this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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If you're brutally honest you'll probably admit that you do most of your job on autopilot. Unless something interesting happens and you have to make a judgement call, the main thing is just getting through the day without screwing up. AI could almost do the routine parts already, and just nudge you as needed. It could probably do most office jobs that way. Employers will pretty soon realize they could run a 20-person department wtih AI and like 3 consultants to put out occasional fires. This will spread more and more to production jobs as industrial automation catches up. But what does an economy do with all the employees it suddenly doesn't need? I know the cliche that the goal of capitalism is to make money without employees, but without a certain critical mass of people getting wages they can spend, oligarchs can't rake in profits and governments can't rake in taxes. So at that point how do we make the economy work? I think that's a conversation we'll be having sooner than we think, and it's better if we have it before the proverbial shit hits the proverbial fan.
"AI" doesn't exist, the Machine Learning algorithms we see today are incapable of performing any meaningful tasks a human does.
It can't even replace call centers. One of the horrible jobs I was hoping would finally go away forever.
It's 99% hype currently, with the only viable applications being spam and misinformation, like the advertising you see for "AI"
I know it's not actual "intelligence" - and I complain about this terminology all the time - but for the sake of conversation I use the term AI. Even though all it's really doing is remixing content it has been trained on to produce something convincingly like what a human can do, it's often useful enough to replace human output. In practice that's what's significant - good enough to replace human labor and much cheaper. I have a software dev friend who uses Claude all the time in his work. During a recent in-person D&D game he had it generate a SQLLite database and scripts to help map some things we were dealing with - without even interrupting the game. I agree that people grossly overestimate AI, especially with wild theories that it's about to take over the world or that it's already self-aware - that's just media-driven and movie-driven fantasy - but there are many routine parts of people's jobs that the stuff we currently call "AI" can handle at least as reliably as a person.
In France (and I'm sure everywhere else) the government is too busy giving money and resources to AI companies while ignoring climate change, funding ICE car companies who are fighting the evil EV car makers, and not putting public chargers for those EVs. I wish it was a joke or a meme but this is exactly how I see it. We'll be in deep shit in 10 years, massively fucked in 20 years, and I hope I'll be dead in 30 years to see Mad Max IRL.