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Original poster

To worry that there may be no hope for a good future thanks to AI

203 replies

Designless · 11/02/2026 12:26

I use it, it up skills me a lot, I am at the top of my game but.... I think I'll be lucky to reach retirement age still in work and I despair for young people trying to get entry level jobs. Everything that I did to get on the ladder is done by AI now.

I know the nebulous cope response is "that's what the luddites said - NEW jobs will arise" but I think this is different. AI can think. AI allows a handful of unbelievably wealthy people to control everything.

Someone please post something hopeful before I pop from despair thanks :(

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LittlePetitePsychopath · 11/02/2026 13:08

AI can't think. It hallucinates. It needs things from humans to learn from, constantly. Gemini is a state. ChatGPT hallucinates everything from football games to court cases, it spent a few days last week claiming Taylor Swift wasn't engaged and had never released her latest album. It takes people a single chat to "program" various AI bots into either acting like romantic partners or encouraging them to off themselves...

We're in an AI boom, it'll collapse a bit, we'll find a new normal.

VimesandhisCardboardBoots · 11/02/2026 12:56

AI can't think. It's named wrong, there is no intelligence behind you.

All it is is a prediction machine, a souped up version of the predictive text you've used on your phone for decades. It can't come up with new ideas, can't reason, can't innovate. All it's doing is taking a guess about the next word based on each prior word.

That's not to say it's not scary, and that it's not going to make some jobs harder to come by. But it's never going to take over from the majority of human employment.

And it's only going to get thicker. AI needs content from humans to learn from and right now that content is disappearing amongst all the slop produced by AI across the internet. The next generation of AI is just going to get trained to the crap the current generation is putting out, and so on and so on.

MigGirl · 11/02/2026 12:35

AI can't think and that is the biggest restriction to it. Its a coded algorithm which needs human input and then the output needs to be checked.

I've tried to use it, I have found it helpful with some tasks, but as my job is quite manual it will never take over my role unless we have fully functioning robots as well. Which may happen long term but they would probably cost a lot more then employing me.

I had this discussion with my DH earlier and we both agreed that only the specify programed AI's are really good at the moment the general one's seem to take a lot of input to output what you need and then you have to check everything is correct. It's currently a clever tool that needs a human to input information into it to get the right output, people's jobs will just change to having to learn to use it effectively. Yes it may mean we need fewer people to do some jobs but considering that ageing population and lower birth rates this could actually be a good thing.