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just-a-dreamer- t1_ja4phyg wrote

You got it wrong there, AI is your future. Jobs will be lost within 10 years because of AI.

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Psychomadeye t1_ja6s7nf wrote

It's true. The steam engine will put a lot of people out of work.

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just-a-dreamer- t1_ja6ulce wrote

And AI will do any task better than you.

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override367 t1_ja7x5m9 wrote

Call me when an AI can repair a damaged fiber cable or answer questions in a legislature meeting

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Psychomadeye t1_ja6xrz4 wrote

Not write AI (or even code for that matter). I'd love it if I could get it to. I'd probably get a massive bonus. Could do without the fame though. They also do a pretty poor job improvising outside of their training space.

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just-a-dreamer- t1_ja6y4iq wrote

Goos for you. I hope you can keep your job and make a good living then.

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Psychomadeye t1_ja6yjuy wrote

As a person who works with these things, there's a lot of limitations to these technologies that are ignored by virtually everyone. These things are correlation engines. They're going to take jobs the same way the steam engine took jobs.

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just-a-dreamer- t1_ja72uj5 wrote

Looks like you have a narrow focus on a narrow field in tech.

Narrow AI is good enough to wipe out the white collar labor market within decades.

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Psychomadeye t1_ja74jrp wrote

Not exactly. There are many limits to this. For instance, this would require Moore's law to continue to hold true. It will not (failing somewhere in the next couple years). These models can't really work outside of their training space (space as a physical concept will need to change to fix this.) Information can only travel so fast and that's not going to be fixed either (because that's technically time travel). Some might say quantum computers can help, but as someone who is in this field I couldn't imagine how chemistry simulations would help my model run better. Finally, Models don't really understand things like true or false, or cause and effect and there's no clear path to fix that. There are more issues but you've probably got the idea.

These things are at best tools that can help people go faster. Those that are trying to replace workers may have some success in certain things like call centers. But in reality it's not going to make sense to replace people. Especially when you remember how really massive these models are. You can buy five data centers to run one instance or hire five employees to handle calls. And remember, you're going to need to provide a training space for each job you plan to replace. You might not even have the data for that.

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just-a-dreamer- t1_ja75iqv wrote

And?

The vast majority of humans also can't work outside their training data. The number of people that truly create something new in their field of choice is limited. The majority does not work in a managerial capacity.

It might feel different in tech for job description change like every 2 years. But even there most workers don't create something new and unique.

Narrow AI does not have to wipe out a profession completly, it is good enough to replace like 70% of the workforce to cause serious trouble.

Unpaid student loans, mortgages, car loans, child support, taxes, social security, insurances, health insurance...

Firing just 10% of white collar professionals in a short perioid of time would crash many layers of the financial pyramid.

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Psychomadeye t1_ja796kk wrote

You'd be surprised how small the training space is and how far outside a human reaches. We're talking a litter box to a football stadium in difference. And humans know the difference between true and false vectors, but an AI won't. If there's a chance to policy, you'll need years to retrain that model and will need to somehow find a dataset to use for that. You can't just ask it to use new cover pages on the TPS reports. You need to show it a million TPS reports with those cover pages and hope it generates them properly. Even when you don't create something new, the ability of these models to give you exactly what you want and actually have it work is extremely limited. And again, in order to address these limits, we need infinite space in a finite space, a time machine, or computers that fit inside an atom.

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just-a-dreamer- t1_ja79yrd wrote

Humans are screwed then, for their brains are fairly limited. Yet we manage somehow

I believe AI will optimize it's data over time and learn on the go. Besides, the workflow is designed for human hands and brains, not for AI.

It might be more reasonable to have no TPS reports at all as an example and come up with something that is better suited to AI capabilities.

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Psychomadeye t1_ja851np wrote

>Besides, the workflow is designed for human hands and brains, not for AI.

If we want non human workflow we will need a massive amount of data on that for it to learn the correlation. But I'm at a loss of where anyone would even get data on a non human workflow. These specifically aren't thinking machines. They just know how to generate a point on a graph to look like the rest of the points. They're a really really good dart player. This is why I call them correlation engines. They can't replace workers on their own because the rules of the game change slightly and it'll be months or years of training before it's ready again.

>Humans are screwed then, for their brains are fairly limited.

Our neurons don't suffer the same issues because the sheer size of a human brain expressed as a neural network is larger than we can currently hope to compute yet somehow, training time is seconds and not years, and we have transfer learning at a scale that artificial networks don't have.

>It might be more reasonable to have no TPS reports at all as an example and come up with something that is better suited to AI capabilities.

We need data to train the AI on this new system. This means it will need millions of examples. Then it can spend a few years learning that data. We haven't even gotten into costs yet. Those instances will be costly to run. Newer models might be faster but they are not likely to invent time machines or sub atomic computers without examples of those things.

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Cerulean_IsFancyBlue t1_ja8f1gj wrote

It did. You might want to read up on the human suffering of the industrial revolution. It would be possible to structure society in a way, where that didn’t have to happen when new technology comes along, but we still don’t have that society and here comes another tech revolution.

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Psychomadeye t1_ja8tkgs wrote

I in fact, took classes on the history of technology for humanities requirements for my degree in robotics and AI and both industrial revolutions were covered heavily. The takeaway was that automation almost always results in more jobs, and technology doesn't really have any agency itself. These are concerns from the early industrial revolution that somehow have not gone away despite the opposite being proven repeatedly through all three industrial revolutions. For hundreds of years economists have disagreed with the idea that technological unemployment is a significant issue. It even has a name: The Luddite fallacy. This has come around again in the 21st century because of confusion about the limits of what correlation engines can do. They're really good at throwing darts but can't tell you any of the rules of the game.

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Cerulean_IsFancyBlue t1_ja8uglv wrote

Sure, and the black plague resulted in improvement in labor mobility. Win! :)

These things can be true, but you’re still skipping over a fairly large amount of human suffering that happens during the transition. Remember that a lot of the jobs provided by Industrial Revolution factory work were often less healthy than even subsistence farming. Livings conditions as well, in the growing cities required by the centralized factories using the new large expensive equipment.

And of course, this was not directly the fault of the steam engine. In many ways, the loss of jobs in the farming sector was the result of agricultural policy, and not technology. The surplus rural population, then got fed into the industrial workforce as desperate needy workers, which was as much to blame as “progress”.

The idea that in a generation or two will still have plenty of jobs, does not mean we should ignore the fact that you’re going to have a bunch of people in one or two generations, who can’t earn a living because we don’t have a society that has a proper safety, net or proper retraining systems.

The ideal response would be, to fix those systems. Not to try to stop the inevitable progress of technology. But it’s also not good to get lost in the long term picture and forget about the short term social cost.

EDITED one million typos

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Psychomadeye t1_ja9013o wrote

And we've seen exactly this in the second industrial revolution. The quality of life and recovery time from technological unemployment improved dramatically right up until the great depression. The depression itself is where real financial technology killed banks that didn't know how to use it and the fallback was the gold standard causing the biggest monetary contraction in US history. In the third industrial revolution (now) we've seen multiple recessions but the great recession, which was approximately half as bad as the great depression, dissipated in just about two years. Then there was Covid quarantine that lasted one year. Now people are seriously considering a 4 day work week right after a bunch of corporations stick with WFH because trials have shown an increase in revenue even providing the same pay and benefits. In one or two generations they might be talking about a 3 day work week or short shifts. We're also seeing major issues being addressed like never before. We have unemployment insurance, medicaid, medicare, social security, section 8, snap and a few other things that I've definitely forgotten. The US could spend more on these things but isn't right now because political games. At the end of the day though, the best political strategy is good policy. Right now I'd imagine the biggest challenge we have is climate change and we will need to bring every worker and technological advancement we have to bear on that one for the next one hundred years if we want to make it.

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Cerulean_IsFancyBlue t1_ja93ah1 wrote

EDIT: I wanted to have that I’m enjoying your responses and I hope I’m not coming off as combative. It’s nice to have a good interaction on Reddit and this is the best of my day so far. :)

I agree that good policy is good for all in the long term. Hope we get there.

If you look at the industrial revolution in Britain in isolation, then it is an arc upwards. If you look at the British empire, it’s not quite so rosy.

The destruction of the Indian textile industry was essential to the success of Britain’s domestic wonder. Since it wasn’t an area I had directly studied in school, up until recently I assumed that it was mostly the consequence of Britain being a first mover, and overwhelming the inefficient, unfortunate textile producers in India, and other places. After reading a few histories of the British east India company, it became pretty clear that the British monopoly on textiles was not a matter of efficiency. It was imposed by tariffs, laws restricting, the importation of machinery, and at least three spectacular instances by force of arms and the destruction of property.

Real income and GDP in India took a severe hit from Britain’s Industrial Revolution, and continued to be suppressed to provide a market for British finished goods output. India is still recovering.

Again, this is not a necessary outcome of technology. I’m bringing this up to note that the external costs of past revolutions, especially the global winds, have to be looked at globally. It’s very dangerous to look justify the people who benefit. And in this case, even the working class people in the UK benefited. Yes, the arc went up. But it didn’t go out for everybody, at least not for a few centuries.

But it is unfortunately a common and likely outcome of our current system, where productivity games are assigned, almost exclusively to the owners, and, that group has a tremendous amount of leverage when it comes to creating laws and steering government spending.

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Psychomadeye t1_ja9pmai wrote

It seems that the industrial revolutions mainly benefit the countries that they happen in, and can be quite dangerous to others where it is not happening. Places that these revolutions see as raw materials to be consumed. The people who end up paying for the current digital industrial revolution would be in the places where it is not really taking place. And it is as you say, technology itself does not have agency. A common example is that the compass was invented by the Chinese but it would be another 800 years before they used it for navigation.

In the third revolution, it seems that there will be less imperialism. I'm not 100% certain as to why this is, as I'm an engineer, not a historian or economist. It's possible that the "colonies" are already established for the most part. It's also possible that the refinement of existing industry is the real issue. In the end though, I'm thinking this one is going to be mostly the same deal as last time but faster. That seems to be the pattern so far. Both of the previous revolutions brought about big social changes as well. The second industrial revolution gave us the 5 day workweek and the 8 hour day. The common counter that I've read about to technological unemployment is large scale public works projects.

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EDIT: I am also enjoying the discussion. It's nice to talk to someone who isn't full tilt doom.

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