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 am one of these. We are LIVID that our books were used to 'train' AI in how to better be able to mimic writing books to do us out of a job. We were given no recompense, or warning. We were just told 'tough'.

Having seen some AI-written content though, I am not unduly worried just yet, as AI can't yet mimic convincing human growth and character development, but it is only a matter of time, since it scraped content from hundreds of thousands of books.

And how would basic income work? Would we all have enough to go on holiday whenever we wanted? What if everybody who wanted to go on holiday suddenly had the time and money to go on holiday; there would be far too many people and flights, hotels, transport etc couldn't cope. So how will you choose whose turn it is to go on holiday, and where they can go? Same with restaurants, same with theatre etc.

What if I decided I wanted something more. Say for example when all the jobs go and I'm put on UBI, I'm living in a crummy little flat. Maybe I want to live in a nice big house with a nice big garden. Let's say that you have a nice big house with a nice big garden, because that's what you were in when money became obsolete. How do I buy your house, or one like it, if I can't earn any money? How can I ever become as wealthy as you if I can't get a job? Surely what has to happen is that all the people who are rich when the switch comes keep all their wealth, and nobody else can ever accumulate any at all. Sounds great...

They said it about the printing press. And the weaving loom. The advent of factories. The mechanisation of factories. The computer.

It never happened, it never will. Humans will fuck up the planted long before they invent enough stuff to replace workers.

Yes. Manual work, anything that requires you to use your hands, caring roles etc will all be safe.

We are already thinking about how to advise our year 8 child on picking options at GCSE because of the changes up ahead.

You be a universal basic income so you don’t need to worry about covering the basics. If you want more than that, you train to do something you want to do, and monetise it by starting your own business or working in one of the millions of jobs AI doesn’t do.

the industrial revolution INTRODUCED child labour in factories, it didn’t end it. Before that, children worked on farms and in the home etc, but children being herded down mines and into factories was a product of the industrial revolution.

How what?

But what jobs? Presumably lots of people are going to want more than UBI, so there will a lot of competition. You could say we currently have UBI - we have benefits which are supposed to cover the basics. But most people don't want to sit on benefits, they want to get a job and earn more money. But if there was massive competition for the few jobs the machines can't do, they wouldn't pay much. So we'd all find ourselves doing stuff like farming, cutting hair or care work, and getting paid peanuts for it. Whilst the business owners live lives of unimaginable wealth and luxury. Pretty much like before the Industrial Revolution...

But I thought there was a move away from tech jobs and instead go into trades - with more women in Uni than men, and fewer women inclined/able to go into trades...and AI far less likely to take over trades work, seems to me that the bros have once again skewed it in their favour? The junior coding roles, testing, etc. in tech will have already gone, or be ready to be gone, which are sadly probably a lot of women.

I think we probably should all be terrified having listened to the Godfather of AI talking on a podcast with Stephen Bartlett. He is VERY concerned but said there is nothing we can do. So we’ll have to ride it alongside climate change and impending war with Russia and China.

To what end though? Why have humans at all if they don’t work and contribute to the economy? Doesn’t make sense. We are then nothing more than pets

It's called UBI and people are already working on it

It wasn't a criticism of you actually. But boat work is well paid now. If everyone was competing for those jobs (because other jobs are gone) wages are likely to fall. I meant its more of a Tradegy of the Commons situation. In the general, you (or anyone) can see the pitfalls in AI job losses/wage deflation. On an individual level would you (or me or anyone) willingly pay extra to keep wages high. I was talking to someone who was saying how much the high street had declined since they were last there. The last time they had been there was over a year ago because they mostly do online shopping. Well... No wonder the high street declined. But on an individual level it's understandable.
The comment about intelligence was tongue in cheek. It's clearly skilled work. But people have never been paid according to how skilled the work is. Its a mix of market forces and unions and legislation. My point is "Intelligence" is being defined as something that large learning computer models are good at because that makes it easier to define what they do as "Artificial Intelligence". Stuff the computing models are unable to be good at gets redefined as less important/valuable. So the complicated calculations/real time workings involved in making sure a boat floats could be done by AI. A humans input in that process is still needed but is less measurable, and therefore outside the definition of intelligence. So one can argue less pay is needed because now its grunt work.

I agree on the tax. We need to tax corporations more anyway based on where they actually operate to avoid the whole tax haven issue. but any party trying to do that would invite an algorithmic storm on their heads (since the owners of social media platforms are also invested in AI). I think people could see Elon Musk complaining about extra tax for what it is
But endless posts from other people being promoted that criticises everything about a party or country is scary for politicians.

(Edited for grammar mistake)

Yeah, some jobs will be replaced by AI. However it will also create new jobs. The important thing is to have the mindset of owning the technology rather than blindly following it.

I think our entire outlook will change but we can’t imagine it yet. If you took someone from a village in the 1800s and asked them to plan their lives in modern London, there’s a million things that wouldn’t even cross their minds. We’re like that when we try to think about 2050.

I do think about this, not least because I am a freelancer doing a job that in theory, AI could do with its eyes closed. In reality it can’t do my job yet but I’m sure it’ll get there. I don’t worry about it though because to quote Baz Lurhman:

’The real troubles in your life
Are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind
The kind that blindsides you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday’

It's not about men will suffer this more than women
It's the aspects of jobs that will be replaced by AI are the aspects of jobs that have been talked about as being more important and more valuable than the aspects of jobs AI will struggle to replace.
I also think, in this case, it's not fair to talk about Bros skewing this in their favour. In reality some people will do very well out of this. They are mostly men. But jobs like haulage drivers that are majority male are as vulnerable as some majority female jobs. You just have to look at videos from 3 years ago where Peterson et al said that it was because women weren't willing to do difficult jobs like driving or "boring" jobs like coding that the gender gap exists. Well, when the difficult jobs, and the boring jobs and the "critical thinking" jobs are gone then its a machine-flesh gap not a gender gap. And yes, in reality lots of women do coding and will be affected in reality just as there were more women at uni (if that =critical thinking). But the argument even recently was that men were better at/more interested in those jobs and thats why they earned more overall.

The power of AI will not be owned by ordinary people.

And this is exactly what will happen. There will be an uprising, imo.

It's what's always annoyed me about Star Trek - Captain Picard with his lovely ancestral chateau burbling on about how great it is to live in a post-money utopia. But nobody else ever seems to find it problematic, which I find problematic!

It's difficult to see how an uprising could succeed, even now it would be nigh on impossible to overthrow the tech tycoons and their pet president. I can't see it getting any easier with the rise of autonomous weapons. If we don't start doing something very soon, we may well just be waiting for consciences to kick in and suggest to their owners that destroying humanity for the sake of their bank balances isn't very nice. May be waiting a while though.

It could be a terrible thing in the long run, or it could be fine.

People had just as valid concerns during the Industrial Revolution. And with computers becoming mainstream. In both cases the world changed quite drastically, but people adapted.

Apologies if this has already been addressed but to my mind the danger of AI is that it only knows what it has read on the internet and most everybody knows that the internet is full of rubbish. The internet was created by average (white men) people and it full of angry (not necessarily factual) rants.
So for the same reason, so many people I know in all industries are rejecting it because it's known to be full of wrong answers and 'other peoples' ideas'. No one can trust it for maths and if it can't even do maths, the former forte of computers, what can it even do.
And I can see @NoraLuka 's point that the future is so far ahead in some ways that we can't even imagine it. Remember COVID when seemingly safe jobs like hairdressers, driving instructors, flight attendants/pilots and similar were suddenly out of work?
And the biggest lesson that COVID taught us: in person is actually better...

Who will own in all likelihood and how many jobs will be created?

I hope it’s fine. I can see a world where things just feel way easier. I also don’t want too many people to be redundant.

You would be able to earn money. Frankly, without being rude, you probably wouldn't be able to buy my nice big house right now, even with all the current 'opportunity', education and an open job market. Most people who don't receive enormous inheritance will not go on to be able to afford those things. They will save and possibly, if they are lucky afford modest homes with good savings and various safety nets. Even that is out of reach for most people. The people I grew up with, on the shithole council estate I used to live on, will likely never have even that. The odds of them becoming wealthy are staggeringly small. Most of the time it isn't even about intelligence or skill, it's sheer luck that allows somebody to climb out of that situation or sometimes it's from taking risks, by starting a business for example with either low start up coats or risking what little savings they have, more fail than succeed. If it was that easy right now wouldn't everybody be living in big posh houses having just pulled themselves up by their boot straps and worked hard? Of course they would. I watched generations of my family work doing backbreaking labour and working all hours. Several even went on to develop work related disease which ruined their quality of life and retirement was merely being allowed to finally sit down, too sick to ever enjoy it.

Anyway I digress. The idea with a universal basic income is that nobody would live below that baseline. plenty would be able to live over it. I am all for it as I've heard it worked very very well in trails, though I recognise that their would be pitfalls and it would need to be implemented slowly and carefully. The fact is, it can't be any worse than the other option, which is a massive job loss, recession, possibly even with a war economy, and we have families homeless and people starving in the streets. Standards of living we haven't seen in this country (on the whole, I'm sure their are outlier cases) since over a century ago.

I totally get it, what annoys me is that there’s absolutely nothing democratic about it.
We’re being pushed into using a system that we’ve not even voted for or asked if we want it. It’s going to change society as a whole and it’s being decided by a huge company headed by a small number of individuals who think they know what’s best, how about asking us.
It’s a dangerous precedent to set, no control, government just happily going along by being influenced by these huge companies, (nothing new there), but the audacity to assume they know what’s best.
Has all the pros and cons been addressed before choosing to use an IA system? As per I don’t think governments or ordinary people for that matter have even really grasped how much this will change how we interact in the world. Yes, it’s a useful tool and will offer a great deal, but what will be the cost? Surely, such a huge decision should be made by all not a few.