281–290 of 496 posts
Your employer may “steal” your job and give your job to someone who convinces them they can do it cheaper.
In the new era of ai-augmented white collar work this process will get faster.
But let’s remember it’s always the employer who makes the decision and stop using language implying the existence of “job thieves” of some kind and completely excluding the employers’ choice in the process.
I'm not as worried about AI "stealing" my job as I am worried that it's going to make my job unappealing. As a software engineer, what motivates me most is the creative aspect of it. I like building and designing things. I like thinking about every line of code that I write. If people start outsourcing their coding to generative AI, and if I find myself feeling pressured to follow suit in order to keep up, then every…
I write code/program mostly to make my life easier and well I like to write to code. And AI/copilot just helps me write the better code faster.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Who's making the choice though? There's no one person or even one group of people in charge, short of political regulation. If AI is less expensive than humans, then anyone who doesn't use AI will get outcompeted by those who do. That's the unfortunate reality of markets. Wealth always becomes more and more concentrated until a democratic initiative opposes it.
In the context of “stealing jobs”, the choice is being made by the people who have jobs to offer, the business owners. In the context of building AI, the choice is in the hands of the researchers and engineers, and the businesses investing in AI. Some of the choice is being made by all of us, via interest in AI, discussion, clicks, Google searching, curiosity.
> If AI is less expensive than humans, then anyone who doesn’t use AI will get outcompeted by those who do. That’s the unfortunate reality of markets.
Generally true, I agree. Though we can and do exercise choices to prevent negative social and economic outcomes. Children, for example, are cheaper to employ than adults, but we don’t legally allow it. We can, similarly, choose whether and what AI we want to allow, if we’re sufficiently motivated, right? The choice in this case is in the hands of the populace and the government.
This is a nonsense headline. This is the equivalent of "Factory automation won't steal your job, companies that buy factory automation will." Democratization of AI tools will have upsides and downsides but non researchers weren't playing around with AI text/chat generation before this last round of simple to use tools came out.
The message is not on whether AI will change the jobs or not, of course it will. It may eliminate some, reduce others, change most, and likely create a few new ones instead. The point is about how people chose to react to it, and specifically that "putting the head under the sand" and crying later that AI took the jobs away is not going to help; accepting that the world changes and that you can do something about it and then leveraging it will.
Is it possible that some specific jobs disappear in several years from now, just like it was the case with factories, automation, etc.? Yes indeed it can. They may be taken by people leveraging AI (your boss, your company, your colleague). You can ignore the fact, or accept it and learn to leverage the same tools for your benefit, or better - the benefit of the society.
Lots of "analogies" are given in various threads here, like "Guns don't kill people, people who squeeze the trigger kill people" and "It is not the fall that kills you, but the landing". I do not agree. Sure you can argue any of the two sides, that's the whole point of these statements. They just serve to focus your argument on one side or another.
I have no idea why some people believe that in the future years of experience in a field like software engineering will no longer be marketable skill, but typing some stuff into a text box will be.
It's like an elevator operator arguing that automation of elevators will make their jobs easier overlooking the fact that if literally anyone can do the job then they're probably not going to be needed.
I'm not saying there won't be people in the future typing commands into an input field either, but the point is that this doesn't take any real experience and if it is a job it will be paid extremely poorly. Yes, in the present it might make you more productive compared to your co-workers, but in a few years don't be surprised if other people learn they can also write text into an input field and they might just decide to do it themselves.
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…
The human touch is (often) an advantage. Often, because I don't actually want to go into a bank branch and interact with a teller for the most part. However, I expect that quality human touch will increasingly be a premium service for those willing to pay more. Which is of course a valid business model of which there are many examples.
Funny you mention banks and tellers.
I just recently switched to a bank that has no phone tree; a human always picks up the phone. I also go in-person to do a lot of the stuff I need for security.
It's a wonderful thing to me. Maybe most people don't want it, but I sure do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re an inspiration. I’m going to open an accounting firm and refuse to use calculators.
How often are calculators confidently wrong?
A tool is a tool. it has good uses and not good uses. as the human you figure out where it works and where it doesn't.
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…
> Having the human touch will be an advantage , not a disadvantage. My guess is that having the human touch could be like being a tailor in the age of big textile corporations. Sure, a minority of people use them (and larger numbers use them for really special occasions, e.g. wedding dresses) but it's a tiny portion of the market. Which of course doesn't mean that you can't be one of the actors of that small market,…
And I think you're right, except that I am also betting that that tiny portion of the market will grow as the market becomes flooded with cheap, wrong stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The degree to which it enables undesirable behavior. A disturbed guy may want to murder everybody in a nightclub, but his chances of success go way up when he has a gun vs. a knife. A company owner may want to automate your job away, but without AI the automation is too expensive and unreliable. The big concern with AI isn't so much the Terminator future, but the Cyberpunk future, where all wealth is concentrated at…
Sounds like you took the headline to mean "There's no concern about AI", but in fact it explicitly highlights an important concern for many: if you fail to keep up, you will lose your job. I am puzzled so many here seem to have not read the second half of the headline before commenting that the headline missed "the point". The point is in the second half.
It currently requires 100 people with your job to get all of the work done. With AI this can be reduced to 1 person. All you serfs get to fight over who gets to be the lucky 1%er.
In the past when faced with a situation like this the solution is to find a different job entirely, but every time this repeats finding a different job becomes even more difficult. Eventually we have to start reconsidering how we have structured society, but this would ultimately be a loss of power and prestige for the current winners in society and since they have excess influence in politics it isn't going to happen.