6 ms·

Jon Stewart on AI: It's replacing us in the workforce now

25 points by hotdailys 3y ago

nabla9 3y ago
My sincere hope is that that would happen. Especially in medium and high income jobs in mass scale. Working for living is a problem to be solved. The purpose of technology is to automate things, increase free time. The purpose of politics is to distribute gains justly, whatever that is.
- swid 3y ago
  Good luck distributing gains justly when the masses have nothing of value to bargain with. Politics will likely continue to be co-opted by people who can pay; either directly or through other means of coercion. There used to be a lot more horses… I’m finding 25 million in the US in 1920 compared with 3.8 million today. Of course, they can no longer occupy the niche in society they used to, and so like in nature; when the niche is removed; they can’t just find some other way to be productive or even survive. I don’t think we are so different. Based on the past, I think it’s dangerous to believe some few will keep the rest of us around. Dangerous, because unlike horses, this will cause significant unrest, and ultimately we can’t predict the outcome. My guess is ultimately, with fewer jobs, there will eventually be less people, for better or worse.
  - randysalami 3y ago
    Yes, if some kings didn’t need the labor of their serfs, they would be gone in an instant. Middle class workers only have it so good now because the ruling class is strictly dependent on them for their empires. Once that goes out the window, we won’t be kept around in our positions of privilege since our labor has no value. I imagine it looks like a transition of the middle class to the lower class (with some going to a higher class with specialized technology roles as class traitors), and then the lower class, having had their labor invalidated, being put on UBI and being sucked like cattle by corporations, eroding their rights and sovereignty. With social media addiction, rampant disinformation, newer generations won’t even have the faculties to conceptualize their fate and resist. I also don’t think unrest could ever reach a boiling point in the US with how addicted, misinformed, and manipulated most of the population is. Eventually, we see a complete unification of the wealthy with the state and we transition back into serfdom. People trapped in debt, dependent on the state for sustenance, except this time the state has no dependence on their labor. What happens next is your choice of dystopian horror fiction.
- subjectsigma 3y ago
  > Working for living is a problem to be solved. I strongly, viscerally disagree with this. People (mostly) need to feel like they are capable agents and also like they are contributing to something larger than themselves. I’ve seen friends struggle to get a job and find their place in the world; sitting alone at home and watching TV for weeks straight is an inhuman way to exist, and that’s where a lot of people will end up without work, as the average person seems to be pretty terrible at stimulating themselves intellectually. Note that this doesn’t strictly require capitalism or a 40 hour workweek or anything like that. Since AI is so great at solving everything, maybe one day it can organize the distribution of work to keep the remaining humans busy. I don’t know.
  - serf 3y ago
    a person can be made to feel capable without requiring a living wage. similarly : work exists outside of wages, as do co-operative and unpaid grand works. the (probably fantastical) hope is that when a 'living wage' as a concept disappears it will free up people to pursue things that they're actually passionate about to form an identity and purpose. put from another angle : do you think it's great that people can't find identity without employment? it seems to me we should treat 'lack of identity and self worth due to lack of employment' as a pathology rather than something that we need to feed employment into. the human condition has lasted a lot longer than our current hyper-capitalism-centric ethos about work and passion; if people are becoming worse for it we should probably change the habits and motivations rather than providing their pacifier and acting as if it's a normal human thing for a psyche to dissolve when allowed to act as a free agent.
    - subjectsigma 3y ago
      > put from another angle : do you think it's great that people can't find identity without employment? That’s like asking me if I think it’s ‘great’ that people have two legs and a finite lifespan. It just is. What you choose to do under constraints is a big part of your identity. > it seems to me we should treat 'lack of identity and self worth due to lack of employment' as a pathology Man, is there anything that isn’t a pathology these days?
  - 3y ago
- constantcrying 3y ago
  >Working for living is a problem to be solved. I had a job where I got payed, but had no real work. It was genuinely awful.
  - Teever 3y ago
    Why was it awful? That would be my dream. The first thing I would do is enrol in online courses/ get a second job.
    - constantcrying 3y ago
      It is illegal for me to get a second job. You can not do meaningful learning for that many hours. I was doing it in my free time anyway, that was enough for me. Not to cry about my mental health, but it was very taxing for me. I was just sitting around doing random things occasionally.
    - postalrat 3y ago
      Free money is the dream or not working is dream?
benkarst 3y ago
It's not unemployment, it's self-actualized "me" time!
- black_13 3y ago
  [dead]
paxys 3y ago
I have yet to see a single example of AI replacing someone and doing their job. The vast majority of these cases are simply companies doing layoffs and blaming it on "AI" to deflect the bad press (and of course the media is eating it up). Meanwhile everyone remaining has 2x the work load and a useless $10/mo ChatGPT subscription spitting out garbage.
- constantcrying 3y ago
  Voice acting as a profession will not exist in a couple of years.
  - nothercastle 3y ago
    Is there a good text to speech interface? I’d like to use one to help me to help proofread
    - constantcrying 3y ago
      There are various online AI tools which do reasonably convincing Text to speech. All you need is a little push and good tooling around the software to make voice actors entirely replaceable.
  - paxys 3y ago
    Remember how a decade and a half ago everyone was convinced that taxi drivers and truck drivers would be replaced by AI in the coming years? There were even mass protests over it, and governments started to make contingency plans and enact legislation. The topic was discussed to death non-stop all over the internet and news media, just like AI is right now. Meanwhile today not a single driver has lost their job, and in fact there are shortages in all these industries. Don't try and solve a problem before it is even a problem. Heck if anything good AI generated voiceovers will be a huge boost to the indie gaming industry, so I hope it can actually happen.
    - constantcrying 3y ago
constantcrying 3y ago
Seriously, who cares? It is someone who knows nothing about AI, commenting on someone who knows nothing about AI talking to someone who knows nothing about AI, but who is CEO of a company who owns part of a company which has employees who know about AI.
- seadan83 3y ago
  Citations needed. Jon Stewart is in a place to speak on the impact of AI to his industry, considering he is an industry expert (he has what, 30 to 40 years in Hollywood. That makes him an expert of screenwriting/acting. You only need to know so much to then comment on the impact of AI on your industry. Further, we don't know his personal experiences and the data he is looking at. Let's also take into account recently there was the largest strike that was largely about AI. Given how long that lasted, we would think that there was a lot of extra research done on the topic. Further, Jon was wanting to do a series of segments about AI on his Apple-hosted show. He has a history of researching his topics. Given that history, I would guess that Jon Stewart actually knows quite a bit about AI at this point. He is not a fan-boy though and so that knowledge wouldn't show through him gushing about LLMs) The mistake I see is we are applying Jon Stewarts comments to the software industry. Perhap that mis-application is due to recent biases from things like Devin. Mr Stewart OTOH is really more speaking about the impact of AI to the acting industry, his industry, for which he is an expert. Jon Stewart historically brings the receipts, he routinely researches the topics he speaks about. If you recall, he was in the habit of reading the books of many of his guests. Based on that history, I would flip your comment on its head.
gentleman11 3y ago
A lot of dismissive comments in here already by people who aren’t trying to make a living doing writing, art, or voiceover. It will be music soon too. Tutoring is probably heavily affected already too “But those weren’t real jobs,” some might say. So it doesn’t count until it replaces programmer jobs? Because that’s coming soon too. Would you really encourage your kids to go into this field, expecting them to still have good prospects in 15 years? Also, we used to have a middle class with lots of authors and musicians and artists before the internet commoditized everything
- bdcravens 3y ago
  We also used to have a middle class consisting of horseshoers, elevator operators, and gas station attendants. Many programmers do little more than glue together framework code, and make an excellent living doing it. Little sets them apart other than how fast they jump to the framework of the week. There's not a lot of separation from rent-seeking. What would you do to change the direction of things? Make AI illegal, and hope there aren't companies that will just use it anyways?
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    yeah except serious people in governance and AI science are raising alarm bells.. so "what about the horse carriage drivers" gets pretty thin, like instantly..
  - randysalami 3y ago
    And being able to interface with computers. It’s crazy how many people are unable to use a computer efficiently. Don’t take that skill for granted.
  - addicted 3y ago
    Whether we can or cannot do something about is a wholly different question from whether it’s an issue at all. I see so many people basically say “there’s nothing we can do about it therefore there’s no problem at all”. I don’t think this is a coincidence. This is a very deliberate effort by those in the tech space who want to capture and privatize all the benefits for themselves to make it seem like there are no alternatives to the current trajectory of a handful of companies hoarding all the benefits of AI. Once you accept that there are possible problems one can do stuff to address those problems, such as maybe democratizing AI so it benefits anybody and not just a handful of people who happened to be at the right place at the right time. Heck, even if you accept that there isn’t a problem you can still recognizing that the current trajectory may not be a good one.
FranzFerdiNaN 3y ago
Instead of AI reducing my working hours and my chores so I can spend time on fun things like art and music, AI is making creating art and music obsolete so I can spend more time on my job and chores. What a time to be alive.
rayiner 3y ago
AI promises to be the antidote to the ills of the knowledge economy. Computer technology multiplied the productivity of a small class of high-IQ workers, leading to massive inequality between knowledge workers and other workers. AI, if it works, promises to level the playing field again. It’s not going to replace plumbers, nurses, and HVAC technicians. It’s going to replace the top 20% of mostly college educated knowledge workers whose incomes have grown at triple the median income over the last few decades: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-new-contract-with-the-middle-class-money/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-new-contract-with-the-m...
- Shawnj2 3y ago
  So now everyone except business people will be lower middle class
  - rayiner 3y ago
    Everyone will be middle class again. The present societal consternation is coming from the gap between the middle class and the upper middle class. The middle class Virginia town where I grew up isn’t unaffordable for regular people because of Jeff Bezos. It’s because the town is now full of Google employees and lawyers. And soaring education costs are the result of an arm’s race trying to get into the upper middle class, since that’s what it takes to maybe be able to buy a house where you grew up. Knowledge workers are the ones creating that gap, and places without them are a lot better for ordinary people. Consider somewhere like Iowa, which is very flat economically because there’s no knowledge work. The median income is a bit lower than say New Jersey. But in practice life is better. You can buy a house for 3-4x the median income, because there’s no Amazon engineers pushing you out of the way.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      This is just a terrible take... Those property prices are not going down any significant amount. The capital system in the US has realized it can buy up as much property as possible and use it to extract as much wealth as possible via literal rent seeking. Places that are not close to anywhere have had rent prices explode. Oh, and if there is a massive 2008 like housing crash, the banks themselves will hold on to the properties keeping prices high. Meanwhile the Bezeo's themselves that have the AI will be buying up as many real assets as possible.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
[dupe] Some more discussion last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39902217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39902217

25 points by hotdailys 3y ago

My sincere hope is that that would happen. Especially in medium and high income jobs in mass scale. Working for living is a problem to be solved. The purpose of technology is to automate things, increase free time. The purpose of politics is to distribute gains justly, whatever that is.

swid 3y ago
Good luck distributing gains justly when the masses have nothing of value to bargain with. Politics will likely continue to be co-opted by people who can pay; either directly or through other means of coercion. There used to be a lot more horses… I’m finding 25 million in the US in 1920 compared with 3.8 million today. Of course, they can no longer occupy the niche in society they used to, and so like in nature; when the niche is removed; they can’t just find some other way to be productive or even survive. I don’t think we are so different. Based on the past, I think it’s dangerous to believe some few will keep the rest of us around. Dangerous, because unlike horses, this will cause significant unrest, and ultimately we can’t predict the outcome. My guess is ultimately, with fewer jobs, there will eventually be less people, for better or worse.
- randysalami 3y ago
  Yes, if some kings didn’t need the labor of their serfs, they would be gone in an instant. Middle class workers only have it so good now because the ruling class is strictly dependent on them for their empires. Once that goes out the window, we won’t be kept around in our positions of privilege since our labor has no value. I imagine it looks like a transition of the middle class to the lower class (with some going to a higher class with specialized technology roles as class traitors), and then the lower class, having had their labor invalidated, being put on UBI and being sucked like cattle by corporations, eroding their rights and sovereignty. With social media addiction, rampant disinformation, newer generations won’t even have the faculties to conceptualize their fate and resist. I also don’t think unrest could ever reach a boiling point in the US with how addicted, misinformed, and manipulated most of the population is. Eventually, we see a complete unification of the wealthy with the state and we transition back into serfdom. People trapped in debt, dependent on the state for sustenance, except this time the state has no dependence on their labor. What happens next is your choice of dystopian horror fiction.
subjectsigma 3y ago
> Working for living is a problem to be solved. I strongly, viscerally disagree with this. People (mostly) need to feel like they are capable agents and also like they are contributing to something larger than themselves. I’ve seen friends struggle to get a job and find their place in the world; sitting alone at home and watching TV for weeks straight is an inhuman way to exist, and that’s where a lot of people will end up without work, as the average person seems to be pretty terrible at stimulating themselves intellectually. Note that this doesn’t strictly require capitalism or a 40 hour workweek or anything like that. Since AI is so great at solving everything, maybe one day it can organize the distribution of work to keep the remaining humans busy. I don’t know.
- serf 3y ago
  a person can be made to feel capable without requiring a living wage. similarly : work exists outside of wages, as do co-operative and unpaid grand works. the (probably fantastical) hope is that when a 'living wage' as a concept disappears it will free up people to pursue things that they're actually passionate about to form an identity and purpose. put from another angle : do you think it's great that people can't find identity without employment? it seems to me we should treat 'lack of identity and self worth due to lack of employment' as a pathology rather than something that we need to feed employment into. the human condition has lasted a lot longer than our current hyper-capitalism-centric ethos about work and passion; if people are becoming worse for it we should probably change the habits and motivations rather than providing their pacifier and acting as if it's a normal human thing for a psyche to dissolve when allowed to act as a free agent.
  - subjectsigma 3y ago
    > put from another angle : do you think it's great that people can't find identity without employment? That’s like asking me if I think it’s ‘great’ that people have two legs and a finite lifespan. It just is. What you choose to do under constraints is a big part of your identity. > it seems to me we should treat 'lack of identity and self worth due to lack of employment' as a pathology Man, is there anything that isn’t a pathology these days?
- 3y ago
constantcrying 3y ago
>Working for living is a problem to be solved. I had a job where I got payed, but had no real work. It was genuinely awful.
- Teever 3y ago
  Why was it awful? That would be my dream. The first thing I would do is enrol in online courses/ get a second job.
  - constantcrying 3y ago
    It is illegal for me to get a second job. You can not do meaningful learning for that many hours. I was doing it in my free time anyway, that was enough for me. Not to cry about my mental health, but it was very taxing for me. I was just sitting around doing random things occasionally.
  - postalrat 3y ago
    Free money is the dream or not working is dream?

benkarst 3y ago

It's not unemployment, it's self-actualized "me" time!

black_13 3y ago
[dead]

paxys 3y ago

I have yet to see a single example of AI replacing someone and doing their job. The vast majority of these cases are simply companies doing layoffs and blaming it on "AI" to deflect the bad press (and of course the media is eating it up). Meanwhile everyone remaining has 2x the work load and a useless $10/mo ChatGPT subscription spitting out garbage.

constantcrying 3y ago
Voice acting as a profession will not exist in a couple of years.
- nothercastle 3y ago
  Is there a good text to speech interface? I’d like to use one to help me to help proofread
  - constantcrying 3y ago
    There are various online AI tools which do reasonably convincing Text to speech. All you need is a little push and good tooling around the software to make voice actors entirely replaceable.
- paxys 3y ago
  Remember how a decade and a half ago everyone was convinced that taxi drivers and truck drivers would be replaced by AI in the coming years? There were even mass protests over it, and governments started to make contingency plans and enact legislation. The topic was discussed to death non-stop all over the internet and news media, just like AI is right now. Meanwhile today not a single driver has lost their job, and in fact there are shortages in all these industries. Don't try and solve a problem before it is even a problem. Heck if anything good AI generated voiceovers will be a huge boost to the indie gaming industry, so I hope it can actually happen.
  - constantcrying 3y ago

constantcrying 3y ago

Seriously, who cares? It is someone who knows nothing about AI, commenting on someone who knows nothing about AI talking to someone who knows nothing about AI, but who is CEO of a company who owns part of a company which has employees who know about AI.

seadan83 3y ago
Citations needed. Jon Stewart is in a place to speak on the impact of AI to his industry, considering he is an industry expert (he has what, 30 to 40 years in Hollywood. That makes him an expert of screenwriting/acting. You only need to know so much to then comment on the impact of AI on your industry. Further, we don't know his personal experiences and the data he is looking at. Let's also take into account recently there was the largest strike that was largely about AI. Given how long that lasted, we would think that there was a lot of extra research done on the topic. Further, Jon was wanting to do a series of segments about AI on his Apple-hosted show. He has a history of researching his topics. Given that history, I would guess that Jon Stewart actually knows quite a bit about AI at this point. He is not a fan-boy though and so that knowledge wouldn't show through him gushing about LLMs) The mistake I see is we are applying Jon Stewarts comments to the software industry. Perhap that mis-application is due to recent biases from things like Devin. Mr Stewart OTOH is really more speaking about the impact of AI to the acting industry, his industry, for which he is an expert. Jon Stewart historically brings the receipts, he routinely researches the topics he speaks about. If you recall, he was in the habit of reading the books of many of his guests. Based on that history, I would flip your comment on its head.

gentleman11 3y ago

A lot of dismissive comments in here already by people who aren’t trying to make a living doing writing, art, or voiceover. It will be music soon too. Tutoring is probably heavily affected already too “But those weren’t real jobs,” some might say. So it doesn’t count until it replaces programmer jobs? Because that’s coming soon too. Would you really encourage your kids to go into this field, expecting them to still have good prospects in 15 years? Also, we used to have a middle class with lots of authors and musicians and artists before the internet commoditized everything

bdcravens 3y ago
We also used to have a middle class consisting of horseshoers, elevator operators, and gas station attendants. Many programmers do little more than glue together framework code, and make an excellent living doing it. Little sets them apart other than how fast they jump to the framework of the week. There's not a lot of separation from rent-seeking. What would you do to change the direction of things? Make AI illegal, and hope there aren't companies that will just use it anyways?
- mistrial9 3y ago
  yeah except serious people in governance and AI science are raising alarm bells.. so "what about the horse carriage drivers" gets pretty thin, like instantly..
- randysalami 3y ago
  And being able to interface with computers. It’s crazy how many people are unable to use a computer efficiently. Don’t take that skill for granted.
- addicted 3y ago
  Whether we can or cannot do something about is a wholly different question from whether it’s an issue at all. I see so many people basically say “there’s nothing we can do about it therefore there’s no problem at all”. I don’t think this is a coincidence. This is a very deliberate effort by those in the tech space who want to capture and privatize all the benefits for themselves to make it seem like there are no alternatives to the current trajectory of a handful of companies hoarding all the benefits of AI. Once you accept that there are possible problems one can do stuff to address those problems, such as maybe democratizing AI so it benefits anybody and not just a handful of people who happened to be at the right place at the right time. Heck, even if you accept that there isn’t a problem you can still recognizing that the current trajectory may not be a good one.

FranzFerdiNaN 3y ago

Instead of AI reducing my working hours and my chores so I can spend time on fun things like art and music, AI is making creating art and music obsolete so I can spend more time on my job and chores. What a time to be alive.

rayiner 3y ago

AI promises to be the antidote to the ills of the knowledge economy. Computer technology multiplied the productivity of a small class of high-IQ workers, leading to massive inequality between knowledge workers and other workers. AI, if it works, promises to level the playing field again. It’s not going to replace plumbers, nurses, and HVAC technicians. It’s going to replace the top 20% of mostly college educated knowledge workers whose incomes have grown at triple the median income over the last few decades: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-new-contract-with-the-middle-class-money/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-new-contract-with-the-m...

Shawnj2 3y ago
So now everyone except business people will be lower middle class
- rayiner 3y ago
  Everyone will be middle class again. The present societal consternation is coming from the gap between the middle class and the upper middle class. The middle class Virginia town where I grew up isn’t unaffordable for regular people because of Jeff Bezos. It’s because the town is now full of Google employees and lawyers. And soaring education costs are the result of an arm’s race trying to get into the upper middle class, since that’s what it takes to maybe be able to buy a house where you grew up. Knowledge workers are the ones creating that gap, and places without them are a lot better for ordinary people. Consider somewhere like Iowa, which is very flat economically because there’s no knowledge work. The median income is a bit lower than say New Jersey. But in practice life is better. You can buy a house for 3-4x the median income, because there’s no Amazon engineers pushing you out of the way.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    This is just a terrible take... Those property prices are not going down any significant amount. The capital system in the US has realized it can buy up as much property as possible and use it to extract as much wealth as possible via literal rent seeking. Places that are not close to anywhere have had rent prices explode. Oh, and if there is a massive 2008 like housing crash, the banks themselves will hold on to the properties keeping prices high. Meanwhile the Bezeo's themselves that have the AI will be buying up as many real assets as possible.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

[dupe] Some more discussion last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39902217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39902217