To be utterly despondent about AI

[AnotherGreyMorning]

and our future?

Jobs becoming obsolete. People unable to earn a living.

Villains harnessing for their own ends.

It will all move far too fast and at sophisticated levels for even the most dedicated to manage.

Governments will be stunned by it. People will really suffer.

I just feel quiet dread because whilst life will be great for the wealthy and those who are protected, for the vast majority, I think it will be hellish.

I so agree with this. As an editor, I'm seeing this a lot.

This is terrifying.

You are right to be despondent in the world of music. The end of copyright protection, (the ability to monetise your work through your music ‘rights’), as AI owners can scrape (ie steal) your music from the internet, combine it with similarly stolen music from other sources and ‘create’ something new, without telling you, asking your permission, or paying you for the use of your work. The Labour Government is doing nothing to stop this and is falling over itself to sacrifice our creative industries to the ‘tech giants’. It is a disaster.

At what point do we wake up and realise UBI is inevitable? Instead of governments cutting welfare and calling sick and disabled people lazy. What do they plan to do with us when most of us are unemployed and can't pay our bills? This has been on my mind a lot lately. I'm scared 🤷‍♀️

Whoever wrote up thread about energy usage is right to be concerned. So much of the usage is so f’ing banal. Why, for example, are forests being cut down (or even solar panel outputs being wasted) so you can represent yourself as a doll in a box?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yg690e9eno.amp

it’s so mind numbingly arrogant. There has been life in Europe for 100 million years and me have only been meaningful participants for at best 40,000 years. This does start to feel so hubristic and wasteful and very ‘end of days’.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/nov/09/healthcare-artificial-intelligence-ai

Also interesting and pertinent.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/23/million-young-people-work-uk-hidden-jobs-crisis-covid-ai-britain-neets

Just another article that highlights the allegedly unforseen impacts of AI on employment amongst other things....

Completely agree. We need to think really carefully about where AI is leading us.
There are issues with the environmental cost, with infringement of copyright, with overreliance on computers instead of problem solving and thinking creatively ourselves. Creative industries are vanishing and, in time, the most common jobs available will be software engineer and programmers.

Doubt we will need programmers soon.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/25/ai-could-replace-3m-low-skilled-jobs-by-2035-research-finds

The last paragraph says it all.

AI is going to massively destabilise employment and effectively push us into even deeper inequality, because skilled and professional jobs will also utilise AI and will become a smaller pool too.

We're in danger of becoming close to another feudal style of life where one section of the population exists to serve the other in the most basic ways with little or no scope to "better" themselves.

Possible dystopian out comes include enforced employment to obtain basic living standards due to ideology, aka slavery by another name.

Science fiction has already given us literal "energy farms" - Black Mirror anybody?

And so many people scoff at perfectly reasonable fears that we are engineering our own obsolescence. It's the long haul version of seeing Covid looming and sounding alarm bells in the January, and being told it was all just paranoid scare mongering.

It's not even so much the concept, it's that the main actors in power don't appear to give a flying fuck about the consequences as long as the money keeps rolling in by any possible means and are determined to gas-light us to the hilt in the process.....

Yep, exactly this. People don't realise that being able to find the answer is not the same as knowing what answer to find, and that's the big difference. AI can solve any question you can form properly, but if you don't know what question to ask, you're kinda stuck.

As a software engineer I'm not at all worried about losing my job to AI but I am definitely learning to work WITH AI. Everyone needs to learn and to adapt, if you don't want to do either then say goodbye to your job. This however is not new or specific to AI, people unwilling to evolve have always been left behind and I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad thing.

It's a bit patronising to suggest that only people 'unwilling to evolve' are going to lose their jobs to AI.

AI is already taking jobs, and it's still early days. The job losses over the next 5 to 10 years are going to be massive. If employer can get rid large numbers of expensive humans with all their pesky complicated needs by replacing them with AI, they will do so. They are already doing so. It doesn't matter how 'unwilling to evolve' you may or may not be. AI is evolving much faster than any human could manage.

Of course they will do so, I didn't say they wouldn't, but what's your answer, succumb to the inevitable or evolve and learn to work with it? People who understand and work with AI will continue to have jobs, people who don't won't, so I guess that's your choice to make. I work with AI in my every day job, I have a good understanding of AI and how to use it, I am not worried about my job. I also think a lot of the job losses in the tech sector will turn around bc AI is simply just not able to replace engineers currently. I work on a team specifically tasked to try and use AI to replace engineers and it just simply can't. Will it at some point, yeah, probably, but nobody can stop that. Doom mongering certainly won't stop it.

@NoKidsSendDogs

It will affect you even if it's not directly.

Surely you can de that mass
Unemployment will be a bad thing for society.

You may not lose your job but you will feel it regardless. In the form of unrest in society tex rising. Cut backs and so on

You sound very smug. Maybe, or maybe not, your job is not at risk. But many people's jobs are. Lots of people have already lost jobs or failed to find one, and it's not due to their failure to 'evolve'.

Nor is it about 'understanding' AI. If employers find AI cheaper, which they will and indeed already have, then they will happily replace employees with it. No amount of 'understanding' is going to change that.

What I find chilling is indeed the smugness of those "au fait" with AI as it currently stands, and their failure or unwillingness to look beyond their own little bubble.

There's going to be a point where they might not be "working with AI" but being worked BY AI. We simply do not know wherethis is all going in terms of the future capabilities and potential sophistication of the technology. Nor do we fully know or appreciate the motivations of those invested in driving its implementation with such zeal.

Obviously money is the most obvious one, but some of the tech bros out there holding the reins and the lucrative deals have incredibly suspect ideologies.

There is also the question of whether it is ethical to essentially turn anyone using the Internet, which we have been forced to depend on, into lab rats for an unprecedented experiment that is already having deep psychological impacts, such as documented cases of AI induced psychosis.

But as long as it works for those who embrace it, who cares apparently. Sod the collateral damage eh ?

I work in tech, so it's not optional to embrace AI. It's a jump-on-board or get left behind. I'm having to do a serious amount of upskilling in my own time to keep on top of everything, learning to create and use agents. It's not all ChatGPT!

However, yes, AI will "replace" or take jobs but it's also simultaneously creating a whole host of new jobs. It's a bit of a double-edged sword. I imagine roles in customer service, data entry etc which are mundane, routine, repetitive will be done by AI but then there will be job created in research, engineering, data science. I'd imagine the skillset of those in data entry is vastly different to those in data science though so it's not like you can hop from one to another.

Is AI really creating 'a whole host of jobs'? I don't doubt that some jobs may be being created, but is it anywhere near enough to replace those which will be lost?

Also, we're still early in the AI game. So what makes you confident that these new jobs being 'created' won't also be taken by AI in a few years time?

It is in my industry @IcedPurple, we have a whole new team of people dedicated to AI in my company alone. I can only go on my own working experience though. In others industries, not so much yet maybe.

AI will always need a humans in the loop. That much is a fact.

Right. But that's just in one industry. And it's just now. As you know, AI is developing at an exponential rate and jobs which are 'safe' now may not be a few years down the road.

AI will always need humans, yes. But how many? I can't see how it can be anywhere near enough to replace those whose jobs will be lost through AI across the job market in general. I'd love to be wrong on this, but I just don't see where all these 'new jobs' are going to come from.

I guess we're just going to have to wait and see.

It is stealing enriching creative jobs and generating crappy mind numbing ones. Fuck that shit.

AI is not going to replace jobs en masse, people who know how to use AI will replace people who don't. So maybe you should learn to use it instead of complaining about it, because it's going to happen, whether you like it or not.

People complained about massive job loss with every technological innovation and it's not happened. Maybe short term job loss, but always with long term job creation and economic growth. We all have to grow and evolve on a daily basis, many of us have to learn new skills on a regularlt to remain relevant and good at our jobs. How is this any different?

No, AI will be able to develop itself. It won’t need someone to do it.