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AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

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Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#81
post #16
post #8

The accounting note is not true in the traditional sense. The field in the US is just getting offshored to India/PH/Eastern Europe for better or for worse. There is even a big push to lower the educational requirements to attain licensure in the US (Big 4 partners want more bodies and are destroying the pipeline for US students). Audit quality will continue to suffer and public filers will issue bunk financials if th…

Yup, 95% of the AI hype is to apply pressure on the labor market and provide cover for offshoring/downsizing.

Where is the evidence for this? Who is "applying pressure on the labour market"?

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#82
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intelligence doesn't matter. To quote "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies": > There is an important sense, however, in which chess-playing AI turned out to be a lesser triumph than many imagined it would be. It was once supposed, perhaps not unreasonably, that in order for a computer to play chess at grandmaster level, it would have to be endowed with a high degree of general intelligence. The same thing m…

There is a reason chess was "solved" so fast. The game maps very nicely onto computers in general. A grandmaster chess playing ai is not better at driving a car than my calculator from the 90s.

Yes, that's my point. AI doesn't need to be general to be useful. LLMs might replace software engineers without ever being "general intelligence".

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#83
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is. Sure, you can view an LLM as a lossy compression of its dataset. But people who make the comparison are either trying to imply a fundamental deficiency, a performance ceiling, or trying to link it to information theory. And frankly, I don't see a lot of those "hardcore information theory in application to modern ML" discussions around. The "fundamental deficiency/performance ceiling" argument I d…

Sure, you can upscale a badly compressed jpeg using ai into something better looking. Often the results will be great. Sometimes the hallucinated details will not match the expectations. I think this applies fundamentally to all of the LLM applications.

And if you get that "sometimes" down to "rarely" and then "very rarely" you can replace a lot of expensive and inflexible humans with cheap and infinitely flexible computers.

That's pretty much what we're experiencing currently. Two years ago code generation by LLMs was usually horrible. Now it's generally pretty good.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#84
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a reason chess was "solved" so fast. The game maps very nicely onto computers in general. A grandmaster chess playing ai is not better at driving a car than my calculator from the 90s.

Yes, that's my point. AI doesn't need to be general to be useful. LLMs might replace software engineers without ever being "general intelligence".

Sorry for not making my point clear.

I'm arguing that the category of the problem matters a lot.

Chess is, compared to self-driving cars and (in my opinion) programming, very limited in its rules, the fixed board size and the lack of "fog of war".

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#85
post #39

Every day when I am out in the city, I am amazed by how many jobs we have NOT managed to replace with AI yet. For example, cashiers. There are still many people spending their lives dragging items over a scanner, reading a number from a screen, holding out their hand for the customer to put money in, and then sorting the coins into boxes. How hard can it be to automate that?

You mean ordering kiosks and self-checkout machines? We have automated it, it's just not everywhere has implemented it. The one I'm desperately waiting for is serverless restaurants—food halls already do it but I want it everywhere. Just let me sit down, put an order into the kitchen, pick it up myself. I promise I can walk 20 feet and fill my own drink cup.

Self check-out machines aren't automation.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#86
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you can upscale a badly compressed jpeg using ai into something better looking. Often the results will be great. Sometimes the hallucinated details will not match the expectations. I think this applies fundamentally to all of the LLM applications.

And if you get that "sometimes" down to "rarely" and then "very rarely" you can replace a lot of expensive and inflexible humans with cheap and infinitely flexible computers. That's pretty much what we're experiencing currently. Two years ago code generation by LLMs was usually horrible. Now it's generally pretty good.

I think you are selling yourself short if you believe you can be replaced by a next token predictor :)

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#87
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you get that "sometimes" down to "rarely" and then "very rarely" you can replace a lot of expensive and inflexible humans with cheap and infinitely flexible computers. That's pretty much what we're experiencing currently. Two years ago code generation by LLMs was usually horrible. Now it's generally pretty good.

I think you are selling yourself short if you believe you can be replaced by a next token predictor :)

I think humans who think they can't be replaced by a next token predictor think too highly of themselves.

LLMs show it plain and clear: there's no magic in human intelligence. Abstract thinking is nothing but fancy computation. It can be implemented in math and executed on a GPU.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#88

Every day when I am out in the city, I am amazed by how many jobs we have NOT managed to replace with AI yet. For example, cashiers. There are still many people spending their lives dragging items over a scanner, reading a number from a screen, holding out their hand for the customer to put money in, and then sorting the coins into boxes. How hard can it be to automate that?

>How hard can it be to automate that?

Self checkout has been a thing for ages. Heck in Japan the 711s have cashiers but you put the money into a machine that counts and distributes change for them.

Supermarkets are actually getting rid of self checkouts due to crime. Surprise surprise, having less visible "supervision" in a store results in more shoplifting than having employees who won't stop it anyway.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#89
post #8

The accounting note is not true in the traditional sense. The field in the US is just getting offshored to India/PH/Eastern Europe for better or for worse. There is even a big push to lower the educational requirements to attain licensure in the US (Big 4 partners want more bodies and are destroying the pipeline for US students). Audit quality will continue to suffer and public filers will issue bunk financials if th…

Do you have any evidence of this because the rationale seems like a coping strategy or conspiracy theory how it's being suppositioned.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#90
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but having a cashier standing there waiting to scan your items will prevent most normal people from stealing. Sure, some will brazenly walk right past with a TV on their shoulder, but most people won't. If there's no cashier and you're doing it yourself, a whole lot more people will "forget" to scan a couple items, and that adds up.

There's usually a security person or two in the store, looking over the self checkouts. I agree that job prevents a lot of people from becoming opportunistic thiefs, but I'm making a distinction between cashiers and security. Today the store needs both.

Pretty sure if a "security person" worked so well, Walmart wouldn't be severely reducing self checkouts at their stores to Walmart Plus members only.
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