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

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341–350 of 496 posts

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

#341
My unpopular opinion is that people adopting this type of machine learning will have some benefits and some speed-bumps and obstacles. As GPT iterates through a myriad of versions, improvements, restrictions, filters businesses will have to work around legal challenges, shadow biases, confidently incorrect interpretations and of course dependencies on a rate limited cloud service unless all future iterations become open source, self hosted and distributed and everyone can agree on what data-sets to ingest and what should be filtered/excluded for legal, accuracy and other reasons. Businesses taking this on early will need to be ready to quickly change course on the fly especially as new legislation catches up.

I think the biggest obstacle could be the lack of showing ones work when legal issues will arise. There isn't a "debug last answer" to get forensic data on how the answer what achieved. I am curious how a cranky judge may respond to "because the AI said so".

Another potential risk could be if shadow biases dynamic filtering, dynamic algorithms, dynamic tuning based on social, economic or political preferences of the ML operator, get too aggressive and people start to realize their financial decisions are being manipulated and impacted artificially by automation even more so than occurs today on social media platforms. I do not know how businesses or governments may react to this.

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

#342
What's this constant obsession with "stealing jobs"? The tech industry has been dead for something like 30 years. There is zero intellectual design being put into it. Music is just a bunch of sellouts. You know how "content creators" do that cringy shit where they try to base their life around monetizing their "content"? That's how "musicians" worked before the internet. I couldn't care less how their jobs are threatened. Journalists are obviously no better. I don't miss Blockbuster. I don't miss PSTN operators. I don't miss building pyramids by hand.

Work / money itself is an absurd concept and not something to spend 100% of our time worrying about. As technological capability increases, there will just be a point where food and everything will be handed out for free. And mundane people will still be worse off by their own choosing. And perhaps some shoddy company like Amazon Google Apple etc will be the one doing this so they will use this to enforce their political viewpoint instead of honoring the non aggression principle.

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

#343

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…

Over the weekend, I was trying to add a feature to a largely unfamiliar codebase. ChatGPT appeared to have knowledge of this codebase, so I asked it many questions as I worked, in order to understand the big picture. In hindsight, I'm pretty sure almost every answer ChatGPT gave me was wrong. However, even with this outcome—I've had cases where ChatGPT was significantly more accurate—I think ChatGPT was helpful on ne…

It sounds like you used ChatGPT as a rubber duck. Although this rubber duck can talk back to you.

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

#344
post #10

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.

I think it’s absurd as well. Jobs won’t be stolen, different jobs will be created. At a certain point we will move past scarcity, and maybe we won’t have to labor to not die. What’s so important about a job? Humans need meaning, but meaning doesn’t have to be delivered by PayChex at the expense of the human soul.

Not having to labor is attractive to someone who has a solid foundation of accumulated wealth - at least a house with a garden in a first world country inherited from parents.

For the rest of us skilled labor was (and still is for a while) a means to accumulate some wealth, get an own place to live, move to a different country we want to live in, get some things like travelling an hobbies that are not strictly necessary, but pleasant to have. If labor doesn't serve this purpose any more, it's unlikely that something else will, not in our lifetime at least

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

#345

What's this constant obsession with "stealing jobs"? The tech industry has been dead for something like 30 years. There is zero intellectual design being put into it. Music is just a bunch of sellouts. You know how "content creators" do that cringy shit where they try to base their life around monetizing their "content"? That's how "musicians" worked before the internet. I couldn't care less how their jobs are threat…

> As technological capability increases, there will just be a point where food and everything will be handed out for free.

that's not the trend line I'm seeing.

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

#346
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We lack choice in aggregate. As an individual you have the choice of doing a drug. If I talk about a population of people and I introduce highly addictive drugs to a population of people, then it's almost a guarantee that part of that population will get addicted. In this sense it is not a choice. For AI, if I introduce AI to a population of people then for sure part of the population will exploit and use AI. Logical…

We can and do choose to regulate addictive drugs, and we can similarly choose to regulate AI if necessary, right?

The fact that corporations and businesses will utilize AI to it's maximum extent is completely deterministic. This will happen.

Whether or not humanity in aggregate will launch a delayed immune response against AI via government regulation is not predictable. Regulating addictive drugs has a certain amount of clarity in moral action but regulating technology to prevent job loss is less clear. We didn't regulate calculators for replacing humans did we?

As I said, aspects of aggregate human behavior are deterministic. But I have to emphasize the "aspects" part because there are other "aspects" that are actually not predictable.

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

#347

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)

> If you look at any metric like life expectancy, literacy rates, child mortality, things have gotten so much better.

Indeed. But I was talking about drug pricing, not all of that.

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

#348

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…

It depeneds on what you are working on and your position. Isn't it a lot of code is repitative? Test cases are mostly repitative. AI can help you with that and your productivity increase significantly. 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.

> And AI/copilot just helps me write the better code faster.

Consider that AI, by necessity, has to be trained on an aggregate of human output. That means that, by definition, the aggregate amount of data that it's trained on will be representative of the "average" solution to any problem. This doesn't mean that I can always do better, but I wouldn't assume that what AI will give me would be "good." Most developers I speak with who are using CoPilot and ChatGPT tell me that they always examine the output and have to "massage" it a little. But I don't see it jiving with my workflow, specifically.

In any case, if people find it useful then great! What works for others will not always be what works for me and vice versa.

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

#349
post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have employees, never will. Pretty easy to enforce if it's just me.

I guess if you never grow that much. I don’t know why you would purposefully handicap yourself by not taking advantage of the tools available. Why make yourself less competitive?

Because I think "AI" is the handicap.

"AI" will help at first, sure, but as it is used more and more, the code will become less and less well-designed and built. My code, on the other hand, will retain full quality, and my long-term velocity will out-pace anyone using those tools.

"A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept." [1]

[1]: https://gist.github.com/gtallen1187/e83ed02eac6cc8d7e185

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

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a time, I was attempting to use it for game advice during my recent playthrough of Demon's Souls remake (What's the best build for X? What's the best weapon for X?). I asked ChatGPT where to find the NPC The Filthy Woman in a certain level. ChatGPT answered that that NPC doesn't exist, and perhaps I had the wrong game? That NPC most certainly does exist. I was also using it to generate some Java code for a bit. T…

Out of curiosity was this 3.5 or 4?

I don't believe it was version 4 yet.
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