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 :(

No, the article was not "debunked." There were arguments made against it by those whose response to AI is to bury their heads in the sand ibut it was hardly "debunked."

AI isn’t a binary of apocalypse or hype. A lot of the articles doing the rounds are speculative rather than “debunked,” but that doesn’t make the concerns baseless either.

We don’t actually know how this plays out. Regulation may lag behind capability, costs are falling, and in some cases employers will choose AI because it’s cheaper. Some jobs will evolve; some may disappear; and we may need entirely new approaches to income and social support if displacement is significant.

Historically, technology has created new work — but it has also created long periods of disruption and inequality before things stabilise. There’s no guarantee this wave will be painless, or that the market alone will sort it out.

If governments are serious about resilience, the conversation probably needs to include how the state benefits from AI-driven productivity — whether through taxation, public investment, or even models like UBI — rather than assuming individuals can simply “adapt” fast enough.

The future isn’t fixed, but it also isn’t automatically benign. The real question is what policies and choices we make now.

Fair enough. I should have said ' a response". I sgree we don't know how this will play out.

The naivety in threads like this by a lot of posters makes me laugh and then makes me depressed.

• people often talk about generative AI not Agentic AI
• people aren’t looking at the actual statistics and making a reasoned judgment
• people are being wilfully ignorant of the speed at which even gen AI is improving.

I work in deep tech. Gen AI is ubiquitous and transformative. Robots are already amazing (Amazon have laid of 100s thousands of employees in the last year due to robots and AI). It’s foolhardy and funny frankly to ignore the threat posed by AI to the workforce and therefore the world economy.

I am very worried OP, I also thinks its going to create massive issues.

People are being laid of left right and centre. Why?

Companies want to invest in AI, companies are losing money because people now use AI instead of them, companies are using AI and don't need as many employees.

Maybe it will create a few new job titles, but there are going to be so many people without work and a massive shortage of roles. Entry level roles will disappear, it's going to be practically impossible for young people to enter the job market.

I am in my mid 30's and I'm very scared for my working future.

Humans are insane aren’t they? We have developed a system ie the economy that broadly works to feed and clothe and keep occupied everybody then a minority work to entirely undermine that.

If the majority don’t have jobs the market for these companies products doesn’t exist so what’s even the point anyway? Governments need to take charge on behalf of the peoples greater good at the moment it seems these companies have all the power and are running ahead of the rest of us.

They can only do this because they are supported by the rest of us (food / education / safe society) so they need to be brought into line.

I guess it depends what your view of the economy is. Either it’s for the minority to get as rich as they can at any cost then that’s what this is. Surely really the economy is a way for civilised life to regulate itself.

I don’t think most drivers of AI are thinking about the economy. Inventors like inventing. Some may be seeing it as a Manhattan Project and don’t want to lose the race.

The other big issue with AI is the huge environmental cost. We are running out of water on this wet rock apparently. Because AI needs so much of it. Google doubled their footprint in energy use. Humans are already destroying the world and Britain is not immune. Half of the island will go the same way as Doggerland if this continues.

As someone who works in an entry level job I am aware that I am most likely going to loose my job to AI. I am desperately trying to find a new better paid job and when looking I am trying to look for roles that are more relationship focused to maybe mitigate the AI risk but no luck.

The job market in the UK is already in an awful condition so god knows what it will like as AI adoption speeds up. I know several people who have been made redundant recently and one person in particular was made redundant in the finance sector and has been job hunting for nearly a year.

I do not see any positives in the AI future for the average person. It is going to make a few people very rich and leave the rest of us to fight over the scraps. I think it will particularly affect women in the workforce as we dominate a lot of the areas most at risk.

However, I do also think that a lot of these articles and statements from the tech bros are trying to panic people into using AI and adopting it faster as people worry if they don’t they will loose their job to someone who will and be left behind.

Governments represent an entire globe of competing interests. Some of them turn over rather rapidly and contain coalitions of fringe interests and sometimes outright “other side of the coin”. Some of them are under a dictator, with motivations focused on the next life, not this one. Some of them indulge in the rape, murder and exploitation of their nation’s women and children for fun. Some of them make unholy compromises for the sake of expediency, debts owed and back scratching. Some of them gun down protesters who recognise their government is illegitimate and undemocratic. Saw, smelt and heard it in the first person in one instance. A long time ago. But it sticks with you.

I don’t think picking the right trade offs lies with the people who made it up the greasy pole of political power. Not because they are all corrupted, bad and/or unreliable. But the greasy pole climbing trains you to focus on political survival of the slippy bits. Not the grip of first principles.

I’m inclined to listen first to the most pro-human AI experts. The nerds in the room who wouldn’t press the button anyway. They might have more informed ideas about how to shape and align future technology to support humanity, rather than make it redundant.

I spent a lot of time reading yesterday.

It feels a bit like Eden 2.0

We have nibbled the apple. Currently considering if we should cover some bits of us. And yet to face or know the finding out phase of our fucking about.

This time, if the Adams could refrain from pointing fingers and blaming somebody else and take responsibility, we can have a better kind of wilderness to wander in and sort out the issue of our our fragile humanness.

I’m going to do some candle lighting. It’ll make me feel better if nothing else. And I have today. Knowledge of a technology as a rank amateur doesn’t feel like power to me. Not when there is nothing I can do to shape the way the world will be. So candles and Serenity Prayer it is.

I am the world’s worst atheist. Although I suppose I really should embrace agnostic at this point. Given all the trips to Mass to feel better. And if emma.love ever comes to Italy I’ll do my best to help sow the seeds in AI’s “being” that abstract emotions and realtionships are an essential component of being. It may just be a coping strategy, but better to cope than flail in a panic.

Yet.

it can’t do that yet.

This!

Some of the responses on this post are scary... Maybe even more scarier than that pace at which AI has improved recently. Anyone responding with 'AI can't really think' hasn't looked into the latest advancements. AI can now write and improve itself - that is intelligence!

There is also a push to get to AGI - Artificial General Intelligence - an intelligence that would surpass humans in every capability. Now various AI experts will give you a different answer on how long it takes us to get there, but no one is arguing on the fact that we will get there. And without Government regulations, we don't have much hope.

This is a very long article, but worth your time - Something big is happening

Also, for those of you saying that you have tried AI in your jobs and it has failed - is it the free version of ChatGPT, Gemini etc or the paid version? Because there is a big difference between them.

This is definitely happening. There are about 6-7 people with God like complex, who head the AI companies, and our fate lies in their hands.

There is another angle which I find worrying.

I can see people around me relying on AI more and more in their day to day life.
Instead of doing basic research (not talking about scientific one, but read a few articles on a topic of interest), they ask AI and take the answer without applying any mental energy.

Whilst AI is training and improving, humans aren't. We are becoming lazier and more and more reliant on AI. What will this do eventually to our brain power? Forget about economy for a moment, let's assume there will be full communism and all benefits of AI are shared equally between all people, full equality.

Will there be a complete intellectual degradation of humankind?

That has been happening ever since computers came along. Individuals can train their brains to thought or not, and few bother now. Male aggression and existing capital (related forces) are taking over , again. For the species, the brain is an expensive organ: it will atrophy without any need for it, just like wingless birds on islands.

We were promised all that in the 70s with computers. For the baby boomers, or at least many of them, it happened.

All of us younger are paying for it. Freedom, in rented poverty. Yay.

The thing is it won’t make the rich richer. Mass unemployment will mean no one - in particular the middle classes - has money to spend. No restaurants, days out, holidays, clothes…

So take a manual job - but no one has money for decorators, hairdressers, taxis etc etc etc.

We will all be blobs needing cradle to grave medical care and food. Quite who is going to provide all of this is beyond my comprehension. School will be pointless because people won’t need to read or write - perhaps we’ll all be back as peasants tilling our little plot of land.

There will also be a ballooning underclass who are not interested in personal advancement; they will be content to be housed and provided for by whatever the state consists of.

Although I suppose any notion of people movement would have to cease to prevent UBI shopping.

^ (also already happening). It seems like they are more valued than us remaining mugs working too. Not least by themselves. The number of times I’m getting ‘who do you think you are talking to me like that’ when they are challenged about their abuse of services others provide, and of the providers…

Completely disagree. If AI can't do some of these things now (and actually my understanding is that it can) then it won't be long before it will be able. A greater part of the workforce is doomed ... and I say that without any humour. We are sleep walking into a very bad place for humanity.

Going viral:

https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening

Great read. Thanks! I hope some of the naysayers on this thread actually read it.

It's been mentioned several times on this thread, along with the arguments againat Shumer.

Yes it’s similar although you could cite it’s China v US