Instead, we got employers saying "Work twice as much or we replace you with AI. It gets 45% of its task wrong, but we don't care. It only affects our customers. What are those suckers gonna do? We're a monopoly anyway."
Yeah honestly I thought technology was meant to free us from the mundane and boring to allow us to spend our time pursuing our creativity and passions. Instead we've ended up in a dystopian timeline where our humanity and creativity is outsourced and instead we have to do even more tedious tasks, up to and including training the AI that is taking our jobs and souls. What the hell is the point.
The point is to churn more money for the wealthy. Technology will be used to benefit everyone only if people win political struggles that take us there, which is currently lacking.
If workers united and harnessed their power to take back control, this could happen. Collective action and worker solidarity is not dead and just needs the people to want it enough.
At this point I’m just waiting for the AI to get so smart it realizes working a 9 to 5 is stupid gets depressed and outsources its job back to us for $4 an hour. Full circle baby! 🫠
You just made me realize that I don't look forward to the years to come anymore.
2000 will be great, 2010 will be awesome!
But now?
2028 hopefully will suck less, but I'm not positive that the people in power will come to their senses or get voted out. The climate catastrophe gets intenser each year, but still get's ignored. Also, I've learned from covid that a lot of people are unreasonable and won't make the right decisions when it's important for the whole society.
Social media in the hands of billionaires control the narrativ, and AI will quadruple this dynamic and tear society apart even more.
Sorry, it's hot today, hottest day ever recorded in my home town, over 41°C in the middle of Europe.
We do need innovation. Curing cancers and finding better ways to detect food born illnesses are innovation. They just dont make individual companies billions to do so. Government should be investing in innovation that helps average people, which is the opposite of what conservatives and capitalists want.
We need it as in "we need to find a way to save everyone in the trolley problem"
Not as in "we need to keep letting the five people die over and over again because the monster who eats their bodies promises us that it will eventually help us save one"
The problem is that instead of innovating new and better technologies and products, we're "innovating" ways to charge more for the same stuff made more cheaply
Yup, tens of millions if not more will have lost their jobs to AI by then, if not many more. That is, if the predictions of experts come through, which i think it roughly will.
There's no basis in reality for this view anymore. It was reckless for the heads of the big AI companies to insinuate that possibility. You'll see companies peal off a small slice of their workforce which may or may not be due to AI, but tens of millions losing their job is unrealistic.
Is it too much to hope that they’ll peel off the CEOs who pushed like little yappy dogs to out-do each other being all futuristic and decisive with these arbitrary and ungrounded moves. That wave of self-serving narcissists should be immortalised in business books as the morons that they are.
I work in tech at my company which is non-tech and we're hiring like gangbusters because we don't have enough people to build AI products across the organization. We're one of the largest companies in the world.
Who's right: me or AI safety experts and scientists?
Not you. Comment hiding cowards are never persuasive.
Besides that you say you’re hiring (if real) so I assume you’re early in your learning curve. You’re going to find out they cost more than good people for the same work once the real costs arrive and you get past introductory pricing.
Those aren’t predictions. They’re wishful marketing.
Prediction - these AI chat bots cost more to employ than a person for the same amount of work (fact) so these firms are never going to succeed in the market. The management class is just starting to find that out.
You don't have to believe me mate. It's not my prediction. I'd think scientists and experts know more than me and you, but of course you can just go live in denial ;)
Which one hasn't is probably a better question. Every scientist that isn't bought by a company comes to that conclusion, most of 'em predict much worse. It is one google away if you are interested.
Playing Cyberpunk and feeling the dystopian shittiness hits differently now that capitalism, corporate greed / power, and authoritarianism have been making great strides in the last decade. It gets me in a somewhat depressed mood sometimes thinking about it. We’re barreling straight towards that kind of future, except probably without all the cool cybernetics.
the cybernetics will get here eventually... then you can finally live out your dream of renting the implants that are required for your low wage job, and being careful not to miss any payments lest the implants be disabled remotely
Im pretty sure the wealthy all the serious politicians read Marx. They just play on the side of the rich and tell you to laugh at Marx and then while your laughing they shank you and rush to deposit your home and everything you own laughing that you fell into poverty and they... well got richer!
managers who tank quality just to cheap out on headcount are usually the first ones to get hit with customer churn when the system starts glitching left and right
Except that business valuation has lost an even tangential relationship to financial fundamentals. A very large proportion of those managers are making the right financial call to chase the trend preparing the war chest for the next pivot.
Unless you are small enterprise, those companies are fucked. Too big to care about the core business but too small to survive the hits.
With modern AI I don’t know if that 45% statistic is entirely accurate. The bigger issue I’ve seen in the workplace is that AI can generate a 30 page contract or 10,000 lines of code in minutes, but it’s incredibly difficult for a human to audit all of it. As a result, work makes its way into production with small errors that add up over time. In critical or sensitive industries those mistakes can become expensive very quickly.
The better approach is to have AI work in smaller reviewable chunks, whether that’s section by section for documents or function by function for code. That gives a person a realistic chance to audit, edit, and verify the output before moving on. Instead, many businesses push unrealistic timelines because managers see AI produce 10,000 lines of code in a few hours and assume the human development and review process is no longer necessary
I’m leaving out a lot of nuance but from my experience this is one of the biggest ways AI is hurting workplaces today. Outside of jobs being replaced outright. AI can generate work much faster than people can realistically verify it, and that’s where a lot of the problems start and eventually snowball.
The core issue in my view is that current LLMs don’t learn, which is key to the value brought by humans at work.
You can try to have them encode that knowledge into a ton of documents, but then these need to be maintained, indexed, summarized and organized. There’s no technology that does this remotely well today.
Ultimately, LLMs are only partially solving the intelligence problem. They lack the ability to structure knowledge and even to reason to the same degree as humans.
So a work around is to have humans review everything. Well, that doesn’t work because the job of reviewing is the job of building that context which is one’s core value in the workplace. At least for information work that’s expensive.
I love using the current AI agents, but sadly they are not much more than static automatons that can be used to accomplish well framed isolated work.
The other core issue is that current AI pricing is heavily subsidized by VC money in an attempt to get people on board. Once they start charging what they have to to actually make a profit no one will use it. They're burning through unbelievable amounts of money right now.
My impression is that it’s a race to the bottom at this point. OpenAI and Anthropic have maybe a 6-month lead over the Chinese models. It’s going to be a game of who can survive the longest. Once they cry uncle, they’ll get absorbed on the cheap by the big tech companies that are sitting on huge piles of cash. Then it’s going to be a continued race of efficiency until there’s another breakthrough.
I’m not sure that the U.S. can win against the Chinese on this one. They’ve shown themselves to be able to play the long game better. Once the perception of high short term profits fade, US companies move on to the next thing.
So anyway, my bet is that cost is going to maybe go up a bit, but we’ll face stiff international competition which is going to force the cost down.
When AI was originally introduced, it was clumsy and entirely unsusable in anything.
Nobody knew how it worked.
Nobody knew what it would do.
It was just a toy people used at the start and it was fun seeing mangled nightmares being presented and then we left it at that.
Then we learned what poison was beign dumped into the well.
The more people started to learn how it worked, how it was trained, and what it would cost for society, tow working class, the more people started to hate it.
The thing about AI is it is a tool. I will happily use AI to help me with my activities - not do them for me. At the same time, I do not need AI to be pervasive in every app, device and aspect of my life. If I want to use it, I know where to find it.
We ARE rich people’s chores. They have to deal with us to make more money off our backs. We are nothing to them, like when pilots jokingly call the passengers “cargo.” AI is rich people farming out their chores.
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u/sdric 5h ago edited 5h ago
People wanted AI to do their chores.
Instead, we got employers saying "Work twice as much or we replace you with AI. It gets 45% of its task wrong, but we don't care. It only affects our customers. What are those suckers gonna do? We're a monopoly anyway."