Comment by phyzix5761
6 hours ago
> "Stop AI from taking our jobs" - This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs.
This is a really good point. If a country tries to "protect" jobs by blocking AI, it only puts itself at a disadvantage. Other countries that don't pass those restrictions will produce goods and services more efficiently and at lower cost, and they’ll outcompete you anyway. So even with regulations the jobs aren't actually saved.
The real solution is for people to upskill and learn new abilities so they can thrive in the new economic reality. But it's hard to convince people that they need to change instead of expecting the world around them to stay the same.
This presupposes the existence of said jobs, which is a whopper of an assumption that conveniently shifts blame onto the most vulnerable. Of course, that's probably the point.
This will work even worse than "if everyone goes to college, good jobs will appear for everyone."
The good (or bad) thing about humans is they always want more than what they have. AI seems like a nice tool that may solve some problems for people but, in the very near future, customers will demand more than what AI can do and companies will need to hire people who can deliver more until those jobs, eventually like all jobs, are automated away. We see this happen every 50 years or so in society. Just have a conversation with people your grandparent's age and you'll see they've gone through the same thing several times.
The last 50 years in the USA (and elsewhere) have been an absolute disaster for labor: the economy as a whole grew, the capital share grew even more, and the labor share shrank (unless you use a deflator rigged to show the opposite, but a rigged deflator can't hide the ratios). This contrasts to the 50 years prior, where we largely grew and fell together, proving that K shaped economies are a policy choice, not an inevitability.
A Roosevelt economy can still work for most people when the "job creators" stop creating jobs. A Reagan economy cannot.
> The real solution is for people to upskill and learn new abilities
AI is being touted as extremely intelligent and, thus, capable of taking over almost any white collar job. What would I upskill to?
The jobs that would exist if only we gave the "job creators" just one more tax cut, I'm sure.
> The real solution is for people to upskill and learn new abilities so they can thrive in the new economic reality. But it's hard to convince people that they need to change instead of expecting the world around them to stay the same.
But why do I have to? Why should your life be dictated by the market and corporations that are pushing these changes? Why do I have to be afraid that my livelihood is at risk because I don't want to adapt to the ever faster changing market? The goal of automation and AI should be to reduce or even eliminate the need for us to work, and not the further reduction of people to their economic value.
Because the world, sadly, doesn't revolve around just 1 individual. We are a society where other individuals have different goals and needs and when those are met by the development of a new product offering it shifts how people act and where they spend their money. If enough people shift then it affects jobs.
> If enough people shift then it affects jobs.
Yes, but again, the goal of automatization should be to reduce the need for people having jobs to secure their livelihood and enable a dignified life. However, what we are seeing in the Western Hemisphere is that per capita productivity is rising while the middle class is eroding and capital is accumulated by a select few in obscene amounts. 'Upskilling' does not happen out of personal motivation, but rather to meet the demands of the market so that one does not live in poverty. The idea of ‘upskilling’ to serve the market is also absurd because, in times of ever-accelerating technological development, there is no guarantee that the skills you learn today will still be relevant tomorrow. Yesterday it was “learn to code” but now many people who followed this mantra find themselves in precarious situations because they cannot find a job or are forced into the gig economy. So what do you do with people who couldn't foresee the future, or who are simply too old for the market?
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> If a country tries to "protect" jobs by blocking AI, it only puts itself at a disadvantage
Regulating AI doesn't mean blocking it. The EU AI Act regulates AI without blocking it, just imposing restrictions on data usage and decision making (if it's making life or death decisions, you have to be able to reliably explain how and why it makes those decisions, and it needs to be deterministic - no UnitedHealthcare bullshit hiding behind an "algorithm" refusing healthcare)