Here in the USA, you have to be afraid for your job these days. Layoffs are rampant everywhere due to outsourcing, and now we have AI on the horizon promising to make things more efficient, but we really know what it is actually going to be used for. They want automate out everything. People packaging up goods for shipping, white collar jobs like analytics, business intelligence, customer service, chat support. Any sort of job that takes a low or moderate amount of effort or intellectual ability is threatened by AI. But once AI takes all these jobs away and shrinks the amount of labor required, what are all these people going to do for work? It’s not like you can train someone who’s a business intelligence engineer easily to go do something else like HVAC, or be a nurse. So you have the entire tech industry basically folding in on itself trying to win the rat race and get the few remaining jobs left over…
But it should be pretty obvious that you can’t run an entire society with no jobs. Because then people can’t buy groceries, groceries don’t sell so grocery stores start hurting and then they can’t afford to employ cashiers and stockers, and the entire thing starts crumbling. This is the future of AI, basically. The more we automate, the less people can do, so they don’t have jobs and no income, not able to survive…
Like, how long until we realize how detrimental AI is to society? 10 years? 15?
how long until it’s not making the right people money anymore? Sometime after that.
For now, I work in AI.
IMO, using AI to remove jobs is the business equivalent of the Darwin Award. No sane executive will look at AI and see job replacement. A dumb executive will look at AI and see more productivity gains. A smart executive will see AI as a way to improve tooling for workers that explicitly want to use AI.
Sadly, as with most tech improvements, we’ll see lots of companies run by stupid people try to do stupid things with it. The best we can hope for is that there are opportunities for people to bail and find better job opportunities when their employer says “let’s fire HR and replace with GPT”, only to get absolutely brutalized by legal fees when their AI HR decides to fire someone for a protected reason, or refuses to fire a thief because they have a disability, or something that requires human intervention that doesn’t exist, or one of the hundreds of ways that it could go hilariously wrong.
It happens all the time. I remember watching solid profitable tech companies pivoting to delivering large apps on the new iPhone app store because “it’s the future”, only to realise that spending two years to develop an office suite for the iPhone 4 was a fucking stupid idea in hindsight. I remember people firing web developers because WYSIWYG editors would mean that you could design and build a website in the same way you create a Word doc. Stupid execs will always do stupid shit, and the world will move on.
Yup.
Some guys I know who worked at a developer contracting house (that I briefly worked for as well) all lost their jobs over the course of a year or so, as the company started rapidly downsizing because “Copilot means we don’t need as many developers anymore, we can fill orders with a skeleton crew.”
I’m excited to see that company fail for their bullshit.
It capitalism. Capitalism will replace you with a machine. AI is just a tool.
Most importantly “AI” doesn’t exist.
But it’s also worth nothing that absolutism is almost never helpful. I don’t think data, statistics, computers, etc. are inherently evil technologies. It’s the usual problem of how capitalism directs research and development towards violent control instead of liberation.
General Artificial Intelligence doesn’t exist - we don’t have HAL9000 or Terminator or Cortana yet.
But up to that point, and almost certainly even past it, the AI effect means the more sophisticated AI things become, the more people think “well </insert ai thing/> isn’t actually intelligent or an AI”.
As Larry Tesler says: “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.”
People had the same fears about cars, the internet, computers, telephones, the printing press, and even just books and reading/writing.
