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AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

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Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#241

Post by marcyb5st »

Aerroon wrote: post #153
photochemsyn wrote: post #144

I see this sentiment expressed frequently: > "The past decades have shown that the benefits of technology are unevenly distributed, with some rich becoming super-rich with a good portion of the people lagging behind. However, it is also fair to say that the average well being in the world has steadily increased." The average is far less important than the median , when it comes to social stability. You could argue th…

I'm not sure I agree with that assertion in the first place. Life has improved a lot for most people, but it has improved in ways that you don't really notice. Your car is safer, your apartment is safer, your neighbor's apartment is safer (so it's less likely to burn down yours), there's less crime, there's less hunger, there's more available life saving medicines etc etc. These improvements just aren't all that noti…

While what you say is true, housing is becoming an issue pretty much in every first world country, purchase power for the bottom 50% percentile is at historical lows, young people have issues entering a job market, retirement age is constantly pushed exacerbating the difficulty's young people have in entering the job market.So, yes, quality of life is increasing in some dimensions, but it's also drastically decreasing in others.

For instance, until I manage to purchase an house I felt very stressed about renting for my whole life and owning nothing of consequence. This impacted severely my mood and indirectly my quality of life.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#242

Post by gavinhoward »

lolsowrong wrote: post #15
gavinhoward wrote: post #13

I completely disagree. I'm building a business, and this business will be based on excellent software and excellent support for that software. I will refuse to use AI. But instead of AI users taking my job, I'm sure that refusing to use AI will become my differentiator as every AI user becomes more and more like each other. You may think that good AI users will not become so bland, but they will. Human laziness will…

You’re an inspiration. I’m going to open an accounting firm and refuse to use calculators.

Username checks out because you missed the point.

Yes, I know calculators can encourage people to not think; I should know because I wrote one. [1]

But the current "AI" tech is so much worse on that front. It's a difference of degree, and that degree does matter.

By the way, when I was learning to fly helicopters [2], I used my calculator to calculate weight and balances, but I also did it by hand!

[1]: https://git.gavinhoward.com/gavin/bc

[2]: https://gavinhoward.com/2022/09/grounded-for-life-losing-the...

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#243

Post by dumpsterlid »

golergka wrote: post #209
ajmurmann wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing to outsourcing or, even less fitting, immigration is a terrible analogy. Those jobs and their income go to other humans. Other humans who will consume goods and services, this is especially true for immigration. I'd also argue that offshoring is morally positive because it moves the work and associated income to where people need it more, that's why the labor is cheaper there Both automation and global move…

> However, automation allows for the owner of the goods of production to retain much more of the value created. Owners of means of productions are typically american people with 401k or other pensions funds. There's nothing wrong to provide good returns for regular people.

[dead]

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#244

Post by weatherlite »

dahart wrote: post #207
ajmurmann wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing to outsourcing or, even less fitting, immigration is a terrible analogy. Those jobs and their income go to other humans. Other humans who will consume goods and services, this is especially true for immigration. I'd also argue that offshoring is morally positive because it moves the work and associated income to where people need it more, that's why the labor is cheaper there Both automation and global move…

Okay, it’s not a perfect analogy, but from the perspective of a business owner, the choice is to put money into something expensive like local human labor, or something cheaper whether it’s remote labor or automation of some kind. Lots of tools have been accused of stealing jobs over the years, from factory machines to vehicles to computers. In that sense, I’m only borrowing an analogy with a long rich tradition. The…

What do you mean when you say choice? Who is choosing?

No one asked me or you or most of the people, this is barely on anyone's political platform. Sanders talked about it a bit but he is not influential and even he has more important agenda than A.I. Deciding about this 5-10 years from now will be too little too late imo, something should have been done years ago. This tech is already everywhere, companies will be able to "offshore" expensive labor to A.I running in cheap countries. We can try taxing these things, or creating some kind of UBI but that's about it regarding "choice".

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#245

Post by danogentili »

Herval_freire wrote: post #129
danogentili wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heartily agree with this worldview: as I argued in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34277750 , I believe this is how creatives will be able to make a living in a post-AI world, by continuing to hand-craft art, stories and software that will stand out from the bland AI-generated landscape, and will be enjoyed by other humans, bored by and/or not willing to consume an endless flood of AI-generated content.

You're failing to account for the trajectory of this technology where AI easily produces content indistinguishable and superior to human content. When such A I content becomes cheap and pervasive then AI will suddenly turn into a mirror to humanity. It will show us that "hand crafted" content is itself part of a bland and mechanical content generation algorithm.

Two things:

1) That is a horribly denigrative view of human creativity, one that simply does not reflect reality.

2) I kind of don't care: creativity always was and always will be about humans wanting to create something, the satisfaction and excitement of writing down a fanfic you've been thinking about for the last 3 weeks, the emotion of bringing your thoughts to life. Even with endless AI-generated content, I will never stop using my imagination (regardless of whether there will or won't be a market for it, and regardless of whether it may be worse than, say, dostoevskij's works), and the same holds true for every other creative individual on this planet, and I feel sorry for the people that never felt the feeling of creative excitement, and would rather waste years of their life consuming soulless content.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#246

Post by [deleted] »

the_doctah wrote: post #168
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep saying this, pointing out the "mistakes with confidence" aspect of LLMs, but as someone who is continually amazed by ChatGPT and finds it very useful in my day-to-day, it's hard for me to take this objection seriously if presented as a reason not to use AI . That is, for me, the output of ChatGPT or other AI tools is the starting point of my investigation, not the end output. Yes, if you just blindly past…

Maybe you haven't used it enough. ChatGPT is wrong all the time for me, sometimes insultingly wrong. The confidence in it's incorrect answers just makes it that much worse. I can't buy any of this hype for a "word-putting-together" algorithm. It's not real intelligence.

[deleted]

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#247

Post by jillesvangurp »

buf wrote: post #2

There are two types of people: 1. People afraid AI will take their jobs 2. People using AI to take people's jobs

The language is all wrong here. You don't own your job. You are not entitled to perpetual payment for whatever it is you are doing. A job is not a possession. You are not being robbed of your job. You simply do labor in exchange for money based on the value of that labor. And sometimes you do that under some long term arrangement with an employer and sometimes based on more short term arrangements. Either way, the arrangement is entirely premised on what you do having value and being worth paying for. So, if the value of what you do changes, you need to adapt. It's not being stolen from you because you never owned it to begin with.

The threat with AI for a lot of people is that what they do right now becomes less valuable. And people don't like change and feel threatened by it. Generally there are two solutions to that problem:

1) do something else that is more valuable or more worthy of your time.

2) figure out a way to scale what you do. For example by leveraging AI.

For many people it might be a combination of the two. And for some people it will indeed mean that they need to figure out something else to do.

But we'll still need to have an economy that is based on people earning some kind of income and then spending that income. The whole system grinds to a halt without that. If AI eliminates all the jobs, nobody would earn anything and be unable to spend. So, that's unlikely to happen. Economies are self regulating in the sense that people optimize for value.

In the end AIs are just tools that people use to create value for each other. If an AI can do everything by itself at a very low cost that just means that what it does has low value and is not something that people will spend a lot of money on. Meaning that other things will emerge that they will spend their money on that are more valuable. Those things are probably going to involve human activity that is scarce in some way.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#248

Post by baremetal »

fnimick wrote: post #232
golergka wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, automation allows for the owner of the goods of production to retain much more of the value created. Owners of means of productions are typically american people with 401k or other pensions funds. There's nothing wrong to provide good returns for regular people.

You can't be serious. The vast majority of the "means of production" are owned by the top 1-5% of the country. Sure, I have a 401k, I have 0.000001% of Amazon, that doesn't make me an owner.

You are very likely in the top 5% of earners.

Top 5% of Earners $342,987[1]

[1]https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/how-much-incom...

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#249

Post by photochemsyn »

ajmurmann wrote: post #206
JohnFen wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If you look at any metric like life expectancy, literacy rates, child mortality, things have gotten so much better. (One exception is the US where life expectancy dropped. As was heavily discussed online the last days, this is mostly due to gun violence, traffic accidents and drug abuse which IMO are largely cultural and not due to automation)

Again, are you looking at the average or the median? Just saying the same thing over and over without data to back it up doesn't count for much. The discrepancy is fairly large - average US 'familial' net worth is $748,000, median is only $122,000 - and the median net worth for non-homeowning families is only $6,000.

https://financebuzz.com/us-net-worth-statistics

A serious medical condition is also likely to cause bankrupty and loss of homeowner status for many homeowners in the mid-range for US citizens, which is unusual relative to other industrialized countries.

If you add in obvious stress factors - economic instability, environmental degradation, increasing climatic variability, the revival of infectious disease threats - then you can see why a dystopian future is a real probability, and that the status quo approach is unwise.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#250

Post by EugeneOZ »

japhyr wrote: post #52
tricksforfree wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often are calculators confidently wrong?

As a math teacher, this is such a funny comparison to keep reading. Yes, there's a difference between a deterministic outcome and a non-deterministic one. But throw humans into the loop, and it becomes more interesting. I can't count the number of times I've listened to someone argue their answer must be right because they got it from the calculator. And it's not just students; as a teacher I've always paid attention…

Calculators have no hallucinations, LLMs do. They can literally say that 1+1 is not 2.
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