To think that AI is taking over jobs far, far, FAR quicker than we anticipated?

i get what your saying but then to be fair humans have had the market on writing for years and some of the books is omg, if humans were perfect then in theory the quality alone would mean no one would use AI for books

But it's it the way society is that creates the situations for people like this? Maybe if I had a crap job and crap pay and couldn't see a way out, I'd be like this.
If AI takes all the good, interesting jobs and I have to do a brainless one, I may well turn to attacking AI.

Exactly. If the UK population was 10 million instead of 70 million that would be different, especially if they were all nice, gentle, and intelligent. They'd read, paint, grow flowers, learn languages, learn the guitar, go fishing or birdwatching, play with their children, etc. But what about the violent, ignorant, anti-social people? The people who not only don't care if they upset their neighbours but thoroughly enjoy it. What about the boy racers who woke me up at 3am in cars with giant exhaust pipes that screech and explode? There is so much evil, destructiveness and madness in human nature that it needs to be channeled somewhere.

If you look at the UK workforce it is rapidly ageing and shrinking.
Supermarkets are cutting staff but there is still very high employment
(even allowing for long term sick)
My local Sainsburys has almost no daytime staff under 40

Interestingly the ladies who help at the self check love the fact that they are not sitting at a till getting RSI all day
and one of them credits running around the tills for her improved health and lower weight (they are very chatty souls)

I want a world where AI does everything and our job is just to experience the world.

I don't! It sounds idyllic, but in reality I think hordes of bored and under-occupied people roaming the countryside would be disastrous. The devil finds work for idle hands, and all that. Also, many studies have shown that working or having a similar purpose in life is essential for good mental and physical health, and that both deteriorate quite quickly on retirement, if retirees don't find a similar role (eg volunteering) to get them out of bed in the morning and keep them busy and stimulated.

My local Sainsburys has had Smartshop (where you use a handset to scan as you go, thus saving time at the checkout) for many years, but I noticed yesterday that the handsets now have a "search" function, so if you can't find miso paste, for example, you type it in and the handset tells you immediately that it's in aisle 24. No more searching for an employee to help you find the more obscure items on your shopping list! But also, if there are fewer demands on the shopping order pickers to help customers find miso paste etc, they will complete their order picking more quickly, so fewer of them will be required, so fewer supermarket jobs will be available...

That’s very Black Mirror! 😬

@lljkk yes and no. If you can specify what you want your code to do in discrete chunks, and write tests for it, then generate the code, then that is fine. I know very good programmers that now barely code by hand at all. They get AI to generate about 90% of it. Sure there is supervision role required and there are advantages to having someone oversee things and plumb them together with experience, but you can have a less skilled/experienced worker doing this. It doesn't even matter if the code is a heap of dung as long as it does what you want it to do. And you can iterate on it with the same tools. You can ask an AI what the code does. People are quick to write off AI, but there's a lot of fear of the new. And fear of technology. And lots of the time that is from people that haven't even used the technology or haven't that much of a grasp of it. And like most tech it can be used for good, evil and garbage. I'd recommend people just trying out co-pilot, or gemini play around with it and get a feel for what it does. It takes a while to get to grips with prompting, just like it takes a while to get to grips with how to use something like a traditional search engine. You then get a bit of a nose for AI generated content. I'm not enjoying people trying to game outlets like Youtube, by producing thousands and thousands of videos of automated content for long tail clicks and views. I'm not sure if this will further poison/weaken the LLMs. In some ways it would be more useful if people could pubilsh their prompts, and/or definitely label their content if it is AI generated. I was laughing at X's grok. where it may try and summarise a concise tweet in three paragraphs and totally read it wrong.

If we don’t supervise the AI’s code, is that when it makes The Terminator, or have I skipped a step?

AI isn't great with power cuts

@Juliagreeneyes wrote...
Except the one thing AI can do pretty well is code.

Is that true.... someone told me that AI tends to generate code that is hard for humans to understand or document and as a result hard to maintain or revise; the real cost in coding is not in the first version write but in the maintenance and refinements and customisation for client needs. So ... AI-code is useful as a tool for humans and to support human effort, but humans still need to fully supervise the code generation and specifications, fully understand the code and document clearly so that the code can be revised by others in future. Humans can use AI to help debug but humans are the ones who have to know what bugs to look for and to guide the AI to help find the bugs and make sure the code is doing things it should do. So skilled human involvement is still constant. As a result, AI is far from producing code without lot of supervision or code that is default low maintenance and easy to revise ; still very far from a quick safe mindless process to ask AI to write anything but extremely simple computer programs.

Or so I was told.

Excellent film, but very poor grasp of the physics of energy.

Much as this made me laugh, it kind of sums up why big bosses would rather have AI, bots etc.

It is silly. All the "benefit dossers" claiming benefits for "dubious" health issues are said to be able to WFH. Yet no WFH role is safe from AI, and will be the first to go.

I want to see what happens when yr 11 ask their ai teacher the difference between lang and lit for the 93rd time in a single lesson.

Either:
a. Bits of student all over the floor when it flips and zaps one of them
Or
b. Bits of computer, when it flips and zaps itself.

It seems that everyone is falling over themselves to use it. I don't think it will bring anything good to the world. I don't want to be replaced in my creative job, I want something to do my laundry and washing-up. What will happen when everything is fake? We will not be able to trust our eyes and will revert to no technology at all.

Don’t agree with this at all. There are so many practical jobs that can’t be done by AI. Plumbers, cleaners, farm laborers.

Have you seen The Matrix?

I am actively avoiding any company that only offers AI chatbot for customer service. Because usually if I have to contact customer service it's a question with some nuance the AI can't understand. I don't think it's quite "I" enough for what it's rolled out for just yet. Most of the time.

A sort of monopoly money Citizens Income, set according to the cost of living in a country and separated from a country's ability to pay it, has to be the way in the future?

What I can say is that my job was replaced by an AI. In a sector I thought this wouldn't really happen, as I'm quite skilled at the work (programming), and I spent years building up that skill. I thought my job would be safe and the art department would suffer before me. How wrong was I.

I've heard people say "oh, it will be so nice when we have AI and no one needs to work. Then we can all go and enjoy nature." Oh really? In 1900, there were a billion humans. By 1960 that had trebled to three billion. It's now eight billion and heading for ten.

I live in a village and feel like I'm suffocating. The narrow country lanes have traffic like a flippin motorway. My local woods have been hacked down to make way for a new estate, and a second massive estate has been built at the other end of the village. We've also been told that the fields in the centre of the village are going to have 500 disgusting little rabbit hutch houses all jammed on top of one another. If no one needs to work, imagine a spring day in the countryside! Forget being alone with nature, or listening to the birds. Places of natural beauty will be as busy as Oxford Street in a January sale.

And before someone says the birth rate is dropping, it isn't dropping everywhere. Africa's birth rate is so high the African population is going to double. Also, medicine is constantly improving. With medical nanobots and senolytic drugs and god knows what else, people will soon be living to 120 and beyond. In other words, they won't be dying and making room.

@SnarkSideOfLife
Every time Amazon apply for planning for a warehouse they big up the number of order checker jobs.
In one warehouse I watch
EVERY order has to have a human check.

Watch the car park not the hype

www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/21/robot-packers-and-ai-cameras-uk-retail-embraces-automation-to-cut-staff-costs

Well there’s definitely information on the internet saying that in some Amazon warehouses robots check the orders as well as picking them. So no human checking the order. 🤷‍♀️