4 ms·
Not a bad piece. I quite liked how they manage to find the likely middle ground between the doomers on both sides while still twisting the knife in the typical
by stego-tech 2y ago
Not a bad piece. I quite liked how they manage to find the likely middle ground between the doomers on both sides while still twisting the knife in the typical “workforce will adapt” chuds who think they’re above the fracas.
It’s not about whether the present AI bubble is a giant sham that’ll implode like a black hole, or if it’s the real deal and AGI is days away. It’s always been about framing the consequences of either outcome in a society where 99.9% of humans must work to survive, and the implications of a giant economic collapse on those least-able to weather its impact in a time of record wealth and income inequality. It doesn’t matter which side is right, because millions of people will lose their jobs as a result and thousands will die. That is what some of us are trying to raise the alarm about, and in a post-2008 collapse world, young people are absolutely going to do what it takes to survive rather than what’s best for society - which is going to have knock-on effects like the author described (labor shortages in critical fields) for decades to come.
In essence, if one paper from one guy managed to depress enrollment in a critical specialty for medicine, and he was flat-out wrong, then imagine the effects the Boosters and Doomers are having on other fields in the present cycle. If I were a betting dinosaur, I suspect there will be a similar lack of highly-skilled programmers and knowledge workers due to the “copilot tools will replace programmers” hype of present tools, and then we’ll have these same divorced-from-society hypesters making the same predictions again, ignorant of the consequences of their prior actions.
Which is all a lot of flowery language just to say, “maybe we need to stop evaluating these things solely as ways to remove humans from labor or increase profit margins, and instead consider the broader effects of our decisions before acting on them.”