I'm so sick of every advert shouting 'AI' at me now, half the time it's not even AI it's just a buzzword... but we can't ignore that some form of AI is coming but what I want to know is (and can't get a good answer to).
It's all very well thinking that AI is going to replace millions of jobs, but...
They can't get enough electricity or RAM now, how would they cope if they actually had millions of customers depending on it?
The idea that AI will 'free us' from mundane tasks to concentrate on more important things is horseshit. Tech bros only care about one thing, making money. But they only seem to be focussing on one side of the equation.
Why do the tech bros think you can take millions of people out of work and the economy just keeps ticking along. It won't. If people lose their jobs they won't have money to spend (and even if they do they won't spend it), therefore the companies with AI workers won't have any customers... this is basic economics surely? Even those that don't lose their jobs will be affected. Who do they think goes to coffee shops, buy suits a shoes, buys cars, buys air tickets and goes to concerts, football matches etc?
So much of our economy is actually based on people having money to spend thoughtlessly. Netflix, Deliveroo, Starbucks, you can forget all that. And who will be buying £1200 Iphones and Teslas if everyone's scared to death of losing their jobs?
And if you remove millions of white collar workers from the 'system', why would anyone need to live in London any more. Why not sell up and move out to cheaper places where your UBI (hahaha) will go further?
So then the housing market collapses. Yes this is all going well isn't it?
Not to mention that office blocks become utterly worthless if you don't have people to put in them.
How much damage do we actually think the Govt will let occur before they start to intervene? I mean they will literally have to do something, otherwise the country will be bankrupt.
And, while AI will replace some jobs, you'd have to be a certified lunatic to think it's a good idea to replace your entire workforce (or even a substantial amount) with AI. This would effectively put your company under someone else's control, and leave you in a very weak position.
Say you employ 1000 people, they might be in a union, but they will never all leave at once. Just won't happen. But your AI supplier might remove all your staff in one go if you can't agree to pay a higher price than you were before...
Also, if you hand over decision making to AI, how do you know it's making decisions in your best interests? Say for example you put it in charge of purchasing. I'd suggest it won't necessarily find the best deal for you, it might instead decide to buy from companies associated with its 'owner', and it's almost certainly going to prioritise buying from other companies that use AI.
The UK in particular is very biased towards small companies. They are the backbone of the country, but these companies are the least likely to implement AI, because a) people in small companies don't tend to sit at a desk and do one job all day, they serve at the counter, they do the ordering, they take phone orders. AI companies will tell you that one person could do all that on their own with the help of AI, but what happens when they are on holiday? They need at least one other person there and a lot of small companies are literally 3 or 4 people as it is.
I tried putting some of these questions to Meta's AI and it said 'that's the $64,000 question isn't it?' to how does AI take jobs without crashing the economy. Even it realises that this doesn't hold water. Because the equation doesn't work if you just rip one side of it out.