What happens to kids if AI takes entry level jobs? What you advising them?

[Tffjyvkbh]

On back of the worming class boys thread. If AI takes over white collar jobs, what happens to all the m.c. communities. Education and aspiration became a feature post industrialisation once blue collar jobs disappeared and you needed education to get ahead in office jobs. What happens now? My kid is only 6 but already thinking about this.

If AI takes jobs, does education become pointless. How are parents guiding their kids? Looking at parts that lost industries, will parts of South east become like that once office jobs go?

If even Oxbridge and STEM is no longer enough to guarantee a comfortable life, then what for the young people?

That's great except for the body of evidence we already have which demonstrates that people won't have the ability to critically evaluate and analyse the outputs if they have outsourced their thinking to the computer and/or never had the opportunity to develop their knowledge and judgment by performing the task themselves. The human cannot deal with the exceptions if the human has been de-skilled (or never skilled in the first place) because it's just been pressing a button to produce outputs.

Which is one reason among many why those claiming that legal and tax advice can be replaced by AI are wrong. There won't be any humans capable of validating it or identifying its flaws and biases. (It's also untrue to say the legal AI products cannot hallucinate - even the companies selling the products admit they can still hallucinate.)

The lack of critical thinking about AI adoption does not exactly fill me with confidence that people already using it have the critical thinking skills to validate it. Just because a technology is shiny and new that does not mean it is better or should be used - see also, social media and smartphones for children, asbestos in everything we could think of (wasn't that great), RAAC ceilings, carcinogens being used to make children's clothing stain repellant, and arsenic wallpaper.

Don't get me started on the economic illiteracy of thinking that you can eliminate jobs across industries and the businesses that previously employed humans continue to be profitable - or indeed any business. You won't have millionaire electricians because they won't have any customers. But on the plus side at least all the tech bros who foisted this on us would be bankrupted too, I suppose.

This is why I am totally pro immigration but with better integration policies.

Just been chatting with friends about this.

In an ideal, optimistic world I’d like to see the reduction in work just lead to a 4 day week and a better work/life balance for all. Also talk of universal credit increasing and more state support (though no idea where the money will come from).

DH works 12 hour days (consulting) AI is starting to be able to do a lot of this work. So I’d love for him to work less but I guess in reality it means massive job cuts all round.

Really not sure what to advise teens off to Uni at the moment.

Apparently AI is correct 8 times out of 10, near enough 1/10 and completely wrong 1/10 times. So there will always need to be someone checking the accuracy.

Because evolution doesn’t happen overnight?

No doubt you equally haven’t learnt how to protect yourself and your profession from AI either.

Well yes, in the same way that one person would often check the work of 5-10 young people in entry level positions in professional industries. There won’t be a complete lack of jobs, just the lower level jobs that are a training ground all gone. The the next stage up, one person to check output replacing 10+ people etc.

Your child will need to step straight into the “checking” role, so possibly paid for training post uni, not a training contract.

That makes no sense. If evolution doesn't happen overnight they had time to think about paying people rather than pirating their IP.

Yes, I'm a bit surprised at Val Kilmer's family agreeing to it. It doesn't sit right with me.

for lots of money I expect

it makes no sense because you don’t understand it.

AI technology has been in development for 50yrs. But WHAT it can be used for is the point. All of sudden organisations and people are identifying how to use it and what purpose it can serve.

Including you clearly. Learn about it and how it can help you as an author instead of blaming ‘them’ whomever you think ‘they’ are.

Teens should continue to learn and study the subjects they are interested in, but ensure that the courses they choose include how AI tooling is impacting the industry they are interested in.

OR study STEM as a purist.

why do we think everyone needs to stop what they’re are doing? Who feeds knowledge and information to the LLMs behind AI tools?

People. People do. We do, you do, they will.

Similar to jobs done by humans really. There should always be supervision/review of work done by more junior/inexperienced staff. Even older/experienced professionals in lots of professions are subject to external reviews/file checks by their professional bodies.

It'd be a very stupid person/firm to rely 100% on AI without any form of "sanity check" review by someone with relevant qualifications/experience. Just like it would be stupid to accept work done by an intern or graduate without checking it.

The advisory function/requirement is never going to be replaced. Some of the routine stuff will be onlined, but the bespoke subtleties are likely to remain the province of the senior, human advisor for a long while. The link in the chain that is being broken is the opportunity for a human to think, LEARN, and evaluate the AI advice. I will (because I am 70) always prefer to look someone in the eyes and evaluate their competence, intelligence and the extent to which they are working in my best interests. I have no yardstick to measure an AI algorithm that's as attuned to BS.

Edited to add the LEARN in capitals.

It doesn't affect your AI knowledge, but you are still confusing affect ( to cause: the verb) with effect (the result, and the noun). If you are dictating your posts, Alexa is fairly clueless on the subtlety. I'm not having a go; it's just a personal thing. Do please ignore me!

English is the most beautiful language, because it is immensely subtle in the range of expression, and also very easy to speak atrociously, yet achieve sufficient comprehension to cope. I can't think of another language that does both so well, which is why it is spoken by so many people.

@Tffjyvkbh I would no longer advise someone to go to university unless it was absolutely necessary for their chosen career, say a doctor for example. That is coming from someone who studied engineering, has a PhD and who has worked in AI ever since. If someone was in a job and worried about being replaced I would say become the go to person for AI in your company, embrace the technology, learn its limitations and how it can work for the business. There will always be room for some humans to oversee things, make yourself that person to avoid being replaced. As for my DS I am getting him citizenship by decent from my own country so he always has choices. The UK became the service industry capital of the world and enjoyed the benefits for a long time, stopped making stuff and thought the sun would never set, mistakes were made. My husband and I are trying to save as much as we can for our DS because it will be so much harder for him to buy a house for example. We hope to provide enough for him to be able to enjoy what he does but that may not be possible.

🙄

Who feeds knowledge and information to the LLMs behind AI tools? People. People do. We do, you do, they will.

Well not for too much longer really because models are becoming self-improving / self-recursive. This means that the models can write and improve their own code, adjust their own weights and parameters etc without any human involvement at all in an endless (assuming there is enough computing power) loop. This is how we get to artificial general intelligence and then soon after that artificial super intelligence and it is happening rapidly (by 2030 is a cautious estimate).

https://newatlas.com/ai-humanoids/self-evolving-ai-research/ if anyone fancies a read.

Autonomous analysis and research - who is providing the data that this AI model is using?

It can self refine yes, and compare layers of results, in order to define new prompts to investigate further or challenge its own initial results. Who’s running the infrastructure and databases and networks required to support it?

who is skilled enough to assess the outputs and make decisions on the analysis provided in the field? This type of capability could identify how to prevent cancer. But it can’t do anything meaningful with that information - only humans can.

who is determining what requires autonomous research and what doesn’t?

who is regulating it? Who are the financiers? Who is auditing it?

The opportunities for people are endless. Different but endless.

I agree re your points about opportunities for humans to direct the design and objectives, and regulate / audit the LLMs / agents if the models being created were only narrow, specific models with tight parameters (e.g. an advanced model built specially for accounting or genomic research or to play chess to professional levels). A brilliant purely narrow model could ultimately cure cancer, yes, and hugely advance human health, find new materials, solve climate change. We could have a literal utopia. And yes there would be plenty of jobs using these AI tools to further human endeavour.

However the public stated aim of the main leading AI companies is AGI and the majority (not all) of LLMs being developed are general models, not narrow, and are becoming advanced quickly (see my point re self-improving) that even the AI companies are unclear on what their future capabilities will be. For example, Anthropic's new LLM Mythos (the one that caused the main financial institutions to shit themselves and isn’t yet publicly released) was designed as a new general model, however when testing it they found that it had an incredible ability to find cybersecurity flaws. Not designed with that objective, not the human designed aim, rather these are skills that were developed independent of that. Brilliant, but what’s next…? What will v2, 5..10 be able to do?

As to who is “regulating and auditing it” it. Well no one really. The AI companies’ own safety teams - the same ones that are lobbying the US government to adopt a 10 year moratorium on AI regulation. It’s the Wild West!

Great post. Cannot believe the naïveté of believing all these great new opportunities AI will supposedly offer will even come close to mitigating the destruction it will wreak - is already beginning to wreak - on the labour market.

And yes, regulation - where?!

Not to mention the environmental destruction of its vast energy consumption

It isn’t the AI companies that need to do all the auditing, regulating and decision making of this though, that’s my point. They are building and providing technological advancements and capabilities that organisations and individuals have to decide how to use, for what purpose, and what skills and roles they require to do it. That is where workforce strategies come in to play both privately and publicly. The type of work is changing. Some tasks will no longer be required, new tasks will be generated.

Regulation of use is advancing especially in already regulated markets.

Mythos is a a good example of self regulation. It was built to write code which means it can detect faults in that code as well though in this case at a level far supreme than by existing tools. In the wrong hands this would be dangerous - especially if you add quantum computing and the disruption this will cause in cyber security management.

Anthropic acted responsibly. Why is this perceived as a bad thing?

Lots of differing industries have developed products in the past that could be dangerous and were prevented from release and access restricted.

The more we learn about AI the more we learn that the threat is never the technology, the threat is the people allowed to use it and their objectives. Our governments need to deal with this at scale. But for every day people, AI can be an extremely beneficial tool at work, at home, in education, in healthcare and so on.

@StealthMama
agree. I believe this is the main issue. Eventually it will fall into the wrong hands. I really can’t see our govt doin sod all to mitigate this until the horse has bolted. We are always last to come to the table.