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?

We shall see.

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.

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.

So what do you think we should do?

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).

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'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

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.

Another author here! Terrifyingly I was chatting to a dad on the school run who says he uses AI for his DC’s bedtime story. I’m like, have you heard of books?

Lots of people don’t care about badly written books but they do tend to buy in volume. And lots of people do and always will care about good stories – it’s human nature to tell and to crave stories. I haven’t seen any AI yet that can do what my favourite authors can and in other situations, I haven’t seen it do much at all – I don’t use AI for lots of reasons, including climate impact, but if I forget to add “-AI” to a Google search I’ll get its stupid suggestions. You know, you’re looking for a midweek dinner idea and Google AI will go “Lots of dinner recipes involve ingredients. Try cooking with ingredients to make something healthy and quick. Dinner is a meal. Enjoy!”

As well as effect on jobs, my concern is the energy usage needed. What with electric cars and increased of AI - servers etc in use - where is the production of this additional energy going to come from?

The out-of-work masses on generator treadmills. Gives us something to do for our new robot overlords.

Wow, the dad on the school run - I would be shocked if someone said that to me.

That's a very accurate description of how Ai talks!!

And yes, of course, there is the HUGE energy cost of running these LLMs. The whole thing is destroying us slowly, or not so slowly

AI is very energy intensive so it could end up off limits to all but super rich and cronies

At the moment people with DC in trade and practical apprenticeships are the most cheerful. Most jobs likely to be taken by AI are lone homeworking ones which aren't good for people psychologically

I'm annoyed by Google AI automatic summaries as you can't see where the info is from. With likely growth of misinformation people might give up on internet altogether

My scattergun thoughts

If AI does wipe out most jobs, would that really be such a bad thing? If we all had wonderful, fulfilling careers, maybe it would be regrettable. But we don't. In my experience, most people hate their job. In fact, for quite a lot of people, work ruins their life. Because of bills, or the fear of living in a dump surrounded by noise and violence, they grind away at a job they hate with people they hate and it sucks the life out of them. And even the ones who enjoy their job often find the stress makes them ill. Countless marriages are wrecked by work. Someone has an obnoxious bully for a manager, or a loathsome work colleague, comes home in a filthy mood and takes it out on their partner and kids. Happens every day in every street.

I’ve just had an argument with a bot on MOONPIG 😝 even though I know it’s a bot I still lost my temper with it!

Books are all very well, but if your three year old demands "a story about a pink crocodile who goes on an adventure to Cornwall with my fluffy unicorn Errol and me and fights pirates" and won't go to sleep until she's heard it then AI can be a lifesaver.

And yet Labour plans to cut benefits. Make it make sense.

It will change society. Within five years there won't be any call centres. Most receptionist jobs will be gone. Pretty much any customer service role will no longer exist. This isn't speculation, it is absolute certainty. The applications are being perfected as we speak and ready for roll out.

Virtually all.admin jobs will be gone, as will all junior legal positions. Knowledge will become a worthless commodity. You won't be able to charge anybody for your expert opinion because they will have access to something vastly more "intelligent" than you.

The movie and TV industry WILL be gone within the next ten years. If you work in this field in any capacity, get out now. If you don't believe me, go on YouTube and watch the short movie "The Heist", it's entirely A.I generated, no actors, sets, costumes, camera operators, nothing. It gives you a glimpse of what is to come. So no more TV presenters, news readers, actors, writers, that whole industry is now over.

And that's just the start.

We are not ready for what is coming. It will devastate society, there will be mass unemployment, and nobody has a clue how to manage it. We will no longer be the smartest people in the room.

One of the main reasons people read is the sense of connecting with another mind/consciousness. When I read my favourite authors, it's like meeting up with an old friend. P. G. Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, Aldous Huxley, etc, each have a distinctive voice. You could line up some random paragraphs by, say, Dickens or Jane Austen or Thomas Hardy, and I'd know immediately that it was them. Most people could pick out passages by their favourite authors. Like I said, they'd just know the voice. This is why people read biographies. I've got biographies of Evelyn Waugh, the Brontes...all sorts. And not just biographies. I have Oscar Wilde's collected letters, and also the collected letters of Patrick Fermor and Robert Graves. I've even got Virginia Woolf's diaries. And I read them because I like the complete person, not just the words they put together. AI books wouldn't interest me one tiny bit. They would be, quite literally, soulless.

About 30 -40 years ago people said computers would take over all the jobs. They didn't, and neither will AI.

It's going slower than I expected (as a lawyer). There are a lot of tedious manual things which could be done by AI and I have seen no evidence of any reduction in actual man power required to do these tasks, depsite law firms throwing cash and slick presentations at the problem. It will come but it's not there yet so I think I will probably manage to slide into retirement before it comes for my job thankfully!

You won't lose your job to A.I

You WILL lose your job to someone who uses A.I better than you do.

Oh sh*t @Chiseltip as an admin worker I'm buggered. 😱

The transition between pre AI world and AI world will be bumpy initially, as we figure out how best to use it in our lives and workplaces. But I do think that life as we understand it now will be vastly different once it becomes part of everyday life. Think of big innovations such as the TV- in the 50s and 60s you had barely any channels and sometimes one tv per street. Nowadays the TV is an immersive experience that means we no longer have to sit around twiddling our thumbs.

The same with the internet- look how different our lives are now because of that. AI will be the same, we’re probably around 1999 if you were to compare with the WWW timeline. In 1999 you had AOL chat and Amazon was still just a rainforest. Who could have known that the WWW would shape our lives as much as it has nowadays.

Just make one up? Less carbon-intensive. (I was going to say less energy-intensive but I hate doing bedtime, it’s knackering!)