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Women 3x More Likely to Lose Job to AI Than Men, UN Study Finds

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Re: Women 3x More Likely to Lose Job to AI Than Men, UN Study Finds

#11

Post by reissbaker »

This "study" is almost a parody of itself. Their methodology was they got humans to rate about 1.6k tasks, and then asked GPT-4 to rate the other 30k tasks; essentially their entire dataset is AI-generated (and using a pretty dumb model). Then they dressed it up in very fancy infographics and got the UN to publish it.

Some pretty bad examples:

* Accountants supposedly have significant risk of being replaced by AI, whereas advertising and PR managers have minimal risk. In reality, advertising has already been impacted by generative AI, whereas attempting to replace accountants with GPT-4 would generate significant legal risk.

* "Travel guides" are listed as minimal risk despite being fairly easy to generate, with plenty of AI-generated travel slop already existing. Meanwhile, "hotel receptionists" are listed as having significant risk of being replaced — do the study authors think that ChatGPT going to man the front desk, hand out keycards, and check people's IDs — sooner than just generating text and images of travel?

I wouldn't pay much attention to this study, other than as an example of how to not do a study on AI risk.

Re: Women 3x More Likely to Lose Job to AI Than Men, UN Study Finds

#12

Post by zb3 »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #8
HideousKojima wrote: post #7

Seems like the obvious reason is because women are disproportionately more likely to take "email jobs" than jobs that require hard skills, and email jobs are easier to replace with AI (mostly because they aren't really providing much real value and probably could have been safely eliminated even without AI). You even see this trend in fields that are harder, with women who become doctors far more likely to become ped…

> or plumbing Or plumbing in general, like pipes and water, which AI (still?) cannot do.

This would certainly require something beyond just software, like AI-powered humanoid robots, and I don't even know what's the current progress on that.. are we closer to that on the software or the hardware side?

Re: Women 3x More Likely to Lose Job to AI Than Men, UN Study Finds

#13

Post by jonplackett »

retskrad wrote: post #9

Ask the average woman in the US, Europe and even Asia if they cared about any plight that men might go through, like losing their jobs in some fashion. Most would shrug and move on. Why are men expected to show so much empathy for women they don’t even personally know? These days, men and women compete for the same jobs, degrees, and apartments. So why should men keep putting women first?

So you are expecting anything that happens to women in general only to happen to women you don’t know?

Re: Women 3x More Likely to Lose Job to AI Than Men, UN Study Finds

#14

Post by cellis »

zb3 wrote: post #12
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or plumbing Or plumbing in general, like pipes and water, which AI (still?) cannot do.

This would certainly require something beyond just software, like AI-powered humanoid robots, and I don't even know what's the current progress on that.. are we closer to that on the software or the hardware side?

I recently worked with a friend on an electrical rewiring job. There’s no way robots as they’re currently being developed have anywhere near the dexterity and vision + motor skills required to do electrical work in an average home built for humans up until probably 2030…and I don’t think they ever will. I’m willing to make a long bet on that. What I would bet on is new structures being built that are “robot ready” and that more and more of the housing stock is built like that, but given the pace of coding ( building code updates ) I don’t see that happening for another 20 years.
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