When I was young and starting out with computers, programming, BBS’ and later the early internet, technology was something that expanded my mind, helped me to research, learn new skills, and meet people and have interesting conversations. Something decentralized that put power into the hands of the little guy who could start his own business venture with his PC or expand his skillset.
Where we are now with AI, the opposite seems to be happening. We are asking AI to do things for us rather than learning how to do things ourselves. We are losing our research skills. Many people are talking to AI’s about their problems instead of other people. And they will take away our jobs and centralize all power into a handful of billionaire sociopaths with robot armies to carry out whatever nefarious deeds they want to do.
I hope we somehow make it through this part of history with some semblance of freedom and autonomy intact, but I’m having a hard time seeing how.
I don’t think AI is taking jobs, I think dumbass execs use it as an excuse to fire people though.
No its apart of the companies business strategy. These tech companies fire an unprecedented amount of employees (primarily from the mass hiring during 2020) make a post they fired these employees because of ai improvements, see their stock price rise ultimately inflating it and creating an economic bubble, and rinse and repeat with the next wave of potential hires who are sucking their employers dick a little to hard.
It’s unethical, and it violates any and all job security and I don’t want to be apart of that toxic workspace. Its ironic im saying this because a few years ago if I got a job at Google I would say “fuck yea mother fucker count me in” and now I just don’t want to work for them. There are far better companies doing interesting and valuable work to benefit society than these hipster douche bags.
It’s definitely taking some jobs. Not a huge amount yet, but it’s unfortunately still getting better at a pretty good clip.
Maybe, which jobs though?
Graphic artists, translators, and copywriters are losing jobs in droves. It’s expanding. I sell contact center software and it’s just kicking off in my industry, but it’s picking up.
Yeah, I can see it happening there, especially for graphic artists (however actual graphic design is much better than anything a model can currently spit out). Translation is surprising to me, because in my experience, LLMs are actually kind of bad at actual translation especially when sounding natural according to local dialect. So I might consider that one to be a case of dumb bosses that don’t know any better.
I’m a DevOps engineer and dumb bosses are absolutely firing in my industry. However, our products have suffered the consequences and they continue to get worse and less maintainable.
As someone who uses machine translation on a daily basis, I’ve watched it go from being barely usable to as good as human translation for most tasks. It’s really uncommon that I find issues with it any more. And even if there is one issue in 1000 words or whatever, you can just have a human proofread it instead of translating the whole thing, it will reduce your headcount my 90%. But I think for most things, no one calls translators any more, they just go to google translate. Translators now only do realtime voice translation, not documents which used to be most of their work.
These things creep up on you. They aren’t good and you get comfortable that they don’t work that well, and then over time they start working as well or better than humans and suddenly there’s really no reason to employ someone for it.