The AI boom is screwing over Gen Z | ChatGPT is commandeering the mundane tasks that young employees have relied on to advance their careers.::ChatGPT is commandeering the tasks that young employees rely on to advance their careers. That’s going to crush Gen Z’s career path.
I’m fine with that. I’m not going for a career anyways, most of us aren’t.
Gen Z getting screwed, well that’s a first. I hope this doesn’t start some kind of trend.
It will
tbf, if 99.9% of the jobs are replaced by ai, there won’t be a reason to work at all anymore. since you don’t have to pay the ai a wage, let it rest, give it vacations, etc. costs of basic needs may go so low that they could be redistributed for free. But that’s communism!!! Cringe!
Check out how it was like during the industrial revolution when automation changed a lot in a short period of time to get an idea of how this generally goes.
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.
Otoh one of my friends is an IT teacher and there are regular issues with students blindly following dumb chatGPT advice.
Recently, one had removed their fstab directory 🤣
ChatGPT is very good at giving advice that sounds good but it still has absolutely no understanding about what it says. The quintessential child of a politician and a manager…
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.
Can you elaborate on the “fixed demand” aspect?
From what I know as a software engineer, companies would simply make twice as much software, if their software engineers were twice as efficient. There are always requirements pushed out of scope because the complexity of the solution is growing and growing. The ability to make more complex software solutions with the same amount of engineers is not going to result in less engineers, it is just going to cause more complex software products.
Also note that more engineers has deminishing results due to communication losses. This, along with a fixed supply of engineers seems the biggest limitation to the industry to me.
From what I know as a software engineer, companies would simply make twice as much software, if their software engineers were twice as efficient.
Only if there’s demand for twice as much software. Otherwise, you make the same software twice as fast and with half as much work. Let’s go back to the example of accountants. Sure, the demand for accounting work may be somewhat increasing, but with productivity per worker increasing orders of magnitude faster than demand, the overall number of accountants shall decrease. A piece of code a junior programmer writes within a week can be obtained immediately with a tool like chatgpt simply by formulating a clear prompt – it’s not like we’re talking about better keyboards which improve your typing speed and therefore increase your productivity by 10% by letting you type code faster, it’s actually orders of magnitude!
There are always requirements pushed out of scope because the complexity of the solution is growing and growing. The ability to make more complex software solutions with the same amount of engineers is not going to result in less engineers, it is just going to cause more complex software products.
Again, sure, but wouldn’t you agree the technology will some time reach a point where more complexity is redundant? I would argue it’s sooner than later, see how smartphones and computers keep improving in their performance, but there are no technology breakthroughts anymore. Is infinite growth even possible?
Also note that more engineers has deminishing results due to communication losses. This, along with a fixed supply of engineers seems the biggest limitation to the industry to me.
Not sure what you’re getting at here, so let’s go back to your original question: what do I mean by fixed demand of the office jobs.
Doing accounting faster will not land you more gigs anymore, unless you steal some other accountants’ clients. Writing longer reports will not make your employer require you to write more of them, unless they fire your colleague who does that too. Going through motions and legal documents faster will not magically give you more legal work, unless a different legal counsel changes industry. Unlike manufacturing in the 1800s, the supply and productivity of modern jobs are not limited by technological disadvantages so much, but instead, the demand for this work is corelated with other branches of economy.
One could argue, in fact it’s an ongoing debate where I’m from (Poland): “yeah sure but when we started switching away from coal then miners were supposed to be off work as well and yet they mostly managed to find previously non-existing jobs in newly created industries and the unemployment remained low”. Right, but in that case one industry was replaced by another, workers’ productivity could be moved to doing something else. This time it’s different, because the jobs don’t change, the demand doesn’t change, instead the supply of labour (via increased, AI-fueled productivity) increases so much, that large part of the workforce is found to be straight up redundant.
this time the problem is we won’t increase the output and let the workers work more efficiently and earn more money
I agree with what you’re saying but I just want to contextualize this bit, because you make it seem like technological advances led to increased worker productivity and higher wages.
It didn’t. It never has.
The government made it happen because people pressured the government to make it happen. Strikes, riots, and literal bloodshed twisted gilded arms to share the economic gains they were amassing for themselves.
And so the implication is that, sure, this phase of technological can increase worker productivity, letting the same number of office workers do more, work less, and earn the same amount. In principle, that is entirely possible. In practice, we arrive back where you say office workers will just be replaced.
Interesting point, I guess you are right
This is not going to turn out well for a lot of people. Soon human beings will be obsolete in the name of AI
could you please elaborate? do you mean in the workplace?
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.
Yeah we’re quickly approaching a tipping point where people can no longer scoff at the idea of UBI. The more jobs that get automated, the fewer people working and pumping money back into the economy. This can only go on for so long before the economy completely collapses.
It’s the march of progress, but it’s coming for previously “safe” jobs. I make a good living as a consultant, but about 80-90% of my job could be automated by AI. I just went to a conference in my field and everyone in the room was convinced that they couldn’t be replaced by AI - and they’re dead wrong. By the time my small corner of industry gets fully automated I’ll be retired or, at the least, in a position where I’m the human gathering the field data and backchecking the automated workflows before it goes out the door.
political capital to implement a UBI
I applaud your optimism, and genuinely hope you’re right.
I hate this timeline
What if the headline read: “Horseless carriages are crippling stable owners and farriers”
Would you still hate this timeline?
“Horseless carriages driven around cities accelerate climatic problems”
“City growth caused by mass adoption of personal horseless carriages makes pedestrians unable to get anywhere”
So, yea, that would still be a problem
Turns out walkable cities do in fact exist despite those countries phasing out said horseless carriages.
Haha! Not in America, you cosmopolitan citizen of the world!
I was making a greater metaphorical point that society can and does adapt to new technologies
Cries in Kaczynski
Eh. Society can adapt. But, it doesn’t have to. The Amish are a thing, after all. And so are America’s car-centric cities when high speed rail exists.
I for one can’t wait for the headline “Gen Z increasingly joining Amish, DESTROYING industries”
This is not equivalent. LLMs are not new tools, they’re just the latest parlor trick of old tools. It has more to do with crypto and NFTs than with cars. And with the confidence of hindsight, cars (indirectly via the combustion engine and fossil fuels) absolutely destroyed the planet with anthropogenic climate change. We have every reason to hate this timeline.
This is just silly lol
Good thing our governments are totally on top of making sure this doesn’t cause some kind of crisis /s
Unfortunately international competition will prevent any country from enacting sane and effective regulation. The first country that moves to restrict AI development and implementation will quickly fall behind the other countries without restrictions.
The only thing that would really work would be a global agreement to limit development, but I can’t see that happening anytime soon, or nations like China, Iran, or India actually respecting such limits even if they were agreed upon.
If enough people find themselves without a way to put food on the table, that country might find a sudden and severe obstacle to their economic prospects.
The rich people who own and benefit from the AI systems and have control over the governments and major businesses will be the last ones to feel the economic impact. When (and if) they do they will simply move to another country that is not yet failing, because people in this group experience no national loyalty and feel no remorse for their exploitation. They will move on to another place that they can draw profit from until that is also burnt out.
By that point the AI systems will already be developed and implemented and it will be too late to establish any functional regulation.
I am not talking about regulation.
Ok, I am talking about a way to avoid the world getting to the point of “If enough people find themselves without a way to put food on the table”. I want us to address the AI problem before countries find “sudden and severe” obstacles to their economic prospects.
How do we do that, if not by regulation? What can we talk about that leads to prevention?
We need to be proactive, not reactive.
I agree, but that was my response to the likely attitude of the wealthy, businesses and their government supporters that you pointed out, who will oppose regulations.
They can’t expect to move out of the way forever as they make the living conditions of average people untenable everywhere. The people’s unrest has been constantly rising.
Oh I see, I misunderstood. Unfortunately, it looks like the intent may be to mislead regulators and have them waste time on more sensationalized “AI takes over the world” ideas, while they continue to make a profit off of more mundane forms of exploitation.
They can’t expect to move out of the way forever as they make the living conditions of average people untenable everywhere.
Never underestimate the capacity for shortsightedness and the ambition for immediate profit.
The only thing that would really work would be a global agreement to limit development
Really? That’s the only thing? Or maybe just unemployment, something that’s been around for almost 100 years.
Or maybe just unemployment, something that’s been around for almost 100 years.
This might work after the AI systems have already become a major problem, and unemployment affects a large percentage of the population.
It won’t prevent AI systems from becoming a major problem in the first place.
I would much rather have the prevention than a cure.
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.
It’s a Tragedy Of The Commons situation: each market actor expects to get the benefits of automating away entry level jobs and expects it’s going to be somebody else who keeps on training people through their junior career years so that mid and senior level professionals are available in the job market.
Since most market actors have those expectations and even those who don’t are pressured by market pressures to do the same (as paying for junior positions makes them less competitive than those who automate that work, so they’re forced to do the same), the tragedy part will eventually ensue once that “field” has kept being overgrazed for long enough.
Why would you want to train people to do it wrong? If you had to train someone tomorrow would you show them the email client or give them a cart and have them deliver memos for a week?
Right now we have handed over some more basic tasks to machines. Train the next generation to take those tasks being automated as a given.
It’s not the tasks that matter, it’s the understanding of the basics, the implications of certain choices and the real life experience in things like “how long I thought it would take vs how long it actually took” that comes with doing certain things from start to end.
Some stuff can’t be learned theoretically, it has to be learnt as painful real life lessons.
So far there seems to be an ill-defined boundary between what AI can successfully do and what it can’t, and sadly you can’t really teach people starting past that point because it’s not even a point, it’s an area where you have to already know enough to spot the AI-made stuff that won’t work, and the understanding there and beyond is built on foundational understanding of how to use simpler building blocks and what are the implications of that.
We have this thing called school
You clearly never worked in an expert knowledge area.
In any complex enough domain knowledge there are elements you can only ever learn from doing it for real, with real requirements, real users and real timeframes.
With my career spanning 4 countries I have yet to see somebody straight out of uni that could just drop-in and start working at mid-level, and that includes the trully gifted types who did that stuff at home for fun.
Engineer for 15 years but go ahead and try patronizing me again or you can read what I wrote and respond to it, not what you wish I wrote. Guess you didn’t learn what a strawman was. Maybe should have worked in 5 countries.
Amazing.
How many junior professionals have you hired (or at least interviewed as domain expert) and how many have you led in your career?!
I’ll refrain from pulling rank here (I could, but having lots of experience and professional seniority doesn’t mean I know everything and besides, let’s keep it serious) so I’m just wondering what kind of engineering area do you work in (if it’s not too much to ask) and what in your career has led you to believe that formal education is capable of bridging any training gap that might form if the junior-professional-stage dissapears?
In my professional area, software development, all I’ve seen so far is that there are elements of experience which formal education won’t teach and my own experience with professional education (training courses) is that they provide you with knowledge, maybe a few techniques, but not professional insight on things like choosing which elements are best for which situation.
This is not to say that education has no value (in fact, I believe it’s the opposite: even the seemingly “too theoretical to be useful” can very much turn out to be essential in solving something highly practical: for example, I’ve used immenselly obscure knowledge of microprocessor architectures in the design of high performance distributed software systems for investment banks, which was pretty unexpected when I learned that stuff in an EE Degree). My point is that things such a “scoping a job”, “selecting the better tool for the job” and even estimating risk and acceptability of it in using certain practices for certain parts of a job, aren’t at all taught in formal education and I can’t really see the pathway in the Business Process (the expression in a Requirements Analysis sense, rather than saying it’s all a business) of Education which will result in both formalizing the teaching of such things and in attracting those who can teach it with knowledge.
Maybe the Education System can find a way of doing it, but we can hardly bet that it will and will do so before any problems from an AI-induced junior-level training gap materialises (i.e. there won’t be any pressure for it before things are blowing up because of a lack of mid-level and above professionals, by which time it there will be at least a decade of problems already in the pipeline).
I’ve actually mentored several junior and mid-level developers and have mainly made them aware of potential pitfalls they couldn’t see (often considerations which were outside the nitty gritty details of programming and yet had massive impact on what needed to be programmed), additional implications of certain choices which they weren’t at all aware of and pointed to them the judgment flaws that lead them to dead-ends, but they still need to actually have real situations with real consequences to, at an emotional-level, interiorise the value of certain practices that at first sight seem counterproductive otherwise they either don’t do it unless forced to (and we need programmers, not code monkeys that need constant surveillance) or do it as a mindless habit, hence also when not appropriate.
Maybe what you think of as “junior” is a code-monkey, which is what I think of as “people who shouldn’t even be in the profession” so you’re picturing the kind of teaching that’s the transmission of “do it like this” recipes that a typical code monkey nowadays finds via Google, whilst I’m picturing developers to whom you can say “here’s a small problem part of a big thing, come up with a way to solve it”, which is a set of practices that’s way harder to teach even in the practical classes on an Educational environment because it’s a synthetic environment with were projects have simulated needs and the consequences of one’s mistakes are way lower.
PS: Mind you, you did put me thinking about how we could teach this stuff in a formal educational context, but I really don’t have an answer for that as even one-to-one mentoring is limited if you’re not dealing with real projects, with real world users (and their real world needs and demands) and implications and real lifecycles (which are measured in years, not “one semester”). I mean, you can have learning placements in real companies, but that’s just working at a junior-level but with a different job title and without paying people a salary.
What are these decades? Is that something longer than next quarter?
we are going to hold the month open a few more days
I think those in charge often don’t care. A lot of them don’t actually have any incentive for long term performance. They just need a short/medium term stock performance and later they can sell. Heck, they’ll even get cash bonuses based solely on short term performance. Many C-secs aren’t in for the long haul. They’ll stay for maybe 5-10 years tops and then switch jobs, possibly when they see the writing on the wall.
Even the owners are often hoping to just survive until some bigger company buys their business.
And when the company does explode… They’ll just declare bankruptcy and later make a new company. The kinds of people who created companies rarely do it just once. They do it over and over, somehow managing to convince investors every time.
That sounds like someone else’s problem.
there would be a hole as executives and managers move out of the company.
And why would those executives and managers care about that? They just need to make sure they time their departures to be early enough that those holes don’t impact the share prices. Welcome to modern capitalism where the C suites only goal is to make sure they deploy their golden parachute while the company still has enough cash left over to pay them.
Yeah, it should be obvious by now after 3 decades of 1980s-MBA style corporate management (and a Financial Crash that happenned exactly along those lines) that “the bonus comes now, the problems come after I’ve moved on” measures will always get a go-ahead from the suits at the top floor.
And?
It it makes you feel better the alternative can be much worse:
People are promoted to their level of incompetence. Sure she is a terrible manager but she was the best at sales and is most senior. Let’s have her check to make sure everyone filled out expense reports instead of selling.
You don’t get the knowledge sharing that comes from people moving around. The rival spent a decade of painful trial and error to settle on a new approach, but you have no idea so you are going to reinvent this wheel.
People who do well on open-ended creative tasks are not able to do as they failed to rise above repetitive procedural tasks. Getting started in the mailroom sounds romantic but maybe not the best place to learn tax law.
The tech and corporate and general operational knowledge drifts further and further away from the rest of the industry. Eventually everyone is on ancient IT systems that sap (yes pun intended) efficiency. Parts and software break that it is hard to replace. And eventually the very systems that were meant to make things easier become burdens.
For us humans there really is no alternative to work and thinking is the hardest work of all. You need to consistently reevaluate what the situation calls for and any kinda rigid rule system of promotion and internal training won’t perform as well.
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
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listen, im gonna be hopeful, ok?
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who says i don’t have plenty of dashes of that, you don’t know me
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.
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.
But how will the rich people afford more submarines to commit suicide in?
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This was exactly the problem that Charles Murray pointed out in the bell curve. We’re rapidly increasing the complexity of the available jobs (and the successful people can output 1000-1,000,000 times more than simple labor in the world of computers). It’s the same concept as the industrial revolution, but to a greater degree.
The problem is that we’re taking away the vast majority of the simple jobs. Even working at a fast food place isn’t simple.
That alienates a good chunk of the population from being able to perform useful work.
That book is shit and should not be cited in any serious discussion. Here’s a good video explaining why the book is full of racist shit: https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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Good bot!
If it were full of shit, then you wouldn’t be discussing the exact he pointed out in this book.
There is some racist discussion in there, but that’s secondary and doesn’t detract or impact his main point about what increasingly complex labor does to a society.
Precisely, the hill to die on is to socialize the profits, not to demand we keep the shitty, injuring, repetitive task jobs that break a person’s back by 35.
You don’t protest street lights to keep the lamp lighters employed. The economy needs to change fundamentally to accommodate the fact that many citizens won’t have jobs yet need income. It won’t change, but it needs to.
So we’ll keep blaming the wrong thing, technology that eases the labor burden on humanity, instead of destroying the wealth class that demands they be the sole beneficiary of said technology and its implementation in perpetuity to the detriment of almost everyone outside the owner class. Because if we did that, we’d be filthy dirty marxist socialist commies that hate freedumb, amirite?!
There are both dystopian (a tiny Elite owns the automatons and gets all gains from their work and a massive unemployed Underclass barelly surviving) and utopian (the machines do almost everything for everybody) outcomes for automation and we’re firmly in the path for Dystopia.
But that would require some mechanism for redistributing wealth and taking care if those who choose not to work, and everyone knows that’s communism.
some sort of A Better World?
I think you misspelled “taxes,” but its possible your spelling will turn out to be more accurate.
Well… the difference is the former has a history of actually working.
This is where I was kind of on board with Andrew Yang. He was looking to setup UBI based on a tax on automation that displaced jobs. I think at first this would be very small, but having the systems in place would be important to allow it to scale up when it’s needed, rather than trying to just start the conversation once it’s a big problem.
That being said, I’m not a fan of your phrasing around, “those who choose not to work.” Being displaced by automation and not having the capability for some of the in demand jobs is one thing. Being mentally and physically able to work, and just deciding you’ll let others do that while you bring nothing to the table… that’s a different issue. UBI allows us to not have to worry about that distinction, and the resulting payout will be lower because of it, meaning people wouldn’t be living well on it, especially at first. It wouldn’t be a living wage, just a nice little bonus. To give everyone 14+ in the US $20/month would cost $5.5B… so we’re talking really small to start.
So much this. The way headlines like this frame the situation is so ass-backwards it makes my brain hurt. In any sane world, we’d be celebrating the automation of mundane tasks as freeing up time and resources to improve our health, happiness, and quality of life instead of wringing our hands about lost livelihoods.
The correct framing is that the money and profits generated by those mundane tasks are still realized, it’s just that they are no longer going to workers, but funneled straight to the top. People need to get mad as hell not at the tech, but at those who are leveraging that tech to specifically to deny them opportunity rather than improving their life.
I need a beer. 😐
money and profits generated by those mundane tasks are still realized, it’s just that they are no longer going to workers, but funneled straight to the top
Workers should be paid royalties for their contributions. If “the top” is able to reap the rewards indefinitely, so should the folks who built the systems.
It’s not even a new thing either.
It used to be that every single piece of fabric was handmade, every book handwritten.
Humans have been losing out on labor since they realized Og was faster at bashing rocks together than anyone else.
It’s just a question of if we redistribute the workload. Like turning “full time” down to 6 days a week and eventually 5, or working hours from 12+ to 8hrs. Which inflates the amount of jobs to match availability.
Every single time the wealthy say we can’t. But eventually it happens, the longer it takes, the less likely it’s peaceful.
Where are you that 7 days a week 12 hour days is full time? That’s literally just always working. Standard full time in the states is 40 hour work weeks.
The past. You should probably read their comment again.
But eventually
There’s no eventually, people have been killed, murdered and harassed whilst fighting to make it a reality. Someone has to fight to make it happen and an “eventually” diminishes the value of the effort and risks put forth by labor activists all over the world throughout history. It didn’t happen magically, people worked really hard to make it so.
It sounds like you just don’t know what the word eventually means…
The problem, as it almost always is, is greed. Those at the top are trying to keep the value derived from the additional efficiency that ai is going to bring for themselves.
Wait you expect a wealthy mammal to share?
Exactly. This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with UBI.
But, the rich and plebes alike will push AI as the Boogeyman as a distraction from the real enemy.
There’s this bizarre right-wing idea that if everyone can afford basic necessities, they won’t do anything. To which I say, so what? If you want to live in shitty government housing and survive off of food assistance but not do anything all day, fine. Who cares? Plenty of other people want a higher standard of living than that and will have a job to do so. We just won’t have people starving in the street and dying of easily fixable health problems.
We also have to be careful of how people define this sort of thing, and how the wide range of our current wealth inequality affects how something like UBI would be implemented.
In the rich’s eyes, UBI is already a thing and it’s called “welfare”. It’s not enough that people on welfare can barely survive on the poverty-level pittance that the government provides, but both the rich and slightly-more-well-off have to put down these people as “mooching off the system” and “stealing from the government”, pushing for even more Draconian laws that punish their situation even further. It is a caste of people who are portrayed as even lower scum than “the poors”, right down to segregating where they live to “Section 8” housing as a form of control.
UBI is not about re-creating welfare. It’s about providing a comfortable safety net while reducing the obscene wealth gap, as technology drives unemployment even higher. Without careful vigilance, the rich and powerful will use this as another wedge issue to create another class of people to hate (their favorite pastime), and push for driving the program down just as hard as they do for welfare.
The differences between UBI and “welfare” are perhaps subtle but very important IMO.
In Australia there’s an entire industry around punishing and humiliating people that need welfare. It’s just absurd and unnecessary. UBI avoids any of that by just making the entitlement universal.
We have “job network providers” which IMO do not provide any value to anyone. Suppose in a particular region there are 4,000 unemployed people and this particular week there are 400 new jobs. To receive welfare you need to be working with a job network provider to find a job. However, those job network providers aren’t creating any jobs. One way or another 400 people will probably get a new job this week. They might help a particular person tidy up their resume or whatever but they’re not actually finding jobs for people. Their only purpose is to make receiving welfare a chore, it’s absurd.
There’s also people stuck in the welfare trap. As in, if I don’t work at all I get $w welfare, but for every $1 I earn I lose $0.50 from $w, so why would I work a shitkicker job flipping burgers for effectively half the pay.
Slightly different systems, but in the US, welfare is a lot like that as well, especially punishing people by removing welfare or food stamps when they make X dollars.
The welfare trap is a feature of all means-tested social security systems.
Yeah, modern welfare isn’t remotely enough to match the spirit of UBI. It’s structured so that you have to have a job. It’s not enough to live by at all. And bizarrely, there’s some jobs where they’d actually be worse than welfare because min wage is so crazy low in many parts of the US.
And even if you’re on disability, you’re gonna have a hard time. It pays barely enough to maybe scrape by if you cut every possible corner.
No form of welfare is close to being livable for the typical recipient. At best, they usually give you some spending cash while you live with friends or family. Maybe if you’re really lucky you can find that rare, rare subsidized housing and manage to just barely make ends meet.
By comparison, most proponents of UBI want it to be livable. Nothing glamorous, admittedly, but enough to live a modest life. Enough that if there’s no jobs available you qualify for (or none that will pay a living wage, at least), you’ll be okay.
Bro service industry jobs and similar are booming. Train under a plumber, electrician or gassist and you will be set for years
Where I’m from even those jobs pay shitty salaries that haven’t kept up with the cost of living. I know electricians who can barely afford rent.
Ok fair enough. Where is that? Most of the world has less than enough people for those service jobs so unless you live just in the right place or the planet where almost everyone is a plumber, I’d call that extreme bad luck haha
Oh we definitely don’t have enough tradespeople, but their unions have not kept them up to the cost of living. It’s causing a huge problem here. The only way to make real money is to start your own business, and most people aren’t interested in that or can’t afford to.
But that’s exactly what I meant can’t you go independent? That’s weird, tradesmanship here even has unions but they have so much work they can’t handle the load ( ayyy lmao) and they are trying to stimulate people to take into this trades.
Suggesting an alternative industry as an escape from AI doesn’t work. The media tried this with the millions of truck drivers, pushing them to go into software development 5-10 years ago, as we started conversations around the impending automation of their careers.
The thought at the time, and this seemed like an accurate forecast to me, was that the tech industry would continue to grow and software engineers would be extraordinarily safe for decades to come. I was already in this profession, so I figured my career was safe for a long while.
Then a massive AI boom happened this year that I hadn’t anticipated would come for 15ish more years, and similarly AI experts are now pushing up predictions of AGI by literally decades, average estimates being under 10 years now instead of 30 years.
At the same time, the tech industry went through massive layoffs. Outsourcing, massive increases in output with generative AI automating away repetitive copy/paste programming or even slightly more complicated boilerplate that isn’t strictly copy/paste, amongst natural capitalist tendencies to want to restrict high value labor to keep it cheap.
Those people who shifted away from truck driving and towards software engineer 4+ years ago, thinking it was a “safe path” and now being told that it’s impossible to find a junior dev position might become desperate enough to change paths again. Maybe they’ll take your advice and join a trade school, only to find in 4 years we’ll hit massive advancements in robotics and AGI that allows general problem solving skills from robots in the real world.
We already have the tech for it. Boston dynamics has showcased robots that can move more than fluently enough to be a plumber, electrician, etc. Now we just need to combine generative AI with senses and the ability to process information from those senses and react (this already works with images, moving to a video feed and eventually touch/sound/etc is a next step).
While everyone constantly plays a game of chicken, trying to move around this massive reserve army of labor, we’ll see housing scalpers continue to raise rents, and cost of living becoming prohibitive for this growing class of underemployed or unemployed people. The reserve army of labor, when kept around 5-10% of the population, serves as an incentive for people to be obedient workers and not to rock the bed too much. That number growing to 20-50% is enough to rock the bed, and capitalists will advocate for what they’ve already advocated in the third world, a massive reduction or total annihilation of welfare, so millions more can starve to death.
We already have millions of people dying a year due to starvation, and nearly a billion people are malnourished due to lack of food access. Raising this number is a logical next step for capitalists as workers try to fight for a share of the automated economy.
Not gonna read all that but alternative industries will happen ai or not.
The necessity to look for an alternative industry will happen ai or not.
And it’s not impossible to find junior tech positions what the hell are you talking about.
Also there is not a conspiracy to reduce the planetary population. And if you claim that I want proof.
If you’re not going to spend the 60 seconds it takes to read my comment, don’t bother responding. Nobody mentioned a conspiracy to cull the population, the millions of people who are dying a year from hunger or entirely curable diseases like TB aren’t dying because of some deep state conspiracy, they’re dying because it’s what’s logical in a capitalist economy. These people have no economic power, so they get no resources.
Similarly, as the economy gets further automated, workers lose economic power, and we’ll be treated with the same capitalist logic that anyone else in the world is treated with, once we have no economic power we are better off dead, and so that’s what will happen.
The position that “alternative industries will always exist” is pretty foolish, humans aren’t some exceptional supreme beings that can do something special artificial beings cannot. Maybe you’re religious and believe in a soul, and you think that soul gives you some special powers that robots will never have, but you’d be simply mistaken.
Once the entire economy is automated, there will still be two classes, owners and non-owners, instead of owners and workers. Non-owners will either seize the means of production or die per the logic of capitalism (not some conspiracy).
Now we just need to combine
“Just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Sensor integration is currently the biggest hurdle in AI and one of the most complex but less understood areas of research. Everyone can make a magnetic sensor, anyone can make an image recognition AI, anyone can make an inverse kinematic robotic control arm. But having them integrate and coordinate together to create fluid problem analysis and motion has proven to be elusive and non-trivial. Tesla commits traffic offenses, taxi networks are brought to a halt by shirts with traffic cones on them. For things the most basic human context aware analysis can solve instantly. It has cost Boston Dynamics billions of defense budget money to create a partial solution that still requires the permanent supervision of a human operator. A full solution is not on the table in the short-term.
Go where the future is…HVAC. Soon everyone is going to need AC just to survive.
Pumping all my fun money into trane stock…
Which will accelerate the destruction of the planet. Yay!
What’s the alternative? Just die?
Yup
Whether you have ac or not, the planet is set on course to be destroyed unless big oil countries suddenly find their kindness to all mankind and stop drilling oil. Which is impossible.
I’m aware of that, hence why I said accelerate
Maybe. But if they stop drilling for petroleum, I wonder where the electricity to make the solar panels and wind turbines will come from. Oh and the polymers and plastics used to make those things. While ue use the available electricity for charging our electric cars.
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Bullshit. Learn how to train new hires to do useful work instead of mundane bloat.
They don’t want to train new hires to begin with. A lot of work that new hires relied on to get a foothold on a job is bloat and chores that nobody wants to do. Because they aren’t trusted to take on more responsibility than that yet.
Arguably whole industries exist around work that isn’t strictly necessary. Does anyone feel like telemarketing is work that is truly necessary for society? But it provides employment to a lot of people. There’s much that will need to change for us to dismiss these roles entirely, but people need to eat every day.
The “not willing to train” thing is one of the biggest problems IMO. But also not a new one. It’s rampant in my field of software dev.
Most people coming out of university aren’t very qualified. Most have no understanding of how to actually program real world software, because they’ve only ever done university classes where their environments are usually nice and easy (possibly already setup), projects are super tiny, they can actually read all the code in the project (you cannot do that in real projects – there’s far too much code), and usually problems are kept minimal with no red herrings, unclear legacy code, etc.
Needless to say, most new grads just aren’t that good at programming in a real project. Everyone in the field knows this. As a result, many companies don’t hire new grads. Their advertised “entry level” position is actually more of a mid level position because they don’t want to deal with this painful training period (which takes a lot of their senior devs time!). But it ends up making the field painful to enter. Reddit would constantly have threads from people lamenting that the field must be dying and every time it’s some new grad or junior. IMO it’s because they face this extra barrier. By comparison, senior devs will get daily emails from recruiters asking if they want a job.
It’s very unsustainable.
Indeed: at least in knowledge based industries, everybody starts by working with a level of responsability were the natural mistakes a learning person does have limited impact.
One of my interns read the wrong voltage and it took me ten minutes to find his mistake. Ten minutes with me and multiple other senior engineers standing around.
I congratulationed him and damn it I meant it. This was the best possible mistake for him to make. Everyone saw him do it, he gets to know he held everything up, and he has to just own it and move on.
The problem is really going to be in the number of jobs that are left with 40hrs of work to do.
I fully agree, however doing some mundane work for a few weeks while you learn is useful. You can’t just jump straight into the deep work.
Exactly this.
100% if an AI can do the job just as well (or better) then there’s no reason we should be making a person do it.
Exactly!
Part of the problem with AI is that it requires significant skill to understand where AI goes wrong.
As a basic example, get a language model like ChatGPT to edit writing. It can go very wrong, removing the wrong words, changing the tone, and making mistakes that an unlearned person does not understand. I’ve had foreign students use AI to write letters or responses and often the tone is all off. That’s one thing but the student doesn’t understand that they’ve written a weird letter. Same goes with grammar checking.
This sets up a dangerous scenario where, to diagnose the results, you need to already have a deep understanding. This is in contrast to non-AI language checkers that are simpler to understand.
Moreover as you can imagine the danger is that the people who are making decisions about hiring and restructuring may not understand this issue.
The good news is this means many of the jobs AI is “taking” will probably come back when people realize it isn’t actually as good as the hype implied
Not quite. It’s more that a job that once had 5-10 people and perhaps an “expert” supervisor will just be whittled down to the expert. Similarly, factories used to employ hundreds and a handful of supervisors to produce a widget. Now, they can employ a couple of supervisors and a handful of robot technicians to produce more widgets.
The problem is, where do those experts come from? Expertise is earned through experience, and if all the entry-level jobs go away then eventually you’ll run out of experts.
Education. If education was free this wouldn’t be a problem, you could take a few more years at university to gain that experience instead of working in a junior role.
This is the problem with capitalism, if you take too much without giving back, eventually there’s nothing left to take.
You don’t get experts from education. You get experts from job experience (after education).
It’s just that I fear that realisation may not filter down.
You honestly see it a lot in industry. Companies pay $$$ for things that don’t really produce results. Or what they consider to be “results” changes. There are plenty of examples of lowering standards and lowering quality in virtually every industry. The idea that people will realise the trap of AI and reverse is not something I’m enthusiastic about.
In many ways AI is like pseudoscience. It’s a black box. Things like machine learning don’t tell you “why” it works. It’s just a black box. ChatGPT is just linear regression on language models.
So the claim that “good science” prevails is patently false. We live in the era of progressive scientific education and yet everywhere we go there is distrust in science, scientific method, critical thinking, etc.
Do people really think that the average Joe is going to “wake up” to the limitations of AI? I fear not.
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And AI is not always the best solution. One of my tasks at my job is to respond to website reviews. There is a button I can push that will generate an AI review. I’ve tested it. It works… but it’s not personal. My responses directly address things they say, especially if they have issues. Their responses are things like, “thanks for your five-star review! We really appreciate it, blah blah blah.” Like a full paragraph of boilerplate bullshit that never feels like the review is addressed.
You would think responding to reviews properly would be a very basic function an AI could do as well as a human, but at present, no way.
This assumes that your company doesn’t decide the AI responses are good enough in exchange for the cost savings of removing a person from the role, and that they don’t improve in a subsequent update.
True, although my company emphasizes human contact with customers. We really go out of our way with tech support and such. That said, I hate responding to reviews. I kind of wish it was good enough to just press the ‘respond to review with AI’ button.
This.
In accounting, 10 years ago, a huge part of the job was categorising bank transactions according to their description.
Now AI can kinda do it, but even providers that would have many billions of transactions to use as training data have a very high error rate.
It’s very difficult for a junior to look at the output and identify which ones are likely to be incorrect.
