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Culture War appropriate? Okay, I'm hearing everything about how AI is coming for our jerbs/gonna make us so productive, eventually only six humans will be working in the entire economy and the rest of us will be livin' large on that sweet, sweet UBI from all the yuuuuge economic gains.
But what does that mean in actuality if I'm not a software engineer type?
For example, a Substack comedian (literally, that was his day job) has a post up about AI and how this is all hysteria, nobody is going to lose their jobs, it's merely the usual sort of dip in the economy and the sectors most affected are:
Okay. I fall into the "secretaries and administrative assistants" bucket and I know Sweet Fanny Adams about AI. My exposure to it in the workplace is with the free Copilot Microsoft has bundled in with Microsoft 365 and, apart from annoying me with "Do you want me to write that email?" (no thanks, I think I can figure how to say "I got that invoice, thanks" all by my little ownsome), I see no use for it.
But! AI is going to be the wave of the workplace future! So, for all you who know and use the thing and are up on the different models, here's an example of a task I routinely need to do in my job. Can AI (Copilot or whatever) do this, or most of it, for me?
A request from our auditors:
Where this information is located:
How do I use AI to take all this drudgery off my hands? Can I ask/tell it "here's the details of how to log in, now go ahead lil' Copilot and pull out all that info and make a nice, tidy spreadsheet out of it all"? Or do I have to hand-hold it every step of the way, in which case I am just as well off to do it all myself?
AI could probably do all these things if you handhold it, but these things are all general computer use which is something that AI is currently quite bad at so I doubt current models could do these types of things consistently. Bad performance at general computer use is a colossal bottleneck for all sorts of things where progress has been pretty slow.
The idea we're not going to have jobs in the future due to AI is just classic Lump of Labor fallacy. Something like 80% of the world's population were simple peasants in 1500, while after the Industrial Revolution that number dropped to ~1% for most advanced countries. If national economies could go from the vast majority of people simply scratching out enough food for themselves and their immediate families to fully industrialized societies without widespread unemployment, then the same can happen for AI.
Similarly, even though they're no longer needed as draft animals, horses are doing just fine.
In 1900 there were about 21 million of them in the US, whereas now that mechanization has made them much cheaper to feed there are, let me see... oh, no. Oh, no no no.
Human population decline is already priced in thanks to demographic transition. No AI required.
I'm pretty sure that, if you could ask them, a horse would rather be a random horse today than a random horse 130 years ago.
But would they rather be a random horse 130 years ago, or not exist at all? Because that's what happened to the majority of horses that would have been here today; they were simply never born.
I can believe that the median horse life 130 years ago was net negative. Seeing a horse being beaten literally broke Nietzsche's brain.
Even if it was net positive, unless you'd like to bite the bullet of the repugnant conclusion, I don't find it to be too compelling.
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