Comment by frankie_t
2 days ago
First of all, I expect to be a loser in the socioeconomical effect the AI brings. This isn't really about the technology itself but about the political systems we have now. From the pure job perspective, I will either lose my job, or will keep it but it will be increasingly more stressful and less interesting. There are literally zero benefits for me as a worker. The only hope is that the economic effect will be so huge, the trickle-down crumbs will be enough to live a decent life, but that is unlikely to happen in my country.
But, even if I had generational wealth behind me to be able to leverage the AI to my advantage, I still see a lot of cons in the way cheap content generation worsens the world around me: facilitating fraud, political shilling, disrupting online conversations (now everyone just sends bot summaries to each other). In a way, I feel a similar change that from the "pre-facebook" Internet to the "pre-chatgpt" Internet that happened in the early 10s.
You don't need "generational wealth" to leverage AI. If anything the opposite is true; AI empowers people with less to do more. Hiring humans is expensive, tokens are much cheaper.
Also, programmers will be least negatively affected by AI. Humans will need to be in the loop in the forseable future, and programmers are a good candidate for those kinds of positions.
But more generally, I'll never understand this attitude about jobs. As if your job is this thing that you own that someone might take away from you. To me, my job is is something useful that I do in exchange for money. If I cease to be useful then it's fine if I lose my job. I'll find somewhere else to work, somewhere I can be useful. It might be paid worse of lower status but, to me, being useful is the whole point.
> AI empowers people with less to do more
I could accept this, although it's not the hard truth yet. But doing is not equal to earning money. If you do more while being employed by someone else, the benefits are reaped by your employer. You only get the expectation to do more. Also, I don't believe that businesses can expand infinitely, so the employment market might not be strictly a zero sum game, it's also not an infinite sum game. Which means the competition in the workforce rises and salaries fall.
Alternatively, you would switch to be self-employed, basically starting your own business. This is what actually requires wealth (and also connections, entrepreneur acumen and ultimately desire to do business). Saying "generational wealth" was perhaps a bit of an overtone. You could substitute some part of the wealth with other factors. But ultimately, the more money you have, the more you can spend on tokens (and other things like marketing too, but that was true before ai as well) to drive your business forward.
> It might be paid worse of lower status but, to me, being useful is the whole point.
This might sound good if you live in a country with strong social support, and believe it's going to continue doing so for your lifetime. Or alternatively, that you don't have any people that depend on you and you don't value your health or physical comfort. But most people ultimately work for money, because the base necessities (food, shelter, security, healthcare) and quality of life enhancers (education) cost a lot of money, and some are growing in cost much quicker than the salaries.
They were saying you need it to benefit from AI. AI users aren't the beneficiaries as now they need to work more for the same pay.