Microsoft, Google join study to see if AI will affect jobs
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
As if leadership did not already cut copywriters, designers, or accountants during the last rounds of "optimizations."
And as if video productions don't increasingly use ElevenLabs to replace voice actors for any digital and broadcast video, paying $5 for what would have been talent work with usage rights worth $1,200/6mo. Plus agency fees.
In the real world, it already happened.
Nice movie business you have there... shame if something bad were to happen to it.
Nice code you have there, yes that employee can reuse it!
Honestly, I don't see anyway to keep AI generated content from being distributed (on a worldwide basis), but perhaps it can be used to level the playing field for new players rather than building higher barriers for the entrenched "leaders".
Sadly, content copyright doesn't matter much to the companies that produce that.
Thats already the case for images in the US, and likely will be for other formats too
Many Big Tech companies are participating, with unions advising. The Cisco announcement is less clickbait-y: https://newsroom.cisco.com/c/r/newsroom/en/us/a/y2024/m04/le...
In its current state, the main thing AI does is hollow out the middle class. Who has access to the best models, and where does the money go when i.e. an entire customer support tier is let go?
We didn't do that with computers in the '70s (which are also "AI"); why start now? ;D
But, no matter who is behind a study, trust doesn't even begin until replication has occurred.
They promote their AI tools in such way that companies actively try to replace their employees with these tools, leading to more layoffs. Unemployment Insurance is either not enough, or in some cases people are ineligible to get it (I worked just over one quarter in NY and my application was rejected). There is no UBI (Universal Basic Income), also people who struggle with rent cannot get housing.
OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft and others are causing layoffs and they are happy to do that because of greed (profits and prestige of having great products). While people are left struggling to survive. When these people have nothing left to live for there will be an increase in petty and violent crime and thus affect all people.
We need better care for the people affected - housing, food, health care benefits and helping them get their next job by providing opportunities to advance their career / upskill or change career.
It already did. In 1977 Exxon studied just that, and concluded that it will destroy the planet.
But Exxon kept on drilling because of greed, demonstrating that its leaders care more about making money than killing people.
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2023-01-12/exxonmo...
Drilling oil no reason other than to give people jobs seems more virtuous than greedy, no?
Here we learn that greed means a desire to give other people jobs. The things one learns.
But since nobody else wants oil because of that whole killing people thing, clearly it's not greed.
Got it. I figured that's what was actually happening. It was strange that the original comment thought that Exxon was greedily drilling oil and sticking it in tanks to sit forevermore.
Are you under the impression that Exxon was formed and is run by a bunch of people thinking, "How can we employ lots and lots of people?" And not by people thinking, "How can we make money?"
no?
No.
The jobs at risk / already dead from AI are things like internet ghost writing / SEO spam writing and customer service roles for cheap companies. For the rest of us it's a (very useful) tool, not a competitor.
Even if its work that a wider range of people could do, it's still work that's going to need to be done, and it's not going to be done by a chatbot. So it seems that even for many jobs that LLMs could ostensibly replace, it's more likely to widen the labor pool rather than literally replace people. If anything it might increase the number of businesses and opportunities, because it would enable the breadth of domains that micro and small companies could perform in.
Vehicles were quite unique in that they were capable of entirely replacing their predecessor for simple transportation tasks. But in e.g. software, the programming tasks LLMs may one day be able to carry out are but one aspect of the job. Getting back to janitors for instance, you're not going to replace a janitor with a roomba.
But I don't think that's the real risk. The real risk is people in charge of jobs that believe AI can replace their employees, regardless of its true capabilities.
LLMs cannot even solve math problems, and we expect them to do tasks far more complex e.g. software engineering.
Attempts to make them good at math have shown its not easy, and often times sacrifices language quality. How do we expect something that cannot solve y=mx+b reliably for any input >100 to write more than a todo list app?
A lot of companies/investors are just assuming its a training data problem, but we can already produce massive amounts of robust math training data, and LLMs still aren't good at math.
At least this is my understanding, I was doing some research into Kahnmigo and its math tutoring capabilities and went down a rabbit hole about LLM math.
Who expects that? Even if LLMs produced perfect output every time, they are still just a fancy compiler. You continue to need a software engineer to write the code.
Some expect that they will enable software to go the way of the elevator, which is to say that modern elevators didn't eliminate the elevator operator – they made everyone the elevator operator. This is quite possible, and has arguably already happened at least in some niche cases. But that is an expansion of the pool of human software engineers, not an LLM doing software engineering.
Maybe there is some kind of technology out there that will someday take on the tasks of software engineering, but not LLMs. They cannot do software engineering any more than a C++ compiler can do software engineering.
https://www.cognition-labs.com/introducing-devin
SA: “Coding is probably the single area from a productivity gain we’re most excited about today"
Nvidia CEO: "Don't learn to code"
The whole group of companies working on it are all pushing that it will make programming redundant, but they don't even make a Ti-83 redundant.
This title raising the question of whether an elephant in a porcelain shop could possibly affect the porcelains.
... the exact opposite of this title.
This seems similar to asking the O&G companies to self-report their methane emissions.
So the Luddites wrecked the looms.
If AI pays off as is hoped, the incentive to suppress neo-Luddites would be even greater.
And then went on to create computers, which made them far more powerful capitalists than the loom owners. Funny how things work out.
Start Boycotting (in the original sense, literally everyone pretend they’re ghosts) the people who cut jobs after making record profits. There’s a lot we can do.
It is, though, as the problem is scarcity. So long as you have that, it is impossible to not end up in a situation where some people have things other people don't have. It doesn't go away simply by slightly changing the way people choose to organize.
> Worker solidarity, political awareness, and effective political work is the solution.
These are oft considered useful tools to help us achieve post-scarcity, but are not the solution in and of themselves. This is like saying that the hammer is the solution to the housing problem. Indeed, a hammer can help with solving the housing problem, but simply having a hammer doesn't get you there. You have to also hit the nail.
"And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth."
We are currently ensuring scarcity to propagate the system and not "solving" the problem. We could also solve homelessness - we went to the moon. The solution is... to build housing. We FORCE homelessness on people to ensure them "participating" in the system.
That's what Cuba thought, with the people coming together under worker solitary and political awareness to create an explicit mandate to see the transition from forced scarcity to post-scarcity through. Ironically, many years later, there are few places with more scarcity.
They had the tools. Yet, it seems they missed the nail. But they maintain the transition will happen any day now, so... We shall see.
> We could also solve homelessness - we went to the moon.
I don't know, the moon might be a nice place to visit, but is rather hostile as a place to live. You might want to give this a second thought.
> The solution is... to build housing.
A good idea in theory, but in practice requires people. We've completely failed to automate house production in any meaningful way despite a whole lot of trying.
And who wants to subject themselves to that harsh environment when you can relax behind a computer screen instead? Construction is not exactly fun. I expect you aren't lining up to do it. I'm definitely not. The few who are willing to do it are booked up years in advance. They are already building as fast as they can.
I do not know how is this in USA, but in my country (Brazil) we have more empty houses than homeless people (it's 11 millions of empty houses vs. 6 millions of homeless people). It shows that even if this supposed scarcity of houses are solved, capitalism will not allocate the resources in a way that maximizes human benefit, it insists in maximizing only profit and reproduction of capital. The headline in this news is a symptom: if a new tech makes possible produce more with less labor, we worry that capitalism will cut jobs, and the best news that we could receive is that it will not happen, perhaps because it will open more markets to compensate. We will never celebrate that now we will have more free time because the new tech will allow us to work less.
Right, real scarcity. You can't just wish post-scarcity into being. The USSR also made the same pledge under much the same conditions, all while being in control of most of the world's natural resources. But, still, scarcity prevailed.
> capitalism will not allocate the resources in a way that maximizes human benefit
Where humans are deemed beneficial then capitalism will allocate towards maximizing human benefit. Where humans are not deemed beneficial, you cannot system yourself out of that. Capitalism itself has no thoughts or feelings towards humans, only humans do.
And, indeed, you are quite right that humans by and large hate other humans and will do all kinds of things to "keep them down". The legal system goes to great lengths to ensure that humans cannot be come beneficial. That’s not capitalism, though.
I like how you say this as if it's some sort of slur. This is fundamentally how the world economy works, not some evil plot. And even if you have some problems with particular implementations of some brands of capitalism, "wanting to get the most value for the lowest cost", which is exactly what "profit-seeking capitalists" do, is a pretty universal human trait, from the CEO who decides he can lay off humans and replace them with AI, to the everyday consumer who decides they can use ChatGPT to plan things around a specific vacation destination instead of using a travel agent.
5 families have more wealth than 50% of Americans combined. Stock buybacks incentivize short term beahavior - and they used to be illegal!
WE set the market parameters. We don’t have to just say “this is how it works”.
Does that say more about the five families or the 120 million other families in America? Wealth is, after all, created out of thin air. Paint a painting that other people like and you've created wealth. Likewise, stop liking the metaphorical paintings those five families have and their wealth vanishes. How did most Americans become so boring that five families are responsible for 50% of all that is considered desirable?
I just think it's silly to blame "profit-seeking capitalists", which is really just another word for "people who want to get the most value for the lowest cost", which is everybody.