Don't let the AI apocalypse scares you

I have seen so many articles, tweets, posts, etc. in the past few months about AI eradicating all jobs or something along the line, and robots eliminating all needs for human labour.

And then I look at all the jobs that I have worked on.

Good luck using AI to get through government bureaucracies. I am sure ChatGPT get help you navigate all the regulations, apply to all the licenses automatically, comply with regulations etc. I am sure when a company is fined millions they can just say “but…ChatGPT say this can work!”

Good luck telling the CEO to use AI assistant. I am sure the 70-years-old CEO would prefer shouting to a phone which may tell them the idea does not work instead of shouting to a group of employees who would nod nervously and then implement the ideas while ignoring the bad parts.

Good luck replacing humans with robots. The maintenance costs of hardware and software on an army of robots which needs fuel and electricity and probably internet connection MUST BE lower than hiring labour at minimum wages. Right? Did I forgot to mention that human can takes care of themselves?

Remember that the society is run by humans. Even the rich and the powerful are human and have human needs. They would want other people to work for them.

What if a singularity AI took over the world? I mean if that is possible and the society fail to prevent such an event from happening then humanity deserves to perish anyways. Also please don’t tell me you believe in Roko’s basilisk.

Stop worrying and start living your life!

Spitfire,
@Spitfire@pawb.social avatar

As AI becomes more advanced, I feel that a lot of jobs are going to be made obsolete as the AI will then be able to do things in a fraction of the time.

Of course someone (hopefully) will fact-check what the AI produces but this would still likely be much less manpower needed than today. There’s plenty of instances today where AI will cite events that didn’t happen or make something up.

It’s still a big concern of mine as time goes on.

Overzeetop,

LOL. CEOs aren’t going to be using AI for themselves; they have the money to hire teams of people (who will use, but vet, AI output) and provide specialized, boutique assistance. Instead, they will be forcing you and I to use AI because it costs them less money to serve us.

Robots and AI are orders of magnitude cheaper to run than humans, and have been for decades. ATMs are robots. Earthmoving equipment is robots. Computer software is a type of robot - from word processing to CAD to calculators. Mostly human controlled - as will the foreseeable future robots - but requiring fewer and fewer humans to do a set amount of labor (physical or mental).

What is the biggest push right now? Automated driving. What is the largest job sector in a majority of the US states? Delivery driver. There are fears of automated drivers missing edge cases and hitting pedestrians and (clutch your pearls) children. Over 40,000 people and over 1000 children were killed in the US by human drivers just last year. 3 Adults and 3 children were killed in Ohio just this week when a tractor trailer plowed into two passenger vehicles and a school bus because the driver wasn’t paying attention. The simplest impact detection “robot” could have prevented that. AI is already better, on average, than humans - it’s only our sense / belief in self determination that we erroneously think that we are (on average) better than a machine. And AI/ML/Automated drivers will improve with time, whereas humans are explicitly getting worse as we are offered more and more distractions in our daily lives.

AI/ML/Robots are already being implemented in the US Government (I know people who are doing it). They are coming for your job. They’re coming for my job. It’s only hubris that makes us think we are outrunning our digital competitors. The question is if we (through governments and regulation) will benefit from it or become destitute by it.

sculd,

Oh I have no doubt that AI will replace a lot of jobs. What I am saying is instead of worrying about being replaced, understand that there will be jobs available and try moving to that direction.

The former makes us freeze in fear, the latter allows us to take action.

Overzeetop,

I sat in a conference room with 300+ other professionals in my field and they laughed that AI could take their jobs. I’m on the “top” of that pile of practitioners - I make my living in the niche where I’m the old expert who gets called in when nobody else can figure out a solution, or in the ordinary job to make sure it’s done right the first time. Easily 80% of my job could be replaced by AI, if my industry were a big enough cherry to pick. Luckily for them (and me) it’s not. For my industry the danger is that the AI will “solve” the problem of newly graduated professionals - the people who learn on the normal ways so that they can grow old and become the experts who understand the basics and work on the hard, unique conditions. If AI displaces the graduates so that I can increase my profits through a lower employee count, it’s really just shortchanging society 30 years down the road when we won’t have humans with hands on experience. That’s the societal danger we face if we aren’t careful. You and I can got on top of this, but if nobody behind us can there will be a gap in knowledge. (I’m re-reading Azimov’s Foundation series. It feels a lot less like the idle entertainment it did when I read it as a teenager)

sculd,

That is a problem I already see in my field. Instead of asking my junior for a first draft, using ChatGPT could be faster and cheaper.

I can make adjustments because I already know the ins and outs, but I wonder what fresh graduate can do do get the experience.

Not to mention that some schools are saying they should encourage students to use AI. Please no, let them try doing things the hard way first before moving to the easy way.

t3rmit3,

This misses the key advantage of AI to businesses: lower total overhead through AI. You’re acting as though every job lost to AI will be replaced with another job opening somewhere else, but that hasn’t been true for efficiency automation historically (sorry horses), unless you’re talking about jobs that aren’t in the same field, in which case you’re just pulling a “learn to code”.

There will be people who have 10+, 20+ years of experience whose jobs will be lost, and they can’t just start over from square 1 in their careers.

The former makes us freeze in fear, the latter allows us to take action.

Thanks, LinkedIn.

itchick2014,

Just to make the point about the Ohio crash more clear…it was a charter bus full of high school students. Not a typical school bus. Plus other cars were involved too. Such a horrible event.

raccoona_nongrata, (edited )
@raccoona_nongrata@beehaw.org avatar

I’m not so concerned with AI stealing jobs (though the current models do steal and profit from labor to function, which is unethical). The more concerning idea is how it will be used as an invisible weapon to reinforce fascist social engineering projects.

When people first learned of how much mass surveillance was going on across the world and on the Internet, people would sort of joke wryly about “the NSA agent” who read their stuff and put them on a list or whatever whenever they made some sharp political commentary or said something that could be misconstrued as terroristic out of context, as if we each had an agent assigned to us who just sat in a room all day and read our posts and listened in on our phone calls.

The thing is, AI will actually make that kind of thing possible as it gets more indistinguishable from humans. We could each get our own little tailored propaganda bot who tracks us across the web, not just listening and profiling us constantly, but actively manipulating and decieving us in subtle ways. Even fabricating evidence for their lies on the fly in the form of fake videos, photos and news sources etc.

My fear is that, as humanity enters this next cycle of deepening fascism and coordinated anti-democratic effort we’re seeing, the ever more sophisticated tools of oppression available to fascists will ensure we wont ever emerge again. Instead we will stay in a permanent state of blind, deaf and dumb servitude with no avenue of resistance or to even understand the need for resistance.

sculd,

Agreed that this is a legit concern.

The most worrying aspect of AI technology is not AI itself, but the people behind it, which is why regulating AI is so important for our society. And so far society is failing on that front.

scrubbles,
@scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech avatar

Exactly what I worry about. I’m toying with AI at home, as a software engineer I kind of have to if I’ll want to remain employable. I see where it’s good, where it’s not so good.

Automating human’s jobs away completely? We’re a long way off. Most times you see a “wow AI did this?” it was hand picked by people as the best result out of dozens, and then usually tailored past then. It does some really cool stuff to about 80% of the way of a semi usable product, but then it needs humans to fine tune. Plus coding things, sure it can get you started much quicker or give you functions, but we’re decades away from being able to interact with an AI to the point where it can maintain your entire ecosystem. I can’t imagine the complexity there.

What it does do a great job at is seeing patterns, and pointing out those patterns. Exactly what the people you describe want it for. “Given this person’s medical history, should we insure them?” “How likely is this person going to default on their loan?” and quite literally Minority report style is what I’m afraid of. “Given everything we know about this person, what crimes are they likely committing?”

The old “don’t do anything wrong and no one come looking” kinda goes out the window with that. It’s going to be able to make predictions on you based on other’s behavior. I definitely see some “We got a warrant because our AI told us you were up to no good” and some 99 year old judge saying that’s okay.

and don’t think that just because governments are heavy and slow that they won’t do this. They’ll have some hot shot contractor come up, build it for them, and they’ll get to use it with little to no oversight because “the government doesn’t own it”.

The jobs thing is a distraction so we don’t see what dystopia AI can really bring us into.

NaibofTabr,

I am sure the 70-years-old CEO would prefer shouting to a phone

Hello computer!

sculd,

Hilarious! First time watching this. Thanks for sharing.

ErKaf,
@ErKaf@feddit.de avatar

Stop worrying and start living your life!

Nice try, AI

Gamers_Mate,

You can Trust AI it is your friend.
Also on an unrelated note you would not have happened to see John Connor anywhere have you?

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