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 :(

it would take more guts, foreword thinking and innovation than our current (or any recent) government but it could be a good thing.

If the majority of white collar jobs can be taken over by AI, this still leaves a lot of jobs that can't - or can't yet. Lots of us wouldn't be physically able or wouldn't want to do a lot of these jobs every single day for years - think builders, chefs, care work, retail, surgeons...but for 2-3 days a week they could be doable.

We could go to a UBA where everyone works part time (3 days a week) and has to volunteer one day a week in their community - which would still mean an extra 'free' day. Ideally this would also include people who currently don't work. We'd lose the disincentive of benefits gradually tapering off and also less admin on working out everyone's different entitlements to different things. Hopefully there would be less of a 'hierarchy' of jobs if more people did the keyworker type ones that are more essential to society than pen pushing but less regarded.

I’m the opposite. I think the future is a much more exciting prospect with AI!

Tech elites are starting their own for-profit cities

And what do all these techbros who have all helped develop and unleash this hell upon us actually suggest we DO about it in a world where there is no work and no economy?

First we couldn’t be hunter gatherers any more, then we couldn’t be farmers: then industrialised jobs went and now any form of jobs are going.

Why do men never listen to warnings before it affects them personally. There have been numerous calls to reform and reset the system since 2000. Now this.

The issue with AI is pretty much the same as nuclear power. If the US (primarily) doesn’t advance China will and it becomes the equivalent of an arms race.

It’s incredibly hard to stop development, nuclear has the good and very bad. Hopefully we can find some good and weave a path of least destruction due to AI.

DH and I talk about this a lot. We’re both mid-forties so reckon we can probably hold out until early retirement in about 15 years. However, no idea what will happen for kids at school now when it comes to them trying to find a job 🤷‍♀️

In case anyone is interested, here's a link to some Spotify podcasts from experts who are all warning the AI industry to slow down and have a reality check:

The man who wrote the book on AI

We have 2 years before everything changes

Godfather of AI

All of these are from last year.

Unfortunately, this vision isn't realistic either because advances in AI are also made in conjunction with advances in robotics (which is somehow drawing less attention because robots have been around for longer I suppose). All of it, whether white collar jobs or manual jobs, is about automation. And essentially making large swathes of the human race redundant. The real danger is bringing about those changes whilst still hanging on to a utilitarian view point. There is still a long way to go -for example look up the debacle of Waymo's automated cars in LA in bad weather, funny to see that human vision is still vastly superior- but if those advances work properly in a decade or so the vast majority of people won't be able to justify their existence through economic worth. I truly shudder to think what the tech bros (fans of Nietzsche for the most part) will do with the 'too many'.

Another "great" war
A zoonotic plague or two
Simple

While people are giving up due to ai other people are continuing to go out and do courses, gain skills, pivot and work on. People need to get their head down and work on through and stop taking other people’s hope of a future away. And op stop bloody using ai if you’re so terrified of it- if people refused to use it this wouldn’t be a thing!!!

Ps plumbers, hairdressers, mechanics, electricians, baristas, car assistants, nurses, doctors, there’s a lot of jobs out there where it will never be financially viable to spend money on something to do it instead of humans

If I could get chat gpt to make me one coherent ten day fitness schedule according my very specific instructions WITHOUT COCKING THE WHOLE THING UP then I would be slightly more in awe.

Yes but no one else will have disposable income to pay for these services if there’s mass redundancies. There’s not enough of these types of jobs for everyone. Apart from care workers but some people would rather starve

Exactly. Even with the CoL crisis, I have stopped buying coffee and getting my hair coloured. DH is good at DIY so we do most repairs on our own.

If AI takes jobs, people will just stop or reduce many of these services.

This is definitely impacting my profession (law). The work absolutely needs to be checked but there is no doubt that AI can carry out research, review draft documents to pull out certain clauses at speed, deal with due diligence, create bundles etc. We simply won't need nearly as many junior lawyers in the future since it will be possible to carry out lots of the traditional tasks much faster using AI. My firm is halving the number of trainees it takes next year and is currently trialling AI software designed specifically to take on junior lawyer tasks. The law firms are all saying "don't worry - junior lawyers will simply be given more complex tasks sooner and can focus on client relationships and business development" but that isn't what is being said during senior level strategic discussions. They have already recognised that we will have a few coming in for succession reasons but there is more money to be made doing things faster and more efficiently using AI.

AI - specifically LLMs, since that's what people are always talking about these days - can think. They can reason, they can follow logical sequences and they can generate them from (almost) nothing).

This is really important to understand.

However, the more important thing to understand is that it doesn't give you the answer to your question; instead, it shows you what an answer might look like.

LLMs tend towards getting as close to a correct answer as possible purely because that's how we've optimised them, but the reality is that they only show you a facsimile of an answer that's as internally-consistent as it can manage within the constraints of its training data, quantisation and available context.

Just saying "AI can't think" is a very reductive way to express the issues, but once you realise what's actually happening it can change them from being largely-useless to actually having productive use cases.

The problem is that the people making decisions on how LLMs are used do not understand any of this, and thus they're making stupid decisions (irony abounds).

It's those stupid decisions that lead to us staring down the barrel of a bleak potential future.

Agree!
The point is that AI and LLMs specifically reflect the level of thought and expertise that you put in. So, the more understanding you have of a topic which you want to research, and the more articulate and precise you are in the way you write your prompts, the more help it will be. But unleashing someone who has no clue on an LLM and getting them to ask vague questions may end up with very misleading results. That's really why I'm concerned about neglecting the more junior/mid level training of human workforce and essentially breaking the career ladder because expertise and deep understanding comes from working in a real-world context.

Indeed. The one thing that could save junior-level folk is if they grow up using it...but, of course, our beloved leaders are currently looking for ways to age-gate AI services for under-16s, which means they won't be able to compete at all.

Again, idiots who understand nothing making decisions on behalf of those who do.

Cui bono is useful here. These models require a lot of resource and investment, anyone investing, wants a solid return, so future potential is important.

Are you using the free version or the paid version of chat GPT.

If you don't mind, PM me your requirements and I'll see what a paid version of AI can do?

This is depressing for many reasons.

If you dont mind me asking, did your law firm weigh up the environmental impact of using AI in this way, when making these decisions? I feel like no one is taking that into consideration. As long as they are saving money they don't care about what they are doing to the planet, I suppose.

Yeah all these companies care about is profit. Lots of people in possession of ChatGPT think they’re suddenly lawyers now though so a lot of these services will no longer be in demand

My eldest and her friends (15/16) are very anti-AI, especially the ones amongst them that are creative. It will be interesting to see how that manifests as they move into the workplace.

I use AI a bit at work, usually to aid my own organisation or give a starter for 10 for a piece of work. But the very large organisation I work in is so dysfunctional that I struggle to see how AI could effectively replace a person - it would be hard for it to learn in a place that doesn’t seem to write anything down or have straightforward processes for anything!

I wish to update my answer.

AI is not AI, or at least not the large language models we are talking about aren’t.

Most the the headlines about “AI job losses !” are part AI hype. part companies not wishing to admit they overhired as a response to the pandemic.

After a deep dive over Easter my impression is the space between the hype and reality is enormous. Perhaps people smarter than me know better, but it looks like a massive ponzi scheme and is giving me flashbacks to the DOT COM bubble bursting.

I don’t know where venture capitalists get their money from so have no idea if the burst bubble will impact just the investors, or create a Tsunami (from the earthquake many classes above us) for us normies.

I’ve decided to not worry about it as there is bugger all I can do about it. But no, it is not going to make us an unemployed underclass by anything other than causing a massive recession.

Less Skynet. More FuckUpNet (again).