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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

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.
      - snarf21 4y ago
        Exactly, the headline should be "AI WILL steal your job!". How it will steal it is irrelevant to one's loss of job.
  - harimau777 4y ago
    People willing to replace workers with lower cost options always existed; however, AI is an enabling factor. People willing to murder always existed; however, guns are an enabling factor. As I understanding, the parent's argument is that focusing on the person willing to do the action is not useful because they were always there. What has changed is the enabling factor.
  - jandrese 4y ago
    The degree to which it enables undesirable behavior. A disturbed guy may want to murder everybody in a nightclub, but his chances of success go way up when he has a gun vs. a knife. A company owner may want to automate your job away, but without AI the automation is too expensive and unreliable. The big concern with AI isn't so much the Terminator future, but the Cyberpunk future, where all wealth is concentrated at the top and economic mobility is stopped. A dysfunctional feudal system that is impossible to reform because the small handful of people who own everything also control the politics and the police.
    - cal85 4y ago
      Sounds like you took the headline to mean "There's no concern about AI", but in fact it explicitly highlights an important concern for many: if you fail to keep up, you will lose your job. I am puzzled so many here seem to have not read the second half of the headline before commenting that the headline missed "the point". The point is in the second half.
      - jandrese 4y ago
        You are still missing the point. It currently requires 100 people with your job to get all of the work done. With AI this can be reduced to 1 person. All you serfs get to fight over who gets to be the lucky 1%er. In the past when faced with a situation like this the solution is to find a different job entirely, but every time this repeats finding a different job becomes even more difficult. Eventually we have to start reconsidering how we have structured society, but this would ultimately be a loss of power and prestige for the current winners in society and since they have excess influence in politics it isn't going to happen.
      - LegitShady 4y ago
        If you keep up you may lose your job anyways, as productivity increases due to ai may just mean fewer jobs. Thats the point that is made about AI taking jobs in general - this person seems to reference it in the headline but then dives into a different unrelated argument so is basically clickbaiting.
- pzo 4y ago
  Even if sceptic of AI are right, the gun/trigger analogy will still apply - because in short term those still big group who will embrace AI are those people that starts pulling the triggers. They will have adventage over those that prefer to stay samurai and not touch those guns.
cal85 4y ago
The headline is a pithy statement that those who ignore AI will be left behind, just as those who ignore automation were left behind. I don't think it means what you seem to think it means.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Ironically, the advice from some circles for those left behind by automation was "learn to code".
  - cal85 4y ago
    Which was good advice, and I would argue still is. But even if you think it is no longer good advice, would you at least accept it was good advice for a very long time, leading to a lot of lucrative careers?
fnordpiglet 4y ago
I think it’s absurd as well. Jobs won’t be stolen, different jobs will be created. At a certain point we will move past scarcity, and maybe we won’t have to labor to not die. What’s so important about a job? Humans need meaning, but meaning doesn’t have to be delivered by PayChex at the expense of the human soul.
- flangola7 4y ago
  Ultimately the whole number of jobs will decrease, in the same way that cars didn't create new jobs for horses. I'm definitely not opposed to post scarcity. I do wonder how you feel about the replacement of social "jobs" in the world. Models like GPT roleplay a girlfriend, parent, colleague at least as well as it roleplays a developer or a scriptwriter. I don't think many people have those consequences in mind yet.
- vitehozonage 4y ago
  >At a certain point we will move past scarcity, and maybe we won’t have to labor to not die. Society seems to be globally showing very decisively that it wont allow that to happen. Productivity has already increased massively. Society could have already used that productivity to decrease the hours that each person has to work to survive. Instead, society's structure pushes those profits to the owners of the businesses that run the technology. 'Working class people must work full time' is still such a fundamental part of culture that it is literally the Federal Reserve's mandate to maximise employment.
- oytis 4y ago
  Not having to labor is attractive to someone who has a solid foundation of accumulated wealth - at least a house with a garden in a first world country inherited from parents. For the rest of us skilled labor was (and still is for a while) a means to accumulate some wealth, get an own place to live, move to a different country we want to live in, get some things like travelling an hobbies that are not strictly necessary, but pleasant to have. If labor doesn't serve this purpose any more, it's unlikely that something else will, not in our lifetime at least
  - 4y ago
alentred 4y ago
I think the message here is that you are in control of what happens to you next. In this regard the headline and the post are fine. Well, unless you subscribe to the other philosophy camp (determinism). The message is not on whether AI will change the jobs or not, of course it will. It may eliminate some, reduce others, change most, and likely create a few new ones instead. The point is about how people chose to react to it, and specifically that "putting the head under the sand" and crying later that AI took the jobs away is not going to help; accepting that the world changes and that you can do something about it and then leveraging it will. Is it possible that some specific jobs disappear in several years from now, just like it was the case with factories, automation, etc.? Yes indeed it can. They may be taken by people leveraging AI (your boss, your company, your colleague). You can ignore the fact, or accept it and learn to leverage the same tools for your benefit, or better - the benefit of the society. Lots of "analogies" are given in various threads here, like "Guns don't kill people, people who squeeze the trigger kill people" and "It is not the fall that kills you, but the landing". I do not agree. Sure you can argue any of the two sides, that's the whole point of these statements. They just serve to focus your argument on one side or another.

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.
    - snarf21 4y ago
      Exactly, the headline should be "AI WILL steal your job!". How it will steal it is irrelevant to one's loss of job.
- harimau777 4y ago
  People willing to replace workers with lower cost options always existed; however, AI is an enabling factor. People willing to murder always existed; however, guns are an enabling factor. As I understanding, the parent's argument is that focusing on the person willing to do the action is not useful because they were always there. What has changed is the enabling factor.
- jandrese 4y ago
  The degree to which it enables undesirable behavior. A disturbed guy may want to murder everybody in a nightclub, but his chances of success go way up when he has a gun vs. a knife. A company owner may want to automate your job away, but without AI the automation is too expensive and unreliable. The big concern with AI isn't so much the Terminator future, but the Cyberpunk future, where all wealth is concentrated at the top and economic mobility is stopped. A dysfunctional feudal system that is impossible to reform because the small handful of people who own everything also control the politics and the police.
  - cal85 4y ago
    Sounds like you took the headline to mean "There's no concern about AI", but in fact it explicitly highlights an important concern for many: if you fail to keep up, you will lose your job. I am puzzled so many here seem to have not read the second half of the headline before commenting that the headline missed "the point". The point is in the second half.
    - jandrese 4y ago
      You are still missing the point. It currently requires 100 people with your job to get all of the work done. With AI this can be reduced to 1 person. All you serfs get to fight over who gets to be the lucky 1%er. In the past when faced with a situation like this the solution is to find a different job entirely, but every time this repeats finding a different job becomes even more difficult. Eventually we have to start reconsidering how we have structured society, but this would ultimately be a loss of power and prestige for the current winners in society and since they have excess influence in politics it isn't going to happen.
    - LegitShady 4y ago
      If you keep up you may lose your job anyways, as productivity increases due to ai may just mean fewer jobs. Thats the point that is made about AI taking jobs in general - this person seems to reference it in the headline but then dives into a different unrelated argument so is basically clickbaiting.
pzo 4y ago
Even if sceptic of AI are right, the gun/trigger analogy will still apply - because in short term those still big group who will embrace AI are those people that starts pulling the triggers. They will have adventage over those that prefer to stay samurai and not touch those guns.

cal85 4y ago

The headline is a pithy statement that those who ignore AI will be left behind, just as those who ignore automation were left behind. I don't think it means what you seem to think it means.

AlexandrB 4y ago
Ironically, the advice from some circles for those left behind by automation was "learn to code".
- cal85 4y ago
  Which was good advice, and I would argue still is. But even if you think it is no longer good advice, would you at least accept it was good advice for a very long time, leading to a lot of lucrative careers?

fnordpiglet 4y ago

I think it’s absurd as well. Jobs won’t be stolen, different jobs will be created. At a certain point we will move past scarcity, and maybe we won’t have to labor to not die. What’s so important about a job? Humans need meaning, but meaning doesn’t have to be delivered by PayChex at the expense of the human soul.

flangola7 4y ago
Ultimately the whole number of jobs will decrease, in the same way that cars didn't create new jobs for horses. I'm definitely not opposed to post scarcity. I do wonder how you feel about the replacement of social "jobs" in the world. Models like GPT roleplay a girlfriend, parent, colleague at least as well as it roleplays a developer or a scriptwriter. I don't think many people have those consequences in mind yet.
vitehozonage 4y ago
>At a certain point we will move past scarcity, and maybe we won’t have to labor to not die. Society seems to be globally showing very decisively that it wont allow that to happen. Productivity has already increased massively. Society could have already used that productivity to decrease the hours that each person has to work to survive. Instead, society's structure pushes those profits to the owners of the businesses that run the technology. 'Working class people must work full time' is still such a fundamental part of culture that it is literally the Federal Reserve's mandate to maximise employment.
oytis 4y ago
Not having to labor is attractive to someone who has a solid foundation of accumulated wealth - at least a house with a garden in a first world country inherited from parents. For the rest of us skilled labor was (and still is for a while) a means to accumulate some wealth, get an own place to live, move to a different country we want to live in, get some things like travelling an hobbies that are not strictly necessary, but pleasant to have. If labor doesn't serve this purpose any more, it's unlikely that something else will, not in our lifetime at least
- 4y ago

alentred 4y ago

I think the message here is that you are in control of what happens to you next. In this regard the headline and the post are fine. Well, unless you subscribe to the other philosophy camp (determinism). The message is not on whether AI will change the jobs or not, of course it will. It may eliminate some, reduce others, change most, and likely create a few new ones instead. The point is about how people chose to react to it, and specifically that "putting the head under the sand" and crying later that AI took the jobs away is not going to help; accepting that the world changes and that you can do something about it and then leveraging it will. Is it possible that some specific jobs disappear in several years from now, just like it was the case with factories, automation, etc.? Yes indeed it can. They may be taken by people leveraging AI (your boss, your company, your colleague). You can ignore the fact, or accept it and learn to leverage the same tools for your benefit, or better - the benefit of the society. Lots of "analogies" are given in various threads here, like "Guns don't kill people, people who squeeze the trigger kill people" and "It is not the fall that kills you, but the landing". I do not agree. Sure you can argue any of the two sides, that's the whole point of these statements. They just serve to focus your argument on one side or another.