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

[Themarchoftime]

Obviously, am aware of AI's presence for some time. But I'm shocked how AI features seem to be on all platforms now, email/web etc, and how many roles are being diminished by the use. It seems week on week it's progressively spreading.

Someone who works with AI suggested to me that it's happening so much quicker than anyone expected, that we could all be looking at no jobs across many sectors in 10-12 years.

This has totally depressed me, especially as I'm early fifties, looking to skill up/change roles! And scared me, a bit, also for my kids.

Am i being a catastrophic thinker?

Yup, it's really scary.
Career advice for teens is going to need an overhaul. Things are going to be completely different in the next 5-10 years. I feel that government and schools won't keep up

It is going to be a massive shift, but like previous “revolutions” will lead to new, different opportunities. I was reading an article that said that AI will reach a point where the data it is trained on will all be AI generated, so humans will be needed to ensure it doesn’t just go off into a bizarre automated world of its own.

Yup, in customer service type jobs it’s totally taking over. Depends on the job really… if I were a coder or data analyst or similar role, I’d be looking to re-train…

I wonder if the speed of adoption might go against AI, in that it might be being used in places where it isn't yet quite up to scratch, causing a backlash.

Apparently AI written books (I'm an author) are pretty terrible. Yet people are producing them and putting them out into the market. I think you'd only need to inadvertently buy a couple of these before you'd swear off ever reading anything AI written again.

In a way, yes, you're catastrophising, because AI can be used to free up resources to pay for other, higher value add roles, especially where those roles are funded by the public purse or by philanthropy. I am a director of a charity where there is potential to use AI to eliminate certain fairly routine tasks, which reduces our overheads in our donor management and HR functions and means we have more to spend on programs. Technology has been eliminating routine tasks (automatic purchase order matching) or manpower (long wall miner machine) for time immemorial. This is just the next stage.

I'm an author too...I think there's a lot of people who don't give a shit about badly written books

This is positive, thank you

I think both my DC have picked the wrong, AI susceptible career. I think things may get very scary.
I hope I am catastrophising
Has anyone read the Harlan Ellison story " I Have no Mouth but I must Scream". It's a terrifying short story about a massive machine that controls the last few humans.

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.

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.

This is also true

Even if not directly affected by Ai, the combo of AI and major economic downturn will have/is having a major effect on people's cash/funds. I see and hear this from everyone I know

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.

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.

What do you do re: climate change? No piling on, genuine curiosity

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.

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?

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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"