AI will be great for big businesses, alright for small businesses, and catastrophic for many employees. I imagine a gig economy where self employed workers need to leverage ai to be effective, and it becoming exhausting to keep up. I hope I’m wrong
Your second point is like saying: 'I imagine a gig economy where taxi drivers will need to leverage a car to be effective.' If someone offers you a hammer to build a cabin, why would you say no?
To your point about it being good for small and medium sized businesses — let’s assume it gets rid of a significant amount of workers. Who would be the consumers of these products, other small/medium sized businesses who also mostly have AI producing work? Obviously it’s a simplified question, but I’m curious how we’ll handle the removal of “useless workforce” when AI does an objectively better job.
Gutting a ton of jobs across many sectors in the economy won't change demand for food or rent, but will likely hurt every service sector and slow the economy down overall as people without jobs push out purchases they would have made otherwise.
The previous generations could never imagine the kinds of jobs we have today.
Now I am not saying that this is a guarantee to happen again, and that new jobs will be created and such. But I think anyone claiming to know that "this time it will be different" and that "we wont create new jobs that we can't imagine today" could be just as wrong about that idea too.
As maybe a last resort, regulation could play a factor in how many AI resources a company can use, which will mimic scarcity.
You act as if humans haven’t been solving existential problems for their whole existence. It’s not like 50% of the workforce will get laid off and there will be no response to that.
Who's going to buy from these businesses if people don't have jobs?
Other businesses.
If the "people don't have jobs" due to AI, consumer goods companies will go out of business, and society's resources will get redirected to non-consumer businesses and the passion projects of the ownership class.
Outside Soviet Russia, there has to be an end consumer in there somewhere. There isn't such a thing as a truly "non-consumer business."
And I answered that. The ultimate consumers will be a group of wealthy people who control the productive resources using AI and use them to pursue their personal goals. There will be some B2B exchanges between those people, and perhaps a smallish cadre of employees who's labor is still useful to the wealthy, but most commerce as we know it will grind to a halt because the vast majority workers' labor won't be valuable to those who could pay them.
I think this is a dead angle for a lot of AI experts. That sudden bump in efficiency might ruin large parts of the markets businesseses are built upon.
The concern is always that there is a finite amount of work[0] to go around in any given iteration of our current style of society. New kinds of work do get invented from time to time. Automation eliminates kinds of work. The two are rarely in sync with eachother and the difference is usually measured in human privation and suffering.
[0]work being defined as, "something you can trade for food and healthcare"
Though I can imagine a counter argument from a technologist/futurist positing that the incentive to automate in part comes from that merciless system of survival.
The modern Luddite, I think, doesn't necessarily "hate" looms, or their inventors. They just don't have any faith that those necessary compensations you describe will ever happen, or at least not quickly enough to save them. Perhaps the government is convinced by exactly that argument above. Or at very least too apathetic (or financially tangled) to fight it.
We all act along the axes where we can affect something, effect something. Smashing looms is a fool's errand, but sometimes that's all the power you feel you have.
Agree
> We all act along the axes where we can affect something, effect something. Smashing looms is a fool's errand, but sometimes that's all the power you feel you have.
However I think what's fascinating about this is it requires believing you can't change your skill set to something else. Sometimes I don't think its as simple as feeling empowered, but also fear and anxiety about change.
Oh my god, yes. The way it makes everything possible means you never get to feel like you actually know WTF you're doing, because the edge is always expanding. Bring back the days of having a small shelf of 5-10 books that contained 99% of what you needed to know to do your programming/sysadmin/whatever job.
Yes, it's absolutely exhausting. If you've never experienced or even seen what came before, it may not seem so just because you don't have a point of comparison.
I was less productive than I am now, but making something was more satisfying.
Today.. .. first one has to get up speed on whatever the F changed this week
Before the internet could pose a challenge to my bookshelf, I had over fifty that I referred to fairly regularly (my office library had about 100, my total library several hundred), ~5 of those covered 80% of what I needed for a given project, but which 5 those were changed from project to project.
This is made worse by their size and scope. Spring Boot is a giant ecosystem, as is .NET, as is Azure, etc.
Also, search results tend to be a sea of data which might, or might not, contain some crucial bit of information that will help.
So, all too often, "using Google to answer a question" becomes a 2-hour or day-long research project to figure out how to solve some small, arcane problem like why the POST to some service doesn't have the Authorization header.
And when there's internal and external pressure to be productive, meet deadlines, and not feel incompetent, sometimes it gets frustrating and stressful and tiring.
My point is that we couldn't possibly do our jobs now without Google, but that we used to be able to do it just by knowing the stuff in a few books really well and knowing where—in the books or in e.g. manpages—to find what we didn't know. A small shelf of books is way better than Google, if you can be reasonably certain that the answers you need are in there.
Yes, this situation is far more exhausting.
Who am I kidding, Idiocracy is already a reality. Just look at the comments here on HN.