You'll never hear AI from Apple announcements, this contrast sharply with the few other large tech companies..

Kinda like crypto but on smaller scale.

If LLMs don't flame out it will be like the dawn of offshoring except wider scale and without the upside of poor people in other countries making more money; just more wealth concentrated in the hands of ever fewer people.

Technology is a double edge sword in every way.

Jobs which are specifically about being a human seem like they can't be automated, like actors, waiters, athletes, sex workers.

I sincerely doubt anyone would watch or care about fake AI generated sports.

Well, people pay for fake sports, and pay for fiction (i.e. fake stories) in movies/TV/books.

Not much of a stretch that a competent AI could generate good enough content, given the sludge currently making money out there ...

What AI is likely to do is distract people from the continued accumulation of wealth and power. Reinforce the notion that it's "fair" (everyone else can be automated after all). And provide a cap to your wages (if the machine could do it with 50 MWh of power, then your salary will logically have to be lower than that, even if the machine doesn't actually exist YET).

The cotton loom didn’t present itself as a means of accumulating wealth and power, but yet it did. Why would you pay a group of people that much to weave when a cotton loom can do the work of 10?

Anything that makes things easier will reduce the number of jobs.

Smart phones improved billions of lives and displaced a relatively small number of jobs. Global shipping routes decimated hundreds of towns and cities, many of which still haven't recovered decades later, with 90% of the benefits going to 1% of the population.

There are massive ranges possible on the winner and loser sides of any new technology equation. I'd argue that widespread AI will cause broad harm and very concentrated gains, which I think will be very bad for society on the whole.

I wonder if we'll reach the point where "AI" ends up with the same negative connotation as "Made in China".

Paul McCartney has had to repeatedly point out that the new song they are producing is John Lennon's real voice, and AI was only used to separate and clean the tracks up.

Even still, there are real musicians out there that will learn how to use AI to generate musical ideas that are new and fresh. They'll ironically have to be in the closet about it, lest people just assume the musician didn't do anything beyond prompting for musical output.

Y'all cheerleaders are going to create an underclass the likes of which you've never seen before. I hope they take up torches and pitchforks

I don’t think work will go away, it will just change, maybe too quickly for people to keep up.

Post AGI nobody knows. It’s debatable that humans will still have a place in an AGI world. But that’s also much further away than people seem to think. I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime (next 40-60 years).

or those who become unneeded would simply starve to death, or have to compete to get the last vestiges of available jobs.

I know which is more likely, from looking back at history.

I live in a country where the government is actually calling for an INCREASE in work. When in history have we ever decreased the workload with the reason "well we don't need to produce any more"?

Yet all this tech stuff does is create even more. Working hours are up and productivity is down, and purportedly nobody knows why.

I want my 4 hour workday, goddammit

Where is this mass displacement of which you speak?

Which companies are firing en masse and replacing with AI?

More locally, the local McDonalds recently remodeled, reducing the customer counter to something like 1/8th the size and installing terminals (not AI but automation), and I've seen images online of fast food testing AI for ordering, particularly over drive-through.

My friend got a marketing director job using a ChatGPT-generated marketing strategy (they gave her an impossible deadline and so I suggested she try it), and now she uses ChatGPT to generate marketing copy instead of hiring content writers. Someone else I know uses AI to SEOize very technical text to something search engines like at like 10x the rate he used to do by hand.

As a solo and formerly senior SWE, ChatGPT is like having a junior developer on call to do my research and get me preliminary results. Stuff I used to have to rely on my team or google-fu to answer, now I just ask ChatGPT.

You're sticking your head in your sand if you think it isn't coming. Just think about every one of those optimizations that AI offers, typically you had to have a human being do it before.

I dont think the doom and gloom scenario being sold as the AI apocalypse is as bad as it is being portrayed.

Who? Be specific. This displacement is happening rapidly, it should be easy to point out.

> The trucking industry is dumping tons of $$$ into automated AI trucking. Tech companies are experimenting with drone delivery instead of hiring drivers. Rideshares experimenting with self-driving taxis. The list goes on.

How many truck drivers have been laid off from this technology which hasn't been deployed widely / left the experimentation phase?

> she uses ChatGPT to generate marketing copy instead of hiring content writers.

So far the only real competition you've mentioned. And yeah, language models are good at writing low value language. I have yet to hear about mass unemployment of content writers however. These are people who will upskill/shift into other marketing roles easily.

> Someone else I know uses AI to SEOize very technical text to something search engines like at like 10x the rate he used to do by hand.

And this is a bad thing?

> As a solo and formerly senior SWE, ChatGPT is like having a junior developer on call to do my research and get me preliminary results.

You say this as if companies will stop hiring juniors. They won't. The world will simply write more code with more productive people.

> You're sticking your head in your sand if you think it isn't coming.

The same has been said during every technological shift. Mechanization will result in mass unemployment of laborers. Email will result in mass unemployment of mail carriers. Through many cycles of technology, the human race has never allowed slack in the workforce to go unused for very long. We could have stopped at the steam engine and accepted the quality of life we had, instead of repurposing displaced workers and marching forward. This won't change until we have true AGI which we are nowhere near.

AI will take some jobs, but there is another risk. It's far more likely that they "de-skill" a certain aspect of work so it becomes less creative and more mundane, more easily replaceable. The goal is to turn creative work into something like a position on an assembly line.

The problem isn't technology, it's in who it benefits. Productivity gains could benefit everyone. We could all get more time off, for example. Instead, those gains make a small number of people extremely wealthy and everyone else more miserable.

The average person active on HN could do this. They could move somewhere with extremely low cost of living and work a remote job. But almost nobody does this. Instead people choose to live in incredibly high cost areas at well paid jobs, chasing ever higher quality of life.

It's not some boogeyman forcing this. It's just human nature.

I just freakin said who. That is very specific. What are you looking for me to name Jessica, former content lead at AcmeCorp?

> How many truck drivers have been laid off from this technology which hasn't been deployed widely / left the experimentation phase?

None, yet.

But you are missing my point. This stuff is beginning to happen. Much has yet to happen. You are betting that it won't happen, and I am saying you are wrong. Very little of this will empower people where they are, at the lowest rungs of various corporate ladders. But it will empower their taskmasters, who will happily shed them with the same bullshit excuses they've always given: "Not my problem" and "Sorry, it's just business."

Since you're so damn optimistic about the future, what are these jobs that these people will be retraining to? That don't exist yet. Please share just a little bit of your visionary insight.

How about a company or an article?

> But you are missing my point. This stuff is beginning to happen.

I'm not, you're missing mine. You believe they are beginning to happen. But you tell me they haven't happened yet. There is nothing substantive to justify this fear. History certainly doesn't. That's my point.

> Since you're so damn optimistic about the future, what are these jobs that these people will be retraining to? That don't exist yet.

Imagine that, the future creating new jobs for people. Not as if that has ever happened before. We're all still toiling in the fields aren't we.

ML and LLMs in particular are just fancy maths/statistics. Yes they are immensely useful, but also 1. overhyped / overrated, 2. facing the problem of in-breeding.

AGI will work nothing like today's LLMs. AGI will stare at your question, and instead of answering, ask you: "why do you want to know that?". You can't have intelligence without curiosity.

We will no longer be the dominant species.

If the AGI is anything like us, it might keep us around as slaves.

Not immediately, but give it 100 years. We’ll be the frog in the pot of boiling water.

AGI final form is giving non-answers a-la stack overflow.

That's just garbage propaganda from the hype men. I don't buy it and you shouldn't either. We don't live in a sci-fi fantasy novel.

The real end game for "AI" is power for the few, with little need for the plebs (us), so no need to share any of that power. That's what our current social structure will give us, and "AI" isn't going to change that structure.

If a hypothetical machine could do your job, well you better do it cheap enough that we don't start researching that. It's like UBER, the taxis will drive themselves soon enough, so you have to work for no pay for now, to usher in the future where you will make money. Nevermind that it never happened and people are still working slavery wages.

Pascals Wager basically.

It will make a lot of money for existing rich people, sure.

But will it help a family pay for rising medical, housing, and food costs? Absolutely not.

It will mainly serve to optimize and automate, but under a profit driven system, optimizations only serve to extract more wealth, not distribute it.

Considering the current economic system and state of social safety nets, I have to disagree with you. I bet the widespread adoption of ML models will only increase the Gini coefficient by doing to knowledge-workers what automation did to factory workers. The middle-class will be hollowed out.

Instead of trying to slap a technical fix onto that problem, we could be working to address root causes.