this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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[–] LeFantome 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

People have the wrong idea about how advanced AI has to be to take people’s jobs.

The loom was not intelligent. It did not “understand” weaving. It still eliminated so many jobs that human society was altered forever and so significantly that we are still experiencing the effects.

As an analogy ( not saying this is how the world will choose to go ), you do not need a self-driving car that is superior to humans in all cases in order for Uber to eliminate drivers. If the AI can handle 95% of cases, you need 5 drivers for 100 cars. They can monitor, supervise, guide, and fully take over when required.

Many fields will be like this. I do not need an AI with human level intelligence to get rid of the Marcom dept. I need one really skilled person to drive 6 people’s worth of output using AI. How many content creators and headline writers do I need to staff an online “news” room? The lack of person number two may surprise you.

Getting rid of jobs is not just a one for one replacement of every individual with a machine. It is a systemic reduction in demand. It is a shifting of geographic dependence.

Many of the tasks we all do are less novel and high-quality than we think they are. Many of us can be “largely” replaced and that is all it takes. We may not lose our jobs but there will certainly be many fewer new jobs in certain areas than there would have been.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

To add to your comment, there's also the corp's willingness to make things more precarious, as long as it gets cheaper to run and people keep consuming, so the situation might be even worse. In your uber example, they could simply not care for the 5%, stop providing them the service and go full self-driving.