this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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Exactly , and I mean exactly, the same thing was said back in the 80s
Edit: formatting
Ya what’s your point? Are you saying that the invention of computers didn’t displace a lot of jobs?
If you’re saying that AI is going to disrupt the market and displace a large number of jobs just like computers did then you’re 100% right.
Nothing is finite. AI isn’t going to be the first or last thing to shake up the world.
Eventually your skills are going to become less valued and you’ll have no choice but to retool. Either you figure out how to retool or you get left behind.
The Segway was sold at the time as a "revolution in transportation". Ditto for the Hyperloop, by the way.
Then there's the Theranos' "revolutionary" Tech as mentioned in the article.
And don't get me started on how Pets.com (which famously went bust in the .Net Crash) was also revolutionary.
There are way more situations of Tech snakeoil being peddled to the masses as "revolutionary" than there are of trully revolutionary Tech being sold as such (I can only think of 3 trully revolutionary Technologies in the last half a century: the Personal Computer, the Internet and Smartphones, and one of those was a surprise revolution whilst another was only hyped after it was actually starting to show revolutionary results, and only smartphones were hyped from the start), so the logical default position for anybody but the snakeoil salesmen trying to swindle the masses is to suspect of tall tales in Tech, the taller the tale the greater the suspicion.
(I keenly remember the early days of the Internet, and it was incredibly low-key compared to the present day hype-spectables for bullshit that never even works).
Believing such claims by default is either incredibly naive or the product of a vested financial interest in getting people to put money into it.
The latest iteration of this kind of technology is always called AI until the next iteration comes along.
Well this isn’t quite true, automation and computers have replaced many jobs. They just haven’t been skilled labour.
Now AI is catching up with skilled labour, whether it’s CNNs for loss prevention, LSTM/1DCNN for anomaly detection in Time Series (e.g. biosignal, finance) or more recently llms explaining and adapting code.
In one way or another, that work, at least in part, would have been done by a person, even if it’s an intern for example.
That's where the majority of jobs are that computers and automation "took".
Large companies needed hundreds of accountants to do what a dozen can do now. Same goes for developers. Or biologists. Or architects. Or whatever else.