The AI boom is screwing over Gen Z | ChatGPT is commandeering the mundane tasks that young employees have relied on to advance their careers.::ChatGPT is commandeering the tasks that young employees rely on to advance their careers. That’s going to crush Gen Z’s career path.
The fucked up part isn’t that AI work is replacing human work, it’s that we’re at a place as a society where this is a problem.
More automation and less humans working should be a good thing, not something to fear.
But that would require some mechanism for redistributing wealth and taking care if those who choose not to work, and everyone knows that’s communism.
So much this. The way headlines like this frame the situation is so ass-backwards it makes my brain hurt. In any sane world, we’d be celebrating the automation of mundane tasks as freeing up time and resources to improve our health, happiness, and quality of life instead of wringing our hands about lost livelihoods.
The correct framing is that the money and profits generated by those mundane tasks are still realized, it’s just that they are no longer going to workers, but funneled straight to the top. People need to get mad as hell not at the tech, but at those who are leveraging that tech to specifically to deny them opportunity rather than improving their life.
I need a beer. 😐
money and profits generated by those mundane tasks are still realized, it’s just that they are no longer going to workers, but funneled straight to the top
Workers should be paid royalties for their contributions. If “the top” is able to reap the rewards indefinitely, so should the folks who built the systems.
I think you misspelled “taxes,” but its possible your spelling will turn out to be more accurate.
Well… the difference is the former has a history of actually working.
This is where I was kind of on board with Andrew Yang. He was looking to setup UBI based on a tax on automation that displaced jobs. I think at first this would be very small, but having the systems in place would be important to allow it to scale up when it’s needed, rather than trying to just start the conversation once it’s a big problem.
That being said, I’m not a fan of your phrasing around, “those who choose not to work.” Being displaced by automation and not having the capability for some of the in demand jobs is one thing. Being mentally and physically able to work, and just deciding you’ll let others do that while you bring nothing to the table… that’s a different issue. UBI allows us to not have to worry about that distinction, and the resulting payout will be lower because of it, meaning people wouldn’t be living well on it, especially at first. It wouldn’t be a living wage, just a nice little bonus. To give everyone 14+ in the US $20/month would cost $5.5B… so we’re talking really small to start.
some sort of A Better World?
There are both dystopian (a tiny Elite owns the automatons and gets all gains from their work and a massive unemployed Underclass barelly surviving) and utopian (the machines do almost everything for everybody) outcomes for automation and we’re firmly in the path for Dystopia.
Exactly. This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with UBI.
But, the rich and plebes alike will push AI as the Boogeyman as a distraction from the real enemy.
There’s this bizarre right-wing idea that if everyone can afford basic necessities, they won’t do anything. To which I say, so what? If you want to live in shitty government housing and survive off of food assistance but not do anything all day, fine. Who cares? Plenty of other people want a higher standard of living than that and will have a job to do so. We just won’t have people starving in the street and dying of easily fixable health problems.
We also have to be careful of how people define this sort of thing, and how the wide range of our current wealth inequality affects how something like UBI would be implemented.
In the rich’s eyes, UBI is already a thing and it’s called “welfare”. It’s not enough that people on welfare can barely survive on the poverty-level pittance that the government provides, but both the rich and slightly-more-well-off have to put down these people as “mooching off the system” and “stealing from the government”, pushing for even more Draconian laws that punish their situation even further. It is a caste of people who are portrayed as even lower scum than “the poors”, right down to segregating where they live to “Section 8” housing as a form of control.
UBI is not about re-creating welfare. It’s about providing a comfortable safety net while reducing the obscene wealth gap, as technology drives unemployment even higher. Without careful vigilance, the rich and powerful will use this as another wedge issue to create another class of people to hate (their favorite pastime), and push for driving the program down just as hard as they do for welfare.
The differences between UBI and “welfare” are perhaps subtle but very important IMO.
In Australia there’s an entire industry around punishing and humiliating people that need welfare. It’s just absurd and unnecessary. UBI avoids any of that by just making the entitlement universal.
We have “job network providers” which IMO do not provide any value to anyone. Suppose in a particular region there are 4,000 unemployed people and this particular week there are 400 new jobs. To receive welfare you need to be working with a job network provider to find a job. However, those job network providers aren’t creating any jobs. One way or another 400 people will probably get a new job this week. They might help a particular person tidy up their resume or whatever but they’re not actually finding jobs for people. Their only purpose is to make receiving welfare a chore, it’s absurd.
There’s also people stuck in the welfare trap. As in, if I don’t work at all I get $w welfare, but for every $1 I earn I lose $0.50 from $w, so why would I work a shitkicker job flipping burgers for effectively half the pay.
Slightly different systems, but in the US, welfare is a lot like that as well, especially punishing people by removing welfare or food stamps when they make X dollars.
The welfare trap is a feature of all means-tested social security systems.
Yeah, modern welfare isn’t remotely enough to match the spirit of UBI. It’s structured so that you have to have a job. It’s not enough to live by at all. And bizarrely, there’s some jobs where they’d actually be worse than welfare because min wage is so crazy low in many parts of the US.
And even if you’re on disability, you’re gonna have a hard time. It pays barely enough to maybe scrape by if you cut every possible corner.
No form of welfare is close to being livable for the typical recipient. At best, they usually give you some spending cash while you live with friends or family. Maybe if you’re really lucky you can find that rare, rare subsidized housing and manage to just barely make ends meet.
By comparison, most proponents of UBI want it to be livable. Nothing glamorous, admittedly, but enough to live a modest life. Enough that if there’s no jobs available you qualify for (or none that will pay a living wage, at least), you’ll be okay.
This was exactly the problem that Charles Murray pointed out in the bell curve. We’re rapidly increasing the complexity of the available jobs (and the successful people can output 1000-1,000,000 times more than simple labor in the world of computers). It’s the same concept as the industrial revolution, but to a greater degree.
The problem is that we’re taking away the vast majority of the simple jobs. Even working at a fast food place isn’t simple.
That alienates a good chunk of the population from being able to perform useful work.
That book is shit and should not be cited in any serious discussion. Here’s a good video explaining why the book is full of racist shit: https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/UBc7qBS1Ujo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Good bot!
If it were full of shit, then you wouldn’t be discussing the exact he pointed out in this book.
There is some racist discussion in there, but that’s secondary and doesn’t detract or impact his main point about what increasingly complex labor does to a society.
It’s not even a new thing either.
It used to be that every single piece of fabric was handmade, every book handwritten.
Humans have been losing out on labor since they realized Og was faster at bashing rocks together than anyone else.
It’s just a question of if we redistribute the workload. Like turning “full time” down to 6 days a week and eventually 5, or working hours from 12+ to 8hrs. Which inflates the amount of jobs to match availability.
Every single time the wealthy say we can’t. But eventually it happens, the longer it takes, the less likely it’s peaceful.
But eventually
There’s no eventually, people have been killed, murdered and harassed whilst fighting to make it a reality. Someone has to fight to make it happen and an “eventually” diminishes the value of the effort and risks put forth by labor activists all over the world throughout history. It didn’t happen magically, people worked really hard to make it so.
Where are you that 7 days a week 12 hour days is full time? That’s literally just always working. Standard full time in the states is 40 hour work weeks.
The past. You should probably read their comment again.
But how will the rich people afford more submarines to commit suicide in?
The problem, as it almost always is, is greed. Those at the top are trying to keep the value derived from the additional efficiency that ai is going to bring for themselves.
Wait you expect a wealthy mammal to share?
Precisely, the hill to die on is to socialize the profits, not to demand we keep the shitty, injuring, repetitive task jobs that break a person’s back by 35.
You don’t protest street lights to keep the lamp lighters employed. The economy needs to change fundamentally to accommodate the fact that many citizens won’t have jobs yet need income. It won’t change, but it needs to.
So we’ll keep blaming the wrong thing, technology that eases the labor burden on humanity, instead of destroying the wealth class that demands they be the sole beneficiary of said technology and its implementation in perpetuity to the detriment of almost everyone outside the owner class. Because if we did that, we’d be filthy dirty marxist socialist commies that hate freedumb, amirite?!
It was already happenning in things like Software Developmnt with outsourcing: all the entry level stuff was sent away to be done by people who cost a fraction of what even a Junior Dev would cost in the West, and that’s exactly the stuff that one starts one’s career with.
As someone who lives in the east where these jobs are outsourced to, it’s not like junior devs here get to work on them either. Most outsourced stuff is assigned to people higher up. The talented juniors are left sitting on the bench as retainer manpower, others are in an endless string of unpaid internships.
The job situation is more similar then you think all over the world
Can you explain what you mean by retainer manpower? I’ve never worked anywhere where there was an extra person. Usually a job that requires 20 people would be set up for 20, 3 would leave the company, one would go out on disability and you have 16 doing the job of 20. They make a new middle management role with little to no raise but a sense of pride that you are now in charge and they stick that person with ensuring the 16 people don’t fall behind. Which really means you now have 15 workers, and 1 person stuck in meetings all day explaining why we are barely keeping our heads above water.
Companies hire junior devs (and other cheap labour) as “reserves”, in the off chance that you get more projects (sometimes this is negotiated as a bonded contract, which you can’t break for 3-5 years, but I hear that abusive practice is dying slowly).
They are paid abysmally low salaries, but youre not allowed to work, or find work elsewhere while you’re on this type of contract. If a project comes and you’re needed, you’re put on a regular contract that is comparatively not as low paying.
All the factors you mentioned are still at play, these people are almost never put on existing projects, so you end up with less people doing more work, with more people just sitting around doing nothing waiting for new projects.
This type of environment is extremely negative and depressing to be in, and it promotes a lot of office politics to get yourself off that list and into a better salary etc.
Lol it’s not ChatGPT screwing over Gen Z. It’s the rich business owners who care more about profits than people.
Let’s play devil’s advocate: if AI is capable of doing a job for a fraction of the cost, faster, with no mistakes, no “moods”, no sick days, then why would they hire a person? I honestly see no reason for them to do so and that concerns me.
Bullshit. Learn how to train new hires to do useful work instead of mundane bloat.
100% if an AI can do the job just as well (or better) then there’s no reason we should be making a person do it.
Part of the problem with AI is that it requires significant skill to understand where AI goes wrong.
As a basic example, get a language model like ChatGPT to edit writing. It can go very wrong, removing the wrong words, changing the tone, and making mistakes that an unlearned person does not understand. I’ve had foreign students use AI to write letters or responses and often the tone is all off. That’s one thing but the student doesn’t understand that they’ve written a weird letter. Same goes with grammar checking.
This sets up a dangerous scenario where, to diagnose the results, you need to already have a deep understanding. This is in contrast to non-AI language checkers that are simpler to understand.
Moreover as you can imagine the danger is that the people who are making decisions about hiring and restructuring may not understand this issue.
The good news is this means many of the jobs AI is “taking” will probably come back when people realize it isn’t actually as good as the hype implied
Not quite. It’s more that a job that once had 5-10 people and perhaps an “expert” supervisor will just be whittled down to the expert. Similarly, factories used to employ hundreds and a handful of supervisors to produce a widget. Now, they can employ a couple of supervisors and a handful of robot technicians to produce more widgets.
The problem is, where do those experts come from? Expertise is earned through experience, and if all the entry-level jobs go away then eventually you’ll run out of experts.
Education. If education was free this wouldn’t be a problem, you could take a few more years at university to gain that experience instead of working in a junior role.
This is the problem with capitalism, if you take too much without giving back, eventually there’s nothing left to take.
You don’t get experts from education. You get experts from job experience (after education).
No, companies will and are accepting reduced quality outputs in exchange for a 90+% reduction in costs to get that task done. (90% being a conservative estimate)
It’s just that I fear that realisation may not filter down.
You honestly see it a lot in industry. Companies pay $$$ for things that don’t really produce results. Or what they consider to be “results” changes. There are plenty of examples of lowering standards and lowering quality in virtually every industry. The idea that people will realise the trap of AI and reverse is not something I’m enthusiastic about.
In many ways AI is like pseudoscience. It’s a black box. Things like machine learning don’t tell you “why” it works. It’s just a black box. ChatGPT is just linear regression on language models.
So the claim that “good science” prevails is patently false. We live in the era of progressive scientific education and yet everywhere we go there is distrust in science, scientific method, critical thinking, etc.
Do people really think that the average Joe is going to “wake up” to the limitations of AI? I fear not.
And AI is not always the best solution. One of my tasks at my job is to respond to website reviews. There is a button I can push that will generate an AI review. I’ve tested it. It works… but it’s not personal. My responses directly address things they say, especially if they have issues. Their responses are things like, “thanks for your five-star review! We really appreciate it, blah blah blah.” Like a full paragraph of boilerplate bullshit that never feels like the review is addressed.
You would think responding to reviews properly would be a very basic function an AI could do as well as a human, but at present, no way.
This assumes that your company doesn’t decide the AI responses are good enough in exchange for the cost savings of removing a person from the role, and that they don’t improve in a subsequent update.
True, although my company emphasizes human contact with customers. We really go out of our way with tech support and such. That said, I hate responding to reviews. I kind of wish it was good enough to just press the ‘respond to review with AI’ button.
This.
In accounting, 10 years ago, a huge part of the job was categorising bank transactions according to their description.
Now AI can kinda do it, but even providers that would have many billions of transactions to use as training data have a very high error rate.
It’s very difficult for a junior to look at the output and identify which ones are likely to be incorrect.
Exactly!
They don’t want to train new hires to begin with. A lot of work that new hires relied on to get a foothold on a job is bloat and chores that nobody wants to do. Because they aren’t trusted to take on more responsibility than that yet.
Arguably whole industries exist around work that isn’t strictly necessary. Does anyone feel like telemarketing is work that is truly necessary for society? But it provides employment to a lot of people. There’s much that will need to change for us to dismiss these roles entirely, but people need to eat every day.
The “not willing to train” thing is one of the biggest problems IMO. But also not a new one. It’s rampant in my field of software dev.
Most people coming out of university aren’t very qualified. Most have no understanding of how to actually program real world software, because they’ve only ever done university classes where their environments are usually nice and easy (possibly already setup), projects are super tiny, they can actually read all the code in the project (you cannot do that in real projects – there’s far too much code), and usually problems are kept minimal with no red herrings, unclear legacy code, etc.
Needless to say, most new grads just aren’t that good at programming in a real project. Everyone in the field knows this. As a result, many companies don’t hire new grads. Their advertised “entry level” position is actually more of a mid level position because they don’t want to deal with this painful training period (which takes a lot of their senior devs time!). But it ends up making the field painful to enter. Reddit would constantly have threads from people lamenting that the field must be dying and every time it’s some new grad or junior. IMO it’s because they face this extra barrier. By comparison, senior devs will get daily emails from recruiters asking if they want a job.
It’s very unsustainable.
Indeed: at least in knowledge based industries, everybody starts by working with a level of responsability were the natural mistakes a learning person does have limited impact.
One of my interns read the wrong voltage and it took me ten minutes to find his mistake. Ten minutes with me and multiple other senior engineers standing around.
I congratulationed him and damn it I meant it. This was the best possible mistake for him to make. Everyone saw him do it, he gets to know he held everything up, and he has to just own it and move on.
The problem is the concept of work hasn’t shifted to keep up with the technological reality that has been created. Jobs should slowly be phased out. We need a new economical concept to take hold that doesn’t rely solely on class and fear to make it trundle along. Jobs should be what you do to grow your own fruit and veggies for fun, while the administration and maintenance of basically everything should be left to technology. Wealth and wealth accumulation should no longer exist or be seen as anything other than childish and irrelevant.
“Haha best I can do is lower wages and more homelessness”
Removed by mod
No offense, but this sounds like the pipe dream to end all pipe dreams
Things can change very fast depending on specific circumstances. I hope you’re more wrong than you think.
Removed by mod
It’s not just Gen Z, everyone’s jobs are at risk as AI improves and automates away human labor. People who think that with exponential rate of progress of AI there will continue to be an abundance of good jobs are completely delusional. Companies hire people out of necessity, not some goodness of the heart. If machines can do everything humans can do and better, then companies will hire less people and outsource to machines. Sure there will be people working on the bleeding edge of what AI isn’t yet capable of, but that’s a bar that’s only going to get higher and higher as the performance advantage gap of humans over machines reduces.
Of course none of this would be an issue if we had an economic system that aligned technological progress with improved quality of life and human freedom, but instead we cling on to antiquated systems of the past that just disproportionately accrue wealth to a dwindling minority while leaving the rest of civilization at their mercy. Anyone with any brain or sense of integrity realizes how absurd this is, and it’s been obvious we need a Universal Basic Income for a long time. The hope I have is that Andrew Yang explained it eloquently 4 years ago and it resonated way stronger than I expected with the American population, so I think in a few years when AI is starting to automate any job where one doesn’t need a 160 IQ, people will see the writing on the wall and there will finally be the political capital to implement a UBI.
It’s the march of progress, but it’s coming for previously “safe” jobs. I make a good living as a consultant, but about 80-90% of my job could be automated by AI. I just went to a conference in my field and everyone in the room was convinced that they couldn’t be replaced by AI - and they’re dead wrong. By the time my small corner of industry gets fully automated I’ll be retired or, at the least, in a position where I’m the human gathering the field data and backchecking the automated workflows before it goes out the door.
political capital to implement a UBI
I applaud your optimism, and genuinely hope you’re right.
Yeah we’re quickly approaching a tipping point where people can no longer scoff at the idea of UBI. The more jobs that get automated, the fewer people working and pumping money back into the economy. This can only go on for so long before the economy completely collapses.
And the funny part is that ChatGPT isn’t good enough at anything to be trusted with doing it alone. You still need an expert on the subject matter to proofread anything that will be seen by the public or used to make a business decision.
You can say the same for entry level employees though. I’m not trusting anyone new to post without review.
Granted I rather the company pay someone so they can be taught and eventually become autonomous over time.
And presumably a human who works has some intention to get it right so they can prove their worth or learn or any of a million reasons to want to succeed at work.
ChatGPT is just math in a black box that spits out random language stems filtered and organized by the input parameters you choose.
presumably a human who works has some intention … to succeed at work
Which is the one in ten who really love what they do and want to go into management or oversee the process for professional fulfillment. Of the other nine, three are waiting to move to a company that pays better, two will decide they don’t like it and change careers entirely, and four really are terrible at it but HR decided they met the minimum requirements and would work for entry level wages so they’ll be in that job for the foreseeable future with zero upward growth, eventually getting bitter and doing a worse and worse job while complaining about their lack of promotion.
deleted by creator
Bro service industry jobs and similar are booming. Train under a plumber, electrician or gassist and you will be set for years
Go where the future is…HVAC. Soon everyone is going to need AC just to survive.
Which will accelerate the destruction of the planet. Yay!
Whether you have ac or not, the planet is set on course to be destroyed unless big oil countries suddenly find their kindness to all mankind and stop drilling oil. Which is impossible.
Removed by mod
I’m aware of that, hence why I said accelerate
Maybe. But if they stop drilling for petroleum, I wonder where the electricity to make the solar panels and wind turbines will come from. Oh and the polymers and plastics used to make those things. While ue use the available electricity for charging our electric cars.
What’s the alternative? Just die?
Yup
Pumping all my fun money into trane stock…
deleted by creator
Ok fair enough. Where is that? Most of the world has less than enough people for those service jobs so unless you live just in the right place or the planet where almost everyone is a plumber, I’d call that extreme bad luck haha
deleted by creator
But that’s exactly what I meant can’t you go independent? That’s weird, tradesmanship here even has unions but they have so much work they can’t handle the load ( ayyy lmao) and they are trying to stimulate people to take into this trades.
Suggesting an alternative industry as an escape from AI doesn’t work. The media tried this with the millions of truck drivers, pushing them to go into software development 5-10 years ago, as we started conversations around the impending automation of their careers.
The thought at the time, and this seemed like an accurate forecast to me, was that the tech industry would continue to grow and software engineers would be extraordinarily safe for decades to come. I was already in this profession, so I figured my career was safe for a long while.
Then a massive AI boom happened this year that I hadn’t anticipated would come for 15ish more years, and similarly AI experts are now pushing up predictions of AGI by literally decades, average estimates being under 10 years now instead of 30 years.
At the same time, the tech industry went through massive layoffs. Outsourcing, massive increases in output with generative AI automating away repetitive copy/paste programming or even slightly more complicated boilerplate that isn’t strictly copy/paste, amongst natural capitalist tendencies to want to restrict high value labor to keep it cheap.
Those people who shifted away from truck driving and towards software engineer 4+ years ago, thinking it was a “safe path” and now being told that it’s impossible to find a junior dev position might become desperate enough to change paths again. Maybe they’ll take your advice and join a trade school, only to find in 4 years we’ll hit massive advancements in robotics and AGI that allows general problem solving skills from robots in the real world.
We already have the tech for it. Boston dynamics has showcased robots that can move more than fluently enough to be a plumber, electrician, etc. Now we just need to combine generative AI with senses and the ability to process information from those senses and react (this already works with images, moving to a video feed and eventually touch/sound/etc is a next step).
While everyone constantly plays a game of chicken, trying to move around this massive reserve army of labor, we’ll see housing scalpers continue to raise rents, and cost of living becoming prohibitive for this growing class of underemployed or unemployed people. The reserve army of labor, when kept around 5-10% of the population, serves as an incentive for people to be obedient workers and not to rock the bed too much. That number growing to 20-50% is enough to rock the bed, and capitalists will advocate for what they’ve already advocated in the third world, a massive reduction or total annihilation of welfare, so millions more can starve to death.
We already have millions of people dying a year due to starvation, and nearly a billion people are malnourished due to lack of food access. Raising this number is a logical next step for capitalists as workers try to fight for a share of the automated economy.
Not gonna read all that but alternative industries will happen ai or not.
The necessity to look for an alternative industry will happen ai or not.
And it’s not impossible to find junior tech positions what the hell are you talking about.
Also there is not a conspiracy to reduce the planetary population. And if you claim that I want proof.
We need to start instituting universal basic income to compensate for the job losses. It’s inevitable. We have to protect the person, not the jobs.
There’s something that a person close to me said about certain tech/features that stuck with me and seems to click here, it was: “A lot of it just stops you from using your brain.”
Is this not similar to the introduction of calculators in schools? We don’t need to use our brains anymore to do the “mechanical calculation”. Instead we can offload this task to the machine and use our brain for other tasks.
Not exactly. When it comes to calculations that could be super unreasonable and impractical to do by hand (think multiple exponents on a number, or cosine, sine, and tangent as simple examples), they help reduce that tedium in the overall process of what you’re trying to do. There comes a point where it’d be absurd to do certain kinds of math by hand primarily. I’m not largely math-oriented, but even with calculators one could understand the reasoning behind certain concepts despite using a calculator to work through them. People who take calculus can understand it but still use a calculator.
To have a calculator to do your times tables instead of knowing them, or any basic stuff in the four units would be detrimental I feel, because you’d benefit in knowing those up front, and how to process them mentally.
Have you used these tools for a complicated project? I’ve played around a little and it didn’t feel like turning off my brain at all, more like working with a genius drone and figuring out how to direct its skills to my ends and constantly evaluating the 10,000 foot view to edge the project forward.
You can’t turn your brain off and use current AI. You have to be constantly watching for whenever it will happen to fabricate some innocent-looking code that is actually very destructive.
Removed by mod
Not sure what you mean?
My boy says this as if underpaying and abusing (usually female) office workers to do the boring algebraic and arithmetic for you wasn’t a thing in engineering business and academia before the advent of digital computers.
Mathematics is about reasoning. Calculations and arithmetics are merely a little insiginificant part of it. I believe mental math should be encouraged at early stages of education, as it develops cognitive skills, memory and brain plasticity; all research confirm this. Sure, calculating 65*82 is tricky to do in head, but if you understand that this is equivalent to (60+5)(80+2) and work from that then it suddenly becomes approachable for everyone, you just have to reason this out in your mind. My algebra teacher once said something which perhaps translates poorly but let me try to convey what he meant: “A mediocre mathematician seeks analogies between problems, so that they can solve new problems using tools they are already familiar with. However a good mathematician seeks analogies between analogies”. Will you ever require mental math? Probably no, but consider it a workout for your brain, which creates neuroconnections which will later come in helpful when learning new stuff and needing to understand new, complex concepts quickly
Removed by mod
I consider myself, at best, a medior profile in my industry (IT). ChatGPT with GPT-4 (at least the initial version of it) was completely capable of doing EVERYTHING I need to do daily for my job. And probably faster and with much fewer mistakes.
That simply tells me it’s a guarantee my job’s gone in a matter of time. Whether that’s one year or five remains to be seen, but it’s inevitable.
Otoh one of my friends is an IT teacher and there are regular issues with students blindly following dumb chatGPT advice.
Recently, one had removed their fstab directory 🤣
ChatGPT is very good at giving advice that sounds good but it still has absolutely no understanding about what it says. The quintessential child of a politician and a manager…
In an ideal world, people would start receiving better and more fulfilling opportunities when their mundane tasks are automated away. But that’s way too optimistic and the world is way to cynical. What actually happens is they get shitcanned while the capitalists hoard the profits.
We need a better system. One that, instead of relentlessly churning for the impossibility of infinite growth and funneling wealth upwards, prioritizes personal financial stability and enforces economic equallibrium.
I hate this timeline
What if the headline read: “Horseless carriages are crippling stable owners and farriers”
Would you still hate this timeline?
“Horseless carriages driven around cities accelerate climatic problems”
“City growth caused by mass adoption of personal horseless carriages makes pedestrians unable to get anywhere”
So, yea, that would still be a problem
Turns out walkable cities do in fact exist despite those countries phasing out said horseless carriages.
Haha! Not in America, you cosmopolitan citizen of the world!
I was making a greater metaphorical point that society can and does adapt to new technologies
Cries in Kaczynski
Eh. Society can adapt. But, it doesn’t have to. The Amish are a thing, after all. And so are America’s car-centric cities when high speed rail exists.
I for one can’t wait for the headline “Gen Z increasingly joining Amish, DESTROYING industries”
This is not equivalent. LLMs are not new tools, they’re just the latest parlor trick of old tools. It has more to do with crypto and NFTs than with cars. And with the confidence of hindsight, cars (indirectly via the combustion engine and fossil fuels) absolutely destroyed the planet with anthropogenic climate change. We have every reason to hate this timeline.
This is just silly lol
governments need to take seriously what we are looking at in the next 40 years. There IS going to be less work, and less need for it. We can no longer play a game of work = virtue and that you must work to live.
If we fail to address this we will be complicit in a slow genocide
Removed by mod
listen, im gonna be hopeful, ok?
Removed by mod
who says i don’t have plenty of dashes of that, you don’t know me
I like to compare modern LLM to Excel or calculators in the past. Some years ago a company would have an in-house team of accountants. Then came Excel and now a single accountant can do the job for 10 companies. Let’s now consider programmer: currently a project manager oversees a team of programmers, most of whom are only responsible for mundane work of typing out code. With AI a single worker will be able to perform more productive than that team of programmers, because they will offload the boring work to AI and focus all their attention to what AI is perhaps incapable of.
What this article is really saying, which I agree with, is that AI improves productivity ,just like perhaps the steam engines did in the 1800’s. But this time the problem is we won’t increase the output and let the workers work more efficiently and earn more money, because it’s not manufacturing jobs which were limited by technology that this is influencing. It’s office jobs, which the economy has a pretty much fixed demand for. Workers will not improve their productivity, they will just be replaced because their work can be offloaded to a machine capable of doing that same jobs better in every significant way.
this time the problem is we won’t increase the output and let the workers work more efficiently and earn more money
I agree with what you’re saying but I just want to contextualize this bit, because you make it seem like technological advances led to increased worker productivity and higher wages.
It didn’t. It never has.
The government made it happen because people pressured the government to make it happen. Strikes, riots, and literal bloodshed twisted gilded arms to share the economic gains they were amassing for themselves.
And so the implication is that, sure, this phase of technological can increase worker productivity, letting the same number of office workers do more, work less, and earn the same amount. In principle, that is entirely possible. In practice, we arrive back where you say office workers will just be replaced.
Interesting point, I guess you are right
Can you elaborate on the “fixed demand” aspect?
From what I know as a software engineer, companies would simply make twice as much software, if their software engineers were twice as efficient. There are always requirements pushed out of scope because the complexity of the solution is growing and growing. The ability to make more complex software solutions with the same amount of engineers is not going to result in less engineers, it is just going to cause more complex software products.
Also note that more engineers has deminishing results due to communication losses. This, along with a fixed supply of engineers seems the biggest limitation to the industry to me.
From what I know as a software engineer, companies would simply make twice as much software, if their software engineers were twice as efficient.
Only if there’s demand for twice as much software. Otherwise, you make the same software twice as fast and with half as much work. Let’s go back to the example of accountants. Sure, the demand for accounting work may be somewhat increasing, but with productivity per worker increasing orders of magnitude faster than demand, the overall number of accountants shall decrease. A piece of code a junior programmer writes within a week can be obtained immediately with a tool like chatgpt simply by formulating a clear prompt – it’s not like we’re talking about better keyboards which improve your typing speed and therefore increase your productivity by 10% by letting you type code faster, it’s actually orders of magnitude!
There are always requirements pushed out of scope because the complexity of the solution is growing and growing. The ability to make more complex software solutions with the same amount of engineers is not going to result in less engineers, it is just going to cause more complex software products.
Again, sure, but wouldn’t you agree the technology will some time reach a point where more complexity is redundant? I would argue it’s sooner than later, see how smartphones and computers keep improving in their performance, but there are no technology breakthroughts anymore. Is infinite growth even possible?
Also note that more engineers has deminishing results due to communication losses. This, along with a fixed supply of engineers seems the biggest limitation to the industry to me.
Not sure what you’re getting at here, so let’s go back to your original question: what do I mean by fixed demand of the office jobs.
Doing accounting faster will not land you more gigs anymore, unless you steal some other accountants’ clients. Writing longer reports will not make your employer require you to write more of them, unless they fire your colleague who does that too. Going through motions and legal documents faster will not magically give you more legal work, unless a different legal counsel changes industry. Unlike manufacturing in the 1800s, the supply and productivity of modern jobs are not limited by technological disadvantages so much, but instead, the demand for this work is corelated with other branches of economy.
One could argue, in fact it’s an ongoing debate where I’m from (Poland): “yeah sure but when we started switching away from coal then miners were supposed to be off work as well and yet they mostly managed to find previously non-existing jobs in newly created industries and the unemployment remained low”. Right, but in that case one industry was replaced by another, workers’ productivity could be moved to doing something else. This time it’s different, because the jobs don’t change, the demand doesn’t change, instead the supply of labour (via increased, AI-fueled productivity) increases so much, that large part of the workforce is found to be straight up redundant.
