Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
“But those weren’t real jobs,” some might say.
So it doesn’t count until it replaces programmer jobs? Because that’s coming soon too. Would you really encourage your kids to go into this field, expecting them to still have good prospects in 15 years?
Also, we used to have a middle class with lots of authors and musicians and artists before the internet commoditized everything
Many programmers do little more than glue together framework code, and make an excellent living doing it. Little sets them apart other than how fast they jump to the framework of the week. There's not a lot of separation from rent-seeking.
What would you do to change the direction of things? Make AI illegal, and hope there aren't companies that will just use it anyways?
I see so many people basically say “there’s nothing we can do about it therefore there’s no problem at all”. I don’t think this is a coincidence. This is a very deliberate effort by those in the tech space who want to capture and privatize all the benefits for themselves to make it seem like there are no alternatives to the current trajectory of a handful of companies hoarding all the benefits of AI.
Once you accept that there are possible problems one can do stuff to address those problems, such as maybe democratizing AI so it benefits anybody and not just a handful of people who happened to be at the right place at the right time.
Heck, even if you accept that there isn’t a problem you can still recognizing that the current trajectory may not be a good one.
No one is saying that. What people are saying is that technology has routinely made certain jobs irrelevant since the beginning of human civilization, and no one can do anything about it other than accept it and move on. Soon enough new ones will spring up to take their place. Sharing and commenting on variations of the same article every single day is certainly not helping anyone's jobs.
10 new jobs cannot be sufficient to replace 100 replaced jobs. What are other 90 going to do?
Did the world end when weavers lost their jobs because of automated looms or elevator operators lost their job because of buttons? Just like all the times before, we will figure it out. The only thing that will make the outcome worse is forced government action based on a few loud voices and populist demands.
Wait, what's that you say? AI can make hyper-realistic porn now too?
We're doomed.
1) increasing output for the same labor costs
2) reducing labor costs by replacing humans with machines or smaller numbers of humans that operate the machines
The interesting difference is that AI can automate a wide range of "creative" and "knowledge worker" jobs that formerly resisted automation, so many tech workers (and others) may have their jobs automated out of existence, much as cloud computing automated the work of human system and network administrators.
If AI replaces my job, I'll accept it. I don't want to do a job that could better be done by a machine.
All you need is a little push and good tooling around the software to make voice actors entirely replaceable.
Don't try and solve a problem before it is even a problem. Heck if anything good AI generated voiceovers will be a huge boost to the indie gaming industry, so I hope it can actually happen.
>Heck if anything good AI generated voiceovers will be a huge boost to the indie gaming industry.
And all other video game industries, which will also not be paying voice actors.
You haven't been paying attention. There are Waymo fully autonomous rides happening already in multiple very large cities. It exists every bit as much as AI voice acting platforms.
In fact it is completely natural and healthy that there is a transformation in the job market, although it can easily be a tragedy for the individual.
>So far the employment numbers in the US are looking extremely good.
Voice actors are a tiny group. They don't really factor into nation wide statistics.
I remember that as an AI-car company driven hype cycle that was used to justify beta testing their cars on public roads. According to them, traffic Jams were supposed to be a solved problem and everyone would be making 20k/yr leasing out their car as a robotaxi.
With that said, the impact of AI is not equal across different industries.
Can't go from text to the desired inflection yet.
I have a hunch the arts don't need to worry as much as they do now.
Celebrity is, has always been and will continue to be a draw.
The SAG-AFTRA strike was in large part about AI. The fact the strike happened, that approximately 200k people were that concerned about their livilhood that they went on strike is all quite strong evidence there is a real concern. At this juncture, I think the burden of proof would be on you for why those 200k people had no concerns, that they skipped paychecks and sold their homes for nothing.
A strike that was so painful to the union itself, seemingly would have been about something important. "the "harshest pain" was "perhaps felt among the below-the-line workers who've had to sell or mortgage their homes, and wipe through IRAs to survive." [1] If that strike was over nothing, that sure was a lot of pain to inflect for no cause of concern what-so-ever. I would trust those people to know their own industry far better than myself.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_SAG-AFTRA_strike
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I don't see Devin or any other type of AI practically replacing a software engineer any time soon. I believe we agree there, and perhaps that was your original point. I think that point was incorrectly extrapolated to other industries. Further, the timeline for when jobs can be taken by AI is different for different industries. This article, where I was trying to see if I could find any raw numbers, summed up the concern pretty well for actors & screen-writers (in essence, AI is already there for them):
> Using AI to create performances that never took place is not just hypothetical. It is already happening. But AI-generated deepfakes, such as a series of convincing but totally fabricated videos of a Tom Cruise doppelganger, are mostly found on social media, not in movies or shows from the studios.
> But the same technology could easily be used to replace the actors in background roles in studio and streaming productions — the ones listed in the credits with titles like “second police officer” or “waiter in the restaurant.” These roles generate a huge number of the jobs that SAG-AFTRA members depend on to pay their bills. [2]
Which is to say, as a software engineer, when I look at Devin, I call BS that it can replace another software engineer. Though, if my trade were creating images, AI is already there were a film industry could decide they want pictures of 6 fingered people because it will boost their profit margin, that is already a reality. If I were shown an AI that did almost exactly my job, I would probably be concerned.
Is this all a bad thing, a good thing, avoidable, or even necessary? I don't know. Is it happening - yes, in different industries to different degrees. (Frankly, we in hacker news need to get our heads out of our asses, not everyone in the world is a software engineer)
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/18/business/ai-actors-strike/ind...
Working for living is a problem to be solved.
The purpose of technology is to automate things, increase free time.
The purpose of politics is to distribute gains justly, whatever that is.
There used to be a lot more horses… I’m finding 25 million in the US in 1920 compared with 3.8 million today. Of course, they can no longer occupy the niche in society they used to, and so like in nature; when the niche is removed; they can’t just find some other way to be productive or even survive. I don’t think we are so different. Based on the past, I think it’s dangerous to believe some few will keep the rest of us around. Dangerous, because unlike horses, this will cause significant unrest, and ultimately we can’t predict the outcome. My guess is ultimately, with fewer jobs, there will eventually be less people, for better or worse.
I imagine it looks like a transition of the middle class to the lower class (with some going to a higher class with specialized technology roles as class traitors), and then the lower class, having had their labor invalidated, being put on UBI and being sucked like cattle by corporations, eroding their rights and sovereignty. With social media addiction, rampant disinformation, newer generations won’t even have the faculties to conceptualize their fate and resist. I also don’t think unrest could ever reach a boiling point in the US with how addicted, misinformed, and manipulated most of the population is.
Eventually, we see a complete unification of the wealthy with the state and we transition back into serfdom. People trapped in debt, dependent on the state for sustenance, except this time the state has no dependence on their labor. What happens next is your choice of dystopian horror fiction.
I strongly, viscerally disagree with this. People (mostly) need to feel like they are capable agents and also like they are contributing to something larger than themselves. I’ve seen friends struggle to get a job and find their place in the world; sitting alone at home and watching TV for weeks straight is an inhuman way to exist, and that’s where a lot of people will end up without work, as the average person seems to be pretty terrible at stimulating themselves intellectually.
Note that this doesn’t strictly require capitalism or a 40 hour workweek or anything like that. Since AI is so great at solving everything, maybe one day it can organize the distribution of work to keep the remaining humans busy. I don’t know.
similarly : work exists outside of wages, as do co-operative and unpaid grand works.
the (probably fantastical) hope is that when a 'living wage' as a concept disappears it will free up people to pursue things that they're actually passionate about to form an identity and purpose.
put from another angle : do you think it's great that people can't find identity without employment?
it seems to me we should treat 'lack of identity and self worth due to lack of employment' as a pathology rather than something that we need to feed employment into. the human condition has lasted a lot longer than our current hyper-capitalism-centric ethos about work and passion; if people are becoming worse for it we should probably change the habits and motivations rather than providing their pacifier and acting as if it's a normal human thing for a psyche to dissolve when allowed to act as a free agent.
That’s like asking me if I think it’s ‘great’ that people have two legs and a finite lifespan. It just is. What you choose to do under constraints is a big part of your identity.
> it seems to me we should treat 'lack of identity and self worth due to lack of employment' as a pathology
Man, is there anything that isn’t a pathology these days?
It is, but I'd argue that's a failure of imagination on their part to do anything else other than watch TV. There are many opportunities to volunteer somewhere and get engaged with a community, but they have to get off their couch to do it. (don't even need to get off the couch, given the right set of skills.)
Wall•E predicted a world of rich, fat humans amusing and eating themselves to death. It got the rich part wrong.
The people on the ship where the 1%ers.
100%, but that doesn't mean it has to be work. That doesn't have to be a job, especially one that you enjoy only 30% of the time. Purpose can come form lots of things, but we just push everyone to make that thing commercial, part of capitalism
I had a job where I got payed, but had no real work. It was genuinely awful.
Not to cry about my mental health, but it was very taxing for me. I was just sitting around doing random things occasionally.
Knowledge workers are the ones creating that gap, and places without them are a lot better for ordinary people. Consider somewhere like Iowa, which is very flat economically because there’s no knowledge work. The median income is a bit lower than say New Jersey. But in practice life is better. You can buy a house for 3-4x the median income, because there’s no Amazon engineers pushing you out of the way.
Those property prices are not going down any significant amount. The capital system in the US has realized it can buy up as much property as possible and use it to extract as much wealth as possible via literal rent seeking. Places that are not close to anywhere have had rent prices explode. Oh, and if there is a massive 2008 like housing crash, the banks themselves will hold on to the properties keeping prices high. Meanwhile the Bezeo's themselves that have the AI will be buying up as many real assets as possible.
It's an unflattering take for many egos, but it's what's actually happening. It's not the "capital system" that's bidding up the price of housing. Only a fraction of housing is owned by investors, and only a fraction of those investors are large investors like "banks." The figure for "investor-owned" properties includes individuals who own rental properties--many of whom are the "minor rich" created by the knowledge industry. (Not Bezos, but his project managers and engineering managers.)
You could ban large corporations from buying investment properties, but it wouldn't address the basic problem resulting from the fact that you have 20% of the population engaged in knowledge work whose incomes are vastly outstripping those of the middle 60%. That's why normal people have been pushed out of places like the Bay Area.
Some more discussion last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39902217
The mistake I see is we are applying Jon Stewarts comments to the software industry. Perhap that mis-application is due to recent biases from things like Devin. Mr Stewart OTOH is really more speaking about the impact of AI to the acting industry, his industry, for which he is an expert. Jon Stewart historically brings the receipts, he routinely researches the topics he speaks about. If you recall, he was in the habit of reading the books of many of his guests. Based on that history, I would flip your comment on its head.