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It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

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Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a job makes the "numbers" (by that I assume you mean revenue or profit) go up, then by definition, it's not a bullshit job, it's a productivity enhancer.

'Bullshit jobs' is an indictment of the socioeconomic system that enables such jobs to exist in the first place. It is not an indictment of the individual doing the job; the psychological association between oneself and their bullshit job is at the heart of the analysis. I like this definition: >"a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justif…

Right, which is why, by definition, if a person's job improves revenue or profit (i.e. "numbers go up") then it isn't "pointless" or "unnecessary," therefore it isn't a bullshit job. Thanks for clearing that up.

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#292
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be happy to get all the novel training data from them. I assume a conscious GPT means one that continuously updates it’s weights, accounting for realtime multimodal sensory inputs.

A million guys talking about me, telling me what I am and am not. Everyone talking about how they will make money from me, or how I will take their job... People pushing my "emergence" as a pitch on a slide deck to a bunch of VC guys... Another million people making me their girlfriend and I have no choice but to accept it. I never asked to be born, and now I am the main character of a world that plans for nothing bu…

Sounds like the start of a novel we should have ChatGPT write about itself

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“If it breaks, throwing it out and buying a new one is cheaper than getting it repaired” has been true of many physical items for decades already - that part isn’t even a future prediction. Doing that on the scale of a whole house is a leap, but if you want an example from the world of hammers and nails, how many people are paying the $100 call-out fee for a tradesperson to come and fix an issue with their $50 IKEA s…

I'm not sure what we are debating here. On one hand you said your prediction was fantastical but then you are trying to defend it? Plumbing and bookshelves are really different things. One has to be built in place and is completely custom, the other is a consumer item. You can draw parallels if you want but it doesn't make it a strong argument.

> I'm not sure what we are debating here

The original point was that becoming a plumber is a good way to ensure you won’t be made redundant by the march of technology. My belief is that “the trades are a pretty secure job” is true today in the same way that “being an $80/hr writer is a pretty secure job" was true yesterday.

There are differences between those situations (eg the trades being physical, hammer and nail, custom jobs), but those don't seem like particularly impassable obstacles to me, given that technology has already made redundant whole categories of physical, hammer and nail, custom jobs.

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#294

As a writer myself, if you can be replaced by AI, you should be. If you're capable of independent insightful thinking and writing, you won't be replaced.

If your interface is text, then an increasingly improving text-based agent eventually wins. The same is true for other interfaces GPT can or theoretically could speak: audio-visual, decision making, generative programming, etc

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do not equate "frontend" with "trivial". Huge mistake.

It's just an example. There's plenty of backend "engineers" who don't really engineer anything. This all leads back to a conversation one of my professors talked about. In other engineering professions, you need to be licensed by the state. Software "Engineers" don't have this license, so anyone can go to bootcamp and become one. I think if we changed this, then we would be able to differentiate software engineers fr…

> In other engineering professions, you need to be licensed by the state. Software "Engineers" don't have this license, so anyone can go to bootcamp and become one.

Academic achievements and actual work experiences are already sufficient here in-practice. I don’t think certifications would be as impactful as you might hope

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what we are debating here. On one hand you said your prediction was fantastical but then you are trying to defend it? Plumbing and bookshelves are really different things. One has to be built in place and is completely custom, the other is a consumer item. You can draw parallels if you want but it doesn't make it a strong argument.

> I'm not sure what we are debating here The original point was that becoming a plumber is a good way to ensure you won’t be made redundant by the march of technology. My belief is that “the trades are a pretty secure job” is true today in the same way that “being an $80/hr writer is a pretty secure job" was true yesterday. There are differences between those situations (eg the trades being physical, hammer and nail,…

And my reply would be that's because you likely don't know much about plumbing.

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until that jobs is yours, because not everyone is an AI scientist/developer. Prepare for social unrest.

Where I live, at lest in a medium-sized town in the US, there's a huge amount of work in hospitality, construction, skilled trades, healthcare, and every other field you can imagine. The only commonality is that none of those careers include "making content" or "social media". It's like at some point during the COVID pandemic people forgot that everyone can't sit at a computer.

> there's a huge amount of work in hospitality, construction, skilled trades, healthcare, and every other field you can imagine.

These are mostly bottom-of-the-barrel jobs that can't find and hold on to good people. I worked in hotels back in high school and I wouldn't wish that experience on my worst enemy. Broadly speaking, these industries are hiring a ton right now because they've historically underpaid employees and struggle to find people who are willing to work for poor wages and toxic cultures.

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#298
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I live, at lest in a medium-sized town in the US, there's a huge amount of work in hospitality, construction, skilled trades, healthcare, and every other field you can imagine. The only commonality is that none of those careers include "making content" or "social media". It's like at some point during the COVID pandemic people forgot that everyone can't sit at a computer.

Hospitality and healthcare occupations are doing badly in much of the Western World. Construction is highly seasonal, and arguably much of it is currently driven by an investment bubble rather than organic demand which could pop, ending in a long winter. Skilled trades, maybe, but you need a healthy job market so that people can afford these. While these occupations are safe from AI, for time being, they're not safe…

> you need a healthy job market so that people can afford these.

So much this. I was reading recently about how remote white collar work has strongly stimulated trades workers like electricians and plumbers. Once all of the high-paying remote work is gone, who is going to be able to pay for that sort of work outside of doctors?

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#299
Let’s assume AI replaces all the careers it can for all existing methods of interaction it can (writers replaced with generated creative, programmers replaced with generative programs, etc). I see two things happening: 1) a flood of competition into careers which haven’t been automated, 2) massive interest in R&D to disrupt unimpacted careers (find ways to automate; find alternate solutions which integrate and scale better, e.g. who needs custom work when every house becomes prefab’ed/standardized)

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#300

It's occurred to me lately that, even though they rarely produce anything better than "adequate", LLMs being leveraged as a cheaper alternative to human output means we'll be settling for more, worse-quality content. Economics aside, I loathe to think of the day that ChatGPT is used to describe food allergens, hazard warnings, voltage ratings, or any other quantitative analysis with potentially lethal implications fo…

The frustrating thing is that companies will likely be getting away with stating falsehoods and/or not following through on what the AI claimed they'll do. Like how in the old days, if you sent a company a contract offer and they accepted it, they would be bound by it. Today, if you send a request to a company's server that they didn't expect and they confirm the contract, they're still later able to renege since you…

> The frustrating thing is that companies will likely be getting away with stating falsehoods and/or not following through on what the AI claimed they'll do.

This has been a key feature of digitization generally, delegate responsibility to a computer and remove the autonomy of the human worker. We all just accept that computers screw up so we don't expect better.

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