Here in the USA, you have to be afraid for your job these days. Layoffs are rampant everywhere due to outsourcing, and now we have AI on the horizon promising to make things more efficient, but we really know what it is actually going to be used for. They want automate out everything. People packaging up goods for shipping, white collar jobs like analytics, business intelligence, customer service, chat support. Any sort of job that takes a low or moderate amount of effort or intellectual ability is threatened by AI. But once AI takes all these jobs away and shrinks the amount of labor required, what are all these people going to do for work? It’s not like you can train someone who’s a business intelligence engineer easily to go do something else like HVAC, or be a nurse. So you have the entire tech industry basically folding in on itself trying to win the rat race and get the few remaining jobs left over…
But it should be pretty obvious that you can’t run an entire society with no jobs. Because then people can’t buy groceries, groceries don’t sell so grocery stores start hurting and then they can’t afford to employ cashiers and stockers, and the entire thing starts crumbling. This is the future of AI, basically. The more we automate, the less people can do, so they don’t have jobs and no income, not able to survive…
Like, how long until we realize how detrimental AI is to society? 10 years? 15?
Society can exist without jobs, not everything has to be capital, in fact reaching a post scarcity world is needed for communism.
AI hype is also overblown as fuck, I remember watching the CGP grey video Humans Need not Apply, like what, 8 years ago? Haven’t really achieved some epic breakthrough did we?
For me from a software engineers perspective, “AI” is nothing but a productivity tool, it reduces the amount of mundane work I have to do, but then so does the IDE I use.
as humans we have been automatic tasks for a long time, just think about your washing machine, you have any idea how hard it would be to have clean clothes without them? Do you think we would be better off if we needed cleaning services that clean our clothes for us using human labour just so people have jobs? Or is it better to use that effort elsewhere?
Not AI TV’s with Bluetooth connection to your phone! Those will be totally fine! Go ahead and say things about Trump and then go to Amazon and search for the grass trimmer you love. Go ahead and talk about the truck you like or the computer ram you need. So you work for Costco? Hmmm tells us more? Are you at the executive level? You wouldn’t be a purchaser maybe 🤔? Or what?
You may be in the younger side, or just not remember, but this happens almost every 20 years like clockwork.
In the 80’s it was the PC and computers at large.
In the 00’s it was robotic automation that was going to be the end of manual labor.
Now it’s this.
The sooner people realize that all of things are just about the small number of wealthy people who control resources making more money at the expense of the majority of all other humans, maybe something will get done. It’s been tried before in various movements with little to show for it, but maybe I’m just cynical.
There will need to be a major shift in how economic flow works in order to support an existing or expanding population regardless.
The more we automate, the less people can do, so they don’t have jobs and no income, not able to survive…
Most solutions to this issue usually involve some variant of a universal basic income. However, that gets politically boiled down to “MOAR TAXES GOVERNMENT IS STIFLING THIS COUNTRY!1!1”, so in countries like the US that want to keep the freedom of being able to be homeless and starving, it’s not going to be possible.
Never, because it’s not. This is the future:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/fully-automated-luxury-gay-space-communism
Let’s get there as quickly as possible
Automating jobs away is a good thing, many others here have explained why. When I read your title, I actually expected you would be writing about how AI is “detrimental to society” because it makes mistakes that humans don’t make and is therefore useless for anything serious; this, I would have had a harder time arguing against.
Automating jobs away is a good thing
I remember seeing someone post this comic a while back, thought it was a pithy explanation.
https://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/TheWealthofDragons.png
But AI is only going to get better in the long run. How is that a solid argument?
What is AI, according to you?
It’s a marketing term, aimed to create a void. So I wonder what products you think fills this void.
Ugh, I hate that you’re right about this. It used to mean a topic of study in computer science. Now it means…I don’t even know what it’s supposed to mean.
The 12 year old video below explains the root cause of economic misery. Technology is a tool that can be used for good or evil. But the ruling class wants ALL the money. So technology is often used for more efficient oppression.
Meanwhile, we working class folks are too busy working and/or distracted (often fighting with each other) to mount any real resistance.
People simultaneously seem scared of AI automating jobs, and of there being too many old people for the young people to look after as they’d be too busy with their jobs. Wouldn’t those cancel each other out?
there being too many old people for the young people to look after as they’d be too busy with their jobs
When your entire society revolves around working for a salary or for getting paid, that’s why you can’t take care of the old people. Now suppose AI automates a lot of stuff and we have time for taking care of older people… How are we supposed to do that without jobs? That’s the problem
I’ll make those robots do that job
The whole planet is threatened by AI. If you look at the amount of energy needed not only to power the infrastructure, but the energy needed to create the infrastructure, and compare it to the work produced, and the energy needed for humans to produce equivalent work, it’s totally fucked and dumb as hell
Edit: to elaborate, there was this commercial for a Google Pixel I saw, people in group chat talking about a football game, person says “create an image of football gloves made out of butter”. .08kWh later that image gets posted in chat for a chuckle. Dude, just say “gloves made of butter? smdh” Lady laying in bed talking to a glorified chatbot, just hop on Lemmy or reconnect with an old friend and save .16kWh. These are the most common use cases for AI, basically finessing a prompt a dozen times to make a Shrek and Garlfield comic that winds up in some Facebook group with 9 likes. Multiply those figures a couple million times tho and it’s like holy shit. We somehow went from extremely low-bandwidth words to high bandwidth Youtube and Tiktok to the messiest bullshit humans have ever invented, to do things we could easily do with characters on a keyboard
Energy demands are only going to increase as we replace gas with electric alternatives. The problem you’re pointing to is an issue with the current infrastructure.
Infrastructure in this case refers to the data centers and LLMs. It takes hundreds of megawatt hours to train a single current-gen LLM and who knows how many gigawatts of energy are being consumed by the sum of LLMs at any given point but it likely dwarfs the sum of all energy spent training LLMs.
But then there’s the energy involved in producing those cards, shipping those cards, the data centers themselves.
It wouldn’t be preposterous to suggest that the sum of energy spent at any given time on generative AI is enough to power New York City. Might even be well more than
No, in this case I’m referring to the electric grid and what powers it.
Already figured it out. I am waiting on the rest of you.
they can’t afford to employ cashiers
They’ve already removed most of the ones in the UK, it seems. Really worrying stuff when you realise how much they crept in during covid.
I think social media provides a good reference to start speculating an answer to your question.
