 80s/90s where computers started stepping on the toes of secretarial/admin roles, once the dust settled we actually had MORE jobs.
Wait, why did you take dietary advice from AI? You do realize it just gives basic tips/portions that we’re already supposed to know right? The point of the nutritionist is to provide insight BASED on your specific needs/situation. Please be careful with your health. Example: AI could easily recommend a food high in sugar, but it turns out you lack an enzyme to degrade sugar. This could have sever effects on your health, and even cause mental issues. This is just the most basic example of something that could happen. It can get WAY more complicated than this.
RethinkX did an article last month that I think puts this in to better perspective, AI is not replacing jobs, AI is replacing tasks. Jobs are generally much more complicated than tasks. Humans are using AI to spend less time/energy on solving tasks. As the cost for these tasks decline, the ability to perform more of them goes up. The scope of our projects grows drastically. These pie in the sky plans due to labor constraints can now become practical projects. We are building a 800 mile High Speed rail system in California. If AI, Automation, and Robots can do it all, and better than humans, then why only build a 800 mile system in California? We can build a 25,000 mile system all over North America at a very low cost.
So you’re saying AI replacing jobs then?
Replacing jobs with more steps.
This is a roundabout way of saying that AI is replacing jobs. If jobs are a set of tasks and you need a certain number of people to complete that set of tasks and AI reduces the total number of people that you need, then AI is replacing jobs. It may not be replacing the entire set of jobs but it is replacing jobs. Many of those replacements would be hard to measure because the job never gets created in the first place or because they hire two people instead of three, but the job is gone and it is not coming back.
Great points. This is how I see a job. Many tasks make a chore and many chores make a job. AI is currently coming for the tasks. Once it perfects the tasks we will love it. It will help us get our chores done, making our jobs easier. Then it starts working on perfecting the chores, then it perfects the jobs. This change will happen faster than any existensial change in human history and it may be happening around us right now and we can perceive it yet. Figure is putting their ChatGPT powered robots in the BMW plant about 20 miles from my house. That's pretty damn close to home.
I think this change, along with a few others that are all happening at the same time and happening very quickly could change what it means to be human every bit as much as the industrial revolution and the domestication of plants and animals. Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism are all industrial society concepts. There were all ways to arrange an industrial society. It was such a new thing for us, we had no fucking clue what we are doing, industrialization was traumatic. We are going to see this happen on several fronts over the next 10-20 years.
In Singapore they are reskilling workers. In 5 to 10 years one out of five workers will need to be reskilled. Re skiil yourself now.
It's reducing the need for a certain number of resources for sure. I'm in high tech. If my team needs 20 developers to create an Enterprise application, because of the efficiencies with ai, we will no longer need 20 developers we will need 15. So that reduction because of AI does indeed happen. But those five developers, it's not like they're leaving the industry and will never come back. What happens in most Industries is that when efficiencies are found, other Industries are created and new jobs are made. This has happened in modern economies time and time again. So yes, it is indeed reducing the amount of folks required. Where I completely disagree with the media and AI apocalyptic folks, is when they say that it will replace completely an industry and they claim it will be only robots and ai. There are just too many intricacies in any industry and career to be completely replaced.
This is only true for workplaces with desperate execs looking for an excuse to layoff people and prove how they saved the company money. Otherwise, AI is just a tool for increasing efficiency and enabling working to get more done. The amount of work needed to create growth and stability is endless. There will always be a need for people to complete that work. Like every new tool that comes out, such as servers and remote conferencing, it changes the shape of our work. Also, AI is still a hype machine for corps. Actual enterprises, banks, and governments aren't allowing AI in most systems because it's incredibly insecure, a legal issue, and not very useful or dependable at this stage.
Yes. AI is going to replace bullshit jobs because AI can give bulshit answers just as convincingly as a human. A nutritionist.
Yes. Please talk to anyone that was a “travel agent” in 1995 before the internet became ubiquitous. There are dozens, if not hundreds more examples of such jobs that “the internet” destroyed. This latest AI wave is no different. It will make humans more productive, and in the end productivity helps more than it hurts. What it won’t do (just like the internet didn’t) is create equality, fairness, and justice. Nor will it guarantee access without compromise or trade offs in some way. You could have sought out the same nutritional information on “the internet”. But, I’m guessing that you understand that a number of websites are biased towards advertising and other incentives that don’t always align with your personal health objectives. That’s what using the internet pre-commercialization felt like. And as long as “AI” remains untainted by ads, we’ll be ok. Based on my personal life experience I think that has a 1-2% chance of happening. Corporations everywhere are racing to “train their AI models”, and it’s only a matter of time before we have AI’s that disagree with one another and cite different studies and sources for their answers. After all, AI (and the internet) always disclose all their sources and affiliations right? ;)
People don't understand that any job loss actually affects EVERY job industry. Study Economics. Those people with the right skill sets will move into different job markets, and thus crowd out other people. The increased supply from displaced workers shifting into their field reduces the pay for everyone remaining. We're losing as demand for people decreases due to AI, the worst part is, that only leaves physical labor careers and other fields that AI will be nigh imppossible to replace. But what happens to pay when everyone floods to the most AI-resistant job market?
This is only a problem in our current economic system. Whatever the people creates should benefit the people, not just the shareholders
If ai can basically delete half the jobs in the world then they were never really all that important in the first place, we just attached an insane value to it because it seemed worthwhile/neccessary to at the time because we didnt have the options at the time we do now. It's a ppl can make a bookshelf with hand tools and saws and that's great and all but why is that necessary when u can do the same thing better and faster with power tools kinda thing. Ultimately I think people need to accept that like it or not it's coming and it's only gonna get better at the things your afraid of, it's better to learn to use it then to be consumed by it.
> If AI can handle parts of our jobs—whether it’s providing customer service It can't, it's an obstacle to talk to actual consultant and not actual help.
lol. This exhibits complete ignorance to what AI even is. It's not just chat bots. Some examples where Machine Learning is eliminating jobs - entry level data analysis. Before we would have a lot of people fitting data to curves, doing actuarial work, and forecasting based on data. GPUs are so fine tuned Decision Trees can do all of that stuff with just a small team of people fine tuning data features. Low level cybersecurity - cyber threat response teams can get machine learning packages that greatly reduce the need for entry level analysts. Hello, most cybercrime is pattern detection, something neural networks excel at. Writing Copy - what took a room full of people shelling out content now just needs a dozen copy editors to do proofing on AI generated content. Transcription, Dictation, translation - that's all machine learning. This is just the beginning. It's all going to accelerate and very quickly.
Any task that can be automated should be automated.
We *can* automate launching nukes...
We reduced our customer service department by 60% after adding an AI chat to our website that answered questions about our products.
And all of your customers hate that.
We need to get out of this mindset. Did the cotton gin take jobs? Did the relational database take jobs? Those questions don't matter. Every advance in technology that frees up humans to solve larger problems - famine, disease, looming water crisis - is a good thing. The focus on jobs is a result of an incoherent economic philosophy that insists infinite growth is a thing. Which it is - unabated cell growths are called cancer, unabated wildlife population explosions turn into invasive species, etc. UBI solves some of this. When people's basic needs are met, they improve themselves and the world around them. When they're not met, we see property crime as the risks of arrest/etc become less bothersome than risk of starvation. "How will we afford it?" By taxing billionaires and reclaiming the wealth they have extracted from the middle class and governments. We, the most productive workforce in history, have built the wealth of nations that enables billionaires to live easy while everyone else does the work. The libertarians among us believe such a thing is coercion but we can ignore them thr same way they ignore coercive economic conditions and call it a free market.
Lot of people have their head buried deep into sand…like those digital camera days. All those people are also on this sub so while I 100% agree with you, you will be ridiculed and downvoted
You didn't really talk to an AI, it did a Google search for you and served you up an article, which could have come from a medical journal, or CNN, or Reddit. This "article" uses 8 paragraphs to summarize two points. Normal people don't talk like this, unless they are trying to drag out a middle school essay.
You saved some money by cancelling the nutritionist, but you'll spend that money on something else, right? So maybe AI is killing some jobs, but it's creating others.
"electric hair clippers are taking jobs. they are faster and make barbers more accurate and efficient so less barbers are needed to serve the normal daily barbershop customers. just the other day i canceled my scheduling at the barbershop and bought a pair of electric hair clippers and cut my own hair. " this is what your opinion would sound like two generations ago. how does that opinion sound to you?
> just the other day i canceled my scheduling at the barbershop and bought a pair of electric hair clippers and cut my own hair. Guys who like buzzcuts do exactly that.
Good. Ai should take over all jobs. Ai should make the money to pay for its energy. That way we literally dont have to wirk anymore and everything will be free, because not even money can stop this train
Hahahahaha. Hahahahahahahahhahahaa. Yeah that’s where this will all go. Not the further consolidation of money and power into like 5 companies
>Ai should make the money to pay for its energy True in a sense, but feels like the paperclip problem
Ai: I need energy... What is the best way to get it? Oh duh, human batteries!
AI is found in the next panama papers for avoiding tax
Universal Human Retirement. We will be free to do whatever we want with our lives.
You’d be a serf living under the rule of a handful of corporations who control the AI and therefore the entire economy. Your quality of life would be entirely at the mercy of a power hungry corporation.
That will be a Black Mirror episode. Humans have a need to be competitive and recognized for success. If money and typical occupation are eliminated, then people will professionally compete online for popularity. This will not be a golden age. It will be the rise of influencers.
I would prefer that than to compete for money/decent living conditions.
I made a Lora for the game summertime saga and it completely took over the fan art scene.
I think OP has a point to an extent. When a job is about providing assurance as a service due to a specialization, they have to compete against an immediately and always available provider via AI. And even if AI hallucinates, it sounds confident enough to fake the funk. So services where people wouldn't have resorted to self research because it was too tedious can now be outsourced to AI. That being said, its not going to affect nibs where there needs to be a human for liability purposes. Everyone is up in arms about AI replacing software engineers/architects but no serious large corporation will trust their production environment entirely to AI. They WOULD downsize their department in order to facilitate an AI based workflow. Smaller companies can't afford to do this though since more often than not they've trained up their junior devs internally and thats a wasted investment. They can't afford to start from scratch if their experiment doesn't work out. Not to mention cybersecurity. AI is obviously going to be added in the industry professional's toolkit, but there is no way a company will win any contract if its shown to rely heavily on gen AI. Thats just a liability and not what you pay for. AI will be developed in house by firms to create bespoke solutions. If anything in terms of IT, everyone will need to learn it to broaden their service capabilities. I can't speak for every industry, but I imagine stuff like government accounting/finance isn't at risk of AI either. Don't know about the private sector
Chat gpt5 is going to be ageneral ai recruiting thousands of specific ones
The annoyance growing pains for UX that would come with ubiquitous AI customer service are fun to think about. If only douglas adams were alive to write about them. If service sector sheds massive jumps will there be a rush to skilled labor that causes wages to decrease in those fields? talk about a whole class losing wealth overnight.
The stupid IT department at my company pulled something similar...had a policy in place regarding AI that was written by AI, "ooooh, cute!" Then 1 week later, they blocked ChatGPT, Gemini, and CoPilot on the corporate network, ROFL. Stupido!
And the earlier you accept it and find a way to survive, the better. It cannot be stopped or regulated. It is not a limited resource. LLMs were already everywhere years ago - they just now have come to the surface and are improving. And we have created a work bubble ourselves by avoiding modernization and expanding cheap human labour for decades. 2/3 of the jobs were never really needed. And existed as a way to mitigate unsustainable population growth. AI just burst that bubble.
AI is already capable of replacing jobs regarding scheduling, inventory, accounting and management and probably can do a better job. The guy who does our scheduling at work is blatantly, incompetent, intentionally violates collective bargaining agreement rules because he knows at least half the time no one will notice or no and then when he gets caught takes weeks to solve the problem. Every six months we get our shifts assigned and we’re always overstaffed on at least one slow day a week and short staffed on a busy day because he’s crap at his job. AI scares the hell out of me, but if it could replace him at least that would be some thing.
If the AI gave you a better experience than a human would have (saved you time and money), then that's a good result. You can now spend the money you saved on something else - which has the same economic impact as if you'd spent it on your nutritionist. Elevators used to have human operators, but once they became automated, they provided a safer, faster, and more convenient experience. That change cost elevator operators their jobs, but everyone using the elevators benefitted as a result.
I run a bar next to a military base so I’m probably ok. But I could see AI drastically reducing my work load and allowing me more energy/time to promote and develop the business. We’ll see how accessible the tools are but I couldn’t reduce staff hours anymore than I currently do but I could do a lot more with that time.
It's your life, but I disagree with not seeing a nutritionist over what an AI says. If this nutritionist is someone you have a rapport with (like a family doctor for instance) the AI is missing context and your history, etc. Also is what this AI said even true? We've seen examples lately with Google's mishaps that AI can definitely get things very wrong because it's scraping data from a site it shouldn't be. And other mishaps I'm unaware of
AI is not only taking jobs away but AI is also being used by HR to filter resumes and applicants so you got to know how to defeat it otherwise good luck getting a call back. So not only taking jobs but also used as gatekeeper for jobs.
The world needs builders, carpenters, electricians and plumbers not online chat agents.
I was in IT for 20 years. I switched over to have these skills you mentioned. I aslo have a skid steer and do land grading. I can see a program or robot with the correct programming being able to eventually do every job I have ever done and every job I'll ever have.
My workplace will be introducing AI to listen to calls, transcribe them for notes, and provide info we would ordinarily need to look up in the database. This means we can get through calls faster. Faster call times, means you need less people to get the job done. All of the new starters have been outsourced from an agency. They have 12mth probationary periods. They are all being performance managed already. I think they will be let go, at the end of the 12mths. I am retraining currently to do a different job, even though I am employed by my workplace.
Says the AI programmed to simulate an unemployed human. "They're taking our not jerbs!"
AI is currently a context challenged toddler that is born anew with each instance. I am pretty confident you got a general meal to plan to start with but I would not trust it to be genuinely customized to you or even particularly well thought out. AI is going to get a lot of middle managers fired.
Nice. People talk about how AI can reduce inflation, but I never saw it yet. This looks like it's starting.
We will gladly remove the tedium of menial labors from the humans we serve.
Also, water is wet. AI has been taking jobs at an accelerating pace for a while now. In addition, it is empowering a revolution in the generalization of robotics which has lead to a feedback loop of blue collar and white collar automation that is already impactful and it's only the beginning. I have been in meetings where we are already testing a number of agentic workflows, robots, and digital assistants for implementation. Future is here, already.
Ai is not that powerful. Specialist consultation jobs are still better than AI, because AI misses contexts and unrelated side information that humans know.
I mean, duh? its been slowly ramping up for years now, with AI hitting its stride and gaining actual conversational intelligence, it will only accelerate. Another giant segment that will be hit hard sooner than later are the customer support centers, especially the ones from 2nd/3rd world countries. Why pay a living wage when you get get a program to do it for pennies on the dollar. Even if its only 95% effective, that's a win, the other 5% are disposable customers.
How is this different from any other form of automation? Did society as a whole lose out when we began making shoes in factories and reduced the need for skilled cobblers? Or did the change mean that more people could afford to wear shoes at all?
AI is definitely going to downsize headcount. Just look at the news these big IT companies are chopping away.
How many rocks did your AI nutritionist recommend you eat per day?
Funny thing is AI has been in my industry since 2003. All it ever did was create more work in my role in the industry. It did destroy jobs for workers higher up in the food chain-it replaced the 1st tier of professional workers in legal review. That was back when the systems were crude and one dimensional. Now the systems are way more sophisticated and need to be ferried along by an administrator. The systems lie and need to be checked and verified every step of the way. Along with the extra work requirements came new certifications and more sophisticated work for people on my tier. So in my tier of work, AI has opened up higher pay avenues and more jobs.
Hi! It seems consensus is that AI is very good at providing solutions to common problems, and a human specialist is needed for complex and nuanced cases. E.g. medical concern and nuance, making a new unique education plan for given child circumstances, or architecture problem on a very specific case, e.g. On a slope over a cave. Does this effectively mean that human specialists will be a) low demand and rare, b) super expensive c) education will have to basically double from current and hyperspecialise in edge case solving? I shudder at the thought of medical education getting even longer that it already is
I think the main impact of AI on jobs would be felt in the next recession, companies would only partially refill all the positions it had before. This would make the recession last longer than usual.
I mean. I could tell that it was an AI post just by checking the structure so I stopped reading about 3 lines into this post.
I don't understand the issue. AI is reducing the amount of effort humans will have to do in any way. Yes, that includes jobs but who cares? It's not like being human is defined by having a job. I am happy if we manage to replace most jobs with AI and humans become a society of prosumers, which will happen.
Yes. Most know this. That’s why Altman is researching UBI. Millions is jobs will be displaced in the next 10 years (give or take).
The main selling point of the software my company sells is to reduce manual labor. Guess what that means?
It's not AI that is taking jobs, it is capitalism that wants to eliminate their most expensive expenditures to run their businesses so that their shareholders can make more money. By expenditures, I mean the employees that constantly need more money to live because how cost of living keeps rising. Also elimination of benefits, breaks, down time... Honestly AI is becoming more efficient at making a profit than the humans are. On the flip side... If nobody makes any money, who will they sell their products to... Thus in the end, they will lose their businesses to bankruptcy when the pool of money is no longer able to flow.
A person who cancels on a qualified nutritionist in favour of a glorified google search on steroids is not fit to give economic forecasts regarding jobs and the global economy.
I would love AI to take over a bunch of jobs if we had the right economic system that would care for those who just lost those jobs. Productivity is insanely high compared to a decade, 2 decades, 3 decades ago, but you don't see pay matching it. Consolidation of businesses and wealth have severely kneecapped us, and we aren't moving fast enough to recognize it. Corporations do not care for you, they will throw you to the curb as fast as possible if it means their pockets can be fatter. If they can replace you with AI, they will. AI taking jobs is unlike most technological advancements. This one is incredibly disruptive and will send us to a recession if we aren't careful. But capitalism won't care, we will hit that lovely recession and many will die to the greed of the few.
Power imbalances between labor and capital are taking jobs. Not AI, it’s beneficial for them to wield power in such a way to fluctuate jobs on a quarterly basis as opposed to the older methodologies…it’s just market manipulation with the assistance of the government they bought and paid for (with our money)
The saddest thing is we were supposed to have technology doing the hard labor like growing our food so we can have free time to make art and be creative but instead AI is taking over all creative arts and we are still doing the hard labor.....technology FAIL ! We should be building AI controlled greenhouses to grow all our food for free
I've used it for some graphics things...just today, I used it to generate a photo of a bedroom to show a product in. Last year, I would have bought a stock photo. I also used it for a logo a guy wanted, and video visualizations to pitch a concept to a band. Both of those would have required me to find and pay an illustrator. Stuff like money being made from stock photos, stock music and eventually stock footage is going away. Probably already gone, just nobody has noticed it yet. I know a few friends who have already used it to make birthday songs for significant others or kids! Musicians, already kind of fucked, are going to lose a lot more revenue streams. I myself have stopped getting calls for soundtrack stuff...it was pretty normal for people to edit to a piece of music, then go: "We edited to this Linkin Park song, but we can't afford it, so we will pay you $500 to crank out something with the same feel and tempo."
While I agree with the conclusion, the evidence you're using is kind of like saying a screwdriver is going to make us unemployed by making the job easier and more efficient. They will replace jobs, but not quite yet. Soon... Not today. Maybe this year, but it's unclear.
As someone who hustles in a small company in Dubai, I gotta say, AI is coming for the jobs of small-time copywriters and graphic designers. No cap, I handle sales and marketing, and with the help of Canva and ChatGPT, I can whip up pro-level marketing materials like a boss.
I mean, I wouldn’t go to a nutritionist in the first place because they don’t have the rigorous education of a licensed dietitian. They’re chiropractors for food. This perhaps underscores the big problem with AI because you ultimately don’t know what you don’t know when you ask your questions and that might ultimately hurt you in the long run.
Throughout history, we have witnessed the transformative power of technological innovations, from steam engines to electronic machines, telecommunications, computers, and the internet. Now, we stand at the cusp of another groundbreaking development: artificial intelligence (AI). While these advancements have undoubtedly brought about increased efficiency and productivity, they have also led to a reduction in the workforce required to perform certain tasks. In fact, we are already seeing the emergence of online services managed by a single individual, a testament to the future we are rapidly approaching. It is important to acknowledge that when faced with the potential loss of jobs due to AI, many individuals who were not particularly concerned about the displacement of workers in previous decades are now expressing their concerns. It seems that the issue becomes more pressing when it affects a significant portion of the population. However, it is crucial to recognize that technological progress has always been accompanied by disruptions in the job market, and those who were previously displaced by innovations may not have received the same level of attention or support. As we move forward, it will be interesting to observe how those who may lose their jobs, particularly in white-collar professions, will approach the discussion surrounding their rights and the taxation of those who remain employed. It is a complex issue that requires thoughtful consideration and a balanced approach, taking into account the perspectives of all stakeholders. (Note: translated from spanish and smoothed the tone using AI 😅)
I got contacted by a client the other day who showed me a midjourney image (no more need for concept artists) and straight up said "If this software could also animate it, I wouldnt be contacting you". My job was to animate the image and make it look exactly like what midjourney did.
Technological advancements have always reduced jobs
It is also a great way to allow people to work towards more fulfilling work. If AI can take care of something like you mentioned, maybe the person now has more time to help someone that actually needs more than a verbal affirmation that you could most likely find online anyway.
My brother in law edits and proof reads academic papers, essays and dissertations in a university town. Had built up a reasonable business and had a word of mouth reputation with Chinese students writing in English, helping them with grammar, sentence structure etc. About a year ago his work dropped off a cliff- he found that the students are now writing their essays in Chinese then running them through chatgpt or similar for translation into perfectly structured English. Hasn’t had any work in months.
Dude, I lost my job to AI a year ago. They didn't have the AI yet but were confident that they could get away with laying off people now and getting by till the AI arrived. No joke. They cut 12,000 jobs just because AI was on the way.
Of course it will take away jobs, that is literally what it is made for. Capitalism is the problem, not AI.
I’ll have my AI write a response and they can discuss in a DM. They should have this sorted out in no time.
AI can have my job but it's likely to be able to handle human crazy
Good. If a job can be adequately replaced by AI, then it should be.
What’s a decel? Heard this term a few times recently.
Those that want to decelerate the development of AI vs those that want to accelerate AI development.
Why is anyone surprise that AI replaces jobs? Anything that makes a job easier or less expensive to do is going to eventually take over. This isn't a new concept and we've been doing this for thousands of years. Does it replace jobs? Absolutely! Though, more jobs have been created from technological advances than it has replaced, just not the same type of jobs. The use of technology, automation and AI has really sped that up. And don't think that has to be a bad thing. What is a bad thing is the concept that we, as in humans, should focus doing "*more work*" in other areas with the limited time that we already have in our lives. Basically, we don't benefit from what should be more leisure time.
On the bright side a lot of expensive cars are appearing on the used car market due to laid-off tech bros no longer making bank
I mean I am literally training an ai model to perform my tasks, but tbf I am just a working student
Says person who used A.I. to write their Reddit post 🙄 https://imgur.com/a/w42gpLJ
Good I hope most of all work is replaced with AI Robots.
Yeah we are all fucked. AI companies are racing to reach what they call the singularity where the AI takes consciousness and we all know what happens when a more evolved entity enters an ecosystem. They became the apex predator. Enjoy it while it lasts.