55 ms·

AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

273 points by kungfudoi 4y ago

tpoacher 4y ago
No shit sherlock. "Video streaming won't hurt DVD sales, people preferring video streaming over DVDs will." "Online news won't hurt paper print, publishers publishing online instead of in print will." "Guns won't hurt you, people shooting you with guns will."
buf 4y ago
There are two types of people: 1. People afraid AI will take their jobs 2. People using AI to take people's jobs
- tobr 4y ago
  3. People using AI to take other people’s jobs, because they’re afraid AI will take their jobs.
  - kneebonian 4y ago
    I'm in this boat. I was worried about AI for a while then I realized I have to figure out how to use it or get left behind. The problem is I am still having difficulty understanding how to use the tool effectively. Any advice would be much appreciated.
    - ProllyInfamous 4y ago
      My late-January 2023 prediction, perhaps mimicking the still-then-growing trend: 2023 will be the year that leaves the majority of humans behind.
    - pnt12 4y ago
      I think that's a good approach, and I've also taken it. I was skeptic but now I'm evaluating its strengths and weaknesses. But also keep in mind there's lots of hype and lots of productivity gurus praising it as the greatest thing, instilling FMO on others.
  - pzo 4y ago
    4. People downplaying AI and ignoring AI completely.
- Manjuuu 4y ago
  3rd type of people: AGI.
- go_prodev 4y ago
  3. Virtual people. AI pretending to be human to prevent humans from taking their job.
  - giaour 4y ago
    Don't forget about humans pretending to be an AI so that other humans will be impressed with how far AI has advanced: https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2020/04/04/artificial-or-human-intelligence-companies-faking-ai/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2020/04/04/artif...
- m3kw9 4y ago
  Or people just have no choice using AI baked into their once old tools
- cwmoore 4y ago
  Corporations are people.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  The language is all wrong here. You don't own your job. You are not entitled to perpetual payment for whatever it is you are doing. A job is not a possession. You are not being robbed of your job. You simply do labor in exchange for money based on the value of that labor. And sometimes you do that under some long term arrangement with an employer and sometimes based on more short term arrangements. Either way, the arrangement is entirely premised on what you do having value and being worth paying for. So, if the value of what you do changes, you need to adapt. It's not being stolen from you because you never owned it to begin with. The threat with AI for a lot of people is that what they do right now becomes less valuable. And people don't like change and feel threatened by it. Generally there are two solutions to that problem: 1) do something else that is more valuable or more worthy of your time. 2) figure out a way to scale what you do. For example by leveraging AI. For many people it might be a combination of the two. And for some people it will indeed mean that they need to figure out something else to do. But we'll still need to have an economy that is based on people earning some kind of income and then spending that income. The whole system grinds to a halt without that. If AI eliminates all the jobs, nobody would earn anything and be unable to spend. So, that's unlikely to happen. Economies are self regulating in the sense that people optimize for value. In the end AIs are just tools that people use to create value for each other. If an AI can do everything by itself at a very low cost that just means that what it does has low value and is not something that people will spend a lot of money on. Meaning that other things will emerge that they will spend their money on that are more valuable. Those things are probably going to involve human activity that is scarce in some way.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - pnt12 4y ago
    This ignores the whole human part of a job. Many people are wage slaves: if they're job is gone, they have a big trouble. That's why they're scared of AI, that's why so many news count the potential jobs cuts: more fear means more clicks. There's also a lot of inequality, and AIs will push for a bigger gap, not smaller. If everyone is 20% more productive, does everyone get a 20% raise? Historically, no: the company gets the extra profit. So there's more to discuss than free market 101s, which don't capture the whole complexity of the world.
- philote 4y ago
  3. People who may want to try out AI to see if they're 1 or 2 but don't want to give ChatGPT their email and phone number to do so. Also, are people uploading their company's private code to ChatGPT to get its help? Wasn't there a big issue with ChatGPT leaking info recently?
deleted 4y ago
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debacle 4y ago
Unless we expect a grassroots AI luddite movement, this is hair splitting.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  play hype games, get hype prizes
- pixl97 4y ago
  With the cost of living in the US being completely out of control, and the potential for AI to gut wages in a number of high paid areas, why are we not expecting a new luddite movement? Or is this another case of not understanding why the luddites broke the machines in the first place?
  - debacle 4y ago
    Americans are too divided to organize against something like this in any way.
  - flangola7 4y ago
    People only think of the Luddites as stubborn and trying to hold back "progress" and not as the entire class of people whose life's work, passion, personal identity, and means of supporting themselves, was stripped away with no replacement. If you spent decades polishing your skills, took pride in your work and being a known expert and someone others could rely on, and made a comfortable living for yourself and your family doing it, it was would be horrible and devastating to watch it all slip through your fingers like sand. They weren't even given the comfort of still having a good income and comfortable life. The money they would have made for their hard earned work and skills was siphoned off by distant people in suits and jewelery who never had to put in a drop of sweat. They instead received such mockery that their name itself is now a derogatory term.
  - oytis 4y ago
    Most of people don't work in these high paid areas, and there is no revolution in sight. Being newly impoverished is less pleasant than being poor, and we can expect some accidents there, but eventually people will probably adapt to the new normal.
blibble 4y ago
I for one can't wait for more contentless boilerplate to appear in every email, pull request, "customer service" conversation, etc
- redundantGPT 4y ago
  It's like inverse compression: Employee: Please expand these three bullet points into an email to my manager. Manager: Please summarize this email from my direct report in three bullet points.
- klabb3 4y ago
  Hi blibble, I notice you wrote an insightful comment so I decided to upvote it for your pleasure. Keep it up and make sure to follow me on all my social media. Sent from my GPT4 assistant
tosser0001 4y ago
I'm not necessarily concerned that I will be entirely without a job because of AI. What I am concerned with is that the aspects of my job that I derive pleasure from will be replaced by AI.
- endorphine 4y ago
  Can you provide some examples of aspects of your work that you're concerned about?
  - jvanderbot 4y ago
    I enjoy learning about the design philosophy behind an API, or diving into a library to learn the "off the beaten path" workflows. That's where the magic optimizations or shortcuts live. So far, copilot just shows me the happiest path options for everything I've tried, and really falls over when it's not something that "Well this API looks like API_functionCall, so your query for <get X> must look like API_getX". It rarely does.
  - cyrialize 4y ago
    Slightly related - there was a Reddit post about a person lamenting the changes in their job. [0] They make 3D models and they greatly enjoyed making models from scratch and taking 2-3 weeks to do so. Now with AI, they use tools to create a model - and then spend 2-3 days to update it. This is a productivity improvement, but it also took away a key thing they loved about their job. There isn't really a solution here at all, and the poster wasn't looking for solutions either. Just venting. We'll be seeing this more in the future, and I wouldn't be surprised if multiple people change careers over it. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35308498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35308498
- thriftwy 4y ago
  You cannot in good conscience be wishing to do menial tasks for a living, that AI can do for you and instead of you. That's how doing manual search and replace instead of search/replace in editor or computing stuff in spreadsheet by hand instead of using formulas. If you think AI's output is suboptimal, right. Maybe find a way to use/train AI better to produce good enough output. But simply wishing to out-robot a robot is pointless.
sagarmaruthi 4y ago
It sure will widen the already existing gap drastically.
snarf21 4y ago
This is a nonsense headline. This is the equivalent of "Factory automation won't steal your job, companies that buy factory automation will." Democratization of AI tools will have upsides and downsides but non researchers weren't playing around with AI text/chat generation before this last round of simple to use tools came out.
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  I think there is a big concern that this will destroy the middle class.
  - pydry 4y ago
    Middle class got hollowed out a long time before this came along. Automation was always picked as a good scapegoat for the declining fortunes of the middle class because the inevitable forward march of progress is immune from pitchforks while oligarchs, landlords and bought politicians are not.
- jandrese 4y ago
  My thought was it read exactly like "Guns don't kill people, people who squeeze the trigger kill people." Technically right in a specific context but completely misses the point.
  - cal85 4y ago
    What point does it miss?
    - snarf21 4y ago
      I would argue that the point is that AI WILL steal lots of jobs (directly or indirectly) and the directness of that theft is fairly irrelevant. :shrug:
      - cal85 4y ago
        It seems like you took the headline to mean something like "You don't need to worry about losing your job because of AI". That would make sense if you only read the first half of it. But the second half completely changes the meaning - it's saying you definitely do need to worry about losing your job because of AI (and maybe you should start taking action to avoid that fate). So I think you not only missed the point but interpreted it backwards.
gavinhoward 4y ago
I completely disagree. I'm building a business, and this business will be based on excellent software and excellent support for that software. I will refuse to use AI. But instead of AI users taking my job, I'm sure that refusing to use AI will become my differentiator as every AI user becomes more and more like each other. You may think that good AI users will not become so bland, but they will. Human laziness will drive them to accept more and more of what the AI says with less and less review of it. Thus, they will output stuff that, over time, is more pure AI, becoming more like the AI and more like each other. Having the human touch will be an advantage, not a disadvantage.
- deleted 4y ago
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- lolsowrong 4y ago
  You’re an inspiration. I’m going to open an accounting firm and refuse to use calculators.
  - lezojeda 4y ago
    [dead]
  - tricksforfree 4y ago
    How often are calculators confidently wrong?
    - lolsowrong 4y ago
      Depends on the calculator. Floating point imprecision is well documented.
      - tricksforfree 4y ago
        That's true. But we know exactly why it can't do it.
throwaway22032 4y ago
It's a timescale, like all technological progress. Or even evolution. So you're working in a games development studio as a visual artist. At first you're producing renderings in Blender or whatever. Then, AI is able to generate three-dimensional meshes for you. You are in the loop, deciding that these meshes are suitable, which textures work, which are the best, designing the prompts, etc. This is 3D midjourney. At this point, you're now able to produce far more more quickly and it's likely that fewer artists are required within your company. Later, AI is able to more accurately decide which models will be preferred by the higher ups, or by the playerbase, better than you are as an artist. The AI has now replaced you as an artist. The software team or management simply ask the AI - "please produce me a set of fantasy character models for my game, with these characteristics". This is essentially GPT mixed with 3D midjourney. I'd say we're not far off, currently, from this point. Beyond that, perhaps the AI is then able to produce game rules, visual imagery, game engines etc than your company. The prompt "produce a doom clone with portals" results in a higher quality product than a team of humans working on it. We don't quite have that yet. Beyond that, the AI may be able to determine which games will be valued by the market and thus what is worth spending effort on. It could end up outcompeting all game studios. Move further and it may produce something which just up-ends the game industry entirely by producing a product which gamers prefer to spend their time on. I don't think that people quite grok the idea of what human-level or beyond AI actually is. By definition superhuman AI is more able than you are. The question is whether we will actually end up with it; that it will outcompete us if we create it is tautological.
- hotpathdev 4y ago
  With the progression of the technology, you may find there are not so many "in-between" steps as you expect in your current list. It will quickly go from the current stage "employee being more productive" to "steam, I want to play a game where <insert prompt here>". No need to generate art assets or have anything resembling a game engine, just pure interactive "imagination".
  - throwaway22032 4y ago
    I agree. My belief is that in order to communicate my intuition about this it helps to provide discrete steps which explain the transition.
spark3k 4y ago
This is like saying tractors won't steal agricultural hand-ploughing jobs, the people building the tractors will. Technically true. But... stupid.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Tractors and policy favoring bigger scale agricultural production. The US is profoundly inefficient at utilizing land for agriculture. The “miracle of the desert” and emptying a giant, un-renewable aquifer has been carrying us for decades. In my lifetime, we’ll be relying on small garden plots just like the Soviets did for vegetables.
- Veen 4y ago
  It's the people driving the tractors who take jobs, not the ones building them. If you operate a hand-plough for a living when tractors come on the scene, you'd better learn how to drive a tractor. The same is true of AI.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Is it stupid? Because people are railing against the AI, not the system of evaluating worth and distributing wealth that implies that the advent of a miraculous labor-saving technology should be met with fear, not excitement about expansion of the capabilities of every human being.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    I think this is right on. AI would be an amazing if it didn't mean that some people will have an even harder time making ends meet. Why does every technological innovation that improves productivity end up shifting even more resources to those at the top of the ladder?
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      The factory worker bemoans his station as the new automated smelter they're going to install may run him out of a job. Before he goes upstairs to commiserate with his spouse, he throws his dirty clothes in the washer, nary a care paid to the previous generation's neighbor children who used to make all their money washing other family's clothes for them. (Probably not too much thought should be paid to the fact that when that economic system collapsed, we instituted allowances for children).
Spooky23 4y ago
It’s the tech equivalent of “guns don’t kill people, people do” argument. Pretty inane. This stuff is going to nuke thousands of knowledge workers, either directly or via services. Is that a bad thing for society? Sure. Does that matter, no.
- deleted 4y ago
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j0057 4y ago
Reassuring read from someone unable to consistently write "ChatGPT" vs "ChatGTP".
dahart 4y ago
At some level it’s tautological. Initially I had a similar negative reaction other commenters had, but I think I’m deciding I like the people framing. Obviously this is not an either-or. It’s not a question of AI vs people, it’s both AI+people. But only people are making the choices. People are building AI, people who can use AI will choose to use it, and people who run businesses will choose to allow it and/or incorporate it. Just like jobs lost to immigration and/or outsourcing, the jobs aren’t being stolen, they’re being intentionally given to cheaper alternatives, by business people, without much worry about the consequences. It’s healthy for us to think about the AI revolution as a social & economic choice, because that’s what it really is.
- Herval_freire 4y ago
  No it's not healthy in my opinion. A drug addict doesn't exactly have a choice when he uses drugs. Aspects of human behavior in aggregate are so predictable it's basically deterministic. If AI one day matches or surpasses human intelligence it is obvious humanity will exploit that AI as it already is doing now. There is no actual "choice" here. Just an illusion of it.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    We've changed collective human behavior before though, outlawed slavery etc.
    - falcolas 4y ago
      And yet, even in countries where slavery is outlawed, it's still done - sometimes out in the open, sometimes behind closed doors. e.g. the US, where people in jail are exempt from all our progressive slave labor laws.
      - marginalia_nu 4y ago
        Be that as it may, the collective behavior and shape of society has undeniably changed.
xyzal 4y ago
I'd love if AI automated the 'talking to people' part of my job for me
morpheuskafka 4y ago
The article can't even spell "ChatGPT" right! And randomly makes words plural like "white collars job" and "a sure things." The author says they are a ghost writer and is confident they can do a better job than AI, and according to their bio they have written 100+ papers... I wouldn't be so confident that they are better than AI and writing stuff like this if this is their best work!
m3kw9 4y ago
Kinda disagree, AI will be eventually be built into all tools where appropriate and you will use it either you like it or not. Simple example: Photoshop. You may not know it but it uses AI. With ChatGPT etc, it will be in more tools. So relax, most people won’t need to lift a finger to leverage AI, it’s built in and is by default used
victoryhb 4y ago
Why should we listen to someone who cannot even spell "ChatGPT" right for opinions on AI?
JanneVee 4y ago
Well it isn't happening today. Just spent 20 minutes of my life chasing a GPT hallucination. No doubt that it will be more accurate sometime in the future but right now I'm faster without it.
baxuz 4y ago
"Guns don't kill people. People who use guns kill people"
photochemsyn 4y ago
I see this sentiment expressed frequently: > "The past decades have shown that the benefits of technology are unevenly distributed, with some rich becoming super-rich with a good portion of the people lagging behind. However, it is also fair to say that the average well being in the world has steadily increased." The average is far less important than the median, when it comes to social stability. You could argue that the establishment of plantation slavery in the American South improved the average wealth and leisure time relative to the pre-slavery economy, but the median would be highly skewed by a few people hoarding all the wealth and enjoying all the leisure time. In the case of AI, ensuring that the results of individual productivity gains are not hoarded by the uber-wealthy is important. If AI helps an employee finish what used to be a 12-hour job in just 6 hours, why not cut the employee's working hours in half while retaining the same salary, instead of giving the executive suite another million-dollar compensation boost? A 30-hr work week, enabled by AI assistance, would mean people had more time for community engagement, family interaction, personal development and so on, leading to healthier societies.
- Aerroon 4y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with that assertion in the first place. Life has improved a lot for most people, but it has improved in ways that you don't really notice. Your car is safer, your apartment is safer, your neighbor's apartment is safer (so it's less likely to burn down yours), there's less crime, there's less hunger, there's more available life saving medicines etc etc. These improvements just aren't all that noticeable. But this is the stuff that really matters. Whether the wealthiest person's bank account shows an extra zero or not means very little in comparison to your kid being able to get medicine for a disease that wasn't treatable 30 years ago.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - kfkfodlnfkfdk 4y ago
      I know people below the poverty line who have access to cheap forms of insulin that didn't even exist fifty years ago because rich people funded the research They wouldn't even be alive if your lie was true
nmz 4y ago
I suppose HN is unwilling to admit to itself of the obvious societal demerits they are enabling. Lying to oneself is I suppose very human, and exactly what you would expect of someone doing something unethical. The same thing happened with crypto.
davidkuennen 4y ago
I've been using GPT-4 to translate my app into new languages. Saved me thousands of dollars in the past few weeks. I used to pay translators for that, but GPT-4 translation is so good. I'd argue domain specific even better than a translator.
- dbancajas 4y ago
  How do you know the translations are accurate if you don't speak the native language?
  - davidkuennen 4y ago
    I compared it to past translations the translators did and also my native language. That's how I gained the confidence it'd do just as well with new languages.
anonzzzies 4y ago
But everyone knows this right? It’s been happening now for months and the fallout has been interesting. The people who refuse to use it are either the top of something (money/iq/eq etc) or will not make it (it is the current status and job and income level) as they can trivially be replaced soon (and now).
proc0 4y ago
Seems like a pedantic argument. Obviously there is always a human behind it unless it's sentient and can make its own decisions, at which point there are much bigger ethical considerations to discuss first.
- js8 4y ago
  But that's the point of stating it, isn't it? The people like Yudkowski or Musk who warn against AI are typically worried about the later scenario, not about "it will take jobs".
ModernMech 4y ago
I've already stolen 4 jobs for myself. I was getting ready to hire a team for my project, but now I don't have to. However... I didn't have money to hire that team in the first place, so the project was actually stalled to the point of collapse, and those 4 jobs never would have existed. Now with AI I have enough capacity myself to push it further, and so perhaps I'll get to the point where I can actually hire people to work on the project. In that sense, AI will be responsible for those jobs being created.
WFHRenaissance 4y ago
Instead of OmniTron3000 stealing your job, it will be Joe AND OmnioTron3000 stealing your job.
paxys 4y ago
If there are 100 manual jobs today and 80 AI-assisted jobs tomorrow then AI has "stolen" 20 jobs. There's really no other way to frame it. The added productivity gains are going into someone's pocket, and if you are in the labor class then that someone isn't you.
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  AI is yet another technology that can help you escape the labor class.
substation13 4y ago
I am finding the combination of LLMs and strongly-typed functional programming to be incredibly potent. By building programs out of small, single-purpose pure functions, it is much easier to review the output of the LLM, whilst also giving me the ability to grok and steer the overall direction of the code. A traditional type-checker catches many of the looks-right-but-is-subtly-wrong hallucinations too.
a4isms 4y ago
"Computers will not steal your job. People leveraging computers will steal your job." —1963, 1973, 1983, 1993...2023
amelius 4y ago
Yeah, the billionaires who have armies of AI bots. Eventually, anyways.
floor_ 4y ago
"AI don't take jobs from people, people take jobs from people." We hear this kind of argument from gun lovers all the time.
clbrmbr 4y ago
Stopped reading when I got to “ChatGTP” tbh.
globalise83 4y ago
I think this is right. There is no AI in the foreseeable future that would be able to understand a complex business, prioritise and roadmap some future strategy, and convert that into business requirements detailed enough to implement as working software, architect a proper solution, and then work with an AI to develop and verify the software through an incremental development process. But I do believe that there are some people who could work with GPT 6 or 7 to achieve that. And those people would be productive enough to replace a whole team of product owner, architect, designer, developers, etc. and will therefore become very rich.
- lnsru 4y ago
  You can outsource everything right now to some dirt cheap offshore team. I doubt, that outsourcing alone will make you very rich.
  - globalise83 4y ago
    Outsourcing to a team of cheap offshore developers has immense coordination costs for whoever is doing the outsourcing: communication, clarification verification, etc. Outsourcing to an AI has virtually none: feedback is instant, you can check understanding easily, you can specify exactly what you want to get back. And the costs are dramatically lower than even the cheapest of outsourcers. Whoever can orchestrate the activity of an AI will capture nearly all of the value.
throwaw12 4y ago
strange wording > It is not AI that will end up stealing your job, > it will be stolen by people that have learnt to use AI to become more productive This is by definition AI stealing your job. AI will not come and say: hey move on, I will do this job, everything is accomplished indirectly. With same logic you can say, there are no bad politicians, it's people who are following their advice are bad
weatherlite 4y ago
AI won't steal your job, it will legally take it.
gspencley 4y ago
I'm not as worried about AI "stealing" my job as I am worried that it's going to make my job unappealing. As a software engineer, what motivates me most is the creative aspect of it. I like building and designing things. I like thinking about every line of code that I write. If people start outsourcing their coding to generative AI, and if I find myself feeling pressured to follow suit in order to keep up, then everything I enjoy about coding goes away.
- gpanders 4y ago
  I completely agree. Many of the recent articles and blog posts written by AI enthusiasts giving examples of how AI makes their job "easier" or "more productive" just demonstrates this to me even further. What they call "more productive" looks to me like "incredibly boring". In addition, another point I don't often see mentioned is the alarmingly likely possibility that all AI-enhanced software engineering will go through these tools that are owned by 1 or 2 (American) tech companies. Are people really excited about a future where you can't even perform the basics of your skillset without depending on a Microsoft service? We are rapidly advancing toward a future where a single company owns the most popular text editor, the most popular code hosting platform, (one of) the most used cloud infrastructure platforms, and soon, if the AI enthusiasts have it right, the tool that will be a "necessity" to even write code at all. If that future unfolds, I will leave software voluntarily long before I get "replaced".
  - patrickmay 4y ago
    Emacs will always be here.
- newhotelowner 4y ago
  It depeneds on what you are working on and your position. Isn't it a lot of code is repitative? Test cases are mostly repitative. AI can help you with that and your productivity increase significantly. I write code/program mostly to make my life easier and well I like to write to code. And AI/copilot just helps me write the better code faster.
doomleika 4y ago
Cop out. You can replace AI with X where X is significant climate changer and it will be always true. What AIGC is capable today will displace a large amount of workforce and many of them won’t be able to keep up the change(be it age, skills that were valuable but now nullified by AIGC). Chaos is a ladder but that doesn’t justify the pretenses of Darwinism.
deleted 4y ago
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softwaredoug 4y ago
Everyone’s worried about AI taking their software jobs, yet humanity faces existential problems around climate change, poverty, failed states, etc. And huge opportunities like space exploration and better health care. Maybe this has more to do with our ego - losing perceived status as masters of the universe, when in reality hard, intractable problems exist more than ever. Why aren’t we changing to work on them? Maybe the cost of software development has been actually a barrier to solving many of these problems, and society may be better off without that cost? Are we the baddies?
- JohnBerryman 4y ago
  I think that ego/status is a big part of it. And the loss aversion bias. Our thought process is "This thing is going to be able to do software as well as a human, therefor it is going to take my job." When a more optimistic and probably more realistic take is "This thing is going to do the boring parts of software, so I can spend my time building out the more interesting, big-picture parts of code. I'm going to be so much more productive." But the fear of loss is so much more distracting than the potential gain. ... And what is it that we fear losing? Status! Software development is in high demand, it's a sought after role, we feel "special".
leshow 4y ago
And realize that as workers become more productive, wages will not increase. More wealth will be created per unit of time, but that wealth will likely not be realized by the average worker.
cameronfraser 4y ago
Everyone that knows what they are talking about have already been saying this. This is what the narrative actually is. Not AI replacing humans.
nomy99 4y ago
Interesting anecdote: I was interviewing a full stack developer, and I asked him to build a simple react UI. He was allowed to use google, but couldn't come up with a solution. He then said if he had access to chatGPT, he could've solved it..We didn't hire him, but should that be an expectation? Can you use chatGPT on an interview?
andrei_says_ 4y ago
Can we please adjust the framing about jobs? Another employee will not steal your job. Your employer may “steal” your job and give your job to someone who convinces them they can do it cheaper. In the new era of ai-augmented white collar work this process will get faster. But let’s remember it’s always the employer who makes the decision and stop using language implying the existence of “job thieves” of some kind and completely excluding the employers’ choice in the process.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  I don't care how we frame it so long as the framing is consistent. What really gets me itching to fire up the guillotine is when people flip flop between stealing and progress based on who's doing it and who it's happening to.
kypro 4y ago
I hate this take. I have no idea why some people believe that in the future years of experience in a field like software engineering will no longer be marketable skill, but typing some stuff into a text box will be. It's like an elevator operator arguing that automation of elevators will make their jobs easier overlooking the fact that if literally anyone can do the job then they're probably not going to be needed. I'm not saying there won't be people in the future typing commands into an input field either, but the point is that this doesn't take any real experience and if it is a job it will be paid extremely poorly. Yes, in the present it might make you more productive compared to your co-workers, but in a few years don't be surprised if other people learn they can also write text into an input field and they might just decide to do it themselves.
eur0pa 4y ago
It's not the fall that kills you, it's the landing
toss1 4y ago
Contrary conjecture: As with many "productivity enhancements", these AIs[0] will streamline some work to the point of practical elimination, but will in the end make more work, by enabling higher-level tasks to be doable instead of just imagined. It seems a lot of the missing "productivity enhancements" from the PC and internet revolutions don't appear because people didn't net get fired, they just started doing different tasks (TBD whether those are actually useful, but evidently most managers think they are). Oblig car analogy - more highways induce demand for travel by making it easier, so the net is that traffic is worse; similarly, this may induce demand for work. [0] these are artificial, but not intelligent; it is predictive models with insane amounts of ingested data. Whether text, code, or images, it speeds production in middle-of-the-road cases, but cannot figure out what to produce. There's no more evidence of reasoning than that an image in a mirror is evidence of skilled kinesiology. With an actual reasoning AGI, the conjecture would be quite different.
justinzollars 4y ago
I'm seeing a lot of AI doomerism. I'm incredibly optimistic about AI, recently ChatGTP helped me debug a Neovim/Microsoft Language Server bug related to symlinks - I couldn't have done it on my own but asking the right questions helped me tease out a production bug related with gopls.
alentred 4y ago
I think it is important for the context to notice that the post is written by a renowned Italian mathematician and a computer scientist, and Italy just banned ChatGPT. I feel that the post is not about the AI (people using AI) taking the jobs, but about whether it is a good idea to blindly ignore the fact.
agentultra 4y ago
This is a useful distinction, I think, to make: the current hype cycle and headlines are making it sound like we have invented autonomous, intelligent beings with super-human abilities of their own. "AI," is such a poor, non-descriptive term that it allows charlatans and click-bait to proliferate and scare non-technical, uninformed people. They can bend their claims any way they want. The people using these technologies under the banner of "AI" definitely want you to believe it's a revolutionary, fundamental, paradigm-shifting technology that will utterly change society: and they're the only ones that can bring it to you. This isn't a public, social project for the good of society. We're seeing classic capitalist moves to make first-mover advantage to leverage this technology. Too much of this hype-cycle shares the same characteristics of the crypto-bubble from last year: it's revolutionary and inevitable and will completely change society! We need to educate people on what these technologies actually are and not let people sell the public on speculation and science-fiction "what ifs."
LinuxBender 4y ago
My unpopular opinion is that people adopting this type of machine learning will have some benefits and some speed-bumps and obstacles. As GPT iterates through a myriad of versions, improvements, restrictions, filters businesses will have to work around legal challenges, shadow biases, confidently incorrect interpretations and of course dependencies on a rate limited cloud service unless all future iterations become open source, self hosted and distributed and everyone can agree on what data-sets to ingest and what should be filtered/excluded for legal, accuracy and other reasons. Businesses taking this on early will need to be ready to quickly change course on the fly especially as new legislation catches up. I think the biggest obstacle could be the lack of showing ones work when legal issues will arise. There isn't a "debug last answer" to get forensic data on how the answer what achieved. I am curious how a cranky judge may respond to "because the AI said so". Another potential risk could be if shadow biases dynamic filtering, dynamic algorithms, dynamic tuning based on social, economic or political preferences of the ML operator, get too aggressive and people start to realize their financial decisions are being manipulated and impacted artificially by automation even more so than occurs today on social media platforms. I do not know how businesses or governments may react to this.
uconnectlol 4y ago
What's this constant obsession with "stealing jobs"? The tech industry has been dead for something like 30 years. There is zero intellectual design being put into it. Music is just a bunch of sellouts. You know how "content creators" do that cringy shit where they try to base their life around monetizing their "content"? That's how "musicians" worked before the internet. I couldn't care less how their jobs are threatened. Journalists are obviously no better. I don't miss Blockbuster. I don't miss PSTN operators. I don't miss building pyramids by hand. Work / money itself is an absurd concept and not something to spend 100% of our time worrying about. As technological capability increases, there will just be a point where food and everything will be handed out for free. And mundane people will still be worse off by their own choosing. And perhaps some shoddy company like Amazon Google Apple etc will be the one doing this so they will use this to enforce their political viewpoint instead of honoring the non aggression principle.
- sharemywin 4y ago
  > As technological capability increases, there will just be a point where food and everything will be handed out for free. that's not the trend line I'm seeing.
  - uconnectlol 4y ago
    Most jobs are worthless and shouldn't be artificially preserved. The end game of AI is just doing nothing and still having a roof and food. It's not like we're going to have human manual labor picking apples. At which point all of these people who sold out and made their what would otherwise be an intellectual job into something profitable, will have no value.
  - gpgn 4y ago
    yeah, no way "food will be handed out for free" when you can make a profit by selling it; they'd rather throw it away (as they do right now) than give it away for free
    - uconnectlol 4y ago
somsak2 4y ago
AI won't steal your scrolling, this website will
drewcoo 4y ago
Ah, the old "guns don't kill people" argument. That will distract us all from the dangers of weaponized AI.
aaroninsf 4y ago
Surprisingly, there is no apparent discussion here about the fact that this argument parrots, precisely, the rightly-derided original, "guns don't kill people, people do." There is an interesting way in which this is different, though, which is that the current lack of agency by AI is going to prove a very short window, most of all for the sort of agency of interest here, "who" is deciding which jobs to cut. Anyone with a loan or insurance denied on the basis of "what the computer said" would rightly already contend that there is sufficient agency to yes, steal your job.
qgin 4y ago
1 person leveraging AI will steal 10 jobs. It’s not a 1 to 1 replacement.
jacknews 4y ago
So assuming the same output is required, if people wielding AI are more productive, you'll need less people. . But we're missing an important point, as far as software development or at least web development/user-centered apps goes at least, if not many other situations; We will need less software, not more, and the software we will need will be much more infrastructure and 'industrial'. For example, currently I might go to a units conversion website to do a quick cooking calculation. chatGPT. I go to a weather website (always via google, because I never remember the website names) to check the weather. chatGPT. I want some information on my stocks, and their outlook. chatGPT - can summarize the price movements and the 'buzz' around said stocks without wading through pages of web UI. I want to book a holiday. Instead of wading through ad- and promotion- laden booking sites, chatGPT. The authors example of 'writing articles'. Why bother reading them? Unless it's reading for pleasure, do I want to seek out a particular publication and wade through a load of fluff to get the meat of what I want to inform myself about? No, just ask chatGPT. Sure it's going to have to learn to present results neatly in tables and pictures and so on, and it's going to have to use plugins to get actual answers to some things. And I don't want to have to type at it all the time, so I'll want some 'promptmarks' or something more sophisticated. But all these websites that we're worried GPT will write for us, unemploying developers - it's 'worse' than that - the sites won't be needed to start with. As for other stuff, say news, why bother getting chatGPT to write a styory for a page on NYT or whatever. I can just ask GPT 'whats up' and it'll tell me news. Sure for all this, it's not quite there yet, but I think the writing is on the chat-box, er, wall. . The other main issue being missed is capitalism. We've enjoyed a golden age of creation where basically all you need is a laptop and some open-source software, and you can code, or write articles, draw artwoks or whatever. Albeit you have to use infratructure to distribute that code or make it available online etc. With AI, the means of production will suddenly change from a laptop, to multi-million dollar models, owned by someone else. That could have a profound effect on who gets to create, and under what conditions.

273 points by kungfudoi 4y ago

No shit sherlock. "Video streaming won't hurt DVD sales, people preferring video streaming over DVDs will." "Online news won't hurt paper print, publishers publishing online instead of in print will." "Guns won't hurt you, people shooting you with guns will."

buf 4y ago

There are two types of people: 1. People afraid AI will take their jobs 2. People using AI to take people's jobs

tobr 4y ago
3. People using AI to take other people’s jobs, because they’re afraid AI will take their jobs.
- kneebonian 4y ago
  I'm in this boat. I was worried about AI for a while then I realized I have to figure out how to use it or get left behind. The problem is I am still having difficulty understanding how to use the tool effectively. Any advice would be much appreciated.
  - ProllyInfamous 4y ago
    My late-January 2023 prediction, perhaps mimicking the still-then-growing trend: 2023 will be the year that leaves the majority of humans behind.
  - pnt12 4y ago
    I think that's a good approach, and I've also taken it. I was skeptic but now I'm evaluating its strengths and weaknesses. But also keep in mind there's lots of hype and lots of productivity gurus praising it as the greatest thing, instilling FMO on others.
- pzo 4y ago
  4. People downplaying AI and ignoring AI completely.
Manjuuu 4y ago
3rd type of people: AGI.
go_prodev 4y ago
3. Virtual people. AI pretending to be human to prevent humans from taking their job.
- giaour 4y ago
  Don't forget about humans pretending to be an AI so that other humans will be impressed with how far AI has advanced: https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2020/04/04/artificial-or-human-intelligence-companies-faking-ai/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2020/04/04/artif...
m3kw9 4y ago
Or people just have no choice using AI baked into their once old tools
cwmoore 4y ago
Corporations are people.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
The language is all wrong here. You don't own your job. You are not entitled to perpetual payment for whatever it is you are doing. A job is not a possession. You are not being robbed of your job. You simply do labor in exchange for money based on the value of that labor. And sometimes you do that under some long term arrangement with an employer and sometimes based on more short term arrangements. Either way, the arrangement is entirely premised on what you do having value and being worth paying for. So, if the value of what you do changes, you need to adapt. It's not being stolen from you because you never owned it to begin with. The threat with AI for a lot of people is that what they do right now becomes less valuable. And people don't like change and feel threatened by it. Generally there are two solutions to that problem: 1) do something else that is more valuable or more worthy of your time. 2) figure out a way to scale what you do. For example by leveraging AI. For many people it might be a combination of the two. And for some people it will indeed mean that they need to figure out something else to do. But we'll still need to have an economy that is based on people earning some kind of income and then spending that income. The whole system grinds to a halt without that. If AI eliminates all the jobs, nobody would earn anything and be unable to spend. So, that's unlikely to happen. Economies are self regulating in the sense that people optimize for value. In the end AIs are just tools that people use to create value for each other. If an AI can do everything by itself at a very low cost that just means that what it does has low value and is not something that people will spend a lot of money on. Meaning that other things will emerge that they will spend their money on that are more valuable. Those things are probably going to involve human activity that is scarce in some way.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pnt12 4y ago
  This ignores the whole human part of a job. Many people are wage slaves: if they're job is gone, they have a big trouble. That's why they're scared of AI, that's why so many news count the potential jobs cuts: more fear means more clicks. There's also a lot of inequality, and AIs will push for a bigger gap, not smaller. If everyone is 20% more productive, does everyone get a 20% raise? Historically, no: the company gets the extra profit. So there's more to discuss than free market 101s, which don't capture the whole complexity of the world.
philote 4y ago
3. People who may want to try out AI to see if they're 1 or 2 but don't want to give ChatGPT their email and phone number to do so. Also, are people uploading their company's private code to ChatGPT to get its help? Wasn't there a big issue with ChatGPT leaking info recently?

deleted 4y ago

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debacle 4y ago

Unless we expect a grassroots AI luddite movement, this is hair splitting.

mistrial9 4y ago
play hype games, get hype prizes
pixl97 4y ago
With the cost of living in the US being completely out of control, and the potential for AI to gut wages in a number of high paid areas, why are we not expecting a new luddite movement? Or is this another case of not understanding why the luddites broke the machines in the first place?
- debacle 4y ago
  Americans are too divided to organize against something like this in any way.
- flangola7 4y ago
  People only think of the Luddites as stubborn and trying to hold back "progress" and not as the entire class of people whose life's work, passion, personal identity, and means of supporting themselves, was stripped away with no replacement. If you spent decades polishing your skills, took pride in your work and being a known expert and someone others could rely on, and made a comfortable living for yourself and your family doing it, it was would be horrible and devastating to watch it all slip through your fingers like sand. They weren't even given the comfort of still having a good income and comfortable life. The money they would have made for their hard earned work and skills was siphoned off by distant people in suits and jewelery who never had to put in a drop of sweat. They instead received such mockery that their name itself is now a derogatory term.
- oytis 4y ago
  Most of people don't work in these high paid areas, and there is no revolution in sight. Being newly impoverished is less pleasant than being poor, and we can expect some accidents there, but eventually people will probably adapt to the new normal.

blibble 4y ago

I for one can't wait for more contentless boilerplate to appear in every email, pull request, "customer service" conversation, etc

redundantGPT 4y ago
It's like inverse compression: Employee: Please expand these three bullet points into an email to my manager. Manager: Please summarize this email from my direct report in three bullet points.
klabb3 4y ago
Hi blibble, I notice you wrote an insightful comment so I decided to upvote it for your pleasure. Keep it up and make sure to follow me on all my social media. Sent from my GPT4 assistant

tosser0001 4y ago

I'm not necessarily concerned that I will be entirely without a job because of AI. What I am concerned with is that the aspects of my job that I derive pleasure from will be replaced by AI.

endorphine 4y ago
Can you provide some examples of aspects of your work that you're concerned about?
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  I enjoy learning about the design philosophy behind an API, or diving into a library to learn the "off the beaten path" workflows. That's where the magic optimizations or shortcuts live. So far, copilot just shows me the happiest path options for everything I've tried, and really falls over when it's not something that "Well this API looks like API_functionCall, so your query for <get X> must look like API_getX". It rarely does.
- cyrialize 4y ago
  Slightly related - there was a Reddit post about a person lamenting the changes in their job. [0] They make 3D models and they greatly enjoyed making models from scratch and taking 2-3 weeks to do so. Now with AI, they use tools to create a model - and then spend 2-3 days to update it. This is a productivity improvement, but it also took away a key thing they loved about their job. There isn't really a solution here at all, and the poster wasn't looking for solutions either. Just venting. We'll be seeing this more in the future, and I wouldn't be surprised if multiple people change careers over it. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35308498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35308498
thriftwy 4y ago
You cannot in good conscience be wishing to do menial tasks for a living, that AI can do for you and instead of you. That's how doing manual search and replace instead of search/replace in editor or computing stuff in spreadsheet by hand instead of using formulas. If you think AI's output is suboptimal, right. Maybe find a way to use/train AI better to produce good enough output. But simply wishing to out-robot a robot is pointless.

sagarmaruthi 4y ago

It sure will widen the already existing gap drastically.

snarf21 4y ago

This is a nonsense headline. This is the equivalent of "Factory automation won't steal your job, companies that buy factory automation will." Democratization of AI tools will have upsides and downsides but non researchers weren't playing around with AI text/chat generation before this last round of simple to use tools came out.

theGnuMe 4y ago
I think there is a big concern that this will destroy the middle class.
- pydry 4y ago
  Middle class got hollowed out a long time before this came along. Automation was always picked as a good scapegoat for the declining fortunes of the middle class because the inevitable forward march of progress is immune from pitchforks while oligarchs, landlords and bought politicians are not.
jandrese 4y ago
My thought was it read exactly like "Guns don't kill people, people who squeeze the trigger kill people." Technically right in a specific context but completely misses the point.
- cal85 4y ago
  What point does it miss?
  - snarf21 4y ago
    I would argue that the point is that AI WILL steal lots of jobs (directly or indirectly) and the directness of that theft is fairly irrelevant. :shrug:
    - cal85 4y ago
      It seems like you took the headline to mean something like "You don't need to worry about losing your job because of AI". That would make sense if you only read the first half of it. But the second half completely changes the meaning - it's saying you definitely do need to worry about losing your job because of AI (and maybe you should start taking action to avoid that fate). So I think you not only missed the point but interpreted it backwards.

gavinhoward 4y ago

I completely disagree. I'm building a business, and this business will be based on excellent software and excellent support for that software. I will refuse to use AI. But instead of AI users taking my job, I'm sure that refusing to use AI will become my differentiator as every AI user becomes more and more like each other. You may think that good AI users will not become so bland, but they will. Human laziness will drive them to accept more and more of what the AI says with less and less review of it. Thus, they will output stuff that, over time, is more pure AI, becoming more like the AI and more like each other. Having the human touch will be an advantage, not a disadvantage.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lolsowrong 4y ago
You’re an inspiration. I’m going to open an accounting firm and refuse to use calculators.
- lezojeda 4y ago
  [dead]
- tricksforfree 4y ago
  How often are calculators confidently wrong?
  - lolsowrong 4y ago
    Depends on the calculator. Floating point imprecision is well documented.
    - tricksforfree 4y ago
      That's true. But we know exactly why it can't do it.

throwaway22032 4y ago

It's a timescale, like all technological progress. Or even evolution. So you're working in a games development studio as a visual artist. At first you're producing renderings in Blender or whatever. Then, AI is able to generate three-dimensional meshes for you. You are in the loop, deciding that these meshes are suitable, which textures work, which are the best, designing the prompts, etc. This is 3D midjourney. At this point, you're now able to produce far more more quickly and it's likely that fewer artists are required within your company. Later, AI is able to more accurately decide which models will be preferred by the higher ups, or by the playerbase, better than you are as an artist. The AI has now replaced you as an artist. The software team or management simply ask the AI - "please produce me a set of fantasy character models for my game, with these characteristics". This is essentially GPT mixed with 3D midjourney. I'd say we're not far off, currently, from this point. Beyond that, perhaps the AI is then able to produce game rules, visual imagery, game engines etc than your company. The prompt "produce a doom clone with portals" results in a higher quality product than a team of humans working on it. We don't quite have that yet. Beyond that, the AI may be able to determine which games will be valued by the market and thus what is worth spending effort on. It could end up outcompeting all game studios. Move further and it may produce something which just up-ends the game industry entirely by producing a product which gamers prefer to spend their time on. I don't think that people quite grok the idea of what human-level or beyond AI actually is. By definition superhuman AI is more able than you are. The question is whether we will actually end up with it; that it will outcompete us if we create it is tautological.

hotpathdev 4y ago
With the progression of the technology, you may find there are not so many "in-between" steps as you expect in your current list. It will quickly go from the current stage "employee being more productive" to "steam, I want to play a game where <insert prompt here>". No need to generate art assets or have anything resembling a game engine, just pure interactive "imagination".
- throwaway22032 4y ago
  I agree. My belief is that in order to communicate my intuition about this it helps to provide discrete steps which explain the transition.

spark3k 4y ago

This is like saying tractors won't steal agricultural hand-ploughing jobs, the people building the tractors will. Technically true. But... stupid.

Spooky23 4y ago
Tractors and policy favoring bigger scale agricultural production. The US is profoundly inefficient at utilizing land for agriculture. The “miracle of the desert” and emptying a giant, un-renewable aquifer has been carrying us for decades. In my lifetime, we’ll be relying on small garden plots just like the Soviets did for vegetables.
Veen 4y ago
It's the people driving the tractors who take jobs, not the ones building them. If you operate a hand-plough for a living when tractors come on the scene, you'd better learn how to drive a tractor. The same is true of AI.
shadowgovt 4y ago
Is it stupid? Because people are railing against the AI, not the system of evaluating worth and distributing wealth that implies that the advent of a miraculous labor-saving technology should be met with fear, not excitement about expansion of the capabilities of every human being.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  I think this is right on. AI would be an amazing if it didn't mean that some people will have an even harder time making ends meet. Why does every technological innovation that improves productivity end up shifting even more resources to those at the top of the ladder?
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    The factory worker bemoans his station as the new automated smelter they're going to install may run him out of a job. Before he goes upstairs to commiserate with his spouse, he throws his dirty clothes in the washer, nary a care paid to the previous generation's neighbor children who used to make all their money washing other family's clothes for them. (Probably not too much thought should be paid to the fact that when that economic system collapsed, we instituted allowances for children).

Spooky23 4y ago

It’s the tech equivalent of “guns don’t kill people, people do” argument. Pretty inane. This stuff is going to nuke thousands of knowledge workers, either directly or via services. Is that a bad thing for society? Sure. Does that matter, no.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

j0057 4y ago

Reassuring read from someone unable to consistently write "ChatGPT" vs "ChatGTP".

dahart 4y ago

At some level it’s tautological. Initially I had a similar negative reaction other commenters had, but I think I’m deciding I like the people framing. Obviously this is not an either-or. It’s not a question of AI vs people, it’s both AI+people. But only people are making the choices. People are building AI, people who can use AI will choose to use it, and people who run businesses will choose to allow it and/or incorporate it. Just like jobs lost to immigration and/or outsourcing, the jobs aren’t being stolen, they’re being intentionally given to cheaper alternatives, by business people, without much worry about the consequences. It’s healthy for us to think about the AI revolution as a social & economic choice, because that’s what it really is.

Herval_freire 4y ago
No it's not healthy in my opinion. A drug addict doesn't exactly have a choice when he uses drugs. Aspects of human behavior in aggregate are so predictable it's basically deterministic. If AI one day matches or surpasses human intelligence it is obvious humanity will exploit that AI as it already is doing now. There is no actual "choice" here. Just an illusion of it.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  We've changed collective human behavior before though, outlawed slavery etc.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    And yet, even in countries where slavery is outlawed, it's still done - sometimes out in the open, sometimes behind closed doors. e.g. the US, where people in jail are exempt from all our progressive slave labor laws.
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      Be that as it may, the collective behavior and shape of society has undeniably changed.

xyzal 4y ago

I'd love if AI automated the 'talking to people' part of my job for me

morpheuskafka 4y ago

The article can't even spell "ChatGPT" right! And randomly makes words plural like "white collars job" and "a sure things." The author says they are a ghost writer and is confident they can do a better job than AI, and according to their bio they have written 100+ papers... I wouldn't be so confident that they are better than AI and writing stuff like this if this is their best work!

m3kw9 4y ago

Kinda disagree, AI will be eventually be built into all tools where appropriate and you will use it either you like it or not. Simple example: Photoshop. You may not know it but it uses AI. With ChatGPT etc, it will be in more tools. So relax, most people won’t need to lift a finger to leverage AI, it’s built in and is by default used

victoryhb 4y ago

Why should we listen to someone who cannot even spell "ChatGPT" right for opinions on AI?

JanneVee 4y ago

Well it isn't happening today. Just spent 20 minutes of my life chasing a GPT hallucination. No doubt that it will be more accurate sometime in the future but right now I'm faster without it.

baxuz 4y ago

"Guns don't kill people. People who use guns kill people"

photochemsyn 4y ago

I see this sentiment expressed frequently: > "The past decades have shown that the benefits of technology are unevenly distributed, with some rich becoming super-rich with a good portion of the people lagging behind. However, it is also fair to say that the average well being in the world has steadily increased." The average is far less important than the median, when it comes to social stability. You could argue that the establishment of plantation slavery in the American South improved the average wealth and leisure time relative to the pre-slavery economy, but the median would be highly skewed by a few people hoarding all the wealth and enjoying all the leisure time. In the case of AI, ensuring that the results of individual productivity gains are not hoarded by the uber-wealthy is important. If AI helps an employee finish what used to be a 12-hour job in just 6 hours, why not cut the employee's working hours in half while retaining the same salary, instead of giving the executive suite another million-dollar compensation boost? A 30-hr work week, enabled by AI assistance, would mean people had more time for community engagement, family interaction, personal development and so on, leading to healthier societies.

Aerroon 4y ago
I'm not sure I agree with that assertion in the first place. Life has improved a lot for most people, but it has improved in ways that you don't really notice. Your car is safer, your apartment is safer, your neighbor's apartment is safer (so it's less likely to burn down yours), there's less crime, there's less hunger, there's more available life saving medicines etc etc. These improvements just aren't all that noticeable. But this is the stuff that really matters. Whether the wealthiest person's bank account shows an extra zero or not means very little in comparison to your kid being able to get medicine for a disease that wasn't treatable 30 years ago.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - kfkfodlnfkfdk 4y ago
    I know people below the poverty line who have access to cheap forms of insulin that didn't even exist fifty years ago because rich people funded the research They wouldn't even be alive if your lie was true

nmz 4y ago

I suppose HN is unwilling to admit to itself of the obvious societal demerits they are enabling. Lying to oneself is I suppose very human, and exactly what you would expect of someone doing something unethical. The same thing happened with crypto.

davidkuennen 4y ago

I've been using GPT-4 to translate my app into new languages. Saved me thousands of dollars in the past few weeks. I used to pay translators for that, but GPT-4 translation is so good. I'd argue domain specific even better than a translator.

dbancajas 4y ago
How do you know the translations are accurate if you don't speak the native language?
- davidkuennen 4y ago
  I compared it to past translations the translators did and also my native language. That's how I gained the confidence it'd do just as well with new languages.

anonzzzies 4y ago

But everyone knows this right? It’s been happening now for months and the fallout has been interesting. The people who refuse to use it are either the top of something (money/iq/eq etc) or will not make it (it is the current status and job and income level) as they can trivially be replaced soon (and now).

proc0 4y ago

Seems like a pedantic argument. Obviously there is always a human behind it unless it's sentient and can make its own decisions, at which point there are much bigger ethical considerations to discuss first.

js8 4y ago
But that's the point of stating it, isn't it? The people like Yudkowski or Musk who warn against AI are typically worried about the later scenario, not about "it will take jobs".

ModernMech 4y ago

I've already stolen 4 jobs for myself. I was getting ready to hire a team for my project, but now I don't have to. However... I didn't have money to hire that team in the first place, so the project was actually stalled to the point of collapse, and those 4 jobs never would have existed. Now with AI I have enough capacity myself to push it further, and so perhaps I'll get to the point where I can actually hire people to work on the project. In that sense, AI will be responsible for those jobs being created.

WFHRenaissance 4y ago

Instead of OmniTron3000 stealing your job, it will be Joe AND OmnioTron3000 stealing your job.

paxys 4y ago

If there are 100 manual jobs today and 80 AI-assisted jobs tomorrow then AI has "stolen" 20 jobs. There's really no other way to frame it. The added productivity gains are going into someone's pocket, and if you are in the labor class then that someone isn't you.

carlosjobim 4y ago
AI is yet another technology that can help you escape the labor class.

substation13 4y ago

I am finding the combination of LLMs and strongly-typed functional programming to be incredibly potent. By building programs out of small, single-purpose pure functions, it is much easier to review the output of the LLM, whilst also giving me the ability to grok and steer the overall direction of the code. A traditional type-checker catches many of the looks-right-but-is-subtly-wrong hallucinations too.

a4isms 4y ago

"Computers will not steal your job. People leveraging computers will steal your job." —1963, 1973, 1983, 1993...2023

amelius 4y ago

Yeah, the billionaires who have armies of AI bots. Eventually, anyways.

floor_ 4y ago

"AI don't take jobs from people, people take jobs from people." We hear this kind of argument from gun lovers all the time.

clbrmbr 4y ago

Stopped reading when I got to “ChatGTP” tbh.

globalise83 4y ago

I think this is right. There is no AI in the foreseeable future that would be able to understand a complex business, prioritise and roadmap some future strategy, and convert that into business requirements detailed enough to implement as working software, architect a proper solution, and then work with an AI to develop and verify the software through an incremental development process. But I do believe that there are some people who could work with GPT 6 or 7 to achieve that. And those people would be productive enough to replace a whole team of product owner, architect, designer, developers, etc. and will therefore become very rich.

lnsru 4y ago
You can outsource everything right now to some dirt cheap offshore team. I doubt, that outsourcing alone will make you very rich.
- globalise83 4y ago
  Outsourcing to a team of cheap offshore developers has immense coordination costs for whoever is doing the outsourcing: communication, clarification verification, etc. Outsourcing to an AI has virtually none: feedback is instant, you can check understanding easily, you can specify exactly what you want to get back. And the costs are dramatically lower than even the cheapest of outsourcers. Whoever can orchestrate the activity of an AI will capture nearly all of the value.

throwaw12 4y ago

strange wording > It is not AI that will end up stealing your job, > it will be stolen by people that have learnt to use AI to become more productive This is by definition AI stealing your job. AI will not come and say: hey move on, I will do this job, everything is accomplished indirectly. With same logic you can say, there are no bad politicians, it's people who are following their advice are bad

weatherlite 4y ago

AI won't steal your job, it will legally take it.

gspencley 4y ago

I'm not as worried about AI "stealing" my job as I am worried that it's going to make my job unappealing. As a software engineer, what motivates me most is the creative aspect of it. I like building and designing things. I like thinking about every line of code that I write. If people start outsourcing their coding to generative AI, and if I find myself feeling pressured to follow suit in order to keep up, then everything I enjoy about coding goes away.

gpanders 4y ago
I completely agree. Many of the recent articles and blog posts written by AI enthusiasts giving examples of how AI makes their job "easier" or "more productive" just demonstrates this to me even further. What they call "more productive" looks to me like "incredibly boring". In addition, another point I don't often see mentioned is the alarmingly likely possibility that all AI-enhanced software engineering will go through these tools that are owned by 1 or 2 (American) tech companies. Are people really excited about a future where you can't even perform the basics of your skillset without depending on a Microsoft service? We are rapidly advancing toward a future where a single company owns the most popular text editor, the most popular code hosting platform, (one of) the most used cloud infrastructure platforms, and soon, if the AI enthusiasts have it right, the tool that will be a "necessity" to even write code at all. If that future unfolds, I will leave software voluntarily long before I get "replaced".
- patrickmay 4y ago
  Emacs will always be here.
newhotelowner 4y ago
It depeneds on what you are working on and your position. Isn't it a lot of code is repitative? Test cases are mostly repitative. AI can help you with that and your productivity increase significantly. I write code/program mostly to make my life easier and well I like to write to code. And AI/copilot just helps me write the better code faster.

doomleika 4y ago

Cop out. You can replace AI with X where X is significant climate changer and it will be always true. What AIGC is capable today will displace a large amount of workforce and many of them won’t be able to keep up the change(be it age, skills that were valuable but now nullified by AIGC). Chaos is a ladder but that doesn’t justify the pretenses of Darwinism.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

softwaredoug 4y ago

Everyone’s worried about AI taking their software jobs, yet humanity faces existential problems around climate change, poverty, failed states, etc. And huge opportunities like space exploration and better health care. Maybe this has more to do with our ego - losing perceived status as masters of the universe, when in reality hard, intractable problems exist more than ever. Why aren’t we changing to work on them? Maybe the cost of software development has been actually a barrier to solving many of these problems, and society may be better off without that cost? Are we the baddies?

JohnBerryman 4y ago
I think that ego/status is a big part of it. And the loss aversion bias. Our thought process is "This thing is going to be able to do software as well as a human, therefor it is going to take my job." When a more optimistic and probably more realistic take is "This thing is going to do the boring parts of software, so I can spend my time building out the more interesting, big-picture parts of code. I'm going to be so much more productive." But the fear of loss is so much more distracting than the potential gain. ... And what is it that we fear losing? Status! Software development is in high demand, it's a sought after role, we feel "special".

leshow 4y ago

And realize that as workers become more productive, wages will not increase. More wealth will be created per unit of time, but that wealth will likely not be realized by the average worker.

cameronfraser 4y ago

Everyone that knows what they are talking about have already been saying this. This is what the narrative actually is. Not AI replacing humans.

nomy99 4y ago

Interesting anecdote: I was interviewing a full stack developer, and I asked him to build a simple react UI. He was allowed to use google, but couldn't come up with a solution. He then said if he had access to chatGPT, he could've solved it..We didn't hire him, but should that be an expectation? Can you use chatGPT on an interview?

andrei_says_ 4y ago

Can we please adjust the framing about jobs? Another employee will not steal your job. Your employer may “steal” your job and give your job to someone who convinces them they can do it cheaper. In the new era of ai-augmented white collar work this process will get faster. But let’s remember it’s always the employer who makes the decision and stop using language implying the existence of “job thieves” of some kind and completely excluding the employers’ choice in the process.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
I don't care how we frame it so long as the framing is consistent. What really gets me itching to fire up the guillotine is when people flip flop between stealing and progress based on who's doing it and who it's happening to.

kypro 4y ago

I hate this take. I have no idea why some people believe that in the future years of experience in a field like software engineering will no longer be marketable skill, but typing some stuff into a text box will be. It's like an elevator operator arguing that automation of elevators will make their jobs easier overlooking the fact that if literally anyone can do the job then they're probably not going to be needed. I'm not saying there won't be people in the future typing commands into an input field either, but the point is that this doesn't take any real experience and if it is a job it will be paid extremely poorly. Yes, in the present it might make you more productive compared to your co-workers, but in a few years don't be surprised if other people learn they can also write text into an input field and they might just decide to do it themselves.

eur0pa 4y ago

It's not the fall that kills you, it's the landing

toss1 4y ago

Contrary conjecture: As with many "productivity enhancements", these AIs[0] will streamline some work to the point of practical elimination, but will in the end make more work, by enabling higher-level tasks to be doable instead of just imagined. It seems a lot of the missing "productivity enhancements" from the PC and internet revolutions don't appear because people didn't net get fired, they just started doing different tasks (TBD whether those are actually useful, but evidently most managers think they are). Oblig car analogy - more highways induce demand for travel by making it easier, so the net is that traffic is worse; similarly, this may induce demand for work. [0] these are artificial, but not intelligent; it is predictive models with insane amounts of ingested data. Whether text, code, or images, it speeds production in middle-of-the-road cases, but cannot figure out what to produce. There's no more evidence of reasoning than that an image in a mirror is evidence of skilled kinesiology. With an actual reasoning AGI, the conjecture would be quite different.

justinzollars 4y ago

I'm seeing a lot of AI doomerism. I'm incredibly optimistic about AI, recently ChatGTP helped me debug a Neovim/Microsoft Language Server bug related to symlinks - I couldn't have done it on my own but asking the right questions helped me tease out a production bug related with gopls.

alentred 4y ago

I think it is important for the context to notice that the post is written by a renowned Italian mathematician and a computer scientist, and Italy just banned ChatGPT. I feel that the post is not about the AI (people using AI) taking the jobs, but about whether it is a good idea to blindly ignore the fact.

agentultra 4y ago

This is a useful distinction, I think, to make: the current hype cycle and headlines are making it sound like we have invented autonomous, intelligent beings with super-human abilities of their own. "AI," is such a poor, non-descriptive term that it allows charlatans and click-bait to proliferate and scare non-technical, uninformed people. They can bend their claims any way they want. The people using these technologies under the banner of "AI" definitely want you to believe it's a revolutionary, fundamental, paradigm-shifting technology that will utterly change society: and they're the only ones that can bring it to you. This isn't a public, social project for the good of society. We're seeing classic capitalist moves to make first-mover advantage to leverage this technology. Too much of this hype-cycle shares the same characteristics of the crypto-bubble from last year: it's revolutionary and inevitable and will completely change society! We need to educate people on what these technologies actually are and not let people sell the public on speculation and science-fiction "what ifs."

LinuxBender 4y ago

My unpopular opinion is that people adopting this type of machine learning will have some benefits and some speed-bumps and obstacles. As GPT iterates through a myriad of versions, improvements, restrictions, filters businesses will have to work around legal challenges, shadow biases, confidently incorrect interpretations and of course dependencies on a rate limited cloud service unless all future iterations become open source, self hosted and distributed and everyone can agree on what data-sets to ingest and what should be filtered/excluded for legal, accuracy and other reasons. Businesses taking this on early will need to be ready to quickly change course on the fly especially as new legislation catches up. I think the biggest obstacle could be the lack of showing ones work when legal issues will arise. There isn't a "debug last answer" to get forensic data on how the answer what achieved. I am curious how a cranky judge may respond to "because the AI said so". Another potential risk could be if shadow biases dynamic filtering, dynamic algorithms, dynamic tuning based on social, economic or political preferences of the ML operator, get too aggressive and people start to realize their financial decisions are being manipulated and impacted artificially by automation even more so than occurs today on social media platforms. I do not know how businesses or governments may react to this.

uconnectlol 4y ago

What's this constant obsession with "stealing jobs"? The tech industry has been dead for something like 30 years. There is zero intellectual design being put into it. Music is just a bunch of sellouts. You know how "content creators" do that cringy shit where they try to base their life around monetizing their "content"? That's how "musicians" worked before the internet. I couldn't care less how their jobs are threatened. Journalists are obviously no better. I don't miss Blockbuster. I don't miss PSTN operators. I don't miss building pyramids by hand. Work / money itself is an absurd concept and not something to spend 100% of our time worrying about. As technological capability increases, there will just be a point where food and everything will be handed out for free. And mundane people will still be worse off by their own choosing. And perhaps some shoddy company like Amazon Google Apple etc will be the one doing this so they will use this to enforce their political viewpoint instead of honoring the non aggression principle.

sharemywin 4y ago
> As technological capability increases, there will just be a point where food and everything will be handed out for free. that's not the trend line I'm seeing.
- uconnectlol 4y ago
  Most jobs are worthless and shouldn't be artificially preserved. The end game of AI is just doing nothing and still having a roof and food. It's not like we're going to have human manual labor picking apples. At which point all of these people who sold out and made their what would otherwise be an intellectual job into something profitable, will have no value.
- gpgn 4y ago
  yeah, no way "food will be handed out for free" when you can make a profit by selling it; they'd rather throw it away (as they do right now) than give it away for free
  - uconnectlol 4y ago

somsak2 4y ago

AI won't steal your scrolling, this website will

drewcoo 4y ago

Ah, the old "guns don't kill people" argument. That will distract us all from the dangers of weaponized AI.

aaroninsf 4y ago

Surprisingly, there is no apparent discussion here about the fact that this argument parrots, precisely, the rightly-derided original, "guns don't kill people, people do." There is an interesting way in which this is different, though, which is that the current lack of agency by AI is going to prove a very short window, most of all for the sort of agency of interest here, "who" is deciding which jobs to cut. Anyone with a loan or insurance denied on the basis of "what the computer said" would rightly already contend that there is sufficient agency to yes, steal your job.

qgin 4y ago

1 person leveraging AI will steal 10 jobs. It’s not a 1 to 1 replacement.

jacknews 4y ago

So assuming the same output is required, if people wielding AI are more productive, you'll need less people. . But we're missing an important point, as far as software development or at least web development/user-centered apps goes at least, if not many other situations; We will need less software, not more, and the software we will need will be much more infrastructure and 'industrial'. For example, currently I might go to a units conversion website to do a quick cooking calculation. chatGPT. I go to a weather website (always via google, because I never remember the website names) to check the weather. chatGPT. I want some information on my stocks, and their outlook. chatGPT - can summarize the price movements and the 'buzz' around said stocks without wading through pages of web UI. I want to book a holiday. Instead of wading through ad- and promotion- laden booking sites, chatGPT. The authors example of 'writing articles'. Why bother reading them? Unless it's reading for pleasure, do I want to seek out a particular publication and wade through a load of fluff to get the meat of what I want to inform myself about? No, just ask chatGPT. Sure it's going to have to learn to present results neatly in tables and pictures and so on, and it's going to have to use plugins to get actual answers to some things. And I don't want to have to type at it all the time, so I'll want some 'promptmarks' or something more sophisticated. But all these websites that we're worried GPT will write for us, unemploying developers - it's 'worse' than that - the sites won't be needed to start with. As for other stuff, say news, why bother getting chatGPT to write a styory for a page on NYT or whatever. I can just ask GPT 'whats up' and it'll tell me news. Sure for all this, it's not quite there yet, but I think the writing is on the chat-box, er, wall. . The other main issue being missed is capitalism. We've enjoyed a golden age of creation where basically all you need is a laptop and some open-source software, and you can code, or write articles, draw artwoks or whatever. Albeit you have to use infratructure to distribute that code or make it available online etc. With AI, the means of production will suddenly change from a laptop, to multi-million dollar models, owned by someone else. That could have a profound effect on who gets to create, and under what conditions.