Yes, AI Will Take Your Job(blog.calebjay.com) |
Yes, AI Will Take Your Job(blog.calebjay.com) |
1. AI will get better, and at a price point that makes sense for businesses to operate on.
2. "Managers" (non-technical users) will be as good at using AI as "frontend engineers" (technical users) or make something of comparable quality.
3. All or most technical problems can be solved by AI.
I think the title and take for this type of doom thinking is not really productive. AI is really just a tool which does some unit of work, it cannot on its own "find gold". Some people are better at using it than others, and there is a reason why the largest AI companies have continued to hire YOY for more top talent and employees.
Some jobs will be replaced, or have their expectations changed extensively. But the idea its going to take all knowledge workers jobs, is a path that needs a lot of things to go wrong for it to occur.
1. AI does not need to get better for the MBA to use it instead of your labor.
2. They don't need to be good at using AI because they don't care about quality.
3. Most technical problems are unsolved right now and AI won't change that.
In a company that badly managed, AI or not AI the ship's going down.
"Path that needs a lot of things to go wrong" -- wrong for whom? For the people with money and power, the people who determine what jobs exist and what those jobs are doing, this would be a dramatic version of things going right (as long as they're able to capitalize on it). Human labor is an expense for business owners, not a virtue.
Not speaking to you in particular, but I'm shocked at how so many otherwise brilliant people are rendered practically neo-luddites by AI. The cotton gin was disruptive, but once it was invented there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. The same is true of agentic AI. The question isn't whether or not it will upset the status quo of human labor, it's how much and in what way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp84sRpM1Js
In case it isn't clear: riots in Paris are (relatively) common. Common enough so that regular life, or in this case, a croissant review, doesn't stop. People travelling to the train station might encounter a couple rubbish bins on fire on their way there, and then find that their train was cancelled because of riots.
That's what Europe has that the US is lacking, and can't quite conceive.
> Yes, AI will take your job, except for a small subset of people: plumbers, surgeons and the like. Oh, and politicians, executives, and board members.
Not if every time they get out of their gated community or their 5-star hotel they face burning trash and get thrown rotten eggs to their faces.
You got to up your game, America.
Yes, the written word will take your job.
Yes, fire job take.
Yes, the automobile will take your and the horse’s job.
Yes, we’re all doomed. Might as well go back up the trees and start hollering.
Now they're threatening us with total automation. In their dreams, we're not the people riding horses who now get to drive shiny new cars. We are the horse. If that dream is possible with the current technology, they will stop at nothing to achieve it.
- Yes, engines did replace horses, it was utility revolution
- Yes, computers replacing pen, paper and calculators
- Yes, internet has revolutionized access, borderless business, communication and digital transformation
All the inventions have been about tool replacing another tool, but AI trajectory does not really fit those models.
Maybe AI utilization today is giving the impression of tool and productivity revolution but it's the only entity challenging the actual human organ. It's brain replacing brain and that's the unprecedented and unfamiliar territory.
Eventually this new brain will get its own limbs too!
The difference is that it's less clear how humans can "just adapt to use the new tool" when the tool thinks. But this isn't actually that much of a difference -- were the horse ferriers re-employed as engine designers and manufacturers? No. From their perspective the engine was just as much of an existential threat.
The question remains: how do we mitigate the impact of making human labor obsolete on society and on the humans impacted. How do we make sure humans still have a way to contribute to society and the economy? The alternative is disastrous.
You may want to look at the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, and Canada.
If we're gonna take a look at places, where I'm really interested in watching is the PRC, Cuba, and Vietnam. Capitalism managed to beat the Soviet Union, will it to any other remainders from the era, or will the conversion to state capitalism create a strange equilibrium? In any case it's not like the PRC is doing much better in terms of worker's rights, you still have to justify your existence through labor there more than you do in the aforementioned Nordic countries.
> Capitalism is unnatural, and selects for unnatural things.
Wrong. Even plants have a conspicuous signaling economy to get their way to selection.
Capitalism is allowing the winners of the markets to make the rules that everyone has to abide by, sidestepping "democracy" with anti-democratic "lobbyism" and creating a power hierarchy based on networth. The markets that allowed this are usually "free'ish" at best.
https://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/1...
In person, I'll hedge of course, it's a natural part of conversing and inviting people to share.
Arguing whether someone is permitted to speak on a subject sounds like it would take as much effort as simply discussing the subject itself.
The author is doing really cool things, like a worker-coop for software engineering:
Also i think the article contained some interesting points. Like the "class consciousness" of the owner-class and how this affects decisions on AI. But, to me, there were more.
Anyway, to each their own. I liked it.
I would not expect a job market "expert" or a historian to be able to predict future world where cumulative machine intelligence is higher than cumulative human intelligence. Why would you?
Don't wish. Just vibecode it for your personal use. Seriously.
Even if America was on a path towards communism, you'd be an ignorant fool to suggest the aforementioned ills would cease to exist given they are recurrent throughout communist systems.
Further reading: Walkaway by Cory Doctorow, The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin, The Anarchist Cookbook by Keith McHenry (and look into Food not Bombs, Food not Lawns etc while you're at it), and various solarpunk copium like "A Half-Built Garden" by Ruthanna Emrys.