This is so full of s***. AI salespeople can convince managers to fire you, but it doesn’t mean that the AI will actually do the work you did. So those jobs go away temporarily and then they come back, or they go away permanently because the company fails and it’s replaced by another company that actually produces things.
Or we could totally change the topic and remark that what we’re seeing is that the billionaires are stealing more and more of our money. That’s actually a problem with the billionaires and has little to do with current technology. And it is a real problem that could lead to society changing in various ways. I’m hoping for positive change where we tax the rich and lock up the thieving bastards. But it could also go shitty. Nobody knows.
Whatever happens, technology will continue to evolve, and the AI bubble is still a bubble. It doesn’t have substance. We’ve heard for the last hundred years that technology is advancing more and more rapidly and that we’re going to hit that magical threshold when everything magically changes. And it was always bullshit, and it always will be. Doesn’t mean your job is safe, but your job was never safe. That’s life.
Jobs are already disappearing. What is the author talking about?
Yup lost my last job to ai
Curious what you were doing and how?
It was an analytical style role, and I guess they figured the machine would do it better than me. But before I lost my job I had checked what the machine was pulling, and the answers weren’t accurate
Got it, they thought the could let someone ask the AI to sumnarize or analyze the data. And you can tell it was making it up.
They need the human to know the difference. I hope it bites them in the ass. Sorry you had to lose a job for it, but they dont know what they are doing.
Thanks for that sorry for being vague I didn’t want to risk doxxing myself. Thankfully I’ve managed to bounce back in short order, I know not everyone is so lucky
I imagine lots of ugly social media posts promising ugly things but probably not a whole lot else, since “Revolt” isn’t a clickable item on a menu. I’m speaking only as an American - we’ve become a people who buy bags of pre-shredded lettuce and pre-grated cheese. You can’t expect much action from us if it takes us very far from a phone charger.
Shredded cheese mixed with a bit of gas and diesel makes cheesy napalm so I think we’re gonna be ok.
That’s why these pedo losers all built bunkers
Not saying the answer is space communism, but the answer is space communism.
Jokes aside, worker displacement is only a problem if displacement means not landing in an economy, a second parallel economy must be made to capture people so we don’t all just succumb to homeless/moneylessness.
Jobs have already been disappearing. Entry level programming jobs have been wiped out.
Senior positions are being let go too. My previous employer dropped almost all the senior people and replaced them with juniors with copilot accounts.
I look forward to reading the company autopsy in a year.
Good luck finding senior programmers in a decade eh
They’re getting their money now. The future doesnt matter to them.
Yeah, they love to sell tomorrow for today
Don’t even need to imagine yourself; this is one of the foundational pillars of the worldbuilding in the cyberpunk genre.
I work in IT and as such I work in AI because there’s no getting away from the hype in my line of work.
But I don’t believe in it and I think it can be very harmful for society. I see a few nice things about it (people with disabilities for example) but mostly negative.
To be honest I’m looking forward to the news of datacenters going up in flames. Which I’m pretty sure will happen when people start losing their jobs en masse.
Or all the water in their state (see Utah) or raising the temps so high their power bills are the size of a mortgage.
Tbh theres probably not going to be water in utah by the time the data center finishes construction. And utah will likely be uninhabitable.
I didn’t realize Utah was so bad with their water supply. That’s a bummer to hear because that state is beautiful.
If you find a desolate arid desert beautiful, then yes. It’s a whitish brown Arizona.
Paywall-free archive: https://archive.is/PeHtc
I’m not really getting raises for a couple years, despite being a can do high performer. So now I just use AI to do mediocre work, and only work around 3-4hrs per day.
Is your company hiring? 😅
AI allows you to quiet quit without shitty bosses noticing. Win win :/
What I have noticed thispast year is that higher ups aren’t really understanding the total cost of AI solutions. They go use sites to have conversations with the most powerful LLMs not realizing that your company is not going to afford that level of tech. Your current IT infrastucture can’t add a few dozen high power/high cost systems to train the model for your business’s nuance. It is never a build it and forget it problem.
Additionally there is a skill of humans being easily retrained for other tasks. Creating a Jack of All Trades will net you a great workforce with people filling roles when you have medical leave, turnover and business pivots. AI isn’t general enough to make this change without major redesign.
The only “problem” with this amazing skill is that companies no longer run on the idea of employee retention. You get promoted by jumping ship. Working harder doesn’t make the headway in a company like it used to 25+ years ago.
Nothing will happen.
Frogs in a pot of water being brought to a boil.
Those in charge will handwave away the job losses and blame some other factor for the economic downturn other their own shortsighted greed while they cry for their bailouts.
I actually like using AI in my workplace to rid the need for tedious data entry. But i realised that if I told people about it, the management might see that they may not need me anymore so i won’t teach anyone how to efficiently use AI.
Years ago, my wife took a job as the lone secretary to a lawyer with a high volume of paperwork, permit applications, etc. The previous secretary, who had retired, didn’t like the computer, and just typed everything by hand.
My wife automated all the forms so she could jump from field to field, and get the paperwork done much faster. So fast in fact, that he decided not to hire the second secretary, and just dump it all on my wife. Then he turned out to be an absolute monster in so many ways that my wife just up and quit one day, which was fine with me.
But she had never told him about her automated forms that she created. He just thought her increased productivity was due to using the computer. So she told me that she made those forms to help herself, not him, and dumped all of them before she left, and he never knew.
I had a shitty job for a while. A good chunk of my day was taken up with just running this one report. A coworker and I would alternate weeks.
Well I automated it. It still took me half the day to run it, but that’s because I needed breaks to play with my daughter and pet my cat.
When I quit, I sent the automation to my coworker. No sense in her wasting her time.
Yeah I am aware that managers will just put more jobs on to you if you do it quick. That’s why I don’t tell them if I finished a task early.
Lol please. America already gutted its entire industrial base to the point where there’s a permanent shortage of blue collar jobs, and most people are working crappy wages in a service role for whichever megacorp owns the entire market.
AI could take over tomorrow and there wouldn’t be enough people to care, despite getting utterly screwed over.
It might only get ugly if purchasing power collapses and causes solvency. Otherwise it’ll just continue to degrade into an infinite debt economy which is basically just generational slavery like a significant portion of exploited labor and human trafficking already is.
Don’t worry though, there’s a million other problems that’ll probably pop the bubble first anyway lol.
There are two big industries that are going to be the canaries in the coal mine, and be the first to take serious hits - Driving, and Fast Food.
Both Uber and Lyft make it clear on their websites that their future is an autonomous fleet, and they’re testing heavily. Waymo has been testing for months, and is starting to roll out in many cities, including mine. Every one of those driverless cars is replacing a human job.
Further, many of the people driving rideshares, would be listed as unemployed, if they weren’t able to eke out a meager living driving. Take away this job, and it isn’t like they have a lot of options to pivot to. If they did, they wouldn’t be driving. Those lost jobs are going straight to the unemployment rolls.
And what about truck drivers? That is another serious driving industry that is going to be fully replaced before long. Again, those drivers don’t have a lot of other options.
Fast Food is the other one. Every fast food corp has been testing a robotic kitchen for years now, and I’d be surprised if even a single one isn’t ready to roll out tomorrow. They are already getting us ready by both phasing in app use, and kiosk use, but also masking the kitchen area. It used to be that you could see the kitchens in fast food places, but new ones are hiding the prep area behind walls, where they can’t be seen, because soon they’ll all be automated.
Fast food is a traditional first job, or a second job, or a second income, or a supplement to retirement, etc. A LOT of households rely on fast food jobs, but within a decade, most of them will be fully automated.
Further, what will happen is that a robotic warehouse will load an autonomous truck, which will go to fully automated fast food outlets, where it will be robotically unloaded, stored, and eventually prepared, and served to a customer, without a human touching it anywhere along the way.
The tech to do all of that exists right now. The only reason they haven’t done it is because they know the consumer backlash will be enormous, but they won’t be able to resist the lure of all those new profits for too long, and somebody will finally take the plunge and be the first. They’ll get savaged in the media, but then everyone will follow, and 10 years from now, every fast outlet will be automated, and millions of jobs will evaporate.
It’s inevitable.
As a former rruck driver, we’re not getting replaced anytime soon.
Fast food is already as automated as it can be. Replacing cooks with robot kitchen is looks good as a management dream, but anyone who tried it quickly discovers that you need industrial robots, and they are fuckng expensive, and you need engineers anyway to maintain them. So you are replacing cheap cooks with outrageously expensive engineers.
“But no”, some ignorant CEO says, “we’re not assembling cars, we don’t need pneumatic robot arm that can lift 10 tons”. Yeah, you still need a robot arm, and it’s just a miniaturized industrial robot, not any much cheaper.
But robot kitchen exist, and they are actually very profitable. Go to your nearest grocery shop. 99% of items on the shelves were produced by a robot. Everything in a plastic wrap, everything in a jar, was produced on a conveyor. Even fresh produce involves some kind of automation.
So robots won’t fry your potatoes, because french fries have really short shelf life. Otherwise they totally could, but hiring a cook is cheaper.
Robots are already frying your potatoes and have existed for years. Given that deep fryers are the leading cause of kitchen accidents, it was one of the lowest hanging fruits to automate. https://youtu.be/PSl8Xyp1kYg
It’s inevitable
And it totally has the potential to collapse on itself. Let AI replace a lot of office workers. Let self-driving cars replace drivers. Let robots replace fast food workers and delivery persons. Move manufacturing jobs offshore. Everyone is unemployed and nobody can afford your robot-created fast food anymore. You have no customers and go bankrupt
And what about truck drivers? That is another serious driving industry that is going to be fully replaced before long. Again, those drivers don’t have a lot of other options.
Truck driving would have a major knock-on effect as well from diners and truck stops, which are often major cash centers of smaller towns.
As those people move on to other jobs, there will be growth in other areas. This is part of the normal ebb and flow of the economy. Rather let’s make sure everyone is generally being taken care of. We can’t put society in stasis for fear of someone somewhere losing out.
Some people are comparing this to the industrial revolution. Which resulted in hellish conditions for much of the working class for ~100 years until unionization started becoming more widespread.
Will there be enough jobs for all those displaced in those ‘other areas’? And how long is it going to take for those to materialise?
Traditionally society has overcome these type of changes. But they weren’t as wide as this one (AI has a huge range of usecases) nor was the change as rapid. And as AI grows into new areas it will continue to displace jobs and human activity.
I really doubt this will turn into a net positive for society and if it does it will still be a very hard transition for at least a decade.
What money are they going to use to move from their home in nowheresville to somewhere where jobs are
I’m not saying leave them out to dry, but we shouldn’t do labor just for the sake of it. If we can automate it and we save labor overall, that’s how society advances. The real question is who gets the benefit, and how we take care of people’s needs, not if it’s a good idea to improve labor efficiency
Would love me some Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, but looking how things are progressing socially, I have my doubts that things are going to end well for anyone worth less then a few million.
