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Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

theguardian.com

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Re: Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

#21

Post by mistrial9 »

bdcravens wrote: post #15
gentleman11 wrote: post #10

A lot of dismissive comments in here already by people who aren’t trying to make a living doing writing, art, or voiceover. It will be music soon too. Tutoring is probably heavily affected already too “But those weren’t real jobs,” some might say. So it doesn’t count until it replaces programmer jobs? Because that’s coming soon too. Would you really encourage your kids to go into this field, expecting them to still h…

We also used to have a middle class consisting of horseshoers, elevator operators, and gas station attendants. Many programmers do little more than glue together framework code, and make an excellent living doing it. Little sets them apart other than how fast they jump to the framework of the week. There's not a lot of separation from rent-seeking. What would you do to change the direction of things? Make AI illegal,…

yeah except serious people in governance and AI science are raising alarm bells.. so "what about the horse carriage drivers" gets pretty thin, like instantly..

Re: Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

#22

Post by randysalami »

bdcravens wrote: post #15
gentleman11 wrote: post #10

A lot of dismissive comments in here already by people who aren’t trying to make a living doing writing, art, or voiceover. It will be music soon too. Tutoring is probably heavily affected already too “But those weren’t real jobs,” some might say. So it doesn’t count until it replaces programmer jobs? Because that’s coming soon too. Would you really encourage your kids to go into this field, expecting them to still h…

We also used to have a middle class consisting of horseshoers, elevator operators, and gas station attendants. Many programmers do little more than glue together framework code, and make an excellent living doing it. Little sets them apart other than how fast they jump to the framework of the week. There's not a lot of separation from rent-seeking. What would you do to change the direction of things? Make AI illegal,…

And being able to interface with computers. It’s crazy how many people are unable to use a computer efficiently. Don’t take that skill for granted.

Re: Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

#23

Post by paxys »

cute_boi wrote: post #20
paxys wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “But those weren’t real jobs,” some might say. No one is saying that. What people are saying is that technology has routinely made certain jobs irrelevant since the beginning of human civilization, and no one can do anything about it other than accept it and move on. Soon enough new ones will spring up to take their place. Sharing and commenting on variations of the same article every single day is certainly not he…

> Soon enough new ones will spring up to take their place 10 new jobs cannot be sufficient to replace 100 replaced jobs. What are other 90 going to do?

Who says it will be 10 new jobs? Why not a thousand? Or a million?

Did the world end when weavers lost their jobs because of automated looms or elevator operators lost their job because of buttons? Just like all the times before, we will figure it out. The only thing that will make the outcome worse is forced government action based on a few loud voices and populist demands.

Re: Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

#24

Post by artninja1988 »

paxys wrote: post #14
constantcrying wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voice acting as a profession will not exist in a couple of years.

Remember how a decade and a half ago everyone was convinced that taxi drivers and truck drivers would be replaced by AI in the coming years? There were even mass protests over it, and governments started to make contingency plans and enact legislation. The topic was discussed to death non-stop all over the internet and news media, just like AI is right now. Meanwhile today not a single driver has lost their job, and…

Also remember when Geoffrey Hinton famously predicted all radiologists would be out of a job by now in 2016? That also didn't happen. So yeah, I would take these predictions with a massive grain of salt. So far the employment numbers in the US are looking extremely good.

Re: Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

#25

Post by TFYS »

paxys wrote: post #23
cute_boi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Soon enough new ones will spring up to take their place 10 new jobs cannot be sufficient to replace 100 replaced jobs. What are other 90 going to do?

Who says it will be 10 new jobs? Why not a thousand? Or a million? Did the world end when weavers lost their jobs because of automated looms or elevator operators lost their job because of buttons? Just like all the times before, we will figure it out. The only thing that will make the outcome worse is forced government action based on a few loud voices and populist demands.

The closer to human abilities AI gets, the less space there will be for new jobs to appear. Just because new jobs appeared before doesn't mean they always will. It does make sense to slow down this progress if we don't have answers to what happens if jobs start disappearing faster than we can replace them.

Re: Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

#26

Post by randysalami »

swid wrote: post #4
nabla9 wrote: post #2

My sincere hope is that that would happen. Especially in medium and high income jobs in mass scale. Working for living is a problem to be solved. The purpose of technology is to automate things, increase free time. The purpose of politics is to distribute gains justly, whatever that is.

Good luck distributing gains justly when the masses have nothing of value to bargain with. Politics will likely continue to be co-opted by people who can pay; either directly or through other means of coercion. There used to be a lot more horses… I’m finding 25 million in the US in 1920 compared with 3.8 million today. Of course, they can no longer occupy the niche in society they used to, and so like in nature; when…

Yes, if some kings didn’t need the labor of their serfs, they would be gone in an instant. Middle class workers only have it so good now because the ruling class is strictly dependent on them for their empires. Once that goes out the window, we won’t be kept around in our positions of privilege since our labor has no value.

I imagine it looks like a transition of the middle class to the lower class (with some going to a higher class with specialized technology roles as class traitors), and then the lower class, having had their labor invalidated, being put on UBI and being sucked like cattle by corporations, eroding their rights and sovereignty. With social media addiction, rampant disinformation, newer generations won’t even have the faculties to conceptualize their fate and resist. I also don’t think unrest could ever reach a boiling point in the US with how addicted, misinformed, and manipulated most of the population is.

Eventually, we see a complete unification of the wealthy with the state and we transition back into serfdom. People trapped in debt, dependent on the state for sustenance, except this time the state has no dependence on their labor. What happens next is your choice of dystopian horror fiction.

Re: Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

#27

Post by constantcrying »

artninja1988 wrote: post #24
paxys wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember how a decade and a half ago everyone was convinced that taxi drivers and truck drivers would be replaced by AI in the coming years? There were even mass protests over it, and governments started to make contingency plans and enact legislation. The topic was discussed to death non-stop all over the internet and news media, just like AI is right now. Meanwhile today not a single driver has lost their job, and…

Also remember when Geoffrey Hinton famously predicted all radiologists would be out of a job by now in 2016? That also didn't happen. So yeah, I would take these predictions with a massive grain of salt. So far the employment numbers in the US are looking extremely good.

Many, many predictions about job losses came true. Jobs stop existing if they can be performed automated to a large extent, this has come true for many, many jobs over time. There is a great German video series about elderly people (in their 80s or even 90s) showing the trades they learned when they were young. They were doing stuff like carving troughs out of trees, making wooden wheels, operating water powered saws and similar stuffs. None of these jobs exist anymore.

In fact it is completely natural and healthy that there is a transformation in the job market, although it can easily be a tragedy for the individual.

>So far the employment numbers in the US are looking extremely good.

Voice actors are a tiny group. They don't really factor into nation wide statistics.

Re: Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

#28

Post by mechagodzilla »

cute_boi wrote: post #20
paxys wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “But those weren’t real jobs,” some might say. No one is saying that. What people are saying is that technology has routinely made certain jobs irrelevant since the beginning of human civilization, and no one can do anything about it other than accept it and move on. Soon enough new ones will spring up to take their place. Sharing and commenting on variations of the same article every single day is certainly not he…

> Soon enough new ones will spring up to take their place 10 new jobs cannot be sufficient to replace 100 replaced jobs. What are other 90 going to do?

We find ourselves, in 2024, with unemployment levels (at least in the US) at near all-time lows. This is after centuries of mechanization and automation, decades of the computer and internet revolutions (which have barely any steam left, compared to the previuous ~70 years of rapid improvement), and with a global demographic shift that will actually require significant productivity improvements (as in "more output per worker") just to maintain existing quality of life with an increasingly aged population. China is probably losing 1M+ workers a year for the foreseeable future (their workforce actually peaked in 2015!). LLM-style AI is going to cause such a tidal wave of garbage that it's not even obvious to me that it will be a net increase to productivity at all, let alone make us all so productive that there will be a massive unemployment crisis. It's definitely going to affect some specific jobs, just the way other jobs have come and gone for centuries now, but I'm not convinced it will improve productivity as much as we actually need it to.

Re: Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

#29

Post by paxys »

TFYS wrote: post #25
paxys wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who says it will be 10 new jobs? Why not a thousand? Or a million? Did the world end when weavers lost their jobs because of automated looms or elevator operators lost their job because of buttons? Just like all the times before, we will figure it out. The only thing that will make the outcome worse is forced government action based on a few loud voices and populist demands.

The closer to human abilities AI gets, the less space there will be for new jobs to appear. Just because new jobs appeared before doesn't mean they always will. It does make sense to slow down this progress if we don't have answers to what happens if jobs start disappearing faster than we can replace them.

Who is going to "slow down this progress"? Some mythical world government? The Illuminati? You can't legislate human thought and human ingenuity. Progress is happening, whether you like it or not. You either embrace it or get left behind.

Re: Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

#30

Post by Dwedit »

constantcrying wrote: post #8
paxys wrote: post #6

I have yet to see a single example of AI replacing someone and doing their job. The vast majority of these cases are simply companies doing layoffs and blaming it on "AI" to deflect the bad press (and of course the media is eating it up). Meanwhile everyone remaining has 2x the work load and a useless $10/mo ChatGPT subscription spitting out garbage.

Voice acting as a profession will not exist in a couple of years.

Still need voice directing, and the voice director will have to act out the inflections, line delivery, etc before the voice gets switched out for another one.

Can't go from text to the desired inflection yet.

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