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.

Well it's progress, and progress is why our species no longer live in caves. Bring it on, although I may change my mind when it goes rogue and kills us all.

But if you have 'true equality', as you put it, that means what it says. It means equality with the 10-20% of the population that is violent and anti-social. There is a silly left-wing fantasy that people only steal and act badly because they're desperate and poor. In reality, a lot of the vicious little scumbags who swagger through our towns in masks with drug bags slung across their chests enjoy the glamour of it all. They enjoy hurting and upsetting people. They like the attention. They like the feeling of danger and power. They like the feeling that people are scared of them. It isn't just about money. It's a sort of fashion/pose/lifestyle. There is a whole industry built around it – it has its own music, its own fashion, etc. None of that will change even if you do put them on a UBI. The difference is you won't be able to escape them, because you'll be on the same income as them. And they won't change. They enjoy it too much. They'll still be bullying and intimidating and hurting their neighbours. One of the main reasons people work hard and save is so they can live as far from people like that as possible.

You are right to be concerned - entire industries are already being decimated by it, just ask anyone who works in the creative sector.

To make comparisons with the Industrial Revolution or washing machines is to entirely miss the point - it's not streamlining processes and improving efficiency, it is removing the viability of entire sectors. And those sectors employ real people with extensive qualifications and skills who have families / mortgages etc.

@AnotherGreyMorning Agree with your most recent post. People’s quality of lives are (generally) going to suffer very much and I can imagine suicide figures will rocket, perhaps with the next five years.

I work with ai. I don't say too much but it's already taken a lot of jobs in my industry.

There was a recent article in one of the newspapers about how many jobs has already been taken and the numbers in the predictions range from 60,000 to 250,000 job losses a year. It will take are absolutely shocking.

One of the things that surprising is the lower working classes probably won't be the most effective which is a historic first. It will in fact be most graduate jobs. I own boats, ai will never be able to bring my boat in to dock, perform repairs and maintenance, weld and fit a new fuel tank. It won't cut my hair. It won't replaster the walls in my house. Clean the schools or hotels. It can't cook. Jobs that require a person to physically perform an action are for now far safer, robotics are leagues behind and when when they get to a point that they could be used for some of these things, reliably, they will be prohibitively expensive for longer still.

I mean if low level entry jobs in accounting and law are already being done by AI, where will graduates find work to start their careers? And if they can't start their careers, how will they sit rent in cities like London?
The knock on is huge. And that's just the start.

They'll likely live with parents even longer than now - and re-train - do adjacent jobs move sectors or do lower paid jobs. I think it will exacerbated existing trends - later entry into independent adulthood - depressed wages - more job uncertainly - less desre/ablity to have kids.

I don't think any government would want a large section of well educated young people left with no work - they historically tend to make trouble.

Much the same was said about the internet.

And what happens to the housing market in London?

Considering the high proportion on here from the middle classes, it's astonishing how complacent people are.

🙄

It was the Industrial Revolution that put the children in the factories. There were no factories before the Industrial Revolution. Before that, most people worked on farms and in trades, but then when automation came and took their jobs, they had to move to cities to try and find work. Many ended up living hideous, short lives in slums - and working in factories. The Industrial Revolution was absolutely awful for very many people, and only really improved after two world wars. We seem to ignore the century of horror, and just leap from the 18th century to the 20th, gushing about how much better life is now we're not ploughing all the time.

We may be about to enter the 19th century.

No it wasn't. There was never convincing evidence that the internet would wipe out white collar jobs.

The industrial revolution introduced a huge number of manual jobs and exploited child labour to feed the demand in factories. Not sure what you mean here?

AI has definitely had an adverse effect on the legal profession and not just at entry level
People are now using AI to write opinions , appeals etc and are using this information to cut down legal costs when involved in litigation .
Solicitors and barristers are definitely feeling the pinch

Those jobs may be safe from direct replacement by AI, but as other jobs go, more people will look to those jobs. So you’ll end up with, for example, more people training to be hairdressers, plumbers, plasterers, etc. which will drive down the fees they can charge.

ETA - plus of course mass unemployment will massively reduce the money people have for haircuts and home improvements.

Sorry @rumblegrumble I didn't see you'd already addressed the same post.

Hard of hearing can connect up their hearing aids to a phone which processes noise around them to clearly translate a conversation

Let me know when that's actually happening, as AI subtitling is utter fucking garbage and hearing aids do not 'clearly' anything.

Well, ChatGPT has just told me it was, who am I to argue?

I'm not in London.

London been way too expensive - as are large parts of the SE for us to every live and work or for our kids to do so.

My kids prospects of getting on housing market look harder than even ours - and they will likely have some inhertiance - so better of than many others - and that's outside SE/London.

TBH long term house prices slumping could be the best thing that could happen - so more young people can move out of parantal homes as they can afford to buy.

Our parents own their homes outright - we have a small mortage left - siblings in HA housing - the rest younger generation haven't yet bought so any housing price decrease will likely benefit my family.

TBH house prices across country are an issue for younger population - so decreases would be welcome to many - it's just traditioanlly they come with econmic downturns which also hurt large swaths of the population and that's more the issue than London house prices with their unearned wealth on paper.

I think it will more much dramatic than a simple slump in house prices.

People who are not concerned about AI don't understand it.

I'm an AI Product Director for a SaaS company in the UK and I've been in software design and development for my entire career. The rate of change is absolutely unprecedented and frankly terrifying and exhausting. Sure, right now our productivity is probably about 4x greater due to AI, but we've gone from being able to plan product strategy a decade in advance, to looking at our six month road map and wondering if there is any fucking point building it, or whether we will turn up on Monday and discover it's all obselete.

Every week brings new announcements from the big players like Open AI, Google, Anthropic etc which sideswipe entire product categories and leave companies with their solutions having been completely commodified overnight. Junior roles in everything from marketing to engineering have disappeared.

I have teen DC and I have no idea how to advise them. I'm not sure the advice to focus on STEM is correct. I'm just trying not to think about it tbh.

This is true, but generally speaking the educated upper working class and the middle class have found themselves in the most secure positions with regards to employment. This will no longer be the case.

There will be job shortages, but having any kind of qualification won't help you get any of the low level jobs they simply need people who work relatively hard albeit unskilled labour. I wouldn't suddenly hire graduates just because they have university education if what I needed was kitchen experience etc.

Education and those in it at the moment is not preparing people for the real world. It is still being promoted as the route to a well paid career and obviously some university education is needed for example for doctors, but for the majority of people a degree is going to become a very expensive and redundant bit of paper. With the cost now being so much more, I can't see anybody sensible deciding to take art degrees etc. I feel bad for students who are currently training for jobs that simply will not exist but will be saddled with debt that others don't have.

Unfortunately ai is inevitable because companies will never not use it. If the government were sensible they could implement a robot tax so that each for job lost to ai the company must pay more than that person's job would have generated in reveneau for the government. With these jobs disappearing the shortfall will be enormous and with more out of work the need for tax to come from somewhere else becomes obvious. Also if using ai was taxed heavily, it may make companies consider retaining human employees. Businesses unfortunately only care about the bottom line.

@CatHairEveryWhereNow your comment "I'm not in London." is odd. It's not about you and where you are. It's about everyone and how it's going to affect them wherever they are.

London. Leeds. Manchester. Liverpool. Singapore. NYC. Berlin. Luxembourg.

At a certain point there was debate about whether the owners of sites like Twitter, Facebook etc should be held responsible in the same way that newspaper owners/editors were for their content. It was decided they wouldn't and were allowed to self regulate while at the same time allowed to hold themselves up as an alternative to legacy media. So the best of both worlds. Concerns about data storage/personal data were also brushed aside
Several genocides and a Cambridge Analytica later here we are.
It doesn't have to be a disaster is what I'm saying. A lot of it depends on how we respond now. But expecting the people in charge of the AI push to support other peoples income/ordinary people's jobs out of the goodness of their own heart is foolish. Elon Musk loves to talk about how when there are robots we will all be supported by basic income but his DOGE also stripped benefits/healthcare from people in the US on low incomes now. Why would he be suddenly generous in the future. And in his view of the future it's him and other tech billionaires who.will.be generating all the wealth.

On the plus side if Elon Musk is in charge of the AI/robot takeover it will probably explode all by itself.

Hear hear. As a creative artist who has many friends who are authors many of their books were ripped off for AI training. It’s shocking.