Mechanical Turk workers are using AI to automate being human

Who? Be specific. This displacement is happening rapidly, it should be easy to point out.

> The trucking industry is dumping tons of $$$ into automated AI trucking. Tech companies are experimenting with drone delivery instead of hiring drivers. Rideshares experimenting with self-driving taxis. The list goes on.

How many truck drivers have been laid off from this technology which hasn't been deployed widely / left the experimentation phase?

> she uses ChatGPT to generate marketing copy instead of hiring content writers.

So far the only real competition you've mentioned. And yeah, language models are good at writing low value language. I have yet to hear about mass unemployment of content writers however. These are people who will upskill/shift into other marketing roles easily.

> Someone else I know uses AI to SEOize very technical text to something search engines like at like 10x the rate he used to do by hand.

And this is a bad thing?

> As a solo and formerly senior SWE, ChatGPT is like having a junior developer on call to do my research and get me preliminary results.

You say this as if companies will stop hiring juniors. They won't. The world will simply write more code with more productive people.

> You're sticking your head in your sand if you think it isn't coming.

The same has been said during every technological shift. Mechanization will result in mass unemployment of laborers. Email will result in mass unemployment of mail carriers. Through many cycles of technology, the human race has never allowed slack in the workforce to go unused for very long. We could have stopped at the steam engine and accepted the quality of life we had, instead of repurposing displaced workers and marching forward. This won't change until we have true AGI which we are nowhere near.

The standard "how come patrons at a bar pay $10 for a drink but I only make $15 / hour when I serve twenty drinks an hour" argument.

The answer of course is because you didn't create the bar, you didn't secure all the necessary supplies and amenities to run it and ultimately you're not liable for what happens to it. In essence if the bar loses money each month you're still owed a paycheck.

And ultimately that's why raw materials and content DON'T have inherent value (e.g. dug up gold sitting in a mine shaft, the best song ever buried in your notebook).

What they have is POTENTIAL value if the infrastructure exists to get them processed and to the locations where people want them and if people are willing to put skin in the game to bet it will pay off.

And that need for infrastructure is the reason that argument always falls apart.

Co-opts are about the best feasible answer we have now, but it always seems to be the case that suddenly people have far more capitalistic notions about running a business when THEY become the majority risk holder for a new venture.

Per a comment above, that for a long time now they've been sharing scripts to get the same answer so they can get paid, this indicates cheating.