The AI Job Swindle

therectangle.substack.com

12 points·olyellybelly··5 comments

>I’m bringing this up because, in the workplace, AI models have the potential to deliver both things. And that should terrify you.

Calm down!

Things that should terrify you:

- bioweapons

- nuclear war

- the collapse of society

- a civilization ending solar flare

- a comet striking earth

- a mega volcano

Gyrations in the job market are worrying, especially for young people, but they should not terrify you.

>but they should not terrify you.

Eh, this totally depends on magnitude.

Great depression level 'gyrations' leads to mass unemployment, social unrest, starvation, and war.

In the case of economic failure.

Increased productivity due to automation isn't an economic failure - it's a redistribution challenge.

Much like democracy being ill-suited to combat climate change, capitalism seems ill-suited to deal with a long-horizon problem like this. It doesn't matter if you will be unable to find workers in a decade or two when your KPI is headcount reduction and it's evaluated quarterly, or when your bonus as an executive depends on the stock price over a given year.

One of the only arguments that hit for me against AI art was exactly this one. How will we get skilled human artists to handle the 20% of use cases AI art may not be suitable for when they never had the chance to hone their skills by working on the 80%?

That's the exact same problem in coding as well. Oh, we'll have senior level devs dive into the hard problems in the codebase and AI agents will handle the easier stuff.

And how, pray tell, will any people in future learn how to get the level where they can solve hard problems in the first place??

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