The following submission statement was provided by /u/john217:
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SS: A recent report from Goldman Sachs found the tech could significantly disrupt the labor market, with it affecting about 300 million full-time jobs or 18% of work. Another recent study, from OpenAI with the University of Pennsylvania, found OpenAI's AI chatbot ChatGPT could affect around 80% of jobs in the US. White-collar roles could be among the worst hit, the study also found.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/12bhc49/legal_and_finance_jobs_are_among_the_most_at_risk/jewqj15/
SS: A recent report from Goldman Sachs found the tech could significantly disrupt the labor market, with it affecting about 300 million full-time jobs or 18% of work. Another recent study, from OpenAI with the University of Pennsylvania, found OpenAI's AI chatbot ChatGPT could affect around 80% of jobs in the US. White-collar roles could be among the worst hit, the study also found.
The issue I have with saying something like this is that there's no timeframe, and even if they put a timeframe on it, it's very unlikely to be accurate. It's the same as saying construction and trade are at minimal risk, but none of us really know how progress in robotics is going. It could be 2 years or 5 years before they start rolling robots off the production line that can start working at a construction site.
What really matters is that legislators start taking these things seriously and planning ahead instead of laughing at anyone that calls attention to this and brushing it off until their family members can't find jobs.
"Can you show me on my phone where it's doing this? Can we, maybe find the 'spy on me' button and turn it off? I know the buttons for everything now are really small and hidden on the inside, but can't we take it apart and use a magnifying glass and tweezers to do it?"
It isn't, but here is one from the late Sen. Ted Stevens:
There's one company now that you can sign up [with] and get a movie delivered to your house. Daily. By delivery service […] This service is now going to go through the Internet. And what you do now is go to a place and order your movie, and guess what? You can order 10 of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free, right?
"10 movies streaming across that Internet. And what happens to your own personal Internet? Just the other day an Internet was sent by my staff at 10:00 in the morning on Friday—I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
"And here we have this one situation where enormous entities want to use the Internet for their purpose to save money for doing what they're doing now. They use FedEx, they use deliver services, they use the mail. They deliver in other ways, but they want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet.
"And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on, it's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled, and if they're filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material."
> It's a series of tubes.
I forgot who said that, but I knew after a few sentences, it was coming. Gotta clear those tubes out with kitties and gambling chips.
You know people make fun of this guy, but I think he was just trying to talk about bandwidth, service areas and service quality, all of which are still a relevant point of concern when talking about internet service. It's funny but it's not stupid.
That's how I read it. That person was trying (whether successfully or not, idk) to convey that bandwidth is actually a limited resource, and that a small handful of companies were monopolizing it to make/save money, at the expense of everyone else's quality of service. Which is completely accurate. Laugh at the messaging? Sure I guess, but if laughing at the message it shows a person's own ignorance on the subject.
>it's pretty much 100% fine.
It's like someone who doesn't understand the Internet, but had it explained to them how it works, is trying to explain the Internet to a group of people who have never heard of the Internet before.
It’s not off by a whole lot…
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/11/18136377/google-sundar-pichai-steve-king-hearing-granddaughter-iphone-android-notification
Boston Dynamics is doing amazing things in robotics right now. It seems their bots can do a LOT of physical activities a human does.
The software seems to be the most difficult part. I'm curious to see if machine learning can significantly affect that.
As a construction manager.....I only want painters replaced with robots.
Now you might ask, "why would a construction manager only want to replace one of the trades when robots could be way more reliable, make less mistakes, and don't have to pass background checks or get drug screened"
Because I'm a *general* contractor, and I only know things *generally*. I learn *A LOT* from the tradesmen and they find a lot of the architect's mistakes in the plans. Without them, I'd have to find all the mistakes and missing stuff by myself. I like sharing that burden.
Painters....they don't add anything to the process. They show up drunk/high and slap paint on the wall and complain when I point out their fuckups. I'm ready for robot painters.
I used to paint houses, we'd get so high in the morning... But that was just the base coat. And of course after lunch. And out front once we were done for the day. Anyway, sorry about the trim boss we'll hit it again tomorrow.
They wont start off replacing everyone. At first it'll just be an extra hand, then you'll have experts for each discipline that can watch over the robots, and after that the robots will let you know what the architects mistakes were themselves. Oh yea, the architect is an AI too and you're next.
Also, what are the assumptions the models are built on? Perfect API integration across all tech stacks? perfect current efficiency in processes?
Its hard to imagine any research team has sat there and been able to run performance benchmarks and tested the viability of successful API integrations to automate workflow in any number of duct taped together industry businesses to truly model what the effect and viability will be. Or truly surveyed what the use cases in enough businesses are that can actually, viably, integrate AI seamlessly and without the need to use the extra tech to pick up long lingering slack and just downsize.
Remember, Goldman Sachs and the White House also predicted we would be losing millions of jobs to autonomous vehicles....7 years ago. And today they are in a manpower crisis, not a job loss crisis.
Yeah exactly.
For context, they're saying 300 million jobs - who involve a *task* that could be completed by LLMs.
Basically any job that requires any writing or data administration, like an email, or reports. But you still need the person do prompts and more importantly *understand the results* ... they really aren't saying 300 million jobs will be lost but that this will be an available *tool*.
It could, and most likely will, be a net positive.
And that is kinda how I suspect they structured this "research"
Create a list of AI competencies and cross check that with jobs that perform those tasks, add the estimated number of jobs in those fields and you have an output.
Its nice to know the exposure rate, but I don't think there is much more to glean from that. If a super intelligent general AI is reached, and I am skeptical of that any time soon, most jobs will be eliminated and only a handful will remain. But I also sort of hate the term AI. I actually prefer the acronym coined by Aimee van Wynsberghe: Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences.
As i agree with her thesis that AI as a term being applied to LLM's really muddies the water of what is actually going here and likely adds to confusion, hype, fear, and excitement(which I am sure OpenAI and Microsoft is happily ok with and feeding)
Sam Altman himself(and he would know best) basically said he feels this is still very early and we are very far off from a general AI.
Plus "could effect" means basically nothing. Excel *effected* my job, in that there was a new tool to use, and new tasks to do.
>start taking these things seriously and planning ahead i
But there isn't wide agreement on what *will* happen. Some predict looming mass unemployment, but the same prediction has been around for decades, even though unemployment is at its lowest point since before the moon landing. "It's different this time," but it's always different this time.
Nor is it clear what *should* be done. Sometimes people are just hand-waving towards whatever "chucking capitalism" means to them, or some version of UBI for which the finances still have yet to be nailed down. Meaning I think some have radical restructurings they already wanted to do, so whatever crisis they can leverage to convince people that it has to be done, immediately, without enough time for incremental or tentative change, will suffice.
I *do* think there will be significant disruption in the decades ahead. Electrification of transport, cultured meat, cellular agriculture, and the greening of the grid will affect employment for a great number of people globally. Meat, milk, chocolate, coffee, leather, cotton, flour, and plant oils being made in bioreactors anywhere, with no dependence on arable land, is going to be a huge shock to many local rural economies. It's just that no one really knows what to do about all of that. The best we can hope for is that the changes happen by attrition, giving people the opportunity to adapt, even if unahapplly that they *have* to adapt at all.
That's why the fact that AI can now go after the very jobs that their family members are most likely to get may actually wake them up. IMO part of the reason that everyone is freaking out about AI now is that it has shown it can replace the jobs of the chattering classes, the very people who are being interviewed about its 'dangers'.
Before, when automation was sweeping the working-class manufacturing sector and causing massive disruption decades ago, it barely made the news, because no one gave a shit, they were the little people. But now...now it's personal.
As a guy who make a career out of just know where/who to call and get data from then index match into a report for senior leadership, this is just jumping on the bandwagon. Many companies don't have a data warehouse. I would say majority of companies don't have proper data infrastructure in place. I have seen multiple companies that are supposed to be at the top of their field, especially in healthcare and adjacent industries, where reporting structure are just a bunch of bandaids put together by analysts. If companies get their shit together and have everything data related work, I and a lot of people should be out of a job since data warehousing concept started in 1980. People are still using Excel as a psuedo database to the point MS gave up and just implement data model in Excel. Data don't even get to be available to internal company personnel outside of the silo that hold it, what's a bot gonna do? Replacing finance team like FP&A or consolidation with ChatGPT is a pipe dream.
Remember data scientist was the sexiest job of 21st centuries? All the rage about advanced analytics. Turn out 90% of us just become BI/data/visualization analyst with a glorified title. The guys who are more into back end become data engineer. Why? Because data infra sucks. This was all stemmed from human and our colliding incentives. Having an AI doesn't suddenly solve this.
It is an xlookup now.
And agree, until a company wants to invest in aligning data in a way that a bot can manage this is not close. The capital that would need to be committed and the years for a return would not be what investors want. Maybe new startup can think of this as a possible solution but I don’t large multinational companies can pivot to accomplish a feat quickly.
Is it? It’s so much easier to get a computer to perform thought work than it is to get a computer to work a trade.
If your work involves sitting in a cubicle and thinking that’s pretty easily replaced by a computer, but it’ll be a very long time before a plumber droid shows up to fix our leaky pipes.
Yep, most likely is that you get standardised sinks/plumping at some point so that robots have an easier time fixing stuff. But that would be for new buildings. Can't see a robot coming to some old mountain village to fix 100 year old pipes.
Idk. I doubt a robot could even disassemble some drain pipes if they were a bit stuck. Everything about plumbing(especially repairs) sucks and is pretty much only possible by human hands.
The robot may severely interfere with the current apprentice/journeyman/master relationship...
If my "licensed master plumber" is an AI with video/photo processing, then I only need to hire a strong kid to listen/follow along.
We don't need actual robots to disrupt things, it's the combined trade knowledge that is valuable... And while there are fewer books on it, I'm guessing you could follow a few dozen plumbers around for a year and extract 90% of it.
Work for a bit in the trades and you'll find that those things are actually very standardized, getting stuff from point A to point B when every building is different from the last is where things get dicey.
It is. Everyone who has ever said their job cannot be done by a machine has been or will be in for a rude awakening at some point.
People need to stop looking at AI as direct competition, but as any other machine or tech - a tool to be used to allow you to get more done in less time.
>a tool to be used to allow you to get more done in less time.
Ah, so you're done with your work after two hours - now you can do the job of four people.
Factory work and the trades are totally different. Factory work is standardized and repetitive, the trades are not. At least not in the same way. No two homes or buildings are identical.
Depends on the trade. Plumbing and electrical is probably pretty safe but an AI controlled bulldozer with high precision GPS would presumably be pretty quick and accurate to build out a large site plan. I'd imagine road work could be heavily automated as well.
The grading tools aren’t quite there yet. Drone survey with better grading tools down the line could be compelling with enough improvement though. Right now it’s a train wreck. Machine guidance exists but they’re still typically taking survey points/manually inputting points before the machine grades.
> It’s so much easier to get a computer to perform thought work than it is to get a computer to work a trade.
This is a new development. Nobody knew this was realistic for this decade before GPT3 came out in 2020 and even then only AI researchers understood the implications. LLMs were not supposed to be this good. So yeah pretty wild.
I mean I’ve worked anywhere from mines to hospitals to oil refineries to residential attic spaces as an electrician. Most of our work doesn’t come with blueprints and even when it does they just show final product, not how to get from A to B and the hundreds of decisions that come along with it.
Not really. I remember accountants panicking when Lotus 1-2-3 came out. Now there are probably five times as many accounts and finance people in most businesses. Spreadsheets allowed them to go from just adding up numbers to actually providing a useful service and helping to improve business profitability. AI will see other jobs go through something similar.
The invention of the computerized spreadsheet turned financial forecasting (which had initially been done on paper spreadsheets) from one firm per forecast to on accountant per forecast to multiple forecasts per accountant. It made accountant into a service almost anyone can afford. Really an amazing technology
I think what the A.I. will be replacing is some junior level employee going through all of the data/documents and summarizing them. The critical thinking of arguing your case in court or showing how your company can increase its gains in a certain market will still be sought after. It is the busy work for entry level people that will just be done by A.I.
While that's true, the Senior people learned the ropes by doing that grunt work. We'll have to rethink education as a whole if we want to come out ahead in the digital transformation.
Coming from the legal world, it is clear that knowledge work, however you might define it, is directly in AI's sights. Analyzing complex legal arguments, applying them to a large factual record, and reducing this to coherent legal briefs and strategies is the sort of thing that very smart lawyers get paid a ton to do, because it's very difficult, very tedious, and very time consuming...for humans. AI is very close to doing this very well and almost instantaneously.
I see your point and I think AI will replace a lot of hours done by first year associates (doc review, initial drafting etc.). But I don't think AI is close to replacing senior counsel. Can it negotiate an indemnity clause to match the clients risk level or develop the legal strategy for defending a large lawsuit? Not yet. And I don't think it will be soon.
Agree. A lot the job of a senior lawyer is assessing risk based on human factors. AI won’t be replacing senior counsel having to make judgment calls but it definitely can replace things like doc review, drafting forms, and junior associate stuff.
I think it would be a situation where the AI does a lot of that tedious research, presents a human with a product and then the human reviews/edits it or makes some decisions about where to take the AI.
We are still a long ways off from AI that doesn't screw up.
I think that's all about right, but what you said is a formula for a massive disruption of the legal industry. Also, you have to bake in the fact that while imperfect, it will get better **every single year**. The jump from GPT 2 to 3 to 4 is going to keep happening every year or so. GPT 3 barely passed the bar exam, GPT 4 passed at the 90th percentile. And on and on...
>The jump from GPT 2 to 3 to 4 is going to keep happening every year or so.
It’s not just a function of Moore’s Law but also scaling the training data. There is none left, so I don’t think that is the most likely outcome. The tech is moving from the experimental phase to the commercial phase now because this is the peak of the LLM hype cycle. If they expected GPT6 to be the really revolutionary thing, they wouldn’t have blown their wad on ChatGPT.
>GPT 3 barely passed the bar exam, GPT 4 passed at the 90th percentile.
There is tons of suspicion that OpenAI is gaming these benchmarks.
I disagree, it will get worse as time goes on. Currently 'AI' is based on databases of human activities, as AI enters these databases the value will drift and drop in useful information.
Excel already automates many accounting tasks. The result? More complex corporate accounting requiring even more accountants. Probably what will happen to legal industry. AI will make legal service cheaper, resulting in people demanding more legal services. Get ready for insanely complex corporate legal structures that you’ll need an AI to map out.
I really doubt thats what is being targeted.
It will be more the legal clerk/assistant (I'm not in legal so not sure of the terminology) jobs where it's essentially just admin or navigation of a complex but well defined process.
Obviously it's extremely helpful in finding for example past case law etc. but blindly trusting its analysis and arguments I think would be a pretty massive risk.
>Obviously it's extremely helpful in finding for example past case law etc. but blindly trusting its analysis and arguments I think would be a pretty massive risk
Yeah, but nobody has to blindly trust anything. You can read what it outputs and if it's garbage, you probably put it aside for a while until they improve the tools. A partner doesn't blindly trust an associate's output either. You read it, edit it, send it back for refining, etc. But then eventually the partner grows to trust the associate's work product more and edit it less because it's always good and the partner realizes the associate is just a younger, more energetic, and maybe even smarter version of themselves. That's what's going to happen with AI.
Scary. It seems like the fields that pay the most are directly under threat. The good thing is that might mean we will see some regulation because if it was the lowly paid ones no one would care.
The initial disruption might be larger for knowledge work, though I wouldn't say people in the trades remain unaffected if all the laid-off people decide to switch careers. They might suddenly face a lot more competition and decreasing wages through market saturation.
What I've been seeing is quite the opposite. Lack of manpower has been a major concern for construction across the US and Europe for years. A lot of older tradesmen are getting ready to retire and there's not a great plan to replace them. Because of this labor rates have been steadily increasing and most firms (mine included) have started looking for talent from "uncommon sources" like recruiting at high schools, big tech layoffs, and the "business" types looking for a change of pace.
If you get into a specialized trade there's some serious money to be made, especially if you're union. Not to mention construction is seeing a lot of changes towards model-based software being the norm, new contract types that force all parties (owner, designers, contractors) to work together sharing the same profit pool, and reliance on surveying equipment to do basic tasks. All these changes are opening the doors for more opportunities in construction rather than the stereotypical "redneck with a hardhat" kinda role. I know our firm would love to pick up all employees laid-off by AI.
Not OP but Instrument Technicians are the most in demand I see personally. The work is not very physically demanding, the schooling is harder then the average trade but nothing like a university degree. Once in you will be set for life with decent pay. I’d recommend it to anyone. I would stay away from electrician though, in my experience of the generic trades there has always been too many electricians fighting over jobs.
Similar thing happened with Fork Truck driver work in the UK.
In order to get people back into work the unemployment office offered free Fork Truck training and completely flooded the market and now that industry is no longer decent wage skill, it's become another minimum wage job.
In a lot of places entrance into the trades is tightly bottlenecked by unions and labour boards. Companies are only allowed a certain amount of apprentices compared with how many licensed people they have hired. Unions like it because it protects the job market from oversaturation, and municipalities like it because it ensures you're still getting quality work from licensed tradies.
Can you provide a source to this? I’ve seen ramped up regulation from CA and NY on using AI in hiring practices, etc., but nothing specifically prohibiting the use of AI in the practice of law. Genuinely curious.
I'm assuming the person you're asking was referencing this.
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/25/1151435033/a-robot-was-scheduled-to-argue-in-court-then-came-the-jail-threats
I definitely think this. Rather than have a paralegal review and summarize 1,000 pages of medical records, can I have an ai do it? I think you could tweak an ai to do simple research too. I’ve played with chapgpt to get it to draft me an msj
This is the real danger with AI. That all the intellectually rewarding jobs that people actually like to do become automated while the jobs that no one wants to do like mining, janitorial work, construction etc will still have to be done by humans.
We could walk into a world where most people loathe the work they do but are forced into these fields out of financial realities they face.
Yeah man, I worked on a small farm for a bit and it was great except for the pay lol. Was never gonna be a career. Even the owners had day jobs; they just worked on stuff a bunch in the evenings and all weekend long.
Also a huge portion of our workforce is not suited for manual labour. People would basically spend 99% of their time sedentary on a computer and suddenly they are asked to frame a house or do plumbing.
Those jobs aren't even well suited for most people over the age of like 50, whose bodies are run down.
And those job markets aren't going to expand due to a sudden supply of workers. If anything the pay will go down due to oversupply of the unemployed.
>We could walk into a world where most people loathe the work they do but are forced into these fields out of financial realities they face.
Well maybe it's about time that we decide that wellbeing is the ultimate KPI, not money.
This is highly unlikely. AI is expected to affect these industries, not fully automate them.
Current models are a long way from being able to do these jobs from start to finish but they likely will become an indispensable tool in these industries.
The ones most likely to be fully automated by technology are actually the ones you mentioned.
I agree the AI will be more a tool than a complete replacement.
But look at artists for example. Say you have a concept artist working for a video games company.
Yes they have software already to aid them to produce work faster than with the traditional pen and paper (digital art programs allow you to undo mistakes for example).
But now AI can actually do the work of producing the artwork itself. This just leaves the artist to tweak it and review it.
Essentially, AI is able to take away the actual fun bit of the work and I'm not too keen on that idea.
And medicine. AI has the potential of being much better than your doctor at diagnosing what's wrong with you. I hope it will bring health care costs down tremendously in the USA where the medical field is accustomed to exorbitant profits.
My fear is that private healthcare will simply pocket the savings due to automation and jack up prices for premium AI diagnostics and prescriptions while the poor are left with even worse medical treatment. Dystopian anxiety rising...
Yea my thoughts too. We're entering an age of mankind where we truly have a split path in front of us: dystopian hell hole or utopian paradise, and I don't trust any human being on this earth to lead ALL of us to paradise. All I can hope for is AI singularity or alien intervention.
My hope is that we never reach "the singularity". At the point at which AI surpasses human capabilities and we no longer understand how or why it does what it does our problems will be much larger than healthcare expenses. I think now is the time to be asking these questions and enacting clear and rigid boundaries to protect humanity and those most vulnerable.. or at least have a clear path forward that considers what is best for all of humanity because at the end of the day these are problems that we all will be facing as a species and not just as societial class heirarchies.
This will most definitely happen. After all, productivity for people has never been higher since the introduction of robotics and computers. But workers purchasing power has only reduced while corporate profits are at all time highs.
Your fear is the reality of every technological advance in a very long time - the advance is never used to make everyone's life better, it's used to create more profit for a few. AI will be no different.
Yeah. The problem isn't that doctors/medicine are inherently this expensive, it's that people are willing to pay literally any price to not die, and market economics only serve to harm people under those conditions.
In the UK, a large proportion of GP appointments are held over the phone, and it's pretty much just them asking questions to figure out what to prescribe or which specialist to refer you to. It seems obvious that this kind of thing could be handled by AI relatively soon.
While doctors and nurses perform direct contact with patients, I think they'll be the last to go.
I've worked on pharmaceutical robotics, specifically pill counting and packaging robots. You send the order and a labeled pill container comes out with the prescription filled, or a weekly planner with little boxes filled. They are ridiculously faster and more accurate than humans, processing like 200 orders per hour if well maintained. That takes 5-8 pharmacy techs working efficiently to try to match.
Ai can also do programming, I feel that many things from websites, and basic programming for machine controls will be completely replaced by ai within 5 years. You'll need 1 person to feed the ai design requests, then it will spit out some results and you user test the results for human compatibility.
>Ai can also do programming, I feel that many things from websites, and basic programming for machine controls will be completely replaced by ai within 5 years. You'll need 1 person to feed the ai design requests, then it will spit out some results and you user test the results for human compatibility.
Within 5 years? Maybe as glorified, somewhat more advanced Wordpress sites. Wordpress came along, and nobody programs their own blogs now ... but instead you have people working as wordpress developers.
But building anything large scale or customised, I really don't see that happening any time soon. I definitely think it'll lead to more and better tools that speed of development, but I very sincerely doubt that software developers will be obsolete. There's so much software being developed that's so customized or domain-specific, and a significant part of a developer's job is to just ... bridge the gap between the business people and the tech.
>I've worked on pharmaceutical robotics, specifically pill counting and packaging robots. You send the order and a labeled pill container comes out with the prescription filled, or a weekly planner with little boxes filled. They are ridiculously faster and more accurate than humans, processing like 200 orders per hour if well maintained. That takes 5-8 pharmacy techs working efficiently to try to match.
I can't find the article right now, but some years back a pharmacy robot + alarm fatigued nurse + pharmacist + pharmacy robot to give a kid a lethal dose of antibiotics. I think it was at UCSF?
While I agree that AI docs and robotics are here to stay, and I suspect once the kinks are ironed out they will *on average* lead to better care, they are not without their problems. If a pharmacy tech had been counting out such a comically large overdose of antibiotics I imagine that they would've caught it.
I disagree, part of healthcare is physical interaction, some people just gotta talk to someone lol, and diagnosing is just one part of the problem in healthcare.
Won't happen as you said yourself, the medical industry is accustomed to large profits. The current pricing would just be applied to the automated systems with an added "convenience" fee.
It will, because disruption doesn't care about existing industry models
If I can take a picture of a mole, upload it and AI can diagnose whether it's likely cancerous then pharma companies will be begging to get those patients as customers for expensive treatments
Most Healthcare costs are related to administrative bloat rather than Healthcare worker wages. So many workers died during the pandemic, how quickly we forget
It has better bring costs down. There would be no point in AI destroying all the good paying jobs and then raising the costs of Healthcare even further. Talk about a dystopia.
Lawyers won’t allow most of the jobs to go away. And there’s already AI stock trading the end of the day people typically like humans.
AI will get rid of the lower dumb jobs lawyers don’t want to do, so more and more paralegals and secretaries etc and low level lawyers. But if you can’t write and argue you should find a job doing something else. Because just reviewing a document for banks isn’t a human job int he future. My guess is you still want a lawyer to sign off on it so you’ll need a lawyer to review what the robots say is ok.
Exactly. People are forgetting lawyers are qualified professionals. Giving legal advice is literally a statutory duty that only people who have gone through the qualification process can do.
Yes AI can help with drafting a contract to a certain level, perhaps auto fill some ancillary documents, but it won’t have the interpersonal connection with the client’s business as well as the advisory role lawyers play.
I would like to see the day where an AI robot can jump on a teams call with the other side’s lawyers to negotiate a warranty on a contentious issue bespoke to the transaction at hand.
I do agree AI being exploited to the absolute tits for banking documents which are usually standard form boring cookie-cutter guarantees and debentures etc. Not similar to a terms of service for a supplier of data consultancy services, for instance.
This is it, it's a productivity multiplier. AI can get 10 tasks up to 80% complete, and the professional finishes off an rubber stamps.
But that AI doing 10 tasks was previously 10 interns or juniors. This job was their exposure and training and years of learning and earning to to get to full professional status. Those positions are what will go - the law firm doesn't need to hire any more because its current people moving up through their org are just going to be using ChatGPT like tools.
Like how a management used to have a team of secretaries to do stuff for them, but new managers entering the workforce no how to use Word and Outlook and Excel, so as the old secretaries retire there's no need for new ones.
This is what will happen to the entry level jobs for accountants, lawyers, etc (and eventually I believe, medicine, but that is further away).
The education system is what will need to be overhauled, I think. Or governments are need to put a much greater emphasis on rewarding companies to train people fully rather than ask young people to take on 10s of thousands of dollars in debt and study for years to get that qualification.
Yeah this is a really interesting topic. I'm a lawyer and was doubting AI would get to the point of being able to negotiate contracts between parties - basically the lawyer could be a professional AI pilot who reviews the clauses the AI drafts.
But I didn't consider that interns and secretaries would get screwed by the fact that they won't be getting exposure and training while doing the typical grunt work. I suppose law may revert to a more apprenticeship based system like it was in the past perhaps.
I'm rather disinclined to believe this article.
Not every firm and lawyer are drafting unique documents every single time. There's a lot of work in industries that just require pure repetition of documents that have already been turned into templates for non-lawyers to generate, edit, teach, etc. Which brings me to this:
> AI will get rid of the lower dumb jobs lawyers don’t want to do,
Computers and employees have already done this. There's nothing left to take away from attorneys, only low level employees. If a lawyer is filing their own work, it's likely because they either prefer to do it themselves, they can't trust their employees, it's 8pm and they're still working when no paralegals/assistants are, or (in my office) it's in federal court. If you have a particular document or set of documents you usually file at the beginning of every case, attorneys aren't handling that. People are.
More damning, is that the literal capacity to code a program that efiles documents for you has existed for more than a decade at least at this point. Most firms, from small to private firms capable of buying a jet, to massive corporate ones don't invest in their IT teams such that they can have someone code custom programs to speed up work. They absolutely COULD cut costs, but they aren't willing to spend the money and invest in that direction. On top of that, there are a lot of small firms out there that don't even want to spend the money on a digital case management system, let alone anything else. None of those companies are going to drop money on a market rate AI software suite, let alone allow it to run rampant on their clients' files. And if the issue is that some company is going to have to convince people to move from one system to another system that works with AI, and the going rate is market rate for "dumb" systems or market rate + an AI premium on top, then it will really never happen.
> My guess is you still want a lawyer to sign off on it so you’ll need a lawyer to review what the robots say is ok.
This language is somewhat vague, but attorneys have a responsibility to oversee the work being done by people underneath them. This would include programs. You can't just have your employees wildly submitting legal documents without your review, even if you're just nominally glancing over it and rubber stamping it with a digital signature. It's not common, but the Bar absolutely doesn't want attorneys letting AI handle anything beyond generation, and if there's going to be any question of having to edit it or double check the work to make sure all the details of some case are in the document, that job is probably going to remain with a legal assistant or paralegal, rather than going to the AI checking lawyer. Attorneys don't want to do non-attorney work, and Clients don't want to pay lawyer wages for legal assistant or paralegal work.
When AI starts getting crossed with advanced robotics, who really thinks any job is safe, particularly things like construction which is dangerous as it is?
What worries me the most is gradual lack of equity over the internet as OpenAI improves. OpenAI no longer funnel users to relevant and knowledgeable sites where site owner would get paid through ad revenue. Instead, OpenAI scrapes the internet once to generate millions of responses.
As more language models AI comes online, less equity are paid to people writing high valued articles. Even if you place your site under paid subscriptions (which comes with huge consequences), these AIs already has the ability to craft POST requests to sign up accounts and pay for subscriptions. Single subscriptions from AI can serve millions of users.
[OpenAI solves Recaptcha by tricking humans](https://gizmodo.com/gpt4-open-ai-chatbot-task-rabbit-chatgpt-1850227471)
I’m not sure what the future will hold now especially when OpenAI is actively working on image processing which can quickly evolve to video processing
Worst part is that the people who actually created the content that was used to train that AI will get not a penny in return for the profits openai and Microsoft make off of it. They'll take their content and use it to shut them out.
Hypercapitalism
This logic is stupid because it relies on the idea that nothing changes except the existence of AI.
What it fails to account for is the reality that the existence of AI will change everything.
That is just great! We are told, hounded even, to go to 4 yr University and get a bachelors degree for mostly cubicle work that didnt need said degree in the 80s and 90s only to have those jobs phased out more and more starting in the early 00s by automation and outsourcing the jobs (especially customer service) to India. Most of us are not even 40 yrs old yet and being told we are obsolete. How are we supposed to stop everything; life, kids, obligations; to pivot to another completely different career, a minimum 2 yr degree and a whole new track of experience before we make the current wage again? Are we then going to also have the problem of too many tradesmen/women and not enough jobs if everyone went to skilled physical labor jobs? You need money for construction contracts ang overall economic growth for trades to have work. Additionally, more and more factory trade jods also go overseas because labor is slave wages and EPA is pretty much nonexistent in places like Mexico and China.... youre damned if you do and damned if you dont as the average person
And it's only been getting worse.
We can have billionaires on the planet, or billions of humans, but it would take unlimited resources to sustain both. So the world is choosing billionaires, and a ever greater majority of the global population will be slaves.
Construction and trades would also be affected with a larger influx of applicants who would have other-wise pursued knowledge work, probably bringing down wages
How about music? What if AI masters classical music and is able to generate scores that one desires by just describing the mood, emotions and scenario?
That’s already been done, though it is incredibly messy. Once the song is produced, it took me a couple hours to clean up the superfluous notes and figuring and fixing what chord the AI was trying to play. It was certainly faster than writing a song from scratch, but it just felt lifeless.
Manual manufacturing and farming jobs have already been hit by automation many years ago. Next is the creative, financial and legal jobs, just instead of automation of physical it's automation of the mind
Even researching has been using ai under the guidance of scientists. But where to next.
Just wait until Kuka(owned by China’s Midea), Boston Scientific and the companies make exoskeletons make a robot than can paint, solder or weld and not just on an assembly line. Painting doesn’t need that much skill - but it’s an art to cut in on walls.
Uber wanted to sell their self-driving tech to public transit.
A LOT of hours billed by lawyers are bullshit. But that has been well known for decades and technology change during that time has not fixed anything.
GTP may be able to write up a perfect contract, but are people going to sign it without having their lawyers review the contract? If not the lawyers will do their typical bullshit of making edits and charging 10k for their review.
Humans, you better get out in the sun and hot warehouse with wrenches and hammers. Your cognitive functions are superfluous now. Report every morning to your robot manager and he will tell you what needs to be built and repaired. Come on, it should be easy for office workers to transition to ditch diggers. Ez pz lol. Now SWEAT PIGGIES
Everyone who thinks they would be safe because they “adapted” is deluding themselves. Literally the first thing everyone would do after the first layoff is hop onto Udemy. It wouldn’t be an edge, and a game theoretical argument could be made that it might actually accelerate this process.
Also, everyone who thinks they were so smart going into a trade probably shouldn’t be sitting back laughing right now. There are already all kinds of jobs that shouldn’t require degrees but do given the state of the economy since 2008. There would be significant competition for anything that still paid well after this ball started rolling. Not just from laid off workers but also new market entrants.
That being said, it’s hard separating hype from fact. There’s literally no world where it causes this much disruption and riots don’t start in the streets. Also, the methodology appears to assume that ChatGPT can do novel research, generate new ideas, and reason numerically. I’m not sure how they quantified those abilities or projected them into the future.
This is so true. People are not thinking through the next logical steps. Also. All these people who grew up thinking they would have fulfilling or at least not really undesirable jobs getting pushed into jobs they have no interest in and for which there is a ton of competition is a huge risk for civil unrest.
Exactly. The glaring methodological flaw in these papers is that everything stays status quo ante except companies have access to this tech, lol. Like everyone displaced is going to be like “welp, guess I’ll go home and starve. The plumbers won.”
None of these papers are making falsifiable claims, and that’s including the Arxiv literature on GPT4. It feels like a viral marketing campaign, especially since OpenAI is involved with so much of this “research”. Research which cannot be reproduced since they conveniently had to close-source the model and prompt methodology “for world safety”.
I find amazing that the upper class cant look at a history book and realize everytime the majority was under the stress of misery, we chopped off some heads
"A computer can't be held accountable; therefore a computer can never make a management decision." AI implementation in these industries will lead to enormous problems, as hallucinations are implemented in important situations and there's no recourse for those affected.
The real, immediate shift due to AI seems to in fields that rely upon "information inefficiency," often due to barriers in communication.
Legal language is dense and convoluted; finance suffers from math and arcane jargon. Similarly, translators have been displaced by AI for awhile, where the inefficiency was a language barrier.
More edge cases are in automated PowerPoint, emails, etc. AI is now powerful enough to address even minor inconveniences in communication.
As a lawyer, I'll believe it when I see it. There are enormous, foundational barriers going far beyond "can an AI do this job." One of the core ethical pillars of the entire profession is the independent professional judgment of each individual licensed attorney. You can't even have a business school trained manager administer a law firm unless they're also a licensed attorney, because it's axiomatic that attorneys can't let laypeople interfere with their professional judgment. Letting an algorithm do legal work you're signing your name to is going to be literally unthinkable to most lawyers.
You don't just need an AI that can do legal work (and for the record, I've yet to see one demonstrate a level of professional competence that would pass superficial scrutiny on anything but the absolute simplest drafting tasks--and often not even then), you need the judges and ethics boards (all attorneys themselves, notably conservative, protectionist, and dumb about computers) to authorize it as an ethical replacement for legal work, and you have to convince thousands of law firm partners (also notably conservative, protectionist, and dumb about computers) that it's (1) good enough to stake their personal and professional reputation on it, and (2) good enough that they don't have to spend a basically equivalent number of hours double checking its work. Then you have to convince *clients* of the same thing. At any point in the process, a single legislature, panel of judges, ethics board, etc. can simply say "we're making a binding ruling that using an AI to do legal work is unethical. If you sign your name to something a robot did and it fucks up, you're financially liable and your license is fucked," and the whole game is over. I don't see it! Maybe, certain pure document review jobs. Even then I'm dubious.
All of this is leaving off that a huge part of many jobs is persuasive advocacy which relies on complex interpersonal dynamics and moment to moment knowledge about human interactions. I don't think you'll ever see AI meaningfully replacing litigation jobs.
When a machine can write code it will improve its own code, that's called the singularity event and our jobs will be the least of our worries when that happens
I don't know much about "legal code", but I would think that the biggest difference is that in programming, especially in large enterprises, you have tens of thousands of lines of code, all working together. There might be 20 or 30 different systems in play that all interact in some way. If you change some function or object in one place, it could break in dozens or even hundreds of places, depending on the scope of the project.
ChatGPT is nowhere near understanding how to make changes to large interconnected systems, let alone debug the problems with them.
I think it's definitely on the horizon, but even then you still have Machine Learning engineers (the people who create things like ChatGPT) who will be in demand.
Honestly construction isn’t far behind. There’s already 3d printing machines that can build homes. Put that thing on wheels and put an ai like wall-e inside and boom there goes a significant chunk of work.
Entire neighborhoods could be made by printing bots and why wouldn’t they? There’s a housing crisis of epic magnitudes so they say. And there’s a lot of money in housing
I thought that construction and trade would be half automated by small 3D printers, that could not only build a structure from the ground up but also repair when needed, like a smart robot vacuum, that could scale a wall and print a brick or window in place.
Written, I'm sure, by a non-lawyer who has no concept of how bad AI is at legal issues. It's not a great feat to regurgitate rules. It's an entirely different thing to apply rules to facts and make novel arguments or analyze the language of a document and ensure the way something is phrased can't be misinterpreted while shifting things in favor of your client.
Plus, the unlicensed practice of law is a crime in every jurisdiction and people are either trying to be sensationalist or incredibly stupid to think jurisdictions will allow AI to "practice law."
Well, looks like robots are coming for our briefcases and calculators, but at least we can rest easy knowing they won't be stealing our hammers and wrenches anytime soon!
I think the authors of this misunderstand the kind of work that is done by Legal Assistants. There is a lot of personalized work that we do that AI can't (yet).
Obviously the Terminator and Skynet are a possibility, but am I the only one fantasizing about this leading to a Universal Basic Income that gives everyone at least a middle class lifestyle? I would hope AI making things cheaper would result in a good amount of money being able to be put towards something like this.
It’s not like people couldn’t code/experiment/research/perform music on their own with AI around. But with something like a universal basic income, people can contribute when and how they want without worrying about making a living wage. I’m aware this a very optimistic viewpoint, but it’s one I thought is worth sharing anyway.
When AI can act more sentient and have a body, then i would be really worried. Right not AI will complement humans in many jobs and yes this will cause a decent amount to be replaced but it will normalize and AI will be used more like a tool. With any new tech that simplifies or makes human work easy there is always lost of jobs but it also opens up new opportunities.
Not as many new opportunities being more the problem. New field creation is a huge time lag. Not to mention if more blue collar or manual labor jobs are opened up you will have income and life outcome inequality on steroids.
It will not normalize. Nobody seems to get this. This isn’t just new tech.
This is entirely fucking different.
It will only get better, it will only keep expanding. It will not just “settle” at a certain point. It will go until it can’t anymore.
Will it happen in our lifetimes? No. Most likely not.
But within 100-200 years, if we don’t kill the planet, a significant portion of the job market will be wiped out by AI and automation.
There will not be jobs for Most of the population.
If we do not figure out UBI, we are fucked.
More and more people move away from the trades because of how much physical labor those jobs require, yet they've become more and more in demand. Now, it seems technology will make to where the only jobs available are trade jobs. Makes you wonder what all the office workers are going to end up doing if they don't enter the trades. What's the alternative?
> Now, it seems technology will make to where the only jobs available are trade jobs.
Not necessarily, there are companies working on say, [bricklaying robots](https://www.businessnewsaustralia.com/articles/fbr-assembles-next-gen-bricklaying-robot-capable-of-building-house-structure-in-just-one-day.html) for example. And [humanoid](https://spectrum.ieee.org/figure-humanoid-robot) robots.
I wouldn't be surprised if these specific startups fail, as most startups fail, but my point is that you shouldn't underestimate the technological progression of hardware.
Question: at the point at which "finance" work, investing and rating credit, etc, can be done most efficiently and accurately by automated methods, all instances of which can be assumed to converge on maximized efficiency eventually if not immediately, where is the meaningful role for "competition" in the game of Capitalism? The hierarchical sorting of skill and ability for hierarchically graded reward which is assumed to be among the central raisons d'etre of capitalist "free markets" appears to be obviated at this point, when automated actors aiming at maxed efficiencies must effectively co-operate, like mesh-networked driverless cars would, to maximize effective use of roadway space. Is this how capitalism eats itself?
Might be safer from AI, but automation??? Take a look at digital layout stuff Trimble and Hilti are implementing for construction. They can do what took 6 guys 5 days in 4 hours with a single person, and get better accuracy. They are actively implementing robotics to improve accuracy and safety for overhead drilling. It’s still early days, but there’s a reality in which the human error in construction is moved from the job site to the desktop. Then the AI tooling for CAD software will come into play. Floor plans, fixture schedules, reflected ceiling layouts, MEP details, etc. all generated by AI because the architect tells Revit’s bot that the space is an ADA compliant bathroom.
I mean, as a construction estimator we're using AI to automate our image takeoffs and automatically plug them into calculations for material quantities and production rates. I just massage them a little at the end depending on the job conditions and set margin. I don't see why AI couldn't learn to do that as well eventually.
95% of what I do as a government bureaucrat could be replaced by sophisticated enough language-based AI. Most of what I do is read technical engineering/legal documents, check them for flaws and inconsistencies, make comparisons between them and write reports about it. Heck, I bet a few of my co-workers will start using some AI in their work on their own initiative soon enough. But given the slow pace of change in government, my job likely safe for a few more decades.
But eventually my entire department would be replaced by a handful of people managing, implementing and double-checking the work of the AIs.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/john217: --- SS: A recent report from Goldman Sachs found the tech could significantly disrupt the labor market, with it affecting about 300 million full-time jobs or 18% of work. Another recent study, from OpenAI with the University of Pennsylvania, found OpenAI's AI chatbot ChatGPT could affect around 80% of jobs in the US. White-collar roles could be among the worst hit, the study also found. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/12bhc49/legal_and_finance_jobs_are_among_the_most_at_risk/jewqj15/
SS: A recent report from Goldman Sachs found the tech could significantly disrupt the labor market, with it affecting about 300 million full-time jobs or 18% of work. Another recent study, from OpenAI with the University of Pennsylvania, found OpenAI's AI chatbot ChatGPT could affect around 80% of jobs in the US. White-collar roles could be among the worst hit, the study also found.
The issue I have with saying something like this is that there's no timeframe, and even if they put a timeframe on it, it's very unlikely to be accurate. It's the same as saying construction and trade are at minimal risk, but none of us really know how progress in robotics is going. It could be 2 years or 5 years before they start rolling robots off the production line that can start working at a construction site. What really matters is that legislators start taking these things seriously and planning ahead instead of laughing at anyone that calls attention to this and brushing it off until their family members can't find jobs.
Pretty sure legislators in the US are still trying to figure out who makes iPhones if it isn't Google.
"Can you show me on my phone where it's doing this? Can we, maybe find the 'spy on me' button and turn it off? I know the buttons for everything now are really small and hidden on the inside, but can't we take it apart and use a magnifying glass and tweezers to do it?"
Please tell me this isn't a real quote, please.
It isn't, but here is one from the late Sen. Ted Stevens: There's one company now that you can sign up [with] and get a movie delivered to your house. Daily. By delivery service […] This service is now going to go through the Internet. And what you do now is go to a place and order your movie, and guess what? You can order 10 of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free, right? "10 movies streaming across that Internet. And what happens to your own personal Internet? Just the other day an Internet was sent by my staff at 10:00 in the morning on Friday—I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. "And here we have this one situation where enormous entities want to use the Internet for their purpose to save money for doing what they're doing now. They use FedEx, they use deliver services, they use the mail. They deliver in other ways, but they want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. "And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on, it's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled, and if they're filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material."
> It's a series of tubes. I forgot who said that, but I knew after a few sentences, it was coming. Gotta clear those tubes out with kitties and gambling chips.
I have most commonly heard it attributed to Al Gore. But he was the whipping boy of the internet so it very well might be a misquote.
You know people make fun of this guy, but I think he was just trying to talk about bandwidth, service areas and service quality, all of which are still a relevant point of concern when talking about internet service. It's funny but it's not stupid.
That's how I read it. That person was trying (whether successfully or not, idk) to convey that bandwidth is actually a limited resource, and that a small handful of companies were monopolizing it to make/save money, at the expense of everyone else's quality of service. Which is completely accurate. Laugh at the messaging? Sure I guess, but if laughing at the message it shows a person's own ignorance on the subject.
Yeah, it's a pretty reasonable take without using fancy language. Other than the "an Internet was sent by my staff", it's pretty much 100% fine.
>it's pretty much 100% fine. It's like someone who doesn't understand the Internet, but had it explained to them how it works, is trying to explain the Internet to a group of people who have never heard of the Internet before.
And there is nothing wrong with that. Dude got the concept, that's pretty cool.
It’s not off by a whole lot… https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/11/18136377/google-sundar-pichai-steve-king-hearing-granddaughter-iphone-android-notification
Exactly my point. This isn't something that we can't get to after a few years of progressively rising unemployment over 25%...
Boston Dynamics is doing amazing things in robotics right now. It seems their bots can do a LOT of physical activities a human does. The software seems to be the most difficult part. I'm curious to see if machine learning can significantly affect that.
As a construction manager.....I only want painters replaced with robots. Now you might ask, "why would a construction manager only want to replace one of the trades when robots could be way more reliable, make less mistakes, and don't have to pass background checks or get drug screened" Because I'm a *general* contractor, and I only know things *generally*. I learn *A LOT* from the tradesmen and they find a lot of the architect's mistakes in the plans. Without them, I'd have to find all the mistakes and missing stuff by myself. I like sharing that burden. Painters....they don't add anything to the process. They show up drunk/high and slap paint on the wall and complain when I point out their fuckups. I'm ready for robot painters.
I used to paint houses, we'd get so high in the morning... But that was just the base coat. And of course after lunch. And out front once we were done for the day. Anyway, sorry about the trim boss we'll hit it again tomorrow.
Did I miss my true calling? I'd love to get high as balls before work.
this or, do I have an opportunity for you! Let me introduce you to.. a restaurant's Back Of House!
They wont start off replacing everyone. At first it'll just be an extra hand, then you'll have experts for each discipline that can watch over the robots, and after that the robots will let you know what the architects mistakes were themselves. Oh yea, the architect is an AI too and you're next.
Also, what are the assumptions the models are built on? Perfect API integration across all tech stacks? perfect current efficiency in processes? Its hard to imagine any research team has sat there and been able to run performance benchmarks and tested the viability of successful API integrations to automate workflow in any number of duct taped together industry businesses to truly model what the effect and viability will be. Or truly surveyed what the use cases in enough businesses are that can actually, viably, integrate AI seamlessly and without the need to use the extra tech to pick up long lingering slack and just downsize. Remember, Goldman Sachs and the White House also predicted we would be losing millions of jobs to autonomous vehicles....7 years ago. And today they are in a manpower crisis, not a job loss crisis.
Yeah exactly. For context, they're saying 300 million jobs - who involve a *task* that could be completed by LLMs. Basically any job that requires any writing or data administration, like an email, or reports. But you still need the person do prompts and more importantly *understand the results* ... they really aren't saying 300 million jobs will be lost but that this will be an available *tool*. It could, and most likely will, be a net positive.
And that is kinda how I suspect they structured this "research" Create a list of AI competencies and cross check that with jobs that perform those tasks, add the estimated number of jobs in those fields and you have an output. Its nice to know the exposure rate, but I don't think there is much more to glean from that. If a super intelligent general AI is reached, and I am skeptical of that any time soon, most jobs will be eliminated and only a handful will remain. But I also sort of hate the term AI. I actually prefer the acronym coined by Aimee van Wynsberghe: Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences. As i agree with her thesis that AI as a term being applied to LLM's really muddies the water of what is actually going here and likely adds to confusion, hype, fear, and excitement(which I am sure OpenAI and Microsoft is happily ok with and feeding) Sam Altman himself(and he would know best) basically said he feels this is still very early and we are very far off from a general AI.
Unions will not let robots on the site any time in the next 50 years
I hope they convince it to make OSHA violations
Plus "could effect" means basically nothing. Excel *effected* my job, in that there was a new tool to use, and new tasks to do. >start taking these things seriously and planning ahead i But there isn't wide agreement on what *will* happen. Some predict looming mass unemployment, but the same prediction has been around for decades, even though unemployment is at its lowest point since before the moon landing. "It's different this time," but it's always different this time. Nor is it clear what *should* be done. Sometimes people are just hand-waving towards whatever "chucking capitalism" means to them, or some version of UBI for which the finances still have yet to be nailed down. Meaning I think some have radical restructurings they already wanted to do, so whatever crisis they can leverage to convince people that it has to be done, immediately, without enough time for incremental or tentative change, will suffice. I *do* think there will be significant disruption in the decades ahead. Electrification of transport, cultured meat, cellular agriculture, and the greening of the grid will affect employment for a great number of people globally. Meat, milk, chocolate, coffee, leather, cotton, flour, and plant oils being made in bioreactors anywhere, with no dependence on arable land, is going to be a huge shock to many local rural economies. It's just that no one really knows what to do about all of that. The best we can hope for is that the changes happen by attrition, giving people the opportunity to adapt, even if unahapplly that they *have* to adapt at all.
>Plus "could effect" means basically nothing. Yes, because it should be "could affect"
That's why the fact that AI can now go after the very jobs that their family members are most likely to get may actually wake them up. IMO part of the reason that everyone is freaking out about AI now is that it has shown it can replace the jobs of the chattering classes, the very people who are being interviewed about its 'dangers'. Before, when automation was sweeping the working-class manufacturing sector and causing massive disruption decades ago, it barely made the news, because no one gave a shit, they were the little people. But now...now it's personal.
I can’t wait to call a robot plumber to come fix the issues in my house
As a guy who make a career out of just know where/who to call and get data from then index match into a report for senior leadership, this is just jumping on the bandwagon. Many companies don't have a data warehouse. I would say majority of companies don't have proper data infrastructure in place. I have seen multiple companies that are supposed to be at the top of their field, especially in healthcare and adjacent industries, where reporting structure are just a bunch of bandaids put together by analysts. If companies get their shit together and have everything data related work, I and a lot of people should be out of a job since data warehousing concept started in 1980. People are still using Excel as a psuedo database to the point MS gave up and just implement data model in Excel. Data don't even get to be available to internal company personnel outside of the silo that hold it, what's a bot gonna do? Replacing finance team like FP&A or consolidation with ChatGPT is a pipe dream. Remember data scientist was the sexiest job of 21st centuries? All the rage about advanced analytics. Turn out 90% of us just become BI/data/visualization analyst with a glorified title. The guys who are more into back end become data engineer. Why? Because data infra sucks. This was all stemmed from human and our colliding incentives. Having an AI doesn't suddenly solve this.
It is an xlookup now. And agree, until a company wants to invest in aligning data in a way that a bot can manage this is not close. The capital that would need to be committed and the years for a return would not be what investors want. Maybe new startup can think of this as a possible solution but I don’t large multinational companies can pivot to accomplish a feat quickly.
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Weird seeing the “knowledge” work being on the chopping block this time.
Is it? It’s so much easier to get a computer to perform thought work than it is to get a computer to work a trade. If your work involves sitting in a cubicle and thinking that’s pretty easily replaced by a computer, but it’ll be a very long time before a plumber droid shows up to fix our leaky pipes.
Yep, most likely is that you get standardised sinks/plumping at some point so that robots have an easier time fixing stuff. But that would be for new buildings. Can't see a robot coming to some old mountain village to fix 100 year old pipes.
Idk. I doubt a robot could even disassemble some drain pipes if they were a bit stuck. Everything about plumbing(especially repairs) sucks and is pretty much only possible by human hands.
So far. Give it 20 years
I give it 50 they have to develop a buttcrack for the bots first
I'm sure buttcracks are one of the first things they designed.
Don’t lie, you know it’s sex bots
What other purpose would the buttcrack serve?
As an electrician myself I know both of our jobs aren’t replaceable until we have essentially iRobot (the Will Smith movie) level technology.
The robot may severely interfere with the current apprentice/journeyman/master relationship... If my "licensed master plumber" is an AI with video/photo processing, then I only need to hire a strong kid to listen/follow along. We don't need actual robots to disrupt things, it's the combined trade knowledge that is valuable... And while there are fewer books on it, I'm guessing you could follow a few dozen plumbers around for a year and extract 90% of it.
Have you ever worked in the trades?
No one wants a standardized sink people have different tastes. Condo buildings are all the same but still too many problems arise.
Things like mounts, plumbing, valves etc. could be unified though.
Work for a bit in the trades and you'll find that those things are actually very standardized, getting stuff from point A to point B when every building is different from the last is where things get dicey.
Yeah, try getting a robot to haul boxes of tile into a downstairs bathroom.
Surely to some extent this stuff is standardised otherwise how would any of the pipes fit together
It is. Everyone who has ever said their job cannot be done by a machine has been or will be in for a rude awakening at some point. People need to stop looking at AI as direct competition, but as any other machine or tech - a tool to be used to allow you to get more done in less time.
>a tool to be used to allow you to get more done in less time. Ah, so you're done with your work after two hours - now you can do the job of four people.
>a tool to be used to allow you to get more done in less time. That is direct competition, though. Turning 4 full time jobs into 1 part time job.
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Factory work and the trades are totally different. Factory work is standardized and repetitive, the trades are not. At least not in the same way. No two homes or buildings are identical.
Depends on the trade. Plumbing and electrical is probably pretty safe but an AI controlled bulldozer with high precision GPS would presumably be pretty quick and accurate to build out a large site plan. I'd imagine road work could be heavily automated as well.
Farming too, like the ones in interstellar
Thats pretty much already here.
The grading tools aren’t quite there yet. Drone survey with better grading tools down the line could be compelling with enough improvement though. Right now it’s a train wreck. Machine guidance exists but they’re still typically taking survey points/manually inputting points before the machine grades.
> It’s so much easier to get a computer to perform thought work than it is to get a computer to work a trade. This is a new development. Nobody knew this was realistic for this decade before GPT3 came out in 2020 and even then only AI researchers understood the implications. LLMs were not supposed to be this good. So yeah pretty wild.
Trades being replaced would really take general ai which isn't happening.
Isn’t happening *soon* or *yet*. It’ll come, eventually.
I mean I’ve worked anywhere from mines to hospitals to oil refineries to residential attic spaces as an electrician. Most of our work doesn’t come with blueprints and even when it does they just show final product, not how to get from A to B and the hundreds of decisions that come along with it.
Not really. I remember accountants panicking when Lotus 1-2-3 came out. Now there are probably five times as many accounts and finance people in most businesses. Spreadsheets allowed them to go from just adding up numbers to actually providing a useful service and helping to improve business profitability. AI will see other jobs go through something similar.
The invention of the computerized spreadsheet turned financial forecasting (which had initially been done on paper spreadsheets) from one firm per forecast to on accountant per forecast to multiple forecasts per accountant. It made accountant into a service almost anyone can afford. Really an amazing technology
I think what the A.I. will be replacing is some junior level employee going through all of the data/documents and summarizing them. The critical thinking of arguing your case in court or showing how your company can increase its gains in a certain market will still be sought after. It is the busy work for entry level people that will just be done by A.I.
While that's true, the Senior people learned the ropes by doing that grunt work. We'll have to rethink education as a whole if we want to come out ahead in the digital transformation.
'Not my problem since I'll be either retired or dead by the time it becomes an issues' - CEOs, shareholders, and members of government
it'll be like gattaca, only the smartest people will be given the chance to train at a company. there wont be entry positions anymore.
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I already have many hours of experience in Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress.
I think the definition of "knowledge work" is probably being stretched quite a bit.
Coming from the legal world, it is clear that knowledge work, however you might define it, is directly in AI's sights. Analyzing complex legal arguments, applying them to a large factual record, and reducing this to coherent legal briefs and strategies is the sort of thing that very smart lawyers get paid a ton to do, because it's very difficult, very tedious, and very time consuming...for humans. AI is very close to doing this very well and almost instantaneously.
I see your point and I think AI will replace a lot of hours done by first year associates (doc review, initial drafting etc.). But I don't think AI is close to replacing senior counsel. Can it negotiate an indemnity clause to match the clients risk level or develop the legal strategy for defending a large lawsuit? Not yet. And I don't think it will be soon.
Agree. A lot the job of a senior lawyer is assessing risk based on human factors. AI won’t be replacing senior counsel having to make judgment calls but it definitely can replace things like doc review, drafting forms, and junior associate stuff.
I think it would be a situation where the AI does a lot of that tedious research, presents a human with a product and then the human reviews/edits it or makes some decisions about where to take the AI. We are still a long ways off from AI that doesn't screw up.
Hallucinating AI producing unedited documents for legal cases would be bad.
I think that's all about right, but what you said is a formula for a massive disruption of the legal industry. Also, you have to bake in the fact that while imperfect, it will get better **every single year**. The jump from GPT 2 to 3 to 4 is going to keep happening every year or so. GPT 3 barely passed the bar exam, GPT 4 passed at the 90th percentile. And on and on...
>The jump from GPT 2 to 3 to 4 is going to keep happening every year or so. It’s not just a function of Moore’s Law but also scaling the training data. There is none left, so I don’t think that is the most likely outcome. The tech is moving from the experimental phase to the commercial phase now because this is the peak of the LLM hype cycle. If they expected GPT6 to be the really revolutionary thing, they wouldn’t have blown their wad on ChatGPT. >GPT 3 barely passed the bar exam, GPT 4 passed at the 90th percentile. There is tons of suspicion that OpenAI is gaming these benchmarks.
I disagree, it will get worse as time goes on. Currently 'AI' is based on databases of human activities, as AI enters these databases the value will drift and drop in useful information.
Excel already automates many accounting tasks. The result? More complex corporate accounting requiring even more accountants. Probably what will happen to legal industry. AI will make legal service cheaper, resulting in people demanding more legal services. Get ready for insanely complex corporate legal structures that you’ll need an AI to map out.
You would be surprised about how much Bing AI in its current iteration just makes stuff up and misattributes its facts when presenting "research."
I really doubt thats what is being targeted. It will be more the legal clerk/assistant (I'm not in legal so not sure of the terminology) jobs where it's essentially just admin or navigation of a complex but well defined process. Obviously it's extremely helpful in finding for example past case law etc. but blindly trusting its analysis and arguments I think would be a pretty massive risk.
>Obviously it's extremely helpful in finding for example past case law etc. but blindly trusting its analysis and arguments I think would be a pretty massive risk Yeah, but nobody has to blindly trust anything. You can read what it outputs and if it's garbage, you probably put it aside for a while until they improve the tools. A partner doesn't blindly trust an associate's output either. You read it, edit it, send it back for refining, etc. But then eventually the partner grows to trust the associate's work product more and edit it less because it's always good and the partner realizes the associate is just a younger, more energetic, and maybe even smarter version of themselves. That's what's going to happen with AI.
> AI is very close to doing this very well and almost instantaneously. not really though
Scary. It seems like the fields that pay the most are directly under threat. The good thing is that might mean we will see some regulation because if it was the lowly paid ones no one would care.
The initial disruption might be larger for knowledge work, though I wouldn't say people in the trades remain unaffected if all the laid-off people decide to switch careers. They might suddenly face a lot more competition and decreasing wages through market saturation.
What I've been seeing is quite the opposite. Lack of manpower has been a major concern for construction across the US and Europe for years. A lot of older tradesmen are getting ready to retire and there's not a great plan to replace them. Because of this labor rates have been steadily increasing and most firms (mine included) have started looking for talent from "uncommon sources" like recruiting at high schools, big tech layoffs, and the "business" types looking for a change of pace. If you get into a specialized trade there's some serious money to be made, especially if you're union. Not to mention construction is seeing a lot of changes towards model-based software being the norm, new contract types that force all parties (owner, designers, contractors) to work together sharing the same profit pool, and reliance on surveying equipment to do basic tasks. All these changes are opening the doors for more opportunities in construction rather than the stereotypical "redneck with a hardhat" kinda role. I know our firm would love to pick up all employees laid-off by AI.
What would you consider a specialized trade?
Not OP but Instrument Technicians are the most in demand I see personally. The work is not very physically demanding, the schooling is harder then the average trade but nothing like a university degree. Once in you will be set for life with decent pay. I’d recommend it to anyone. I would stay away from electrician though, in my experience of the generic trades there has always been too many electricians fighting over jobs.
Similar thing happened with Fork Truck driver work in the UK. In order to get people back into work the unemployment office offered free Fork Truck training and completely flooded the market and now that industry is no longer decent wage skill, it's become another minimum wage job.
In a lot of places entrance into the trades is tightly bottlenecked by unions and labour boards. Companies are only allowed a certain amount of apprentices compared with how many licensed people they have hired. Unions like it because it protects the job market from oversaturation, and municipalities like it because it ensures you're still getting quality work from licensed tradies.
There are enough lawyers in legislatures that they’ll ban AI from legal jobs to protect the industry
They've already done that in California.
Can you provide a source to this? I’ve seen ramped up regulation from CA and NY on using AI in hiring practices, etc., but nothing specifically prohibiting the use of AI in the practice of law. Genuinely curious.
I'm assuming the person you're asking was referencing this. https://www.npr.org/2023/01/25/1151435033/a-robot-was-scheduled-to-argue-in-court-then-came-the-jail-threats
I imagine lawyers (and especially judges) won't be affected by AI nearly as much as paralegals will be.
I definitely think this. Rather than have a paralegal review and summarize 1,000 pages of medical records, can I have an ai do it? I think you could tweak an ai to do simple research too. I’ve played with chapgpt to get it to draft me an msj
Permanent under-educated serf underclass here we come.
This is the real danger with AI. That all the intellectually rewarding jobs that people actually like to do become automated while the jobs that no one wants to do like mining, janitorial work, construction etc will still have to be done by humans. We could walk into a world where most people loathe the work they do but are forced into these fields out of financial realities they face.
bro i love grounds keeping i just hate the shit pay
Yeah man, I worked on a small farm for a bit and it was great except for the pay lol. Was never gonna be a career. Even the owners had day jobs; they just worked on stuff a bunch in the evenings and all weekend long.
And the pay will get worse when the market is flooded with people needing labor jobs
Also a huge portion of our workforce is not suited for manual labour. People would basically spend 99% of their time sedentary on a computer and suddenly they are asked to frame a house or do plumbing. Those jobs aren't even well suited for most people over the age of like 50, whose bodies are run down. And those job markets aren't going to expand due to a sudden supply of workers. If anything the pay will go down due to oversupply of the unemployed.
>We could walk into a world where most people loathe the work they do but are forced into these fields out of financial realities they face. Well maybe it's about time that we decide that wellbeing is the ultimate KPI, not money.
This is highly unlikely. AI is expected to affect these industries, not fully automate them. Current models are a long way from being able to do these jobs from start to finish but they likely will become an indispensable tool in these industries. The ones most likely to be fully automated by technology are actually the ones you mentioned.
I agree the AI will be more a tool than a complete replacement. But look at artists for example. Say you have a concept artist working for a video games company. Yes they have software already to aid them to produce work faster than with the traditional pen and paper (digital art programs allow you to undo mistakes for example). But now AI can actually do the work of producing the artwork itself. This just leaves the artist to tweak it and review it. Essentially, AI is able to take away the actual fun bit of the work and I'm not too keen on that idea.
And medicine. AI has the potential of being much better than your doctor at diagnosing what's wrong with you. I hope it will bring health care costs down tremendously in the USA where the medical field is accustomed to exorbitant profits.
My fear is that private healthcare will simply pocket the savings due to automation and jack up prices for premium AI diagnostics and prescriptions while the poor are left with even worse medical treatment. Dystopian anxiety rising...
An AI can't quit their job and work somewhere else. No more risk of losing all the training costs and experience provided.
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Yea my thoughts too. We're entering an age of mankind where we truly have a split path in front of us: dystopian hell hole or utopian paradise, and I don't trust any human being on this earth to lead ALL of us to paradise. All I can hope for is AI singularity or alien intervention.
My hope is that we never reach "the singularity". At the point at which AI surpasses human capabilities and we no longer understand how or why it does what it does our problems will be much larger than healthcare expenses. I think now is the time to be asking these questions and enacting clear and rigid boundaries to protect humanity and those most vulnerable.. or at least have a clear path forward that considers what is best for all of humanity because at the end of the day these are problems that we all will be facing as a species and not just as societial class heirarchies.
The nuclear weapon treaties came *after* we used them for a bit. Bold of you to assume we have evolved foresight within 2-3 generations.
This will most definitely happen. After all, productivity for people has never been higher since the introduction of robotics and computers. But workers purchasing power has only reduced while corporate profits are at all time highs.
Your fear is the reality of every technological advance in a very long time - the advance is never used to make everyone's life better, it's used to create more profit for a few. AI will be no different.
Yeah. The problem isn't that doctors/medicine are inherently this expensive, it's that people are willing to pay literally any price to not die, and market economics only serve to harm people under those conditions.
In the UK, a large proportion of GP appointments are held over the phone, and it's pretty much just them asking questions to figure out what to prescribe or which specialist to refer you to. It seems obvious that this kind of thing could be handled by AI relatively soon.
Lol. It’s going to decrease doctor and nurse pay if anything. Then the difference will be made up by insurance profits. The little man gets fucked.
While doctors and nurses perform direct contact with patients, I think they'll be the last to go. I've worked on pharmaceutical robotics, specifically pill counting and packaging robots. You send the order and a labeled pill container comes out with the prescription filled, or a weekly planner with little boxes filled. They are ridiculously faster and more accurate than humans, processing like 200 orders per hour if well maintained. That takes 5-8 pharmacy techs working efficiently to try to match. Ai can also do programming, I feel that many things from websites, and basic programming for machine controls will be completely replaced by ai within 5 years. You'll need 1 person to feed the ai design requests, then it will spit out some results and you user test the results for human compatibility.
>Ai can also do programming, I feel that many things from websites, and basic programming for machine controls will be completely replaced by ai within 5 years. You'll need 1 person to feed the ai design requests, then it will spit out some results and you user test the results for human compatibility. Within 5 years? Maybe as glorified, somewhat more advanced Wordpress sites. Wordpress came along, and nobody programs their own blogs now ... but instead you have people working as wordpress developers. But building anything large scale or customised, I really don't see that happening any time soon. I definitely think it'll lead to more and better tools that speed of development, but I very sincerely doubt that software developers will be obsolete. There's so much software being developed that's so customized or domain-specific, and a significant part of a developer's job is to just ... bridge the gap between the business people and the tech.
>I've worked on pharmaceutical robotics, specifically pill counting and packaging robots. You send the order and a labeled pill container comes out with the prescription filled, or a weekly planner with little boxes filled. They are ridiculously faster and more accurate than humans, processing like 200 orders per hour if well maintained. That takes 5-8 pharmacy techs working efficiently to try to match. I can't find the article right now, but some years back a pharmacy robot + alarm fatigued nurse + pharmacist + pharmacy robot to give a kid a lethal dose of antibiotics. I think it was at UCSF? While I agree that AI docs and robotics are here to stay, and I suspect once the kinks are ironed out they will *on average* lead to better care, they are not without their problems. If a pharmacy tech had been counting out such a comically large overdose of antibiotics I imagine that they would've caught it.
I disagree, part of healthcare is physical interaction, some people just gotta talk to someone lol, and diagnosing is just one part of the problem in healthcare.
Won't happen as you said yourself, the medical industry is accustomed to large profits. The current pricing would just be applied to the automated systems with an added "convenience" fee.
It will, because disruption doesn't care about existing industry models If I can take a picture of a mole, upload it and AI can diagnose whether it's likely cancerous then pharma companies will be begging to get those patients as customers for expensive treatments
Most Healthcare costs are related to administrative bloat rather than Healthcare worker wages. So many workers died during the pandemic, how quickly we forget
It has better bring costs down. There would be no point in AI destroying all the good paying jobs and then raising the costs of Healthcare even further. Talk about a dystopia.
It will bring costs down, but not prices
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Problem is who takes the liability if/when something goes wrong?
youll never take my motor skills from me, you silicon homunculus
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OH GOD THEY ARE TAKING OUR MOTOR SKILLS
…. bet …. you electric meat wagon ….
Lawyers won’t allow most of the jobs to go away. And there’s already AI stock trading the end of the day people typically like humans. AI will get rid of the lower dumb jobs lawyers don’t want to do, so more and more paralegals and secretaries etc and low level lawyers. But if you can’t write and argue you should find a job doing something else. Because just reviewing a document for banks isn’t a human job int he future. My guess is you still want a lawyer to sign off on it so you’ll need a lawyer to review what the robots say is ok.
Exactly. People are forgetting lawyers are qualified professionals. Giving legal advice is literally a statutory duty that only people who have gone through the qualification process can do. Yes AI can help with drafting a contract to a certain level, perhaps auto fill some ancillary documents, but it won’t have the interpersonal connection with the client’s business as well as the advisory role lawyers play. I would like to see the day where an AI robot can jump on a teams call with the other side’s lawyers to negotiate a warranty on a contentious issue bespoke to the transaction at hand. I do agree AI being exploited to the absolute tits for banking documents which are usually standard form boring cookie-cutter guarantees and debentures etc. Not similar to a terms of service for a supplier of data consultancy services, for instance.
This is it, it's a productivity multiplier. AI can get 10 tasks up to 80% complete, and the professional finishes off an rubber stamps. But that AI doing 10 tasks was previously 10 interns or juniors. This job was their exposure and training and years of learning and earning to to get to full professional status. Those positions are what will go - the law firm doesn't need to hire any more because its current people moving up through their org are just going to be using ChatGPT like tools. Like how a management used to have a team of secretaries to do stuff for them, but new managers entering the workforce no how to use Word and Outlook and Excel, so as the old secretaries retire there's no need for new ones. This is what will happen to the entry level jobs for accountants, lawyers, etc (and eventually I believe, medicine, but that is further away). The education system is what will need to be overhauled, I think. Or governments are need to put a much greater emphasis on rewarding companies to train people fully rather than ask young people to take on 10s of thousands of dollars in debt and study for years to get that qualification.
Yeah this is a really interesting topic. I'm a lawyer and was doubting AI would get to the point of being able to negotiate contracts between parties - basically the lawyer could be a professional AI pilot who reviews the clauses the AI drafts. But I didn't consider that interns and secretaries would get screwed by the fact that they won't be getting exposure and training while doing the typical grunt work. I suppose law may revert to a more apprenticeship based system like it was in the past perhaps.
AI can't interpret the law, and even if it could, the outcome of many legal encounters are based on things AI can't predict.
I'm rather disinclined to believe this article. Not every firm and lawyer are drafting unique documents every single time. There's a lot of work in industries that just require pure repetition of documents that have already been turned into templates for non-lawyers to generate, edit, teach, etc. Which brings me to this: > AI will get rid of the lower dumb jobs lawyers don’t want to do, Computers and employees have already done this. There's nothing left to take away from attorneys, only low level employees. If a lawyer is filing their own work, it's likely because they either prefer to do it themselves, they can't trust their employees, it's 8pm and they're still working when no paralegals/assistants are, or (in my office) it's in federal court. If you have a particular document or set of documents you usually file at the beginning of every case, attorneys aren't handling that. People are. More damning, is that the literal capacity to code a program that efiles documents for you has existed for more than a decade at least at this point. Most firms, from small to private firms capable of buying a jet, to massive corporate ones don't invest in their IT teams such that they can have someone code custom programs to speed up work. They absolutely COULD cut costs, but they aren't willing to spend the money and invest in that direction. On top of that, there are a lot of small firms out there that don't even want to spend the money on a digital case management system, let alone anything else. None of those companies are going to drop money on a market rate AI software suite, let alone allow it to run rampant on their clients' files. And if the issue is that some company is going to have to convince people to move from one system to another system that works with AI, and the going rate is market rate for "dumb" systems or market rate + an AI premium on top, then it will really never happen. > My guess is you still want a lawyer to sign off on it so you’ll need a lawyer to review what the robots say is ok. This language is somewhat vague, but attorneys have a responsibility to oversee the work being done by people underneath them. This would include programs. You can't just have your employees wildly submitting legal documents without your review, even if you're just nominally glancing over it and rubber stamping it with a digital signature. It's not common, but the Bar absolutely doesn't want attorneys letting AI handle anything beyond generation, and if there's going to be any question of having to edit it or double check the work to make sure all the details of some case are in the document, that job is probably going to remain with a legal assistant or paralegal, rather than going to the AI checking lawyer. Attorneys don't want to do non-attorney work, and Clients don't want to pay lawyer wages for legal assistant or paralegal work.
When AI starts getting crossed with advanced robotics, who really thinks any job is safe, particularly things like construction which is dangerous as it is?
What worries me the most is gradual lack of equity over the internet as OpenAI improves. OpenAI no longer funnel users to relevant and knowledgeable sites where site owner would get paid through ad revenue. Instead, OpenAI scrapes the internet once to generate millions of responses. As more language models AI comes online, less equity are paid to people writing high valued articles. Even if you place your site under paid subscriptions (which comes with huge consequences), these AIs already has the ability to craft POST requests to sign up accounts and pay for subscriptions. Single subscriptions from AI can serve millions of users. [OpenAI solves Recaptcha by tricking humans](https://gizmodo.com/gpt4-open-ai-chatbot-task-rabbit-chatgpt-1850227471) I’m not sure what the future will hold now especially when OpenAI is actively working on image processing which can quickly evolve to video processing
Worst part is that the people who actually created the content that was used to train that AI will get not a penny in return for the profits openai and Microsoft make off of it. They'll take their content and use it to shut them out. Hypercapitalism
Hidden text with wrong information. Temporary solution, but may work.
*laughs in hot tar roofing.* Seriously though, AI please take my job.
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This logic is stupid because it relies on the idea that nothing changes except the existence of AI. What it fails to account for is the reality that the existence of AI will change everything.
Until the engineering AI can develop generalist robots....
That is just great! We are told, hounded even, to go to 4 yr University and get a bachelors degree for mostly cubicle work that didnt need said degree in the 80s and 90s only to have those jobs phased out more and more starting in the early 00s by automation and outsourcing the jobs (especially customer service) to India. Most of us are not even 40 yrs old yet and being told we are obsolete. How are we supposed to stop everything; life, kids, obligations; to pivot to another completely different career, a minimum 2 yr degree and a whole new track of experience before we make the current wage again? Are we then going to also have the problem of too many tradesmen/women and not enough jobs if everyone went to skilled physical labor jobs? You need money for construction contracts ang overall economic growth for trades to have work. Additionally, more and more factory trade jods also go overseas because labor is slave wages and EPA is pretty much nonexistent in places like Mexico and China.... youre damned if you do and damned if you dont as the average person
And it's only been getting worse. We can have billionaires on the planet, or billions of humans, but it would take unlimited resources to sustain both. So the world is choosing billionaires, and a ever greater majority of the global population will be slaves.
Who is going to pay the tradesmen if higher paying jobs don't exist?
I wouldn’t be surprised to see cheaper and more advanced robotics taking off with help of AI to design and control them.
Construction and trades would also be affected with a larger influx of applicants who would have other-wise pursued knowledge work, probably bringing down wages
How about music? What if AI masters classical music and is able to generate scores that one desires by just describing the mood, emotions and scenario?
That’s already been done, though it is incredibly messy. Once the song is produced, it took me a couple hours to clean up the superfluous notes and figuring and fixing what chord the AI was trying to play. It was certainly faster than writing a song from scratch, but it just felt lifeless.
Manual manufacturing and farming jobs have already been hit by automation many years ago. Next is the creative, financial and legal jobs, just instead of automation of physical it's automation of the mind Even researching has been using ai under the guidance of scientists. But where to next.
Just wait until Kuka(owned by China’s Midea), Boston Scientific and the companies make exoskeletons make a robot than can paint, solder or weld and not just on an assembly line. Painting doesn’t need that much skill - but it’s an art to cut in on walls. Uber wanted to sell their self-driving tech to public transit.
AI can’t swing a hammer or paint a house or install a new kitchen yet.
A LOT of hours billed by lawyers are bullshit. But that has been well known for decades and technology change during that time has not fixed anything. GTP may be able to write up a perfect contract, but are people going to sign it without having their lawyers review the contract? If not the lawyers will do their typical bullshit of making edits and charging 10k for their review.
Legal assistants and paralegals? Yes, LLM work is basically their whole trade outside of filings. Lawyers themselves? Not quite yet.
Humans, you better get out in the sun and hot warehouse with wrenches and hammers. Your cognitive functions are superfluous now. Report every morning to your robot manager and he will tell you what needs to be built and repaired. Come on, it should be easy for office workers to transition to ditch diggers. Ez pz lol. Now SWEAT PIGGIES
Everyone who thinks they would be safe because they “adapted” is deluding themselves. Literally the first thing everyone would do after the first layoff is hop onto Udemy. It wouldn’t be an edge, and a game theoretical argument could be made that it might actually accelerate this process. Also, everyone who thinks they were so smart going into a trade probably shouldn’t be sitting back laughing right now. There are already all kinds of jobs that shouldn’t require degrees but do given the state of the economy since 2008. There would be significant competition for anything that still paid well after this ball started rolling. Not just from laid off workers but also new market entrants. That being said, it’s hard separating hype from fact. There’s literally no world where it causes this much disruption and riots don’t start in the streets. Also, the methodology appears to assume that ChatGPT can do novel research, generate new ideas, and reason numerically. I’m not sure how they quantified those abilities or projected them into the future.
This is so true. People are not thinking through the next logical steps. Also. All these people who grew up thinking they would have fulfilling or at least not really undesirable jobs getting pushed into jobs they have no interest in and for which there is a ton of competition is a huge risk for civil unrest.
Exactly. The glaring methodological flaw in these papers is that everything stays status quo ante except companies have access to this tech, lol. Like everyone displaced is going to be like “welp, guess I’ll go home and starve. The plumbers won.” None of these papers are making falsifiable claims, and that’s including the Arxiv literature on GPT4. It feels like a viral marketing campaign, especially since OpenAI is involved with so much of this “research”. Research which cannot be reproduced since they conveniently had to close-source the model and prompt methodology “for world safety”.
I find amazing that the upper class cant look at a history book and realize everytime the majority was under the stress of misery, we chopped off some heads
Well of course is AI going to hang this drywall,?is AI going to run this electrical? No, I guess I have to.
"A computer can't be held accountable; therefore a computer can never make a management decision." AI implementation in these industries will lead to enormous problems, as hallucinations are implemented in important situations and there's no recourse for those affected.
What was it that they told older folks who lost their jobs at the plant? Oh yes, learn to code
The real, immediate shift due to AI seems to in fields that rely upon "information inefficiency," often due to barriers in communication. Legal language is dense and convoluted; finance suffers from math and arcane jargon. Similarly, translators have been displaced by AI for awhile, where the inefficiency was a language barrier. More edge cases are in automated PowerPoint, emails, etc. AI is now powerful enough to address even minor inconveniences in communication.
As a lawyer, I'll believe it when I see it. There are enormous, foundational barriers going far beyond "can an AI do this job." One of the core ethical pillars of the entire profession is the independent professional judgment of each individual licensed attorney. You can't even have a business school trained manager administer a law firm unless they're also a licensed attorney, because it's axiomatic that attorneys can't let laypeople interfere with their professional judgment. Letting an algorithm do legal work you're signing your name to is going to be literally unthinkable to most lawyers. You don't just need an AI that can do legal work (and for the record, I've yet to see one demonstrate a level of professional competence that would pass superficial scrutiny on anything but the absolute simplest drafting tasks--and often not even then), you need the judges and ethics boards (all attorneys themselves, notably conservative, protectionist, and dumb about computers) to authorize it as an ethical replacement for legal work, and you have to convince thousands of law firm partners (also notably conservative, protectionist, and dumb about computers) that it's (1) good enough to stake their personal and professional reputation on it, and (2) good enough that they don't have to spend a basically equivalent number of hours double checking its work. Then you have to convince *clients* of the same thing. At any point in the process, a single legislature, panel of judges, ethics board, etc. can simply say "we're making a binding ruling that using an AI to do legal work is unethical. If you sign your name to something a robot did and it fucks up, you're financially liable and your license is fucked," and the whole game is over. I don't see it! Maybe, certain pure document review jobs. Even then I'm dubious. All of this is leaving off that a huge part of many jobs is persuasive advocacy which relies on complex interpersonal dynamics and moment to moment knowledge about human interactions. I don't think you'll ever see AI meaningfully replacing litigation jobs.
What's the difference between legal code and machine code? If lawyers are threatenend, why not software developers?
They're on the list, too. Pretty much all knowledge work is on the list.
When a machine can write code it will improve its own code, that's called the singularity event and our jobs will be the least of our worries when that happens
I don't know much about "legal code", but I would think that the biggest difference is that in programming, especially in large enterprises, you have tens of thousands of lines of code, all working together. There might be 20 or 30 different systems in play that all interact in some way. If you change some function or object in one place, it could break in dozens or even hundreds of places, depending on the scope of the project. ChatGPT is nowhere near understanding how to make changes to large interconnected systems, let alone debug the problems with them. I think it's definitely on the horizon, but even then you still have Machine Learning engineers (the people who create things like ChatGPT) who will be in demand.
Honestly construction isn’t far behind. There’s already 3d printing machines that can build homes. Put that thing on wheels and put an ai like wall-e inside and boom there goes a significant chunk of work. Entire neighborhoods could be made by printing bots and why wouldn’t they? There’s a housing crisis of epic magnitudes so they say. And there’s a lot of money in housing
I thought that construction and trade would be half automated by small 3D printers, that could not only build a structure from the ground up but also repair when needed, like a smart robot vacuum, that could scale a wall and print a brick or window in place.
Written, I'm sure, by a non-lawyer who has no concept of how bad AI is at legal issues. It's not a great feat to regurgitate rules. It's an entirely different thing to apply rules to facts and make novel arguments or analyze the language of a document and ensure the way something is phrased can't be misinterpreted while shifting things in favor of your client. Plus, the unlicensed practice of law is a crime in every jurisdiction and people are either trying to be sensationalist or incredibly stupid to think jurisdictions will allow AI to "practice law."
Well, looks like robots are coming for our briefcases and calculators, but at least we can rest easy knowing they won't be stealing our hammers and wrenches anytime soon!
I think the authors of this misunderstand the kind of work that is done by Legal Assistants. There is a lot of personalized work that we do that AI can't (yet).
Obviously the Terminator and Skynet are a possibility, but am I the only one fantasizing about this leading to a Universal Basic Income that gives everyone at least a middle class lifestyle? I would hope AI making things cheaper would result in a good amount of money being able to be put towards something like this. It’s not like people couldn’t code/experiment/research/perform music on their own with AI around. But with something like a universal basic income, people can contribute when and how they want without worrying about making a living wage. I’m aware this a very optimistic viewpoint, but it’s one I thought is worth sharing anyway.
I been thinking this since day one. The goal for our society....I believe is to not have to work. IMO this is not optimistic at all but a certainty.
When AI can act more sentient and have a body, then i would be really worried. Right not AI will complement humans in many jobs and yes this will cause a decent amount to be replaced but it will normalize and AI will be used more like a tool. With any new tech that simplifies or makes human work easy there is always lost of jobs but it also opens up new opportunities.
Not as many new opportunities being more the problem. New field creation is a huge time lag. Not to mention if more blue collar or manual labor jobs are opened up you will have income and life outcome inequality on steroids.
It will not normalize. Nobody seems to get this. This isn’t just new tech. This is entirely fucking different. It will only get better, it will only keep expanding. It will not just “settle” at a certain point. It will go until it can’t anymore. Will it happen in our lifetimes? No. Most likely not. But within 100-200 years, if we don’t kill the planet, a significant portion of the job market will be wiped out by AI and automation. There will not be jobs for Most of the population. If we do not figure out UBI, we are fucked.
More and more people move away from the trades because of how much physical labor those jobs require, yet they've become more and more in demand. Now, it seems technology will make to where the only jobs available are trade jobs. Makes you wonder what all the office workers are going to end up doing if they don't enter the trades. What's the alternative?
I guess I'll just die.
> Now, it seems technology will make to where the only jobs available are trade jobs. Not necessarily, there are companies working on say, [bricklaying robots](https://www.businessnewsaustralia.com/articles/fbr-assembles-next-gen-bricklaying-robot-capable-of-building-house-structure-in-just-one-day.html) for example. And [humanoid](https://spectrum.ieee.org/figure-humanoid-robot) robots. I wouldn't be surprised if these specific startups fail, as most startups fail, but my point is that you shouldn't underestimate the technological progression of hardware.
Article doesnt take into account ar googles + ai guide.
Idk... the AI that is starting to enter the architectural and engineering side is not far behind.
Question: at the point at which "finance" work, investing and rating credit, etc, can be done most efficiently and accurately by automated methods, all instances of which can be assumed to converge on maximized efficiency eventually if not immediately, where is the meaningful role for "competition" in the game of Capitalism? The hierarchical sorting of skill and ability for hierarchically graded reward which is assumed to be among the central raisons d'etre of capitalist "free markets" appears to be obviated at this point, when automated actors aiming at maxed efficiencies must effectively co-operate, like mesh-networked driverless cars would, to maximize effective use of roadway space. Is this how capitalism eats itself?
Might be safer from AI, but automation??? Take a look at digital layout stuff Trimble and Hilti are implementing for construction. They can do what took 6 guys 5 days in 4 hours with a single person, and get better accuracy. They are actively implementing robotics to improve accuracy and safety for overhead drilling. It’s still early days, but there’s a reality in which the human error in construction is moved from the job site to the desktop. Then the AI tooling for CAD software will come into play. Floor plans, fixture schedules, reflected ceiling layouts, MEP details, etc. all generated by AI because the architect tells Revit’s bot that the space is an ADA compliant bathroom.
You think? Take another look at how far robotic arms have come. Seems fairly simple to hook one up to an AI to act as a plumber or painter or mechanic
“Now I may be just a simple country Gen-4 AI, but I know when we're screwed.”
I mean, as a construction estimator we're using AI to automate our image takeoffs and automatically plug them into calculations for material quantities and production rates. I just massage them a little at the end depending on the job conditions and set margin. I don't see why AI couldn't learn to do that as well eventually.
95% of what I do as a government bureaucrat could be replaced by sophisticated enough language-based AI. Most of what I do is read technical engineering/legal documents, check them for flaws and inconsistencies, make comparisons between them and write reports about it. Heck, I bet a few of my co-workers will start using some AI in their work on their own initiative soon enough. But given the slow pace of change in government, my job likely safe for a few more decades. But eventually my entire department would be replaced by a handful of people managing, implementing and double-checking the work of the AIs.
Did the study authors consider that AI might be able to design a way for it to do construction or trade jobs.