Comment by JumpCrisscross
1 year ago
> Now it is a shift from some kind of labor into nothing
I'm arguing that this is far from a certainty. If anything, it seems to be a creature of the AI companies' leadership's marketing.
> reason those people are in administrative jobs is because that's where the money is
This doesn't preclude there being other things there's money in. Just consider how much cheaper education becomes without administrative bloat.
> See Russian Roulette analogy above. It's survivorship bias warmed over.
What's the basis for casting technological revolutions as a game of Russian roulette? Of course your model will predict doom if you hard code that in.
> industrial revolution worked out for some parts of the world
I mean, sure. If you think the world would be better off had we never industrialized or invented agriculture, I guess there's a lot to be depressed about.
> not sure it isn't avoidable
The tech has military applications. It's not avoidable.
> as long as we aren't able to clean up our present day messes that we probably shouldn't be opening more Pandora's boxes unless we have a plan on how we're going to deal with the possible aftermath
You don't know what's in the box until you open it. We wouldn't have wind farms and solar panels (as efficient as they are) without computers. If we'd listened to the people who said we should stop digitising to save jobs we would be worse off vis-à-vis climate change.
> they have universal apathy regarding their future, between 'AI', climate change and various wars why study, why prepare for a world that's changing too fast to keep up with?
Where are these kids geographically? The brighter ones I know are brimming with optimism.
> unbounded optimism is likely to lead to some massive level of disappointment
By definition, right?
I'm not saying we won't be disappointed. But optimism with respect to technological revolutions tends to lead to a better place than fear and pessimism. Even if that better place has its disappointments.
I envy you your optimism. Meanwhile, I have one person here who is out of a job because 'automatic translation is good enough' (15 years of study down the drain) and a bunch of kids who have absolutely no idea on why they would put in effort in school given the imminent advent of AI and the short best-before dates on the kind of jobs that interest them.
If you have any good advice that transcends 'become an entrepreneur' and 'deal with it' then I'm all ears. Because this is no longer a theoretical issue for me.
> Where are these kids geographically?
NL.
> The brighter ones I know are brimming with optimism.
They're anything but stupid, in fact that's part of the problem, they're clever enough to see which way the wind blows. If they were less smart it would be less of a problem.
I think the critical skill for everyone to have now is "spot the bullshit" which can take different forms in different media and domains. Whenever the topic of AI comes up in family discussions I let my teens know just how much BS companies are willing to generate due to the investment dollars pouring in. Hence, AI is over-hyped for the most part, although unfortunately for your friend there are several automatic translation tools that just work.
However, if I ran a business where we needed to translate documents I still wouldn't trust that to an automatic tool. AI is seriously flawed, hopefully eventually more people will realize that before it buries the internet in layers of garbage.
To summarize, my children are mostly indifferent to the advent of AI because I always tell them it's complete trash.
But that's not true though, it isn't complete trash. Some of it is trash, some of it is nothing short of amazing. And the bit that is amazing, when applied at scale and properly weaponized already has the potential to transform our world in many ways.
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