AI to hit 40% of jobs and worsen inequality, IMF says
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I can list so many things that were hyped up the same way 10 years ago that still aren’t revolutionising the world today.
Maybe it will get super good really fast. Or maybe it’s the next self driving trucks or 3D tv where solving the last of the problems is much harder than the first 90%.
The problem with it is that it is being marketed as the do-all productivity enhancer. It is not. There are some fields in which it excels, but are all rather very specific (think summarizing a long document).
Something like "Find me documents that talk about achieving x using y process". If it finds a few irrelevant ones or misses some, its ok and still provided value by searching far more things than you ever could manually.
Chatbots in front of customer care agents.
Every previous AI hype-train (Eliza did not replace therapists)
Battery though, we have seen the price (USD/KWh) go down every year, and the energy density (KWh/kg) increase every year.
Research articles are usually things that take years to trickle down into the mass production. And by then the hopes or lab results no longer translate, or they've evolved into improvements and savings that are harder to link back to their original source.
Why would those getting good enough happen sooner than people expected? I'd assume those will get good enough at roughly the rate pessimists expected, at least if we look historically that seems like a good bet, these things move really really slowly once you try to apply it to the real world in practice.
Would you call an AI bot to fix your heater? I would not. There's no substitute for artisanship.
AI is different than previous generation of disruptions, because its primary target will be software industry itself. ChatGPT has replaced stackoverflow and Google for me.
Even if AI can't carry out serious tasks, it can still have better form than humans, it would be an improvement for customer support compared to what some companies are doing today (almost nothing). We still need humans to escalate to, when AI is useless.
I hope instead of leading to layoffs AI will lead to competition on quality, diversity, price or customizability. Raising the bar for everyone, instead of replacing us. Is there any reason a company would prefer lowering costs to competing for market share with AI? There's more upside to increasing profits than reducing costs.
AI
The other area that really worries me is government. I think they're the most likely to get sold on AI as a cost cutting measure, we'll all suffer as a result, and there won't be any recourse.
I can't believe how many people are willing to hand the world over to a bunch of non-deterministic, opaque boxes. Being an outlier is going to suck in the future.
We’re at AI’s 80s brick cell phone stage right now, there’s a lot of improvement to come.
Software engineering is a field in which many revel in its perceived complexity, the 'status' that comes with doing a job that brings so much to the table, yet is not understood by the average person.
Now, all of a sudden, there is a tool that is starting to bite into that and it is very easy to dismiss it using phrases such as "half broken garbage".
For now AI in this context is often just another piece of such tooling and people using it may experience for example github copilot or the like spit out faulty blocks of code most of the time when it's not doing something cookiecutter. When you then know full well it needs to improve till it's almost correct 100% of the time and do a whole lot more then yeah people are going to be dismissive for a good while longer.
Not the AIs we have today, I don't even think the initial AGI will be smart enough to significantly simplify current processes, it would need to be much smarter than the humans it replaces to do that.
If you program entirely by copy and pasting from stack overflow, sure you should be worried. But despite that being a meme, most people do more than that.
1 year ago if you’d told me that commercial photographers would be toast, I wouldn’t have believed you. But after Midjourney V6, I have zero doubts that commercial photography is absolutely doomed.
If you make something ridiculously cheap to produce, it also has the effect of discounting the value people take from it.
We’re crossing the uncanny valley and soon enough you won’t know if an image is real or AI. The tell-tale signs will fade (already are) and the “authenticity” you speak of will actually be there. So to speak.
I can already take a photorealistic photo with my camera, no AI needed. We don't hire photographers just because they can create photorealistic images, we hire them because they can take the right photorealistic images.
It's similar to how people are worried about AI killing all programming jobs. Yes, I've also been blown away by the ability of LLMs to write some code, but my value as a developer comes more from being detail oriented, understanding when requirements are underspecified, thinking through edge-cases, and then finally being able to turn this into something a machine can execute. Compilers didn't put earlier assembly language programmers out of business, it just required most programmers to program differently.
While I do worry about the sheer number of jobs (because I think more junior, entry-level jobs will get supplanted, which makes it harder to move up the career ladder in the first place), I think people will still want the expertise of good photographers.
Maybe we’ll get ubiquitous local stable diffusion, companies can just send the prompts and then we can just skim the text to get the idea if we don’t feel like rendering them.
No one needs to take a photo of a can of Coke sitting on a poolside bar when Midjourney can create it in 30 seconds.
I think the area that will move will be stock photos. They're only really used when the photo doesn't actually matter. I'm already seeing many AI generated images replacing stock photos on random blog posts.
Have you ever seen an ad for a fastfood burger? Have you ever seen the real thing? The ad looks literally nothing like the real thing.
Off the top of my head: anything related to real estate, food, clothing - if the ad happens to reflect the actual product you lucked out.
Either way, it would literally be impossible to get the food in the picture.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2014/02/fast-fo...
Maybe it's a hard thing to search for, but I mostly just found FTC guidelines which state "Your Ads Must Be Truthful and Accurate" but I can't find any more details. I think there's stuff like you can't misrepresent the dimensions of something or the color but I doubt there would be laws that don't effect photoshop but would apply to AI.
It’s fine for filler images that don’t serve any purpose. But say you want a photo of a specific street for your story, having a street that looks a bit similar but mostly randomised significantly detracts from the value.
If they do change the can, they can train a model with the new can design. A few images can become millions.
It’s basically bimodal now.
No, but it has turned anything but the very highest end furniture into absolute garbage. It's nearly impossible to find furniture made of solid wood (whether a couch frame or a dresser drawer) unless you're spending darn near 5 figures on a set.
There is still manual labour in some of that, but it's vastly reduced, and almost never bespoke.
The same is true of so many things. Only those with money to burn, can afford that ancestral experience.
The software would then create a bunch of photos based on the positioning and expressions captured by the tripod-mounted panoramic cameras, but enhanced with the facial photos taken at check-in. The number of photos you could create would be infinite, of course (and would likely be priced based on the number of photos you review and download).
Photographers do provide value when they compose photos, but this aspect would be less important if you can edit photos after-the-fact using AI. Hell, I might like to touch up some of the photos from my wedding, to get rid of unsightly background elements that the (expensive) photographer failed to account for.
If people wanted just any old pictures at their wedding, they'd put some disposable cameras on the tables and call it a day (and some do exactly that, to be fair, and save a lot of money. But most people don't).
A.I. is not likely going to provide authentic in the moment photos anytime soon, if ever, and if it ever does then it's basically just an motorized mechanical photographer anyway, that would need to be able to go over various terrain effectively or be a drone, probably. At that point it'd likely be about as expensive as just hiring a person, and a person would probably be more friendly and get better photos out of people.
NFL has plenty of authentic camera work mixed in with a bit of flair like that (I didn't know they did that now, that's interesting), but I imagine for a wedding they care even more about making sure it's fully accurate and not generated. Maybe I'm wrong, guess we'll see what happens in the next ten years.
I do know in my case that we could have gone cheaper on photographers and we didn't, though (we saved money by not getting video or paying for a physical album afterwards, not the people), and I wouldn't be interested in A.I. generating the pictures (even assuming it would be better quality than today) in any way instead of snapping what actually happened.
And I'm not someone who's against people using generative A.I. for the most part, so that doesn't have anything to do with my preference.
From a few crappy photos of your face, you can generate photos of you in nearly every setting: so I think all the "studio" part of a commercial photographer's job is toast.
Why do you need the actual baby when you can have a fake baby with mangled hears and 7 fingers per hand?
Comments like these are fine on Twitter and Facebook, but if you're on HackerNews, commenting on an article about AI, it makes you look completely out of touch. You've clearly not kept pace with the technology and are just repeating verbatim what you saw 6 months ago.
HN, as a whole, has been so behind the curve that it's not even funny.
Future images will make real babies look ugly in comparison.
Midjourney v6 still has massive issues with lining up stuff that goes behind something else and I have no idea if that’s fixable or an inherent limitation to their approach. Hands have noticeably improved, but are still very hit and miss etc.
What’s really frustrating is I often can’t tell if I’m bad at prompts or the underlying system is has issues.
It's not just NVIDIA, Ubisoft also has some very impressive research in this area. I believe Ubisoft has already implemented some of the new tech in their recent games - it makes sense, they have hundreds and hundreds of people work on their games and they require huge amounts of animation, any savings there are going to be huge for them.
If AI is cheap, then by using AI generated content to cut costs, you will cheapen your brand by association. There are examples of brands doing this to themselves already.
I am not saying this in gist or to as a gotcha, the reality is that many --I dare say majority of-- "handmade" and "artisanal" brands are just that "brands" and are often only slightly --if that-- different from their mass produced "counter-parts".
And yes, I hate how much quote I had to use too, you can blame the marketing people for that.
Average consumers won’t be able to tell at all
Do yourself a favor and head over to Midjourney’s explore tab after signing up for an account.
I'm not entirely sure a final nail will be from AI, but there are def. too many people chasing too few jobs in that industry.
Maybe its a bit of a stretch but I don't believe that people will be like "oh crap, my skills don't make me a living anymore. bad luck, nothing I can do about it". Currently people in disadvantage(real or perceived) are already revolting against affirmative action and cheaper labor from abroad.
However, history shows that it's actually bad because it brings out the worst humans, the ones with the most greed and the most curel methods, and results in things like civil war, military dictatorships, and much higher wealth inequality than before.
This is in contrast to the countries that are resource poor, they live from human labour instead and seem to have better development trajectory. Of course, there is an impact of influence from the west which benefits from cheap resources, but I'd argue that some of those effects come from the inside.
I think that with AI, our societies will look more like some african country with warlords than the developed, labour based economies we have today.
Does that mean that soldier is going to be the last job? AI is coming for those jobs too. Drones of various kinds are already used in today's wars, but they do certainly still have need for foot soldiers.
I think that the emergence of AI will have a major impact on resource distribution questions in developed economies, which until now have distributed resources based on labour force. Without intervention, it will trend more towards distribution seen in countries with the curse of resources, which is more violent.
It's not the same. Oil and other extractable resources are not evenly spread. AI can be. You only need to train once the base models, but oil extraction is continual work.
As for consumption - both resources and AI support diverse applications creating diverse jobs. AI has this interesting property that it adapts to the user by itself, the benefit flows mostly to the user as they prompt to solve their problems. The AI provider only gets cents per million tokens.
When talking about job market comparing humans with AI is not very useful, humans will all have AI support, the real comparison will be between AI alone and AI+human.
The same argument you’re making about automation could’ve been made 70 years ago before outsourcing was the norm. Those factory workers whose jobs were sold for pennies on the dollar? They will rise up against the factory owners. Actually, it turns out that racism is a pretty powerful distraction.
I don't believe even a bit that the progress can be stopped, can't even be slowed IMHO. However the society will be dramatically transformed and that transform wouldn't end as a libertarian dream world.
John Henry fought the steam digger and won, but it killed him. Fast forward to the present I don’t see tunnel projects unmanned - instead they’re covered in people working on various things. The difference is the people aren’t hired for their strong backs but for their strong mind and skill. Machines aren’t replacing people - they’re replacing the people doing the job now with new people doing an adjacent job. The churn in labor is definitely painful, but it’s disingenuous to say automation has eliminated work for humans. It’s just changing the nature of work.
Finally, what’s so awesome about working? I welcome a time when humans are freed from the chains of toil. And if robots fight each other, as long as they do it away from people, that’s one job I’m thrilled to see end.
If AGI becomes a thing, without political intervention, a lot of people will effectively be left out of the economy.
never happened in any field, task or topic, domain experts >> AI
I don't know where we currently are in the hockey stick curve in ML/AI development, but if it keeps developing at this pace it will soon start hitting high-skill and high-income workers, and then we're going to have a huge economic problem.
Most work done is like this, still, even today. It may be replaced down the road, but an AI model won't help someone take out the trash.
Cleaning, food prep, labor, retail, etc…
It’s jobs that exist in the digital realm that are way more likely to be automated in the near term
I feel like these discussions are always so high level/hand wavy
Platforms like this will have a huge impact on law firms, small and large. The biggest deals will always get human scrutiny, but midsize deals will probably be done with tools like these. Law school graduates who expected to be able to make six-figure salaries to pay off their six-figure debts are going to be negatively impacted.
The smart ones are already trying to figure out how to use these tools, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and which areas of law are going to be affected less (litigation versus transaction).
I don't think it matters much. Eventually most AI tools will be as easy to use as a smartphone. Why waste time learning ever changing AI workflows and APIs at this point.
Up to know, all technological revolutions have occurred in an exponentially growing economy. That's why Schumpeter's "creative destruction" was not a problem: it was compensated by the opening of new areas for growth, mostly unlocked by consuming more resources.
But now we are hitting the limits of the planet, and amongst others the limit of extraction rhythm for most our materials. So the exponential growth can't continue. (apart from the growth from technological progress, which will be much lower)
That's where the argument doesn't hold: we do not have a growing supply of work anymore, so the increased productivity of some workers will just prevent the others from working.
100 years ago, nobody could imagine a job like computer programmer. Jobs will disappear, but new jobs will be created.
This will definitely create or widen inequality. However regulate AI aka EU also wouldn't help. You may slow it down but the result is still the same.
I don't have a solution. I know the basic common theme to this question on HN is UBI. But I have yet to see or read anyone's answer to how UBI solves housing issues. ( Which is a problem slightly different in different location / country / politics ) I guess that is a different topic.
The first thing would be to de-profitize places for humans to live.
Interest rates for humans with 0,1, or 2 homes could be set to low or preferably 0 interest.
Taxes for homes could skyrocket after 2 homes, as to make parasitical rental companies uneconomical.
AirBNB and similar rental structures can be required to business and hotelier standards (aka: make it uneconomical).
Banks can also be compelled to take evidence of "paid $2000/mo rental for X years" as proof of paying same for mortgage.
Companies who want to be in the rental industry must follow stringent cost-lowering structures, like rent control and other de-profiting strategies.
And also, we need to build housing of all sorts, and not just single home dwellings and apartments. We're missing the various sorts of "middle urbanized housing" cause it's illegal.
I would argue that the timing of policy related to this issue can do at least as much damage as the technology itself.
* I.e your one fleeting existence on earth.