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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

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often are calculators confidently wrong?

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…

It's still just guessing. Ask ChatGPT to provide some links to documentation and check them.

LLMs are great for “creative” work: images, poems, games - entertainment based on imaginary things.

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

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Is there a median child mortality or literacy rate?

For net-worth, which I never mentioned, your own source shows increases over time of both median and average since 2016.

All the distressing situations you describe of course are real, but were they less common in the US in the past?

QoL has gone up tremendously over the last fifty years, especially if you look at it globally. Do we need something like UBI to avoid terrible poverty for everyone? Absolutely! As we slowly move towards a post-scarcity society, re-distribution of wealth becomes more and more critical. That said, I'd rather be bottom 30% of income today than top 70% 50 years ago. No money in the world could have bought you minimally-invasive surgery, modern anesthesia...

Nice summary of all the ways things have gotten better: https://twitter.com/JosephPolitano/status/163837967499987353...

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

#303

Can we please adjust the framing about jobs? Another employee will not steal your job. 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…

I don't care how we frame it so long as the framing is consistent. What really gets me itching to fire up the guillotine is when people flip flop between stealing and progress based on who's doing it and who it's happening to.

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

#304
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initially I didn’t like the drug addict analogy, but maybe it’s a good one, maybe you’re right. A drug addict did have a choice, and exercised it, and addiction was the consequence. With AI we’re at the first stage where we’re not yet addicted, but once we become addicted, it will be very very hard to wean ourselves off of it if/when we find out it’s doing more damage than good. We do have a choice right now, but you…

> A drug addict did have a choice, and exercised it, and addiction was the consequence This sort of disregards the large percentage of people who get hooked on drugs while recovering from injuries or medical issues. After marijuana, pain killers are the second most abused illegal substance.

That’s fair, you’re totally right. But, this is exposing why the drug addict analogy isn’t a great analogy relative to use of AI. I went along with it to find common ground, but I don’t believe the existence of drug addicts are evidence that we lack any choice when it comes to building, deploying, or using AI, like @Herval_freire implied. Do you? I think we do have the freedom to exercise caution, or regulate the use of certain dangerous machines, if we want.

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

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.g…

I think you missed their point - calculators don't exist in accountancy firms to 'encourage accountants not to think', they exist because they dramatically speed up accountancy and make accountants more productive.

Sure you can open an accountancy business and refuse to use calculators, but that's just working with a strange self-imposed limit rather than using technology to best support your business.

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

#306
post #276
post #207

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…

Why don't we first automate the jobs that need to be done, but nobody wants to do anymore? One example: sorting mixed garbage and filtering out recyclable plastics (of various types), cans, paper etc. would be a great application for AI, wouldn't take away anyone's job (at least not in developed countries), and would be good for the environment.

People do want to do them. That's why they do them.

They simply don't ask for more money than the AI would require yet. Once there's a sufficient margin in it, not exactly at the cut-off but perhaps at 150-200%, they're gone.

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

#307

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…

John Henry beat the steam powered drill after all!

Yes, he did.

But working machines vs thinking machines is still a different ball game.

I won't give details of why I believe the way I do (I might someday; I have a blog post draft), but I'm extremely confident that thinking machines will never surpass humans.

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

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wil…

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

No it's not. It's a realistic view. Do not discount a view just because it's not inline with positivity. Only the realism of the view should be considered. And unfortunately it does reflect reality.

There's a huge amount of data supporting my viewpoint. Most of the content right now on the internet in books and in movies are generic human generated content. The very existence of this content is indisputable evidence for this.

Also you can't discount the trajectory of AI technology. The progress of the last decade is indicative of progress for the next decade. It the trend continues, logically, the only outcome is that the AI surpasses us.

>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.

Good for you. It's good to exercise your creative brain and be excited about it. My comment isn't about this at all. It's simply about how your and other peoples content could become indistinguishable and inferior to AI. You can be creative all you want, it doesn't mean other people will care or want to consume the creative products you produce.

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

#309
Contrary conjecture:

As with many "productivity enhancements", these AIs[0] will streamline some work to the point of practical elimination, but will in the end make more work, by enabling higher-level tasks to be doable instead of just imagined.

It seems a lot of the missing "productivity enhancements" from the PC and internet revolutions don't appear because people didn't net get fired, they just started doing different tasks (TBD whether those are actually useful, but evidently most managers think they are). Oblig car analogy - more highways induce demand for travel by making it easier, so the net is that traffic is worse; similarly, this may induce demand for work.

[0] these are artificial, but not intelligent; it is predictive models with insane amounts of ingested data. Whether text, code, or images, it speeds production in middle-of-the-road cases, but cannot figure out what to produce. There's no more evidence of reasoning than that an image in a mirror is evidence of skilled kinesiology. With an actual reasoning AGI, the conjecture would be quite different.

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

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think policing analogies is serving the conversation well. Someone whose job disappears in a puff of smoke doesn’t have a reason to care about whether the job was automated or whether it was moved overseas—in both cases, the economic activity is still there (or more likely, it’s increased), but the workers who trained for it are no longer getting compensated, and our concerns are for the welfare of these work…

>If you take a look at the US manufacturing sector, the output is higher than ever You are incorrect. S&P Global US Manufacturing PMI Final March 49.2, down from flash print at 49.3, but up from the 47.3 in Feb - that is the 5th straight month of contraction (sub-50) ISM Manufacturing March dropped to 46.3, from 47.7, and below 47.5 expectations - that is the 5th straight monthly contraction to the lowest since May 2…

They're talking about outsourcing and offshoring, which is a process that takes place over decades, so you should be looking at statistics to match that. Over decades, it is indeed higher than ever.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/manu...

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