4 ms·

Replacing jobs is a funny one. I don’t care about this. Looms replaced jobs. AI is a loom. People always have to change their job. You can’t get an 80’s program

Replacing jobs is a funny one. I don’t care about this. Looms replaced jobs. AI is a loom. People always have to change their job. You can’t get an 80’s programming job anymore for example. Even if you like tape archives alot and so on. The “keep jobs” movement sounds wholesome until you realize it also imples keeping that job of the person who waves a flag in front of your car, etc. The real goal is more like keep people happy, which with our economic system means keep them in money, with our calue system means keep them in jobs… but it doesn’t have to be the same job they had yesterday. The worry about AI taking over the world is silly. In 1000 years there will be no humans anyway, at least as we recognise today. We would have fast evolved ourselves into something different. We might like being part AI anyway or all AI. It may take a few generations to see that. Hard for us to fathom. Infact AI might be a way to keep intelligent life going beyond a climate catastrophe, and then explore space and so on. I sound like a weirdo, as would anyone who said “yeah we’ll all be locked down next year in 2019”

bruce511 2y ago
I concur with your points here. I was gonna say that cars put a lot of folk out of work. But I think perhaps we give AI too much of a rosy future. The clue is in the name. The first hint is the I part. Intelligence. This can be hard to define (in humans) much less measure. Take school for example. It measures ability to memorize and recall, and then uses this as a proxy for 'intelligence". "Smart" kids get good grades, by regurgitating information. But few jobs require this specific skill. Generally speaking doing well at school and well at life are not well correlated. Google is good at memory. AI is good at presentation. Again, when a human writes well we use that as a proxy measure for intelligence. There is reasonable overlap there, but its far from perfect. When computers first became popular (80's more or less) there was a lot of existential panic because computers remember really well (and do arithmetic really fast.) Some people described them (incorrectly) as intelligent, despite having skills we associated with intelligence. Modern AI adds "writes well" to the mix. It writes so fluently that it appears to understand. Since we implicitly associate understanding with intelligence we describe the program as "intelligent". We even put that in the name. Naturally we then project it forward to embody it with abilities that come with "intelligence". Which is legitimately scary. But, perhaps, the moderator should be the other word in the name. Artificial. It's not really intelligent, it just mimics it really well. Obviously computer software will evolve, and jobs will evolve. Typing pools have disappeared, and I would argue "secretarys" are so unrecognizable from 40 years ago that we can declare that job (at least as it was) extinct. Cars killed the horse rearing, stabling, grooming, buggy industries. Airplanes killed cross-atlantic passenger liners. Progress kills jobs all the time. But, so far, it's created more than it's killed. I'm not sure this tech magically undoes that trend.

bruce511 2y ago

I concur with your points here. I was gonna say that cars put a lot of folk out of work. But I think perhaps we give AI too much of a rosy future. The clue is in the name. The first hint is the I part. Intelligence. This can be hard to define (in humans) much less measure. Take school for example. It measures ability to memorize and recall, and then uses this as a proxy for 'intelligence". "Smart" kids get good grades, by regurgitating information. But few jobs require this specific skill. Generally speaking doing well at school and well at life are not well correlated. Google is good at memory. AI is good at presentation. Again, when a human writes well we use that as a proxy measure for intelligence. There is reasonable overlap there, but its far from perfect. When computers first became popular (80's more or less) there was a lot of existential panic because computers remember really well (and do arithmetic really fast.) Some people described them (incorrectly) as intelligent, despite having skills we associated with intelligence. Modern AI adds "writes well" to the mix. It writes so fluently that it appears to understand. Since we implicitly associate understanding with intelligence we describe the program as "intelligent". We even put that in the name. Naturally we then project it forward to embody it with abilities that come with "intelligence". Which is legitimately scary. But, perhaps, the moderator should be the other word in the name. Artificial. It's not really intelligent, it just mimics it really well. Obviously computer software will evolve, and jobs will evolve. Typing pools have disappeared, and I would argue "secretarys" are so unrecognizable from 40 years ago that we can declare that job (at least as it was) extinct. Cars killed the horse rearing, stabling, grooming, buggy industries. Airplanes killed cross-atlantic passenger liners. Progress kills jobs all the time. But, so far, it's created more than it's killed. I'm not sure this tech magically undoes that trend.