Quote (thesnipa @ Nov 13 2024 08:32am)
as someone who works in automation i can tell you that your position is very naïve.
one of the worst problems people have in predicting AI is basing their assumptions on both historical and current metas. ai isn't a steady increase, it's exponential.
the invention of the computer eliminated many jobs, it made the people who kept their jobs far more efficient. accounting, drafting, clerical, etc depts had their work forces cut in half or so over time in many cases.
i've literally walked across picket lines to automate factories where 250 workers are protesting outside, and when we're done 150 will be welcomed back, with plans to reduce to 50 or 100 over the next 5-10 years. you cant make changes like this on the macro scale without significant issues over the long term.
new industries will be created, but not at the same pace, and not everyone put out of work will have the skills or ability to do these new jobs. AI/automation may not present an existential crisis, but the path to stability will be very bumpy. and the job displacement and economic hardship that led to the rise of MAGA will come again when it comes knocking.
I agree on most of this. I am overall making a distinction between automation and AI, which are related but not the same.
Automation certainly invalidates many jobs - however, it doesn't invalidate human capital - the nature of the jobs changes, people need to find new jobs & learn new skills, etc. For example, many people who learned to code for the world of the 2010's were invalidated by further advances in computational technology, thus thousands upon thousands of them got laid off. Those people will now have to learn a new skill to made ends meet, be that learning to mine, learning to plumb, learning to pipefit etc.
To your line 2), I disagree that the advances are exponential - we have already met the physical limit on transistor size without encountering non-negligible quantum tunneling issues, so computational power is now relatively static. It's not getting more powerful. We can build bigger and bigger computers, but the transistor boom is over. Quantum computers are still largely a fictional imagination, much like nuclear fusion energy - I wouldn't count on these being commercially available in our lifetime.
I also believe it isn't wrong to compare our present situation to the past. The textile mill, steam engine, computer, all technological advancements led to many many people's jobs being supplanted/invalidated. But that didn't mean jobs went away altogether - they simply changed, with perhaps more service jobs becoming available. The idea that people can automate everything & not work is largely a utopian fiction - people 200 years ago thought that and they were wrong, same with people today. The path though as you mention might be bumpy, it might be mildly bumpy or very bumpy, it's hard to predict.
Note that my perspectives are from the perspective of a physical scientist, not a mathematician or computer programmer. I don't code. My brother however is a master coder & mathematician who works with the world's leaders in the field of mathematical programming, optimization & machine learning.
This post was edited by El1te on Nov 13 2024 11:22am