This would mean companies can fire or put wage pressure much more effectively on highly Skilled or experienced workers by onboarding low skill low experience much faster

AI will further consolidate mega corp power to a terrifying degree.

It can onboard low skilled labor faster, but they don't have the rest of the skills to round them out. I am not saying that AI isn't coming for your jobs, because it is. GenAI is extremely useful for high skilled folks, just not directly in the thing you are super skilled at, but it can play an enormous supporting role in everything else.

It could go that way, but another possibility is that the technology undermines the education and the informal apprenticeship situation to such a degree that only older workers are effective while younger workers can only achieve what the AI allows them to achieve. Cheating is already pervasive in education.

Consider the relationship between atmospheric nuclear testing and low-background steel [1] but for AI and older workers whose knowledge predates the introduction of LLMs in the workforce.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

From a cursory read, they don't reveal the productivity difference between high skilled and low skilled workers (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31161/w311... guessing this is confidential info.

My guess though is that high skilled workers remain far more productive than AI-augmented low skilled workers.

Why would this be scary? You've upgraded the productivity of maybe hundreds of millions of people.

There are quite a few scary things about this. For one, who’s to say everyone will have access to this (or similar) technology? It will further concentrate wealth in the hands of the few. Also, since that increased productivity is not coming from the human, and is instead coming from the AI, workers’ share of profits will likely decrease, and with it, their bargaining power, and their overall position in the social hierarchy.

Elaborating further on the idea of productivity, as I said above, this doesn’t make employees more productive. It is doing some of the producing. It is not like an improved tool, where someone has to operate it to reap the benefits. It “upgrades productivity” more like how a kiosk at a McDonald’s upgrades productivity - not of the worker, but of the business. And much like the kiosks, we would be naive to believe they won’t replace the humans in due time.

This also has larger consequences for knowledge workers. Previously, to attain a higher level of productivity out of a worker, companies would have to invest in them so they could develop the necessary skills. Gone (or at least lessened) is that need. So workers will have less skill, less job freedom, a smaller share of profit, less social mobility. This is a nightmare for the working class.

ChatGPT is free to use. Stable Diffusion is free to use. Those are two of the largest if not the largest generative models out there.

The point of these models isn't to help poor people, it's to make as much money as possible. One of the most straightforward ways for that to happen is to drastically suppress salaries. This tech could very easily harm way more people than it helps.

Absolutely no one is spending tens of millions of dollars developing these tools in order to let random plebs capture much of the value produced by them.

Yes, mr smith, it’s a eureka moment for capital. I’m sure the high skill employees will be just fine.

For now. I really don't like where it's going long term. Right now your worth as a human is in what you are able to do. I am terrified to think of a time when for everything you could ever hope to learn there would be a model that would be able to do this 10 times better than you for $3/hr amortized cost. The few who would own the models would own the world and the rest would be rendered essentially worthless.

Only with upskilling and opportunities to share in the growth.

It's scary because AI is going to put the developing world out of business.

This coming century is supposed to be about 'Rest of World' - first China, then India and the rest.

But it's going to risk the ability of the nearly-unskilled labour to help.

The Developing World will have ChatGPT as well.

They can learn new things and cover over the things they do now know. Hopefully they can join the Developed World quickly.

Every time someone says X is going to suffer under ChatGPT, I remind that person that X will also improve their productivity by using ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is the most amazing personal tutor I can find. I'm adding 1 IT cert per month, largely due to ChatGPT's help as my personal tutor.

My gosh 'the robots that replaced the factory workers ... will just help the workers - so now worries!'

Do you know what happened to manufacturing when automation low-cost outsourcing happened?

It was wiped out.

It was devastating for certain sectors of the economy, even as 'net productivity rose' - the surpluses were acquired by some, not others.

A lot of 'ghettos' in the US are a direct result of mass factory closures.

Now - imagine that happening over the developing world, or rather, factories that were supposed to open, never did.

The developing world are 'services export' economy, with things like call centres etc. - and AI will more likely than not just evaporate those roles.

That those people will have 'access to ChatGPT' is besides the point when most of them don't even have computers (just mobile phones), or any way to apply that knowledge.

It's a bit like saying: 'The developing world has access to Wikipedia and all of Harvard courses online! They should all have great jobs!'

Unfortunately that's not how it works.

AI is going to help white collar workers, not pink or blue collar work which is low-skilled.