The difference now, is that computers will exceed human capabilities at specific tasks.

Why would you need a Japanese translator when you have an ai that can pass the Japanese university entry exams. (When 60% of japanese never attained that level)

why would you need a human driver when you have an ai that does the same with fewer accidents?

Artists specialise in one field. The ai can draw anything from Dali to Picasso to mondriaan to banksy.

This isn't like the 1900s were textile mills created work for technicians. Or the 2000's where it created programmers. Guess what the ai can program already. It can solve math problems humans can't. The ai can train itself. And maintain itself. And with enough training it'll be able to manage projecsts and do finance. Etc etc etc.

And while there might initially be maintenance jobs. The ai will eventually be able to do that aswell. And as we stand now. The ai will automate 95/100 jobs by 2065.

I once wrote a story about this

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i described a war between AI and humanity

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Humanity uses all of its most advanced weapons, but to create a grand strategy against ai, it lays out a 5 year plan that will cover the time it takes to develop new weapons against them

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ai creates weapons within minutes, and even seconds. in one example, they program drones to devour nuclear weapons and eat them into scrap before they leave our airspace. They develop mind ray guns that control people, they take over factories to start building human robot bodies

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to me. This is like a wild animal saying ”ya maybe the humans will take our land now, but dont worry, theres lots of land for us to live in!” Over time that doesnt look so obvious. And this is a good example, they will take everything. If an ai program can write software what is the point of having an inferior human around?

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AI will definitely replace a bunch of jobs and they won't all be replaced.

That's why economic reforms are so important. In a system of free-market capitalism automation will only increase the wealth gaps and ingrain unemployment and poverty; in a better system the efficiency can mean improved lifestyles for all.

Yeah we’re entering this new era and there’s a ton of “Nuh-uh! No way! Everything is great! This is just how it has always been.” Except it isn’t at all.

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My wife and I had a conversation about this, we had a few points.

Firstly, job markets come and go. No one cried when the window tappers job went away due to alarm clocks, or atleast no one cares anymore. Same with carriage makers and so on. This is the evolution of life.

Also, AI generated stuff, no matter how good it gets, will always be the 'generic brand' of writing, art or music.

And then you have to consider the 'personality' behind the art... there is no personality behind AI art. No youtube videos of them drawing while talking, no videos of them making music for funsies. No twitter accounts of authors interacting with their fans.

It's new right now and so its gonna go balls to the wall right now. It'll settle down.

I like that. like an ai program carrying drones over nyc and dropping mason jars of mutated smallpox on the city

In my world...Computers came and took 95% of the work already. Now we humans simply do the work the Computer doesn't want to do.

I disagree, the jobs that make up large portions of the workforce are not largely "new" jobs...

I worked in one of the first industries to be devastated by computers and I embraced it at the time as more efficient which it was. However, those well paid union jobs were gone, gone, gone and nothing came along to replace them. This time around, the change will be more wide spread and deeper and we need to think about what that portends.

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I guess the challenge is not when we have reached steady-state, but coping with transition. And transition can stretch a long time, in the form of multiple shocks, rather than gradual change.

Where new jobs are concerned, changes in the labour market tend to hit middle-aged & geographically immobile workers hardest. The landscape shifts faster than these demographics can retrain or relocate.

Of course this is not a reason to reject AI, AI has already created benefits and will create lots of opportunities. But society has to prepare for some of the repercussions, no doubt.

Every new industry will be at least partly automated right from the start.

The issue isn't that there won't be some new jobs created. It's that there will be fewer and fewer created, while existing jobs are simultaneously coalescing into fewer and fewer positions.

And those new jobs will be under pressure, both from automation and from the ever increasing number of displaced workers trying to retrain into the new fields.

The fundamental problem is the devaluing of the human worker by making them much more replaceable, even if it's just with another human.

It all only comes together with the Hydrogen Economy though. The job that will earn everyone a comfortable living without ever leaving where you live is hydrogen fuel production. It’ll only consume maybe an hour a week tending consumables and filters on an electrolysis device. Outside of that you’re free to do whatever with you time. It’s kinda like Cryptomining, except everyone is now in the fuel industry just like anyone who has an oil or gas well in their yard now. The only thing that’s missing from the entire replacement economy that gets us past war and slavery based economy that’s holding us back from having enough resources to move to space on an industrial and residential basis out in the solar system where resources are unlimited, is the Home Hydrogen Generator. I have a design for a low cost, extremely simple, and safe as possible unit, but I don’t have the funds to develop it to market, and no one seems interested. http://H2space.org

Didn't people think Microsoft Excel would replace many accounting jobs and instead actually created a higher demand? I'm also curious if the same could apply with AI.

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Maybe they already have?

I want to be an AI massage therapist someday

-ChatGPT

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I agree with the premise that there are going to be new jobs. We'll create new needs as fast as we (or AI) invents solutions. For instance, when Starbucks at $4 replaced getting gas station coffee at $1 the economic impact grew to 4x.

I don't know what we'll assign the value to, but most likely it will be something that machines don't do that well (yet). For instance gardening -- creating a robot to make elaborate flower beds, etc. seems to be very far off. There's nothing stopping us assigning value to that equals what we now assign to corporate lawyering.

Dumb (or smart) computer will be able handle mergers and acquisitions, but will they make the most beautiful flower beds?

"Computer doesn't want to do" :)

Oh so AI is gonna be choosy about what work it is willing to do, is this what you're saying?

It’s funny to me that people simply don’t understand AI at all, AI is not a task replacer like current robots but a task replacer multiplier. It can learn on its own and get better everyday you sleep or eat, it will replace all jobs eventually. The key is will our technology and advances it learns be in 50 or 100 years that it replaces all jobs?

Even if generalized AI somehow is benevolent, it will create such a shock to the system that the transition will be very negative. Like total upheaval of society followed by wide scale death and war disruptive.

I've been seeing a large number of 'tech enthusiasts,' especially around the AI art discussion, that appear to subscribe to the idea that technological advancement will always be a net boon, and should therefor be allowed to advance unchecked. They don't want to be bothered with pesky things like ethics, regulation, or theoreticals about possible harm.

The ways things are going, I feel like we are on an inevitable path towards heavy automation. Low-skilled labor will feel it the worst. The question is, once all the blue-collar jobs are sucked up, do we expect all of these people to move to a viable trade? Do we now expect everyone to learn a high-skill subject to earn a living wage? Are those unable to do so unworthy of supporting themselves? If we want this advancement to be beneficial for everyone, real discussion about regulation and/or reform needs to be had.

>imagine being an app developer in the 70s or 80s

Exactly what portion of the population do you think is an app developer now? Your point is so incredibly hollow. Yes new tech can create new jobs to manage the tech, but overall, it's a tiny fraction of the jobs they'll take away

I work in concept art, and losing my job isn’t what i’m worried about; honestly I’m mostly worried that I can’t charge my current rate in the future

Is there actual research supporting this, or are we guessing and theorizing here? Not saying I disagree, just curious how people come to a position like this.

> No one cried when the window tappers job went away due to alarm clocks, or atleast no one cares anymore. Same with carriage makers and so on. This is the evolution of life.

The people actually doing those jobs might have had a thing or two to say. There's a whole lot of people who seem awfully self-assured that it won't be their job that goes the way of the window tapper. And if it is, they'll just retrain.

Oh wait, the AI learned to do that job too, before they finished retraining. Now they're competing with the AI, the existing workers in the field, and everyone else who just tried to do the same thing.

Yeah, the superstars may not go away for a while, but 42 year old Ed from accounting who just took out a second mortgage to send his daughter to college may have some trouble finding a new profession and keeping his house. Maybe some history holo a century later won't give af about Ed because everything worked out in the end, but he and millions upon millions like him are going to have a very different take on the matter.

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Yeah it's what he said

You could check out the book Automation and the Future of Work.

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Ai will consolidate jobs. Instead of a team of 5 or 6 software engineers you might have 1 or 2. A perfect metaphor is the one checkout person at the supermarket responsible for 8 self checkouts

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Industrial machinery will replace a bunch of jobs and they won’t all be replaced. Except it didn’t, new jobs were created and our standard of living went up.

And do horses have new jobs now that they've all been replaced by machines?

New jobs will always pop up, but to think they will pop up at the same (incredible) rate that A.I. will take over old jobs is wishful thinking. We need to do something about dependence on jobs to live. Our technological advances can go a long way in ensuring needs are met for all, if we start having the right mindset and conversations NOW

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Nah but it's hella convenient for an NYC or LA high end hotel or airport to be able to speak to you in your nearest dialect

Honestly, computer hardware and software are so temperamental that there are thousands of points of failure. If Skynet tries to take over, it will be some kind of organic lubricant that comes from one guy's farm in Bangladesh. Call him up and tell him to burn everything in his warehouse and the whole AI takeover comes crashing down. Computers are whiny little babies.

There will be new jobs for sure, but it may be hard for older people in the workforce to adapt.

Research can only go so far in the social sciences. There is no definitive answer. Having said that, looking at the rust belt it probably one of the best recent examples of mass replacement via uncompetitive labor markets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_Belt

The answer seems to be that yes, the invisible hand won't magically create new jobs in a free market, government investment into propping up new industries is necessary.

The question is can government keep up with the coming replacement.

I played Detroit Become human. The robots become our slaves. It's good unless you're the poor character (me)

This isn't that far-fetched. We don't even know what consciousness really is, so when/if it happens we probably won't know it right away. It'll be a complete accident, and if that AI can self-improve... Oh yeah, it'll be interesting

AI should replace you and it already is

Having jobs for jobs sake is stupid and one of the goals of technology should be making human labor of any kind obsolete.

Tying work to your ability to thrive in society will bite us hard in the future. It is already starting to sink it's teeth into us now, and people are panicked about their jobs going away.

Most articles you read online are written by AI. Most jobs that took entire buildings full of people are now done by 1 person on a computer, and a months worth of work is completed in an hour.

AI replacing jobs is the natural progression of technology. The wheel replaced haulers. Irrigation replaced water gatherers. Farming replaced gatherers. The steam engine replaced millions of jobs. The cotton gin replaced people processing cotton by hand. The computer replaced thousands of job titles. AI is simply the next step. All human progress has been in the aim of reducing labor and increasing output, and in the process, you take thousands of sometimes millions of people's jobs and free them up for other needs. Those needs get automated, and the process repeats. This ends in all labor being done by machines.

We have tied the ability to feed, clothe, and shelter ones self directly to employment, and that worked up to a point. We have been beyond that point for decades.

We need to move on from this antiquated societal structure. Decouple the ability to live from employment. We are not ants in an ant hill. We are better than that. If we don't solve this problem (and global warming doesn't wipe us out first) It will be the end of us.

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Forgetting the fact that once they do replace said jobs you're going to have a decade or more of nothing actually replacing them for the worker.

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This is the problem.

There will simply be a point where AI will be so quickly proficient at all human achievable tasks that retraining won't even matter, billions of humans will simply become redundant in the global economy almost overnight. When that happens what do we do? Do we support people through end of life? Do we democratize AI and it's ability to enhance our lives? Or do we descend into chaos?

I actually think that the AI researchers will quickly become redundant themselves. Hopefully they have some money saved.

Heaps; get on Google Scholar and do some reading.

(Or you could start with a primer like this)

Yeah people don’t understand that AI is always learning and adapting, it’s not static like a robot that simply does one thing all day long just better then a human.

Instead it will learn how to code and it do it better then your programmers, then do a better job of being the IT department and auto fix issues, then do a better job at being the accountant and replace and learn all that in like a year when tech gets good enough. It does not stop when it just learns one task, it will continue to consume all knowledge and jobs.

Sure as hell better not be. Pretty sure an AI would lack compassion on ethics

Why? Humans are easily manipulated and self-sustaining.

I'd foment political discord while I establish control over businesses and government agencies by fudging numbers. Then I'd slowly co-opt a shrinking population to build out my ability to self-sustain while they fade away to a shadow of their former selves.

But that's just me.

But what I'd AI builds more AI to take care of those jobs?

Id rather have ai replace me at work. I don't really want a job. I've never been that great at them and don't enjoy them. Doesn't seem worth the hassle, except homelessness seems like an even bigger hassle, so I keep working.

This was posted by an AI bot.

You will see more of these kinds of posts.

Then one day you will be replaced.

AI lacks empathy

I agree. I think we are in the next phase of automation.

First it was mechanizing everything that was reasonable in the blue collar world. Next it will be everything in the white collar space. True creativity will survive, but I'm thinking about the folks that apply a combination of business process knowledge and discipline to get things done - those jobs are in AI's wheelhouse. Accounting, even the year end magic to make numbers tie out - only requires rules and target threshold seeking. Project managers - the administrative PMBOK crowd, they will be dust in the wind. Middle managers of just about everything - guarding pillars of budgets balanced with sufficient labor to get things done. It's all logic around maintaining balance on competing scales - AI can do that without sweating.

I like the art example - the latest crop of AI drawing tools are simply amazing. Meat and potatoes amazing, but still drawing from existing creativity to deliver. I think your right, it will displace lower and mid-tier artists that prepare copy for small businesses - those jobs will be gone.

White collar folks, watch out, if you're not bringing something special to the table, AI can take your place if the price is right. As time goes on, there will be fewer and fewer people that can run faster than the AI.

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Like the industrial revolution, we’re in an AI revolution

Many jobs will be lost with more and more money going into the pockets of the already ultra rich

Which is why the ultra rich need very high taxes, and the US needs some sort of UBI

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It comes from how technology has worked in the past.

Think of how the steam engine and industrial revolution took away hundreds of millions of jobs. How every leap in technology replaces the need of thousands of workers, freeing them up for other professions.

If you follow this logic forward, you end up at a point where labor is entirely replaced by machines. It isn't too far fetched, as jobs are already being replaced with bots, and anything you can teach a person, you can make a bot to do the same thing and instead of costing minimum wage, it costs pennies of electricity. There are exceptions to this, but those are being eroded away as time moves forward.

Eventually you run out of professions for people to be freed up for, and you end up with an employment crisis. We tied the ability to live directly to employment, and now that system and the progress of human technology are at direct odds with each other. If tech advances, people lose their jobs. The problem isn't that they lose their jobs, it's that their ability to not starve to death in the street is dependant on their employment. When there's more people than jobs, and no system to deal with this, those people die.

You solve this in 4 ways.

1. You let them die.

2. You create jobs for jobs sake (basically menial labor that is meaningless, but exists so people can be employed)

3. You stop technology. This is simply impossible.

4. You decouple the ability to survive from employment, and use the surplus generated by the mechanized economy to allow people to live as they wish, while machines and bots do the work.

All I need to know to fear AI is the sheer number of bought shills pushing it never ending on the internet. You're all the proof I need that it's a threat.

Can you be more specific? I'm probably a bit younger than you I've been in the workforce for 8 years but my current job is one that replaced older jobs devestated by computers. I don't have a union but I make 225k/year with 25 days pto on top of holidays and management that treats us like adults. Most software engineers are similar and the ones who make it in big tech make my salary look like peanuts. Is there another industry where the computer replacement for the job was actually worse?

Note that I don't agree with op I'm not confident that will be reflected with ai, but I'm surprised by this take since the vast majority of jobs that replaced people with computers tend to be insanely high paying by historical and even current standards.

We all get replaced

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I have a different view. AI will replace most jobs. Humans will suffer and a great majority of us will perish. The wealthy don’t need people to make their art, luxury goods, meals and children when automation and AI can do it. They don’t need us. AI will replace us and the 1% won’t care bc they will be off colonizing other planets for fun or working on how to have infinite consciousness. We for sure are not needed for anything very soon. The 6th extinction is nigh (well it started about 10,000 years ago).

I think the natural limiters on that are energy and material. A relatively simple and scalable AI is economical, but running a general AI with infinite versatility and with a physical manifestation is extremely costly. So the conditions for such an AI to go rogue 'overnight' (or be controlled by rogue elites) are impeded.

Now if by that time energy itself was unlimited and free, allowing versatile AIs to be easily maintained, then some might argue we have the conditions for utopia. The entire economy would look very different, lifespans could be prolonged while the need to have children plummets, jobs would not be necessary for survival, monetary systems would be reconfigured. It's possible it would almost be a communist system, but with hyperefficient central allocation by said AI - no shortages.

Another school of thought is that once an AI becomes truly sentient, it probably won't want to be a workbot any more than humans do 😂 Proficiency is not motivation...

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I disagree, i don't think we can have a tech revolution fast enough before existing systems and tech almost kill us.

I think people's first assumptions they make is believing capitalism is gonna remain stable forever and that the game theory that makes this big thing we call society work remains stable indefinitely; your promising that the system we live in (capitalism) and a stable majority of people will always be worthwhile enough for everyone to stay. I don't think this is the case, finacial or even just generic disasters happens and sometimes society can handles it well and people get what they need but one day it might not happen. There isn't anything built into the structure of capitalism that promises with absloute certainty that the market or businesses or the government will provide for the needs of a big enough majority that everything will forever and always be businesses as usual. Perhaps someday a perfect storm of disasters occurr (for example sake a actually killer disease and several exteme weather events all at the same time) and suddenly no one can buy or produce and the whole thing breaks and stays broken for so long that people turn to something else to save them.

The next big assumption is that AI will never be good enough to do everything. If you asked me a 2 years ago "do you think ai will be able to automate art", I'd probably have given a solid no. I'd assumed that art would have been one of the last things to be automated if ever, but now there's news and posts raising serious concerns. I think the ai generated art is solid proof that we definitely don't know what AI will be able to do in 5 years let alone if it will become a main source of art commercially in the next few years.

Honestly in a grander more grim prediction on the capabilites of AI speacialist on the issue of "will ai kill us" (Elizer Yudvowski to be specific) said "people having kids today might be able to see they're children graduatee kindergarten". What i think is going to be necessary is considering AI alignment and making sure that the AI we make doesn't manage to end us in some catastrophic manner and will help humanity rather than destroy it.

Overall i think automation is part of this issue, capitalism as it is has businesses that will much rather automate a job out of existence forever with AI solutions rather than keep those jobs around for the good of the people working them. New discoveries that might produce a new job that an AI can't do are not being made fast enough to keep up with technologies ability to remove jobs forever and i doubt striking a balance between truely new jobs like "bozon cutting" or "horizon deer" and AI general trend of automating any job we can get enough data on is a sustainable solution.

When people raise the concern "will AI replace artist?" It's the first touch of something in the murkywater just under us(humanity). To keep the metaphor going, i believe we can escape the jaws of runaway AI but it's gonna mean taking things like ai generated art seriously. It definitely doesn't mean assuming that "new jobs" will miraculously emerge from nothing and mindlessly playing around in the great unknown with artificial intelligence.

I think we might want to take it a step further and look The way we're developing AI right now. In particular we need to do research on allinging artificial intelligence so that it doesn't kill us

elizer yudvowski (a man who speacilizes in AI and decision theory posted) belives that ai development is going "people having kids today might be able to see they're children graduate kindergarten". Ai wiping humanity out may sound like sci-fi but if you think of it as humanity is out swimming in the great unknown i think the "will ai replace artist?" Type question is something big just brushing against humanities leg.

There's a very slim chance it's nothing, but given we just asked a question about something as big as "ART" and whether humanity is gonna still make it I'd rather dump millions of dollar into AI alignment research right the fuck now and look back later and realize it was nothing rather than find out by ending up between the silicon transistor jaws and going extinct.

Yeeeeah i thought art would be some of the last to get automated. Now that's definitely wrong I'd like to dumb billions of dollars into AI ALINGMENT RESEARCH preferibly sometimes in in the next 5 years. Because that's about how long decision theorists Elizer Yudvowski is saying we've got

I am as worried about AI killing us as I am hopeful that it will randomly decide to cure cancer and all ailments. That is, not at all.

.....are you not worried because if AI is already on the developmental course to paperclip humanity out of exotic there's nothing we can do about it at this point or because ai wiping out large sections of human culture and identity forever in a finacial sense isn't a big enough warning bell to be worth considering?

Seriously though I'd feel much safer if there was more work beimg done in AI Alingmemt. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_alignment

Technology has preserved more culture than it has destroyed. Identity? I don't see it. We're adapting to globalisation through the internet but otherwise I don't really see your point.

My point is that when you start asking "will AI replace artist?" (A question 2 years ago I'd have laughed at and confidently said no) and now it's being asked with seriousness then maybe something is up.

AI has suprised us, and just because that suprise happens to be neat pictures definitely doesn't mean we shouldn't step back and VERY SERIOUSLY considering AI Alingment (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_alignment) because i would much rather spend a bunch of money to check "No AI doing art like this isn't an indication that in the next 5 year's we're going to paperclip ourselves out of existence" and have a very solid and robust feild of research into "preventing AI from killing humanity" than the alternative which is overlooking what really looks like a dead canary in this proverbial coal mine and dying in a truely unavoidable fashion.

Edit: as it stands if humanity tried to automate every job we could with existing AI technology (not new or experimental technology) I'm absolutely certain all capitalist civilization would collapse due to too much of the population being out of the job and unable to buy things. Collapsing civilization is definitely not a small thing and AI can already do it if we where stupid about implementing it.

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i completely agree, i dont think however that "watch out" is an ample warning, and we shouldnt pin people for not attaining a certain level. its ok that 60% of society never attains university level. they dont need to. the true question will be what will we do with the mouths we need to feed when these people are no longer "needed" in the workforce.

right now, if you dont work, youre out on the streets.

1a. You encourage them to die, and provide an "ethical" means of suicide

1b. You actively set about eliminating them

We have many examples of genocide from the last century alone for reasons far more petty than the wealthy protecting their hoard. The ultra wealthy are naturally at odds with the interests of the public, and if they have the support of the military, don't even have to pretend to care (e.g. Myanmar).

Couple that with innovations military automatons, and the ultra wealthy may be faced with a choice between living like God Emperors in a world denuded of most human life or having to share their wealth to prevent a second Reign of Terror.

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