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The psychic cost of AI is already here
Ugh, another AI post.
Today Block laid of about half its 10k employees for AI reasons and the sock soared. Was this pr cover for shedding bloat? Maybe. Elon famously slimmed down Dorsey’s crazy bloated twitter, no AI cover story needed.
But still, the market loved this and will demand more.
Earlier this week IBM stock dived on some Anthropic COBOL skill. Was this premature doom? Maybe. But still.
Let’s put aside whether AI will destroy white collar work in a short term time horizon. Despite the outcome, the idea that it very much might is already mainstream. It’s in the water. How much is the impending fear already shaping decisions? How much psychological weight is it already causing? How much will it accelerate
Certainly people are already changing career plans, college plans, savings strategies, family planning, etc. and it will only get much worse. New broadly available opportunities in AI are not going to open up faster than the fear of AI disruption will spread; we are already in a spiral.
Like many in these spaces, I’ve been worried for a while now, but now it’s going mainstream and will cause aggregate changes in behavior which will have their own effects on society and the economy regardless of the first order effects of AI disruption.
As a minor example, my wife has wanted to move for a few years now. Unfortunately, we’re chained to a 3% mortgage without enough income to achieve escape velocity beyond moving sideways to pay more. We’re finally in a spot this year where we could be a little indulgent and justify moving into a house the right size for a young family of 7, even if means taking on some unoptimized mortgage rate increase.
But I can’t imaging compounding that risk with AI disruption. The music could stop and never start again. Our marriage is good, but my resistance causes its own minor stress. How many marriages aren’t so good, break down over things like this?
How many people don’t get married altogether, etc.
Regardless if Covid was just a flu, the real world response to the percieved threat was transformative. Regardless if AI is just a fad…
Co-workers at my current job ended up pivoting away from Software Engineering, particularly because they saw this coming from miles. They are aiming for Cyber-Security. I studied Software Engineering in undergrad, while i didnt pivot away from it because of AI specifically, i wouldnt be surprised if a lot of tech majors pivoted away from it because of the AI boom. With that being said, im of the opinion that the "AI will take our jobs" schtick is slightly overstated: Technology has always replaced jobs, thats how it always goes. New jobs will arise. People forget that most people were working in agriculture before the industrial revolution, all those farmers didnt just stop working, they found the newly produced jobs else ware in the economy (its actually part of the reason urbanization has increased so much!). I dont think we need to worry all that much until we have actual JARVIS/Cortana level computers running around with Terminator robotics.
I would argue that this time, it is different from the industrialization or the computer revolution.
The computer revolution was the first time the machines came for stuff which had previously required intelligence. In the niches where they were good, they totally crushed humans. Before electronics, computer was a human job. Today, I can waste more multiplications on playing a video game for an hour than humanity solved in total in 1900.
On the other hand, electronics also came with very sharp limitations. A human who might have worked as a computer in 1900 still had skills which the machines did not have, and could thus be running Excel in 1995.
This time around, it is much less clear that the median human will still have any intellectual comparative advantage over the machines. Heck, even the median MINT PhD might not find employment for their brain in 2035 any more than anyone found employment for their multiplication ability in 2000.
So your "new jobs" which will arise might well being the biodrones of an AI: wear AR goggles and simply follow instructions. Walk to the indicated rack. Unplug the indicated network cable. Plug it back in at the indicated port. Drink exactly 50ml to avoid failure from dehydration without requiring more than the minimum of bathroom breaks. An exciting day at work for the most qualified biodrones might be when they were used to replace the CPU in a machine.
I don't really disagree that this is how the arc of progress is turning, but it does seem a bit ridiculous to worry about what your job is going to be if AI attains intellectual supremacy over humans.
It seems to me that there's really only two possible paths forward; either AI remains jagged in capability like current LLM's and the standard economic arguments about technology hold, or we develop an AGI that represents a perfect labor substitute (it seems hard to believe that an intelligence-complete AGI could not develop sufficiently advanced robotics) and every economic and political assumption grounding society made under the assumption that humans are required for production starts collapsing.
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Maybe so; my post is explicitly agnostic to this. I am noting the toll of the social perception that is here today. Let’s assume it’s more than slightly overstated and straight FUD.
Still, right now articles in the MSM are openly pondering the possibility and whether there will massive economic fall out, “influencers” have viral doom posts, AI leaders go on popular podcasts and doom speculate, and then we see real world shake up’s at least being attributes to AI job displacement.
This is all happening today whether or not it’s based on hype, an my point is that this is going to affect decisions and cause aggregate mental and systemic stress in the immediate term, whether or not the tech pans out.
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Honestly I feel like security is gonna get nuked by ai before engineering. It's one thing to poke holes in something, and it's a completely different thing to build something new. You can have AI agents be a red team that never rests, and that constantly looks up new CVEs. The agents can look at all of the code being written, and flag potential flaws. And AI is already pretty good at reverse engineering and pen testing.
The thing with AI slop is that low quality code introduces debt that accumulates, and you eventually end up with something brittle and unworkable. Security has no such problems, you simply poke holes everywhere, and tell people what to do to avoid having holes.
It feels like basically the same dynamic as software engineering. It's a force multiplier for more senior staff who have good intuition about the problem space and can use agents as an army of extremely fast but error-prone interns. Cybersecurity is a very diverse field as well - the guy who sits at a desk watching a dashboard is probably screwed, while experienced vulnerability researchers are having fun being more productive than ever, plus with a whole new set of poorly secured targets in the form of vibe-coded projects.
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