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DeepMind Co-Founder: AI Is Fundamentally a "Labor Replacing Tool"

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Re: DeepMind Co-Founder: AI Is Fundamentally a "Labor Replacing Tool"

#21

Post by alexwhb »

givemeethekeys wrote: post #12
huitzitziltzin wrote: post #3

More than a year into ChatGPT and… unemployment is at historic lows. I don’t remotely see the present generation of LLMs as being “labor replacing tools.” I’m aware of empirical work which shows them to be useful complements to human judgment, not substitutes for the same. I’m also aware of one study showing (iirc) less work for illustrators on an online job board. That latter case is the only case im aware of where…

Here are a few jobs that I'm aware of, which are already well on their way out: - Language translators. - Video annotation, summary, transcription. - Voiceover artists. - Graphic designers. - Warehouse inventory work. - Personal tutors. - Junior software engineers. There will still be openings for these roles in the future, just as there are still openings for Personal Assistants (secretaries, which were once as abun…

So true. And when autonomous driving finally get to the safety levels where society accepts it… that will be a shocking number of jobs taken. Also Amazon is going to start selling their self checkout technology to stores… so most cashiers will definitely be out of work in the next decade if not sooner.

Re: DeepMind Co-Founder: AI Is Fundamentally a "Labor Replacing Tool"

#22

Post by true_religion »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #15
SilverBirch wrote: post #2

I really worry that we're discussing these topics like idiots. I totally understand why you would look at a peice of technology that can enable 1 worker to do the work of 5 and panic. But... we're not living in Dickensian Britain. We know what happens when technology enables massive productivity improvements and the answer isn't mass unemployment. We're not living in some dystopia where typewriters caused mass unempl…

We've gone from a single person being able to buy a house and feed a family, to two salaries in many cases not being sufficient in the past 50 years. While you're right that mass unemployment didn't happen, wage stagnation certainly did.

This seems like a very American perspective. So may I suggest that wage stagnation came from no longer having a underclass of women and people of color to be underpaid for their labor, and frozen out from the general market? Additionally, the US went from being one of the few industrial nations to not have bombed our factories and streets to having competition from other countries. Americas golden age is not really a time with conditions that are easy to replicate.

Re: DeepMind Co-Founder: AI Is Fundamentally a "Labor Replacing Tool"

#23

Post by logiduck »

givemeethekeys wrote: post #12
huitzitziltzin wrote: post #3

More than a year into ChatGPT and… unemployment is at historic lows. I don’t remotely see the present generation of LLMs as being “labor replacing tools.” I’m aware of empirical work which shows them to be useful complements to human judgment, not substitutes for the same. I’m also aware of one study showing (iirc) less work for illustrators on an online job board. That latter case is the only case im aware of where…

Here are a few jobs that I'm aware of, which are already well on their way out: - Language translators. - Video annotation, summary, transcription. - Voiceover artists. - Graphic designers. - Warehouse inventory work. - Personal tutors. - Junior software engineers. There will still be openings for these roles in the future, just as there are still openings for Personal Assistants (secretaries, which were once as abun…

It seems like personal tutors will actually be in higher demand if AI learning takes over. I mean kids have had an ever increasing array of ways to learn and supplement materials over the past 20-30 years and if anything education has been getting worse in recent years with many benchmarks for education reaching decades low levels.

Re: DeepMind Co-Founder: AI Is Fundamentally a "Labor Replacing Tool"

#24

Post by Barrin92 »

> The tech and media industries—which are uniquely exposed to the threat of AI-related job losses—saw huge layoffs last year, right as AI was “coming online.”

This is one of those cases where correlation isn't causation. The actually meaningful thing that came online were interests rates which people discovered can actually be above zero, and one thing that went offline was the pandemic.

AI as it currently exists is not a job replacing tool, it's a task automation tool and in that capacity no different from any other tool. And companies don't actually fire people when tasks get automated, they give the more productive employees more tasks so they can make the company more money.

Re: DeepMind Co-Founder: AI Is Fundamentally a "Labor Replacing Tool"

#25

Post by FirmwareBurner »

true_religion wrote: post #22
_Algernon_ wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've gone from a single person being able to buy a house and feed a family, to two salaries in many cases not being sufficient in the past 50 years. While you're right that mass unemployment didn't happen, wage stagnation certainly did.

This seems like a very American perspective. So may I suggest that wage stagnation came from no longer having a underclass of women and people of color to be underpaid for their labor, and frozen out from the general market? Additionally, the US went from being one of the few industrial nations to not have bombed our factories and streets to having competition from other countries. Americas golden age is not really a…

>So may I suggest that wage stagnation came from no longer having a underclass of women and people of color to be underpaid for their labor, and frozen out from the general market?

Wage stagnation is everywhere in the west, even more than in the US, and Europe didn't have an underclass of women and people of color 50 years ago in the prosperous times when a factory worker could buy an apartment and support a family, so let's not point the fingers there.

Wage stagnation exists because all the fruits of increased productivity gains in workers' labor from the last decades have been skimmed at the top instead of trickled down to the workers in the trenches.

Secondly, it exists because of the last 30+ years of corporate mergers and acquisitions have a concentrated a large piece of the pie of certain industries into the hands of only a few ultra-large players who get to dictate the global market in terms of wages and prices, due to the lack of competition, meaning workers have less bargaining power for wages and consumers less bargaining power for prices.

Thirdly, globalization and lifting of trade barriers, meant that those few ultra-large players left after mergers and acquisitions, could tap into places that offered the lowest wages, lowest taxes, and lowest regulations in terms of environment and labor, enjoying all those benefits simultaneously instead of having to compromise, meaning they could have their cake and eat it too, resulting in massive more profits for them and a global race to the bottom for most of those working for them.

>Americas golden age is not really a time with conditions that are easy to replicate.

America is still living a golden age, due to being the world reserve currency, dominating the finance sector, the software sector (the only one with major growth and the most profitable), being land, energy and resource abundant, having no enemies at its borders, having the worlds biggest and most power-projecting military, and its citizens enjoy one of the highest purchasing power in the world.

Is that not a golden age or what? Most countries would be happy to tick just one of those boxes, let alone all of them combined. I think some Americans often forget just how privileged they are compared to the vast majority of the world.

Re: DeepMind Co-Founder: AI Is Fundamentally a "Labor Replacing Tool"

#26

Post by xnx »

alexwhb wrote: post #20
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Logically, employment may increase while people's standard of living may get worde at the same time? Yes it can and yes it is. I'm also baffled by people keep pointing out low unemployment like it's the be all end all of all arguments for economic prosperity. Obviously sky high unemployment like in the great depression isn't great either but just because people are forced to accept any one of the abundant gig econom…

So true. And unemployment doesn’t take into account disenfranchised workers, which is significantly higher than it has been in recent history.

What's the measure of disenfranchised workers? I couldn't find any good source.

Re: DeepMind Co-Founder: AI Is Fundamentally a "Labor Replacing Tool"

#27

Post by elevatedastalt »

SilverBirch wrote: post #2

I really worry that we're discussing these topics like idiots. I totally understand why you would look at a peice of technology that can enable 1 worker to do the work of 5 and panic. But... we're not living in Dickensian Britain. We know what happens when technology enables massive productivity improvements and the answer isn't mass unemployment. We're not living in some dystopia where typewriters caused mass unempl…

When anecdotes disagree with data, double check the data.

Re: DeepMind Co-Founder: AI Is Fundamentally a "Labor Replacing Tool"

#28

Post by bradknowles »

alexwhb wrote: post #18
surfingdino wrote: post #9

I consulted for three different large organisations over the last 14 months. All of them chose to let their workforce know that the management are "looking into using AI". In all three cases one of the first questions during all-hands town halls was "are we getting replaced by AI?" People are freaking out and managers are loving it, because they have shifted people's attention from how little they are getting paid to…

I think in the short term that definitely makes sense, but long term… I think we’ll see more and more jobs be automated away. Look at what Amazon is doing with their new wheelhouse robots. In 2 to 5 years that’s going to become mainstream. Maybe sooner.

Wheelhouse robots? Could you be more specific?

Amazon has been using robots in their fulfillment centers for years now, and there are plenty of public videos out there on those processes. But I don't see how this would replace the use of humans in other critical aspects of fulfillment center operations.

Re: DeepMind Co-Founder: AI Is Fundamentally a "Labor Replacing Tool"

#29

Post by bradknowles »

givemeethekeys wrote: post #12
huitzitziltzin wrote: post #3

More than a year into ChatGPT and… unemployment is at historic lows. I don’t remotely see the present generation of LLMs as being “labor replacing tools.” I’m aware of empirical work which shows them to be useful complements to human judgment, not substitutes for the same. I’m also aware of one study showing (iirc) less work for illustrators on an online job board. That latter case is the only case im aware of where…

Here are a few jobs that I'm aware of, which are already well on their way out: - Language translators. - Video annotation, summary, transcription. - Voiceover artists. - Graphic designers. - Warehouse inventory work. - Personal tutors. - Junior software engineers. There will still be openings for these roles in the future, just as there are still openings for Personal Assistants (secretaries, which were once as abun…

For all of these jobs, AI systems may be able to solve the easy 80% of the lowest level tasks, they can't solve the hard 20%, and that's where humans will prevail. But AI plus humans will do even better.

I think what's going to happen is that AI will enable these kinds of jobs to be done much more often and in many more situations where they could not be feasibly be performed before, and the actual human job losses will be minimal in these areas.

At least for the near future, and it's hard to predict what may happen ten or twenty years from now.

Re: DeepMind Co-Founder: AI Is Fundamentally a "Labor Replacing Tool"

#30

Post by bradknowles »

alexwhb wrote: post #21
givemeethekeys wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are a few jobs that I'm aware of, which are already well on their way out: - Language translators. - Video annotation, summary, transcription. - Voiceover artists. - Graphic designers. - Warehouse inventory work. - Personal tutors. - Junior software engineers. There will still be openings for these roles in the future, just as there are still openings for Personal Assistants (secretaries, which were once as abun…

So true. And when autonomous driving finally get to the safety levels where society accepts it… that will be a shocking number of jobs taken. Also Amazon is going to start selling their self checkout technology to stores… so most cashiers will definitely be out of work in the next decade if not sooner.

What we know of the current Amazon technology is bad enough that Amazon keeps closing stores. It's just not profitable enough to keep them open.

Now, maybe what they're thinking is that these stores were just a training exercise and known to be unprofitable from Day One, and now those training exercises are over so they can start shutting them down. Dunno -- I have no inside information on this.

But I wouldn't be looking to Amazon to solve all these problems for all the retailers. At least, not until they can come out with better technology.

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