AI Doesn't Kill Jobs? Tell That to Freelancers
wsj.com
wsj.com
It's progress and efficiency. It's advantageous to the people with the purse strings and only hurts the people whose skills are no longer required.
The inequality will continue indefinately; AI isn't going anywhere. At least that gives us all (the laid off and the replaceable) more time to catch up on classic tv: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brain_Center_at_Whipple%27...
Until there is no one left to buy the actual product, at which point those on top suffer as well.
Except this isn't close to reality.
If it comes to pass it sounds very grim
And it does seem like the direction we are heading in, with less and less likelihood of slowing or reversing course
It's generating drawings and music and games and such
It's not replacing fast food service workers, or retail or farmers or plumbers. It's not replacing the shitty grunt work
It's replacing the creative, beautiful stuff
I'm not being childish. I'm simply looking at reality without my head in the sand
It's replacing work that is purely to do with information.
Years ago there was talk about the "anywheres" vs. the "somewheres" - people who can do their jobs from anywhere (home, a cafe, a plane, the other side of the world) vs people whose work is necessaily rooted to a particular place. Your plumbers and farmers and retail workers.
AI can replace "anywhere" work, but there is little progress in robotics. Replacing "somewhere" work is many years away.
I agree there's little progress in robotics, relative to AI. But "many years away" might mean just 10 years away. You can buy this robot for 16 grand USD:
https://www.unitree.com/images/Unitree%20G1%20EN%201080p%20%...
To me, it feels like the barrier now is more on the software end than the hardware end. Is this your impression too, or do you disagree?
https://mobile-aloha.github.io/
AFAIK this is the current for-profit SOTA robot, which goes for $16,000:
https://www.unitree.com/images/Unitree%20G1%20EN%201080p%20%...
My guess is that it's just an expensive toy, only useful to robotics researchers. But I can imagine in 10 years the big LLM+vision models could somehow pilot them, perhaps very slowly compared to a human, but as long as they can finish the job at 0.1% of a human's wage, it might not really matter how much slower they are.
That's an assumption.
AI is not far superior at every job that exists today.
Like, nursing. And a thousand others.
I wasn't claiming that. I was responding to what you wrote: you quoted the part of my comment that said "[An AI that is able to replace humans at every currently existing economic activity] is probably going to be able to replace humans in whatever new industries are created in the process", which you called an assumption. When you quoted me, were you referring to something else?
How frequently do you lament their disappearance?
The vast majority of mankind has left farming, once the opportunity presented itself.
Maybe the end state is a utopia of human flourishing where no one has to do the shit jobs and we direct AI to create a paradise.
Maybe the ends state is a cyberpunk dystopia where power and wealth concentrates in the hands of those who control the AIs, and the masses fight each other to have the opportunity to sell their soul to be a suit while the rest starve.
Maybe AI progress takes a surprisingly long time, and the next 100 years sees a gentle continuation of the 20th century automation trend.
But I'd be surprised if we could put the genie back in the bottle.
So AI can repair sewer pumps? Since when?
Uh, only if you don't vote for politicians who believe in reducing inequality??? Kinda silly to act like inequality is an innate force and not something we control with governments...
Obviously.
Perhaps things are different elsewhere, but here in the US the only politicians with a hope of being elected (democrats and republicans) owe their campaigns to the very same holders of purse strings. Believing that inequality will be solved by voting is complete idiocy. Trite as it might be the saying "if voting changed anything it would be illegal" has been demonstrated to be true time and time again in recent decades.
Voting is a sick joke. Feudalism (on a global scale) is inevitable.
Let’s say I’m an animator but can’t make music. Now I can add moderate quality custom music to my animations and make indie animations entirely solo. That was impossible before.
And let’s not ignore all the great artists out there who struggle programming in their game engine, and can use AI to hack together basic interactivity. Is it better than a professional? No, but it allows a solo artist to craft an experience entirely solo.
AI does for a lot of things what the internet did for publishing - give everyone the power to do it themselves at a smaller scale.
Artificial systems provide a value incentive that could be realigned with humans. That would be beyond difficult as there are so many downsides to hiring humans, but it could happen.
I posit that this will be the same fight as inhouse tech versus outsourcing tech. Eventually, whatever mechanism is implemented will prove to have a negative value for the company. Realignment will occur and the coin will flip to the other side. Inhouse becomes outsourced or outsourcing becomes inhouse. It's inevitable.
The same is inevitable with artificial systems versus human intervention. Flip.
Artificial systems have yet to replace humans (possibly).
Just because it's been true up to now, doesn't mean there isn't a phase transition on the horizon.
offshoring was a good thing. bringing in millions of immigrants (for the sole purpose of driving the wages down) was a good thing, but now that it's your jobs that are on the line now, it is le bad and should be immediately banned, right?
How many typists did word processors put out of jobs? Before, if you wrote a paper or document, you would write it out by hand in a notebook, correct what you wanted and then a lot of times pay a professional typist to quickly and correctly type it up for you. This was a lot better than trying to do it yourself, and spending many frustrating hours making mistakes and using whiteout and retyping.
You will always be able to find someone adversely affected by technology. For example, refrigeration put icemen out of work.
I frequent a KFC, in the 15 years I've been going there the staff count has halved. In the last year they have installed automated ordering machines which for me is great I can use it. For some people they don't like the added complexity ( they aren't as technologically savvy) and prefer ordering in person. However instead of 3 people working at a teller there is now only 1. AI in a few years could likely entirely replace that last person and a place that previously employed 15 unskilled labourers will employ at most 1 or two, per shift.
Those people didn't get UBI, they didn't get the opportunity to reskill, they lost their jobs. That is at this point 7-8 families who no longer have a breadwinner.
Do you think the price I pay for my chicken has decreased in those years? I know for a fact profit margins have increased however.
On a side note. No I no longer support that franchise and rather support a local business who employes actual humans.
We are headed for a dystopia where the gap between the rich and the poor increases. I won't lose my job to AI. However if even 50% of the population does it's still an issue. And government moves extremely slowly, the likely hood that taxes or UBI disincentives the dystopia before it happens is very low. AI can be a game changer, however look at the world you live in and tell me which game it will be changing.