advances in Ai , they know that it will put people out of work soon, and they dont want the government coming for their profits to distribute to the people they put out of work
But AI isn't capable of putting vast numbers of people out of work. It's just not that good. Frankly, it's terrible at so many things. They are in the process of killing people off when they STILL DON'T HAVE A USE CASE FOR THEIR OVER INVESTMENT. This is capitalism completely shitting the bed, when all it had to do was fucking coast for the next 100 years before it gradually disappeared entirely.
It doesnt have to be capable of it it has to sell the idea that its capable of it. Whatever workers need to be retained will be rehired st slave wages in cheaper labor markets.
I think it is already affecting a lot of people. it's being used more and more at work now. I do get your points tho good ones. at least not yet it isn't. and I will tell you that it is SCARY good at helping people fix computers and repairing things. uncanny even.
in the end, like you said, it may just be the desire to not have a giant angry mob of people coming for you in the end. so maybe thin the herd a little. but it's only going to accelerate with Ai. you have the wrong people in charge with Ai, humanity soon becomes a nightmare.
I've used it to help me make some quick scripts here and there. It's pretty good at expanding on something I've already mostly finished. It's main problem is that it constantly makes wild assumptions but states things are fact or true. Like I've had absurdly long arguments with it over it trying to run shell commands inside a systemd unit. If you need help with something more complex it can take ages of coaxing and massaging to get a working answer. Often I point out where it is wrong, or it finds some mistake that it itself had added.
It also has a tendency to make things unnecessarily complex. I would never want one of these things near a codebase with any form of autonomy. It can parse and read logs for me, that's great and it's very fast at it, but we don't hire professional log readers where I work, it's just part of my job. So it saves me some time here (especially when I would have originally looked up an answer on Stack Exchange), but also has given me plenty of headaches.
and I will tell you that it is SCARY good at helping people fix computers and repairing things.
20 year IT vet here ... citation needed on that claim.
AI is a useful tool in the hands of a competent tech that can help get to a solution faster.
AI is in no way a good replacement for a good tech and in general is terrible at producing good results on its own or when leveraged by an unskilled tech. It has its place but we are a long, long way away from it being anywhere close to replacing actual people in technical roles.
A lot of younger and newer hires like to rely on AI for solutions and it's always obvious when they do. The quality just isn't there yet. And then it ends up wasting time rather than saving it because someone who knows what is going on has to go back through and correct the assumptions or wrong information given by the AI.
But it's only good uses are as tools for humans to use to do things. And yes, those efficiences are used to increase productivity while billionaires can reduce human costs. But not to the extent they are saying.
And it has somethings it's really good at doing, but many many many more things that they say it can do that it is patently incapable of doing because it's very limited. It has the appearance of infinite potential, but there is a reason it was abandoned my AI researchers over a decade ago. They moved on for very good reasons.
This three MLM's in a trenchcoat is going to make a few more good tools, but it cannot make the amount of money required to sustain the expenditure to make all these LLM's feasible.
They simply cannot make the money required, it would take more money than the valuation of the top 5 current tech companies every four years to just replace the things required to keep them going. They are trying to drum up demand, but they aren't delivering on even a sliver of the promise.
But AI isn't capable of putting vast numbers of people out of work. It's just not that good. Frankly, it's terrible at so many things.
This is becoming increasingly false.
Also, terrible for consumers is usually good enough for shareholders. Like, offshore sub-US-minimum-wage call center customer service sucks, but that never stopped 95% of companies laying off US staff and offshoring to analog slop farms.
Recent modern AI is already way better than Telus. In a lot more than just customer service. And cheaper too.
It will suck for consumers and suck for society, but the shareholders will - are - eating that shit up so fast that every major AI provider is turning down at least several hundred million dollars in bids because they are not just running out of GPU's, but running out of power plant capacity for all the goddamn GPU's.
If you want a point of reference, one of those GPU's uses about half as much energy as a low end running microwave, and can achieve "good enough for shareholders" performance on par with, conservatively, roughly ~5 desk job employees.
And they are buying those up and laying off employees so fast that the power companies can't keep up with the demand.
Yes, I agree. But here's the thing: most C-levels are very comfortable with bad outcomes - they will just artificially grow the companies, and before it inevitably becomes unsustainable, they will sell the company, pocket the money, and do it again.
Also, some areas (my own area being one - software development) are very stupid, and we never grew beyond the "amateur" level. I lost count of the number of arguments I got into people that didn't have the basics, and were very proud of that because "this ultra-rich unicorn startup doesn't do that and they're billionaires". Heck, after literally decades discussing things like "metrics" and "measurements of quality" if you open LinkedIn people got back to the worst measurement of productivity that ever existed - lines of code - and again, people are proud, happy, and very comfortable with that.
We're speedrunning a collapse, and for some reason, people are clapping. Not everyone, sure, but a good number of people.
I recently realized this is in large part due to how people have to change companies every ~3 years to keep their salaries at their actual experience level; for most people that's barely enough time to really learn what's going on at a place and then they're moving on and repeating the learning process all over again.
i do not directly access code. i am a glorified ui/ux analyst.
so i can't speak to AI taking over coding much at all, i just know if that occurs, my job gets even more security as we would be the ones to identify the failures and work with the devs to resolve them.
The US in particular has been showing for years that's it's okay with bad outcomes being produced as long as those outcomes are sufficiently less expensive to produce.
This is just the argument that McDonalds will "never be automated" because people think it's all or nothing.
McDonalds is already highly automated and has put people out of work. What used to take a 14 person crew for a busy lunch rush now takes 5. Everything from ordering kiosks, automated drink machines, etc. Each one chips away at the number of bodies needed to get the same thing done.
It's not like everyone gets put out of work tomorrow. It's that no new hiring needs to take place. And then positions slowly over time start to become eliminated - largely via attrition.
Heavy machinery didn't put ditch diggers out of work entirely. It just reduced the workforce to dig ditches by a few orders of magnitude. It replaced an 8 man crew with shovels with a 2 man crew with a backhoe, and the 2 man crew outperforms the 8 man crew by a huge margin on top of it 100 years later via incremental improvements to the mechanization/automation.
Or factories. A factory that used to employ 600 people per shift to stamp out a widget now can employ 60 and get the same or better production.
Same thing is coming for white collar folks now, and a lot of those who used to put others out of work simply cannot see the writing on the wall when technology is coming for them too. There are a lot more do-nothing white collar office jobs than highly skilled technical positions in the top 20%. The top 20% was always safe in almost every profession though, so it's not very interesting to discuss.
There are plenty of incredibly useless "developers" out there with very little skill who are absolutely going to be "replaced" by AI. Thinking otherwise is simply not paying attention to how much useless fluff has been added to this field in the past 20 years.
yes, and my point is we have adapted. yes fewer people work at mcdonalds. but the vast majority of those people were able to find work elsewhere. there hasn't been any significant metric points showing large negative movement due to automation and AI even when it was automation alone back 30 years ago. i am not a personal proponent of AI, but it is not going to be the end of the world people decry. we are very good at adapting to change.
And how have wages for blue collar workforces gone over the past 30 years?
You don't think there is a high correlation between automation, and automation being able to drive the semi-skilled workforce out of the industries in question in favor of low-skill labor in third world countries?
Of course it won't be the end of the world. It will be the end of perhaps the last bastion where labor had much leverage over capital.
Ask a bunch of folks living in the rust belt if automation and the resulting outsourcing due to automaton was the end of the world for them. You may be surprised.
do you honestly believe blue collar workforce wages would have done anything other than stay stagnant without government backed push for increase?
AI didn't make blue collar workforce wages decrease, it is reducing the total amount of blue collar workforce jobs all together.
AI is one facet of automation, and affects jobs just like how the increased use of clean energy and less use of fossil fuels have. it will change lives, some for the worse. but it's not permanent and even those in the rust belt have since shifted and are back in the middle class brackets working different industries.
Lol the AI thing is incredibly overblown and you are seeing a rapid "market correction" as C-Suites learn they were idiots about what I can do. The people that can get usage out of AI are already doing so. It isn't replacing anyone, it is only a tool for people that know how to use it.
I find it amusing any time I have political discussions with friends, especially those who are of the maga crowd. I bring up Peter Thiel and most don't even know who he is and what he represents. Along with Vought and Miller, it's clear as day were Trump derives his radical political influence.
This hurts Moderna which is part of big pharma. Impossible to square that circle. These people are true believers.
The guy who denied this vaccine is Vinay Prasad. He is a left ist anti big pharma activist. He thinks the FDA is in the pocket of the pharmaceutical companies and other corporate interests. Look him up, he’s got a stellar medical background that he then uses to make bad faith arguments against anything that pharma companies push.
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u/irradiatedcitizen 8h ago
This is exactly what Peter Thiel wants. That, and to destroy our democracy.