just-a-dreamer- t1_ja6va1y wrote
Reply to comment by [deleted] in Some companies are already replacing workers with ChatGPT, despite warnings it shouldn’t be relied on for ‘anything important’ by Gold-and-Glory
Narrow AI is more than capable to replace most white collar positions.
There is a limit what the market can bear in new services. When you have 5x more capacities as a law firm as an example, you do not have 5x more clients. You fire 4 out of 5 lawyers. They are gone.
Yuli-Ban t1_ja6wnku wrote
> Narrow AI is more than capable to replace most white collar positions.
Problem being that it's not wise to replace those positions. Especially considering so many of them are fairly highly paid, so even a substantial UBI isn't enough to satisfy the sense of loss of economic stability and security.
Yet we're hurtling headlong into doing this, for everyone, all at once it seems, and somehow thinking everything will be okay.
just-a-dreamer- t1_ja6xeuw wrote
If you expect fairness in the capitalist system, you are in the wrong place.
You are nothing but a unit of production calculated against a unit of revenue. Firing white collar workers is the most logical thing a business can do, for they cause the highest expense.
Yuli-Ban t1_ja6zght wrote
I'm not saying you're wrong, not one bit.
I'm just saying that, while this made sense historically, we're approaching a point where this mindset is likely going to cause civilizational disruption— and not the good kind (if there even is such a thing as "good" civilizational disruption)
And not because "white collar workers are important" or anything. I mean the prospect of double digit unemployment, with the intent on reaching triple digit unemployment, and thinking that everyone will be all for this if we pay them $1,000 or so every month (or maybe even $2,000 if generous) is outrageously psychotic and sheltered thinking
Like, to everyone on this subreddit who says "I can't wait for robots to take all our jobs!" Just.... I almost want to say "Fuck off, you don't understand what you're asking." It's not as simple as "I hate my job, let a robot do it so I can use VR and synthetic media all day." Maybe that's what it means to you. That's not what it means to 90% of society. What Average Joe is hearing is "A robot's taking my job, in fact my whole career and the life ahead of me that I planned is now obsolete. I might get something that isn't even minimum wage to subsist upon, or I might get Soviet communism instead. Also, my grandchildren are going to be turned into nonhuman digital intelligences inside of a computer, and no, I don't have any say in it because some incredibly techno-optimistic tech elites decided to create Skynet."
You'd have to actually be deeply, profoundly autistic or socially retarded to think that the massive, overwhelming reaction to this isn't going to be "Fuck that, I'm getting my gun and shooting up the data centers." Not by some lone wolf. Not by some small group of Luddites. I mean by, you know, the 50% to 70% of society you just unemployed.
It could be good. It could genuinely play out well. But we've taken precisely zero steps towards such a positive outcome.
Lawjarp2 t1_ja78q97 wrote
Exactly. But even scarier is the fact that initial set of people who will lose jobs will go from high paying to not even UBI yet. Without UBI this will be chaos in just 5-6 years.
Yuli-Ban t1_ja7a4co wrote
It's not just the people in high paying jobs. You can add creative jobs to that too. And that's important because of our cultural insulation over what creativity is and how it's a "human" thing. We already saw a fierce protest against AI art simply over still images. Imagine what it's going to be like when it's full storytelling, multimedia projects, and music.
A combination of white collar and creative work being automated in such short order is disastrous. But I'm going a step further to say that even a lot of blue collar jobs will be getting automated in a few short years once robotics pick up. Not all of them, surely, but enough that the general unemployment rate should be around 50% to 70%.
UBI is not enough.
Even communism is not enough.
This is not a problem that can be fixed just by throwing money at it. It's a cultural, psychological, and behavioral issue as well. We're going to tell hundreds of millions of people still living a decade or even two decades in the past "You're out of a job, you're of a career, and your grandchildren are going to be posthumans."
What exactly does this sub think is going to happen? Really, honestly. What do Singularitarians seriously think is going to happen? Everyone shrugs and says "Okay, good"?
If so, then I might actually need to leave this sub for good.
just-a-dreamer- t1_ja73evy wrote
I hope people shoot the elites, not the data centers. I see no problem in that. Intelligent people are more efficient fighters.
In simple terms, in capitalism people fear about their jobs getting automated. In socialism people celebrate the reduction of labor through automation.
The eradication of the capitalist system is a an accomplishment in itself, the height of human civilization.
Besides, what other system than socialism could distribute the fruits of AI labor across civilization? At some point in time next to no human being will be able to "work for a living".
Even if you try hard to be the best you can be, it won't be good enough. The capitalist system has nothing to offer to you.
[deleted] t1_ja75nzf wrote
[deleted]
just-a-dreamer- t1_ja76pcd wrote
Are there more workers than ever before? I don't see them. The share of the population that is actually working is declining for decades.
When does a young person truly start working? Close to a majority after college. It was at 15 or earlier not long ago.
Huge parts of the population is on disability, which is more or less wellfare. Millions suck off military/govt pensions after 2-3 decades of work which is also wellfare in a sense.
And there is the ever growing masses of retirees, from old age to asset millionaires living off passive income.
All in all, people who actually go out and work are fewer and fewer in number.
Sad_Anteater3428 t1_ja7s2r4 wrote
This is ahistorical nonsense. The lowest labor force participation on record (since we started tracking) was 58.1% in December 1954 (source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART). Remember, far fewer women worked then. The US population in 1954 was roughly 154M people. Today it is roughly 336M (source: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/popchange-data-text.html). For added context, unemployment during the Great Depending was somewhere around 25% (source: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1948/article/pdf/labor-force-employment-and-unemployment-1929-39-estimating-methods.pdf) and much higher among people of color and women. So, yes, there are far more workers today and far lower unemployment.
Labor force participation rate has declined from its all-time high in the late 90s, but population has increased at the same time. In 2003, when the labor force participation rate was above 65%, there were roughly 138M workers in the US. In January 2023, there were over 160M workers (source: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-employment.htm), greater than the entire US population when labor force participation was at its lowest — and 22M people higher than two decades ago despite a ~3.5%-4% decline in participation rate.
Are there problems in this country? Absolutely. But we can’t fix them if we ignore basic facts.
just-a-dreamer- t1_ja7tz7p wrote
That is because large parts of the USA were agricultural 70 years ago. It was and is a core conservative agenda to not count farm workers on payroll to work them as semi slaves.
Of course, it has racist origins concerning blacks and mexicans.
Large parts of the category of white women didn't officially work untill the 1960's, but of course they did work. Home industry was way more established few generatioms ago with sewing machines and odd jobs. Most women also did the job a daycare worker would attend to these days.
The youth did work full time starting as young as 16 not that long ago. Extended higher education has brought down their contribution. There is only so much work you can contribute while studying full time.
While the labor participation rate rose on paper, it actually went down. It only depends what you count as labor.
The black sharecroper that puts his family to work in the south didn't count as such.
Sad_Anteater3428 t1_ja7wqdt wrote
While your basic premise of systemic undercounting of Black and Latino workers is correct, that changed during the 1980s (source: https://www.bls.gov/mlr/1999/12/art1full.pdf). Housework by (predominantly) women has never been counted. And the share of white male workers has declined since the 1950s. As the linked article states, “In contrast to the labor force participation of women, those of men decreased significantly during the 1950–98 period” (largely because of better disability insurance; disabled/seriously injured men had no choice but to work 50+ years ago) .And, again, the population has more than doubled since 1954. Even if the BLS were consistently undercounting people of color, we’d definitely notice if roughly a third of the population were still undercounted in labor force participation.
In any case, changes in how the data were collected/interpreted 40 or 70 years ago still don’t account for the fact that we have roughly 22M more workers today than twenty years ago.
Edit: Updated with partial reason for decline among white male workers
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