Disagree. AI will cause mass unemployment because it’s way more efficient than a human, doesn’t get sick (relatively less than humans) and costs less. Simple economics. I’ll give you one example. The checkout counters in supermarkets, if the supermarkets would have hired young people on those positions not only we might have less young people going towards drugs and hooliganism but it would have also made them better…
Good example actually. In Switzerland nearly every store has automated checkouts and depending on the local demographic more and more people are using them. There is one human supervising like 4-16 automated checkouts, or 1 open real checkout that keeps an eye on the machines.
That is at least 2-3 workers less for every single store in the country in just the last few years.
Sorry, but there's so many things wrong with this... - nobody cares about "unemployment" - they care about investing decades of their lives and losing their jobs and not being able to replace them quickly at the same level of income and quality of life, including a million photographers, models, makeup artists, etc. who are looking at diffusion model results and wondering who'd pay for their work next year, let alone…
Just a side note, I honestly think models, photography people and markup artists will still exist. People will still make clothes, whether that's AI assisted or not, and people are going to want to take real photos of the clothes, with models wearing them. No not in all cases, but as long as there are people there will be some demand for this. Same goes for fashion shows, they will still exist too. People will contin…
> Handmade goods are another example of this
The market ahare of handmade goods is going down. They are forming a parallel luxury sector with better quality in some items and equal or worse in others at significantly higher price. The analogy for music would be a lot of bands who don't write their own music and can't sing or play their instruments (assuming they even have instruments), relying on technology or other people for these things. In essence, an existing trend exacerbated.
LLMs stand to be much better at research mathematics than humans. Breakthroughs in mathematics often come from taking a concept from one area of mathematics and applying it to another area. Humans find this difficult because it's hard to be a research-level mathematician in more than a few areas, a human life isn't long enough to learn that much. Humans learn depth-first. LLMs learn breadth-first. You can go ask Chat…
LLMs aren't new and there has been no sign of them being able to automate maths research so far. If they do, I will acknowledge them as AGI as it has been my goalpost for over 30 years. I've never moved it once, and I won't. Computers were invented in large part for this purpose. The hope was to have a machine that could spit out interesting theorems. It turned out that generating theorems was trivial (you can just e…
If "interesting" is the keyword here, I'd have hope that language models based around mathematics research would at least be able to narrow the scope of theorems being iterated through to those closest to what mathematicians are already talking about. We'll see
I genuinely love how Marc Andreessen is a capitalist and isn't apologetic about it. It's honestly refreshing, coming from a tech billionaire in '23 SV. And I agree with every word.
> This is very far from the main point: accuracy of the claim that AI will wipe out (in this case health-related) jobs (and/or make health-related services cheaper). "involved" here is so vague as to be meaningless. Let me rephrase: AI is better at human beings at the sort of pattern-matching work that radiology entails, so the majority of radiologists will be unemployed (I'll say in 20 years, if you want to check ba…
The statement that "AI is better than human beings at the pattern-matching work of radiology, so the majority of radiologists will be unemployed" oversimplifies the role of radiologists. While AI can assist with pattern matching and improve scan quality, radiologists are doctors who diagnose pathologies based on multiple factors, not just scans. They also interact with patients, make important judgments, and determin…
> doctors who diagnose pathologies based on multiple factors
This is part of “patterns”. Multiple factors are just patterns.
> They also interact with patients, make important judgments, and determine when further investigation is necessary, for example.
Judgements and determining further investigation can be just output of AIs. Interacting with patient can be important, but as we can and could see, that is not preferred by many people. For example, I used an AI in the past few years for every of my medical problems. It was better than my doctors averagely. I still followed my doctors advices, but they failed many-many times when it wasn’t a simple cold or injury. It’s a matter of time when something will click in my mind and I start to ignore doctors as the first contact points. Especially that there is a good chance that you get an asshole, or an idiot, who just causes more problems (both happened to me way more frequently than it should be acceptable).
LLMs aren't new and there has been no sign of them being able to automate maths research so far. If they do, I will acknowledge them as AGI as it has been my goalpost for over 30 years. I've never moved it once, and I won't. Computers were invented in large part for this purpose. The hope was to have a machine that could spit out interesting theorems. It turned out that generating theorems was trivial (you can just e…
If it generates a bunch of theorems, won't some of those be interesting? Is there no easy way for a mathematician to sift through what it makes?
Yes, and that was basically the controversy around Doug Lenat’s automated mathematician:
LLMs aren't new and there has been no sign of them being able to automate maths research so far. If they do, I will acknowledge them as AGI as it has been my goalpost for over 30 years. I've never moved it once, and I won't. Computers were invented in large part for this purpose. The hope was to have a machine that could spit out interesting theorems. It turned out that generating theorems was trivial (you can just e…
If it generates a bunch of theorems, won't some of those be interesting? Is there no easy way for a mathematician to sift through what it makes?
There are an astronomical number of true theorems, but almost all of them are uninteresting and not useful. We've had automatic theorem-generating software for decades, and there are so many useless true theorems that it can keep busy with all the CPU cycles you throw at it without necessarily generating anything useful at all. Even if you let it run with huge resources and generated loads of theorems, searching through them seems pretty hopeless.
Where machine learning systems like LLMs may be able to help is to spot analogies and ways to translate theorems to different areas to do something useful (but the tendency to hallucinate seems a formidable obstacle for things that must be proven). For real automated headway/assistance, I think we need something like Alpha Go's "intuition" at judging the value of a board state somehow applied to mathematical arguments. That's how mathematicians usually work; we have an intuition that we can use a particular approach to prove something, and then we fill in the precise particulars.
This claim that AI won't cause unemployment baffles me. I understand the argument being made that new types of jobs will be created, but what the people making that argument miss is the massive level of up-skilling/re-skilling that is required of the population whose jobs are replaced. This has not worked out well. Just look at the communities in some poorer parts of the UK, who were relying on coal, mining and steam…
If those communities were moving to London they would be doing fine. The unemployment rate in the UK is really low. It doesn't mean that a job will show up at your doorstep without having to do anything.
How about you also check poverty rates, rents and housing availability, standard of living, not just counting those employed (which includes zero contract hours...)?
UK is not doing well and moving to the incredibly expensive London is not some easy fix you think it is.
This is a cynical piece with a political. Its argument is that AI won't cause unemployment in the US because regulations in industries like healthcare, education, and housing won't allow it. The centerpiece of the argument is this plot, showing how those sectors are becoming a greater and greater share of GDP over time:
No one disagrees that healthcare, education, and housing are "broken" in the US. But the US is only one economy. The plot looks different for other economies. For example, Scandinavian countries with high taxation have free healthcare, free education, and no homelessness.
