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

It's not AI that is the issue, it's greed. It could be used to help people in their jobs not put them out of a job, but it won't be in many circumstances.

I've just been to hospital and they asked if I was happy with them using an AI programme for her to make notes
Never seen that before

About AI?
AI and automation have decreased the number of jobs. That is the key driver as to why wages have stagnated for 55yrs. However, productivity and profits have increased more than enough that if it had been fairly shared, we could all be working 20hrs a week for a high salary that is equivalent to full time pay.

But the shareholders and executives are hoarding the profits for themselves and making workers fight over an ever shrinking pool of labour intensive, low paid, and insecure jobs. Wage stagnation occurs when you have too many workers for the jobs going. We have had it for over a half a century.

The idea that AI and automation will ever create more jobs is a fantasy, they are only funded, prototyped and released after cost-benefit analysis shows they will eliminate jobs while maintaining or increasing profit. That is their purposeful design.

What I would do is something that can’t happen without the shareholders, executives - and the MPs who number among them- voting against their own self-interest. It’s going to take a complete overhaul of our current system to make it happen. One that puts people and the planet before profit.

I quite agree that a lot of readers don't care about character progression or growth or plot arcs, (and a lot of them seem to only want hot sex), but AI, by dint of never having been human, doesn't have the ability to have humans behaving in a human way. So these books aren't just bad, they are random and unbelievable, and I don't think people want to part with their hard earned money to read a bunch of stuff that doesn't make sense. So even AI-written hot sex is pretty daft, and I don't think it's giving readers what they want (there's plenty of free drivel available on Amazon already anyway).

So what do you think we should do?

It's indeed everywhere, but have you actually tried to use it? It's pretty temperamental, I think we're a little way off losing huge swathes of the work force to it.

That’s hardly reassuring! The Industrial Revolution was an utter global catastrophe for the British working class, the millions of people elsewhere in the world we expanded our British empire to and the devastating climate and environmental effects on air, water, land, and all life on Earth all of which we have yet to recover from.

We shall see.

This is has happened throughout human history. It's not a catastrophe, no more so than any other technological development. Like the gen z say "we move"

I tried to use AI yesterday to write Alt-text descriptions of some charts. My favourite was "this chart has lots of coloured lines" to describe a line chart that was showing usage of different types of services over time.

The veterinary company that I work for, are already considering using an AI service for consultations. The vets and nurses will still be doing the actual consult, but the AI service will be recording and creating the notes. It sounds like we will be using this in the next 1 -2 years. All the practices within our company (it is a corporate vet chain), have already had our computer systems upgraded in preparation.

Scary!

If the consequences are malign for too great a proportion of the population, your economy and society are in trouble.

I would say that we are already seeing the beginnings of this.

Consequences, yes of course. The available jobs in 10 years may be different than what they are now. In the 80s, coal miner, milkman, textile worker, steel worker... Thesec were jobs you might do that are almost non existent in the UK now. Not benign for the people who made their livelihood that the world moved on but there was no way of avoiding it.

We have to adapt to the new world like we did when other technological advances happened.

The way we adapt will have enormous ramifications, socially and politically.

The adaptations and their consequences aren't guaranteed to be benign.

"It can't "think" for itselt. Once that happens, most job roles will be redundant."

That is so so far away, it may never happen.

What we call AI is just the same old computer programs with if statements, taking in (a lot) more data and spitting it out in a more "human like" way.

I see big companies casting around for ways to leverage AI and not being terribly successful yet. It can generate content with varying results. You can't rely on it to be accurate. It needs humans to interpret and edit the results. It can automate some repetitive tasks. These were already being outsourced if they didn't have to be done in person. Self service was already proliferating in customer service sectors.

It would be foolish to say no impact, but it won't affect every job. We have to adapt to the new world like we did when other technological advances happened.

I gave up my car ( In London so it's easy). Walk everywhere. Two DC and DH also use the Tube or cycle.
I am veggie ( also easy). Eat local food.
I buy very little and buy a lot at charity shops.

I could do more as I do fly overseas to visit family but am trying to minimise that.

Those professions are not necessarily AI proof. AI may not be able to physically do the work, OK.

But will people be able to afford to pay hairdressers, to own cars that need mechanics, to pay for any plumbing work that isn't absolutely necessary, if they have less or no income because their old jobs have disappeared?

It's going slower than I expected but it is speeding up. At the moment AI isn't really "intelligent" as it depends on the information fed into it to make decisions. It can't "think" for itselt. Once that happens, most job roles will be redundant.

I read in (I think - it was decades ago) "Sinclair and the Sunrise Technology" that "unemployment would be a thing of past by the year 2000" because AI and machines would be doing almost all of our work for us. This clearly hasn't happened yet, but will. The latter anyway.

The unemployment part is interesting though and needs to be tackled now. Once humans are obsolete in terms of doing work, we need a plan. In the book I cite the idea was that humans would be freed from doing shitty jobs and would be able to spend their time improving their lives and improving humanity. The trouble is this requires a basic universal income.

If people can't work because of disability, we fund them. We need to get used to funding people who not working because they genuinely can't find work. At the moment people are (often rightly) seen as scroungers if they are long-term unemployed. In the next ten or twenty years millions will be permanently unemployed simply because there are no longer enough jobs where humans are a better worker than machinery and AI.

The use of AI and machinery needs to be taxed. It needs to be more expensive for businesses to use these things than employ humans. This is the only fair way I can see to prevent widespread destitution, then eventually violent revolution.

Between this and climate change....I worry a lot for my DC. ( Before anyone piles on I do a lot about the second)
Not everyone is cut out to be a hairdresser or a mechanic or a plumber or similar AI proof professions.

It's actually going slower than I expected because I've been fretting about it since 2017.

however, things like delivery by drone are behind what I expected too. So maybe AI will experience a slowdown for similar reasons.

I'm glad I'm not young though.

The customer role aspect with AI is interesting. I don't think the AI bot has ever solved my problem when I need to get onto Customer Services. Only last week my parcel went missing and the bot kept saying it was on the way. It had actually been sent to the other side of the country and only for a lovely lady in customer services, it probably wouldn't have arrived as she sent it down with a van going to my county the next week.

You're relying on enough people having jobs that pay enough to be able to cover their bills and make donations, and on governments having a large enough tax take to fund projects.

I don't see that that is guaranteed.