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Generative AI set to affect 300M jobs across major economies
- wslh 4y agoArchive: https://archive.is/SiJmV https://archive.is/SiJmV
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoThe ag tech industry affected 7Bn jobs. Not a lot of reason to fear the reaper.
- fabiospampinato 4y agoNot really like that, because never at any point 7B people on this rock were farmers.
- rizzom5000 4y agoI think you might say that the ag industry allowed 7B people to survive on this rock (along with the fossil fuel industry).
- crucialfelix 4y agoI think s/he is implying that we wouldn't have 7B people if it wasn't for Ag tech
- InCityDreams 4y ago's/he', often written 'they'.
- latency-guy2 4y agoOptionally, and completely up to the author.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ritzaco 4y agoI would like to see timeline predictions in articles like these. I agree completely that GPT can do 10-100% of most jobs I know about, but at the same time Python and UpWork have been around for a while too and I still know people who spend weeks manually reading through PDF files to extract the URLs, or copy-pasting the same line from hundreds of documents into a spreadsheet, etc. Sometimes people under-estimate how 'unagile' most business is. Are we talking months, years, or decades before we see this "new class of dispossessed white-collar workers, who risk suffering a similar fate to that of manufacturing workers in the 1980s."
- tonyaiken 4y agoIt’s much easier to learn prompt than Python
- ChatGTP 4y agoLet’s see about this :)
- ben_w 4y agoOn one hand: yes. On the other hand: in order to be able to use current LLMs effectively, you have to understand their output well enough to debug it, even if you are using the LLM to write the fix to its own bug. I’ve done something along the lines of “write me a python script which converts midi files into this JSON format I’m giving you as an example: …” — a few runtime crashes it was able to fix just from pasting in the command line output, but fixing “all pitches and durations are zero” required me to get my hands dirty and decompose the problem into a chunk small enough for chatGPT to fix. I don’t know how far we are from any AI, LLM or otherwise, not needing or benefiting from human oversight, except in the specific domains like chess where it has already happened. I don’t believe in saying “never” to stuff like this, as that’s a common error with many technologies from flight to superconductors not just AI, but I also notice my personal guesses err on the side of being too near in our future.
- eggsmediumrare 4y agoMy intuition is that job quality (and compensation) will be reduced before we notice a significant reduction in job quantity.
- IG_Semmelweiss 4y agoAlthough this is generally great for developed economies, i can see this being highly disruptive to India, Philipines and similar countries that based their outsourced services on text based Customer Service. I can also see nigerian spam getting much more refined before long....
- renjimen 4y agoSam Altman actually identified customer service as the industry most likely to be downsized due to ChatGPT.
- mistrial9 4y agoodd the focus on "jobs" .. almost like provocation Instead, think of machine services: fully-automated ones like "ads" or semi-automated like news stories, records requests, customer service replies, retail environment/shopping or other high-volume, low-profit trivial interactions.. These services have made billions in profit (ads) or removed billions in costs (employees) in the last twenty years exactly because they are done with minimal "jobs" specifically and by design. Modern Capital markets have found the drug-combo they can't kick.. make money with machines with no "jobs" .. meanwhile, news outlets of all kinds continue in a death-spiral. So combine the angst of media people themselves, the aggressive New Capital making machines that provide services while making few to no "jobs", and generally population anxiety over say .. catastrophic social conditions for example.. that is the real content from this chair. maybe, instead of being real news about "jobs" it is instead, red-meat bait for the people who own capital who want to get into the "making machines that make money without making jobs" game.. Sort of like a modern version of really-attractive but utterly socially un-discussable in public.. starting wars for money, or building super people through breeding, to name some other obvious ones..
- tough 4y agoarent all wars started for money?
- Xunjin 4y agoWars starts from power struggles which often are money/economic related.
- astrange 4y agoNo, ideologues almost always sincerely believe their ideology. The Iraq War was not started for anyone's oil money. And even if military capitalists profited from a war, the other 99% of capitalists in the country would find it a distraction at best.
- tough 4y agoI'd reduce ideology to the fact that it's hard to make a man understand whatever is standing between him and his paycheck.
- kingcobraninja 4y agoIn other news, the printing press set to put thousands of scribes out of work.
- waynenilsen 4y agoWhile negative impacts are specific and large on an individual level, positive impacts are broad and diffuse but vast. This has always been the issue with various kinds of protectionism. Change hurts. We will all be better off. We should consider how to help these people also.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MontyCarloHall 4y agoAs I see it, jobs fall on two axes: * Amount of training required (crystallized intelligence/ability) * Amount of intrinsic ability required (fluid intelligence/ability) Some jobs require neither a huge amount of training nor inherent ability. These are paradoxically often hard to automate, because they typically require a lot of rote physical movements that are difficult for machines (e.g. fast food cook). There are few white collar jobs that fit into this category, since they’ve already been automated away. Some jobs require a lot of training but don’t require a huge amount of inherent ability. For example, after years of training, most anyone will have the skills to be an excellent truck driver. The tech equivalent would be a generic CRUD developer. These are the jobs most at risk for LLM automation. As I see it, a large proportion of white collar jobs fall into this category as well, and that’s where we’ll see the most economic disruption. Finally, some jobs require both training and ability. Regardless of how long and hard they train, most people will never be a professional athlete, because they simply lack the innate ability. The tech equivalent is something like a kernel developer or machine learning scientist. These jobs will be hardest to replace with an LLM, since they require totally novel ways of thinking that are not baked into the LLM’s training corpus. A lot of blue collar jobs are here as well: good electricians, plumbers, mechanics, contractors, etc. require both years of experience and a high level of intelligence, since every house/car/jobsite is different.
- throwaway1777 4y agoIt’s always such a good idea to put things on multiple axes. I wonder if chatgpt would’ve had this insight or if it’s an example of something that would require some prompt engineering.
- mistrial9 4y agoau contrair -- Literally the first line of the widely known 2022 Big-Bench paper on large language models, with over 100 authors, says: Generative language models have as their core capability the production of the most likely continuation for a text sequence. This seemingly simple skill is remarkably general. Any task that can be specified and executed via text can be framed as text continuation. This encompasses a wide range of cognitive tasks, including tasks that can be resolved over chat or email, for example, or in a web forum.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y agoThe problem isn't putting people out of work, that's the whole point of technology. The problem is that the gains are concentrated into the hands of those who own capital instead of distributed across the society of people who actually did the fucking work to make this level of progress possible. We could be working far fewer hours, we could have higher pay, but neither are realized because we can't shake off the goddamned aristocrats and neo feudalists.
- kingcobraninja 4y agoWe have (for the most part) democracy. At this point, either feudalism is a collective choice, or the collective wants to make self-interested decisions but isn't smart enough to know how.
- Avicebron 4y agoOr the oversized influence of the neo-feudalists make the who enterprise of changing it via democratic means borderline/if not impossible...?
- kingcobraninja 4y agoHow is this different from the stupid collective scenario?
- Avicebron 4y agoit's not victim blaming?
- kingcobraninja 4y agoIf democratic society writ large can be considered a singular entity, then yes, it is victim blaming. Democratic society is the victim of and cause of all of its own problems.
- Herval_freire 4y ago
- lordnacho 4y agoThe real question isn't what jobs will go. Every job in the economy now is different from what it was 40 years ago: dev, accountant, doctor, farmer, CEO, plumber, and so on. The question is where do the gains go? For some jobs, AI becomes a tool that the professional buys and uses to make themselves more productive, and he pockets the difference. If I'm writing apps for a living and I can do it in 6 hours a day, and copilot makes it 5 hours, I'm going to pocket that hour and use it on my family. If I'm a web app company and I can just replace the devs with GPT-5, I'm going to buy it and can all the app devs, and pocket the difference.
- Herval_freire 4y agoYeah. It really depends whether the technology has the capability to replace devs.
- wslh 4y agoGood point but I think that, economically speaking, you will not pocket that hours as a developer (only initially), they will be arbitraged in the economy and everything will go faster and probably with less people.
- lordnacho 4y agoThat's not arbitrage, that's just competing away the profits. But yes, don't expect to be able to take it easy for an extra hour forever.
- Scea91 4y agoDefinitely true, my hope is that we will be achieving new things previously beyond our reach. Judging from things like Star Trek we have a long way to go. The question is whether we remain in the driving seat and as OP said, how the gains will be distributed.
- w3454 4y ago[dead]
- winternett 4y ago
- adwi 4y agoClassic Pareto improvement: the gains to the winners (society at large) are greater than the losses to the losers (those who held these jobs), so a side payment makes everyone better off. My concern (besides the medium term pain and instability from that churn) is the current state of governance and baked-in inequality, at least in the US, makes an equitable side payment unlikely.
- wslh 4y agoFrom the moral point of view it is strong to assert than the gains to the winners involve the society at large. At least it sounds like you are predicting the future but the future is not here yet to check.
- tome 4y agoIn 2017 we were going to have "profitable driverless fleets by 2019". Why is it different this time? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15824953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15824953
- kingcobraninja 4y agoMy partner participates in an online RPG writing community. A lot of people there sell character artwork. They have been getting mad that people are using AI generated artwork, and are considering banning it. I'm not really saying this time will be different, but I don't think self driving cars caused even this much disruption.
- tome 4y agoI guess in 2017 the technology wasn't there yet. It was just predicted to be coming. Now we have some technology, available right at this moment, that I suppose can be used to automate away jobs, but no one's put the pieces together yet. For example, I can imagine Whisper + ChatGPT being used to automate away a lot of call centre work. But it's not clear to me whether that means there will be more demand for the work that only human call centre operatives can do, or less.
- agent281 4y agoThe big difference between the two is how much damage occurs if the AI screws up. We don't have self driving fleets right now because a multi-ton truck hurtling down the freeway at 65+ mph can do a lot of damage. AI generated artwork is inert so it can be safely used as a substitute for the human generated stuff. I would expect speed of adoption to operate at inverse proportion to potential harm. image -> text -> code -> self-driving vehicles It's really reductive to just put all code in a single bucket, but most code probably isn't super critical for safety and it can be tested before it gets released/reviewed. I think that's the biggest differentiator from real time applications like self driving cars.
- antibasilisk 4y ago>AI generated artwork is inert I wholly disagree with this. The rate at which AI can produce pornography that caters to exact tastes is completely unmatched, I have seen people report their compulsive pornography habits becoming exponentially worse as a result of Stable Diffusion in particular. The only hold out has been video pornography, but with things like txt2vid improving I can't see that lasting long (pun not intentional).
- jensensbutton 4y agoPeople don't like to hear this, but management jobs will be the least impacted.
- it_citizen 4y agoIf I need 5 developers instead of 20. I need 1 manager instead of 4. Also a large chunk of manager work is grunt work like filling spreadsheets, writing emails, scheduling meetings, etc… With those tasks partially automated, I am pretty sure a manager could oversee larger teams and focus on the big picture instead of doing boilerplate tasks.
- nemo44x 4y agoLet me ask you why you wouldn’t do more now that your developers are more productive? I think the game changes here where dev teams get super charged and do more in the same time. In fact if you downsize to keep doing what you’re doing and your competitor keeps their team size, wouldn’t they overwhelm you? Can you beat them on price? Maybe but software prices are not affected by labor costs really so that’s not a differentiator.
- it_citizen 4y agoI agree that companies will probably just do more but my point was that managers are not safer than other jobs. It is linked to the jobs they manage and a large part of their day to day can also be automated.
- nemo44x 4y agoI guess there’s 2 types of managers - those concerned with day to day managerial things (resource allocation, roadmap planning, 1-on1’s, reviews, etc) and higher level managers concerned with strategy, leadership, managing managers, etc. Do you see both classes being affected the same?
- nemo44x 4y agoIndeed. Managers that can not only run a department but can also do the tasks associated with it will thrive. They’ll get more done with the same team sizes. One thing to remember is managers line to have as many people under them as possible. VPs and directors care a lot about this. They’ll find ways to continue to grow teams whine harvesting more productivity.
- gedy 4y agoMaybe it's for the best if we can work less and raise better and more families. However, I suspect the powerful will use this as a reason to push propaganda for even less people.
- Beaver117 4y agoOk let's say 300M jobs are affected, and we continue to get millions of new college graduates per year unable to find work. What's going to happen? Maybe salaries will take a nosedive? Minimum wage for a junior developer, anyone? Or maybe the people just won't accept it, and boycott companies. If 300M people don't have jobs the economy will certainly stall.
- myth_drannon 4y agoWars to get rid of excess populace.
- vinyl7 4y agoThis is what will happen, not the utopia of being free to pursue anything. We are cattle, and once we are not longer needed, the culling will begin.
- kevin_b_er 4y agoWe won't like the result of the massive consolidation in capital greater than ever before. We shall live in interesting times.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago>> The latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence could lead to the automation of a quarter of the work done in the US and eurozone, according to research by Goldman Sachs. This is Goldman Sachs, so take it with a big grain of salt. In 2017, they predicted huge job losses from self-driving cars: Self-driving cars could cost America’s professional drivers up to 25,000 jobs a month, Goldman Sachs says >> When autonomous vehicle saturation peaks, U.S. drivers could see job losses at a rate of 25,000 a month, or 300,000 a year, according to a report from Goldman Sachs Economics Research. >> The report estimates that semi- and fully autonomous car sales will have about 20 percent share of car sales around 2025 to 2030. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/22/goldman-sachs-analysis-of-autonomous-vehicle-job-loss.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/22/goldman-sachs-analysis-of-au... If it's from Goldman Sachs, and it's a prediction about a technology making a smash on social media, you can rest assured it's speculation with the hope of influencing the markets to make an investment so that Goldman Sachs can profit.
- mousetree 4y agoWait until McKinsey write an article about it /s
- timthelion 4y ago"Affecting jobs" is really a short term problem that can be addressed with training and probably bridge loans from the government. It's not like we've run out of problems to solve. There are still diseases to cure, environmental issues such as climate change and habitat loss to address, the human yearning to "spread to the stars" and colonate Mars. Loneliness, unhappiness, the desire to have a real person make a hand cooked meal, the desire for better television shows, the desire for better video games, the desire for more immersive less seasickmaking AR/VR. There are a million things that need to be done, so why are we so afraid of running out of things to do?
- notjustanymike 4y agoGenerating an app is one thing. Generating an app with a maintainable architecture and ongoing development over 5 to 10 years is another. AI will assist developers but never replace them.
- novaRom 4y agoNever say never. Next 2 or 3 years it will assist, but chances are very good AI will completely automate software and hardware development in several years.
- imranq 4y agoIt's interesting how all it takes is the right bag of numbers (the weights of gpt) and the entire economy can be upended
- datatrashfire 4y agoAfter spending a few months with chatgpt I'm skeptical. It's pretty stupid, more likely to be respond with inaccurate hallucinations than reliable output. It's most useful when I outside of my typical comfort zone and precisely where I'm least able to judge the quality of its response. The tech doesn't understand logic and I think most knowledge workers need that.
- freedom2099 4y agoAre you sure you have been using chatgpt? In all my tests it understands logic extremely well! With version 4 it is even way better!
- DangitBobby 4y agoI found it pretty useful to get me in the ballpark for problems I don't understand but generally useless for refinement. I'm less worried about the impact it will have on developers now.
- cyanydeez 4y agoCan you imagine Russia trying to replace it's propaganda bots with AI. Like
- credit_guy 4y agoAnd agricultural tractors and combines have replaced many more than that in major and minor economies alike. For a more up-to-date example, electric bikes. A Whole Foods delivery guy who rides one of those yellow electric bikes with a little trailer behind can easily deliver as much as 3 people pushing boxes on dollies. Which is the same thing as saying each such bicycle has resulted in two people losing their jobs.
- rockzom 4y ago[flagged]