So does the world currently only listen to singer-songwriters on acoustic guitar at small local venues?
The humanity in the consumption of art has been subject to mass commodification for centuries at this point.
This process is driven by money and not love. Technology has nothing to do with it.
When technology destroys menial jobs, it's progress.
When technology destroys white-color jobs, it's a threat.
</irony>
When technology destroys work people like to do, it's _______.
The Luddites would beg to differ.
People don't work because they like it, they work because they need to. "Work" that doesn't support your livelihood is correctly referred to as "play."
The interesting thing is how society differently reacts when different classes of people lose their work due to progress.
Liberating. I remember enjoying laying out sheet music. Doesn't mean I scorn my iPad.
If not, then technology didn't destroy your work.
Page flippers sure did. (I'm not a professional musician.)
We're not talking just more art here, or some people losing jobs who then have to retrain. We're talking with possibly very near advancements, entire industries completely emptying, with hundreds of millions of people who now have nothing to do and nowhere to retrain to.
Other advancements have caused job losses and opened many more. I'm not understanding where all the potential displacements from AI are supposed to go, or how we're going to balance an economy when you need an order of magnitude fewer employees than ever to pump out more content than anybody could hope to consume.
More than industrialization? Come on. It's staggering because it's impacting us.
Read up on Luddism. These were multi-generational trades undone by the loom alone. The Industrial Revolution required millions of people to not only retrain, but also relocate. It changed political structures, often violently.
Even in the 1980s, skilled spreadsheets were done in by Excel. Does that mean we should ban Microsoft Office so folks can sketch out models by hand?
I'm not saying to ban it. I think the productivity gain could be a gift. Everybody being freed from the need to work would be amazing.
But without actually dealing with it, what's the proposal for dealing with the majority of the population of your country being completely without employment? What do we do for money when there's no work left to be done? The whole country can't trade stocks for a living.
Which 50% are you seeing replaced? We can, and have, always imagined mass income eradication.
I'm not arguing we do nothing. But zero problems surfaced so far are even remotely actionable, as they're all well within the realm of hypothesis versus evidence.
The majority of those will probably be staffed at 10% what they are now at best. Some, like stock trading, will probably be almost completely erased as a human job.
Can't wait for my political system to be violently up ended by AI. I can imagine it will only change for the better, right? Right??
No one knows really the magnitude of AI, but if we take the two extremes, AI takes all our jobs, and AI is just some stats that has no real utility, we’ll probably land somewhere in the middle.
Personally, I’m trying to learn these technologies to augment my current work. I’m treating it like going from using Notepad to program Java, over to a full fledged IDE. Not a perfect analogy, I know.
Given its inevitability, I think it’s logical to try and use it to our advantage as workers. If it ends up taking our jobs anyways, at least we tried. If it doesn’t take our jobs outright, then we’ll still be behind those that use the AI products as tools that augment their productivity, leading to a game of catch-up.
Even with the 6 month hiatus proposed, AI versions will still be released by those that refuse to follow the agreement. We’re in an AI arms race against the likes of other world super powers. And the morality of some are quite questionable (not that US’ morality is perfect by any means)
when there is no more desire to be quenched, when there are no jobs to do, when we have solved all disease, what do we do? Man has been defined so much by his suffering and toil, that when we take it away we are in an environment that we are not prepared for in any kind of sense.
I'm not willing to pretend that we'll somehow get basic income before the need and economic tradeoffs become very apparent. Democracy rarely ever works like that and the alternative isn't any prettier.
Regardless, like most tech/social evolution, we can't stop it even if we wanted to. Even if we try to slow it down it will probably just slow it down for some and build a bigger moat around the few with connections to power.
They will eventually come for it, but it will happen much slower.
On this track, we continue to toil in the dirt, unless we figured out how to automate all the farming too. In fact, it looks like we're automatic all the fulfilling jobs and only leaving toil for the humans.
Who, on this forum, is forced "to toil in the dirt" for subsistence?
And even if it were true, what's the quality of those new jobs? Sitting in front of a command line engineering "prompts"? Sounds more like a particularly dystopian sci-fi story than a bright future.
The poorest state in America, Mississippi, is richer than most of the world [1][2]. (No. 19, between the U.K. and New Zealand.) The post-war era experienced the largest and most broad-based increase in material prosperity in human history. Our poorest Americans saw real economic gains rivaling multi-generational ones for Rome's richest. If there is something that will kill us, it's ahistorical nihilism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
I'm not saying there aren't problems. We're comparing medians. The poorest Mississippians struggles with problems on Maslow's hierarchy well above the median or even top quartile human.
So yes, we've been halfway better than nothing at distributing gains. That isn't an argument against change. But it is solid against arguing were should stall all progress until some imaginary threshold is met.
They find better things to do. Maybe that involves agitating for a different economic system. I am sure some countries will fail horribly at this. In any case, LLMs aren't coming for most writers or coders or scientists or medical researchers. They are going to help negate our current credentialing fetish.
That's not all they can do. And the line between artistry and activism is blurry at best. But yet, if your art can be replicated by Stability, it's no longer novel.
Better things that an AI can't do. To clarify.
I don't think any profession that requires a license is at risk. Software engineers resisted a licensing regiment for decades and now the profession will pay a price.
I don’t think it would destroy jobs for anything high profile (including programmers), but the grunts is a different story. If the secretary or, for instance, nurse, can feed through info and the ‘head’ lawyer/doctor of the practice only has to sign off on the result, the license is not an issue.
Not there yet, but can’t see this as avoidable anymore.
Law firms make money, like any professional services firm, by billing hours. Fewer billable hours means less income for the partners. So while it's the low hanging fruit technically, it will resist as long as possible. It will be clients saying no to paying $250-$500 an hour for work that AI could do better and for free that will force the issue. I foresee more legal work moving in-house.
Medicine is a different beast. There's an acute shortage and a different incentive model (not run as partnerships). Big hospital/medical/insurance firms will invest most heavily in AI.
I'm also not entirely convinced that more software is by default a net positive for humanity, let alone "the earth"
>if AI takes my job
AI is not going to take anyone's job. People using AI will take jobs from people who don't use AI.
>What happens to the doctors
That's completely up to them. Some will use AI to research new treatments, to assist with their daily workload, or even to treat patients.
Some doctors will stick their head in the sand and refuse to work with the new technology. They might lose their jobs if they can't compete with AI-assisted doctors, and it will be entirely their fault.
An incredible distinction on the level of “guns don’t kill people, people with guns kill people”. What’s your point? If everybody uses AI then no one loses their job?
Not really sure what point you’re making though. This almost makes it sounds like you want the reader to conclude that it’s going to be a one-for-one trade, but the whole concern is that it won’t be. If your manager uses AI to replace the job of you and 9 other people on your team, I think it’s a bit silly to say “don’t worry, AI didn’t take your job, a person using AI just took the jobs of 10 people not using AI.”
If your boss fires you because your colleague uses AI sooner or better than you, sure, AI didn’t take your job, but what’s the distinction? If you are in a team of 10 translators and 9 get fired overnight, I would say AI took their jobs. Which is happening.
Also, this is probably shortsighted; when going forward, it will be possible for a manager/hr to chuck a resume and typical tasks into an AI and ask it if it can do it or they should hire a human. Now the AI will lie it can do it, but a lot of work goes into making that better and the execution of the provided tasks for the job will show if it’s lying.
Quite the opposite happened. We appreciate human-vs-human Chess even more because Stockfish, and other AIs, demonstrated there are more challenging lines and strategies to pursue.
I know a few graphical artists, they would tell you that half of their pay is for dealing with annoying customers, and I can't see AI is going to make the clients happy.
Generative AI is just one-step in the overall process.