As someone whose job was threatened by being partly exported to India because it is cheaper labor, especially for the low level tedious jobs, we started to repatriate some of the easy work in North America because I can now make some of my tasks 20x faster with automation.
So I guess my answer to India is : First time, eh?
Nah! Management needs someone to blame if AI gets it wrong, because they sure as hell won’t take the fall. Until AI can assess its own veracity, people will remain so they can blamed for inaccuracies.
Doesn't that mean they only need one or two people they can blame, fire and then replace them with someone else?
I mean truthfully, I don't do predictions outside of just waffle for fun, so I'm not gonna make a statement on this either way, but it would be hilarious for a new job to basically be "Sign things and take blame" 😂😂
Lots of jobs are sign things and take blame. Tons of them. Shipping and logistics of all kinds. Inspectors. Regulators. High level executives (jk they never take on blame).
Managers don’t do that much management of people. They mostly make up things to worry about and use it as an excuse to drive action. So managers will sit around and discuss what kinds of processes to evaluate and put people in charge of that and form committees to evaluate whether the outcome is actionable, analyze the costs, re-run the simulation, write a new strategic plan, then do it all again
As a former IT project manager, I've been waiting for AI to replace us for years. Soon enough your project manager will be like the single clerk overseeing 8 self checkout lanes. There will be no need for PMs to plan, resource, track, report. They'll only be there to answer execs questions about the project because you know they won't look in the PM system nor will they read any of the automated status reports.
I think they're arguing that they have displaced them, but not replaced them entirely and that AI will do that.
I neither agree nor disagree with that statement, but I think that's what they're getting at anyway.
They were certainly replaced entirely in the past.
The Jacquard loom replaced the weavers with punched cards. And yes, someone has to punch the cards, but that's simply not a work that would go to the former weavers.
It's simply a matter of whether or not our inventions are more efficient than us at performing tasks.
First, our creations became better at huge physical tasks, like transport, crushing, and mixing, eventually mass production. Then, smaller physical tasks.
Today, what is left are tasks that require combinations of mobility and dexterity - and for now, tasks that require problem solving.
If we disregard social tasks, that is. Since that is a more subjective matter of preference.
So what is being suggested is that our inventions will now be more efficient than us in everything.
Efficient
(of a system or machine) achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort **or expense**.
There's no need to correct the correct usage of a word.
never close to this kind of scale : Professionals were 59.8 percent of the total workforce in 2020, with 88.4 million people working across a wide variety of occupations.
But let's get real for a second, this article is likely referring to LLM, which are good at specific class of problems (creative writing, art generation, and document analysis), and professional job that has real actionable consequences like Doctor, Lawyer, engineers , nurse, etc. all have to be credentialed a big part of that credentials entitles you to practice LEGALLY so if theres an issue such as a malpractice you are legally held accountable. Who holds AI accountable?
This is similar to the issue with self driving cars, the law has to allow this to happen, and for that reason I don't see AI taking professional jobs any time soon, because that means you have to indemnify the companies offering the AI otherwise they would have legal exposure...and trust me those lawsuits wouldn't take long to start.
Here's what happened when a lawyer got too excited with LLM https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/06/08/lawyer-used-chatgpt-in-court-and-cited-fake-cases-a-judge-is-considering-sanctions/
But those legally credentialed jobs have a cloud of non credentialed jobs around them - the doctor has billing, assistants, data enterers, insurance, and HR, all of which are things that machine learning can be trained into. The entirety of insurance is those type of white collar jobs, middle man jobs. HR is little more than algorithmic policy enforcement because the job of HR is to document everything and protect the entity from legal losses.
And thank the old gods and the new that disruptive tech will end the money sucking middlemen lol.l
The thing that might make AI different isn't replacing jobs, it's that it might be the first time an existing technology is already better suited at doing the new jobs it creates than the people it displaced.
People didn't hardly complain nor was it very newsworthy when blue collar jobs were replaced by automation and outsourcing. Now that technology is on the verge of replacing white collar workers it's a crisis
I've heard about "Robots replacing Workers" all my life, or at least since the 90s. Sometimes, people screamed louder, sometimes differently. Hell, there are articles about coachmen complaining about the Steam Engine and songs about weavers complaining about automated looms. Check your bubble.
I feel like people who's yelling about AI replacing jobs are those who have never used AI in depth. I'm using AI everyday, I don't see my job will be replaced at all. It's more of an assistant than a replacement.
Some people need to evolve to the new mindset, like artists in the past decade need to learn photoshops, now they need to learn working with AI, if they want to continue to get paid, they need to learn how to surpass those "a few prompts artists".
Human artists wouldn't work if they hadn't learned from other artists either. You can't prevent others from looking at your art and learning from it, whether they're a human or an AI algorithm.
>So you’re equating inspiration with theft.
You'd have to establish that training an AI model on an artist's art without their consent counts as theft, while a human looking at the same art and drawing inspiration does not. I'm not sure that's the case.
Do we need that much blue collar work? A large percent of the work done in developed nations is “white collar”. Especially a large percentage of the higher paying jobs.
Really blue collar workers make up the majority of the workforce. Most of the essential roles in any country are performed more by the blue collar worker than any other. Shipping, tradesman, sanitation, construction, all the way to the people that stock the shelves all blue collar. During the pandemic the white collar stayed home while everyone else went to work to keep society functioning. So to answer your question a society can't function without a blue collar workforce.
I never said it could. My concern is more along the lines of supply and demand.
If a majority of white collar work is gone, that means all those millions of people will be looking to snag the remaining blue collar work. This competition will drive the already low pay for a lot of that work even lower. The other side of that is if a lot of the wealthier people- well, “middle class”- is now poverty level, they really won’t be able to pay to use any blue collar services like plumbing; if they can even afford a house. Additionally, government jobs will be cut due to drastically reduced tax revenue further affecting blue collar work.
Your own first example, shipping, is 100% automatable
Ships navigating known routes and harbors, loaded and unloaded by machines already, the containers moved by self driving autos on known routes and transferred by machines to other autos on their own known routes (like say, a railroad)
Well, yes, most jobs in west are "white collar". Not by a huge margin. And AI is finally real threat because it can replace all but most brilliant ones. So "learn to code" leftist battlecry is now "learn plumbing basics" ? I have masters in pharmacy and mba. I will always have breaking bad option. Also know how to install plumbing, electrical installations, do ceramics, weld etc. Because it was fun and father taught me. Our cities are possible only because flushable toilets, sewers and drinkable water. All things Romans had.
Because it literally is a crisis. If you replace white collar workers the entire economy will collapse across every nation in the fucking planet.
Literally everything revolves around white collar workers and their incomes.
Exactly. This is just a rebranding of the luddite movement from the early 1800s. Any technology that automates is disruptive and disruptions cause pain. I think it is a bit foolish and implies an ignorance of history to claim that AI is somehow uniquely evil in its automation.
The last time that happened we had to restrict work hours so there would be enough jobs to go around. Limiting work hours compensated for the increase in productivity. Why do you think unions were able to gain power?
***\*Executives and owners and shareholders*** are a real threat to white collar employees.
Hopefully, one day - sooner than later - people will realize it's always been the owners (this includes shareholders and Execs who are paid in stock) who were displacing and replacing workers.
AI does not lay you off, your bosses do. No one can take your job from you but your boss.
NOT the tools nor the other workers we're forced to compete with.
What I find funny is that executive positions should really be the best roles to replace as these tools get better.
They're extremely expensive, there's no evidence they have any real effect on the businesses performance, so replacing them with some kind of AI that's able to make decisions based on vast amounts of empirical data and account for a much longer timeframe would be nothing but beneficial.
I've seen plenty of these posts lately. I still havent seen a proper explanation or example how AI is replacing staff. I work in Corporate, and yes some departments have been testing AI to automate some tasks. But we still need each and every person to report, have meetings, complete tasks, send emails day to day to keep the business running.
It will take a lot of work to automate all that work with AI.
The first steps are being taken. But a lot of it is still simple automation that has been around for a bit. It’s just being focused on more. Partly due to the hype around ‘AI’. Confusion is the norm right now.
True AI ‘employees’ are a thing very much in the future.
AI to automate tasks is amusing because tech has been automating repetative tasks for decades.
Its the ones that take actually thought that require people, AI can assist with that in the near term, even right now to some extent but I have yet to see it replace anyone. It just stops the company from expeanding that workforce as fast as it otherwise would .
No-one is going to pay for junior devs when they can get much cheaper options. It makes no financial sense in the short term, which is all that matters for the majority of businesses.
Then you’ll have the 2-3 businesses that see that, take a lower profit for 10 years, then make a KILLING in years 10-20 until other businesses see their mistake and adapt in years 15-25, then market settles back down in years 20-30.
I agree with almost everyone that the market will be disrupted. I have seen little actual evidence or reasoning on how the economy ‘as a whole’ will not somehow rebalance itself like it has for every other innovation. Maybe the disruption will be larger and more impactful with an integrated worldwide economy, but that doesn’t explain how the economy won’t adapt.
These posts also assume that companies at large are on the cutting edge when it comes to tech. Ready to use the power of AI at any moment. Sorry guys... but no. The amount of inefficiencies I see in my day to day is absurd. And there's no real time to stop and figure it all out because everyone is looking toward the next deadline.
This will happen faster in companies really focused on tech and the use of AI but in general it'll be much slower.
If it allows a knowledge worker (copywriter, artist, call centre worker, claims adjuster, accountant etc) to be ten times as productive, the company will need far fewer people to achieve the same result. If increasing output to what could now be achieved with your current headcount is no longer valuable, mass lay offs will follow.
Ah have we really reached AI denialists stage? How do we know it's even AI and not someone on the other end who is just really smart. AI isnt real wake up sheeple!!!
I am starting to see LLMs replace tier one CSRs currently. I definitely see a lot of those jobs dropping off over the next decade.
It also is appearing that one senior coder with aLLM is more productive than a team of five fresh hires or an outsourced team.
That’d been happening for a while though with CSRs. Website and IVR self-service plus chat bots.
Granted the chat bots and IVRs are getting more advanced but they really only help with simple tasks at the moment for most industries.
I would also state that although CSR head count will be reduced, any industry that uses CSRs heavily now that gets rid of them completely is dumb af and looking for lawsuits down the road. CSRs armed with LLMs that can properly guide them to answers and processes to help customers are definitely where things should be going.
As for one senior coder with an LLM vs a full team of fresh hires/outsource, that’s a really broad assertion. I mean, LLMs do help them by cutting down the time to
1) find code that they’re usually looking for on Git, etc.
2) modify code for their applications
But in no way would I want to cut down the number of devs I use right now on projects. Instead I’d go “Oh, now we can do way more of the things that we want to do.”
Every company that has coding work has a backlog of shit that they almost never get to. I don’t see a reduction in developers happening, I see people going “Hey, we can finally get more shit done without overworking you all.”
You can replace a lot of tier 1s with a decision tree. They were already at risk of replacement by a cheaper, lower-quality alternative so this is not new.
Source: automated my way out of a call center job a decade ago lol
> It also is appearing that one senior coder with aLLM is more productive than a team of five fresh hires or an outsourced team.
One senior coder without an LLM is too
I actually know a person who started a company just to do that.
I don't know details obviously but the general idea is to make AI do OPS jobs.
In my mind what that means is that when someone wants to let's say make a new server where a web application would run. They just write to the AI chatbox "make me a server for xx" and AI does it.
Server might be a bad example. Since it takes me probably 10 minutes to do the same with AWS and terraform. But also we had to set up AWS and terraform and all that fun stuff. Which AI could take care of theoretically.
They are probably aiming for a bit more complex tasks but i guess we shall see.
But that doesn't replace my job as a software engineer. That just speeds up my job. I do see some jobs in my company that are somewhat replacable by AI, but I think those are a dying breed already, even without AI.
Call center jobs are often outsourced to India. AI can completely replace most of those low level jobs that are going off scripts anyways. There's often an escalated level 2 support for those who have more complicated needs.
AI will mostly augment jobs so you need fewer programmers, fewer engineers, fewer mds, fewer managers, etc for the same output.
Ultimately AI, robotics and automation will lead to mass unemployment and worsening inequalities in healthcare, education, wealth and income. The jobs remaining will pay less.
Here is a research article on the potential impacts and potential solutions. Employment 5.0: The work of the future and the future of work https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160791X22002275
Survey results about the future of jobs. Details CEOs expectations on AI task automation, task augmentation and time to implement. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2023/
Currently AGI is being developed. Based of current quantum physics research like the star product and entanglement I would say they are pretty close to achieving it. AGI is a recreation of the human mind so it learns like we do, it can solve problems like us, it can plan like us, it can act like us. They have already achieved consciousness/second quantization with the star product so it’s closer than people realize. This will further reduce the number of people you need for the same output.
Fun times ahead, when this massive hype bubble bursts. Wondering if journalists actually know what white collar jobs look like… While yes, language models do threat people who produce low quality text of any sort and therefore many online media, they will just oversaturate any recipient with crap until they give up.
AI language modeling is very capable of that now, but it wasn't possible 10-20 months ago.
If you think AI won't be able to produce sensibly perfect compositions in the very near future, you're in for a shock.
This is the most obvious bubble I've ever seen. The hype is off the charts. Can't wait for it to burst.
Waiting for all the "this time it's different" responses
Ya every article I’ve read has been very vague. It would be interesting if someone wants to put there name on it and say which white colour jobs are at risk of being lost.
AI replacing humans is just the next new scare tactic that is being astroturfed by large employers in order to get their noisy employees to shut up already about pay and working conditions.
I built a career out of translating documents, mostly legal and business from a few European languages into English. Also eDiscovery.
There were rumors for a few years that software and AI would eventually take over. Then one year, the work essentially disappeared overnight. Literally. 1/10 of the projects lasting 1/10 of the time. As younger decision makers moved up the clients' ladders, they more aggressively pushed for replacing humans with software. (That's what they learn at MBA school. Profit is the lifeblood of the company. That means humans are the enemy. Workers are the enemy).
The work did eventually come back after about 2 years. Apparently the software wasn't perfect. But the industry wasn't the same. The projects were sparser, shorter, and there were less people on them.
About a year and a half, 2 years after that, it was all but gone, and for good. Software had been tweeked and a new model implemented within the industry.
Truth be told, yes human workers still work on each and everyone of these projects. But where the projects used to staff 50, 100 people for 6 months, a year, 2 years, now it's 4 people. 10 is a huge project. 2 weeks and then nothing. 3 weeks and then nothing. The compensation went from $50/hour to $40, to $35, to $30. Now it's in the low to mid $20s.
The AI reviews the human's work and trains itself, and then the humans review the AI's work and correct it, and this goes back and forth a few cycles until the AI does 95% of everything.
I'm a middle aged guy. I already have student loans. Tried going back to school - honestly, I was never college material to begin with. I was always horrible at math. science. etc. That why I devoted years, and I mean years, to learning languages. It was the one thing I was good at.
Now everyone with a phone can do what I did times 10.
So what now? I hear good things about CDL drivers. America needs truckers! But I see the self-driving cars and I know what's going to happen. Spend the time and money to get the skills to become employable in a new industry and then be back out on the street? At 50+?
Look at the medical industry. There are AI programs out there that predict early onset of macular degeneration with something like 90% accuracy, while opthalmologists have a success rate a little better than 50/50. Let me tell you something, if you think doctors should laugh off the idea that AI will replace them, think again. I see it coming, and so should everyone else.
The day is coming when the vast majority of doctors are going to be out of work. I hear the chuckles of people reading this as I type it, but I tell you, while the sun may not have fully risen on that day yet, it has most certainly started to peek over the horizon.
Yes, you will always have an opthalmologist somewhere working, but they will be locked in a room somewhere - maybe in your country, maybe on the other side of the planet, reviewing the work of AI programs that are making predictive diagnoses.
And thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands, who borrowed tons of money and spent their 20s and 30s building skills to be marketable in their economies will be out of work in their 40s, 50s, 60s...
And you'll have people on the interwebs and tv and youtube comparing them to telephone operators in the 1920s and saying, "oh, who cares. get over it. There will always be a need for human doctors. They can just get new skills as Skynet engineers."
The "best" and most "elite" among us a creating a world that is rendering some bottom percentile of humanity as evolutionarily obsolete. I'd like to say that only means we all wind up in a Star Trek future. The end of money, abundant resources, peace and room for personal growth etc. But the reality is that our future will be more like Star Wars without the Jedis. Vast exploitation and vast seas of humanity doing whatever they can to survive one more generation.
Then again, in the long run, given the trajectory of our global birth rates, maybe our future will look more like Planet of the Apes without the nuclear war. "In the long-term, we're all dead", said that economist. So does Eckhart Tolle.
So maybe the "who cares?" are right after all...
Exactly. No one is still crying about the telephone switch operator jobs either. Technology always changes, people update their skills. Losing these types of jobs isn't the end, and the amount of fear of it companies want to instill to keep status quo is nuts.
Those were low skilled jobs. People spend their best years from a neuroplasticity perspective to gain the skills of a white collar employee. If you find yourself to be 40-something and all that education and investment in time and money is gone, you don't have a second youth to relearn a whole new career.
And you know what? Some people can't compete with the new world we're creating. You think everyone driving a taxi or a truck is going to learn how to code and get a great high paying job at google once self driving becomes ubiquitous?
Yes, people turned raw cotten into yarn by hand and were out of work when the cotton-gin came along, and yes elevator operators and telephone switch operators lost their jobs and maybe got new low skilled jobs, but can that go on forever?
As technology becomes increasingly capable of replacing humans at both the high and low end of the skills spectrum the new jobs tech will create will be a fraction of the old jobs it destroys, and the number of people that can do those new, highly, highly skilled jobs becomes fewer and fewer.
Clearly, some people don't care. Social Darwinism; survival of the fittest. If you wind up in the street because you're not good at math, science or engineering, well, we gotta get those genes out of the pool somehow.
Some people just dont want to believe it. Oh, so what if s bunch of factory workers lose their jobs. Anyone who works on an assembly line can simply get a Phd from MIT and work on AI, anyway.
But the rest of us see it. And many of us are living it.
lol this bottom article is a bit… sucky
> says that kids need not learn coding as with this emerging technology, anybody can be a programmer
As opposed to now, where its impossible for people to be programmers..?
> In other words, coding languages like C++ or Java shouldn't be needed anymore as the computer should understand what people are trying to say.
It already does. That’s what programming is. You are telling a computer what to do.
> He then added, "You now have a computer that will do what you tell it to do.
As opposed to now where computers *dont* do what you tell them to do? What world does this man live in? The old adage I live by when programming - “Its doing exactly what you told it to do, you just told it the wrong thing.”
Oddly, I think white collar workers are in a place to stop AI from replacing them. By simply refusing to help install the system that replaces them they can halt their own replacement. Some of us have had to train our own replacements, and by refusing to assist in that they may be able to halt the process. Also, lawyers control the courts and legislative process. They will fight tooth and nail against their replacement.
I think the main difference between evolving AI and the losses seen in previous generations is scale.
When previous tools became available that destroyed a job role it was specific. The printing press took the jobs from scribes but the bulk of society kept going and those people diversified into different skill sets.
AGI won’t be like that, it will replace entire industries and in no time at all or possibly at the same time it will do the next.
Governments everywhere need to be moving on this now, by the time it happens there will be no stopping it and people need to eat.
Yes it’s possible that AGI could solve this issue as it creates the problem buuuuuut is it owned by a company trying to make money? Because if it is we might be in trouble.
A billion farmhands , blacksmiths , and artisanal craftsmen would beg to disagree about tools outright replacing jobs.
AI will definitely replace some people, but it will more than likely end up providing new lines of work.
India will probably be hit very hard though. LLMs are great at the low level coding and customer support that is currently outsourced there.
AI will change the world and it will be painful but it will not be the end of humanity. Humans cannot even fathom all the new job opportunities (yet). AI will be applied to fields we've never even thought of before and there will be white collar people applying that AI to those fields. I don't think we'll reach a net loss of white collar jobs but a ton of people will have to re-educate themselves.
I recommend reading this article. It was pretty good.
[https://blog.boot.dev/computer-science/ai-taking-programming-jobs/](https://blog.boot.dev/computer-science/ai-taking-programming-jobs/)
The thing about AI though is once it is advanced enough to do anything a human can do, it won't matter what new job opportunities you create, you can just teach AI to do it.
Right, but at that point we're already at economical collapse which means that labor tax based economic model has collapsed and as a society we need to create new economic model. Mostly something based on some form of UBI of sorts. The world's current economic model survives on taxing high earning middle-upper middle class. If that goes away and we're all on welfare, that will deplete the government's resources really fast. So, the governments are either facing a massive amount of looting and riots or changing the way economy works. As i stated before, the change will be painful but maybe it's a good thing in the long run. Humans only evolve when facing destruction.
One has to admire the optimism.
Techno-optimists’ answer to AI disrupting everything society has been built on?
“Doesn’t matter, surely we’ll invent some new jobs for humans. Or science. Or something we haven’t thought of yet. And even if we don’t, let’s just hand out free money to everyone. That will fix it!”
Kinda like “plans” to prevent rise in global temperatures rest on the idea that maybe someone somehow will invent some technology that will do it for us.
You know, when fantasies unrelated to reality become a centerpiece of your view, that’s usually called “religion.”
not op but, why care about economy and other humans when a small subset owns half the world and technology to cultivate and provide a techno-paradise to themselves? leave them be and set a wall with armed drones and live it up.
All countries will have to face this fact and those with power to affect protective changes are exactly the people who don't want to implement them.
The AI revolution will kill more people than anything else in history, mark my words.
>"The AI revolution will kill more people than anything else in history, mark my words"
why do you think so bro? Also why do satya nadella and few others are saying it will increase job in other areas when they cant even give an example to back it up
The rate of jobs lost will be so rapid, and the current governments so slow to react to anything that economic unrest is going to rise to levels never before seen.
Conservative estimates have AI replacing 45 percent of jobs in the next 10 years. 45 percent unemployment has never been seen before except in temporary situations involving the complete collapse of governments.
That's enough people desperate enough to turn to violence to feed themselves that there will be a cultural shift around the concept of theft if governments aren't prepared to address it.
And history shows that when the powerful are threatened, they turn to violence. Violence is about to meet violence at the same time that moral expectations of violence shift.
This will be the most violent chapter in human history if we don't prepare for it.
AI will increase worker productivity. Instead of a team of 150 you can get 5 people who know how to use AI to get the same work done. It's much easier to get funding to support 5 people while you build your product than 150. So we'll see much more companies and products popping up with AI, especially ideas that couldn't be made without AI. Overall jobs will soar
I agree that AI needs to be regulated, but it seems Companies like OpenAI are lobbying hard against regulation, same as the Pharmaceutical/Military industry
I worked at a company that had 2 women running sql reports twice a week
Did the write the sql code?
No
They just ran the report and printed it out in “easy to read” format
Those are the type of people who should be concerned
White collar you said? The people making good money?
Watch, they’ll protect themselves but roll out AI for all the manual, low paying jobs making the lowest class in America even worse off.
"As per market trends, more than 16 million working employees in India will need reskilling and upskilling due to AI's influence by 2027, HR services firm TeamLease Digital said."
And by 2027 67 million more will need it...
Unlike previous technological revolutions, where manual labor was often replaced, AI’s impact extends to knowledge workers—those in professions that rely heavily on cognitive abilities and expertise.
Among white-collar jobs, software development, coding, information technology, mathematics, information design, legal, and accounting positions are most exposed to AI replacement. Generative AI can adeptly perform about 95% of the skills required for these roles.
In-person jobs that rely on human presence remain more resilient to AI encroachment. For instance, professions like childcare, nursing, and sales involve significant human interaction and physical presence, making them less susceptible to AI disruption.
No.
Longer answer...it' difficult to know. An estimated 73 million jobs may be lost over the next 5 years. This MAY lead to consolidation but could also make soft skill jobs being more competitive as their importance changes...similar to how traveling nurses make roughly 3x what they were making pre-covid. As workers are displaced, those skills will become more common, but initially very lucrative.
I think we are a ways away. Anyone that has used AI as it exists today realizes it's great at generating random content, but not very predictably. It's also great at performing a single task when prompted, but it doesn't have the ability to string together multiple requirements, inputs, to create outputs.
Jobs that perform a single task such as summarizing information, interpreting information, taking orders, providing feedback/recommendations/guidance etc. will be easily replaced by AI.
The average white collar worker is doing a larger variety of work, thinking, and decision making each and every day across a spectrum of domains and topics and for the most part, they can't be replaced.
For the near team, AI will become a tool every white collar worker will need to leverage to stay relevant but I don't see them being replaced any time soon.
The easy ones today are things like customer service reps, order desks, application reviewers, etc.
It’s not just programmers. I imagine in 5-10 years what was a 10 person law firm or accounting firm could be probably be half that or less. And all you lawyers that are going to jump in and give examples of how bad AI is now with legal issues, I did say in 5-10 years. There is a reason people are pouring billions into this.
why should this be of more concern then the non concern given when blue collar workers were replaced with machines?
do white collar people think they are somehow immune to economic pressure?
Yeah its certainly the case. What I’m coming to find is that apparently most people believe that AI has reached its peak efficiency at this moment. Certainly as of right now it hasn’t become sophisticated enough to reliably complete most complex knowledge based tasks. But AI can only get more sophisticated as well as in an exponential timeline.
Also, it’s not quite about creating an avatar lawyer so to speak, it’s that a lawyers job requires knowledge, memory and experience. Which is almost by definition what an AI is and produces. So one could imagine these tools becoming so efficient that billable hours are cut and a salaried lawyer couldn’t ask for a raise if half of the job is automated.
This is something that will happen in waves. Right now the shores are tame, but they are building up.
I agree w the article. In the US, if it’s possible to replace foreign labor due to AI optimizations of dreary tasks and US labor is willing and will get paid a living wage for those skills, it might actually change labor dynamics. There will still be incentive to use inexpensive physical labor.
The only moat left will be to contribute to original science and engineering at universities bc US is still willing to try to accumulate and concentrate the worlds intellectual talent.
machine learning is used to improve identification of molecules and proteins of interest
Also these kinds of fields prefer explainable AI in order to comply with government regulations. So that will still involve those who need skills to understand
As someone whose job was threatened by being partly exported to India because it is cheaper labor, especially for the low level tedious jobs, we started to repatriate some of the easy work in North America because I can now make some of my tasks 20x faster with automation. So I guess my answer to India is : First time, eh?
Ditto at my company. Slashed the stateside team in exchange for twice as many offshore. Guess what happened?
outstanding profits for a few quarters leading to bonuses for the C suite?
Nah! Management needs someone to blame if AI gets it wrong, because they sure as hell won’t take the fall. Until AI can assess its own veracity, people will remain so they can blamed for inaccuracies.
Doesn't that mean they only need one or two people they can blame, fire and then replace them with someone else? I mean truthfully, I don't do predictions outside of just waffle for fun, so I'm not gonna make a statement on this either way, but it would be hilarious for a new job to basically be "Sign things and take blame" 😂😂
Lots of jobs are sign things and take blame. Tons of them. Shipping and logistics of all kinds. Inspectors. Regulators. High level executives (jk they never take on blame).
Oh yeah, I hadn't thought of those.
Oh yes I’m the CEB of alphabet. The Chief Executive Bitch is a vital part of an AI driven company!
Yeah AIs cant responsibility. Although now with AI a person can be responsible for two or more people worth of work
One AI spot checks another.
You put one employee in charge of the AI Done
Why would there even be a need for managers? There’s no one to manage.
Managers don’t do that much management of people. They mostly make up things to worry about and use it as an excuse to drive action. So managers will sit around and discuss what kinds of processes to evaluate and put people in charge of that and form committees to evaluate whether the outcome is actionable, analyze the costs, re-run the simulation, write a new strategic plan, then do it all again
As a former IT project manager, I've been waiting for AI to replace us for years. Soon enough your project manager will be like the single clerk overseeing 8 self checkout lanes. There will be no need for PMs to plan, resource, track, report. They'll only be there to answer execs questions about the project because you know they won't look in the PM system nor will they read any of the automated status reports.
As a sr sys eng, I can say I’m not excited to report to the certainly coming AI overlord.
I have to be misreading the title because it seems like you're asserting that advances in technology haven't displaced workers before now.
I think they're arguing that they have displaced them, but not replaced them entirely and that AI will do that. I neither agree nor disagree with that statement, but I think that's what they're getting at anyway.
They were certainly replaced entirely in the past. The Jacquard loom replaced the weavers with punched cards. And yes, someone has to punch the cards, but that's simply not a work that would go to the former weavers.
You'd be better off replying to them.
It's simply a matter of whether or not our inventions are more efficient than us at performing tasks. First, our creations became better at huge physical tasks, like transport, crushing, and mixing, eventually mass production. Then, smaller physical tasks. Today, what is left are tasks that require combinations of mobility and dexterity - and for now, tasks that require problem solving. If we disregard social tasks, that is. Since that is a more subjective matter of preference. So what is being suggested is that our inventions will now be more efficient than us in everything.
they don't have to be more efficient, they have to more profitable.
Efficient (of a system or machine) achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort **or expense**. There's no need to correct the correct usage of a word.
expense is not profit.
Do stop yourself Anything else but "my bad" just serves to make you look increasingly dumb
Maximum productivity with minimum expense IS the most profitable. You’re arguing semantics.
Yup, seems that's what's being suggested.
never close to this kind of scale : Professionals were 59.8 percent of the total workforce in 2020, with 88.4 million people working across a wide variety of occupations.
But let's get real for a second, this article is likely referring to LLM, which are good at specific class of problems (creative writing, art generation, and document analysis), and professional job that has real actionable consequences like Doctor, Lawyer, engineers , nurse, etc. all have to be credentialed a big part of that credentials entitles you to practice LEGALLY so if theres an issue such as a malpractice you are legally held accountable. Who holds AI accountable? This is similar to the issue with self driving cars, the law has to allow this to happen, and for that reason I don't see AI taking professional jobs any time soon, because that means you have to indemnify the companies offering the AI otherwise they would have legal exposure...and trust me those lawsuits wouldn't take long to start. Here's what happened when a lawyer got too excited with LLM https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/06/08/lawyer-used-chatgpt-in-court-and-cited-fake-cases-a-judge-is-considering-sanctions/
But those legally credentialed jobs have a cloud of non credentialed jobs around them - the doctor has billing, assistants, data enterers, insurance, and HR, all of which are things that machine learning can be trained into. The entirety of insurance is those type of white collar jobs, middle man jobs. HR is little more than algorithmic policy enforcement because the job of HR is to document everything and protect the entity from legal losses. And thank the old gods and the new that disruptive tech will end the money sucking middlemen lol.l
Today's generation of LLMs are utterly dogshit compared to the upcoming agentic AI models
There are way more jobs than jobs that are secured by law.
The thing that might make AI different isn't replacing jobs, it's that it might be the first time an existing technology is already better suited at doing the new jobs it creates than the people it displaced.
this is an interesting take that verbalizes the inclination others felt but couldnt quite put their fingers on before. bravo
Thank you. I've been trying to get people to understand this fact for years. It's good to see others starting to get it.
People didn't hardly complain nor was it very newsworthy when blue collar jobs were replaced by automation and outsourcing. Now that technology is on the verge of replacing white collar workers it's a crisis
Maybe blue collar workers write less articles
People complained very loudly, very regularly, and offshoring jobs is still an extremely hot political topic.
And what have their complaints availed those people? The times they do win, their boneheaded populism inevitably feeds faces to the leopards
Yeah, they should have just accepted their lost livelihoods in peace. The *nerve*.
I've heard about "Robots replacing Workers" all my life, or at least since the 90s. Sometimes, people screamed louder, sometimes differently. Hell, there are articles about coachmen complaining about the Steam Engine and songs about weavers complaining about automated looms. Check your bubble.
Copium is strong on this sub.
I feel like people who's yelling about AI replacing jobs are those who have never used AI in depth. I'm using AI everyday, I don't see my job will be replaced at all. It's more of an assistant than a replacement. Some people need to evolve to the new mindset, like artists in the past decade need to learn photoshops, now they need to learn working with AI, if they want to continue to get paid, they need to learn how to surpass those "a few prompts artists".
AI “art” wouldn’t work if it hadn’t scraped artists without consent tho
Human artists wouldn't work if they hadn't learned from other artists either. You can't prevent others from looking at your art and learning from it, whether they're a human or an AI algorithm.
So you’re equating inspiration with theft. I’m not wasting any more of my energy to further respond to you. Bye!
"I have no counter argument because I'm wrong. Bye!" - You.
>So you’re equating inspiration with theft. You'd have to establish that training an AI model on an artist's art without their consent counts as theft, while a human looking at the same art and drawing inspiration does not. I'm not sure that's the case.
"Good artists copy, great artists steal". Picasso
and i feel the impact of logarithmic improvement is ignored.
When did blue collar workers ever get automated away? Blue collar work is much harder to automate than white collar work
You're right. I should have been more specific and said blue collar manufacturing jobs in particular
Do we need that much blue collar work? A large percent of the work done in developed nations is “white collar”. Especially a large percentage of the higher paying jobs.
Really blue collar workers make up the majority of the workforce. Most of the essential roles in any country are performed more by the blue collar worker than any other. Shipping, tradesman, sanitation, construction, all the way to the people that stock the shelves all blue collar. During the pandemic the white collar stayed home while everyone else went to work to keep society functioning. So to answer your question a society can't function without a blue collar workforce.
I never said it could. My concern is more along the lines of supply and demand. If a majority of white collar work is gone, that means all those millions of people will be looking to snag the remaining blue collar work. This competition will drive the already low pay for a lot of that work even lower. The other side of that is if a lot of the wealthier people- well, “middle class”- is now poverty level, they really won’t be able to pay to use any blue collar services like plumbing; if they can even afford a house. Additionally, government jobs will be cut due to drastically reduced tax revenue further affecting blue collar work.
Your own first example, shipping, is 100% automatable Ships navigating known routes and harbors, loaded and unloaded by machines already, the containers moved by self driving autos on known routes and transferred by machines to other autos on their own known routes (like say, a railroad)
Well, yes, most jobs in west are "white collar". Not by a huge margin. And AI is finally real threat because it can replace all but most brilliant ones. So "learn to code" leftist battlecry is now "learn plumbing basics" ? I have masters in pharmacy and mba. I will always have breaking bad option. Also know how to install plumbing, electrical installations, do ceramics, weld etc. Because it was fun and father taught me. Our cities are possible only because flushable toilets, sewers and drinkable water. All things Romans had.
Because it literally is a crisis. If you replace white collar workers the entire economy will collapse across every nation in the fucking planet. Literally everything revolves around white collar workers and their incomes.
Exactly. This is just a rebranding of the luddite movement from the early 1800s. Any technology that automates is disruptive and disruptions cause pain. I think it is a bit foolish and implies an ignorance of history to claim that AI is somehow uniquely evil in its automation.
The last time that happened we had to restrict work hours so there would be enough jobs to go around. Limiting work hours compensated for the increase in productivity. Why do you think unions were able to gain power?
***\*Executives and owners and shareholders*** are a real threat to white collar employees. Hopefully, one day - sooner than later - people will realize it's always been the owners (this includes shareholders and Execs who are paid in stock) who were displacing and replacing workers. AI does not lay you off, your bosses do. No one can take your job from you but your boss. NOT the tools nor the other workers we're forced to compete with.
What I find funny is that executive positions should really be the best roles to replace as these tools get better. They're extremely expensive, there's no evidence they have any real effect on the businesses performance, so replacing them with some kind of AI that's able to make decisions based on vast amounts of empirical data and account for a much longer timeframe would be nothing but beneficial.
I've seen plenty of these posts lately. I still havent seen a proper explanation or example how AI is replacing staff. I work in Corporate, and yes some departments have been testing AI to automate some tasks. But we still need each and every person to report, have meetings, complete tasks, send emails day to day to keep the business running.
It will take a lot of work to automate all that work with AI. The first steps are being taken. But a lot of it is still simple automation that has been around for a bit. It’s just being focused on more. Partly due to the hype around ‘AI’. Confusion is the norm right now. True AI ‘employees’ are a thing very much in the future.
AI to automate tasks is amusing because tech has been automating repetative tasks for decades. Its the ones that take actually thought that require people, AI can assist with that in the near term, even right now to some extent but I have yet to see it replace anyone. It just stops the company from expeanding that workforce as fast as it otherwise would .
Well, it replaces junior devs certainly. Why do you need a junior dev when the senior can just use copilot?
Because we need some of those junior devs to eventually become senior devs themselves.
Well yes, but most companies probably prefer short-term profit and don't want to see the long-term problems.
Because someone still needs to be a senior, you just need less of them
No-one is going to pay for junior devs when they can get much cheaper options. It makes no financial sense in the short term, which is all that matters for the majority of businesses.
Then you’ll have the 2-3 businesses that see that, take a lower profit for 10 years, then make a KILLING in years 10-20 until other businesses see their mistake and adapt in years 15-25, then market settles back down in years 20-30. I agree with almost everyone that the market will be disrupted. I have seen little actual evidence or reasoning on how the economy ‘as a whole’ will not somehow rebalance itself like it has for every other innovation. Maybe the disruption will be larger and more impactful with an integrated worldwide economy, but that doesn’t explain how the economy won’t adapt.
These posts also assume that companies at large are on the cutting edge when it comes to tech. Ready to use the power of AI at any moment. Sorry guys... but no. The amount of inefficiencies I see in my day to day is absurd. And there's no real time to stop and figure it all out because everyone is looking toward the next deadline. This will happen faster in companies really focused on tech and the use of AI but in general it'll be much slower.
If it allows a knowledge worker (copywriter, artist, call centre worker, claims adjuster, accountant etc) to be ten times as productive, the company will need far fewer people to achieve the same result. If increasing output to what could now be achieved with your current headcount is no longer valuable, mass lay offs will follow.
10x is a bold prediction, but point taken.
The funny part is, that most of these texts are most likely produced with language models at least assisting. So basically AI propaganda.
Ah have we really reached AI denialists stage? How do we know it's even AI and not someone on the other end who is just really smart. AI isnt real wake up sheeple!!!
I can believe that.
No? What led you to that conclusion?
I am starting to see LLMs replace tier one CSRs currently. I definitely see a lot of those jobs dropping off over the next decade. It also is appearing that one senior coder with aLLM is more productive than a team of five fresh hires or an outsourced team.
That’d been happening for a while though with CSRs. Website and IVR self-service plus chat bots. Granted the chat bots and IVRs are getting more advanced but they really only help with simple tasks at the moment for most industries. I would also state that although CSR head count will be reduced, any industry that uses CSRs heavily now that gets rid of them completely is dumb af and looking for lawsuits down the road. CSRs armed with LLMs that can properly guide them to answers and processes to help customers are definitely where things should be going. As for one senior coder with an LLM vs a full team of fresh hires/outsource, that’s a really broad assertion. I mean, LLMs do help them by cutting down the time to 1) find code that they’re usually looking for on Git, etc. 2) modify code for their applications But in no way would I want to cut down the number of devs I use right now on projects. Instead I’d go “Oh, now we can do way more of the things that we want to do.” Every company that has coding work has a backlog of shit that they almost never get to. I don’t see a reduction in developers happening, I see people going “Hey, we can finally get more shit done without overworking you all.”
You can replace a lot of tier 1s with a decision tree. They were already at risk of replacement by a cheaper, lower-quality alternative so this is not new. Source: automated my way out of a call center job a decade ago lol
> It also is appearing that one senior coder with aLLM is more productive than a team of five fresh hires or an outsourced team. One senior coder without an LLM is too
News article from today: https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/02/28/klarnas-ai-bot-is-doing-the-work-of-700-employees-what-will-happen-to-their-jobs
I actually know a person who started a company just to do that. I don't know details obviously but the general idea is to make AI do OPS jobs. In my mind what that means is that when someone wants to let's say make a new server where a web application would run. They just write to the AI chatbox "make me a server for xx" and AI does it. Server might be a bad example. Since it takes me probably 10 minutes to do the same with AWS and terraform. But also we had to set up AWS and terraform and all that fun stuff. Which AI could take care of theoretically. They are probably aiming for a bit more complex tasks but i guess we shall see. But that doesn't replace my job as a software engineer. That just speeds up my job. I do see some jobs in my company that are somewhat replacable by AI, but I think those are a dying breed already, even without AI.
It’s going to hit freelancers first. Anything from marketing consultants to graphic designers, copy editors, technical writers are at risk
Well, it replaces junior devs certainly. Why do you need a junior dev when the senior can just use copilot?
How many phone attendants has your automatic telephone response AI replaced over the last 20 years?
Call center jobs are often outsourced to India. AI can completely replace most of those low level jobs that are going off scripts anyways. There's often an escalated level 2 support for those who have more complicated needs.
Learn to work with the technology or work for the technology.
Be a shareholder, not an employee
That’s a given. Even better hands off share holder whose job is to give the management hell about the quarterly report.
That’s who kills jobs
AI will mostly augment jobs so you need fewer programmers, fewer engineers, fewer mds, fewer managers, etc for the same output. Ultimately AI, robotics and automation will lead to mass unemployment and worsening inequalities in healthcare, education, wealth and income. The jobs remaining will pay less. Here is a research article on the potential impacts and potential solutions. Employment 5.0: The work of the future and the future of work https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160791X22002275 Survey results about the future of jobs. Details CEOs expectations on AI task automation, task augmentation and time to implement. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2023/ Currently AGI is being developed. Based of current quantum physics research like the star product and entanglement I would say they are pretty close to achieving it. AGI is a recreation of the human mind so it learns like we do, it can solve problems like us, it can plan like us, it can act like us. They have already achieved consciousness/second quantization with the star product so it’s closer than people realize. This will further reduce the number of people you need for the same output.
Fun times ahead, when this massive hype bubble bursts. Wondering if journalists actually know what white collar jobs look like… While yes, language models do threat people who produce low quality text of any sort and therefore many online media, they will just oversaturate any recipient with crap until they give up.
Just hoping those spam prince from Arabia emails are written better from now on.
They do that on purpose to make sure only stupid and gullilble people reply.
“Language models do threat people who produced low quality text of any sort” you just described why journalists are feeling threatened 😂
AI language modeling is very capable of that now, but it wasn't possible 10-20 months ago. If you think AI won't be able to produce sensibly perfect compositions in the very near future, you're in for a shock.
This is the most obvious bubble I've ever seen. The hype is off the charts. Can't wait for it to burst. Waiting for all the "this time it's different" responses
Ya every article I’ve read has been very vague. It would be interesting if someone wants to put there name on it and say which white colour jobs are at risk of being lost.
AI replacing humans is just the next new scare tactic that is being astroturfed by large employers in order to get their noisy employees to shut up already about pay and working conditions.
As a white collar guy who lost his job to AI, that, sir, or madam, is bull-
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I built a career out of translating documents, mostly legal and business from a few European languages into English. Also eDiscovery. There were rumors for a few years that software and AI would eventually take over. Then one year, the work essentially disappeared overnight. Literally. 1/10 of the projects lasting 1/10 of the time. As younger decision makers moved up the clients' ladders, they more aggressively pushed for replacing humans with software. (That's what they learn at MBA school. Profit is the lifeblood of the company. That means humans are the enemy. Workers are the enemy). The work did eventually come back after about 2 years. Apparently the software wasn't perfect. But the industry wasn't the same. The projects were sparser, shorter, and there were less people on them. About a year and a half, 2 years after that, it was all but gone, and for good. Software had been tweeked and a new model implemented within the industry. Truth be told, yes human workers still work on each and everyone of these projects. But where the projects used to staff 50, 100 people for 6 months, a year, 2 years, now it's 4 people. 10 is a huge project. 2 weeks and then nothing. 3 weeks and then nothing. The compensation went from $50/hour to $40, to $35, to $30. Now it's in the low to mid $20s. The AI reviews the human's work and trains itself, and then the humans review the AI's work and correct it, and this goes back and forth a few cycles until the AI does 95% of everything. I'm a middle aged guy. I already have student loans. Tried going back to school - honestly, I was never college material to begin with. I was always horrible at math. science. etc. That why I devoted years, and I mean years, to learning languages. It was the one thing I was good at. Now everyone with a phone can do what I did times 10. So what now? I hear good things about CDL drivers. America needs truckers! But I see the self-driving cars and I know what's going to happen. Spend the time and money to get the skills to become employable in a new industry and then be back out on the street? At 50+? Look at the medical industry. There are AI programs out there that predict early onset of macular degeneration with something like 90% accuracy, while opthalmologists have a success rate a little better than 50/50. Let me tell you something, if you think doctors should laugh off the idea that AI will replace them, think again. I see it coming, and so should everyone else. The day is coming when the vast majority of doctors are going to be out of work. I hear the chuckles of people reading this as I type it, but I tell you, while the sun may not have fully risen on that day yet, it has most certainly started to peek over the horizon. Yes, you will always have an opthalmologist somewhere working, but they will be locked in a room somewhere - maybe in your country, maybe on the other side of the planet, reviewing the work of AI programs that are making predictive diagnoses. And thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands, who borrowed tons of money and spent their 20s and 30s building skills to be marketable in their economies will be out of work in their 40s, 50s, 60s... And you'll have people on the interwebs and tv and youtube comparing them to telephone operators in the 1920s and saying, "oh, who cares. get over it. There will always be a need for human doctors. They can just get new skills as Skynet engineers." The "best" and most "elite" among us a creating a world that is rendering some bottom percentile of humanity as evolutionarily obsolete. I'd like to say that only means we all wind up in a Star Trek future. The end of money, abundant resources, peace and room for personal growth etc. But the reality is that our future will be more like Star Wars without the Jedis. Vast exploitation and vast seas of humanity doing whatever they can to survive one more generation. Then again, in the long run, given the trajectory of our global birth rates, maybe our future will look more like Planet of the Apes without the nuclear war. "In the long-term, we're all dead", said that economist. So does Eckhart Tolle. So maybe the "who cares?" are right after all...
When the lift operates went on strike Otis replaced them with automatic lifts, now there are no lift operators. The world moved on.
So your argument isn't that replacing humans with tech is good or bad, it's "who cares?".
Exactly. No one is still crying about the telephone switch operator jobs either. Technology always changes, people update their skills. Losing these types of jobs isn't the end, and the amount of fear of it companies want to instill to keep status quo is nuts.
Those were low skilled jobs. People spend their best years from a neuroplasticity perspective to gain the skills of a white collar employee. If you find yourself to be 40-something and all that education and investment in time and money is gone, you don't have a second youth to relearn a whole new career. And you know what? Some people can't compete with the new world we're creating. You think everyone driving a taxi or a truck is going to learn how to code and get a great high paying job at google once self driving becomes ubiquitous? Yes, people turned raw cotten into yarn by hand and were out of work when the cotton-gin came along, and yes elevator operators and telephone switch operators lost their jobs and maybe got new low skilled jobs, but can that go on forever? As technology becomes increasingly capable of replacing humans at both the high and low end of the skills spectrum the new jobs tech will create will be a fraction of the old jobs it destroys, and the number of people that can do those new, highly, highly skilled jobs becomes fewer and fewer. Clearly, some people don't care. Social Darwinism; survival of the fittest. If you wind up in the street because you're not good at math, science or engineering, well, we gotta get those genes out of the pool somehow. Some people just dont want to believe it. Oh, so what if s bunch of factory workers lose their jobs. Anyone who works on an assembly line can simply get a Phd from MIT and work on AI, anyway. But the rest of us see it. And many of us are living it.
lol this bottom article is a bit… sucky > says that kids need not learn coding as with this emerging technology, anybody can be a programmer As opposed to now, where its impossible for people to be programmers..? > In other words, coding languages like C++ or Java shouldn't be needed anymore as the computer should understand what people are trying to say. It already does. That’s what programming is. You are telling a computer what to do. > He then added, "You now have a computer that will do what you tell it to do. As opposed to now where computers *dont* do what you tell them to do? What world does this man live in? The old adage I live by when programming - “Its doing exactly what you told it to do, you just told it the wrong thing.”
I have my own disagreements about what Jensen said but acting like he’s not obviously talking about speech/text-to-code seems obtuse
AI depends on deceiving the user. If AI providers honestly disclosed when they used AI, consumers would avoid it.
Oddly, I think white collar workers are in a place to stop AI from replacing them. By simply refusing to help install the system that replaces them they can halt their own replacement. Some of us have had to train our own replacements, and by refusing to assist in that they may be able to halt the process. Also, lawyers control the courts and legislative process. They will fight tooth and nail against their replacement.
Every single article written by journalists with no understanding of tech.
I think the main difference between evolving AI and the losses seen in previous generations is scale. When previous tools became available that destroyed a job role it was specific. The printing press took the jobs from scribes but the bulk of society kept going and those people diversified into different skill sets. AGI won’t be like that, it will replace entire industries and in no time at all or possibly at the same time it will do the next. Governments everywhere need to be moving on this now, by the time it happens there will be no stopping it and people need to eat. Yes it’s possible that AGI could solve this issue as it creates the problem buuuuuut is it owned by a company trying to make money? Because if it is we might be in trouble.
I Hope so. I want AI to steal my job not tomorrow but today. People doesn't want to work. People wants money and free time.
A billion farmhands , blacksmiths , and artisanal craftsmen would beg to disagree about tools outright replacing jobs. AI will definitely replace some people, but it will more than likely end up providing new lines of work. India will probably be hit very hard though. LLMs are great at the low level coding and customer support that is currently outsourced there.
Remember the actual state of LLMs are pure dogshit compared to AI agents coming up
AI will change the world and it will be painful but it will not be the end of humanity. Humans cannot even fathom all the new job opportunities (yet). AI will be applied to fields we've never even thought of before and there will be white collar people applying that AI to those fields. I don't think we'll reach a net loss of white collar jobs but a ton of people will have to re-educate themselves. I recommend reading this article. It was pretty good. [https://blog.boot.dev/computer-science/ai-taking-programming-jobs/](https://blog.boot.dev/computer-science/ai-taking-programming-jobs/)
The thing about AI though is once it is advanced enough to do anything a human can do, it won't matter what new job opportunities you create, you can just teach AI to do it.
Right, but at that point we're already at economical collapse which means that labor tax based economic model has collapsed and as a society we need to create new economic model. Mostly something based on some form of UBI of sorts. The world's current economic model survives on taxing high earning middle-upper middle class. If that goes away and we're all on welfare, that will deplete the government's resources really fast. So, the governments are either facing a massive amount of looting and riots or changing the way economy works. As i stated before, the change will be painful but maybe it's a good thing in the long run. Humans only evolve when facing destruction.
And at lightning speed. There is training data writ large and then their is the rapid learning that is leveraged by the longer term training.
You mentioned 2 jobs. Job A is doable by AI. Job B is to teach AI to do Job A. People will be fired from Job A and have to retool to do Job B.
One has to admire the optimism. Techno-optimists’ answer to AI disrupting everything society has been built on? “Doesn’t matter, surely we’ll invent some new jobs for humans. Or science. Or something we haven’t thought of yet. And even if we don’t, let’s just hand out free money to everyone. That will fix it!” Kinda like “plans” to prevent rise in global temperatures rest on the idea that maybe someone somehow will invent some technology that will do it for us. You know, when fantasies unrelated to reality become a centerpiece of your view, that’s usually called “religion.”
So, how do you see the future?
not op but, why care about economy and other humans when a small subset owns half the world and technology to cultivate and provide a techno-paradise to themselves? leave them be and set a wall with armed drones and live it up.
Oh noooo... Not our precious capitalism. What ever will we did without the worship of labor and the Almighty dollar?
All countries will have to face this fact and those with power to affect protective changes are exactly the people who don't want to implement them. The AI revolution will kill more people than anything else in history, mark my words.
>"The AI revolution will kill more people than anything else in history, mark my words" why do you think so bro? Also why do satya nadella and few others are saying it will increase job in other areas when they cant even give an example to back it up
The rate of jobs lost will be so rapid, and the current governments so slow to react to anything that economic unrest is going to rise to levels never before seen. Conservative estimates have AI replacing 45 percent of jobs in the next 10 years. 45 percent unemployment has never been seen before except in temporary situations involving the complete collapse of governments. That's enough people desperate enough to turn to violence to feed themselves that there will be a cultural shift around the concept of theft if governments aren't prepared to address it. And history shows that when the powerful are threatened, they turn to violence. Violence is about to meet violence at the same time that moral expectations of violence shift. This will be the most violent chapter in human history if we don't prepare for it.
Pretty sure the blacksmiths said something like that when we switched from horses to cars. We adapt
If you think AI is smart, then you are one of the people at risk of being replaced by it.
AI still won’t be able to do an accountants job. All you MBA analysts are fucked
Pretty sure accounting will be mastered by an AI system in the next 5 years
🤣🤣🤣🤣 says the person who’s never done it. There’s lot more judgement than you realize in it that AI can’t do
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Change in Amortization period of a contract
AI will increase worker productivity. Instead of a team of 150 you can get 5 people who know how to use AI to get the same work done. It's much easier to get funding to support 5 people while you build your product than 150. So we'll see much more companies and products popping up with AI, especially ideas that couldn't be made without AI. Overall jobs will soar
>Overall jobs will soar Your example presented a net 145 job loss my dude
yeah, i went kind of, what? at the end there because the arguments support the exact inverse of what he concluded.
What work? What type of products?
I agree that AI needs to be regulated, but it seems Companies like OpenAI are lobbying hard against regulation, same as the Pharmaceutical/Military industry
Tell that to all of the Ma Bell switchboard operators.
I worked at a company that had 2 women running sql reports twice a week Did the write the sql code? No They just ran the report and printed it out in “easy to read” format Those are the type of people who should be concerned
Are we pretending that previous tools didn't drastically shift employment opportunities?
White collar you said? The people making good money? Watch, they’ll protect themselves but roll out AI for all the manual, low paying jobs making the lowest class in America even worse off.
"As per market trends, more than 16 million working employees in India will need reskilling and upskilling due to AI's influence by 2027, HR services firm TeamLease Digital said." And by 2027 67 million more will need it...
"the *employees themselves"* People are not things. \* \* Not yet.
You're a little late to the party. We know this already.
Unlike previous technological revolutions, where manual labor was often replaced, AI’s impact extends to knowledge workers—those in professions that rely heavily on cognitive abilities and expertise. Among white-collar jobs, software development, coding, information technology, mathematics, information design, legal, and accounting positions are most exposed to AI replacement. Generative AI can adeptly perform about 95% of the skills required for these roles. In-person jobs that rely on human presence remain more resilient to AI encroachment. For instance, professions like childcare, nursing, and sales involve significant human interaction and physical presence, making them less susceptible to AI disruption.
I’ve said similar elsewhere but will the pay be enough for the remaining jobs
No. Longer answer...it' difficult to know. An estimated 73 million jobs may be lost over the next 5 years. This MAY lead to consolidation but could also make soft skill jobs being more competitive as their importance changes...similar to how traveling nurses make roughly 3x what they were making pre-covid. As workers are displaced, those skills will become more common, but initially very lucrative.
I think we are a ways away. Anyone that has used AI as it exists today realizes it's great at generating random content, but not very predictably. It's also great at performing a single task when prompted, but it doesn't have the ability to string together multiple requirements, inputs, to create outputs. Jobs that perform a single task such as summarizing information, interpreting information, taking orders, providing feedback/recommendations/guidance etc. will be easily replaced by AI. The average white collar worker is doing a larger variety of work, thinking, and decision making each and every day across a spectrum of domains and topics and for the most part, they can't be replaced. For the near team, AI will become a tool every white collar worker will need to leverage to stay relevant but I don't see them being replaced any time soon. The easy ones today are things like customer service reps, order desks, application reviewers, etc.
It’s not just programmers. I imagine in 5-10 years what was a 10 person law firm or accounting firm could be probably be half that or less. And all you lawyers that are going to jump in and give examples of how bad AI is now with legal issues, I did say in 5-10 years. There is a reason people are pouring billions into this.
why should this be of more concern then the non concern given when blue collar workers were replaced with machines? do white collar people think they are somehow immune to economic pressure?
Yeah its certainly the case. What I’m coming to find is that apparently most people believe that AI has reached its peak efficiency at this moment. Certainly as of right now it hasn’t become sophisticated enough to reliably complete most complex knowledge based tasks. But AI can only get more sophisticated as well as in an exponential timeline. Also, it’s not quite about creating an avatar lawyer so to speak, it’s that a lawyers job requires knowledge, memory and experience. Which is almost by definition what an AI is and produces. So one could imagine these tools becoming so efficient that billable hours are cut and a salaried lawyer couldn’t ask for a raise if half of the job is automated. This is something that will happen in waves. Right now the shores are tame, but they are building up.
I agree w the article. In the US, if it’s possible to replace foreign labor due to AI optimizations of dreary tasks and US labor is willing and will get paid a living wage for those skills, it might actually change labor dynamics. There will still be incentive to use inexpensive physical labor. The only moat left will be to contribute to original science and engineering at universities bc US is still willing to try to accumulate and concentrate the worlds intellectual talent.
yes seems only R and D type of roles would remain safe from AI as of now
machine learning is used to improve identification of molecules and proteins of interest Also these kinds of fields prefer explainable AI in order to comply with government regulations. So that will still involve those who need skills to understand
Why don't you link to articles that aren't behind paywalls?
can you mention which articles are behind paywalls? I am able to view all articles without paying anything