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The AI backlash is only getting started

economist.com

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Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#121

Post by yunwal »

greenavocado wrote: post #67
watwut wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how tractors were sold initially, but AI is sold with open goal of making majority of the people unemployable, "obsolete" and keep it that way. That is literal rhetoric of those companies. Tractors are tools to make hard boring labor easier.

It's not theoretical. I am literally in corporate meetings where leadership is automating away labor by directly comparing total cost of operations against the current human operator's salary to calculate ROI. The direct purpose is to eliminate jobs (and do things more reliably, ideally, since bots don't sleep or get sick). The question is whether those people will be able to find meaningful new work.

This was absolutely happening with tractors too. Not in a board room or whatever, but people were definitely getting laid off because of tractors.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#122

Post by beej71 »

tengbretson wrote: post #96
dwa3592 wrote: post #64

People have been made to believe by very influential people (dario, sam, elon etc) that AI will replace them. As a result people are getting angry. Who did not see this coming? Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? There is nothing sexy about it. There is nothing cool about it either. Imagine a taxi driver facing his family knowing he…

> Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? Say, you wouldn't happen to write software for a living, would you?

Not the GP, but I used to do. And I share the sentiment even though I'm out of the game.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#123

Post by dofm »

yunwal wrote: post #100
justonepost2 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case there is, by definition, no “medical and health services manager” or “data scientist” in the future. Nothing comes next.

> "by definition" Who's definition are we talking about here

Literally Sam and Dario's.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#124

Post by BeetleB »

baron816 wrote: post #37
dippogriff wrote: post #20

If the labs weren't so aggressive with building datacenters in people's backyards, this could've been a different story. People don't like it when pipelines are built in their backyard either.

Are they built in people’s backyards? There’s a famous case in Northern Virginia that has admitted they messed up zoning which gets cited in every story to make it look like they’re all built in people’s backyards, but the vast majority of them are in industrial zones.

For a lot of folks (including near where I live), "building in my small city" is the same as "backyard". The narrative is "Use up a lot of land, pay almost no taxes, and employ almost no people."

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#125

Post by gruez »

dofm wrote: post #97
gruez wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The untold promise of [tractors] is to replace labor. [...] Mere tools would never justify this kind of investment. How's this any different than say, tractors, or the mechanical loom? After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today.

Tractors and looms displaced labour. Those people got other jobs. In many cases radically worse jobs for the first hundred years; living standards for those people dropped noticeably as they went into industrial mining and factory work. The pitch for AI is that it's affordable at the insane valuations because it replaces labour. It takes work out of the labour market entirely — fewer salaries means more money can be…

>In many cases radically worse jobs for the first hundred years; living standards for those people dropped noticeably as they went into industrial mining and factory work.

source?

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#126

Post by dofm »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #105
justonepost2 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case there is, by definition, no “medical and health services manager” or “data scientist” in the future. Nothing comes next.

"By definition"? If you define that to be the future, yes. But that's the problem with vitorfblima's statement upthread. Are we talking about all labor? That's still a very big, unproven assumption. It's an assumption that I question. And given that I don't buy the premise, I don't buy the conclusions, either. And the farm analogy is somewhat on point. We went from 67% of people working on farms to... I think it's mo…

Where does this agricultural labour point come from?

It's so common here and so obviously wobbly. That labour was displaced (and in most cases into way more gruelling and dangerous factory work).

The AI pitch is that the giant superbrain will do all the knowledge work and rapidly self-improve faster than humans (and therefore, do more future jobs we could do). That is a pitch for replacing human labour.

You can't simultaneously have a machine that is said to be likely to wipe out entire categories — not market sectors, categories of work — and then say that all those people will get jobs elsewhere. Because, where? The timescales they are talking about are short. Where's the work going to come from in time?

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#127

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #94
dwa3592 wrote: post #64

People have been made to believe by very influential people (dario, sam, elon etc) that AI will replace them. As a result people are getting angry. Who did not see this coming? Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? There is nothing sexy about it. There is nothing cool about it either. Imagine a taxi driver facing his family knowing he…

> Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? There is nothing sexy about it. There is nothing cool about it either. This argument alone doesn't really work because literally billions of peoples jobs and livelihoods have been replaced throughout history from the explicit development of technology that replaces the need for human labor. The…

Yes, but it's trivially obvious that AI is different from previous technological automation, since with AI it's ALL jobs being automated, starting with white collar ones, not just some narrow segment.

What was true with previous automation, that some jobs disappear, but new ones are created in their place, will not be true of AI, because AI is a general purpose technology capable of doing the new jobs it creates just as well as the old ones it displaces.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#128

Post by strogonoff »

gruez wrote: post #29
vitorfblima wrote: post #19

The untold promise of IA is to replace labor. That's probably the only reason why some people are willing to spend trillions of dollars in pursuing this technology. Mere tools would never justify this kind of investment. It's no surprise that people are getting angry, even though many are using AI in their everyday life.

>The untold promise of [tractors] is to replace labor. [...] Mere tools would never justify this kind of investment. How's this any different than say, tractors, or the mechanical loom? After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today.

If comparing past industrialisation and automation events with hypothetical LLM dominance in the workforce, some of my questions would be: (0) how limited is the change to a specific industry (e.g., weaving vs. most of intellectual and creative work by everyone starting from children as soon as they can read and type to the elderly)? (1) how many people are affected—in absolute terms not just percentages that ignore population growth? (2) how quickly are they affected? (3) what can people do—where can people move to where they can keep working (e.g., operating/maintaining/manufacturing tractors and looms, intellectual/white collar work, etc.)? (4) what are the organised reskilling processes in place that facilitate said migration? (5) how competitive and diverse, vs. monopolistic and regulated, are the new industries that power the change? how concentrated is created wealth and how many new jobs do they create? (6) what laws (in letter or in spirit) are violated as the change is happening? (7) if it is shown that the current change is about similar to the past in above aspects, does that imply it’s OK that it happens all over again and we have not learned a lesson to go ahead with these things more carefully so that the majority doesn’t suffer as much?

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#129

Post by coef2 »

dwa3592 wrote: post #64

People have been made to believe by very influential people (dario, sam, elon etc) that AI will replace them. As a result people are getting angry. Who did not see this coming? Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? There is nothing sexy about it. There is nothing cool about it either. Imagine a taxi driver facing his family knowing he…

Ironically, developers may turn out to be easier to replace than taxi drivers. We've seen technological progress replaced workers or made certain roles obsolete, and this may become another example. I hope governments and public institutions take a more active role in supporting people going through the transition.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#130

Post by beej71 »

HEmanZ wrote: post #78
baron816 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just how productivity works. If people spend less time building a unit of output, then you have more output. People aren’t going to stop wanting stuff. Right now, the world can’t come close to making all the stuff people want. As long as there’s a desire for further consumption, there will be work for people to do.

I don’t think the claim is that people will be less productive, the world will be far more productive. The claim is that the value of most human labor will be at or near enough to 0 compared to deploying capital (robots, ai) to product the same goods. So humanity becomes owners living ludicrously well on highly productive capital and everyone else getting whatever “humanitarian” portion is assigned to them. And no wa…

Yes. To sledgehammer it home, it's not desire for things that makes consumption happen. You need money. And if bots are doing the work, where's the money coming from?

The argument implies that there's some kind of balance point in there. But I'll bet it's not one where the general populace is living remotely well.

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