4 ms·

> Because AI is nowhere close to replace a large swath of jobs? It's nowhere close now. 10 years ago we were nowhere close to generative AI. How will the AI la

by M4v3R 3y ago

> Because AI is nowhere close to replace a large swath of jobs? It's nowhere close now. 10 years ago we were nowhere close to generative AI. How will the AI landscape look in the next 10-20 years? There's a non-zero chance that it will be ready by then to replace many jobs.

criley2 3y ago
There's a "non-zero" chance all life on earth is eradicated in an extinction event like a gamma ray burst too. That phrase is just smarter sounding weasel words. With regards to generative AI replacing jobs, it seems to me that AI is best at replacing jobs I have a layman's understanding of, and AI is no good at replacing jobs I have a professional understanding in. For example, I am not a lawyer or doctor therefore it seems trivial to me that AI will replace much of what lawyers and doctors do. Both boil down to reading a libraries worth of information and then making sense of it right? Bam, easy for AI. However, I'm a professional engineer and I know how extremely complex and difficult computer science is to get right, especially at scale, therefore I'll eat my hat if in 10 years you can write "Create a facebook clone that can support 500 million simultaneous users" and the AI does anything but hallucinate nonsense that won't work. (There's also the reality that there is far more to large scale software than what can be typed into a computer or repeated by an AI, but hey, details). I'll also point out that 10 years is not so long. 10 years ago Elon Musk told us AI was replacing driving and taxis. 2015 that feature was launched. 10 years later... not so much.
- anonylizard 3y ago
  "it seems to me that AI is best at replacing jobs I have a layman's understanding of, and AI is no good at replacing jobs I have a professional understanding in." You attribute this to a 'bias of underestimating other people's jobs' I attribute this to a 'bias of overestimate our own jobs'. Most programmer jobs do not involve facebook clones that support 500 million users. Most programmer jobs are boring crud apps for random companies in traditional industries. Just think of what the outsourcing mills in India produce, and how many people they employ, then think again about how many jobs generative AI replace. Also, Hollywood rapidly organised to try to slow down AI. They could see, very evidently, how extremely rapidly AI was advancing, and how lethal the threat is to them.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    The actors and writers guilds moved to protect their interests against studios abusing AI.
  - asadotzler 3y ago
    Far easier to AI fake Jim Carey speaking on camera, even doing acrobatics, than it is to AI fake the development of even a tiny piece of novel UI in an app. The reason is we have lots of footage of Jim Carey doing those things and so we can easily recreate him doing those kinds of things. We can probably even put entertaining words in his mouth via AI because we have the entire history of human writing in the model so we should be able to easily create something semi-novel and funny to have him say. What these models cannot do is thoughtfully interview users, evaluate designs on functionality and aesthetics (and perhaps brand) and build an app that looks and behaves well but very different/distinct from existing apps. The novelty is the hard part for these AIs. Even that AI Jim Carey script will reflect or outright steal from the training data. This is why actors came together to say no. It's just too easy, today, to steal their likenesses and do things they would themselves never agree to do. If you're building yet another clone app or site, you too are like these actors, only you're unprotected because too many of us over the last couple of decades were foolishly saying we had it good, the sodas were free, and there was nothing to complain about. If, on the other hand, you're doing something novel, creative, and interesting, you will be fine, better than fine, you will be able to command a premium over the AIs and all the loser might as well be AIs who thought they were too good for a union.
tnel77 3y ago
While I am not terribly worried about the jobs over the next 3-5 years, I am worried about what the landscape will look like in 10-20 years. If the white collar jobs are getting wiped out and we lose a bunch of blue collar jobs like warehouse work and trucking, it’s going to be a real rough time for the economy.
asadotzler 3y ago
Who knows, because that'll take breakthroughs we don't have yet. Where we are now, however, probably cannot evolve much further, so this is kinda what you're gonna get from this period for AI probably for a while. Transformers plus all the web's content and a bit of chat UI and this is what you get from the 2010s breakthroughs. It's a pretty decent auto-complete service but not one that's likely to change the world in profound ways. Recall that we've had many eras of AI, going back into the '70s with expert systems and back propagation that led to neural networks that got a lot of investment in the '80s along with early machine learning and advances in speech recognition and computer vision. The '90s work spent a lot on probabilistic and Bayesian methods, SVMs and Q-learning, then we got big data and deep learning, and don't forget Siri and Roomba to round out the 2000s era, the one that came before the current regime. What the next breakthrough and investment era will bring, we cannot say. It may be a minor leap or a major one. We just don't know.

by M4v3R 3y ago

criley2 3y ago

There's a "non-zero" chance all life on earth is eradicated in an extinction event like a gamma ray burst too. That phrase is just smarter sounding weasel words. With regards to generative AI replacing jobs, it seems to me that AI is best at replacing jobs I have a layman's understanding of, and AI is no good at replacing jobs I have a professional understanding in. For example, I am not a lawyer or doctor therefore it seems trivial to me that AI will replace much of what lawyers and doctors do. Both boil down to reading a libraries worth of information and then making sense of it right? Bam, easy for AI. However, I'm a professional engineer and I know how extremely complex and difficult computer science is to get right, especially at scale, therefore I'll eat my hat if in 10 years you can write "Create a facebook clone that can support 500 million simultaneous users" and the AI does anything but hallucinate nonsense that won't work. (There's also the reality that there is far more to large scale software than what can be typed into a computer or repeated by an AI, but hey, details). I'll also point out that 10 years is not so long. 10 years ago Elon Musk told us AI was replacing driving and taxis. 2015 that feature was launched. 10 years later... not so much.

anonylizard 3y ago
"it seems to me that AI is best at replacing jobs I have a layman's understanding of, and AI is no good at replacing jobs I have a professional understanding in." You attribute this to a 'bias of underestimating other people's jobs' I attribute this to a 'bias of overestimate our own jobs'. Most programmer jobs do not involve facebook clones that support 500 million users. Most programmer jobs are boring crud apps for random companies in traditional industries. Just think of what the outsourcing mills in India produce, and how many people they employ, then think again about how many jobs generative AI replace. Also, Hollywood rapidly organised to try to slow down AI. They could see, very evidently, how extremely rapidly AI was advancing, and how lethal the threat is to them.
- hef19898 3y ago
  The actors and writers guilds moved to protect their interests against studios abusing AI.
- asadotzler 3y ago
  Far easier to AI fake Jim Carey speaking on camera, even doing acrobatics, than it is to AI fake the development of even a tiny piece of novel UI in an app. The reason is we have lots of footage of Jim Carey doing those things and so we can easily recreate him doing those kinds of things. We can probably even put entertaining words in his mouth via AI because we have the entire history of human writing in the model so we should be able to easily create something semi-novel and funny to have him say. What these models cannot do is thoughtfully interview users, evaluate designs on functionality and aesthetics (and perhaps brand) and build an app that looks and behaves well but very different/distinct from existing apps. The novelty is the hard part for these AIs. Even that AI Jim Carey script will reflect or outright steal from the training data. This is why actors came together to say no. It's just too easy, today, to steal their likenesses and do things they would themselves never agree to do. If you're building yet another clone app or site, you too are like these actors, only you're unprotected because too many of us over the last couple of decades were foolishly saying we had it good, the sodas were free, and there was nothing to complain about. If, on the other hand, you're doing something novel, creative, and interesting, you will be fine, better than fine, you will be able to command a premium over the AIs and all the loser might as well be AIs who thought they were too good for a union.

tnel77 3y ago

While I am not terribly worried about the jobs over the next 3-5 years, I am worried about what the landscape will look like in 10-20 years. If the white collar jobs are getting wiped out and we lose a bunch of blue collar jobs like warehouse work and trucking, it’s going to be a real rough time for the economy.

asadotzler 3y ago

Who knows, because that'll take breakthroughs we don't have yet. Where we are now, however, probably cannot evolve much further, so this is kinda what you're gonna get from this period for AI probably for a while. Transformers plus all the web's content and a bit of chat UI and this is what you get from the 2010s breakthroughs. It's a pretty decent auto-complete service but not one that's likely to change the world in profound ways. Recall that we've had many eras of AI, going back into the '70s with expert systems and back propagation that led to neural networks that got a lot of investment in the '80s along with early machine learning and advances in speech recognition and computer vision. The '90s work spent a lot on probabilistic and Bayesian methods, SVMs and Q-learning, then we got big data and deep learning, and don't forget Siri and Roomba to round out the 2000s era, the one that came before the current regime. What the next breakthrough and investment era will bring, we cannot say. It may be a minor leap or a major one. We just don't know.