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.

@Anotherparkingthread perhaps that will form part of the cultural transformation - businesses being forced to care about more than the bottom line.

However, perhaps businesses will become so powerful, more powerful than any government.

@PhobiaphobicBut realistically what can the average middle class person do? I just don’t think there’s any point fretting about it as we don’t really know how it will pan out and most of us have no control over it.

Many warehouse functions are already automated. Amazon is always looking for ways to get rid of their human warehouse staff and replace with technology.

Tbh, I think if you're not worried by AI, you probably haven't given the issue enough thought.

For those suggesting children be encouraged to go into programming, all this will get done by AI, with few exceptions.

To those referencing the industrial revolution as having similar impact, the world population at the beginning of the 19th century was about a billion. The impact of job losses on a population of 9 billion will be catastrophic.

I've seen commentary that humans will provide the creative side of life, but AI can write novels, paint pictures, compose music - and will improve rapidly.

Not to mention that we soon won't be able to believe anything we see or read due to the fakes out there.

This is very depressing and alarming. I try not to think too much about it either and try and avoid consuming AI driven art for now.

I know - you clearly think society will collapse.

I think it will just make existing trends worse quicker. Yes there will be rapid change in many industries - but I don't think there will be massive unemployment or not worse than we've seen in the past -" just" under employment and take up of lower wages jobs as PP says many jobs still need to be done in person.

Perhaps my post was a bit alarmist, I don't know. I think it's the fact that it all feels so unknowable that I'm struggling with. Professionally, I swing from being more energised that I've ever been about my job, to feeling completely exhausted and overwhelmed by the pace and relentlessness of the change.

I’m fretting about it. I’m planning on buying a small house (alone) with a 16 year mortgage of £60K. If I can’t pay my mortgage, with no family support and no inheritance coming, I am going to be screwed.

I work for a company who has been developing AI (aka machine learning) since the 1980s. Your mobile phone is full of it. All that has changed is that language models are getting more impressive and so journalists are now writing about it but AI has been developing for decades and the changes haven't resulted in massive job losses. So there will be two outcomes 1) we will be able to do more with the same number of people and 2) there will be a premium attached to some non-AI products (think how expensive a Diptyque candle is vs a tallow candle).

Yes

The less well paid, less "skilled" jobs will be left to humans. In reality it takes a lot of skill to cut someone's hair well. We also devalue soft skills because they are connected with female dominated jobs. And there has been a lot of work done in the past few years to devalue.those skills further -basically anything AI/a machine can't do isnt actually that important and this therefore proves how amazing AI is AND how it can do everything important. It's a circular argument. So some jobs have always been considered "unskilled" some jobs have been recently subject to a lot of propaganda calling them "unskilled".

Either people work now to place a higher value on skills that are often in high demand. Or accept that the work everyone does in the future will be considered low.value. (it's not just demand/supply in the labour market. If it was, the Elon's of this world wouldn't be complaining that people are lazy because they wont work at/below minimum wage. Or painting jobs like teaching etc for which their is a labour shortage as contemptuous).

@CatHairEveryWhereNow Society as we know it will collapse.

Something else will emerge of course but to the detriment of many.

To say a take up of lower wages jobs will make it ok is not the answer. There won't be enough jobs to sustain all the people.

Rapid change in industries means rapid automation of many industries. Which means far far fewer jobs. Which is catastrophic. Especially for white collar workers.

More people staying at home with their parents - if they can - means rental economy will also be greatly affected. Some landlords rely on that as their income.

@Anotherparkingthread so the question really is will you as an AI developer and boat owner be prepared to pay a decent work to the skivvys that look after your boat and cut your hair? Or will the fact that there are now more people doing those "safe".jobs and the fact that they don't involve real intelligence like AI has mean you are able to justify paying them less?
And if so, are you happy for your taxes to pay a basic income to the rest of us as @Livelovebehappy seems to think will happen?

But nobody can force the companies. Well, Trump could, but he's firmly on their side. Canada just tried to introduce a tax so tech companies would pay if they wanted to operate there, Trump had a tantrum and refused to do a trade deal with them unless they removed it. They removed it. Similar happening with the EU. He's not going to let anybody get in the way of the billionaires building their utopia, it's very much like the British forcing opium on China. The only thing we can do is get strong enough that we don't need America or their products, but we've left it about two decades too late. So we just have to keep using whatever they feed us, and when the time comes we'll get UBI. Which will presumably be enough to keep us alive, but not much more. To be fair, it's not like they've been hiding their intentions - Altman etc have been happily announcing their plan for us for ages, for some reason we've just ignored them - or embraced it as 'yippee, no more work!'. But I think most people imagine a life without work as lovely holidays and dinners out, not a lifetime sitting indoors staring at a screen as there's nothing else to do and nowhere else to go.

I'm also worried about the environmental impact of it. The use of resources is absolutely phenomenal, and is duplicate as several big tech companies race to 'win' AI, they are each building their own infrastructure. The greenwashing about being net zero is unbelievable. There is an acceptance that we just have to do this, versus a weighing up of the risk and reward. The environmental impact may be accepted by people if it, say, cures childhood cancer. But is it worth it to put people out of business or slash jobs? Is it even worth it to read your emails quicker, or get a handy holiday itinerary? Who is going to get net benefit from AI? It's going to be the tech billionaires and the bad actors of the world, not you or me. I day this as someone who was in the industry for a long time and have seen corporations full of "values" abandon them for the race to win.

I think it's terrible, destructive and even dangerous in some situations. I hate it.

The naivety of posters is staggering.

A.I is quite simply the most disruptive technology in human history. We have no comparable example, not the Internet, not the steam engine, not agriculture, nothing.

Consensus is that in less than a decade, sometime around 2032, AGI will become a reality. That is A.I which is indistinguishable from a human. For the first time in our existence, we won't be the most intelligent things in the room. All other technology or inventions relied on us to control or operate it. A.I is different, it will be able to out think us. This isn't science fiction, this is real, and the timeliness are shortening every six months.

How we adapt is anybody guess. Consider a world where all manufacturing is done by machines. Factories won't need car parks, toilets, HR, payroll, admin, just robots, working 247. Supermarkets will be "dark", you will pull up to a kiosk and pick up your online order from a basket on the back of an A.I powered platform. No people required. Knowledge will have no value because the A.I will be infinite and an expert on everything, all at once, no people required.

Let's look at the jobs already lost to A.I.

Film and TV production is a dead industry. Within five years nobody will be employed to make movies or programmes. Just look at the A.I shorts already available online.

Factory work . . Gone.

Admin . . . Gone.

Manufacturing . . .Gone.

Teaching . . Gone.

Driving . . . Gone.

Aviation . . . Gone.

The challenge will be two fold. How to stop people from rioting, without jobs, there will be massive social unrest. UBI will probably have to be introduced, this will be for the older generation. The children now, who will be young adults by the time A.I is released,will likely be the most dangerous, displaced, angry demographic. No jobs, no money, no life, they are going to feel cheated.

If you have a five year old now, literally everything you know about life and the world is irrelevant, you wont be able to guide them, teach them, the world is about to change beyond all recognition.

The problem will be how society responds to AI. It could be a force for good and could allow us to reduce our working week significantly. Unfortunately it could also be used to make profit with little regard for Human cost. It's about how we as a society responds to it.

You still haven't said how though.

No. All the things you mention won't need human to finesse it, there won't be any jobs in those industries. Its not a gender thing, it's a human problem.

Given the environmental costs of AI, will governments allow its unrestricted use? Won't its use eventually have to be heavily taxed?

Apologies if this is an ignorant question!

I find myself increasingly glad I'm in my fifties with retirement in my sights, albeit several years away yet. If I had 20+ working years ahead of me I would be very concerned. As it is I should be able to coast towards retirement in a job that can't be done by AI (currently). And there will probably still be a state pension then. And I'll have shuffled off this mortal coil by the time the worst effects of climate change hit.

It’s a massive blow to environmentalism, just as we were starting to gain real traction. AI needs a stable power grid which just isn’t possible without fossil fuels. Up to now big tech has been pro- renewables, albeit greenwashing their consumption, but as a large and influential economic group they were driving change. I think this will be the biggest setback.

I’m baffled and a little suspicious about why this latest effort has been marketed and accepted as “artificial intelligence” when it continues to fall short of the standards set for decades. In the past, with each advance, we looked and said “impressive, but that’s just programming, not intelligence”. These are impressive language processing models, but they still fall short of any reasonable standard of intelligence. So why are we being manipulated to accept it as such?

Yep. Such shit, anodyne crap which people are using because it's cheap.

I am very happy that my taxes go towards basic income. I am well off now but I grew up on a council estate and I don't want to see anybody struggle.

I know you're assuming that boat work is a low paid job but I can assurey you it is not. I small 100 litre fuel tank will cost you around 600 just to have made, fitting it probably a few thousand. I used to do a lot of the work myself as I enjoy it but I've been too busy this time. There's also the fees when it goes onto the dock. It's extremely expensive nobody is being ripped off. Of course it involves intelligence and I'm saddened that you don't realise the engineering that goes into even simple undertakings when the thing has to be balanced and float. Do you somehow think I get a discount because I'm well off? I have not implicated that anybody should be paid. As said if you read my whole post, corporations that use ai to replace people should be forced to pay more than that persons job would have generated in tax. The money that they save on wages by using ai would mean they could certainly afford it. This would pat the shortfall for reduancies related to ai and make something like a universal basic income possible.

AI will decimate employment. I employ juniors and the tedious grunt work of research and putting information together is already reducing their utility in a significant manner. It will only get worse in my view.

At the moment, AI is the bane of my life at work.The software I use has added loads of AI functions that don't even work and it is a total faff to turn them off. More like Artificial Bullshit and Stupidity.