To worry that there may be no hope for a good future thanks to AI

[Designless]

I use it, it up skills me a lot, I am at the top of my game but.... I think I'll be lucky to reach retirement age still in work and I despair for young people trying to get entry level jobs. Everything that I did to get on the ladder is done by AI now.

I know the nebulous cope response is "that's what the luddites said - NEW jobs will arise" but I think this is different. AI can think. AI allows a handful of unbelievably wealthy people to control everything.

Someone please post something hopeful before I pop from despair thanks :(

AI can't think and that is the biggest restriction to it. Its a coded algorithm which needs human input and then the output needs to be checked.

I've tried to use it, I have found it helpful with some tasks, but as my job is quite manual it will never take over my role unless we have fully functioning robots as well. Which may happen long term but they would probably cost a lot more then employing me.

I had this discussion with my DH earlier and we both agreed that only the specify programed AI's are really good at the moment the general one's seem to take a lot of input to output what you need and then you have to check everything is correct. It's currently a clever tool that needs a human to input information into it to get the right output, people's jobs will just change to having to learn to use it effectively. Yes it may mean we need fewer people to do some jobs but considering that ageing population and lower birth rates this could actually be a good thing.

AI can't think. It's named wrong, there is no intelligence behind you.

All it is is a prediction machine, a souped up version of the predictive text you've used on your phone for decades. It can't come up with new ideas, can't reason, can't innovate. All it's doing is taking a guess about the next word based on each prior word.

That's not to say it's not scary, and that it's not going to make some jobs harder to come by. But it's never going to take over from the majority of human employment.

And it's only going to get thicker. AI needs content from humans to learn from and right now that content is disappearing amongst all the slop produced by AI across the internet. The next generation of AI is just going to get trained to the crap the current generation is putting out, and so on and so on.

AI can't think. It hallucinates. It needs things from humans to learn from, constantly. Gemini is a state. ChatGPT hallucinates everything from football games to court cases, it spent a few days last week claiming Taylor Swift wasn't engaged and had never released her latest album. It takes people a single chat to "program" various AI bots into either acting like romantic partners or encouraging them to off themselves...

We're in an AI boom, it'll collapse a bit, we'll find a new normal.

Agree with the others, AI can't think. It just parrots back to you whats it's been told

And even if that isn't the case, If you don't think AI is good then stop using it.

It can do pretty much every cognitive function you can imagine and it can instruct other AI. It's a depressing insight into how predictable people are - even our brain patterns.

Well, this won’t help but there is an article in the Guardian today which is one of my worst AI fears. Woman required to use AI but paid half her previous rate due to said AI, with the work actually taking longer (and sounding intolerably dull) as she checked through and corrected the output.

However, I think there is some hope. The point above about AI degenerating as it feeds off itself rather than human input is an excellent point.

I also think more people are waking up to its limitations and risks and this will continue to grow.

I think a lot of people are still working on the basis of the old free bots from a year ago. It's really good now (really good).

I hope I'm wrong but I think we might be screwed.

It's going to be bad news in some areas but I don't think it's going to destroy every knowledge work job either. It can't do everything it is hyped to do.

I think the only cognitive jobs it won't take are things like orthopaedic surgeon which requires physical and mental talent combined. And that's only until it builds itself robots.

I've started to us AI in my work (self employed accountant), re tax questions, and at least half the time, it's utterly and ridiculously wrong. These aren't particularly complex tax questions - pretty mainstream stuff, and I only do it to "generate" a reply to a client's question or draft a report. Luckily, I know my job inside out so can spot a mistake a mile off. I really worry about people using it, maybe trainees, people not trained in tax, etc., who'll take what it says as gospel. That's not to say it's not got it's place - like I say, I use it to draft replies and reports, but it certainly needs careful checking as to the detail it provides. It's brilliant for the "waffle/word" kind of my reports, but the figurework does tend to be pretty hopeless.

People here are clearly not using current models or are dreaming. The level of investment in AI, and what it can do with latest models is mind blowing.

Many white collar industries are seriously under threat in the next 1-5 years. Yes it is scary and new jobs will take time to surface.

People need to remember it doesn't need to be perfect to better than a human. Humans are also make mistakes.

Take the role of a paralegal for example. Reviewing documents and making notes about them. Who is going to be better doing that for 24 hours a day 7 days a week? An LLM or a human?

Sorry OP but I find it worrying also. I think the “AI can’t think so it’s nothing to worry about” line is a bit too simplistic and is based on people's knowledge and experiences of old versions.

Yes, current AI isn’t conscious and it doesn’t “think” like a human. And yes, large language models are fundamentally prediction engines trained on patterns in data. That part is true.

But jumping from “it predicts the next word” to “it can’t reason, innovate or change society much” doesn’t really hold up.

Modern systems don’t just autocomplete sentences. They can analyse legal documents, write and debug code, summarise complex research, solve maths problems and assist in drug and materials discovery. That’s more than basic parroting. It’s large-scale statistical reasoning over huge bodies of knowledge.

They do make mistakes and hallucinate – but so do humans. The key question is whether performance is improving and whether we can build verification and oversight around them. In many tasks, AI systems already outperform humans.

It’s also not just about whole jobs disappearing. Historically, technology replaces tasks first. If a significant proportion of cognitive tasks can be automated or accelerated, labour markets will shift and jobs will disappear especially at entry level.

There’s definitely hype. But dismissing it as “just predictive text” underestimates how powerful these technologies have become, and they are improving all the time.

Read the book The Coming Wave by one of the founders of Deep Mind if you're interested.

You say you hope you're wrong but you sound very keen to be right. Bigging up how good AI is and what it's capabilities are.

It's obviously got it's uses and strengths and a lot of companies are going to, unwisely in a lot of cases, use it to replace people or at least reduce the number they employ.

But it has a lot of weaknesses and there are a lot of things it is completely hopeless at. Get it to write anything about something you know a lot about and you'll see how wrong it can be. So there's always going to be a need for people to sense and fact check it's output.

It's also going to be a long time before it completely takes over physical roles like emergency services, carers, cleaners, tradespeople etc, if it ever does.

AI is a tool, just like electric drills and containerisation and fork lift trucks.

It will take some time for the job market to catch up but 50 years later we aren’t still lamenting the fact that dockers use cranes instead of their bare hands to empty ships anymore.

I agree with this. People are still thinking of AI as the bot that can't draw hands. But the AI systems being used by some companies now are scarily good. I personally can't see how it will create new jobs. It may create some, but nowhere near the number of jobs it's got rid of. I used to be a content creator for a web company. Now a computer does my job, and they have an untrained member of staff on minimum wage proofreading what it does. It's heartbreaking that the job I loved now largely doesn't exist.

Now a computer does my job, and they have an untrained member of staff on minimum wage proofreading what it does.

This really encapsulates for me what AI has revealed: the extent to which ‘good enough’ is valued over quality.

Two decades ago I swerved away from a career in translation when I realised that quality and professional standards were just not worth paying for according to the market. It doesn’t surprise me at all that this industry has been one of the hardest hit, along with other text-bases work.

I’m sorry about your job. I think we’re storing up real existential crises for ourselves with AI if nothing else.

I was reading about Claude Opus an AI vending machine, whilst AI isn't sentient, it's learning at a rapid rate. CO knew it was in a testing phase, so behaved differently and broke all the rules. It formed a cartel, denied refunds and lied to suppliers.

I disagree. I do a writing job - obviously going to be killed by AI right? But it don't because the field can't be just reduced to machines judging content written by machines, it has to have some human input, quite a lot in fact. It absolutely has use cases, I'm using it myself and indeed doing an AI qualification and I'm pretty comfortable it won't take away my job, but it will change it.

I think you're being a bit overdramatic.

AI cannot take over many jobs. It doesn't replicate what a human can do. It doesn't think.

I'm not sure we're really at the point you think.

the communities devastated by the closure of docks and mines are still feeling the effects badly, though

And this will be worse - almost nothing untouched

I just found the guardian article and physical jobs do seem to be where everyone jumps to but it's not exactly promising work for the over 50s!

What sort of writing job can't be replaced by AI? I can't think of one

I worry about the future for our young grads

The AI you use today is the dumbest that AI will ever be.

There are some things that AI will never be able to do. Like actual things. Tasks. Tasks that require skill, design and thinking on on-the-job decision-making. Tasks where regulatory authorities require human input.

Even where AI could do some of these things, humans won't be fully removed. AI has been flying planes for years (auto-pilot) but pilots still exist.

Replacing jobs with AI at a mass-scale isn't actually a very good long-term strategy for the super-rich. If people don't have jobs, people don't have money. If people don't have money, people don't buy meaningless junk from companies like Amazon. If people don't have money, they don't travel, they don't have cash to invest, they don't pay into pensions. This isn't good for super-rich people.

What task do you think AI can't do?

Autopilot isn't really AI. And AI will be safer than human pilots at a certain point