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?

And species have also collapsed, when they meet a more powerful species they can't control. (Or just new threats they aren't evolved to handle).

Yes, more and more obviously AI generated content is appearing on platforms such as Facebook. People are very cynical about this - saying they will leave a group unless moderators crack down on the content. I'm on a history group for example, and an article popped up about Vikings. Even a non-historian could easily spot the style and the comically inaccurate content was written by a bot. The images of scantily clad maidens with horned helmets, walking in a snow bound street was hilarious.

DH uses AI to draft things, reports, emails etc. I can always tell when he has done this, as the beige style of Chat GBT is obvious. It is not bed at editing something down, but I always have to reword text so it sounds like me/DH. You can't replace a human touch - not yet anyway.

Wonder if musicians can spot AI composed music? I bet they can.

There's the expression shit jobs. And pointless jobs. It would probably totally offend someone to have their job deemed as pointless or easily replaceable, as we invest so much in it. Possibly 60 years of our waking and working life. I remember going to a country where people were desperate for any scrap of a job or money. A guy spent hours in the toilets holding and dispensing toilet roll for money.

What has Great Britain PLC got to offer the world beyond malted barley and whiskey exports? If there has been a huge proportionate move into blue collar service industries, and those jobs are easily machine swap able where does that leave the UK?

I've seen enough terrible TV, writing and poor art, that are dreadful watered down recycled slop. I don't think we'd miss much of that at all. At least the AI can do a good imitation game. I've learned more from AI summaries and prompting than getting elbow deep in some sources.

The tech that intrigues me is auto-piloting. Imagine if we could have a huge drive to a small robotic taxi fleet, off peak distribution and all the rest of it. Hidden taxi ranks. That would clean up cities immensely. There's already robotic quarry fleets, and tractors. There could be plenty mileage in that.

I meant white collar. Missed the edit window.

I'm okay with automated driving. It would improve the quality of the driving we have now...

”I'm so intrigued.
What is the reliable source for true figure = 80 mln?
The official estimate of UK residents is about 67 million. PP says there actually exist an extra 13 million, or 1 in 6 ppl physically on Great Britain UK soil is undocumented. Are they all adults without need of education or social care or NHS, and managing financially without ever engaging with officialdom?”

For the latter, perhaps you haven’t noticed the huge influx of young male adults who are surviving on the gig economy? Or on the drug/ prostitution gang games? Possibly you’re fortunate enough to not live in the many working class areas and towns, even entire cities that have been taken over. Fortunate enough to therefore pretend it isn’t happening. I used to have grandparents living in Birmingham, I don’t feel much welcome there or in Leicester now. I’ve walked into too many police drugs raids in Derby too and seen neighbourhoods taken over there and in Nottingham.

The reliable estimates of populations around the 80 million mark come from supermarkets estimating the amount of food consumed and I’m sure I’ve seen the same from sewage produced too. Can’t immediately find it with all the sewage disposal issues going on, google ain’t what it used to be and I don’t have the time to do your research for you, I have to work for a living.

As for population I wasn’t providing exact figures, true. I was rounding. But it wasn’t yet 55 million when I was born.

Hope this satisfies your gotcha crap.

That was replying to @lljkk btw. Not sure why with all this wonderful degraded tech rubbish mumsnet wasn’t accepting the username on the first attempt.

There's no shortage of jobs - that's why immigration is so high. Cutting immigration would eventually make wages rise - but only if benefits are also restricted to enforce people to move to where the work is.
Otherwise you get a fruit rotting in the fields type scenario.
Agree with the hoarding of profits but it's cheap foreign labour that makes that possible (that includes skilled roles too)

They would mostly scroll on their phones all day rather than birdwatching etc

There was something in the paper yesterday about how the police are using AI, i only skim read it but it will “type up” witness statements, auto filling various forms. Apparently it’s doing the work of the equivalent of 4000 police officers each year allowing officers to do other stuff and for victims to be dealt with quicker.

Except that the safety measure don’t recognise black and brown people as people. It’s less effective at identifying us.

Appreciate there is this element. But for the foreseeable future at least though, art forms including live dancing and living singing, human acting I don’t believe will be replaced. Listening to a show / watching it on a screen is good in many ways but just can’t replicate a live in person experience, which is why people spend a lot of money to have that live experience. A hologram ballet dancer? Hologram west end shows? No more pop stars just hologram ones, hologram concerts. Just can’t see it.
People love to marvel at human talent and how far the human body can be pushed, how humans can make a song sound wonderful together or how amazing a dancer is- how far they can bend, stretch balance and move. That’s all part of the draw of going to see something live.
Compeitive sports is the same- will there be hologram olympics? Hologram football matches with made up hologram teams? Will we all be cheering on a team totally invented by ai rather than real people? Will you see a football match ‘live’ via a huge hologram but in total surround sound and in 3d?
Maybe you won’t go out at all and all sports and shows and plays and musicals etc are done from the comfort of your own living room with a headset of the future. Totally immersed in another world with thousands of others in their own living rooms on their own headsets.
However, we are a long way from that. The next couple of generations at least are safe I believe where anything creative / human insurance is concerned.

AI is coming to my team, but it’s not going to be as all singing all dancing as we thought. It will probably be a work in progress as it understands more what we need from it. But the headcount saving won’t be happening yet as humans will to check what it’s creating as it won’t always be right, especially at first. It is a good thing, as we pay people to copy and paste data at moment, so case creation by AI will solve that. Yes there will eventually be job losses, but makes sense to move with the times, and AI could save small businesses a lot.

Oh yes, Tony the housekeeping robot - Satisfaction Guaranteed was the title of that strip as I recall - brilliant story!

Story not strip. Missed editing window.

DeepSeek, a Chinese AI is rocking international markets this morning. It just launched yesterday.

Theres more to it than jobs, there are ideologies and fundamental global power at stake.

Chinese have 1b people. How many very very bright exceptional people do they have? The percentage of extreme mathematicians is only ever less than 1% who can work on this sort of stuff.

In the western world we are fragmented and don’t work 996 like the Chinese do.

Google “996 Chinese work hours” and after, DeepSeek if you want to know more.

It’s not looking pretty in my view. If you know, you know.

I've been watching the reaction to the open source DeepSeek release - it absolutely fascinating! I think it was released a week or so ago but only hit the news in a big way over the last day?

The markets will be interesting this week...

Robot hairdressers were being developed “way back” in 2020!

www.cnet.com/science/this-robot-will-give-you-a-new-haircut-if-you-dare/

😯 I have been following (loosely) the development of FSD and didn't realise this was a thing.

A young police officer in our extended family told me it takes 2 hours to do all the paperwork when they arrest someone so this would be excellent time saving as long as checked by humans.

1 farmer is needed to do the work 100 peasants would have done 200 years ago.

If you’d told the peasants that there would be no work on the land for them in the future, they’d have panicked and assumed their descendants would be unemployed and starve… they’d have no concept whatsoever of how the world would change!

But what happened to their descendants? In the main, they thrived and live far, far more prosperous and healthy lives than they ever did.

Technology has been making jobs obsolete since the Industrial Revolution. To date, new jobs have emerged to replace those that were lost. I’m not sure there strong grounds for thinking it will be different with AI.

The issue with AI isn’t job losses, it’s the ability it gives for power to be ever more concentrated in the hands of a select few.

A very quick Google brought up some articles from 2019. I will look properly later but I don't suppose you have any up to date sources you could share do you? Everything is moving so fast it seems that even Google can't keep up!

i would challenge your view that the descendants in the main led more prosperous lives. You clearly have no idea of the amount of extra work caused by differing economies and a very strange idea of the amount of reward open to working class people, especially now. Many no longer own anything beyond the clothes they stand up in.

That’s prob when I read it tbf. Even though things may have improved I think it’s useful ro point out unintended consequences.

There was a tv programme showing some research that explained the inherent bias in eg facial recognition software and how black and brown faces were incorrectly identified. It’s to do with coder bias. It was fascinating and scary.

Ok, thanks. I agree - it's scary stuff and I think stuff like this gets missed (deliberately or not) by people who aren't in the affected group.

It is both fascinating and scary - I'm definitely going to read further. I really hope it's been, or is being, addressed properly.