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AI and the Automation of Work

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Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#111

Post by dontupvoteme »

dsign wrote: post #105
danmaz74 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A security guard at an airport can be a a machine gun on wheels" - are you serious? That is a job which is 99.99% about understanding human intentions in confusing and ambiguous situations, and where making a mistake will literally kill people. It's the last job you want to automate with "AI".

>> It's the last job you want to automate with "AI". Have you been at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in France? The security people there look like paratroopers[^1]. It's terrifying, and it's a reason I avoid that particular airport every time I fly. It sends the message "Paris is an unsafe place to be, we are very paranoid, blame the others, don't come here." The machine guns have no business among civilians, being w…

>Have you been at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in France? The security people there look like paratroopers[^1]. It's terrifying, and it's a reason I avoid that particular airport every time I fly. It sends the message "Paris is an unsafe place to be, we are very paranoid, blame the others, don't come here." The machine guns have no business among civilians, being with robots or people, period.

In europe there's 1-2 orders of less police brutality and issues overall, but the tradeoff is you randomly have military police walking around with rifles.

They're quite friendly actually, I've ended up getting directions from them once or twice when trying to catch a connection.

Also the FAMAS is a beautiful piece of French Engineering

What does suck about CDG is how horrifically unorganized they are. Like "print your boarding pass, but the printer was out of ink, so the barcode didn't generate, and they just *wave you through* the check with an invalid boarding pass because it happens all the time

that is what scares me, not European cops with guns

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#112

Post by dontupvoteme »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #107
dsign wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It's the last job you want to automate with "AI". Have you been at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in France? The security people there look like paratroopers[^1]. It's terrifying, and it's a reason I avoid that particular airport every time I fly. It sends the message "Paris is an unsafe place to be, we are very paranoid, blame the others, don't come here." The machine guns have no business among civilians, being w…

The police look like that in Paris’s suburbs as well, for I guess obvious reasons.

I'm an order of magnitude more afraid of a regular cop back in America than any police in Europe.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#113

Post by digitalengineer »

raincole wrote: post #84
danmaz74 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A security guard at an airport can be a a machine gun on wheels" - are you serious? That is a job which is 99.99% about understanding human intentions in confusing and ambiguous situations, and where making a mistake will literally kill people. It's the last job you want to automate with "AI".

It's a very good example to understand how "AI evangelists" think. Anyone with even slightest common senes would immediately understands why it's a bad idea, but AI evangelists just can't.

It's also very... American to not think mention the absurdity of machine guns at airports, even in the hands of humans. Even if lethal force is required, would you want a security person (not a trained policeman) to "start blasting" and spraying bullets with a machine-gun?

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#114

Post by kranke155 »

As any now typical text of this nature, it cites very little real data.

Here is an article on how recent historians believe that English male height during the Industrial Revolution went down due to malnutrition:

https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/09/13/did-livin...

Historians now think the Industrial Revolution was a giant economic boom where the majority of individuals actually became poorer.

Here is an Indiana University paper, consistent with the findings of others, that automation did reduce manufacturing jobs

> The basic takeaway from the Ball State work is that both forces—offshoring and automation—are in play in the massive occupational realignment due to hit the U.S. economy, but automation is dominant (Wells, 2017). This assessment, that automation is the greater threat, is consistent with their earlier work placing the loss of manufacturing employment on increases in productivity

https://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/ibr/2018/fall/article2.html

This was all around the Trump years when the media and academia were happy to say “China didn’t do it”. Even the NYtimes said it at the time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs...

Yes we can find jobs for people if we keep trying. But the jobs that we find in a post-scarcity services society are often precarious and meaningless - and people know it. Agriculture and manufacturing, which are the two job categories that really matter, do lose jobs to automation because we are squeezing them for profits all the time through all available methods.

To say that everything will be hunky dory with AI is just the same as saying the steam engine won’t take your job. That was BS in the 1800s and it’s BS now. And yes people did lose their way of life and they did become poorer, as demonstrated by the current studies on the matter.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#115

Post by worrycue »

dsign wrote: post #50

It's not ChatGPT what we should be putting in our forecasts, but its successors. And, from what I have been reading, our AI folk are coming with better performers all the time by chaining multiple neural networks, "making modular brains", so to speak. Any argument that starts by saying "ChatGPT is very bad at X, humans will always do X," is flawed IMO. So I think that any job that can be done by a non-human is up for…

> But assume that there are jobs "high in the ladder," for amazing engineers and creatives super-charged with AI powers.

IMHO such jobs won’t exist. Once AI have reach AGI level there is nothing that a human can do that the AI can’t. Might as well just add more AI.

Frankly, what scares me is everyone rushing to advance AI but no one seem to be putting any effort into figuring out what to do about society once humans can no longer trade labor for money.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#116

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

"We don’t have AGI, and without that, we have only another wave of automation, and we don’t seem to have any a priori reason why this must be more or less painful than all the others."

We don't need AGI to eliminate 200+ million jobs. The output of a network driving a car can be literally two signed floating points, left-right/accelerate-brake; in hindsight we will understand there is little intelligence in going from A to B without crashing, a bee does it, in 3D even. To eliminate 1+ billion jobs you take the driving network and give it hands: flipping burgers, feeding a CNC machine, handling packages, all these jobs will be gone forever, as they should.

The only question is what will politicians do when their solutions so far have been to raise the retirement age.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#117

Post by chwa982 »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #64
abhaynayar wrote: post #55

I had bought into the GPT-4 hype. I used GPT-4 on ChatGPT Plus for two months, but then I unsubscribed because I wasn't using it as much as I thought I would. It's certainly a very interesting technology. But in it's current form, I just don't see it replacing most jobs. Will it replace jobs if we scale further? I don't know, but my intuition says no. I feel that we will need some other major breakthroughs in AI to g…

The combination of ChatGPT and Phind helped me, a noob with 8 months of coding knowledge, build an app with real paying users and revenue. I would have never accomplished this on my own, and now I have a working prototype to find co-founders and possible investors.

[dead]

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#118

Post by raxxorraxor »

digitalengineer wrote: post #113
raincole wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very good example to understand how "AI evangelists" think. Anyone with even slightest common senes would immediately understands why it's a bad idea, but AI evangelists just can't.

It's also very... American to not think mention the absurdity of machine guns at airports, even in the hands of humans. Even if lethal force is required, would you want a security person (not a trained policeman) to "start blasting" and spraying bullets with a machine-gun?

I first thought so as well but have now been desensitized by machine guns at school.

The war on terror really drove people crazy...

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#119

Post by ben_w »

digitalengineer wrote: post #113
raincole wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very good example to understand how "AI evangelists" think. Anyone with even slightest common senes would immediately understands why it's a bad idea, but AI evangelists just can't.

It's also very... American to not think mention the absurdity of machine guns at airports, even in the hands of humans. Even if lethal force is required, would you want a security person (not a trained policeman) to "start blasting" and spraying bullets with a machine-gun?

> It's also very... American to not think mention the absurdity of machine guns at airports

Now you mention it, despite the two respective national stereotypes, the only airports where I can remember seeing machine guns on the security team were one of the London airports.

If I saw machine guns in SFO or JFK, I was too tired from the flight to remember.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#120

Post by gpderetta »

amoss wrote: post #100
raincole wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very good example to understand how "AI evangelists" think. Anyone with even slightest common senes would immediately understands why it's a bad idea, but AI evangelists just can't.

So AI evangelism is a role that is ripe for disruption by ChatGPT.

What if it already was and AIs are evangelizing for themselves?
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