Technology

The fucked up part isn't that AI work is replacing human work, it's that we're at a place as a society where this is a problem.

More automation and less humans working should be a good thing, not something to fear.

Lol it's not ChatGPT screwing over Gen Z. It's the rich business owners who care more about profits than people.

It was already happenning in things like Software Developmnt with outsourcing: all the entry level stuff was sent away to be done by people who cost a fraction of what even a Junior Dev would cost in the West, and that's exactly the stuff that one starts one's career with.

Bullshit. Learn how to train new hires to do useful work instead of mundane bloat.

The problem is the concept of work hasn't shifted to keep up with the technological reality that has been created. Jobs should slowly be phased out. We need a new economical concept to take hold that doesn't rely solely on class and fear to make it trundle along. Jobs should be what you do to grow your own fruit and veggies for fun, while the administration and maintenance of basically everything should be left to technology. Wealth and wealth accumulation should no longer exist or be seen as anything other than childish and irrelevant.

Bro service industry jobs and similar are booming. Train under a plumber, electrician or gassist and you will be set for years

We need to start instituting universal basic income to compensate for the job losses. It’s inevitable. We have to protect the person, not the jobs.

It's not just Gen Z, everyone's jobs are at risk as AI improves and automates away human labor. People who think that with exponential rate of progress of AI there will continue to be an abundance of good jobs are completely delusional. Companies hire people out of necessity, not some goodness of the heart. If machines can do everything humans can do and better, then companies will hire less people and outsource to machines. Sure there will be people working on the bleeding edge of what AI isn't yet capable of, but that's a bar that's only going to get higher and higher as the performance advantage gap of humans over machines reduces.

Of course none of this would be an issue if we had an economic system that aligned technological progress with improved quality of life and human freedom, but instead we cling on to antiquated systems of the past that just disproportionately accrue wealth to a dwindling minority while leaving the rest of civilization at their mercy. Anyone with any brain or sense of integrity realizes how absurd this is, and it's been obvious we need a Universal Basic Income for a long time. The hope I have is that Andrew Yang explained it eloquently 4 years ago and it resonated way stronger than I expected with the American population, so I think in a few years when AI is starting to automate any job where one doesn't need a 160 IQ, people will see the writing on the wall and there will finally be the political capital to implement a UBI.

And the funny part is that ChatGPT isn't good enough at anything to be trusted with doing it alone. You still need an expert on the subject matter to proofread anything that will be seen by the public or used to make a business decision.

There's something that a person close to me said about certain tech/features that stuck with me and seems to click here, it was: "A lot of it just stops you from using your brain."

In an ideal world, people would start receiving better and more fulfilling opportunities when their mundane tasks are automated away. But that's way too optimistic and the world is way to cynical. What actually happens is they get shitcanned while the capitalists hoard the profits.

We need a better system. One that, instead of relentlessly churning for the impossibility of infinite growth and funneling wealth upwards, prioritizes personal financial stability and enforces economic equallibrium.

governments need to take seriously what we are looking at in the next 40 years. There IS going to be less work, and less need for it. We can no longer play a game of work = virtue and that you must work to live.

If we fail to address this we will be complicit in a slow genocide

I consider myself, at best, a medior profile in my industry (IT). ChatGPT with GPT-4 (at least the initial version of it) was completely capable of doing EVERYTHING I need to do daily for my job. And probably faster and with much fewer mistakes.

That simply tells me it's a guarantee my job's gone in a matter of time. Whether that's one year or five remains to be seen, but it's inevitable.

I hate this timeline

So what would that mean for the company itself long-term? If they're not training up their employees, and most of the entry level is replaced by text generator work, there would be a hole as executives and managers move out of the company.

It seems like it would be a recipe for the company to implode after a few years/decades, assuming that that the managerial/executive positions aren't replaced also.

I think AI is a very good example of science advancing much faster than wisdom in society. I think as these large companies continue to implement AI to increase profits while simultaneous driving out the working class, it’s only going to further drive a wedge between the upper and lower class. I foresee a “dark age” of AI characterized by large unemployment and a renewed fight focus on human rights. We might already be seeing the early stages of this in some industries like fast food and with the Hollywood strikes.

I like to compare modern LLM to Excel or calculators in the past. Some years ago a company would have an in-house team of accountants. Then came Excel and now a single accountant can do the job for 10 companies. Let's now consider programmer: currently a project manager oversees a team of programmers, most of whom are only responsible for mundane work of typing out code. With AI a single worker will be able to perform more productive than that team of programmers, because they will offload the boring work to AI and focus all their attention to what AI is perhaps incapable of.

What this article is really saying, which I agree with, is that AI improves productivity ,just like perhaps the steam engines did in the 1800's. But this time the problem is we won't increase the output and let the workers work more efficiently and earn more money, because it's not manufacturing jobs which were limited by technology that this is influencing. It's office jobs, which the economy has a pretty much fixed demand for. Workers will not improve their productivity, they will just be replaced because their work can be offloaded to a machine capable of doing that same jobs better in every significant way.