I remember typesetters in our locality were protesting in the 80s that computers were taking off their jobs. They started something like "burn the computers" movement.
More people were later employed as composers than there were typesetters.
These kinds of transitions are large scale wealth redistribution. Your random typesetter 20 years into their career, with experience, good pay, and whole life built around economic conditions they spent those decades working hard to achieve, is not going to jump into a role of senior offset printer specialist, or DTP team manager. They're going to become a junior designer at best, most likely fall out of industry and into a junior whatever role. With commensurate drop in salary.
If you're over 30, imagine dropping down to whatever you earned when you were 20, and tell me that people protesting automation don't have an argument. And remember: it's only your career that resets; your health and obligations and remaining years to live do not.
It absolutely did take jobs. It's just that the job loss in one area was compensated by the growth in other areas.
However hoping that it'll be the same with AI is incredible naive. The job shift in the industrial revolution was possible since there were still lots of tasks left that the machines couldn't do. The areas that can't be done by a machine now are dramatically shrinking with advanced AI. There is not much area left where jobs can shift too.
The creative jobs can be automated just the same as everything dealing with digital data. Skilled trades, carpenter, plumbers and electricians might still be safe for some years, as robots still struggle with climbing a ladder or even just stairs, but those are areas that don't seem to be destined for rapid growth. Whatever new job you can think of, will probably be automated away before a human ever get a chance to touch it.
The most impressive part with ChatGPT and friends after all isn't just that they are reasonably good at what they are doing, but how universal they are. ChatGPT didn't need to be meticulously programmed to do the things it does, it learned most of that by itself just from the data feed into it. Meaning there really isn't any domain that you can't automate with AI in the long run.
What's left for humans? No idea.
Exactly. The ramifications of this tech will brake the current system for sure. Why someone will spend 15 years of his/her life studying medicine if by that time AI will replace him/her?
The more we keep going down the rabbit hole, the more we can see there's no utopia at the end of the tunnel. This is no hyperbole, we don't know what to expect if you automate everything.
Just look for some answers here: - "Blue collar jobs are safe". Really? What happens when everyone is an electrician, plumber, taxi driver, etc...?
- "I use it to amplify my productivity". What happens when AI is so good that it can literally swap you
- "Just create a business around it". There's no competitive edge anymore. Everyone can do "everything" and won't need any expertise at all when AI gets "there".
I'm a SWE but I'm trying to purchase land and invest in things that AI can't replace, like food production, hehe. Agriculture will make a strong comeback this decade. Forget airbnb, a farm is where the $$$$$ is going to be, if not, ask Gates why is he buying land and becoming the biggest "farmer" in the US.
I'm not a conspiracy person, but I can see the "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy" getting dangerously close to reality.
Farms in recent years have consolidated. There are exceptionally few farmers feeding all of us today. This will likely only get worse once all their farm equipment is operated by AI as one farmer will be able to manage far more acreage than they were previously able to.
Nothing is immune.
Of course, it's unlikely we replace plumbers anytime soon, but between the incredible DIY-friendly tools in that space (Shark-bite, PEX) and the fact that no one will have any money to pay for their services, they're probably screwed too.
Never have seen what the answer to people in 40s and 50s with family who can't do a career reset. I guess they'll just have to take a huge pay cut and deal with it, I don't know.
Many of the new jobs' employees were from population growth, people that lived in the countryside thanks to the growth in food production that otherwise wouldn't have, then moved to the cities, etc, as sanitation improved a general fall in the death rate prior to the fall in the birth rate (but later than the initial migration to cities).
Nor was the city standard of living equivalent as people move from rural households (admittedly often multi generational ones, so more crowded than modern ones) to overcrowded tenements.
So the story people gloss over is that all the rural cobblers went to the city and became factory workers and everything is fine. But while it might be a reassuring story that _society_ survives and evolves, it's not at all clear that individuals did as well.
The guy in the OP didn’t even have his job taken, he just had to use a new tool that made his work far more efficient.
If AI destroys the middle class, then the whole system collapses. No middle class = no spending = less businesses = more low-income and at risk people, and the cycle continues.
We'll basically create a neofeudalist society where the rich will control everything and the people will work for them (food, housing, etc...).
It seems crazy, etc... but not improbable. I'm not a conspiracy person, but I can't stop thinking about this: These advancements align with "You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy" sentence from the WEF.
- AI will create more jobs (group 1); - AI will destroy the middle class (group 3).
This is not trial and error. These are people's lives we're talking about. Families, children, etc...
Let's hope this innovation won't cause any bad scenario to occur.
What does have to be changed with the rise of AI is the tax laws. We basically should treat it the same as if an adversary was dumping product under cost (i.e. tax AI "work") and subsidize human workers; basically run a version of protectionism against AI - if we want human work in this post-AGI world to be viable.
They weren't "scared it's going to take their jobs" -- they were _seeing_ the jobs they had _actually disappear_ (not hypothetical future fear), replaced by worse-paying jobs with much worse conditions. They were exactly right that their actual lives were going to get a lot harder.
From a recent Cory Doctorow post: https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-stea... :
> Despite what you may have heard, the Luddites weren’t technophobes. They were skilled workers, expert high tech machine operators who supplied the world with fine textiles. Thanks to a high degree of labor organization through craft guilds, the workers received a fair share of the profit from their labors. They worked hard, but they earned enough through their labors to enjoy lives of dignity and comfort.
> Nineteenth century textile workers enjoyed a high degree of personal autonomy. Their machines were in their homes and they worked surrounded by family and friends, away from the oversight of the rich merchants who brought their goods to market. This was the original “cottage industry.”
> The factory owners who built their “dark, Satanic mills” weren’t interested in making life easier for textile workers by automating their labor. They wanted to make workers’ lives harder.
> Textile machines were valued because they were easier to operate than the hand-looms that preceded them, and that meant that workers who wanted a fair wage for a fair day’s work could be fired and replaced with new workers, without the logistical hassle of the multi-year apprenticeship demanded by the hand-loom and its brethren.
> As Brian Merchant documents in Blood in the Machine, his stunning, forthcoming history of the Luddites, the factory owners of the industrial revolution wanted machines so simple that children could work them, because that would let them pick over England’s orphanages, tricking young kids to come work in their factories for ten and twelve hour days.
> These children were indentured for a period of ten years, starved and mercilessly beaten when they missed quota. The machines routinely maimed or killed them. One of these children, Robert Blincoe, survived to write a bestselling memoir detailing the horrifying life of the factory owners’ child slaves, inspiring Dickens to write Oliver Twist.
> he just had to use a new tool that made his work far more efficient.
He had all satisfaction, creativity, and joy sapped out of his job. He was made alienated, made to feel pointless, in order to commodify a creative pursuit.
Technology is doing what it has always done, rob skilled people of purpose. From the luddites, to potters, shoemakers, etc. They had a skill that was important for other people. Automation made this cheaper, so these skilled laborers were no longer of use. But now everything we have is made out of cheap materials, nothing lasts. Sure its cheap, it has to be cheap for the out-of-the-job skilled worker who is now working a service job, to be able to afford this automated commodity.
This degrades our society, piece by piece, stone by stone. What is the end goal of this automation? The folks who are reaping the benefits of this efficiency will continue to hoard. They'll fight any effort to give back some of those profits robbed from the laborers. We're turning into a society where we just continuously exchange cheap pointless pieces of plastic just to survive. Zero meaning left except for the psychopaths at the top, they're the only ones allowed to derive meaning from their work.
This isn’t what I’m saying at all. His job changed. You know who else has their job change sometimes? Everybody. I remember going to work one day and being told that I was going to be using Angular from now on. On that day all satisfaction, creativity, and joy was sapped out of my job. But I didn’t go and cry about it on Reddit.
> Zero meaning left except for the psychopaths at the top, they're the only ones allowed to derive meaning from their work.
Luddites say this about every single technological innovation that they whinge about.
Perhaps you should have. I think people deserve to feel loss. Alienation is a real issue. Automation breeds Alienation. I much rather feel meaning at work than have a cheaper TV or yet another data mining website that requires yet another account for little benefit.
> Luddites say this about every single technological innovation that they whinge about.
Possibly because it should be concerning that any meaning found in work is being optimized away for someone else's benefit. The weird lack of empathy to admit it happened to you and to decide someone else should feel it to, sorta worries me.
Especially in a creative field. Who does the cookie cutter AI models benefit? It doesn't benefit the consumer who wasted money on a lazy product, it doesn't benefit the people working on the project, as now their working hours are cut due to the soulless optimization. It benefits the boss, the guy extracting this value and selling a lesser product.
Having a job isn’t about finding the ultimate fulfilment in life. It’s about two parties exchanging value, that’s it. If you’d prefer to go back to a time before technological innovation made the necessities of life so cheap to produce that they’re accessible to basically everybody, then I’m sure you could find a country that hasn’t yet gone through that stage of development to live in. I’m almost certain that you don’t actually want that though…
This is your thinking: "Because all previous technological revolutions created more jobs, it follows that the AI technological revolution will create more jobs."
However there is an obvious difference between all previous revolutions and this one: previous revolutions replaced labor. The AI revolution replaces thought. Even the computer revolution replaced labor, such as "typing things onto paper" or "updating a ledger".
For me, the whole ChatGPT debacle just showed me that 99% (or 100%) of humans are, themselves, just autocompletion generators, with the training model being a religious text, a political manifesto or propaganda masquerading as a school system.