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Superduperbals t1_j8epn5m wrote

AI itself isn't really the point of issue, consider the printing press, or the internet, it's the social, cultural, economic transformation that it comes in its wake that really matters. In our case now, we're looking at the potential automation of knowledge work, and certainly this implies that many people are going to be made redundant or replaced by a superior AI.

But I think you're missing the fact that this power dynamic isn't a one-way street, you may have access to the same level of productive AI tech that your bosses leveraged against you in the first place. Already, look at how many people are incorporating ChatGPT into their workflows, soon enough, it'll probably be able to handle 95% of any knowledge tasks that you ask it to do.

If a calculator is like having a math whiz in your pocket then the future of AI will be like having a Fortune 500 company in your pocket; accountants, lawyers, engineers, designers, assistants, salespeople - it would cost you millions in wages to buy that kind of people power - AI will do for less than what you pay for home internet. One person would have the potential to be as productive as a whole startup, or a dozen, even a corp with one million employees.

If you haven't guessed by now this will only make income inequality far, far, far worse. As even more wealth and power is centralized into an even smaller number of hands. Opportunties to get rich quick will be everywhere yet at the same time so far away. No doubt it will accelerate capitalism to its inevitable terminal breaking point. The real issue here is the paradox of, why do we have a progressively shittier quality of life overall despite exponential improvements to productivity across the board? And the answer will be, grimly, that we are both incapable and unwilling to conquer our greed.

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Frumpagumpus t1_j8eqatr wrote

or maybe just cuz we tax income instead of land, allowing monopolies or cabals to form that have infinite bargaining power and even creating additional ones with regulation (healthcare, intellectual property)

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Ok_Homework9290 t1_j8fp57l wrote

>soon enough, it'll probably be able to handle 95% of any knowledge tasks that you ask it to do.

I respectfully disagree with you.

Knowledge work (in general) is a lot more than just crunching numbers, shuffling papers, etc. Anybody who works in a knowledge-based field (or is familiar with a knowledge-based field) knows this.

AI that's capable of fully replacing what a significant amount of knowledge workers do is still pretty far out, IMO, given how much human interaction, task variety/diversity, abstract thinking, precision, etc. is involved in much of knowledge work (not to mention legal hurdles, adoption, etc).

Will some of these jobs disappear over, let's say, the next 10 years? 100%. There's no point in even denying that, nor is there any point in denying that much of the rest of knowledge work will undoubtedly change over the next time span and even more so after that, but I'm pretty confident we're a ways away from it being totally disrupted by AI.

Just my thoughts 😊.

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CrispinMK t1_j8g86sw wrote

Right on the money. This sub tends to assume that just because a technology exists that all of our institutions will immediately respond. That's just not how the world works. It took 20 years for many governments, corporations, etc. to even adopt the Internet, which was proven tech in the 90s. Politics and culture just don't move that fast.

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Proof_Deer8426 t1_j8h0c8f wrote

I don’t think greed is the right word. The power dynamic is a one way street - there may be benefits for workers initially, but as you say, it will ultimately be centralised and controlled by those who already have power. The problem is structural - most people are driven by economic necessity rather than greed - and the structure is upheld by ideology, which ai will be used to reinforce through media and online social networks. It will accelerate capitalism to breaking point, but the question is, what comes next? I suspect some kind of UBI will be instituted to deal with mass unemployment, and that this income will go straight to rent - not just housing but also various rental schemes in the style of Netflix - a sort of modern neo-feudalism, with perhaps some kind of ‘service’ like military or other public work demanded in return for receiving UBI. Having said that, the professional classes like lawyers and accountants will be able to resist their obsolescence for the foreseeable future, even if ai could feasibly do their work, because they are quite a powerful social group in their own right.

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Zealousideal_Ad3783 t1_j8fvm7u wrote

Your fourth paragraph does not at all follow from what you said in your third paragraph. I don’t understand how you could possibly say that the average person will have a progressively worse quality of life when a few sentences earlier you said people will be able to have a whole army of servants for essentially no cost.

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BenjaminHamnett t1_j8g4lnq wrote

Maybe relative living standards. By making normies feel like second class citizens when all the nerds are like super heroes. Imagine if you were the only one without a cellphone and a laptop

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visarga t1_j8j4o1y wrote

> If you haven't guessed by now this will only make income inequality far, far, far worse.

Doesn't follow. When you got this power in your hand, why do you think inequalities will be worse? AI lowers the entry barrier in many fields, thus normal people can rely more on themselves and their own assistant AIs. I think necessities will get cheaper and spending money will be mostly for luxuries.

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hmurphy2023 t1_j8g95ns wrote

>soon enough, it'll probably be able to handle 95% of any knowledge tasks that you ask it to do.

I consider myself an AI optimist, but even I don't believe this.

Knowledge tasks (in general) are a lot more complicated than you're making them seem, and there's lots of aspects to those tasks that are not covered by lms and will likely require new AI breakthroughs to be able to handle them one day, rather than just scaled-up lms.

I think you're being a bit too optimistic.

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Glad_Laugh_5656 t1_j8gi4qb wrote

I've noticed that a surefire way of getting a decent amount of upvotes on this sub is to comment that a certain job/industry is done for (or something along those lines).

It's almost like a lot of people on this sub get major hard-ons when thinking about the demise of an industry or job. Fucking weird.

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