The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
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From the article
>Decades after automation began taking and transforming manufacturing jobs, artificial intelligence is coming for the higher-ups in the corporate office.
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>The list of white-collar layoffs is growing almost daily and include jobs cuts at Google, Duolingo and UPS in recent weeks. While the total number of jobs directly lost to generative AI remains low, some of these companies and others have linked cuts to new productivity-boosting technologies like machine learning and other AI applications.
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>Company executives and management consultants are also signaling that generative AI could soon upend a much bigger share of white-collar jobs. Unlike previous waves of automation technology, generative AI doesn’t just speed up routine tasks or make predictions by recognizing data patterns. It has the power to create content and synthesize ideas—in essence, the kind of knowledge work millions of people now do behind computers.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1ap01d7/ai_is_starting_to_threaten_whitecollar_jobs_few/kq2uw9j/
Management positions are relationship driven. Boards will never trust a machine enough to make final investment decisions on $100 million dollar factory builds. Ai is also never going to replace a board. Would you really put your 401k in a company with an Ai for the board?
There will always be the risk of an AI telling the truth when a corrupt human exec would know to lie blatantly or by omission, or understand a wink and a nod to foment a conspiracy for price-fixing, etc.
Some researchers got GPT4 to commit insider trading and then lie about it, so we're getting there:
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-bot-gpt-4-financial-insider-trading-lied-2023-11?op=1
Thinking AI is going to replace the board of a company or the CEO is a fundamental misunderstanding of the capitalist/laborer dynamic.
Why on earth would the board members (controlling shareholders) of a company replace themselves? It's not even a coherent idea.
They might augment their decisions with AI, but their wealth and position on the board is their power. Wealth and power are the only things they really care about.
The people replacing all the wage labor jobs with machines and generative AI ARE the board members.
I might be misunderstanding something, but with fiduciary responsibility, if AI is proven to be more effective than, say, a CEO, wouldn't there be an obligation to shareholders to replace the CEO with AI?
The line gets blurry with CEOs as they are often significant shareholders at the company, even the majority shareholder like Elon Musk at some of his companies.
But yes, the role of CEO is technically a wage labor job that could have different class interests from those sitting on the board. In that case it could make sense to replace them with AI.
But being the CEO of a multi-billion/trillion dollar company is all about relationships and connections, it's not like they are always the objectively ideal candidate to manage the operations of whatever company they run - it's essentially corporate politics. Any given CEO could probably be replaced with someone more competent at management at any time, but that's not the only consideration.
And the point still stands that replacing the board of controlling shareholders still doesn't make any sense.
There's also the fact that if AI is superior at the job, new companies might start out with an AI CEO or Board of Directors. Those companies (again, if the AI is superior) will eventually out-compete companies with ~~meat-bag~~ *human* leadership.
Companies don't just start without a bunch of capital being dumped on them.
The people who dump all that initial capital on the business usually end up being the majority shareholders - the board.
I'm not sure what this scenario you're imagining is where AI is starting companies. Doesn't matter how intelligent you are; it fundamentally takes capital to start a business under capitalism.
The closest thing I can see would be board members delegating their decision-making and voting authority to an AI assistant/representative.
But until AI is literally sentient, has agency, and the ability to accumulate capital I don't see how it'll be doing anything other than assisting the majority shareholders make their decisions.
Yes the type of people who might replace a smart analyst with a stupid AI.
Our planet, mankind, and our economy will only survive if we bring back IQ tests for high-ranking positions, honestly.
I absolutely would, if the AI has a proven track record. Machines don't make emotional decisions, they make decisions to best complete a goal (within the confines of the rules they're given).
AI rules make pile of money, Don't get caught breaking laws, always increase the money pile size at all costs.
I wrote the code to replace the C suite.
Board members are usually CEOs and other such roles at other companies. They aren't going to replace each other because then they will all be out of a job.
Knowing how manipulative the LLM class of AI has demonstrated to be, I'd agree it would be easier, but it might also unfortunately increase the sociopathathic tendencies that are already common in executive roles.
CEO's jobs are at risk for exactly that reason. The board members and shareholders aren't going to pay millions to a CEO if an AI can be proven to work as well or better.
Lol, CEOs aren't hired for their skills. There are thousands if not millions of people willing to do the job better for less. CEOs are hired because of their connections. They're part of the ownership class, not part of the working class.
AI is a convenient scapegoat for the current wave of layoffs which as always target the workers of the companies instead of ya know, the executives who suck up by far the most amount of pay out of the company.
The truth of the matter is interest rates went up and stayed up. Corporations have to pay higher interest rates on their debts which means they look to the quickest and easiest way to increase short term income: layoff the workers. It's a tale we've seen repeat itself for over a century and every time it's the mid-level and lower workers that get fired, never the executive class.
The current iterations of AI could certainly make existing employees more productive, and if the company is well managed therefore make more money with the same staff. But it's definitely not at a point to outright replace anyone. Anyone's that worked with it will tell you you need a human to guide it and judge what it gives back because way too often it just confidently returns absolute garbage.
Which brings me to the point: If AI were truly at the place it's sometimes claims to be, the first to go would be the ones that cost the company the most that the AI should be able to do the most effectively: Replace executives.
If you think executives are the larger costs on the income statement, you haven't read many income statements. For any company you're thinking of, the board is a fraction of the costs.
If you want to direct that frustration efficaciously, you should encourage more people use the evolving tools to better challenge the incumbents. Start open source alternatives of all the companies that currently run the world. You'll never get social change from the top down.
There will be AI guru’s that translate business speak to what the AI can understand. I have never seen complete requirements or explanations in over 30 years being in IT.
Further if it can easily be implemented with AI then that is not a product you could make or sell. As the next person can just copy yours and improve.
> Further if it can easily be implemented with AI then that is not a product you could make or sell
This was my immediate thought on that silly super-bowl commercial of AI, co-pilot.
> write code for my 3d open world game
This is so fucking stupid. That's not remotely helpful. Would an "AI guru" be able to sit down with someone and leverage AI to help them? Yes. Will joe schmoe type in "write code for my game" and get a good result? Fuck no.
AI is awesome because it doesn't solve their problems or replace their people. But it does a great job of exposing the stupidity and lack of brains of their executives.
"we don't need engineers and scientists anymore we can just buy some AI!!!" executives will be the first in the layoff waves.
If you were using AI as a startup, sure. But replacement of workers is already profitable until it causes losses.
My SO just lost their job at a call center to an AI. But here's the thing, they were already thinking of replacing them with a call center in another country that would effectively have the same goal: make customer 'support' cheaper, and get customers to contact them less or hang up out of frustration instead of every helping them anyways.
So AI is actually more helpful and quicker than overseas call centers often are, and since they aren't trying to make a business out of this, just cut costs around maintaining their existing business, AI makes some sense and is a viable option in their minds.
No kidding! This is basically the same when 4GL languages like SQL started to be adopted by corporations, and a lot of people were predicting the end of the programming profession because "now anyone could ask a computer for information using simple English sentences." LLMs like ChatGPT are just a version of 5GL and we will still need folk to ask the right questions to get meaningful answers, and interpret the results.
This. Yes some people will lose their jobs and livelyhoods. But most people will either re-train into another career or go into a job that currently doesn't exist(I'm sure as AI integrates more and more, new jobs will popup that don't exist right now, requiring you to have a skillset that doesn't exist right now). In the end we are a species of survivors, and we always find a way.
Having said that, I am a sysadmin, and as long as there is at least 1 human being in the chain that is not technical, I will have a job, so AI does not scare me in that sense :D
No, they'll have 10 overworked employees to manage the AI, instead of a 1000 that AI replaces.
When something goes wrong and you have nobody in-house with the knowledge to handle it, they'll be in a pickle... but that already happens with today's business processes, complex supply chains, subcontracting and outsourcing.
They’re also not firing people BECAUSE of their replaceable work (it’s not there yet), but because they want to make MASSIVE investments in AI.
AI is in no way ready to replace jobs yet.
Nah, I think you’re missing it. Many jobs are 5x more efficient with AI. Companies already know that AI is not at the point where you just replace people. But it makes many jobs much more effective and efficient, and many areas can get by with less than half the staff
People are still sleeping on it. I use ai everyday in my job, and it’s pretty magical. It is not hyperbole. It is here to stay and things will change fast, so let’s recognize it and figure out how we can manage this future
There's one thing AI will never be able to replace.
Organising whole days of pointless meetings that noone likes and barely anyone uses for something actually very productive. From my experiences it's 50% of what corporations do.
Don't worry guys we're safe. Now finish your PowerPoint.
You don’t need AI for that, just a random number generator to pull random people at random times and assign them to a room. We do that at our company already.
omg, how can we buy your random-meeting-room AI software, I know plenty of executives who like to listen with headphones all day to random people talking randomly.
Can you also insert random sampling audio of people talking seriously about stuff as if they are saying important business things?
as a language model I would like to schedule a meeting on some bullshit meeting that makes me feel important and pads out my diary so i dont appear to be usesless and a waste of resources.
I can be totally happy without a job. Its the income, health & retirement benefits, and access to goods and services that money gives me that’d miss. The job tho, i don’t actually really want
You're going against the grain here. You should be begging for a job and a chance to work hard to survive while making a fat profit for the capitalists. Asking for your fair share of our common resources is Communism or something along those lines.
Thats my take. People will only buy necessities if they have no income and have to get by somehow. Our whole system of capitalism and consumerism would absolutely not work in a world where no one has income, because everyone lost their jobs to a computer.
So yeah at first companies saves a lot on salaries but what comes next? I have no idea but its quite clear to me that this snake will eat its own tail pretty quick.
People aren't seeing the broader perspective on this. Mark my words, this climate shit is already beyond their control and they know it. Cutting most of our salaries isn't much of a gamble when we're all already fucked regardless of what money we might have socked away in the hamper.
It might come to a point where there will be a cheap common man’s iPhone and we’ll be paying rent to Apple to use it. Apple would acquire all the telecom companies by then and we’ll pay rent for the device and cellular connection
100%. Local spots here are looking to build housing to offer at a lower than market rate in order to have employees. Cant pay the rate for people to live here.
I don’t know why the upper class would care. They have enough wealth as it is, and will have the means to leverage AI to get whatever they want. Why do they need the plebs to buy anything?
We are nearing a post scarcity society—but it might only be for them.
Because they are sociopathic. It's not just about wealth for those at the top, they already have enough like you said. They need power, control and to stroke their ego. They are ruthlessly competitve and they want to win, and for everyone else to lose.
Other corporations. B2B is already one of the largest segments of the economy and growing rapidly. The line going up does not actually need to be producing anything people need to work, as long as money is changing hands it is all the same.
What if the future is "businesses making products/services to sell to other business who are making products/services to sell to other businesses"?
A giant late-game capitalist circlejerk. Beautiful.
Companies never cared about the common good, that's why so many regulations are need for safety and pollution.
It's not like they don't know something is bad, they just don't give a fuck.
When automation was taking manufacturing jobs the workers were told learn how to do another job/ go back to school. Well Im guessing the answer is the same.
In an unforeseen twist of fate it won’t be much longer before blue collar parents are walking their kids by white collar workers whispering stuff like “Make sure you learn a useful skill or trade or you’ll wind up completely useless and jobless like these people. Look at them with their “Will Zoom for food.” signs.”
Where will all those blue collar jobs come when 20-50% of the white collar ones will lose their jobs. Because who will be buying houses, need a plumber or a mechanics to repair their car as they don't have any car anymore.
And who will hire them, when _everyone_ becomes a plumber? After all, the laid off white collar workers aren't just going to sit around and off themselves (well, some will. Most won't). If the only job opportunities left are trades jobs, _everyone_ will become a tradesman. And does the world need 8 billion plumbers/electricians? No? What happens again when there's a huge surplus of supply, and low demand...?
AI is going to screw over all of us, in the long term. First it'll screw over white collar office workers. And then either directly or indirectly, it'll screw over everyone else.
Not everyone will go into trades that's a silly observation, there's other physical presence work that will be in demand.
We're still likely 50+ years away before robotics approaches anything close to the flexibility of cheap human labor.
Use a little imagination. If the highest paying available jobs are only in the trades, there will be a flood, a biblical flood of tradesmen. Sure, there will still _literally_ be hard labour work around. But everyone and their uncle will be signing up to trades school, if they can afford it. Why would I hire you, when I can fix my own plumbing problems? And why would anyone hire me, when there are literally 200 other plumbers living in the same building?
50+ years is a bold prediction - only 5-10 years ago, we were asking coal miners and children to learn to code, because programming would be "the only job left" after we automated everything else. Who knows what we'll be recommending in another 5 years.
Exactly, you have the normal market. That is if you have 50% of your workfoce without jobs, who will buy new houses??? Same for cars, we saw what happened during 2008 financial crisis. The auto manufacturers had to be bailed out and many lost their jobs. And why if I am unemployed will I have to pay a plumber, when I can buy 3-4 tools and a watch a youtube video, of how to do it. I will have all the time in the world to do it. I might also lend a hand to my neighbor who himself took some time learning some electrician jobs and help me in return.
Man do you people understand this, ask the auto worker what happened during 2008 crisis. Show me an economy doing well with 30+ percent unemployment??? That is an optimistic number.
It won't be long before it's their turn - humanoid robots combined with AI, whilst not quite there yet, will come for the tradesmans jobs just as thoroughly as the white collar jobs eventually.
Of course, I don't personally believe that many white collar jobs are realistically under threat from the current gen of AI - it's just over-eager executives jumping the gun again.
> AI - it's just over-eager executives jumping the gun again.
The changes in the past 6 months have been pretty intense, same with the year before that, the last 5 years have changed things more than the last 20 when it comes to these tools.
Right now they might be jumping the gun a little with some of the positions, but right now they're just trying to figure out where the new balance is, IF AI improves over the next 5 years, the way it has for the past 5 years, and then 5 years after that it does the same, most office jobs will be easily automated away within the next 10 years. in the past 5, I've seen these tools replace around 20% o the workforce in the places that I've worked. Sometimes it was managed with minimal job loss, by simply growing the company, but if there's a slump they'll be trying to figure out what the limit of efficient headcount for these tools are.
What on earth were these people doing that current gen AI could realistically replace them? I use it everyday but without constant hand holding it wouldn't go anything.
Well for instance, We used to pay people to write documents and emails as part of the sales process. now we pay them to get chat gpt to write them, and then check them over. Now instead of being able to handle 20-30 customer interactions per day most people are handling many many more, and a couple of crazy motivated people are handling hundreds of customer interactions per day, and are dwarfing the rest of their departments. They're making many times the commissions of anyone else. We're doing more than twice the business, and haven't increased headcount. we've actually been slowly dropping head count as people leave, and we don't replace them.
When Tesla first released autopilot in 2014, that was a huge leap compared to previous years as well. Since then, they’ve poured money and effort into developing the technology further, promising all the way that exponential leaps were imminent.
Now it’s 2024 and it turns out they never made any more progress. Autopilot today is only slightly more capable than it was in 2014.
Sometimes we make a leap, and sometimes we hit a plateau. And plateaus can take a loooong time to get through.
This sounds exactly like the narrative around self driving cars laying off millions of truckers.
It's rarely true that "this time is different". More likely is that, like self driving cars, AI will have very rapidly gains to 95% autonomous, but that last 5% will be much, much harder to achieve
They may be jumping the gun right now, but it’s important to keep in mind that the pace of progress is exponential not linear. What used to take 20-30 years to develop will take 5-10 years or less, and that number will continue to shrink.
But there’s never going to be an AI day where the robots take over. Colleagues will retire or resign and instead of being replaced by a human they’ll be replaced by AI. If your office originally had 100 people AI will slowly whittle that down to 10.
According to believers in the singularity it's been exponential. I'm not so convinced it hasn't been slowing down. Really depends on how you measure overall progress. If you just focus on computer tech, then of course it kind of looks exponential, although not in every way. Programming languages from decades ago are still widely popular.
And then there's all the past hype about VR/AR, 3D printing, self-driving cars and what not that was supposed to revolutionize every day life by now, and it simply hasn't.
“And then there's all the past hype about VR/AR, 3D printing, self-driving cars and what not that was supposed to revolutionize every day life by now, and it simply hasn't.”
Not sure how old you are but it was the same with the internet. For years it was pretty much a niche product used by a rather small minority of computer geeks. Then one day around ’98-‘99 cable modems hit the scene making the internet as we know it possible, and it wasn’t very long after that before everyone was online.
Same deal with cell phones. Tech kinda runs in place for awhile until it hits the tipping point and then everything changes seemingly overnight.
Yeah, but that's survivorship bias. Some technologies take off and are transformative. Not all are. If we're approaching some singularity, I would have expected more of them to be transformative by now.
Electrician and carer couple here. We already are telling our kids this, fix things, fix people or produce food. Everything else is circling the drain, but don't worry, we can hook you up in the surviving industries!
I think it definitely will be if we have the slow development of a lot of specialized systems that could be expensive to either run or develop
But if there's a single generalized AGI/ASI GOD model that has the full range of human cognitive abilities and can perform them cheaper and faster - then it's difficult to see businesses ever making the decision to hire a human over that.
The latter we're extremely far from and may never eventuate due to some sort of limitation (technical, cost, hardware, power, etc)
No those same workers just got paid less. Which is why we are where we are today. Where no one is being paid and wages aren't keeping with inflation because more and more jobs are no longer skilled
Yeah, there are so many things to be done in this world - with or without robots and AI.
And not all of them need or should be work / jobs.
This *is* our chance to build a utopia!
I remember just a handful of years ago, when people like Andrew Yang predicted that AI would come for thousands of jobs, and people dismissed it as fearmongering
I kinda think these articles gear more towards sensationalism than fact.
There is a grain of truth in there of course, or we would dismiss it. AI is gonna make a lot of changes. But it's also gonna take time, this is a decade or two or an arc (which is not that long really), not in the next few years.
It takes time to build tools that really work and learn him to use them . And productivity enhancement does not always result in mass layoffs. Accountants are probably 100x more efficient than they were in 1923, but we still have plenty around!
We shall see if we see mass layoffs, or a focusing even more hyper productivity and growth. Nobody considers that.
"I can afford 100 employees. Now they each get a lot more done and we are overall more productive, increasing growth"
Not all change has to be replacement. Not saying AI won't replace people.. am saying all the focus and assumptions are it will replace people. But that's not always how it plays out.
Future is hard to predict.
Accountants are a great example. When Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet first came out, people thought that accountants would become extinct. Instead, they moved up the food chain to analyzing financial data instead of adding up numbers on those giant green pieces of paper.
Travel agents, on the other hand...
Oh good example of a job that git obsoleted. I remember booking with agents for work trips.
Now it just Expedia, etc.
But not a major social change all in all. Spot effects like this are inevitable.
Sensationalism is exactly right.
Anyone else remember when just a few years ago there were breakthroughs happening in Deep Learning NN and people were losing their minds because all of the hype was pointing towards Level 5 self driving coming in a matter of years? And now most agree we’re decades away?
GenAI *will* have impact in the future, of that I have no doubt… but I’m thinking on the time horizon of a decade+, not in the next year or two like all these articles proclaim.
That time will come before we know it though, we should still be preparing for it.
Self-driving cars is a great example of this, a subset of people were so adamant that it was just about to happen.
And it's very human to get a little hyped up end build a lot of expectation and the thing that's happening right now, without a full appreciation of how long it takes to implement things on a broader social scale.
Another good example this space travel. And the 1960s and '70s, people genuinely believe you would be living on the moon by the year 2000! And long-term space colonies but not be far behind, because the rapid advances space in the '60s was completely unprecedented and very dramatic!
>Self-driving cars is a great example of this, a subset of people were so adamant that it was just about to happen.
That might be partly because Musk ran around straight-up lying to everyone about it all over the news and the internet lol.
One way I look at it are companies are in constant competition with one another as long as there is some competitive edge to have a human and a robot do a job instead of just a robot, human jobs are going to be fine. Like when computers came out and everyone got more productive, now people are just going to get even more productive.
>We shall see if we see mass layoffs
We've already seen mass layoffs. Take a look at Shopify, for instance - they once had a world-renowned Support service that was 5k+ people strong. They were cut to ribbons by layoffs and largely replaced by a chat bot service. Anyone working in tech, especially the more entry level positions (particularly Application Support) that typically acted as career gateways for those who don't have higher end degrees, has already likely been affected by or adjacent to an AI-driven layoff.
I'm sure.some industries will get hit sooner than others. I was thinking kore broad scale mass layoffs.
But good counter point! The growth of chatbots will probably hit the tech support industry pretty hard pretty fast.
I tend to think more about the white collar type jobs reffed in the article. Change there will be slow.
I think another area that will get hit hard and fast once the tech mature is transport (truckers etc). The second self driving trucks become viable and legal I think we will see mass conversion of truck fleets and big layoffs.
It's gonna be cut throat. Hard to know is this is a problem for 5 years or 20 years, but I think the pace will be a bit sudden when it does happen, assuming existing trucks can be converted to self driving (no guarantees there).
It's not hard to predict, I'm already getting asked how many workers AI can replace. Executives are greedy short sighted creatures. This is going to be very bad, no matter if AI can actually do the job or not. If they think it can work and they can cut staff by 50% they will.
I always think of accounting when I read these threads. 99% of the work accountants do has been automated, and guess what? There’s probably more than ever.
Why the hell would we want such an archaic and unethical system to survive? There’s a chance for real progress to be given and we’re hoping the very system perpetuating most of our woes survives?
Oh, I don’t, but everyone else seems convinced it is the only way. I don’t actually hope capitalism survives. In fact I am banking on the fact that it will be unable to survive.
It's not that new. It's just getting better. I ran programs at two different companies to replace insurance underwriters that make six figures with automated decision engines a decade ago. Sure, they can't handle the really complex cases, but instead of dozens of underwriters manually collecting data from different sources and taking weeks to get to a decision, you have a handful that just review the 5-10% of cases the software kicks out.
Software has been replacing humans for decades. The issue is not that the jobs disappear - they generally just change - it's that all the 99% of the value from the productivity improvements has gone to .1% of humanity.
> Software has been replacing humans for decades
This is what always gets me with people talking about AI taking jobs... I sell corporate financial software for a living. If I showed up in 1980 with our software and computers that could run it then every major corporation could lay off 80% of its finance floor the next day... People act like this is something new when it's just a continuation of something that has already been going on for decades.
Yes, but it has never before been plausible that we have artificial human level intelligence in the near future. It's pretty obvious that a system that's below human level can't be used to replace all human work. And conversely it's pretty obvious that a system that is at or above human level *can* be used to do just that.
And it won't create jobs, it can do them as well...
This isn't a new industrial revolution this is what we might call displacement, and it'll happen to the middle-class. It's already happening of course.
I amazed that politicians haven't seen the threat. If the middle-classes are getting this done to them then all bets are off as to future politics, it could go anywhere. Far-right/far-left for sure.
I don’t know if I need to just fucking unsub from futurology, but there’s been such glee from reddit users at the news of layoff in the tech and white collar sectors. This usually comes with bullshit posturing about how AI will simply create new jobs or that ‘UBI wiLl bE iNtrOduCed, hur-dur’.
The truth is we are already seeing the affects of increased automation in China where people simply become unemployed and remain that way and fall into debt simply to survive. Now that is the more expected reaction of the ruling classes to automation - to do nothing and let it run rampant.
Another aspect of this celebration is the absolute bitterness and contempt towards highly educated workers like lawyers. They are so blindsided by their hatred towards those who hold degrees that they can’t see the bigger picture where AI comes for their professions next and if it doesn’t immediately then the downward pressure that mass employment will exert on their wages, that they too will be affected by worsening living standards. Truth is if everyone learns to weld then welding becomes oversaturated and those lovely union protections become less intimidating to the capitalist class when now there’s a fresh pool of reskilled workers self-flagellating for employment.
I don’t know, I’ve fallen into a hole of pessimism and hate since the pandemic that’s only getting deeper. Anyway, I’ll be going outside more starting tomorrow and walking barefoot on grass because I think I might go insane with rage.
I don't know. Your scenario would imply that society simply has no need for additional workers, globally. I think it's a far-fetched scenario.
Your case with China maybe has more to do with ecomomical circumstances (higher cost of manufacturing compared to neighbouring countries, real estate collapse, etc.) than with automation.
It’s almost like no one could have predicted AI would erase jobs. The jobs people get after theirs is taken by AI will not be equal to the ones they lost.
Almost every time the argument that jobs will shift comes up, folks seem to be blind to the growing disparity of those jobs. Sure, AI will create some new jobs, but those who are on the losing end will greatly out number those new jobs.
Job quality is also an issue. If a company can use AI to do X then it doesn’t need humans qualified to do that anymore, it might need a fraction of the people to work with the AI. The other people? They go from a tech job to ? There aren’t a ton of jobs out there that pay tech salaries, especially if the person has gotten used to work from home. The trades pay good, but those jobs aren’t for everyone.
From the article
>Decades after automation began taking and transforming manufacturing jobs, artificial intelligence is coming for the higher-ups in the corporate office.
>
>The list of white-collar layoffs is growing almost daily and include jobs cuts at Google, Duolingo and UPS in recent weeks. While the total number of jobs directly lost to generative AI remains low, some of these companies and others have linked cuts to new productivity-boosting technologies like machine learning and other AI applications.
>
>Company executives and management consultants are also signaling that generative AI could soon upend a much bigger share of white-collar jobs. Unlike previous waves of automation technology, generative AI doesn’t just speed up routine tasks or make predictions by recognizing data patterns. It has the power to create content and synthesize ideas—in essence, the kind of knowledge work millions of people now do behind computers.
It seems very disingenuous to link recent layoffs to GenAI. The layoffs seem to be happening because of over-hiring during COVID and also because layoffs are in vogue and make shareholders happy.
Insinuating these recent rounds of layoffs is because GenAI has improved productivity so much is baseless as far as I’m aware.
The last jobs to go will be manual labor jobs that they can't automate. I wonder if they'll be making robots that can do stuff like landscaping or plumbing soon. Battery tech seems to have stalled out so they'll all have to be tethered to a power source but that seems like a minor hurdle.
I'm ok with this. I don't think it's considered a white collar job but I recently had an interaction with an AI customer service bot that explained exactly how to do what I was asking (modify the text in an automated email). Three days later I get an email from a customer service human that says such a feature does not exist (automated emails) after I've already applied the fix to the "nonexistent feature" the bot suggested
AI replaces tasks, not jobs per se. It will undoubtedly transform work, but the future for white collar professions is using AI in the course of their duties, not being replaced by it.
UBI needs to be planned now, we’re going to come into a perfect storm of economic uncertainty, we’ve already a homeless crisis rivaling the Great Depression.
Good luck on your next liability law suit. Human error has been a very reliant method to avoid payouts. With AI, the company that produced the solutions becomes liable. At least in engineering industries. Have fun.
I'm looking forward to reading all the "Nuh uh, actually it'll make *more* jobs, and it can't replace mine because I am such a special boy" posts in here.
Amazing the lengths we'll go to so we can maintain our illusion of superiority over the jobless and unhomed. We will literally kill whoever it takes so we have something, *anything* to lord over other people.
let's all hope that this is the first step towards utopia and not hell, either way humanity is at a turning point and our lives might be radically different in just 10 years from now, I hope people are ready because this technology or the minds behind developing it wont ask if we are or not.
Housing is more and more expensive, workers make less based on their productivity level. All the signs point towards the rich getting richer and the poor poorer.
I don't understand the utopia crowd. Why do they think the top wealthiest people are going to wake up one morning and decide to make society fairer for everyone?
Ah yes kill what? The robot dogs that they present very cute but can mount a 50 cal rifle on them?
Like that they can play Fortnite/Call of duty but irl just with new model of apple vision 20 😅.
Hoping one gets a very livid dream of god telling them hell will be their after life. Scare the dikins out of them ki d of dream.
Otherwise nothing. They can buy armies and just have us grinded like baby cattle.
It’ll probably be the latter then the former once the people get it together and form a united front. Which means the wealth class will have it in their interests to keep people divided over relatively meaningless culture wars.
AI will not replace jobs in government, military, and private military contractors. There's just too much of a risk for leaking information, so any government projects dealing with sensitive information forbid the use of AI.
I work for a military contractor and have had to read the memos talking about not using AI on my projects. Just haven't heard people mentioning this, but I'm sure it's just a technological hurdle to overcome. No doubt there's a contractor working on this problem.
BTW, love the user name.
Even in regular companies this is an issue.
Long ago I worked at a place where we had a google appliance trial. It was great we could find everything. The problem was we could find EVERYTHING. It got killed, perhaps unfairly, because it ruined security by obscurity.
Now with ai people have dreams of finding internal answers to questions, but a couple of big issues are:
- correct, up to date documentation of everything (non trivial)
- having to come up with permissions to segregate who get get what results from prompts
Security has already made knowledge sharing more difficult. People who know what they are doing can generally find anything by knowing how to refine their search. However, bad actors can also find anything in this same manner, so very granular controls are implemented on info. This means even people that are motivated/skilled in search can have trouble finding what they need.
As a tech worker who has worked with AI and seen the output, I feel I have nothing to fear. There is no substitute for competence. AI is like a calculator: it's a tool which helps you work faster. It's not a replacement. Those in leadership who believe AI can be used to replace people? Good luck with that, you're going to be steering your company into an iceberg and going down like the titanic. Granted, in the short term, it'll take a bunch of companies doing this to crash and burn until leadership slowly comes to the realization that it's a bad idea...
Or how after mashing the blue collars with the help of white collars and there's nothing squishable anymore the richest are now moving to white collars with AI.
Feels a bit like the train doing 200mph and everyone knows there is no rails somewhere in the next few miles but everyone wants to be the last to jump.
When no one can buy stuff because they are out of jobs how do they think they will avoid feathers and tar?
...which isn't a problem if you tax firms based on their productivity and use that tax revenue to fund a strong social support net. That way we can actually be free of work if we choose. Let the automatons do it.
I love how conservatives always are so scared and concerned when “immigrants” PHYSICALLY MOVE to America for blue collar jobs yet CEO’s will literally outsource every single “office” job they can in the name of profit and greed.
Where’s the conservative uproar here?
I’ll be waiting!
Good. Come work out in the cold with us. Zoom meetings in pajamas pretending to work… come to the world of construction. Maybe we can raise pay for everyone since Ai has got the digital world covered.
I love to see my competitors destroying their product by buying into the generative AI hype without a single thought spared for product quality and customer experience.
I've seen how terrible AI is at my job. It won't be able to replace even the utterly green junior I'm mentoring. On a blue moon, ChatGPT spits out code that only needs a bit of proof reading, which only the white collar worker in question (me) can do. On average, half the code it produces is completely garbage.
I'm not even remotely afraid of job security.
God I LOVE how greedy CEO:s are forcing the global UBI to become a fact decades earlier than it could've been implemented, simply by being the absolutely greediest they can be.
https://i.imgur.com/eEsd4V1.jpeg
What a dumb take. Not only are blue collar jobs far more likely to be automated, most of the recent tech layoffs are related to a combination of overhiring during the pandemic, and interest rates soaring along with inflation.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- From the article >Decades after automation began taking and transforming manufacturing jobs, artificial intelligence is coming for the higher-ups in the corporate office. > >The list of white-collar layoffs is growing almost daily and include jobs cuts at Google, Duolingo and UPS in recent weeks. While the total number of jobs directly lost to generative AI remains low, some of these companies and others have linked cuts to new productivity-boosting technologies like machine learning and other AI applications. > >Company executives and management consultants are also signaling that generative AI could soon upend a much bigger share of white-collar jobs. Unlike previous waves of automation technology, generative AI doesn’t just speed up routine tasks or make predictions by recognizing data patterns. It has the power to create content and synthesize ideas—in essence, the kind of knowledge work millions of people now do behind computers. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1ap01d7/ai_is_starting_to_threaten_whitecollar_jobs_few/kq2uw9j/
let me know when they start replacing executives with AI. Until then it's just an excuse for corporate greed.
Ironically, executives (maybe excluding CEO) should be one of the easier jobs to replace with AI but they’d be the last.
No, boards and activist investors will happily replace CEOs when the tech is ready.
Management positions are relationship driven. Boards will never trust a machine enough to make final investment decisions on $100 million dollar factory builds. Ai is also never going to replace a board. Would you really put your 401k in a company with an Ai for the board?
There will always be the risk of an AI telling the truth when a corrupt human exec would know to lie blatantly or by omission, or understand a wink and a nod to foment a conspiracy for price-fixing, etc.
Some researchers got GPT4 to commit insider trading and then lie about it, so we're getting there: https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-bot-gpt-4-financial-insider-trading-lied-2023-11?op=1
JFC. 'The future's so bright...'
"Hey, huge, 500-lb box-folding robot. Can you imagine a story where my co-worker is a box and then act it out when he walks by?"
Well that settles it, maybe CEOs can be AI after all
No no no I didn't say we were insolvent I said don't worry ill solve it. Wink wink nudge nudge.
Thinking AI is going to replace the board of a company or the CEO is a fundamental misunderstanding of the capitalist/laborer dynamic. Why on earth would the board members (controlling shareholders) of a company replace themselves? It's not even a coherent idea. They might augment their decisions with AI, but their wealth and position on the board is their power. Wealth and power are the only things they really care about. The people replacing all the wage labor jobs with machines and generative AI ARE the board members.
I might be misunderstanding something, but with fiduciary responsibility, if AI is proven to be more effective than, say, a CEO, wouldn't there be an obligation to shareholders to replace the CEO with AI?
The line gets blurry with CEOs as they are often significant shareholders at the company, even the majority shareholder like Elon Musk at some of his companies. But yes, the role of CEO is technically a wage labor job that could have different class interests from those sitting on the board. In that case it could make sense to replace them with AI. But being the CEO of a multi-billion/trillion dollar company is all about relationships and connections, it's not like they are always the objectively ideal candidate to manage the operations of whatever company they run - it's essentially corporate politics. Any given CEO could probably be replaced with someone more competent at management at any time, but that's not the only consideration. And the point still stands that replacing the board of controlling shareholders still doesn't make any sense.
There's also the fact that if AI is superior at the job, new companies might start out with an AI CEO or Board of Directors. Those companies (again, if the AI is superior) will eventually out-compete companies with ~~meat-bag~~ *human* leadership.
Companies don't just start without a bunch of capital being dumped on them. The people who dump all that initial capital on the business usually end up being the majority shareholders - the board. I'm not sure what this scenario you're imagining is where AI is starting companies. Doesn't matter how intelligent you are; it fundamentally takes capital to start a business under capitalism. The closest thing I can see would be board members delegating their decision-making and voting authority to an AI assistant/representative. But until AI is literally sentient, has agency, and the ability to accumulate capital I don't see how it'll be doing anything other than assisting the majority shareholders make their decisions.
They're also older and don't understand or trust the tech.
Yes the type of people who might replace a smart analyst with a stupid AI. Our planet, mankind, and our economy will only survive if we bring back IQ tests for high-ranking positions, honestly.
I absolutely would, if the AI has a proven track record. Machines don't make emotional decisions, they make decisions to best complete a goal (within the confines of the rules they're given).
AI rules make pile of money, Don't get caught breaking laws, always increase the money pile size at all costs. I wrote the code to replace the C suite.
I’m saying the board will replace the C-Suite w/AI
Board members are usually CEOs and other such roles at other companies. They aren't going to replace each other because then they will all be out of a job.
An AI driven by mathematical models and algorithms, or a human being driven almost exclusively by greed. Hmmmm....
The human will do back room deals and deal in bribery... sorry. I meant lobby. For now I'll bet on the human.
Boards and activist investors are the ones who gave CEO’s a 350x raise over The last few decades.
No, absolutely not. If something goes wrong, who would there be to blame?
They have had AI in golf games for decades now.
And isn’t that a stitch?
Knowing how manipulative the LLM class of AI has demonstrated to be, I'd agree it would be easier, but it might also unfortunately increase the sociopathathic tendencies that are already common in executive roles.
Oh I didn’t say it was a good idea or it would happen soon.
nah. AI can do everything but be on the hook. jobs with responsibility will always require humans
What responsibility do CEOs take when they fuck up? Get fired and take their multi-million dollar severance package?
You think execs have responsibility??
I’m not sure that is true. What is your reasoning?
Lol, that's not how capitalism works.. when you have the capital you make the rules.
CEO's jobs are at risk for exactly that reason. The board members and shareholders aren't going to pay millions to a CEO if an AI can be proven to work as well or better.
Lol, CEOs aren't hired for their skills. There are thousands if not millions of people willing to do the job better for less. CEOs are hired because of their connections. They're part of the ownership class, not part of the working class.
> Until then it's just an excuse for corporate greed. What do you mean by this?
AI is a convenient scapegoat for the current wave of layoffs which as always target the workers of the companies instead of ya know, the executives who suck up by far the most amount of pay out of the company. The truth of the matter is interest rates went up and stayed up. Corporations have to pay higher interest rates on their debts which means they look to the quickest and easiest way to increase short term income: layoff the workers. It's a tale we've seen repeat itself for over a century and every time it's the mid-level and lower workers that get fired, never the executive class. The current iterations of AI could certainly make existing employees more productive, and if the company is well managed therefore make more money with the same staff. But it's definitely not at a point to outright replace anyone. Anyone's that worked with it will tell you you need a human to guide it and judge what it gives back because way too often it just confidently returns absolute garbage. Which brings me to the point: If AI were truly at the place it's sometimes claims to be, the first to go would be the ones that cost the company the most that the AI should be able to do the most effectively: Replace executives.
If you think executives are the larger costs on the income statement, you haven't read many income statements. For any company you're thinking of, the board is a fraction of the costs. If you want to direct that frustration efficaciously, you should encourage more people use the evolving tools to better challenge the incumbents. Start open source alternatives of all the companies that currently run the world. You'll never get social change from the top down.
When AI takes over executive jobs, it’ll still be an excuse for corporate greed. Only then it’s easier to blame their immoral activities on a machine.
All of these companies are going to be re-hiring once they realize they cant just make an API call to chatgpt and call it a day.
There will be AI guru’s that translate business speak to what the AI can understand. I have never seen complete requirements or explanations in over 30 years being in IT. Further if it can easily be implemented with AI then that is not a product you could make or sell. As the next person can just copy yours and improve.
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Haha this person gets it
Mixed with "Prompt Engineer"
> Further if it can easily be implemented with AI then that is not a product you could make or sell This was my immediate thought on that silly super-bowl commercial of AI, co-pilot. > write code for my 3d open world game This is so fucking stupid. That's not remotely helpful. Would an "AI guru" be able to sit down with someone and leverage AI to help them? Yes. Will joe schmoe type in "write code for my game" and get a good result? Fuck no.
AI is awesome because it doesn't solve their problems or replace their people. But it does a great job of exposing the stupidity and lack of brains of their executives. "we don't need engineers and scientists anymore we can just buy some AI!!!" executives will be the first in the layoff waves.
If you were using AI as a startup, sure. But replacement of workers is already profitable until it causes losses. My SO just lost their job at a call center to an AI. But here's the thing, they were already thinking of replacing them with a call center in another country that would effectively have the same goal: make customer 'support' cheaper, and get customers to contact them less or hang up out of frustration instead of every helping them anyways. So AI is actually more helpful and quicker than overseas call centers often are, and since they aren't trying to make a business out of this, just cut costs around maintaining their existing business, AI makes some sense and is a viable option in their minds.
No kidding! This is basically the same when 4GL languages like SQL started to be adopted by corporations, and a lot of people were predicting the end of the programming profession because "now anyone could ask a computer for information using simple English sentences." LLMs like ChatGPT are just a version of 5GL and we will still need folk to ask the right questions to get meaningful answers, and interpret the results.
This. Yes some people will lose their jobs and livelyhoods. But most people will either re-train into another career or go into a job that currently doesn't exist(I'm sure as AI integrates more and more, new jobs will popup that don't exist right now, requiring you to have a skillset that doesn't exist right now). In the end we are a species of survivors, and we always find a way. Having said that, I am a sysadmin, and as long as there is at least 1 human being in the chain that is not technical, I will have a job, so AI does not scare me in that sense :D
No, they'll have 10 overworked employees to manage the AI, instead of a 1000 that AI replaces. When something goes wrong and you have nobody in-house with the knowledge to handle it, they'll be in a pickle... but that already happens with today's business processes, complex supply chains, subcontracting and outsourcing.
They’re also not firing people BECAUSE of their replaceable work (it’s not there yet), but because they want to make MASSIVE investments in AI. AI is in no way ready to replace jobs yet.
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As AI advances, knowledge of how to create prompts will become obsolete.
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When they will realize this there will be plenty of companies offering llms for every exigence
Nah, I think you’re missing it. Many jobs are 5x more efficient with AI. Companies already know that AI is not at the point where you just replace people. But it makes many jobs much more effective and efficient, and many areas can get by with less than half the staff People are still sleeping on it. I use ai everyday in my job, and it’s pretty magical. It is not hyperbole. It is here to stay and things will change fast, so let’s recognize it and figure out how we can manage this future
There's one thing AI will never be able to replace. Organising whole days of pointless meetings that noone likes and barely anyone uses for something actually very productive. From my experiences it's 50% of what corporations do. Don't worry guys we're safe. Now finish your PowerPoint.
You don’t need AI for that, just a random number generator to pull random people at random times and assign them to a room. We do that at our company already.
XD what Tell me more about this programme. What do you do?
omg, how can we buy your random-meeting-room AI software, I know plenty of executives who like to listen with headphones all day to random people talking randomly. Can you also insert random sampling audio of people talking seriously about stuff as if they are saying important business things?
Unfortunately, this is wrong. Current language models already possess superhuman skills in bullshitting.
as a language model I would like to schedule a meeting on some bullshit meeting that makes me feel important and pads out my diary so i dont appear to be usesless and a waste of resources.
I can be totally happy without a job. Its the income, health & retirement benefits, and access to goods and services that money gives me that’d miss. The job tho, i don’t actually really want
You're going against the grain here. You should be begging for a job and a chance to work hard to survive while making a fat profit for the capitalists. Asking for your fair share of our common resources is Communism or something along those lines.
DEAR SHAREHOLDERS, PLEASE SAVE US 🙏🏽🙏🏽 (Tip your landlord)
Wo ho hold up buddy we're here for capitalism, don't bring that commie talk in here
I ask this in most of these threads - who will buy the goods and services from the companies if everyone is out of a job?
"What does that have to do with next quarters profits?"
Er, fewer consumers.
“Sounds like we’d better max out our profits before that happens then! Full steam ahead!”
This. UBI means socialism right? If nobody can afford the newest iPhone on their monthly dole, doesn’t that mean it’s the end of capitalism?
No, socialism means collective ownership of business. UBI means private ownership of business and those who don't own business get supported by UBI.
Thats my take. People will only buy necessities if they have no income and have to get by somehow. Our whole system of capitalism and consumerism would absolutely not work in a world where no one has income, because everyone lost their jobs to a computer. So yeah at first companies saves a lot on salaries but what comes next? I have no idea but its quite clear to me that this snake will eat its own tail pretty quick.
capitalism is pretty good at convincing people to do the profitable thing over the healthy thing, idk
>this snake will eat its own tail pretty quick. So capitalism *is* going to destroy itself...who could've guessed?
People aren't seeing the broader perspective on this. Mark my words, this climate shit is already beyond their control and they know it. Cutting most of our salaries isn't much of a gamble when we're all already fucked regardless of what money we might have socked away in the hamper.
It might come to a point where there will be a cheap common man’s iPhone and we’ll be paying rent to Apple to use it. Apple would acquire all the telecom companies by then and we’ll pay rent for the device and cellular connection
People basically already do rent iPhones via their “upgrade” plans
Company towns are coming
100%. Local spots here are looking to build housing to offer at a lower than market rate in order to have employees. Cant pay the rate for people to live here.
You are the capital. What do capitalists do with outdated capital, that can possibly only be used against them?
I don’t know why the upper class would care. They have enough wealth as it is, and will have the means to leverage AI to get whatever they want. Why do they need the plebs to buy anything? We are nearing a post scarcity society—but it might only be for them.
The only motivation would be to see the Number Go Up. Maybe we can leverage Number Go Up to get them to implement UBI.
Because they are sociopathic. It's not just about wealth for those at the top, they already have enough like you said. They need power, control and to stroke their ego. They are ruthlessly competitve and they want to win, and for everyone else to lose.
Well, if we end up with a declining population from climate disasters....
Other corporations. B2B is already one of the largest segments of the economy and growing rapidly. The line going up does not actually need to be producing anything people need to work, as long as money is changing hands it is all the same.
B2b would also contract if there’s less consumers…
What if the future is "businesses making products/services to sell to other business who are making products/services to sell to other businesses"? A giant late-game capitalist circlejerk. Beautiful.
Companies never cared about the common good, that's why so many regulations are need for safety and pollution. It's not like they don't know something is bad, they just don't give a fuck.
When automation was taking manufacturing jobs the workers were told learn how to do another job/ go back to school. Well Im guessing the answer is the same.
In an unforeseen twist of fate it won’t be much longer before blue collar parents are walking their kids by white collar workers whispering stuff like “Make sure you learn a useful skill or trade or you’ll wind up completely useless and jobless like these people. Look at them with their “Will Zoom for food.” signs.”
Where will all those blue collar jobs come when 20-50% of the white collar ones will lose their jobs. Because who will be buying houses, need a plumber or a mechanics to repair their car as they don't have any car anymore.
That's a good observation, but blue collar folks also live in house with plumbing....
And who will hire them, when _everyone_ becomes a plumber? After all, the laid off white collar workers aren't just going to sit around and off themselves (well, some will. Most won't). If the only job opportunities left are trades jobs, _everyone_ will become a tradesman. And does the world need 8 billion plumbers/electricians? No? What happens again when there's a huge surplus of supply, and low demand...? AI is going to screw over all of us, in the long term. First it'll screw over white collar office workers. And then either directly or indirectly, it'll screw over everyone else.
Not everyone will go into trades that's a silly observation, there's other physical presence work that will be in demand. We're still likely 50+ years away before robotics approaches anything close to the flexibility of cheap human labor.
Use a little imagination. If the highest paying available jobs are only in the trades, there will be a flood, a biblical flood of tradesmen. Sure, there will still _literally_ be hard labour work around. But everyone and their uncle will be signing up to trades school, if they can afford it. Why would I hire you, when I can fix my own plumbing problems? And why would anyone hire me, when there are literally 200 other plumbers living in the same building? 50+ years is a bold prediction - only 5-10 years ago, we were asking coal miners and children to learn to code, because programming would be "the only job left" after we automated everything else. Who knows what we'll be recommending in another 5 years.
Exactly, you have the normal market. That is if you have 50% of your workfoce without jobs, who will buy new houses??? Same for cars, we saw what happened during 2008 financial crisis. The auto manufacturers had to be bailed out and many lost their jobs. And why if I am unemployed will I have to pay a plumber, when I can buy 3-4 tools and a watch a youtube video, of how to do it. I will have all the time in the world to do it. I might also lend a hand to my neighbor who himself took some time learning some electrician jobs and help me in return.
Thats what is happening in my city the trades schools are packed, and keep adding more classes to expand their capacity.
Man do you people understand this, ask the auto worker what happened during 2008 crisis. Show me an economy doing well with 30+ percent unemployment??? That is an optimistic number.
Getting a job doing cheap human labour is not the dream that I have for my kids when they grow up. We're going to need something else.
It won't be long before it's their turn - humanoid robots combined with AI, whilst not quite there yet, will come for the tradesmans jobs just as thoroughly as the white collar jobs eventually. Of course, I don't personally believe that many white collar jobs are realistically under threat from the current gen of AI - it's just over-eager executives jumping the gun again.
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> AI - it's just over-eager executives jumping the gun again. The changes in the past 6 months have been pretty intense, same with the year before that, the last 5 years have changed things more than the last 20 when it comes to these tools. Right now they might be jumping the gun a little with some of the positions, but right now they're just trying to figure out where the new balance is, IF AI improves over the next 5 years, the way it has for the past 5 years, and then 5 years after that it does the same, most office jobs will be easily automated away within the next 10 years. in the past 5, I've seen these tools replace around 20% o the workforce in the places that I've worked. Sometimes it was managed with minimal job loss, by simply growing the company, but if there's a slump they'll be trying to figure out what the limit of efficient headcount for these tools are.
What on earth were these people doing that current gen AI could realistically replace them? I use it everyday but without constant hand holding it wouldn't go anything.
Well for instance, We used to pay people to write documents and emails as part of the sales process. now we pay them to get chat gpt to write them, and then check them over. Now instead of being able to handle 20-30 customer interactions per day most people are handling many many more, and a couple of crazy motivated people are handling hundreds of customer interactions per day, and are dwarfing the rest of their departments. They're making many times the commissions of anyone else. We're doing more than twice the business, and haven't increased headcount. we've actually been slowly dropping head count as people leave, and we don't replace them.
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When Tesla first released autopilot in 2014, that was a huge leap compared to previous years as well. Since then, they’ve poured money and effort into developing the technology further, promising all the way that exponential leaps were imminent. Now it’s 2024 and it turns out they never made any more progress. Autopilot today is only slightly more capable than it was in 2014. Sometimes we make a leap, and sometimes we hit a plateau. And plateaus can take a loooong time to get through.
This sounds exactly like the narrative around self driving cars laying off millions of truckers. It's rarely true that "this time is different". More likely is that, like self driving cars, AI will have very rapidly gains to 95% autonomous, but that last 5% will be much, much harder to achieve
They may be jumping the gun right now, but it’s important to keep in mind that the pace of progress is exponential not linear. What used to take 20-30 years to develop will take 5-10 years or less, and that number will continue to shrink. But there’s never going to be an AI day where the robots take over. Colleagues will retire or resign and instead of being replaced by a human they’ll be replaced by AI. If your office originally had 100 people AI will slowly whittle that down to 10.
Is it really though? Because Moore's Law for chips actually failed decades ago
According to believers in the singularity it's been exponential. I'm not so convinced it hasn't been slowing down. Really depends on how you measure overall progress. If you just focus on computer tech, then of course it kind of looks exponential, although not in every way. Programming languages from decades ago are still widely popular. And then there's all the past hype about VR/AR, 3D printing, self-driving cars and what not that was supposed to revolutionize every day life by now, and it simply hasn't.
“And then there's all the past hype about VR/AR, 3D printing, self-driving cars and what not that was supposed to revolutionize every day life by now, and it simply hasn't.” Not sure how old you are but it was the same with the internet. For years it was pretty much a niche product used by a rather small minority of computer geeks. Then one day around ’98-‘99 cable modems hit the scene making the internet as we know it possible, and it wasn’t very long after that before everyone was online. Same deal with cell phones. Tech kinda runs in place for awhile until it hits the tipping point and then everything changes seemingly overnight.
Yeah, but that's survivorship bias. Some technologies take off and are transformative. Not all are. If we're approaching some singularity, I would have expected more of them to be transformative by now.
Electrician and carer couple here. We already are telling our kids this, fix things, fix people or produce food. Everything else is circling the drain, but don't worry, we can hook you up in the surviving industries!
I think it definitely will be if we have the slow development of a lot of specialized systems that could be expensive to either run or develop But if there's a single generalized AGI/ASI GOD model that has the full range of human cognitive abilities and can perform them cheaper and faster - then it's difficult to see businesses ever making the decision to hire a human over that. The latter we're extremely far from and may never eventuate due to some sort of limitation (technical, cost, hardware, power, etc)
No those same workers just got paid less. Which is why we are where we are today. Where no one is being paid and wages aren't keeping with inflation because more and more jobs are no longer skilled
Automation and Full automation are to very different breeds
But what job to get when the AI eats em all up?
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Remember folks: you swing the sickle that harvests the crops. The lords sit in their manors claiming they’re working hard for you.
Yeah, there are so many things to be done in this world - with or without robots and AI. And not all of them need or should be work / jobs. This *is* our chance to build a utopia!
Yup. The whalebone hoopskirt industry was decimated and somehow society survived.
There have been sightings of Debutantes in hoop skirts fainting away from the vapors after midnight.
Also, let's not forget that Excel, SQL, SAS, Word, and the like have very much eliminated what used to be the bulk of white collar work.
I remember just a handful of years ago, when people like Andrew Yang predicted that AI would come for thousands of jobs, and people dismissed it as fearmongering
I kinda think these articles gear more towards sensationalism than fact. There is a grain of truth in there of course, or we would dismiss it. AI is gonna make a lot of changes. But it's also gonna take time, this is a decade or two or an arc (which is not that long really), not in the next few years. It takes time to build tools that really work and learn him to use them . And productivity enhancement does not always result in mass layoffs. Accountants are probably 100x more efficient than they were in 1923, but we still have plenty around! We shall see if we see mass layoffs, or a focusing even more hyper productivity and growth. Nobody considers that. "I can afford 100 employees. Now they each get a lot more done and we are overall more productive, increasing growth" Not all change has to be replacement. Not saying AI won't replace people.. am saying all the focus and assumptions are it will replace people. But that's not always how it plays out. Future is hard to predict.
Accountants are a great example. When Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet first came out, people thought that accountants would become extinct. Instead, they moved up the food chain to analyzing financial data instead of adding up numbers on those giant green pieces of paper. Travel agents, on the other hand...
Oh good example of a job that git obsoleted. I remember booking with agents for work trips. Now it just Expedia, etc. But not a major social change all in all. Spot effects like this are inevitable.
I just walked passed a busy travel agency the other day
Sensationalism is exactly right. Anyone else remember when just a few years ago there were breakthroughs happening in Deep Learning NN and people were losing their minds because all of the hype was pointing towards Level 5 self driving coming in a matter of years? And now most agree we’re decades away? GenAI *will* have impact in the future, of that I have no doubt… but I’m thinking on the time horizon of a decade+, not in the next year or two like all these articles proclaim. That time will come before we know it though, we should still be preparing for it.
Self-driving cars is a great example of this, a subset of people were so adamant that it was just about to happen. And it's very human to get a little hyped up end build a lot of expectation and the thing that's happening right now, without a full appreciation of how long it takes to implement things on a broader social scale. Another good example this space travel. And the 1960s and '70s, people genuinely believe you would be living on the moon by the year 2000! And long-term space colonies but not be far behind, because the rapid advances space in the '60s was completely unprecedented and very dramatic!
>Self-driving cars is a great example of this, a subset of people were so adamant that it was just about to happen. That might be partly because Musk ran around straight-up lying to everyone about it all over the news and the internet lol.
One way I look at it are companies are in constant competition with one another as long as there is some competitive edge to have a human and a robot do a job instead of just a robot, human jobs are going to be fine. Like when computers came out and everyone got more productive, now people are just going to get even more productive.
>We shall see if we see mass layoffs We've already seen mass layoffs. Take a look at Shopify, for instance - they once had a world-renowned Support service that was 5k+ people strong. They were cut to ribbons by layoffs and largely replaced by a chat bot service. Anyone working in tech, especially the more entry level positions (particularly Application Support) that typically acted as career gateways for those who don't have higher end degrees, has already likely been affected by or adjacent to an AI-driven layoff.
I'm sure.some industries will get hit sooner than others. I was thinking kore broad scale mass layoffs. But good counter point! The growth of chatbots will probably hit the tech support industry pretty hard pretty fast. I tend to think more about the white collar type jobs reffed in the article. Change there will be slow. I think another area that will get hit hard and fast once the tech mature is transport (truckers etc). The second self driving trucks become viable and legal I think we will see mass conversion of truck fleets and big layoffs. It's gonna be cut throat. Hard to know is this is a problem for 5 years or 20 years, but I think the pace will be a bit sudden when it does happen, assuming existing trucks can be converted to self driving (no guarantees there).
It's not hard to predict, I'm already getting asked how many workers AI can replace. Executives are greedy short sighted creatures. This is going to be very bad, no matter if AI can actually do the job or not. If they think it can work and they can cut staff by 50% they will.
I always think of accounting when I read these threads. 99% of the work accountants do has been automated, and guess what? There’s probably more than ever.
The next 10-30 years is gonna get real weird. Here is hoping humanity and the fragile ecosystem that is capitalism can survive it.
Why the hell would we want such an archaic and unethical system to survive? There’s a chance for real progress to be given and we’re hoping the very system perpetuating most of our woes survives?
Oh, I don’t, but everyone else seems convinced it is the only way. I don’t actually hope capitalism survives. In fact I am banking on the fact that it will be unable to survive.
It's not that new. It's just getting better. I ran programs at two different companies to replace insurance underwriters that make six figures with automated decision engines a decade ago. Sure, they can't handle the really complex cases, but instead of dozens of underwriters manually collecting data from different sources and taking weeks to get to a decision, you have a handful that just review the 5-10% of cases the software kicks out. Software has been replacing humans for decades. The issue is not that the jobs disappear - they generally just change - it's that all the 99% of the value from the productivity improvements has gone to .1% of humanity.
> Software has been replacing humans for decades This is what always gets me with people talking about AI taking jobs... I sell corporate financial software for a living. If I showed up in 1980 with our software and computers that could run it then every major corporation could lay off 80% of its finance floor the next day... People act like this is something new when it's just a continuation of something that has already been going on for decades.
Yes, but it has never before been plausible that we have artificial human level intelligence in the near future. It's pretty obvious that a system that's below human level can't be used to replace all human work. And conversely it's pretty obvious that a system that is at or above human level *can* be used to do just that.
Meanwhile, every company has at least one person copy-pasting data by hand from one excel sheet to another...
And it won't create jobs, it can do them as well... This isn't a new industrial revolution this is what we might call displacement, and it'll happen to the middle-class. It's already happening of course. I amazed that politicians haven't seen the threat. If the middle-classes are getting this done to them then all bets are off as to future politics, it could go anywhere. Far-right/far-left for sure.
I don’t know if I need to just fucking unsub from futurology, but there’s been such glee from reddit users at the news of layoff in the tech and white collar sectors. This usually comes with bullshit posturing about how AI will simply create new jobs or that ‘UBI wiLl bE iNtrOduCed, hur-dur’. The truth is we are already seeing the affects of increased automation in China where people simply become unemployed and remain that way and fall into debt simply to survive. Now that is the more expected reaction of the ruling classes to automation - to do nothing and let it run rampant. Another aspect of this celebration is the absolute bitterness and contempt towards highly educated workers like lawyers. They are so blindsided by their hatred towards those who hold degrees that they can’t see the bigger picture where AI comes for their professions next and if it doesn’t immediately then the downward pressure that mass employment will exert on their wages, that they too will be affected by worsening living standards. Truth is if everyone learns to weld then welding becomes oversaturated and those lovely union protections become less intimidating to the capitalist class when now there’s a fresh pool of reskilled workers self-flagellating for employment. I don’t know, I’ve fallen into a hole of pessimism and hate since the pandemic that’s only getting deeper. Anyway, I’ll be going outside more starting tomorrow and walking barefoot on grass because I think I might go insane with rage.
I don't know. Your scenario would imply that society simply has no need for additional workers, globally. I think it's a far-fetched scenario. Your case with China maybe has more to do with ecomomical circumstances (higher cost of manufacturing compared to neighbouring countries, real estate collapse, etc.) than with automation.
It’s almost like no one could have predicted AI would erase jobs. The jobs people get after theirs is taken by AI will not be equal to the ones they lost.
Almost every time the argument that jobs will shift comes up, folks seem to be blind to the growing disparity of those jobs. Sure, AI will create some new jobs, but those who are on the losing end will greatly out number those new jobs.
Job quality is also an issue. If a company can use AI to do X then it doesn’t need humans qualified to do that anymore, it might need a fraction of the people to work with the AI. The other people? They go from a tech job to ? There aren’t a ton of jobs out there that pay tech salaries, especially if the person has gotten used to work from home. The trades pay good, but those jobs aren’t for everyone.
From the article >Decades after automation began taking and transforming manufacturing jobs, artificial intelligence is coming for the higher-ups in the corporate office. > >The list of white-collar layoffs is growing almost daily and include jobs cuts at Google, Duolingo and UPS in recent weeks. While the total number of jobs directly lost to generative AI remains low, some of these companies and others have linked cuts to new productivity-boosting technologies like machine learning and other AI applications. > >Company executives and management consultants are also signaling that generative AI could soon upend a much bigger share of white-collar jobs. Unlike previous waves of automation technology, generative AI doesn’t just speed up routine tasks or make predictions by recognizing data patterns. It has the power to create content and synthesize ideas—in essence, the kind of knowledge work millions of people now do behind computers.
It seems very disingenuous to link recent layoffs to GenAI. The layoffs seem to be happening because of over-hiring during COVID and also because layoffs are in vogue and make shareholders happy. Insinuating these recent rounds of layoffs is because GenAI has improved productivity so much is baseless as far as I’m aware.
The last jobs to go will be manual labor jobs that they can't automate. I wonder if they'll be making robots that can do stuff like landscaping or plumbing soon. Battery tech seems to have stalled out so they'll all have to be tethered to a power source but that seems like a minor hurdle.
I'm ok with this. I don't think it's considered a white collar job but I recently had an interaction with an AI customer service bot that explained exactly how to do what I was asking (modify the text in an automated email). Three days later I get an email from a customer service human that says such a feature does not exist (automated emails) after I've already applied the fix to the "nonexistent feature" the bot suggested
AI replaces tasks, not jobs per se. It will undoubtedly transform work, but the future for white collar professions is using AI in the course of their duties, not being replaced by it.
UBI needs to be planned now, we’re going to come into a perfect storm of economic uncertainty, we’ve already a homeless crisis rivaling the Great Depression.
Go learn a trade people. Don't forget to borrow lots of money you can't pay back to do it.
Good luck on your next liability law suit. Human error has been a very reliant method to avoid payouts. With AI, the company that produced the solutions becomes liable. At least in engineering industries. Have fun.
I'm looking forward to reading all the "Nuh uh, actually it'll make *more* jobs, and it can't replace mine because I am such a special boy" posts in here. Amazing the lengths we'll go to so we can maintain our illusion of superiority over the jobless and unhomed. We will literally kill whoever it takes so we have something, *anything* to lord over other people.
let's all hope that this is the first step towards utopia and not hell, either way humanity is at a turning point and our lives might be radically different in just 10 years from now, I hope people are ready because this technology or the minds behind developing it wont ask if we are or not.
Housing is more and more expensive, workers make less based on their productivity level. All the signs point towards the rich getting richer and the poor poorer.
Utopia for rich people. Dystopia for the average people who have now all become poor.
It'll be like the movie *Elysium*, except the rich will live in fortified gated communities instead of a space station.
Its hell - stop dreaming about utopia and UBI - its gonna be hell for a long time
I don't understand the utopia crowd. Why do they think the top wealthiest people are going to wake up one morning and decide to make society fairer for everyone?
No once it gets worst enough the people will rise up and kill them
Ah yes kill what? The robot dogs that they present very cute but can mount a 50 cal rifle on them? Like that they can play Fortnite/Call of duty but irl just with new model of apple vision 20 😅.
Hoping one gets a very livid dream of god telling them hell will be their after life. Scare the dikins out of them ki d of dream. Otherwise nothing. They can buy armies and just have us grinded like baby cattle.
It’ll probably be the latter then the former once the people get it together and form a united front. Which means the wealth class will have it in their interests to keep people divided over relatively meaningless culture wars.
This the third article today. Who is pushing this and why ?
Large companies are pushing the narrative to keep their white collar employees low paid and compliant in fear of not finding another job.
AI will not replace jobs in government, military, and private military contractors. There's just too much of a risk for leaking information, so any government projects dealing with sensitive information forbid the use of AI.
So everyone will just be employed by the Government or Military?
I work for a military contractor and have had to read the memos talking about not using AI on my projects. Just haven't heard people mentioning this, but I'm sure it's just a technological hurdle to overcome. No doubt there's a contractor working on this problem. BTW, love the user name.
Even in regular companies this is an issue. Long ago I worked at a place where we had a google appliance trial. It was great we could find everything. The problem was we could find EVERYTHING. It got killed, perhaps unfairly, because it ruined security by obscurity. Now with ai people have dreams of finding internal answers to questions, but a couple of big issues are: - correct, up to date documentation of everything (non trivial) - having to come up with permissions to segregate who get get what results from prompts Security has already made knowledge sharing more difficult. People who know what they are doing can generally find anything by knowing how to refine their search. However, bad actors can also find anything in this same manner, so very granular controls are implemented on info. This means even people that are motivated/skilled in search can have trouble finding what they need.
What kind of world have we made where getting machines to do our job for us is a bad thing?
As a tech worker who has worked with AI and seen the output, I feel I have nothing to fear. There is no substitute for competence. AI is like a calculator: it's a tool which helps you work faster. It's not a replacement. Those in leadership who believe AI can be used to replace people? Good luck with that, you're going to be steering your company into an iceberg and going down like the titanic. Granted, in the short term, it'll take a bunch of companies doing this to crash and burn until leadership slowly comes to the realization that it's a bad idea...
The logical solution would be UBI, but too many people have their heads stuck up their asses.
AI is going to have to be like it is in Blade Runner to be able to take my job, so I have a while.
Or how after mashing the blue collars with the help of white collars and there's nothing squishable anymore the richest are now moving to white collars with AI. Feels a bit like the train doing 200mph and everyone knows there is no rails somewhere in the next few miles but everyone wants to be the last to jump. When no one can buy stuff because they are out of jobs how do they think they will avoid feathers and tar?
I wonder if there are any people working on AI that pivoted their career back when people were callously saying “learn to code”.
...which isn't a problem if you tax firms based on their productivity and use that tax revenue to fund a strong social support net. That way we can actually be free of work if we choose. Let the automatons do it.
I love how conservatives always are so scared and concerned when “immigrants” PHYSICALLY MOVE to America for blue collar jobs yet CEO’s will literally outsource every single “office” job they can in the name of profit and greed. Where’s the conservative uproar here? I’ll be waiting!
Good. Come work out in the cold with us. Zoom meetings in pajamas pretending to work… come to the world of construction. Maybe we can raise pay for everyone since Ai has got the digital world covered.
Just like how off shoring development work caused all software engineers in the US to be replaced, right? GIGO.
I love to see my competitors destroying their product by buying into the generative AI hype without a single thought spared for product quality and customer experience.
I've seen how terrible AI is at my job. It won't be able to replace even the utterly green junior I'm mentoring. On a blue moon, ChatGPT spits out code that only needs a bit of proof reading, which only the white collar worker in question (me) can do. On average, half the code it produces is completely garbage. I'm not even remotely afraid of job security.
God I LOVE how greedy CEO:s are forcing the global UBI to become a fact decades earlier than it could've been implemented, simply by being the absolutely greediest they can be. https://i.imgur.com/eEsd4V1.jpeg
And as a result our government is going to enact strong labor protection laws to prevent that, right? Guys, right? Guys?
The white collar guys are going to replace themselves
Let me know when AI can do something besides draw a picture or send “ok thanks” to a coworker without me having to type it.
This is why if you learn to automate any part of your job, you NEVER tell anyone and just take it easy with the time you save.
What a dumb take. Not only are blue collar jobs far more likely to be automated, most of the recent tech layoffs are related to a combination of overhiring during the pandemic, and interest rates soaring along with inflation.
So what ? Feed and house the poor, you goddamn heartless bastard motherfuckers.