Silicon Valley sees AI as the solution – for everyone else
observer.co.uk
observer.co.uk
The reason we are talking so much about that now is that at the current level of productivity, we just don't need as many humans to do the work, as companies can use AI as leverage to not hire as many people.
This i feel will be a short lived period where not everyone has adopted AI to the fullest and thus simply having AI gives you leverage to not hire as many people and still stay competitive. The same thing happened with computers writ large, during the early days the folks that used computers had massive leverage over those that did not.
But what happens in 5-10 years once most orgs standardize on that leverage and everyone has it. All of a sudden that advantage AI gave you over others evaporates and you're right back to how things have always been, that is more humans give you more leverage.
I think once AI is broadly adopted and standardized, there will be an insane boom period for workers.
Come to think of it, I sort of wonder what many people with office jobs now are doing.
The human touch, if you will, is hard to replicate. Even where AI can convincingly act human, that often isn't enough to satisfy what people feel. Just look at the HN guidelines as a perfect example. "HN is for conversation between humans." If it were about the content then any suitable content would be welcome, regardless of the origin, but people are here under the belief that they are making a connection with other people.
Maybe someday AI will replace the business owners and managers too, but so as long as humans control the resources, they will choose to surround themselves with other humans by expending some of those resources towards those other humans.
So more documentation that no one will ever read... Both generated and summarised multiple times by AI...
1929: 3.2%
1930: 8.7%
1931: 15.9%
1932: 23.6%
1933: 24.9% (Peak of the Great Depression)
1934: 21.7%
1935: 20.1%
1936: 16.9%
1937: 14.3%
1938: 19.0% (Economic recession during the Depression)
1939: 17.2%
1940: 14.6%Sure seems to rhyme. Call it Jevon's Tractor Paradox.
Something else certainly happened in the rest of the world about that time too!
That's why Jevon's Paradox is the dumbest meme we've had this year. The parent concept of marginal utility describes why AI isn't that useful.
While its easy to look at the big picture and long term and say everything will all work out, there are so many individuals who are being hurt because of layoffs, reduced hiring, etc. My team is stressed out because they feel an axe hanging over their heads because private equity has declared no more hiring US developers. It's either AI or outsourcing. We should try to be empathetic because real people are losing their livelihoods and the long term isn't going to help them one bit.
In the short term I still need to eat, and tech integration that takes 20 years in the economy might leave me totally fucked!
Even before LLMs, the cost of living and finding a job that left any disposal income were major societal issues.
The majority of office jobs are comprised of many simple tasks that current and, to an even greater extent, future, models can handle with ease.
Not all companies are looking for 10x productivity gains. I assume most of them probably just want to do exactly what they are doing now but with lower costs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_unemploym...
That said, I'm not particularly convinced that gangs and warlords would suppress employment (if anything, the more organized criminals tend to run protection rackets which sort of require people to have some income they can steal) however they are most certainly reducing the quality of life for people.
Unemployment causing gangs at least feels more plausible, however you seem to have plenty of areas with gang activity that have plenty of employment opportunities as well as social programs. Selling drugs almost certainly makes more money, but comes with much, much higher risks. I might guess that this is more about social mobility than it is about survival, but I don't want to try to over-simplify a complex issue.
There was a change in the world, which went largely unnoticed - sometime in 2013-2017 the global number of infants peaked, never to recover.
Those 20% would just figure that there's no need to have children when you can just focus on yourself and go largely extinct within a generation, replaced with some people from the higher tiers, but not nearly enough to make up for those who weren't born.
This actually has been happening without AI for a while now, but I imagine technology would accelerate the process.
A person being _unemployed_ is not a hereditary trait. Also, while it's already pretty wild to effectively claim that about 20% of humanity carries some kind _doomed to be made unemployable by AI_ gene, it's another giant leap beyond that to declaring this cohort will uniformly choose not to reproduce and therefore become extinct.
It's what's happening right now, just with poverty being the largest factor. Gig/minimum wage workers start families considerably less often and no wonder - how they are supposed to?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060
For every one person who is classified as unemployed, there are one or more others who are classified unable to work for some reason.
I see, so women from narrow Stem backgrounds would totally handle these issues differently, got it.
> the main reason is that they are, overwhelmingly, males
Was that intentional? Do you disagree that tech is overwhelmingly male?
Do you happen to be someone who believes in differences in the sexes? Just curious.
Read it again. They narrow it two ways in addition to being male:
"0. but the main reason is that they are, overwhelmingly, males 1. who come from narrow Stem (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) backgrounds 2. and are trapped in a particular mindset that the technology writer Evgeny Morozov called “solutionism”.
It's not that they are male, it males who come from Stem with a particular solution oriented mindset. I think in a different context you would be less offended. We are talking about driven, solution oriented people. It's a bias. Biases are fine, we all have them, this article is just talking about it.
I could ask again, would you agree that there are differences in the sexes? A different set of biases even?
only use case i see, is ... helping disabled people
It’s “cool” and the tech is here to stay, but we appear light years away from anything like what was promised from materializing.
The current hype cycle is clearly barreling toward the “trough of disillusionment” phase of the Gartner hype cycle.