To be utterly despondent about AI

Given the environmental costs of AI, will governments allow its unrestricted use? Won't its use eventually have to be heavily taxed?

Apologies if this is an ignorant question!

No. All the things you mention won't need human to finesse it, there won't be any jobs in those industries. Its not a gender thing, it's a human problem.

You still haven't said how though.

The problem will be how society responds to AI. It could be a force for good and could allow us to reduce our working week significantly. Unfortunately it could also be used to make profit with little regard for Human cost. It's about how we as a society responds to it.

The naivety of posters is staggering.

A.I is quite simply the most disruptive technology in human history. We have no comparable example, not the Internet, not the steam engine, not agriculture, nothing.

Consensus is that in less than a decade, sometime around 2032, AGI will become a reality. That is A.I which is indistinguishable from a human. For the first time in our existence, we won't be the most intelligent things in the room. All other technology or inventions relied on us to control or operate it. A.I is different, it will be able to out think us. This isn't science fiction, this is real, and the timeliness are shortening every six months.

How we adapt is anybody guess. Consider a world where all manufacturing is done by machines. Factories won't need car parks, toilets, HR, payroll, admin, just robots, working 247. Supermarkets will be "dark", you will pull up to a kiosk and pick up your online order from a basket on the back of an A.I powered platform. No people required. Knowledge will have no value because the A.I will be infinite and an expert on everything, all at once, no people required.

Let's look at the jobs already lost to A.I.

Film and TV production is a dead industry. Within five years nobody will be employed to make movies or programmes. Just look at the A.I shorts already available online.

Factory work . . Gone.

Admin . . . Gone.

Manufacturing . . .Gone.

Teaching . . Gone.

Driving . . . Gone.

Aviation . . . Gone.

The challenge will be two fold. How to stop people from rioting, without jobs, there will be massive social unrest. UBI will probably have to be introduced, this will be for the older generation. The children now, who will be young adults by the time A.I is released,will likely be the most dangerous, displaced, angry demographic. No jobs, no money, no life, they are going to feel cheated.

If you have a five year old now, literally everything you know about life and the world is irrelevant, you wont be able to guide them, teach them, the world is about to change beyond all recognition.

I think it's terrible, destructive and even dangerous in some situations. I hate it.

I'm also worried about the environmental impact of it. The use of resources is absolutely phenomenal, and is duplicate as several big tech companies race to 'win' AI, they are each building their own infrastructure. The greenwashing about being net zero is unbelievable. There is an acceptance that we just have to do this, versus a weighing up of the risk and reward. The environmental impact may be accepted by people if it, say, cures childhood cancer. But is it worth it to put people out of business or slash jobs? Is it even worth it to read your emails quicker, or get a handy holiday itinerary? Who is going to get net benefit from AI? It's going to be the tech billionaires and the bad actors of the world, not you or me. I day this as someone who was in the industry for a long time and have seen corporations full of "values" abandon them for the race to win.

But nobody can force the companies. Well, Trump could, but he's firmly on their side. Canada just tried to introduce a tax so tech companies would pay if they wanted to operate there, Trump had a tantrum and refused to do a trade deal with them unless they removed it. They removed it. Similar happening with the EU. He's not going to let anybody get in the way of the billionaires building their utopia, it's very much like the British forcing opium on China. The only thing we can do is get strong enough that we don't need America or their products, but we've left it about two decades too late. So we just have to keep using whatever they feed us, and when the time comes we'll get UBI. Which will presumably be enough to keep us alive, but not much more. To be fair, it's not like they've been hiding their intentions - Altman etc have been happily announcing their plan for us for ages, for some reason we've just ignored them - or embraced it as 'yippee, no more work!'. But I think most people imagine a life without work as lovely holidays and dinners out, not a lifetime sitting indoors staring at a screen as there's nothing else to do and nowhere else to go.

@Anotherparkingthread so the question really is will you as an AI developer and boat owner be prepared to pay a decent work to the skivvys that look after your boat and cut your hair? Or will the fact that there are now more people doing those "safe".jobs and the fact that they don't involve real intelligence like AI has mean you are able to justify paying them less?
And if so, are you happy for your taxes to pay a basic income to the rest of us as @Livelovebehappy seems to think will happen?

Yes

The less well paid, less "skilled" jobs will be left to humans. In reality it takes a lot of skill to cut someone's hair well. We also devalue soft skills because they are connected with female dominated jobs. And there has been a lot of work done in the past few years to devalue.those skills further -basically anything AI/a machine can't do isnt actually that important and this therefore proves how amazing AI is AND how it can do everything important. It's a circular argument. So some jobs have always been considered "unskilled" some jobs have been recently subject to a lot of propaganda calling them "unskilled".

Either people work now to place a higher value on skills that are often in high demand. Or accept that the work everyone does in the future will be considered low.value. (it's not just demand/supply in the labour market. If it was, the Elon's of this world wouldn't be complaining that people are lazy because they wont work at/below minimum wage. Or painting jobs like teaching etc for which their is a labour shortage as contemptuous).

I work for a company who has been developing AI (aka machine learning) since the 1980s. Your mobile phone is full of it. All that has changed is that language models are getting more impressive and so journalists are now writing about it but AI has been developing for decades and the changes haven't resulted in massive job losses. So there will be two outcomes 1) we will be able to do more with the same number of people and 2) there will be a premium attached to some non-AI products (think how expensive a Diptyque candle is vs a tallow candle).

I’m fretting about it. I’m planning on buying a small house (alone) with a 16 year mortgage of £60K. If I can’t pay my mortgage, with no family support and no inheritance coming, I am going to be screwed.

Perhaps my post was a bit alarmist, I don't know. I think it's the fact that it all feels so unknowable that I'm struggling with. Professionally, I swing from being more energised that I've ever been about my job, to feeling completely exhausted and overwhelmed by the pace and relentlessness of the change.

I know - you clearly think society will collapse.

I think it will just make existing trends worse quicker. Yes there will be rapid change in many industries - but I don't think there will be massive unemployment or not worse than we've seen in the past -" just" under employment and take up of lower wages jobs as PP says many jobs still need to be done in person.

This is very depressing and alarming. I try not to think too much about it either and try and avoid consuming AI driven art for now.

Many warehouse functions are already automated. Amazon is always looking for ways to get rid of their human warehouse staff and replace with technology.

Tbh, I think if you're not worried by AI, you probably haven't given the issue enough thought.

For those suggesting children be encouraged to go into programming, all this will get done by AI, with few exceptions.

To those referencing the industrial revolution as having similar impact, the world population at the beginning of the 19th century was about a billion. The impact of job losses on a population of 9 billion will be catastrophic.

I've seen commentary that humans will provide the creative side of life, but AI can write novels, paint pictures, compose music - and will improve rapidly.

Not to mention that we soon won't be able to believe anything we see or read due to the fakes out there.

@PhobiaphobicBut realistically what can the average middle class person do? I just don’t think there’s any point fretting about it as we don’t really know how it will pan out and most of us have no control over it.

Hear hear. As a creative artist who has many friends who are authors many of their books were ripped off for AI training. It’s shocking.

At a certain point there was debate about whether the owners of sites like Twitter, Facebook etc should be held responsible in the same way that newspaper owners/editors were for their content. It was decided they wouldn't and were allowed to self regulate while at the same time allowed to hold themselves up as an alternative to legacy media. So the best of both worlds. Concerns about data storage/personal data were also brushed aside
Several genocides and a Cambridge Analytica later here we are.
It doesn't have to be a disaster is what I'm saying. A lot of it depends on how we respond now. But expecting the people in charge of the AI push to support other peoples income/ordinary people's jobs out of the goodness of their own heart is foolish. Elon Musk loves to talk about how when there are robots we will all be supported by basic income but his DOGE also stripped benefits/healthcare from people in the US on low incomes now. Why would he be suddenly generous in the future. And in his view of the future it's him and other tech billionaires who.will.be generating all the wealth.

On the plus side if Elon Musk is in charge of the AI/robot takeover it will probably explode all by itself.

This is true, but generally speaking the educated upper working class and the middle class have found themselves in the most secure positions with regards to employment. This will no longer be the case.

There will be job shortages, but having any kind of qualification won't help you get any of the low level jobs they simply need people who work relatively hard albeit unskilled labour. I wouldn't suddenly hire graduates just because they have university education if what I needed was kitchen experience etc.

Education and those in it at the moment is not preparing people for the real world. It is still being promoted as the route to a well paid career and obviously some university education is needed for example for doctors, but for the majority of people a degree is going to become a very expensive and redundant bit of paper. With the cost now being so much more, I can't see anybody sensible deciding to take art degrees etc. I feel bad for students who are currently training for jobs that simply will not exist but will be saddled with debt that others don't have.

Unfortunately ai is inevitable because companies will never not use it. If the government were sensible they could implement a robot tax so that each for job lost to ai the company must pay more than that person's job would have generated in reveneau for the government. With these jobs disappearing the shortfall will be enormous and with more out of work the need for tax to come from somewhere else becomes obvious. Also if using ai was taxed heavily, it may make companies consider retaining human employees. Businesses unfortunately only care about the bottom line.

People who are not concerned about AI don't understand it.

I'm an AI Product Director for a SaaS company in the UK and I've been in software design and development for my entire career. The rate of change is absolutely unprecedented and frankly terrifying and exhausting. Sure, right now our productivity is probably about 4x greater due to AI, but we've gone from being able to plan product strategy a decade in advance, to looking at our six month road map and wondering if there is any fucking point building it, or whether we will turn up on Monday and discover it's all obselete.

Every week brings new announcements from the big players like Open AI, Google, Anthropic etc which sideswipe entire product categories and leave companies with their solutions having been completely commodified overnight. Junior roles in everything from marketing to engineering have disappeared.

I have teen DC and I have no idea how to advise them. I'm not sure the advice to focus on STEM is correct. I'm just trying not to think about it tbh.