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?

That's interesting. What sort of jobs/level are these people at?

Genuinely curious - not being snarky! I know very little about ChatGPT and that sort of AI.

I tried AI to get from a recording of a meeting to a record of decisions and outcomes.
Never again.

And when AI can replace the job of a fork lift driver in a warehouse
or a supermarket shopping order picker
or an Amazon warehouse order checker
I'll be too old to care

One of the jobs I do online is evaluating AI.

Nah, there, is no intelligence there - no learning. It's still just a computer program. AI is great for things like spotting anomalies in scans/xrays etc, but crap at finding the meaning in those anomalies - so it would be a great asset to the NHS to highlight findings that doctors can interpret.

It would be great at something like 111 calls, where there's only a need to follow a script that leads to an outcome. It would be awful at assessing 999 calls, because it can't understand anything other than the spoken word. A breathless voice or a voice in pain would mean nothing to an AI if the person was not able to say they were in pain or breathless.

It cannot learn, although we are constantly told it can. The same mistakes happen again and again, even in something as simple as the AI you see at the top of a google search. It smashes together anything related to specific words - it has no understanding of the same word having different meanings, or people with the same first name being different people. this can possobly be programmed out, but hasn't happened yet.

I think that jobs which require actual human connection will be fine. There's a hell of a difference between taking advice or guidance from an actual person who has been through similar events, and reading a shitty AI paragraph about the topic.

Even for things that can be automated, like checkouts, lots of people still choose to use the option with a person involved.

Shitty AI customer service chat bots annoy customers who persevere until they can reach a human or vote with their feet.

Art, Music and Literature aren't just tasks to be completed. A movie isn't just a story made of pictures. Underneath it all, they are all ways for us to connect with other human minds and feel what they are feeling for a time. People need people.

I've had a play with it, to see what kind of essays it can write. Especially as kids are increasingly using it to submit theirs. It does passable gcse ones, but not A Level. There's no heart or thought.

I do think it's going to change all the knowledge professions. But unless there are massive changes in society, it all feels back to front. Surely AI should make our lives better, not turn us into the mechanicals. I want a world where AI does everything and our job is just to experience the world.

Then I want spaceships. Proper, talking ones.

Nah, anything written by ai is so obviously AI and therefore not much cop.

Cvs are arriving having been submitted to ai first and are weirdly unreadable

Up your standards. Appreciate unique human thought and discussion. Reject AI reports and emails which don't make sense. ' Have a prosperous weekend' Utter bollocks.

Amazon already uses robots for picking orders in the warehouses, 750,000 robots apparently https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/amazon-introduces-new-robotics-solutions

@SnarkSideOfLife
Re read what I said.
Humans check every order due to multiple snafus in the past.

Well there’s definitely information on the internet saying that in some Amazon warehouses robots check the orders as well as picking them. So no human checking the order. 🤷‍♀️

www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/21/robot-packers-and-ai-cameras-uk-retail-embraces-automation-to-cut-staff-costs

@SnarkSideOfLife
Every time Amazon apply for planning for a warehouse they big up the number of order checker jobs.
In one warehouse I watch
EVERY order has to have a human check.

Watch the car park not the hype

I've heard people say "oh, it will be so nice when we have AI and no one needs to work. Then we can all go and enjoy nature." Oh really? In 1900, there were a billion humans. By 1960 that had trebled to three billion. It's now eight billion and heading for ten.

I live in a village and feel like I'm suffocating. The narrow country lanes have traffic like a flippin motorway. My local woods have been hacked down to make way for a new estate, and a second massive estate has been built at the other end of the village. We've also been told that the fields in the centre of the village are going to have 500 disgusting little rabbit hutch houses all jammed on top of one another. If no one needs to work, imagine a spring day in the countryside! Forget being alone with nature, or listening to the birds. Places of natural beauty will be as busy as Oxford Street in a January sale.

And before someone says the birth rate is dropping, it isn't dropping everywhere. Africa's birth rate is so high the African population is going to double. Also, medicine is constantly improving. With medical nanobots and senolytic drugs and god knows what else, people will soon be living to 120 and beyond. In other words, they won't be dying and making room.

What I can say is that my job was replaced by an AI. In a sector I thought this wouldn't really happen, as I'm quite skilled at the work (programming), and I spent years building up that skill. I thought my job would be safe and the art department would suffer before me. How wrong was I.

A sort of monopoly money Citizens Income, set according to the cost of living in a country and separated from a country's ability to pay it, has to be the way in the future?

I am actively avoiding any company that only offers AI chatbot for customer service. Because usually if I have to contact customer service it's a question with some nuance the AI can't understand. I don't think it's quite "I" enough for what it's rolled out for just yet. Most of the time.

Have you seen The Matrix?

Don’t agree with this at all. There are so many practical jobs that can’t be done by AI. Plumbers, cleaners, farm laborers.

It seems that everyone is falling over themselves to use it. I don't think it will bring anything good to the world. I don't want to be replaced in my creative job, I want something to do my laundry and washing-up. What will happen when everything is fake? We will not be able to trust our eyes and will revert to no technology at all.

I want to see what happens when yr 11 ask their ai teacher the difference between lang and lit for the 93rd time in a single lesson.

Either:
a. Bits of student all over the floor when it flips and zaps one of them
Or
b. Bits of computer, when it flips and zaps itself.

It is silly. All the "benefit dossers" claiming benefits for "dubious" health issues are said to be able to WFH. Yet no WFH role is safe from AI, and will be the first to go.

Much as this made me laugh, it kind of sums up why big bosses would rather have AI, bots etc.

Excellent film, but very poor grasp of the physics of energy.

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

Is that true.... someone told me that AI tends to generate code that is hard for humans to understand or document and as a result hard to maintain or revise; the real cost in coding is not in the first version write but in the maintenance and refinements and customisation for client needs. So ... AI-code is useful as a tool for humans and to support human effort, but humans still need to fully supervise the code generation and specifications, fully understand the code and document clearly so that the code can be revised by others in future. Humans can use AI to help debug but humans are the ones who have to know what bugs to look for and to guide the AI to help find the bugs and make sure the code is doing things it should do. So skilled human involvement is still constant. As a result, AI is far from producing code without lot of supervision or code that is default low maintenance and easy to revise ; still very far from a quick safe mindless process to ask AI to write anything but extremely simple computer programs.

Or so I was told.

AI isn't great with power cuts

If we don’t supervise the AI’s code, is that when it makes The Terminator, or have I skipped a step?