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?

At some point in the future its predicted by some that AI will replace so many jobs that governments wont really know what do do with people.

It could solve for our energy needs, production needs and entertainment needs, clean the oceans, help humanity seed other planets etc.

It could make money essentially useless as nobody will want for anything.

Its gonna be interesting for the next few generations if we dont destroy ourselves first.

Economies have always adapted organically with the help of politics to generate goods and to distribute them.

Economies have also collapsed.

Unless you’re incredibly rich, how will
you pay your mortgage or rent? How will you buy food and heat your home? Where will the money come from to live a half decent life?

I'm pretty sure when the internet first came around we said the same thing. Can you remember what it sounded like in 1996 when people tried to explain it to you and it seemed so fanciful and incredible and that it would destroy the world? (Though one could argue that it is in some ways)
I refuse to worry about what I cannot change. People adapt and the world moves on.

I had an argument with the PayPal bot and it handed me over to a real person. .

Interesting, but I can't think of an example!

How do you know it was a real person…?

I think that the nlw and ni increases this year will hasten the introduction of ai into a lot of jobs. I work in health and my practice is looking at ai for booking appointments, typing notes and referral letters, coding and processing medication requests. I've been told we're looking at reducing our administration team hours by 75%.

There was an author recently outed in the romance genre. She didn't even bother to remove the ChatGpt prompt from one of her pages.

That is so disgustingly lazy. It not only is deceptive to a reader by passing the work off as her own, she didn't even read that work and edit it. Such a glaring mistake that has cost her everything (or that pen name at least).

I personally do my very best to avoid authors that use AI for either their covers or content. Writing is an art form we must preserve.

Except the one thing AI can do pretty well is code.

I’m sceptical about the idea that AI will replace the creative and knowledge industries. By definition AI produces mediocrity - that’s how it works. It generates text from an aggregate of lots of data. It looks for a mean and reproduces it. So anything that requires bland mediocrity will be susceptible to AI - writing documents, marketing, generating bland content, etc.

What it can’t do is genuinely innovate, or create things at the margins or outliers, or make innovative syntheses of thought, or decode things that require bodily experience that can’t easily be put into text form. It’s essentially a big set of linguistic data being recombined and reproduced. Anything that requires knowledge of the bodily world - touch, interaction, inference, instinct - it can’t do or interpret. It can’t generate anything new that isn’t contained in the data it’s trained on.

So if you want to find a job that AI can’t do, find something that requires a physical component - a people-facing job that requires human interaction, synthesising ideas, understanding people, making decisions that computers can’t do. Despite all the overblown guff from the techbros, it won’t be replacing teachers, artists, beauty therapists, social workers, barristers, scientists, doctors and nurses, yoga instructors, small business owners, carers, etc etc. any time soon. Basically anything that people enjoy or people need, people will be needed to do.

I work in Tax and AI is revolutionary for us. It has already cut down admin time hugely and I write for several industry publications and can research my articles much quicker and in more depth than before. This means I have more time to spend with my clients on advisory services which is good for both of us.

One thing I remember an aeronautical engineer telling me is technically a plane can be flown without a pilot, however little would trust this. For many humans, there is something about another human being there. Same as surgery, the capability is there for simple surgeries, but not many would trust it. I remember reading Oxford uni opening up a specialised ethics on ai hub and I hope the research from this will explore the downsides of ai to ensure the human race doesn't loose its collective humanistic qualities.

Women's hour also covered an interesting topic the other day on ai being used in fertility medicine. It wasn't to replace people, but to enhance and improve clinical decisions and provide more info for the patient to make an informed choice.

Wait until quantum computing is established though. It'll make our current machines look like stone tools. Quantum ai will replace everything apart from physical work such as cleaning and installation jobs. Doctors will be replaced with a generic healthcare worker who carries out the commands made by quantum ai. Robots already perform surgery.

There would have to a UBI. The powers that be would recognize the danger. Also, AI is going to generate enormous wealth. Once we have 3-D printing and nanobots and god knows what else, production will be on a whole other level.

The real problem is going to be equality. If everyone is on the same UBI, you've basically got communism. Now that would be fine if everyone was nice and quiet and civilized. In reality, a big chunk of the population is violent, ignorant, and anti-social. I have known two people driven to suicide attempts by feral neighbours. I'd guesstimate that around 15-20% of the population is unwilling and unable to live in a civilized way. Unfortunately, they also tend to have the most kids, who they then raise to be just like them. One of the main reasons people work hard and save their money is so they don't have to live around neighbours like that. If everyone is on the same UBI, you won't be able to escape them. (And before anyone jumps on me, I'm not talking about those on low incomes. The good people on low incomes are their biggest victims.)

I’ve heard the plane navigation explanation and I see no reason to disbelieve it at all.

But, personally, I’d rather have a computer in charge - with all its back-ups and fail-safes - than a human pilot!

Surgery I wouldn’t be so happy about. But I can imagine that a supervised AI surgery bot might be OK. The stories of people going in for an amputation and coming out with no legs because the surgeon first took the wrong one off would end, I’m sure.

They'll have to bring in a social credit system. The better behaved you are, the higher your UBI. Feral meatheads will only be given enough for basic food and a cage to live in, whereas nicely behaved law abiding people will get enough for a TV, car, phone, nice food etc.

I work in law and I’m very worried for young people entering the profession. Very recently we’ve started using it for more and more paralegal / junior lawyer jobs (meeting notes, hearing notes, drafting, edisclosure). I can see a lot of jobs going, much faster than I expected tbh. I will discourage my kids from doing law degrees / conversions.

I think you are vastly overstating. Technology eliminating routine tasks “for time immemorial” ? And what do you mean to reduce overheads for donor management and HR functions? I have worked in both areas and can vouch for the absolute need for there to be a bespoke human interaction and no room for sloppy communications.

Lol. If it was another bot it was much better than the original one, which kept reproducing and summarising info from the website rather than actually answering my question!

My DD is training to be a dancer / singer / actress which usually would be one of those jobs where you are unlikely to work. Going forward it’s a job where ai is unlikely to reach for the near future. People love the arts and human emotion. And if thousands more want to train in years to come, dance teachers will be needed I guess. Same goes for live sports and in person sports training. Can’t emulate that with machine.

Basically I think this is the knowledge economy version of the Industrial Revolution, and all the things we’ve trained our kids to do are becoming quickly obsolete. I would have thought it was catastrophising previously but this month at work has made me think otherwise . Very sad that change like this is never actually harnessed for the good of humanity. We’re so clever and yet so stupid

I think alot of occupational health roles will stand the test of time, physiotherapists, speech therapists, counselling. Also the care sector for which i hope salaries would massively improve for.

I feel robotics is quite a whole off in terms of having a robot do child minding, caring roles and those I mention above.

QVC product demonstrating will be first on the list of jobs to be replaced by AI. It's only the cost of producing hours on end of decent quality video that stops them being produced by AI right now, and the new Chinese models are a lot cheaper.

I listen to a fair number of industry specialist podcasts with slightly half arsed amateur presenters which would absolutely be better if presented by AI podcasters prompted and checked for hallucination by professionals.

Interesting. But doesn’t in-person sales depend on at least some human connection and a belief that a fellow human has used and approves of a product or service?

If I was in the market for a face cream or an air fryer I wouldn’t want to have it recommended by a bot. I’d want to know that the recommender thought highly of it because they’d used it as I would.