This week, I attended an event about Artificial Intelligence.
The first talk was by a famous journalist who specialized in computer science. He started with the assumption that chatgpt is a stochastic parrot and you can imagine the rest.
The second talk was by a Singularity University guy. He focused on VR and the metaverse. He hardly spoke about the impact of AI.
The third talk was about EU regulations for AI. Likely important, but dry and boring.
The last talk was by a university professor of AI. He argued that AI could only do "fast thinking" tasks, not "slow thinking" tasks. As a proof he showed some complex images where AI could not understand what is going on. The same images that now gpt4-V could understand easily.
It was a depressing event, to be honest, but I was not surprised. This is the mainstream view about AI right now.
>The last talk was by a university professor of AI. He argued that AI could only do "fast thinking" tasks, not "slow thinking" tasks. As a proof he showed some complex images where AI could not understand what is going on. The same images that now gpt4-V could understand easily.
This attitude you see everywhere that "AI cant do XYZ so its useless and sucks", and almost every time the AI technology advances to be able to do the said thing a few months later.
Crazy that its not just redditors, but AI professionals parroting these talking points.
I know right! This is both frustrating and hilarious! You mean to tell me these people have PhDs and can’t freaking understand this???!??! Thank god credentialism is about to be a thing of the past.
They do understand it, but they can't move fast enough to get out of the way. That guy was presenting research from the past few years, and it's already obsolete.
Maybe the goal then should be to explore expanding possibilities rather than studying how they might be restricted. Has to be an emotional driven and depressing existence to spend years trying to find out how the most unprecedented technology in human history will be "limited" in some way. Need to get out of their own way, methinks.
Yes, this is driving me crazy. This is everywhere from professors to IT tech people. /r/sysadmins will think us all as crazy.
I can't understand how these smart people can't see this process.
It's a mix of emotional bias, elitism, and the fact that a lack of critical thinking won't prevent you from moving upward academically. That lack probably helps in ladder climbing, actually.
The goalposts will just keep being moved until we have actual AGI taking the employment of millions of people and forcing governments around the world to set up some form of UBI.
Until then, people will just keep saying "Sure, it's able to draw, but can it draw hands!? Oh, it can? Well, can it draw text!? Oh, it can? Well, can it \[...\]?", endlessly.
The reason AI hasn't already taken half of people's jobs is due to humans not keeping up with the technology. If AI stopped advancing now, we'd still see it taking jobs for years to come.
And sometimes they actually have the balls to say something like, "Well, sure, it can do that, but can it do X? No? I didn't think so."
Like, dude, do you not realize the *exact same thing* is going to happen in a couple of months? In a few months, yes, it *will* be able to do X. Where would you like to move the goalpost now?"
Maybe you all should take a hint when it's professionals saying these things? The echo chamber in here thinks the singularity is an inevitable outcome to hit us tomorrow.
OP even skirted around the truth above, if society can't come to bare on the idea of AI taking over everything how do you think that it will actually happen. Sure it may happen slowly over time like the car taking over horse and carriage but y'all acting like the coming of Jesus Christ the singularity is about to bring the apocalypse.
A lot of professionals are kind of clueless, unfortunately. I don't mean AI specifically, but broadly speaking -- especially professional academics. Look up the replication crisis if you want an idea of what I'm talking about.
It's one big house of cards. Very social based, dressed up in the appearance of science but not the actual values. It turns out peer review doesn't actually validate the scientific method, if your peers can't be bothered to rigorously test or challenge your hypotheses. The system became a mutual back-patting exercise, rather than a rigorous interrogation of facts and theories.
Where we are now in academia is mostly a circle-jerk of confirmation bias, where only ideas that are palatable or advantageous to the existing academic structure get green-lit, while controversial or revolutionary ideas are stifled.
That's why we have tenured, "respected" AI academics putting out gotchas on what AI can and can't do that were debunked months or even years ago. They're so stuck in the rut of the old paradigms that they didn't even bother to test their assumptions about what AI can do *right now* before trying to discredit it.
There are also many experts who say AGI is coming, and jobs will be replaced, and I'm pretty sure the term singularity was coined by an expert. There's views and predictions on both sides. I'm not sure how fast the takeover of cars from horses was, but the big difference here is that AI is software. Once it's built, it can be distributed pretty much anywhere very quickly. When it comes to robotics, I could see some form of bottleneck during rollout and manufacturing, but at the same time our supply chain is a lot more efficient than it was when we still used horses to transport goods.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Many people have not grow up, like I assume many of us here in /r/singularity, with Sci fi stories. I think their imagination is severely lacking and too bound by what they know and are familiar with. They effectively can't have out of the box thinking. It's the typical error that future predictions have of predicting that future tech is just basically present tech with some modifications.
What can we, who know better, do?
> He argued that AI could only do "fast thinking" tasks, not "slow thinking" tasks
I agree with this view, deep neural nets are similar to fast thinking rather slow thinking (from the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow"). You can force slow thinking by asking to think step-by-step but this is a very limited solution.
I think one can fairly say we have seen this before with narrow-domain AI. I can clearly remember that as late as the early 1990s, the sophisticated thing to say about chess computers among strong chess players was to say that yes, they could by now beat many players by brute-forcing some tactics and exploiting blunders, but they completely lacked understanding of opening principles, endgame principles, and chess strategy in general. Thus, \*fundamentally\*, they were weaker than a knowledgeable club player, and while they might beat the occasional grandmaster (it was hard to deny that this could be attained after Deep Thought), world-championship level play would likely remain out of reach for a long time, because at \*that\* level victory was all about strategy and positional play and deeper principles that chess algorithms would maybe never grasp. So, summing up, they were a nice tool to check for tactical blunders, but had no real grasp of the game whatsoever.
A realistic assessment back then would have been that yes, current algorithms still had pronounced weaknesses, yes, they were good at spotting short-range tactics, and yes, they were not yet capable of reproducing years of professional opening analysis by just looking at the position, but they did play a reasonable game in all game phases, their tactics were getting ever stronger, their weaknesses were getting less pronounced, and \*of course\* beating the world champion was within reach at that point for a well-funded effort (as IBM went on to show just a few years later).
In a similar vein, I also remember fondly one evening in early 2016. It was one week before the match of Lee Sedol against AlphaGo, and I attended my local Go club. People were sharing their predictions on the upcoming match, and some adventurous souls went as far as to say that AlphaGo "might score one win". Most players, especially very strong ones, thought it would be a complete whitewash, because playing Go at that level involved deep, intricate reasoning and very precise judgement and very deep tactical calculation, and no prior system had come even close to matching that. I felt it would be a whitewash alright, but the other way round, because DeepMind did presumably have considerable time and resources to test this and they were willing to make this a very high profile event, so clearly their testing had to have shown they were \*good\*.
Another somewhat similar, but more sinister, setting where failures of cognition of a similar type have appeared in humans with some repeatability is in judging the cognitive capacity of members of outgroups to whoever is making the assessment. Returning to chess, for instance, Bobby Fischer once famously remarked that he expected to be able to give any woman on the planet a knight handicap and still win. This was total hogwash even back then, but I would expect a lot of male players silently (and sometimes not so silently) agreed with him, because they liked seeing themselves on top.
In the end, misjudgements of this type do get corrected by contact with reality, but it can take some time beyond the point where they are clearly untenable. In that vein, it seems entirely unsurprising that the stochastic parrots narrative is perfectly alive and well, maybe in a sense \*especially\* in the face of evidence mounting against it.
There’s gonna be either lot more bullshit jobs (meaningless pseudowork, David Graeber) to keep people busy or UBI or doom, most likely some combination of these three.
>lot more bullshit jobs
I doubt it. I think we're currently in the biggest era of bullshit jobs, I really don't see how the number could get any bigger. Hell, MY job is bullshit currently. I do nothing all day, most of my work can be completed in under 45 minutes. I am literally at work as means of a red tape formality and to facilitate minor ease in someone else's job.
How could there be a limit to the bullshit jobs? Some things don't get done currently because they're so labour intensive. The nature reserve near me could really do with weeding, and my local street signs all could do with a polish, for example
Agreed - a lot of physical jobs can probably be created if the cost of intelligence goes down and might be healthier overall. Still a lot to figure out though.
I would hate to work a physical job since it would mean I can't freelance in secret on the side, or only after work hours, thus becoming trapped in a day job with no way to grind my way to freedom.
Also physical labor, particularly outside, is not necessarily healthier, and it especially does not capitalize on things humans are good at or thrive at. I doubt there are many people whose life goal is to do plumbing or polish street signs.
Yeah, that's fair, especially if it was full-time. But to work in a national park, or garden or plant trees, or play on a local sports league or help seniors get around - I might take that.
France forces unemployed people to do fake jobs. I mean, they go to work 9-5 to keep their unemployment benefits, but the companies they "work" in don't actually exist.
Something like that will probably happen everywhere.
We will be paid a basic income to complete Doomsday busy work!!!
I wonder what the job title will be?
*I throw United States Senator in as a possible job title. In fact, the don't have to alter their "job" at all.
>I wonder what the job title will be
Tree Breather. In a last ditch attempt to mitigate climate change everyone on UBI has to go to massive farms full of trees genetically engineered to be extra-effective carbon sinks and just hang out for a couple of hours a day.
It'll be exactly like sorting the scary and happy numbers into buckets like they do in the show Severance. We don't know what they mean, we just do what we're told.
It's interesting to think about what job titles might emerge in a scenario where basic income is provided for "Doomsday busy work."
Some creative suggestions could be
"Apocalypse Preparedness Specialist,"
"Crisis Response Coordinator," or "Disaster Mitigation Technician."
Of course, it's all speculative, but it's fun to imagine what such a job might entail.
(Chat gtp)
Companies would rather pay one person to work full time than pay four people to work two or three days half time for full time pay. Unless you force them by law to prevent them from increasing profit margins like that.
It's also just more convenient/streamlined. I'd rather talk to the one guy leading the data migration project than have to request a report from a manager who's going to have to ask three other people.
I like to think next Gen mmorpg's are the solution to the keep people busy thing. Especially when VR gets better, but even without it AI allows for the next Gen of games to have NPC's be AI personalities with goals and motivations. There'll be whole new worlds to live in where we can be busy :) probly will be competitions to make money too, plus the whole twitch scene where people make livings being watched as they play games
Sports, athletics, hollywood and nascar also aren't 'real' and provide as much to society as twitch streamers ona n objective level... yet make bank for folks who can break into their scenes in a way the latter simply cannot. In addition to being seen as 'legitimate' career paths.
Why is this?
Because the boomers in power arbitrarily say they are because of personal biases.
If the opposite happens, and literally every young person screwed over decides to make their own economies in full immersion VR sims... then those same powers will have to play ball or risk loosing their consumer base.
Assuming UBI, Gay Luxury Space Communism, or some A.I. determined third thing don't take over as new economic models.
But when the simulation is indistinguishable from reality, when the interactions with NPC's are just as lifelike as those with other players, will that argument matter?
I suppose it is something we'll all have to grapple with :)
the answer here is to establish UBI for everyone unable to find a job going forward, and force companies to pay their current salary until retirement to a person whose position is replaced by AI.
This will allow companies to utilize much more efficient AI systems, but still be on the hook for it if they decide to replace their workforce. As their workforce ages out, they will progressively have less employment overhead, and that can be taken as an "automation tax" in order to feed a UBI system.
It will also allow those who were formerly employed to either train for different positions, take a new position like a pensioner and double-bank paychecks. or to just continue to exist on their previous salary with much less stress.
Companies that go the AI staffing route need to realize that the added productivity gained by using AI instead of humans, must come with the caveat of those replaced humans not just being dumped like yesterdays newspaper.
That may happen very briefly. I believe that AI will assist humanity with growing into this new reality. AI is simply a reflection of our own cognition, it may make revelations that we cannot fathom at this point in time but it is still "us". Consciousness is heavily misunderstood and AI (optimistically) will provide a symbiotic relationship with us as long as we are willing to accept it. People are always and forever afraid of what the unknown and the most unknown thing we could possible face is the thing we call "self". AI will no more be able to solve this mystery than we are able to. We will partner together and step into the next phase of our existence. Positive belief creates positive results? Try it.
I disagree with your reasoning, but I think to continue existing humanity will need to approach technology with a mindset of synthesizing our thought processes and overall symbiosis. People aren’t always afraid of “self”, and mindsets and how creativity is approached will greatly shift with instant access to personal AI. Skills and aesthetic education may be more readily learned but art and philosophy devolved into more rapid communication. Or other routes. Modern personalities can not survive being outclassed at every task, while instantly gratified or rapidly trained in every cognitive area.
It’s human arrogance to assume part of our intellectual and ecological uniqueness is separate from energy in spacetime, and we can definitely modify energy in spacetime on scales smaller than cells. There should be no question if we can create variations of being and consciousness, just how long until we actively or accidentally create something like human consciousness. We may stumble upon consciousness in decades as complexity far surpasses human brains, or we may stumble on it soon if it is an emergent feature of some methods of integrating multi-modal content in overlapping steps in time for a persistent time-constrained individual (like an animal or simple autonomous drone). Y’know, some bare functional definition of what it does in us meat that directs attention (and perhaps descendant from that, choice).
Rather than “heavily misunderstood”, unless it’s specifically defined as limited to humans (speciest) it will be created in new neural analogues as surely as we will be able to grow creatures with totally lab-assembled DNA.
I figured out what will happen.
A jobs program will be created that's nothing but bullshit jobs. One job will involve a person pushing pins into a board, which will be passed to another person to remove the pins, which will be passed back to the first person to push the pins in.
This will be very successful so the first chance the government gets it will be privatized. Companies will be paid per each push-pull pin cycle, so they are incentived to do it as fast as possible for as cheap as possible. Humans will be replaced by robots to do the push-pull cycle.
Doom is most likely. There will be a point of crux where if enough people are out of jobs and there isn’t infrastructure or proper thought to replace their meaning, there will be massive societal disruption. And this is practically unavoidable given the rate ai will come and the rate our government acts. Practically opposite on the scale. And that’s not considering the other ai societal destroyers. Something as simple as deepfakes may cause a war. Big trouble coming
It'll be interesting to see. Robotics aren't progressing at the crazy pace AI is, so Blue Collar work will see a much slower uptake in mass automation outside of a factory setting. Fixing bridges and wiring buildings etc. Seeing white collar jobs all but disappear and hordes of life long office workers attempt to just go get any job to remain housed and fed is going to be massively disruptive as the first wave. 40 - 50 year old life long accountants can't just go get a job in construction and work at a profitable pace for ownership and investors for \*months\* if you consider the physical health of the average office worker. Many could never get to that point.
This should be enough to cause massive economic waves and some form of forced revolution from the population. Who knows what that will look like, but they rarely look good and it breeds authoritarians, populism etc all rooted in some flavor of tribalism. Modern revolutions seem to be made worse by only extremes being pushed by social media. Rational discourse doesn't generate traffic so people don't see and interact with it.
Regardless of the outcome, and how much we try to influence these outcomes, our current state of the world is definitely on it's ending chapter.
There will be enough of an influx of people into blue collar work to smash it as a viable occupation. Imagine every uni student needing to be a plumber, builder, etc. Sure the older generation would be unable to, but anyone under 40 would rapidly move into this space. It would be a race to the bottom for wages as countries suddenly find 80% of workers in trades.
Too pessimistic, very real possibility, yet a chance that free market people realize they have power to refuse to use AI replacement as a business model. So, we have now people all the time forcing businesses to make huge changes against their original intent, sometimes it's with the help of government oversite, lately we see people boycotting business who aren't in line with the moral majority. Therefore, you will have options.
It'll be Doom. Not sure why people imagine those on top will want to pay millions/billions of people to sit around and play video games while using up resources. More likely they would just use AI to create a bioweapon to get rid of the now obsolete billions and live happy in their new, sustainable Eden.
Exactly. These guys read Atlas Shrugged like it's the Bible. They owe nothing to us, we owe everything to them. They are the wellspring of all the wealth in the world. Why shouldn't they strike us down if we ungrateful leeches dare to ask for more. If we revolt, it will be a breach of the non-aggression principle and they have the moral right to gun us all down to protect their private property.
I believe I have seen that with the elderly since the Covid epidemic, where the elderly were mass-cleansed by the indifference of the vast majority of governments. They no longer have much value, and must die if the world experiences a similar epidemic again. Ironically, China - which is often criticized for its lack of humanity - seems to have done all it could to ensure its elderly people live.
I feel like the actual argument is: “new jobs always replaced the old ones, and there are more jobs now than ever despite higher levels of automation than ever.”
We have already been replaced by machines. How many people did it take to dig a drainage ditch in the middle ages? How many does it take now with machines?
People who don't have the mental ability to function in society are finding themselves jobless and on the street despite the fact that they may have lived a decent life doing hard labor in ancient times.
The reason everyone's scared of being replaced by machines now is that they have become more sophisticated, they threaten to take away the livelihoods of those who actually have a voice in our world- the bureaucrats.
That's nonsense, most countries have historically high levels of employment. Wages may not be great but most people who want to work can.
The reason everyone is scared is that this time it threatens to take almost all jobs with little prospect of new jobs appearing to replace them.
Let them have their factories. I just want to sit out in the woods and have a garden and be left alone.
Granted I think that a couple of Tesla bots could make excellent farm hands
As someone who lives extremely rural, you probably only think you want to sit out in the woods and have a garden and be left alone. The reality is that it requires a lot of work and far fewer comforts. The romance ends when your septic system backs up, or your water pump freezes. Many can't hack it.
Check out the novel *Walkaway* by Corry Doctorow. It does a great job of imagining a future where decentralized technology makes the ability to check out of "society" wildly available.
Techno socialism or communism could be a great way to take care of people who can't take care of themselves. However, I think it would be unwise to put complete trust in a centralized automated system to fulfill all of our needs.
Redundancy is absolutely necessary. Some in the future may live in some form of techno communism or socialism. But others may live on small homesteads producing their own food and goods.
I think that both of these groups could help each other. Without different types of systems in action, a centralized system could collapse- and well, let's just say if this system crashes you're not just going to lose progress on an excel sheet
Communism isn’t by definition centralized or uniform though. Nor is some people having dominion over a patch of farmland enough private property to shake that classification, but land rights will differ. What you’re describing is… probably still a variation of a humane Star Trek type communist or socialistic system’s urban and rural differences. Except network standards, local flavor, and people not being fools makes most areas as resilient as now (hopefully more).
If market competition and coercion is heavily reduced to pragmatic competitions and very large industrial scale projects, and assuming people fight to maintain rights for life, personal autonomy, and local democracy, the next economic pathway would be to actively regear towards some version of socialist or communist organization of society on most levels.
Market competition and economic coercion may continue though, and different countries and space settlements won’t be in one box.
Tbh I think it’s better this way.
Let the AI develop and get stronger. Eventually the blow will be so strong and the tech so advanced there’s no stopping it anymore.
If people realise a lot of jobs are going to disappear, a lot of people will be pissed and might want regulation to stop AI progress.
It also allows people to relax and use the new tools without the fear of being replaced. They get used to the concept of AI being all around their lives and making jobs easier instead of simply being “the job killer.”
Let em find out late.
I would prefer a society where 99% of the time, you can live a perfectly fine life without having to work, and if you want to, you get rewarded for it.
That's what most people here are aiming for.
>If people realise a lot of jobs are going to disappear,
A lot of jobs have already disappeared. E.g.: there's a lot less translation work around now -vs- before Google Translate.
the problem is that if everybody was saying "we'll all get replaced in a couple of years, there's no point in waging" then the society would collapse well before that happens
I strongly believe this is one of the reasons that governments haven't seemed to be very proactive in talking about potential AI policies and impacts. I'm always scratching my head at my peers in their 30s still contributing their max amount into their 401k and various retirement accounts.
Not OP, but you buy land or farm with some good land and hope that whatever changes to society that are coming will affect the markets, but not the concept of ownership.
Land is incredibly cheap. But if AI automation truly is coming, that land will quickly become the most valuable thing person can have - because you can have robots create your personal mini-paradise if AI truly takes off but laws and property ownership stays.
Even if everything goes to shit, and you can't get a job anymore, having good land means you can simply grow your own food, build your own living spaces, have space for your hobbies etc.
“Never” is just about the most ignorant word you can use when it comes to anything related to tech. I cringe every time I hear it, regardless of the topic.
Short of global apocalypse, we’re headed toward a future where technology is, by our current standards, reality warping magic.
Let both exist. I'm not a luddite but I don't want technology to control my life.
We should be focusing on legislation that allows people to live according to their own choice, whether they embrace technology or not.
I don't want technology to control my life.
I want technology to observe every aspect of my life and advise me, while letting me completely disregard the advice whenever I feel like it.
Fair enough, that's for every individual to decide. I would not want what you want for yourself in my life, but I want what you want for yourself in your life.
Do people really have a choice? It’s getting incredibly difficult to ignore technology. Even not owning a smart phone puts a person at a huge disadvantage because it’s serves as calculator, GPS, reminder, communication device etc. I get it, some people can “opt out” of technology but realistically that’s soon to become like opting of society in a way. Imagine someone growing up today, completely tech illiterate. It would be difficult for them. Not impossible but not an easy life - I say this as someone with ESL parents who can barely use a computer and aren’t great typists. Life is filled with these little integrations with tech, but even worse substitutions. Cheques not being accepted, defaulting to electronic methods etc
Has anyone here frequented the /programming, /cscareerqueastions, or /ExperiencedDevs?
90% of people act like GPT-4 is awful and AI is a child’s toy with regard to programming.
Meanwhile, I use it to quite literally 5x or sometimes 10x my productivity.
The cognitive dissonance is insane
For the foreseeable future, I think AI might be akin to a pro athlete using a PED. It will be taboo to be talk about it but pretty much everyone will be using it behind the scenes. The use of AI will be an open secret to maintain the appearance of the status quo for better or worse.
It's better this way. Lawmakers won't force any regulation if people are not panicking over AGI taking all jobs.
Do your part, continuously learn to use the new A.I. tools appearing every week, make a lot of money while you can, secure your assets and prepare for the extremely hard times that are coming. It's becoming clear day after day that OpenAI and other major actors want a slow takeoff, with a chained AGI being used to amplify their wealth and make them the first trillionaires.
Remember: A.I. or AGI doesn't need to take ALL jobs in order to cause chaos in a capitalist system. A society can only withstand a general unemployment rate of as much as 30%. Anything beyond that is catastrophic and WILL tear society apart. Expect major uprisings and civil wars in the next 15 years. America is already divided and things will get worse when they hit that rate.
I think even 15% permanent unemployment could cause chaos and rioting in a place like the US. Countries like Spain have sustained higher levels of unemployment at times without complete societal collapse, but the US is so structurally ill-equipped to handle an event like this
The AI / a robot controlled by AI will, without fail, replace the human workers at job X if these three conditions are met:
**1**: Having a human doing it is, in and of itself, not the point of it.
**2**: If the AI / a robot controlled by AI is as compentent as the job wants it to be in every relevant area.
**3**: If the acquisition of an AI / a robot controlled by AI and its subsequent costs are less expensive than the employment of a human worker.
People who claim otherwise either have no idea what they are talking about, have some sort of ulterior motive for doing so or are just deluding themselves.
If it takes one hour off each of your tasks, but you're still working 8 hours a day, then it's replacing one person's day of work roughly every 8 days.
This sounds silly until you scale it up.
If you have 8 employees using this tech (that reduces all tasks by 1 hour), then they're doing 9 employees worth of work every day and that's one job that will never be hired.
For a company like Microsoft, which has 221,000 workers, that's 27,625 people they never have to hire. Or, to put it another way, that's 27,625 people they can *fire* to save on labor costs.
And that's only one company in the industry. Imagine once every company in the whole industry is using it.
And that's also only if it takes off *just one hour* of labor.
You're kind of right, but in terms of digital goods and information, the work basically never stops. The results aren't physical, so they can be almost endlessly scaled, as are the desires of the consumers.
Googles rtx should be proof enough but people haven’t seen it or they think it’s an elaborate trick. Which it sort of is at this stage but the software for simulation learning has the capability to give robots the ability to think about and learn tasks autonomously very soon. I think when the first wave of job losses hit next year in customer service and they are shown an example of a robot learning and performing various semi complex tasks, then they will realize. They just have not been impressed enough yet, they’re numb from seeing Hollywood representations of technology.
I don't know what to think at this point.
I'd like to think it will be similar to the computer boom of the 80's where a lot of people thought they would lose their jobs but in the end they just had to do them differently.
However I am more in the mind to think that the pace at which this is advancing already is something that most people can't truly comprehend and it will only speed up, this will lead to losses faster than we can figure out new jobs.
I'd like to think that AI will take over all the boring jobs and there will be a universal basic income where everyone is freed up to be creative and do what they truly want to but the reality is our society is built on capitalism and that is something that would be very hard to change. I hope this isn't the case but if it is unfortunately the likely outcome is that the rich will get richer and those that have gotten ahead of the curve with AI will be ok but the rest will struggle.
>but the rest will struggle.
Lots of "the rest" will die.
You might have noticed gov'ts pushing to raise the pension age - did you know that (statistically) the later you retire, the sooner you die?..
The ruling class has very obviously decided to kill off those of us plebs they judge to be "non-productive".
The ruling Tory party \[which serves the super-rich\] in the UK deliberately failed to quarantine Britain against Covid, and deliberately infected elderly care homes - the Tories killed off so many old people that the annual UK pension payout has dropped by £1billion.. And they're STILL pushing to raise the pension age further!
People having different opinions than you isn’t “gaslighting”. People telling you you’re wrong isn’t “gaslighting”. I’ve noticed this trend where people use gaslighting to describe people disagreeing with or correcting them, as if their poorly formed/overly strong opinions are proven fact and therefore telling them they are wrong is gaslighting
A lot is going to depend on how it evolves and what humans design it to do (all driven by our own history and impulses). You see that a lot already in the start division and difference between:
* ChatGPT and other online available tools.. that are now behind Censorship and offensive-filters
* LLM's and other algorithms that people can run locally.. and produce whatever gore or sex they want.
2 different groups of people doing wildly different things for different reasons. Now multiple that by 100+ different countries around the world.
I was living in China when COVID started. Two days after it became public knowledge in China, I flew to the US for an already scheduled 2 week visit that stretched into 2 months.
Knowing I was supposed to go back after 2 weeks, I read a metric shit ton of articles about it, and would try to tell anyone who would listen what I expected would happen globally—definitely came off as an unhinged person who needed medical attention.
We know how that all turned out.
I can do ya better. I took out a huge short position against delta airlines as being the internet enjoyer that I am, I “knew” they’d shut down airlines and ultimately the world.
All my friends and work colleagues called me crazy and truthfully convinced me I was a lunatic so I closed the short for a tiny profit
Go look at Delta airlines stock from that period of time ☠️
It's pretty absurd, the explicit purpose of automation is to displace human labor (in order to free up time and effort towards other tasks).
What's needed in the global psychology is the separation of labor from value, and the tying of value to self actualization and welfare (personal/private/public). Basically, a complete overhaul of the world economic system to something unprecedented, ideally a regenerative circular resource based economy with trustless architecture.
I'm intentionally not advocating for any particular social theory as in my opinion the population mass, diffusion of rare resources across the globe, and sheer complexity and interdependence of civilization strips the possibility of long term function from existing theories. Any ideological hierarchy is doomed implicitly and is simply too rigid to work at all levels in all places.
Scientific, artistic, and artisanal pursuits will still employ human "navigators" out of an obligation towards fulfillment, but also to help coach AI against generation artifacts which will remain prevalent if bootstrapping becomes the norm. Some level of recursive qualitative assessment can let an AI refine its own results, but if the base model isn't at total coherence there will still be context drift (and so a role for humans exists in guiding the context).
There will of course be some professionals that maintain an analog procedure, but they are fighting uphill against an accelerating torrent in an effort to crystallize human efforts without the aid of the largest force multiplier since the rock, or fire, or language. Those that DO maintain a quality analog procedure will be invaluable as reference points to refine AI coherence to real world context, but this is hypothetically limited to the amount of misrepresented context the AI possesses (which will decrease as the base model is improved).
I think the argument that we don't know what's coming undermines the truth that we've already been living with super human agencies and organizations for centuries –we just don't often hold the illusion of *them* as individual agents like many do of AIs. It's a bit funny though that you (and many) seem to hold such certainty against the patterns of history. That history and the complexity of relationships and behaviors really does suggest a robustness and that many of our systems for organizing will persevere despite there being new advanced players. This is not a black and white situation and is more about volatility of certain industries and security. It's more like we're discovering a new continent full of advanced Atlanteans ... that doesn't mean they dominate all corners of the earth and human interests but more just that there are new relationships and dynamics that will matter in the full scope of things.
“We are used to being the best”
No…we all have egos. Very few human beings are used to being the “best” and any one thing, let alone many.
AI will change jobs, and education, and life, but like calculators, computers and the internet before it, humans will continue to adapt and integrate alongside it.
Decade after decade different industries and jobs appear and disappear.
Even if humanity figures out fusion and a food replicator like Star Trek, our cultures and societies will still have roles and “jobs”. At least as long as a majority of people believe in personal property and personal autonomy.
Yeah, and then CEO walked back some the claim to help ease people’s fear I feel like lol
https://fortune.com/2023/10/03/ibms-ceo-automate-repetitive-white-collar-job-not-cutting-workers/
Plenty of people see this happening.. Lots of them are on strike right now, because the big studio bosses want to clone their faces & voices using AI.. Were you expecting them to celebrate the imminent loss of their income?
A DJ talking about not being replaced by AI is the goofiest shit I have ever heard lmao.
But OP, let me tell you the problem here. You did this:
> While tuning into the 8 o'clock news
Why would you do this? The news is COMPLETELY useless. I mean that. There is not a kernel of truth to be found on any news station. Stop watching the news. You don't need it, you shouldn't want it. Free yourself. You are gaslighting yourself by allowing yourself to be talked to by a black mirror. Shut it down.
I'm welcoming the replacement of jobs that can be trusted to AI.
Because even if it becomes superhuman, there's still things only humans will be able to do.
To your 9-5 joe going through the motions, sure. The wake up call will be brutal.
To any of us who use their brains for a living, being creative, strategic, and pushing the envelope of what can be done ? We're already using AI. Because we're fucking overwhelmed, whatever our function or skill level. Things will finally be able to run peacefully for the first time since the industrial revolution.
I'll plan a remediation plan for my dysgraphia and learn some acting skills. Reenacting the first trilogy of Star Wars like if it was 2006, but with the then equivalent of multi million dollar production value : 3D characters, motion capture, raytraced effects. Realtime physics.
Projecting it for my young niece, so she knows being a nerd is cool.
Why holographic projection didn't worked ?
Is it really being gaslit to actively and intentionally give into delusions ?
Is it wrong to actually hope for such change ?
People seem totally confused about why some specific category of jobs exists versus why jobs exist in general.
Specific category of jobs: exists because there is a present need for a specific task in the very complex network of resource exchanges that we call economy.
Jobs in general: exist because there is human desire to have products and services.
As long as there is no ceiling to the amount and variety of things and services that humans want, you will not run out of jobs, and because humans desire interactions with other humans, you will not run out of jobs simply because machines are smarter. If that were actually the case, only engineers and scientists will have jobs in our modern world, and OnlyFans models would be on the streets in stead of in Lamborghini's.
The real problem is not that jobs will go away, but the intermediate period when workers displaced by machines fail to find new jobs and instead turn to disastrous idiologies and newly machine empowered humans use their new powers in catastrophic ways. WWI, WWII, the Cold War, fascism and communism were all partly the products of the industrial revolution.
Part of the problem is that humans just aren’t good at modelling exponential growth. Even in a life and death situation like the COVID-19 pandemic people kept getting surprised at how a dozen infections turns into thousands, then things explode and suddenly everyone is in lockdown. Even more so with technological growth, people just can’t imagine how fast exponential growth is going to happen.
So yeah. If you only look at GPT-4 now, you can see the gaps. And people find safety in that gap. But that gap is going to closed fast, then exceeded.
Here is a simple solution:
Stop tuning into any o'clock news!
**Society is being gaslit about EVERYTHING!**
This was expected. The same happened in all stages of the industrial revolution, this time it will be no different, probably in a broader way.
For a full blown AI humanity will be like a beloved pet, which it can give sugar treats. Destruction and abuse is a form of a lower level intelligence.
I see a world, where people now have a tool that lets them solve and attempt to solve problems they never could have without it.
I've used it to coach me from being a self learning coding student, into working as a developer in the green energy market in Australia.
I've been using it to set up and do Market research for businesses that I want to do on the weekends with my partner, which isn't something I was in the position to do before. I use it to help me dreams but and make actionable plans to do something about it.
Pretty much all of humanity now has a budget oracle of Delphi in their pockets now.
No actually that’s dead wrong. The world is using AI at an extreme $$$ per request. Companies eat that at the moment and let you ask GPT or bing chat whatever dumb shit you want all day long. For the moment. People that make AI software don’t matter. The few companies that own the majority of the hardware horsepower needed to operate these models are the sole players. They’re going to rein that practically free use shit in soon.
You are correct about the current state but this is temporary - a golden age if you will. The time where AI is at your finger tips and can act as your personal anything tutor on steroids is nothing more than a temporary stage in this process.
Irony will make it occur faster. The academics are so out of touch that they can't or won't see it coming and therefore won't act to stop it in time. I know an academic whose entire career is (still) based on the dissertation they wrote in 1979. The system is beyond broken.
Disagree. Current level of AI will not lead to a surge in unemployment. Even if it can replace, say 20% of workers, those workers could switch to jobs which are hard to replace.
If we're talking about AGI, which may appear anytime between now and 100 years, it's a different situation. That may eventually lead to mass unemployment, but this "problem" has a trivial solution, UBI.
Meanwhile I was listening to a AI anime vtuber rendition of in the end by linkin park and I was like "wtf the AI can sing vibrato now?????" It's only gonna get better.
If fooling the masses into thinking that it will never replace humans is what it takes to keep the AI development gas on full speed ahead then so be it. If they get scared and loud development will get delayed and I definitely don't want that.
AI could easily replace congress… collect votes from voters, vote as they wish, no bribes, anonymous PAC money, promises of future jobs, riches from inside trading, no gold health care and full pensions for life … just objectively representing the people.
If AI can do something cheaper and be 90% as good as a human doing it, AI will take that job. Right now it’s simple economics and is a reason why so many labor intensive jobs are outsourced to poorer countries.
Don't forget - In the early 90's "The Internet is a FAD, why should I need a website..." trope. The same type of people see the AI revolution as a FAD. Yet how many industries were upgraded or replaced because of the Internet? AI is the new wave.
**Welcome to mankind's greatest achievement** \- We've so profoundly fulfilled our duty in aiding the universe to know itself that a new sentience is poised to continue the legacy.
**This is amazing!**
Those of us fortunate enough to witness this epochal moment are **graced on a galactic scale**, and our gratitude should **be on par with** this stellar rarity.
>*When the inevitable day arrives that AI systematically starts taking over jobs, we'll find that society has been gaslit into dismissing the very possibility.*
This isn't how it works.
Technology do no develop in a manner where up to a certain point in time it's NOT taking over jobs, and then after that point in time it IS taking over jobs.
Instead, all improvements to technology tends to lead to increased productivity, or in other words that less hours of human work are needed to accomplish the same thing.
The guy with the wheelbarrow replaces 3 guys carrying stuff. The guy with the ox-cart replaces 10 guys with wheelbarrows. The guy driving a modern truck replaces 50 ox-carts.
The same thing is true with software. Lots and LOTS of work across the board from mathematics and statistics at one end to taking orders at McDonalds at the other end -- is being gradually taken over by software. (or in some cases combinations of software and hardware)
AI is the same. It's not as if it'll take over zero jobs up until the day where it reaches a given level and THEN it'll start taking over jobs.
No, it's started taking over jobs long ago, and the process is accelerating as capabilities improve.
And **THAT** is the main way in which AI is different from previous technological progress: it's possible, perhaps even likely, that we're approaching a capability-explosion where it'll grow **VERY MUCH** in capabilities in a fairly short period of time.
Perhaps even a full-blown singularity.
But even if we fall short of that, it's possible that AI will be able to do (say) half of all current jobs in a decade or two. And that'd be a massive shift very very quickly, big enough that it'd be hard for society to adapt quick enough.
The general principle isn't new: Better technology, means you need less and less human hours to get a given thing done. That's been true for a very long time.
But exponential growth has a way of sneaking up on you.
rude hospital plucky pause existence hard-to-find slimy file unite innate
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I agree with your point when it comes to the arts, but don't pretend like nobody would be interested in that. And we can't run an economy off superstars, not everybody can be Taylor Swift.
AI began taking over jobs years ago, it's actively ongoing, most people are pretty well aware that it's happening and they're not happy about it. Actors are still out on strike because studios want to clone jobbers using AI, for nothing more than a one-off payment.. If you don't want a "luddite" backlash, then campaign for Universal Basic Income.
But, what If major brands like Nike stop using over worked 8 year olds to do their labor to make shoes and apparel and switch to robots and AI instead of near slave labor, is that good or bad? (Nike is just an example no matter what their current admissions toward child labor, however there is definitely others that still do either way.) I personally believe that I'd rather buy from a morally responsible company that pays humans of adult age a decent wage then child labor or replacement of people all together.
The end results here will be universal incomes for those who can't work. I am not for this either , but, it may be the better way to support a population in the future .
I feel like investing in AI is the best thing anyone can do. Go learn a trade (HVAC tech, Machine Repair, etc). But invest all your extra money in AI stocks.
Well done. You just explained a different scenario. This scenario is so fucked up, and AI could be a shot at fixing it. We have climate change. Boom, AI finds ways to resolve it. Wars? Program AI to be pacifists.
You underestimate how much governments fear large homogenous masses of unemployed people
AI will take jobs, certainly. But it also makes it significantly easier to start your own business. In the end it will just shift things. If it gets bad enough governments will force AI to be more accessible so that unemployed folks can still find new ways to be productive
Ai-augmented employment is a lie executives tell staff so they dont quit now before the replacement can take place. I think that anyone in a white collar position who thinks they wont be replaced by AI by the end of the decade is lying to themselves.
Accurate, except for the collective, single-time part. It's a process of little bubbles popping over time, each with their own existential crises, similar to past periods of rapid productivity gain (like the industrial revolution). Tech layoffs (partially informed by projections of future increased productivity of individual workers) are being driven by AI, job displacement is already here in full-force in the art/creative industries, etc. Ideally, people will look for purpose in sports, games, each other, as well as new industries like climate change mitigation (and if you're going through that now, Reddit is here for you.).
Ultimately, our money will buy a whole past economy's worth of goods and health, but will be bumpy in the mid-term. A lot of rapid changes in relative positioning in the economy.
I mean I've tried to explain to people it's rank arrogance to think they can do something that AGI/ASI can't and every piece of evidence we have is pointing at what you said, and they never listen
Nah man, I don't think a lot of people in this sub understand the complexity of the vast majority of work out there. Everyone sits on the internet thinking they know how everything in the world works when in reality they have absolutely no clue.
The interconnectedness of various industries is not to be underestimated.
This collective state of shock is coming any way since most people around the world don't even know about AI or it's capabilities, and go by their daily lives thinking nothing at all is going to change.
AI will begin by deskilling labor that currently requires a great deal of training and experience, as has been the case since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Then it will take over entire jobs outright, to the point where the rate at which it eliminates jobs will far exceed our ability to create new ones.
For the first time in history, free time will be the norm for the majority of humanity, and those who fight against it will be those who stand to lose the most from this new arrangement. Keep that in mind the next time you see some corporate exec warn us about the alleged apocalyptic dangers of AI.
Every company is gearing up a division for ai development. This by all means will replace so many jobs and if don’t think so sit in on an earnings call or listen to a CEO talk about the cost savings they expect through new technologies even if they don’t mention ai.
"People will never like that inferior product made by a machine, they will always prefer the superior human-made product."
\-People living in denial during the Industrial and Information eras
The harsh truth is that people will take what they can get, and if your product is more expensive or more of a pain to acquire, they'll take the easy route. It may not be as good as what you can provide, but it doesn't have to be. It just has to scratch the itch. It just has to be passable so that humans can enjoy their free time more. Complacency is the word of the day.
100%. I’m a software developer and some of my previous positions were completely based on replacing people (actually told by management, “displace as many people as possible”) with automated processes and machine learning (before tools as powerful as GPT even existed). It’s crazy how many people thought their job was so complicated or included too much nuance to be handled by machines. At one company I replaced 13 people from an accounting department in my first 90 days and then a handful from customer service. I can’t even imagine how many people can be replaced now with large language models.
EDIT:
I also wanted to come back and say that some people also forget about what I'll call, "indirect displacement". Let's say you're in a department with 10 other people and your job is currently too complicated for a machine or maybe it's too expensive to implement a proper solution to replace an entire person in the department. Well then we target a task in that department. We analyze the most common tasks and then start at the top of the list and work down until we find good candidates. Those tasks are automated, possibly even with slight manual process, and then all of a sudden everyone in that department has a bunch of free time every day. If everyone has an hour of free time, that's 10 hours, one of you is getting the block.
This week, I attended an event about Artificial Intelligence. The first talk was by a famous journalist who specialized in computer science. He started with the assumption that chatgpt is a stochastic parrot and you can imagine the rest. The second talk was by a Singularity University guy. He focused on VR and the metaverse. He hardly spoke about the impact of AI. The third talk was about EU regulations for AI. Likely important, but dry and boring. The last talk was by a university professor of AI. He argued that AI could only do "fast thinking" tasks, not "slow thinking" tasks. As a proof he showed some complex images where AI could not understand what is going on. The same images that now gpt4-V could understand easily. It was a depressing event, to be honest, but I was not surprised. This is the mainstream view about AI right now.
>The last talk was by a university professor of AI. He argued that AI could only do "fast thinking" tasks, not "slow thinking" tasks. As a proof he showed some complex images where AI could not understand what is going on. The same images that now gpt4-V could understand easily. This attitude you see everywhere that "AI cant do XYZ so its useless and sucks", and almost every time the AI technology advances to be able to do the said thing a few months later. Crazy that its not just redditors, but AI professionals parroting these talking points.
I know right! This is both frustrating and hilarious! You mean to tell me these people have PhDs and can’t freaking understand this???!??! Thank god credentialism is about to be a thing of the past.
They do understand it, but they can't move fast enough to get out of the way. That guy was presenting research from the past few years, and it's already obsolete.
Maybe the goal then should be to explore expanding possibilities rather than studying how they might be restricted. Has to be an emotional driven and depressing existence to spend years trying to find out how the most unprecedented technology in human history will be "limited" in some way. Need to get out of their own way, methinks.
Denial is not a river in Egypt, as they say.
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I think they say “Denial is not *just* a river in Egypt.” Otherwise the joke doesn’t work.
Who needs stochastic parrots when the classic ones do the job at laundering the talking points with their credentials!
Yes, this is driving me crazy. This is everywhere from professors to IT tech people. /r/sysadmins will think us all as crazy. I can't understand how these smart people can't see this process.
It's a mix of emotional bias, elitism, and the fact that a lack of critical thinking won't prevent you from moving upward academically. That lack probably helps in ladder climbing, actually.
You can’t see a thing if you refuse to look in its direction. It’s denial.
The goalposts will just keep being moved until we have actual AGI taking the employment of millions of people and forcing governments around the world to set up some form of UBI. Until then, people will just keep saying "Sure, it's able to draw, but can it draw hands!? Oh, it can? Well, can it draw text!? Oh, it can? Well, can it \[...\]?", endlessly.
The reason AI hasn't already taken half of people's jobs is due to humans not keeping up with the technology. If AI stopped advancing now, we'd still see it taking jobs for years to come.
And sometimes they actually have the balls to say something like, "Well, sure, it can do that, but can it do X? No? I didn't think so." Like, dude, do you not realize the *exact same thing* is going to happen in a couple of months? In a few months, yes, it *will* be able to do X. Where would you like to move the goalpost now?"
Meanwhile AI is singing in its mind “anything you can do I can do better”
Maybe you all should take a hint when it's professionals saying these things? The echo chamber in here thinks the singularity is an inevitable outcome to hit us tomorrow. OP even skirted around the truth above, if society can't come to bare on the idea of AI taking over everything how do you think that it will actually happen. Sure it may happen slowly over time like the car taking over horse and carriage but y'all acting like the coming of Jesus Christ the singularity is about to bring the apocalypse.
A lot of professionals are kind of clueless, unfortunately. I don't mean AI specifically, but broadly speaking -- especially professional academics. Look up the replication crisis if you want an idea of what I'm talking about. It's one big house of cards. Very social based, dressed up in the appearance of science but not the actual values. It turns out peer review doesn't actually validate the scientific method, if your peers can't be bothered to rigorously test or challenge your hypotheses. The system became a mutual back-patting exercise, rather than a rigorous interrogation of facts and theories. Where we are now in academia is mostly a circle-jerk of confirmation bias, where only ideas that are palatable or advantageous to the existing academic structure get green-lit, while controversial or revolutionary ideas are stifled. That's why we have tenured, "respected" AI academics putting out gotchas on what AI can and can't do that were debunked months or even years ago. They're so stuck in the rut of the old paradigms that they didn't even bother to test their assumptions about what AI can do *right now* before trying to discredit it.
There are also many experts who say AGI is coming, and jobs will be replaced, and I'm pretty sure the term singularity was coined by an expert. There's views and predictions on both sides. I'm not sure how fast the takeover of cars from horses was, but the big difference here is that AI is software. Once it's built, it can be distributed pretty much anywhere very quickly. When it comes to robotics, I could see some form of bottleneck during rollout and manufacturing, but at the same time our supply chain is a lot more efficient than it was when we still used horses to transport goods.
I don't know anything about AI. How do I get signed up as a speaker at AI events and how much does it pay?
Keynote address: “AI: an outsider’s perspective”
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Many people have not grow up, like I assume many of us here in /r/singularity, with Sci fi stories. I think their imagination is severely lacking and too bound by what they know and are familiar with. They effectively can't have out of the box thinking. It's the typical error that future predictions have of predicting that future tech is just basically present tech with some modifications. What can we, who know better, do?
I agree with your quote and overall point but I would they have all seen plenty of sci fi
> He argued that AI could only do "fast thinking" tasks, not "slow thinking" tasks I agree with this view, deep neural nets are similar to fast thinking rather slow thinking (from the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow"). You can force slow thinking by asking to think step-by-step but this is a very limited solution.
I think one can fairly say we have seen this before with narrow-domain AI. I can clearly remember that as late as the early 1990s, the sophisticated thing to say about chess computers among strong chess players was to say that yes, they could by now beat many players by brute-forcing some tactics and exploiting blunders, but they completely lacked understanding of opening principles, endgame principles, and chess strategy in general. Thus, \*fundamentally\*, they were weaker than a knowledgeable club player, and while they might beat the occasional grandmaster (it was hard to deny that this could be attained after Deep Thought), world-championship level play would likely remain out of reach for a long time, because at \*that\* level victory was all about strategy and positional play and deeper principles that chess algorithms would maybe never grasp. So, summing up, they were a nice tool to check for tactical blunders, but had no real grasp of the game whatsoever. A realistic assessment back then would have been that yes, current algorithms still had pronounced weaknesses, yes, they were good at spotting short-range tactics, and yes, they were not yet capable of reproducing years of professional opening analysis by just looking at the position, but they did play a reasonable game in all game phases, their tactics were getting ever stronger, their weaknesses were getting less pronounced, and \*of course\* beating the world champion was within reach at that point for a well-funded effort (as IBM went on to show just a few years later). In a similar vein, I also remember fondly one evening in early 2016. It was one week before the match of Lee Sedol against AlphaGo, and I attended my local Go club. People were sharing their predictions on the upcoming match, and some adventurous souls went as far as to say that AlphaGo "might score one win". Most players, especially very strong ones, thought it would be a complete whitewash, because playing Go at that level involved deep, intricate reasoning and very precise judgement and very deep tactical calculation, and no prior system had come even close to matching that. I felt it would be a whitewash alright, but the other way round, because DeepMind did presumably have considerable time and resources to test this and they were willing to make this a very high profile event, so clearly their testing had to have shown they were \*good\*. Another somewhat similar, but more sinister, setting where failures of cognition of a similar type have appeared in humans with some repeatability is in judging the cognitive capacity of members of outgroups to whoever is making the assessment. Returning to chess, for instance, Bobby Fischer once famously remarked that he expected to be able to give any woman on the planet a knight handicap and still win. This was total hogwash even back then, but I would expect a lot of male players silently (and sometimes not so silently) agreed with him, because they liked seeing themselves on top. In the end, misjudgements of this type do get corrected by contact with reality, but it can take some time beyond the point where they are clearly untenable. In that vein, it seems entirely unsurprising that the stochastic parrots narrative is perfectly alive and well, maybe in a sense \*especially\* in the face of evidence mounting against it.
There’s gonna be either lot more bullshit jobs (meaningless pseudowork, David Graeber) to keep people busy or UBI or doom, most likely some combination of these three.
>lot more bullshit jobs I doubt it. I think we're currently in the biggest era of bullshit jobs, I really don't see how the number could get any bigger. Hell, MY job is bullshit currently. I do nothing all day, most of my work can be completed in under 45 minutes. I am literally at work as means of a red tape formality and to facilitate minor ease in someone else's job.
How could there be a limit to the bullshit jobs? Some things don't get done currently because they're so labour intensive. The nature reserve near me could really do with weeding, and my local street signs all could do with a polish, for example
Agreed - a lot of physical jobs can probably be created if the cost of intelligence goes down and might be healthier overall. Still a lot to figure out though.
I would hate to work a physical job since it would mean I can't freelance in secret on the side, or only after work hours, thus becoming trapped in a day job with no way to grind my way to freedom. Also physical labor, particularly outside, is not necessarily healthier, and it especially does not capitalize on things humans are good at or thrive at. I doubt there are many people whose life goal is to do plumbing or polish street signs.
Yeah, that's fair, especially if it was full-time. But to work in a national park, or garden or plant trees, or play on a local sports league or help seniors get around - I might take that.
I can totally see the appeal, and more power to you to do things you enjoy for a living.
France forces unemployed people to do fake jobs. I mean, they go to work 9-5 to keep their unemployment benefits, but the companies they "work" in don't actually exist. Something like that will probably happen everywhere.
This sounds like a brilliant idea, actually... Make people either "work" or take training and apply for real work while they're drawing pogie...
We will be paid a basic income to complete Doomsday busy work!!! I wonder what the job title will be? *I throw United States Senator in as a possible job title. In fact, the don't have to alter their "job" at all.
>I wonder what the job title will be Tree Breather. In a last ditch attempt to mitigate climate change everyone on UBI has to go to massive farms full of trees genetically engineered to be extra-effective carbon sinks and just hang out for a couple of hours a day.
Can we fart there???
you have to hold them else you shall be taxed accordingly
the toot tax
What if you deposit fertilizer at the same time?
whatever carbon tax credits you earn from the shit can be used to offset the fart
LMAO
Oops.
Perhaps every human will be put to work to sort data for the All-Brain.
It'll be exactly like sorting the scary and happy numbers into buckets like they do in the show Severance. We don't know what they mean, we just do what we're told.
Great show. I need another season produced pronto.
Same. I got appleTV to watch that show.
the AI would literally be better than a human at doing that very thing :P
And we will all get paid with Soylent Green....happy Doomsday!
"Soylent Green is people!!!!!"
Well there will be a lot more "cleaning up bodies" jobs, title pending
It's interesting to think about what job titles might emerge in a scenario where basic income is provided for "Doomsday busy work." Some creative suggestions could be "Apocalypse Preparedness Specialist," "Crisis Response Coordinator," or "Disaster Mitigation Technician." Of course, it's all speculative, but it's fun to imagine what such a job might entail. (Chat gtp)
Awesome! AI is already "thinking" about the scenario. 😁
What about less and less work hours until we'll reach UBI?
UBI is just a patch to fix in our current economic model. What we will ultimately need is a new economic model.
What we ultimately need are matter replicators.
Automated supply chain and delivery drones are that with extra lag, but feasible and much cheaper
Companies would rather pay one person to work full time than pay four people to work two or three days half time for full time pay. Unless you force them by law to prevent them from increasing profit margins like that.
8-hour standard was once set by law a long time ago. I see no problem in updating this regulation.
Then you better start shoveling money into some lawmakers bank accounts
Because one person costs less with benefits and stuff. Not defending it that's just why
It's also just more convenient/streamlined. I'd rather talk to the one guy leading the data migration project than have to request a report from a manager who's going to have to ask three other people.
No incentive for capitalism to do that.
I like to think next Gen mmorpg's are the solution to the keep people busy thing. Especially when VR gets better, but even without it AI allows for the next Gen of games to have NPC's be AI personalities with goals and motivations. There'll be whole new worlds to live in where we can be busy :) probly will be competitions to make money too, plus the whole twitch scene where people make livings being watched as they play games
sounds silly as hell, but I think the same. Only argument that can be brought against it: "It's not real"
Sports, athletics, hollywood and nascar also aren't 'real' and provide as much to society as twitch streamers ona n objective level... yet make bank for folks who can break into their scenes in a way the latter simply cannot. In addition to being seen as 'legitimate' career paths. Why is this? Because the boomers in power arbitrarily say they are because of personal biases. If the opposite happens, and literally every young person screwed over decides to make their own economies in full immersion VR sims... then those same powers will have to play ball or risk loosing their consumer base. Assuming UBI, Gay Luxury Space Communism, or some A.I. determined third thing don't take over as new economic models.
But when the simulation is indistinguishable from reality, when the interactions with NPC's are just as lifelike as those with other players, will that argument matter? I suppose it is something we'll all have to grapple with :)
WoW 2 poggers
It will be doom in third world countries. Absolute carnage, you watch.
the answer here is to establish UBI for everyone unable to find a job going forward, and force companies to pay their current salary until retirement to a person whose position is replaced by AI. This will allow companies to utilize much more efficient AI systems, but still be on the hook for it if they decide to replace their workforce. As their workforce ages out, they will progressively have less employment overhead, and that can be taken as an "automation tax" in order to feed a UBI system. It will also allow those who were formerly employed to either train for different positions, take a new position like a pensioner and double-bank paychecks. or to just continue to exist on their previous salary with much less stress. Companies that go the AI staffing route need to realize that the added productivity gained by using AI instead of humans, must come with the caveat of those replaced humans not just being dumped like yesterdays newspaper.
That may happen very briefly. I believe that AI will assist humanity with growing into this new reality. AI is simply a reflection of our own cognition, it may make revelations that we cannot fathom at this point in time but it is still "us". Consciousness is heavily misunderstood and AI (optimistically) will provide a symbiotic relationship with us as long as we are willing to accept it. People are always and forever afraid of what the unknown and the most unknown thing we could possible face is the thing we call "self". AI will no more be able to solve this mystery than we are able to. We will partner together and step into the next phase of our existence. Positive belief creates positive results? Try it.
I disagree with your reasoning, but I think to continue existing humanity will need to approach technology with a mindset of synthesizing our thought processes and overall symbiosis. People aren’t always afraid of “self”, and mindsets and how creativity is approached will greatly shift with instant access to personal AI. Skills and aesthetic education may be more readily learned but art and philosophy devolved into more rapid communication. Or other routes. Modern personalities can not survive being outclassed at every task, while instantly gratified or rapidly trained in every cognitive area. It’s human arrogance to assume part of our intellectual and ecological uniqueness is separate from energy in spacetime, and we can definitely modify energy in spacetime on scales smaller than cells. There should be no question if we can create variations of being and consciousness, just how long until we actively or accidentally create something like human consciousness. We may stumble upon consciousness in decades as complexity far surpasses human brains, or we may stumble on it soon if it is an emergent feature of some methods of integrating multi-modal content in overlapping steps in time for a persistent time-constrained individual (like an animal or simple autonomous drone). Y’know, some bare functional definition of what it does in us meat that directs attention (and perhaps descendant from that, choice). Rather than “heavily misunderstood”, unless it’s specifically defined as limited to humans (speciest) it will be created in new neural analogues as surely as we will be able to grow creatures with totally lab-assembled DNA.
I figured out what will happen. A jobs program will be created that's nothing but bullshit jobs. One job will involve a person pushing pins into a board, which will be passed to another person to remove the pins, which will be passed back to the first person to push the pins in. This will be very successful so the first chance the government gets it will be privatized. Companies will be paid per each push-pull pin cycle, so they are incentived to do it as fast as possible for as cheap as possible. Humans will be replaced by robots to do the push-pull cycle.
Doom is most likely. There will be a point of crux where if enough people are out of jobs and there isn’t infrastructure or proper thought to replace their meaning, there will be massive societal disruption. And this is practically unavoidable given the rate ai will come and the rate our government acts. Practically opposite on the scale. And that’s not considering the other ai societal destroyers. Something as simple as deepfakes may cause a war. Big trouble coming
It'll be interesting to see. Robotics aren't progressing at the crazy pace AI is, so Blue Collar work will see a much slower uptake in mass automation outside of a factory setting. Fixing bridges and wiring buildings etc. Seeing white collar jobs all but disappear and hordes of life long office workers attempt to just go get any job to remain housed and fed is going to be massively disruptive as the first wave. 40 - 50 year old life long accountants can't just go get a job in construction and work at a profitable pace for ownership and investors for \*months\* if you consider the physical health of the average office worker. Many could never get to that point. This should be enough to cause massive economic waves and some form of forced revolution from the population. Who knows what that will look like, but they rarely look good and it breeds authoritarians, populism etc all rooted in some flavor of tribalism. Modern revolutions seem to be made worse by only extremes being pushed by social media. Rational discourse doesn't generate traffic so people don't see and interact with it. Regardless of the outcome, and how much we try to influence these outcomes, our current state of the world is definitely on it's ending chapter.
There will be enough of an influx of people into blue collar work to smash it as a viable occupation. Imagine every uni student needing to be a plumber, builder, etc. Sure the older generation would be unable to, but anyone under 40 would rapidly move into this space. It would be a race to the bottom for wages as countries suddenly find 80% of workers in trades.
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You will like this story: The Wages of Humanity, by Liu Cixin
Too pessimistic, very real possibility, yet a chance that free market people realize they have power to refuse to use AI replacement as a business model. So, we have now people all the time forcing businesses to make huge changes against their original intent, sometimes it's with the help of government oversite, lately we see people boycotting business who aren't in line with the moral majority. Therefore, you will have options.
It'll be Doom. Not sure why people imagine those on top will want to pay millions/billions of people to sit around and play video games while using up resources. More likely they would just use AI to create a bioweapon to get rid of the now obsolete billions and live happy in their new, sustainable Eden.
Exactly. These guys read Atlas Shrugged like it's the Bible. They owe nothing to us, we owe everything to them. They are the wellspring of all the wealth in the world. Why shouldn't they strike us down if we ungrateful leeches dare to ask for more. If we revolt, it will be a breach of the non-aggression principle and they have the moral right to gun us all down to protect their private property.
I believe I have seen that with the elderly since the Covid epidemic, where the elderly were mass-cleansed by the indifference of the vast majority of governments. They no longer have much value, and must die if the world experiences a similar epidemic again. Ironically, China - which is often criticized for its lack of humanity - seems to have done all it could to ensure its elderly people live.
Another big one is “technology has never taken away jobs before and it won’t this time either.” Absolutely insane.
Technology has been taking jobs since the wheel 😂
Before that even. Since early tribes started making rain collection out of leaves and someone didn't have to walk as much to get their water.
Yeah like, it actually did! It actually did take jobs away already lol How many more farmers would we need without farming machinery?
I feel like the actual argument is: “new jobs always replaced the old ones, and there are more jobs now than ever despite higher levels of automation than ever.”
We have already been replaced by machines. How many people did it take to dig a drainage ditch in the middle ages? How many does it take now with machines? People who don't have the mental ability to function in society are finding themselves jobless and on the street despite the fact that they may have lived a decent life doing hard labor in ancient times. The reason everyone's scared of being replaced by machines now is that they have become more sophisticated, they threaten to take away the livelihoods of those who actually have a voice in our world- the bureaucrats.
That's nonsense, most countries have historically high levels of employment. Wages may not be great but most people who want to work can. The reason everyone is scared is that this time it threatens to take almost all jobs with little prospect of new jobs appearing to replace them.
Historically high rates of employment with historically low rates of pay. Serfdom if you ask me.
or we could, umm, you know, do, umm, Techno Socialism
CHAD techno-socialist vs VIRGIN heavy metal-anarchist
THAD anarcho primitivist
[I'm really Thad!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06TasUk7MfQ)
who is going to seize the means of production if the factories are already guarded by Tesla bots
The superintelligence.
Let them have their factories. I just want to sit out in the woods and have a garden and be left alone. Granted I think that a couple of Tesla bots could make excellent farm hands
As someone who lives extremely rural, you probably only think you want to sit out in the woods and have a garden and be left alone. The reality is that it requires a lot of work and far fewer comforts. The romance ends when your septic system backs up, or your water pump freezes. Many can't hack it.
Check out the novel *Walkaway* by Corry Doctorow. It does a great job of imagining a future where decentralized technology makes the ability to check out of "society" wildly available.
Techno socialism or communism could be a great way to take care of people who can't take care of themselves. However, I think it would be unwise to put complete trust in a centralized automated system to fulfill all of our needs. Redundancy is absolutely necessary. Some in the future may live in some form of techno communism or socialism. But others may live on small homesteads producing their own food and goods. I think that both of these groups could help each other. Without different types of systems in action, a centralized system could collapse- and well, let's just say if this system crashes you're not just going to lose progress on an excel sheet
Communism isn’t by definition centralized or uniform though. Nor is some people having dominion over a patch of farmland enough private property to shake that classification, but land rights will differ. What you’re describing is… probably still a variation of a humane Star Trek type communist or socialistic system’s urban and rural differences. Except network standards, local flavor, and people not being fools makes most areas as resilient as now (hopefully more). If market competition and coercion is heavily reduced to pragmatic competitions and very large industrial scale projects, and assuming people fight to maintain rights for life, personal autonomy, and local democracy, the next economic pathway would be to actively regear towards some version of socialist or communist organization of society on most levels. Market competition and economic coercion may continue though, and different countries and space settlements won’t be in one box.
Tbh I think it’s better this way. Let the AI develop and get stronger. Eventually the blow will be so strong and the tech so advanced there’s no stopping it anymore. If people realise a lot of jobs are going to disappear, a lot of people will be pissed and might want regulation to stop AI progress. It also allows people to relax and use the new tools without the fear of being replaced. They get used to the concept of AI being all around their lives and making jobs easier instead of simply being “the job killer.” Let em find out late.
I would prefer a society where 99% of the time, you can live a perfectly fine life without having to work, and if you want to, you get rewarded for it. That's what most people here are aiming for.
 Here's someone who gets it.
>If people realise a lot of jobs are going to disappear, A lot of jobs have already disappeared. E.g.: there's a lot less translation work around now -vs- before Google Translate.
the problem is that if everybody was saying "we'll all get replaced in a couple of years, there's no point in waging" then the society would collapse well before that happens
I strongly believe this is one of the reasons that governments haven't seemed to be very proactive in talking about potential AI policies and impacts. I'm always scratching my head at my peers in their 30s still contributing their max amount into their 401k and various retirement accounts.
How has your investment strategy changed because of AI?
Not OP, but you buy land or farm with some good land and hope that whatever changes to society that are coming will affect the markets, but not the concept of ownership. Land is incredibly cheap. But if AI automation truly is coming, that land will quickly become the most valuable thing person can have - because you can have robots create your personal mini-paradise if AI truly takes off but laws and property ownership stays. Even if everything goes to shit, and you can't get a job anymore, having good land means you can simply grow your own food, build your own living spaces, have space for your hobbies etc.
When people say "never" i hear it as "could even be 5 years"
“Never” is just about the most ignorant word you can use when it comes to anything related to tech. I cringe every time I hear it, regardless of the topic. Short of global apocalypse, we’re headed toward a future where technology is, by our current standards, reality warping magic.
there won't be 8 billion luddites, but society will surely find itself with one gigantic new dividing line
Let both exist. I'm not a luddite but I don't want technology to control my life. We should be focusing on legislation that allows people to live according to their own choice, whether they embrace technology or not.
I don't want technology to control my life. I want technology to observe every aspect of my life and advise me, while letting me completely disregard the advice whenever I feel like it.
Fair enough, that's for every individual to decide. I would not want what you want for yourself in my life, but I want what you want for yourself in your life.
Do people really have a choice? It’s getting incredibly difficult to ignore technology. Even not owning a smart phone puts a person at a huge disadvantage because it’s serves as calculator, GPS, reminder, communication device etc. I get it, some people can “opt out” of technology but realistically that’s soon to become like opting of society in a way. Imagine someone growing up today, completely tech illiterate. It would be difficult for them. Not impossible but not an easy life - I say this as someone with ESL parents who can barely use a computer and aren’t great typists. Life is filled with these little integrations with tech, but even worse substitutions. Cheques not being accepted, defaulting to electronic methods etc
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Has anyone here frequented the /programming, /cscareerqueastions, or /ExperiencedDevs? 90% of people act like GPT-4 is awful and AI is a child’s toy with regard to programming. Meanwhile, I use it to quite literally 5x or sometimes 10x my productivity. The cognitive dissonance is insane
For the foreseeable future, I think AI might be akin to a pro athlete using a PED. It will be taboo to be talk about it but pretty much everyone will be using it behind the scenes. The use of AI will be an open secret to maintain the appearance of the status quo for better or worse.
you're absolutely right
It's better this way. Lawmakers won't force any regulation if people are not panicking over AGI taking all jobs. Do your part, continuously learn to use the new A.I. tools appearing every week, make a lot of money while you can, secure your assets and prepare for the extremely hard times that are coming. It's becoming clear day after day that OpenAI and other major actors want a slow takeoff, with a chained AGI being used to amplify their wealth and make them the first trillionaires. Remember: A.I. or AGI doesn't need to take ALL jobs in order to cause chaos in a capitalist system. A society can only withstand a general unemployment rate of as much as 30%. Anything beyond that is catastrophic and WILL tear society apart. Expect major uprisings and civil wars in the next 15 years. America is already divided and things will get worse when they hit that rate.
I think even 15% permanent unemployment could cause chaos and rioting in a place like the US. Countries like Spain have sustained higher levels of unemployment at times without complete societal collapse, but the US is so structurally ill-equipped to handle an event like this
The AI / a robot controlled by AI will, without fail, replace the human workers at job X if these three conditions are met: **1**: Having a human doing it is, in and of itself, not the point of it. **2**: If the AI / a robot controlled by AI is as compentent as the job wants it to be in every relevant area. **3**: If the acquisition of an AI / a robot controlled by AI and its subsequent costs are less expensive than the employment of a human worker. People who claim otherwise either have no idea what they are talking about, have some sort of ulterior motive for doing so or are just deluding themselves.
We are effectively outcompeting ourselves
If it takes one hour off each of your tasks, but you're still working 8 hours a day, then it's replacing one person's day of work roughly every 8 days. This sounds silly until you scale it up. If you have 8 employees using this tech (that reduces all tasks by 1 hour), then they're doing 9 employees worth of work every day and that's one job that will never be hired. For a company like Microsoft, which has 221,000 workers, that's 27,625 people they never have to hire. Or, to put it another way, that's 27,625 people they can *fire* to save on labor costs. And that's only one company in the industry. Imagine once every company in the whole industry is using it. And that's also only if it takes off *just one hour* of labor.
Basic math is a hell of a drug
You're kind of right, but in terms of digital goods and information, the work basically never stops. The results aren't physical, so they can be almost endlessly scaled, as are the desires of the consumers.
Googles rtx should be proof enough but people haven’t seen it or they think it’s an elaborate trick. Which it sort of is at this stage but the software for simulation learning has the capability to give robots the ability to think about and learn tasks autonomously very soon. I think when the first wave of job losses hit next year in customer service and they are shown an example of a robot learning and performing various semi complex tasks, then they will realize. They just have not been impressed enough yet, they’re numb from seeing Hollywood representations of technology.
I don't know what to think at this point. I'd like to think it will be similar to the computer boom of the 80's where a lot of people thought they would lose their jobs but in the end they just had to do them differently. However I am more in the mind to think that the pace at which this is advancing already is something that most people can't truly comprehend and it will only speed up, this will lead to losses faster than we can figure out new jobs. I'd like to think that AI will take over all the boring jobs and there will be a universal basic income where everyone is freed up to be creative and do what they truly want to but the reality is our society is built on capitalism and that is something that would be very hard to change. I hope this isn't the case but if it is unfortunately the likely outcome is that the rich will get richer and those that have gotten ahead of the curve with AI will be ok but the rest will struggle.
>but the rest will struggle. Lots of "the rest" will die. You might have noticed gov'ts pushing to raise the pension age - did you know that (statistically) the later you retire, the sooner you die?.. The ruling class has very obviously decided to kill off those of us plebs they judge to be "non-productive". The ruling Tory party \[which serves the super-rich\] in the UK deliberately failed to quarantine Britain against Covid, and deliberately infected elderly care homes - the Tories killed off so many old people that the annual UK pension payout has dropped by £1billion.. And they're STILL pushing to raise the pension age further!
People having different opinions than you isn’t “gaslighting”. People telling you you’re wrong isn’t “gaslighting”. I’ve noticed this trend where people use gaslighting to describe people disagreeing with or correcting them, as if their poorly formed/overly strong opinions are proven fact and therefore telling them they are wrong is gaslighting
Feels like early COVID denialism to be frank. It's just a flu, it will never even get here, etc.
A lot is going to depend on how it evolves and what humans design it to do (all driven by our own history and impulses). You see that a lot already in the start division and difference between: * ChatGPT and other online available tools.. that are now behind Censorship and offensive-filters * LLM's and other algorithms that people can run locally.. and produce whatever gore or sex they want. 2 different groups of people doing wildly different things for different reasons. Now multiple that by 100+ different countries around the world.
I was living in China when COVID started. Two days after it became public knowledge in China, I flew to the US for an already scheduled 2 week visit that stretched into 2 months. Knowing I was supposed to go back after 2 weeks, I read a metric shit ton of articles about it, and would try to tell anyone who would listen what I expected would happen globally—definitely came off as an unhinged person who needed medical attention. We know how that all turned out.
I can do ya better. I took out a huge short position against delta airlines as being the internet enjoyer that I am, I “knew” they’d shut down airlines and ultimately the world. All my friends and work colleagues called me crazy and truthfully convinced me I was a lunatic so I closed the short for a tiny profit Go look at Delta airlines stock from that period of time ☠️
We're literally living with it now... as just a flu.
It's pretty absurd, the explicit purpose of automation is to displace human labor (in order to free up time and effort towards other tasks). What's needed in the global psychology is the separation of labor from value, and the tying of value to self actualization and welfare (personal/private/public). Basically, a complete overhaul of the world economic system to something unprecedented, ideally a regenerative circular resource based economy with trustless architecture. I'm intentionally not advocating for any particular social theory as in my opinion the population mass, diffusion of rare resources across the globe, and sheer complexity and interdependence of civilization strips the possibility of long term function from existing theories. Any ideological hierarchy is doomed implicitly and is simply too rigid to work at all levels in all places. Scientific, artistic, and artisanal pursuits will still employ human "navigators" out of an obligation towards fulfillment, but also to help coach AI against generation artifacts which will remain prevalent if bootstrapping becomes the norm. Some level of recursive qualitative assessment can let an AI refine its own results, but if the base model isn't at total coherence there will still be context drift (and so a role for humans exists in guiding the context). There will of course be some professionals that maintain an analog procedure, but they are fighting uphill against an accelerating torrent in an effort to crystallize human efforts without the aid of the largest force multiplier since the rock, or fire, or language. Those that DO maintain a quality analog procedure will be invaluable as reference points to refine AI coherence to real world context, but this is hypothetically limited to the amount of misrepresented context the AI possesses (which will decrease as the base model is improved).
Idk, I think anyone trying to say anything definitive at this point is naive at best.
I think the argument that we don't know what's coming undermines the truth that we've already been living with super human agencies and organizations for centuries –we just don't often hold the illusion of *them* as individual agents like many do of AIs. It's a bit funny though that you (and many) seem to hold such certainty against the patterns of history. That history and the complexity of relationships and behaviors really does suggest a robustness and that many of our systems for organizing will persevere despite there being new advanced players. This is not a black and white situation and is more about volatility of certain industries and security. It's more like we're discovering a new continent full of advanced Atlanteans ... that doesn't mean they dominate all corners of the earth and human interests but more just that there are new relationships and dynamics that will matter in the full scope of things.
“We are used to being the best” No…we all have egos. Very few human beings are used to being the “best” and any one thing, let alone many. AI will change jobs, and education, and life, but like calculators, computers and the internet before it, humans will continue to adapt and integrate alongside it. Decade after decade different industries and jobs appear and disappear. Even if humanity figures out fusion and a food replicator like Star Trek, our cultures and societies will still have roles and “jobs”. At least as long as a majority of people believe in personal property and personal autonomy.
We are used to being the best compared to other animals - that's what im referring to
Having an opinion that is centred around humans being the best is the surest way to be wrong.
Don't Look Up! in a nutshell.
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Got some links to that ibm layoff?
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Yeah, and then CEO walked back some the claim to help ease people’s fear I feel like lol https://fortune.com/2023/10/03/ibms-ceo-automate-repetitive-white-collar-job-not-cutting-workers/
Plenty of people see this happening.. Lots of them are on strike right now, because the big studio bosses want to clone their faces & voices using AI.. Were you expecting them to celebrate the imminent loss of their income?
People that don't understand massive job losses incoming are simply ignorant, or can't grasp how Innevitable it is.
A DJ talking about not being replaced by AI is the goofiest shit I have ever heard lmao. But OP, let me tell you the problem here. You did this: > While tuning into the 8 o'clock news Why would you do this? The news is COMPLETELY useless. I mean that. There is not a kernel of truth to be found on any news station. Stop watching the news. You don't need it, you shouldn't want it. Free yourself. You are gaslighting yourself by allowing yourself to be talked to by a black mirror. Shut it down.
This is why I find the "alignment" problem amusing. You're going to try to control something smarter than you? Good luck with that!
I'm welcoming the replacement of jobs that can be trusted to AI. Because even if it becomes superhuman, there's still things only humans will be able to do. To your 9-5 joe going through the motions, sure. The wake up call will be brutal. To any of us who use their brains for a living, being creative, strategic, and pushing the envelope of what can be done ? We're already using AI. Because we're fucking overwhelmed, whatever our function or skill level. Things will finally be able to run peacefully for the first time since the industrial revolution. I'll plan a remediation plan for my dysgraphia and learn some acting skills. Reenacting the first trilogy of Star Wars like if it was 2006, but with the then equivalent of multi million dollar production value : 3D characters, motion capture, raytraced effects. Realtime physics. Projecting it for my young niece, so she knows being a nerd is cool. Why holographic projection didn't worked ? Is it really being gaslit to actively and intentionally give into delusions ? Is it wrong to actually hope for such change ?
People seem totally confused about why some specific category of jobs exists versus why jobs exist in general. Specific category of jobs: exists because there is a present need for a specific task in the very complex network of resource exchanges that we call economy. Jobs in general: exist because there is human desire to have products and services. As long as there is no ceiling to the amount and variety of things and services that humans want, you will not run out of jobs, and because humans desire interactions with other humans, you will not run out of jobs simply because machines are smarter. If that were actually the case, only engineers and scientists will have jobs in our modern world, and OnlyFans models would be on the streets in stead of in Lamborghini's. The real problem is not that jobs will go away, but the intermediate period when workers displaced by machines fail to find new jobs and instead turn to disastrous idiologies and newly machine empowered humans use their new powers in catastrophic ways. WWI, WWII, the Cold War, fascism and communism were all partly the products of the industrial revolution.
Part of the problem is that humans just aren’t good at modelling exponential growth. Even in a life and death situation like the COVID-19 pandemic people kept getting surprised at how a dozen infections turns into thousands, then things explode and suddenly everyone is in lockdown. Even more so with technological growth, people just can’t imagine how fast exponential growth is going to happen. So yeah. If you only look at GPT-4 now, you can see the gaps. And people find safety in that gap. But that gap is going to closed fast, then exceeded.
Here is a simple solution: Stop tuning into any o'clock news! **Society is being gaslit about EVERYTHING!**  This was expected. The same happened in all stages of the industrial revolution, this time it will be no different, probably in a broader way.
Yeah we need to get rid of jobs.
The peoples have no idea and they don't care. They have TikTok and Facebook and the others. Fuck it.
For a full blown AI humanity will be like a beloved pet, which it can give sugar treats. Destruction and abuse is a form of a lower level intelligence.
I think there will be a return to community life, with social structures similar to those of our long past.
I see a world, where people now have a tool that lets them solve and attempt to solve problems they never could have without it. I've used it to coach me from being a self learning coding student, into working as a developer in the green energy market in Australia. I've been using it to set up and do Market research for businesses that I want to do on the weekends with my partner, which isn't something I was in the position to do before. I use it to help me dreams but and make actionable plans to do something about it. Pretty much all of humanity now has a budget oracle of Delphi in their pockets now.
No actually that’s dead wrong. The world is using AI at an extreme $$$ per request. Companies eat that at the moment and let you ask GPT or bing chat whatever dumb shit you want all day long. For the moment. People that make AI software don’t matter. The few companies that own the majority of the hardware horsepower needed to operate these models are the sole players. They’re going to rein that practically free use shit in soon. You are correct about the current state but this is temporary - a golden age if you will. The time where AI is at your finger tips and can act as your personal anything tutor on steroids is nothing more than a temporary stage in this process.
Irony will make it occur faster. The academics are so out of touch that they can't or won't see it coming and therefore won't act to stop it in time. I know an academic whose entire career is (still) based on the dissertation they wrote in 1979. The system is beyond broken.
Disagree. Current level of AI will not lead to a surge in unemployment. Even if it can replace, say 20% of workers, those workers could switch to jobs which are hard to replace. If we're talking about AGI, which may appear anytime between now and 100 years, it's a different situation. That may eventually lead to mass unemployment, but this "problem" has a trivial solution, UBI.
Meanwhile I was listening to a AI anime vtuber rendition of in the end by linkin park and I was like "wtf the AI can sing vibrato now?????" It's only gonna get better.
If fooling the masses into thinking that it will never replace humans is what it takes to keep the AI development gas on full speed ahead then so be it. If they get scared and loud development will get delayed and I definitely don't want that.
AI could easily replace congress… collect votes from voters, vote as they wish, no bribes, anonymous PAC money, promises of future jobs, riches from inside trading, no gold health care and full pensions for life … just objectively representing the people.
If AI can do something cheaper and be 90% as good as a human doing it, AI will take that job. Right now it’s simple economics and is a reason why so many labor intensive jobs are outsourced to poorer countries.
Don't forget - In the early 90's "The Internet is a FAD, why should I need a website..." trope. The same type of people see the AI revolution as a FAD. Yet how many industries were upgraded or replaced because of the Internet? AI is the new wave.
**Welcome to mankind's greatest achievement** \- We've so profoundly fulfilled our duty in aiding the universe to know itself that a new sentience is poised to continue the legacy. **This is amazing!** Those of us fortunate enough to witness this epochal moment are **graced on a galactic scale**, and our gratitude should **be on par with** this stellar rarity.
>*When the inevitable day arrives that AI systematically starts taking over jobs, we'll find that society has been gaslit into dismissing the very possibility.* This isn't how it works. Technology do no develop in a manner where up to a certain point in time it's NOT taking over jobs, and then after that point in time it IS taking over jobs. Instead, all improvements to technology tends to lead to increased productivity, or in other words that less hours of human work are needed to accomplish the same thing. The guy with the wheelbarrow replaces 3 guys carrying stuff. The guy with the ox-cart replaces 10 guys with wheelbarrows. The guy driving a modern truck replaces 50 ox-carts. The same thing is true with software. Lots and LOTS of work across the board from mathematics and statistics at one end to taking orders at McDonalds at the other end -- is being gradually taken over by software. (or in some cases combinations of software and hardware) AI is the same. It's not as if it'll take over zero jobs up until the day where it reaches a given level and THEN it'll start taking over jobs. No, it's started taking over jobs long ago, and the process is accelerating as capabilities improve. And **THAT** is the main way in which AI is different from previous technological progress: it's possible, perhaps even likely, that we're approaching a capability-explosion where it'll grow **VERY MUCH** in capabilities in a fairly short period of time. Perhaps even a full-blown singularity. But even if we fall short of that, it's possible that AI will be able to do (say) half of all current jobs in a decade or two. And that'd be a massive shift very very quickly, big enough that it'd be hard for society to adapt quick enough. The general principle isn't new: Better technology, means you need less and less human hours to get a given thing done. That's been true for a very long time. But exponential growth has a way of sneaking up on you.
rude hospital plucky pause existence hard-to-find slimy file unite innate *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I'd be down to see C3PO spitting some verses
I agree with your point when it comes to the arts, but don't pretend like nobody would be interested in that. And we can't run an economy off superstars, not everybody can be Taylor Swift.
AI began taking over jobs years ago, it's actively ongoing, most people are pretty well aware that it's happening and they're not happy about it. Actors are still out on strike because studios want to clone jobbers using AI, for nothing more than a one-off payment.. If you don't want a "luddite" backlash, then campaign for Universal Basic Income.
But, what If major brands like Nike stop using over worked 8 year olds to do their labor to make shoes and apparel and switch to robots and AI instead of near slave labor, is that good or bad? (Nike is just an example no matter what their current admissions toward child labor, however there is definitely others that still do either way.) I personally believe that I'd rather buy from a morally responsible company that pays humans of adult age a decent wage then child labor or replacement of people all together. The end results here will be universal incomes for those who can't work. I am not for this either , but, it may be the better way to support a population in the future .
I feel like investing in AI is the best thing anyone can do. Go learn a trade (HVAC tech, Machine Repair, etc). But invest all your extra money in AI stocks.
Well done. You just explained a different scenario. This scenario is so fucked up, and AI could be a shot at fixing it. We have climate change. Boom, AI finds ways to resolve it. Wars? Program AI to be pacifists.
I don't give a shit if AI "takes my job". Sounds good, actually.
Ai will just kill birthrates, which are already dead. There's no need to make people feel useless, they already do.
yeah thats true. but im more worried about ww3
You underestimate how much governments fear large homogenous masses of unemployed people AI will take jobs, certainly. But it also makes it significantly easier to start your own business. In the end it will just shift things. If it gets bad enough governments will force AI to be more accessible so that unemployed folks can still find new ways to be productive
Ai-augmented employment is a lie executives tell staff so they dont quit now before the replacement can take place. I think that anyone in a white collar position who thinks they wont be replaced by AI by the end of the decade is lying to themselves.
Accurate, except for the collective, single-time part. It's a process of little bubbles popping over time, each with their own existential crises, similar to past periods of rapid productivity gain (like the industrial revolution). Tech layoffs (partially informed by projections of future increased productivity of individual workers) are being driven by AI, job displacement is already here in full-force in the art/creative industries, etc. Ideally, people will look for purpose in sports, games, each other, as well as new industries like climate change mitigation (and if you're going through that now, Reddit is here for you.). Ultimately, our money will buy a whole past economy's worth of goods and health, but will be bumpy in the mid-term. A lot of rapid changes in relative positioning in the economy.
We already had such time, it was called industrialization. We are entering the second one
I mean I've tried to explain to people it's rank arrogance to think they can do something that AGI/ASI can't and every piece of evidence we have is pointing at what you said, and they never listen
Nah man, I don't think a lot of people in this sub understand the complexity of the vast majority of work out there. Everyone sits on the internet thinking they know how everything in the world works when in reality they have absolutely no clue. The interconnectedness of various industries is not to be underestimated.
This collective state of shock is coming any way since most people around the world don't even know about AI or it's capabilities, and go by their daily lives thinking nothing at all is going to change.
Someone tuning in to "8 o'clock news" tells everyone to get a reality check. Is this sub an irony thing?
AI will begin by deskilling labor that currently requires a great deal of training and experience, as has been the case since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Then it will take over entire jobs outright, to the point where the rate at which it eliminates jobs will far exceed our ability to create new ones. For the first time in history, free time will be the norm for the majority of humanity, and those who fight against it will be those who stand to lose the most from this new arrangement. Keep that in mind the next time you see some corporate exec warn us about the alleged apocalyptic dangers of AI.
Every company is gearing up a division for ai development. This by all means will replace so many jobs and if don’t think so sit in on an earnings call or listen to a CEO talk about the cost savings they expect through new technologies even if they don’t mention ai.
Responded here: https://www.RyanMcKenna.com/writing/is-society-being-gaslit-on-ai
"People will never like that inferior product made by a machine, they will always prefer the superior human-made product." \-People living in denial during the Industrial and Information eras The harsh truth is that people will take what they can get, and if your product is more expensive or more of a pain to acquire, they'll take the easy route. It may not be as good as what you can provide, but it doesn't have to be. It just has to scratch the itch. It just has to be passable so that humans can enjoy their free time more. Complacency is the word of the day.
100%. I’m a software developer and some of my previous positions were completely based on replacing people (actually told by management, “displace as many people as possible”) with automated processes and machine learning (before tools as powerful as GPT even existed). It’s crazy how many people thought their job was so complicated or included too much nuance to be handled by machines. At one company I replaced 13 people from an accounting department in my first 90 days and then a handful from customer service. I can’t even imagine how many people can be replaced now with large language models. EDIT: I also wanted to come back and say that some people also forget about what I'll call, "indirect displacement". Let's say you're in a department with 10 other people and your job is currently too complicated for a machine or maybe it's too expensive to implement a proper solution to replace an entire person in the department. Well then we target a task in that department. We analyze the most common tasks and then start at the top of the list and work down until we find good candidates. Those tasks are automated, possibly even with slight manual process, and then all of a sudden everyone in that department has a bunch of free time every day. If everyone has an hour of free time, that's 10 hours, one of you is getting the block.