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Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

theguardian.com

11–20 of 65 posts

Re: Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

#11
post #2

My sincere hope is that that would happen. Especially in medium and high income jobs in mass scale. Working for living is a problem to be solved. The purpose of technology is to automate things, increase free time. The purpose of politics is to distribute gains justly, whatever that is.

> Working for living is a problem to be solved. I strongly, viscerally disagree with this. People (mostly) need to feel like they are capable agents and also like they are contributing to something larger than themselves. I’ve seen friends struggle to get a job and find their place in the world; sitting alone at home and watching TV for weeks straight is an inhuman way to exist, and that’s where a lot of people will…

a person can be made to feel capable without requiring a living wage.

similarly : work exists outside of wages, as do co-operative and unpaid grand works.

the (probably fantastical) hope is that when a 'living wage' as a concept disappears it will free up people to pursue things that they're actually passionate about to form an identity and purpose.

put from another angle : do you think it's great that people can't find identity without employment?

it seems to me we should treat 'lack of identity and self worth due to lack of employment' as a pathology rather than something that we need to feed employment into. the human condition has lasted a lot longer than our current hyper-capitalism-centric ethos about work and passion; if people are becoming worse for it we should probably change the habits and motivations rather than providing their pacifier and acting as if it's a normal human thing for a psyche to dissolve when allowed to act as a free agent.

Re: Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

#12
post #6

I have yet to see a single example of AI replacing someone and doing their job. The vast majority of these cases are simply companies doing layoffs and blaming it on "AI" to deflect the bad press (and of course the media is eating it up). Meanwhile everyone remaining has 2x the work load and a useless $10/mo ChatGPT subscription spitting out garbage.

Voice acting as a profession will not exist in a couple of years.

Is there a good text to speech interface? I’d like to use one to help me to help proofread

Re: Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

#13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voice acting as a profession will not exist in a couple of years.

Is there a good text to speech interface? I’d like to use one to help me to help proofread

There are various online AI tools which do reasonably convincing Text to speech.

All you need is a little push and good tooling around the software to make voice actors entirely replaceable.

Re: Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

#14
post #6

I have yet to see a single example of AI replacing someone and doing their job. The vast majority of these cases are simply companies doing layoffs and blaming it on "AI" to deflect the bad press (and of course the media is eating it up). Meanwhile everyone remaining has 2x the work load and a useless $10/mo ChatGPT subscription spitting out garbage.

Voice acting as a profession will not exist in a couple of years.

Remember how a decade and a half ago everyone was convinced that taxi drivers and truck drivers would be replaced by AI in the coming years? There were even mass protests over it, and governments started to make contingency plans and enact legislation. The topic was discussed to death non-stop all over the internet and news media, just like AI is right now. Meanwhile today not a single driver has lost their job, and in fact there are shortages in all these industries.

Don't try and solve a problem before it is even a problem. Heck if anything good AI generated voiceovers will be a huge boost to the indie gaming industry, so I hope it can actually happen.

Re: Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

#15

A lot of dismissive comments in here already by people who aren’t trying to make a living doing writing, art, or voiceover. It will be music soon too. Tutoring is probably heavily affected already too “But those weren’t real jobs,” some might say. So it doesn’t count until it replaces programmer jobs? Because that’s coming soon too. Would you really encourage your kids to go into this field, expecting them to still h…

We also used to have a middle class consisting of horseshoers, elevator operators, and gas station attendants.

Many programmers do little more than glue together framework code, and make an excellent living doing it. Little sets them apart other than how fast they jump to the framework of the week. There's not a lot of separation from rent-seeking.

What would you do to change the direction of things? Make AI illegal, and hope there aren't companies that will just use it anyways?

Re: Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

#16
post #2

My sincere hope is that that would happen. Especially in medium and high income jobs in mass scale. Working for living is a problem to be solved. The purpose of technology is to automate things, increase free time. The purpose of politics is to distribute gains justly, whatever that is.

>Working for living is a problem to be solved. I had a job where I got payed, but had no real work. It was genuinely awful.

Why was it awful? That would be my dream. The first thing I would do is enrol in online courses/ get a second job.

Re: Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

#17
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voice acting as a profession will not exist in a couple of years.

Remember how a decade and a half ago everyone was convinced that taxi drivers and truck drivers would be replaced by AI in the coming years? There were even mass protests over it, and governments started to make contingency plans and enact legislation. The topic was discussed to death non-stop all over the internet and news media, just like AI is right now. Meanwhile today not a single driver has lost their job, and…

Autonomous driving doesn't exist. Convincing Text to speech does, it is just a matter of tooling around it.

>Heck if anything good AI generated voiceovers will be a huge boost to the indie gaming industry.

And all other video game industries, which will also not be paying voice actors.

Re: Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

#18
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Working for living is a problem to be solved. I had a job where I got payed, but had no real work. It was genuinely awful.

Why was it awful? That would be my dream. The first thing I would do is enrol in online courses/ get a second job.

It is illegal for me to get a second job. You can not do meaningful learning for that many hours. I was doing it in my free time anyway, that was enough for me.

Not to cry about my mental health, but it was very taxing for me. I was just sitting around doing random things occasionally.

Re: Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

#19

A lot of dismissive comments in here already by people who aren’t trying to make a living doing writing, art, or voiceover. It will be music soon too. Tutoring is probably heavily affected already too “But those weren’t real jobs,” some might say. So it doesn’t count until it replaces programmer jobs? Because that’s coming soon too. Would you really encourage your kids to go into this field, expecting them to still h…

> “But those weren’t real jobs,” some might say.

No one is saying that. What people are saying is that technology has routinely made certain jobs irrelevant since the beginning of human civilization, and no one can do anything about it other than accept it and move on. Soon enough new ones will spring up to take their place. Sharing and commenting on variations of the same article every single day is certainly not helping anyone's jobs.

Re: Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

#20
post #19

A lot of dismissive comments in here already by people who aren’t trying to make a living doing writing, art, or voiceover. It will be music soon too. Tutoring is probably heavily affected already too “But those weren’t real jobs,” some might say. So it doesn’t count until it replaces programmer jobs? Because that’s coming soon too. Would you really encourage your kids to go into this field, expecting them to still h…

> “But those weren’t real jobs,” some might say. No one is saying that. What people are saying is that technology has routinely made certain jobs irrelevant since the beginning of human civilization, and no one can do anything about it other than accept it and move on. Soon enough new ones will spring up to take their place. Sharing and commenting on variations of the same article every single day is certainly not he…

> Soon enough new ones will spring up to take their place

10 new jobs cannot be sufficient to replace 100 replaced jobs. What are other 90 going to do?

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