Hello friends. This thread has been set to community participants only. That means that only our regular commenters in good standing may comment in this thread.
Everyone else's comments will be removed by automod.
People who contribute constructively automatically gain access in time. We do not hand out entry on request.
Alas, this cyberpunk dystopia’s version of cyberpsychosis is just AI convincing people to go insane, and not losing touch with your humanity because you became too much of a machine.
The least they could do is make this dystopia cool.
Or they say, “I just saw DPL finally and it was amazing”. And then five more people will use the same acronym and agree it changed their lives. And no one will tell you what the initialism is for.
Goated movie; everyone should watch it. Don't care what age you are, you'll laugh your head off, and it's a very lighthearted and touching movie to boot.
It's weird that you are representing the robots rather than the executives and socioeconomic systems as the driving force. AI isn't the underlying problem, but it does exacerbate it, at least in the short term. Instead of rallying against AI as a concept, why not use this disruptive moment to rally against the perverse incentives?
It saddens me that what should have a widely celebrated breakthough - the ability to fluently interact with machines in natural language - is causing so much fear and disgust. It also saddens me that we have backslid so much in terms of social progress in the past 10 years.
I don't think how "easy" a solution is should be the metric by which we argue for it. Also I don't think smashing a robot with a rock will solve anything.
one robot with one rock, no. many robots and many rocks, eh. who knows? better than your solution of “ackshually the torment nexus is a good thing if you pretend we’re not in the system that we’re in and that it will magically change despite the total power and control the very people building the torment nexus wield over governments and markets”
ai bad. maybe it would be good under a different system, under this one it will lead to the deaths of billions. you understand the goal of ai is to replace humanity, correct? that’s not a conspiracy theory or crazy take, they literally say that shit out loud.
No, I don't think you are right that the goal of AI is to replace humanity. I can understand why you're so hyperbolic if you think that. But you don't have a basis to think that other than your own imagination.
I don't think we should pretend to know things that we don't. And I think you're pretending to know something.
Brother, they're using AI in military intelligence. Whatever security qualms are holding up AI adoption in your workplace will be gone in a couple of months and you'll be stuck in the same hell as the rest of us.
"The factory of the future will have two employees: a man and a dog. The man's job will be to feed the dog. The dog's job will be to prevent the man from touching any of the automated equipment." - Warren G. Bennis
AI will never be synonymous with job security when our current economic and political paradigms hold sway. It's just an equation that produces no good results for the common person when added together.
Anyone who tries to tell you differently either swallowed the lies themselves, or stands to benefit from you swallowing the lies.
Theoretically, AI could help to be a tool to increase produtivity across the employees. But all the CEOs thinks are about how to use AI to replace employees.
And that is ignoring how a bunch of it are just all-rounder LLMs, when most companies needs, at most, specialized scaled-down AIs. And "at most" been an imperative word, because there are plenty of companies that AIs are hardly needed for anything.
This is what I think the biggest effect of the eventual AI bubble popping will do.
Right now CEO's are excited at the idea of outmoding humanity in order to achieve an "All profits, no costs" business utopia, but once the bubble pops, AI as a business/research concept will most likely consolidate within task based agentics and all these "You can fire your entire company, because now "our" AI (which is just Claude/CGPT/Grok/etc with a fancy UI wrapper) will do it all for you!" start ups/companies will go bankrupt and/or get eaten by the big 3~5 companies.
Yup, I think the end result of this AI bubble popping will be lots of smaller companies using the tool, and subsequently getting swallowed up into larger monopolies.
Theoretically, the industrial and information revolutions should have allowed people to spend more time developing themselves and harmonizing with nature. Instead we got corporations ramping up production while injecting planned obsolescence and enshittifying everything in order to maximize quarterly profits.
This is just that taken to the next inevitable step.
As long as we maintain the same mindset that's been steering our world for the past century, nothing positive is going to come of it.
If we just had effective tax systems and UBI or even just a comfortable safety net, the elimination of jobs would be a good thing. But because in this society we all have a gun to our heads to hold a job, efficiency getting so good we don't need X amount of workers means X people starve on the streets.
Cory Doctorow uses the "reverse centaur" analogy to stress the difference between technology that makes you awesome (i.e. a centaur) vs. technology that makes you its bitch (i.e. a reverse centaur).
He also makes the point that the output of AI is woefully inadequate -- yes, it can replace the output of a (shitty) human, but the AI salesmen have been trying to convince these companies that it can completely replace their (already talented and skilled, but sometimes expensive and opinionated) employees for a fraction of the cost, which is bullshit.
(It also WON'T get good enough to fully replace humans fast enough to "stick the landing" either -- sorry, sloperators -- which is kinda important when our economy supposedly depends on having the "best and brightest".)
What should be highlighted more, though, isn't that people are losing jobs to AI because it's doing such a great job, but because companies have lowered the bar a lot on the quality of their products and services.
No. AI is not going to do a better job than a skilled worker. But companies are not interested in the skilled worker's skills now that they've understood they didn't have to offer a quality product.
I've done some reading on the 1800's Luddite movement and interestingly enough, that's exactly what it was about.
History has flanderized the Luddites as being anti-technology; but in reality, they were against cruddy wages, machines that produced legitimately inferior results, as well as exploitation of under-paid/unpaid children and minorities (to operate/repair those machines).
All amplified by the fact that none of the cost-cutting actually resulted in cheaper prices for consumers, all the while Napoleonic Wars and various world trade disputes at the time were making life more expensive than anyone of that era had ever seen...
Yeah the Luddites (or I might be thinking of the levelers) had a lot of ideas beyond “we don’t like the industrializing” but their opponents really went hard for the smear.
Because their uprisings presented a lot pf risk of repeating due to some of their more radical ideas.
I forget which ones but I recommend the History of England podcasts episodes on them.
Plus, it mainly offers like “let me do the job for you” but it’s only able to like produce maybe a few steps into the process.
It can’t edit or revise itself in a way a person has to. You can tell it to automate like revising swathes of a power point.
However, you’ve to scour every inch of the thing (if you care about quality) because AI hallucinates and isn’t you the person. The person prompting it knows the company voice, inflection, how to use statistics in a way that is legally / ethically sound. The computer can only throw back like “X data sets formatted a bullet point list like this” and “5/10 search results” (of unknown accuracy) said this is right.
In place, of you having to actually source and verify it. You’re trusting an unknown data set to fact check you.
And as my History professor said about the Protestant Reformation “there are some things you can’t just google” because certain - historical topics in particular - are so flooded with inaccurate, slanted, or factitious sites and takes you’re at risk of major misinformation if you don’t vet it yourself.
There is a reason, researching information correctly and sourcing is a major part of academia. Because without it, you’re at risk of perpetuating inaccuracies.
I'm waiting for them to replace the very CEO's who demanded AI replacement in the first place. I remember reading a reddit article about some C suite executive who demanded all his people use AI for documentation instead of ot being written or checked by a person. This resulted in massive garbage that took a chunk out of companies profits. C suite executive, rather than take credit for his F up blamed the people he demanded use AI in the first place.
Honestly, the first company that replaces their CEO with an AI is going to see their stock go to the moon. AIs could do that job so much better than the average CEO.
Entire C suite not just CEO and then since they won't have to pay golden parachutes or bonuses for C Suite they could pay the workforce more. But they would then try to pay provate equity and investors unless those got removed.
Most C Suite are greedy and dumb and think of only short term gain which causes long term loses and the company's death.
Can we acknowledge that nearly EVERY job posting lately is emphatic that you MUST embrace AI? If ever there was a warning sign that our legislators need to start coming up with a framework for UBI...
Yeah, I learned my work was "experimenting" with AI to "supplement" my work last Monday, that same week on Friday I got a call first thing in the morning from my boss telling me that my position was being liquidated and replaced by said AI and that I was officially laid off.
People are comparing objection to AI with the objection people had to the microcomputer revolution in the late 70's, obviously because the microcomputer's detractors turned out to be wrong and so they want to assert that AI's detractors will also be wrong.
But there's a crucial difference. Those who opposed the computer revolution were mainly older people who didn't understand the technology. Young people did understand it, and embraced it. With AI, it seems like the detractors are mainly young people who understand the technology, whilst those most enthusiastic are older people who don't really understand it.
Currently in a meeting where they are excitedly showing us all the new AI features integrated into our new IT workspace. They just casually show that our customers can just interact with the AI who can do our role, and make and solve tickets. They insist it's not going to replace anyone though. Mind you a month after I was hired they had massive layoff for basically like every IT team but ours. But they totally wont do it to us they insist >.>
I'm an IT guy, so I don't use AI, but I am forced to be involved with provisioning licenses for AI to users while hearing the accountants complain to my bosses about how much the AI is costing the company, all so they can write emails faster.
I can't say who I work for, but I regularly hear dollar numbers thrown around on Teams calls that are higher than any amount of money I'll ever make in my life, and frequently the dollar amount will be followed by "So its just a small account" or "only a small transaction."
Genuinely, I'm surrounded by idiots and forced to give them tools to make themselves dumber and more easily replaced.
It's kind of a shame you became the artist that reminds everyone "hey the world is shit."
Your art style is so neat and your jokes are so funny... But the topics always boil down to "hey. This thing sucks ass".
I know someone's gotta do it, and the more the merrier. But still, wish there were times you made comics about genuinely good things.
You're telling me to blindly put my faith in a chance-based algorithm, not telling me to learn about the foundational principles behind them. Machine learning is cool. But corporate chatbots are only the future because their owners have a stranglehold on international politics.
I hate Gen AI "art" as much as the rest of the people here. I hate generated text in emails and documentation.
I do however use my own Microsoft Copilot agent to streamline my work and keep my data organized. I'm also a big advocate of using AI for the right things and not replacing people with AI but enhancing their productivity so they can balance their work better. (less burnout, better quality and things like that).
Am I scared AI's going to take my job? Nope, not as things stand currently. Am I afraid that some united states based business people will fire loads of people thinking AI can do their job ruining both their former employees lives and their business? Yeah for sure.
I’ve lost no less than 3 jobs due to ai, and all I hear are people complaining that no one does my job anymore. Like I would if companies didn’t think getting a robot to do it was cheap and they didn’t care about literally anything else. For context I use to do customer service now it’s ai doom loops.
I mean on one hand I'm an actual licensed engineer and it pisses me off to no end that everything is an "engineer" now. Like the hotel maintenance guy is the "facilities engineer".
But on the other hand "prompt engineer" is nowhere near as bad as "AI artist" because it acknowledges that all they're doing is screwing around with prompts.
As a real Engineer (Mechanical Engineering working in Optics and Laser Applications) who actually works for a living, it's funny to me seeing guys call themselves prompt "engineers" when their literal job is to be only be temporarily employed long enough to train their replacements preach to the world how their jobs are the only viable future careers.
That’s why tech billionaires are calling for a universal basic income, but in France it’s called the RSA, and it amounts to only 650 euros per month for a single person over 26 (which is 30% of the median net salary—to give you an idea of the wealth involved, the average rent for a 25-square-meter apartment costs that much, and you can only rent if you earn more than three times the rent), and with a child and/or a disability, it can go up a bit more; however, if you’re under 26, you’re out of luck—the government considers you to be your parents’ problem. And that’s not even counting the intrusive monitoring you face when you receive RSA, which generally discourages between 30 and 40 percent of people from requesting it.
Totally agreed. UBI solves nothing. Because it'll be poverty level.
It's just something the socipaths that are developing AI want mentioned because it gives people hope, it lulls people into thinking they don't have to do anything againsta AI, that things "will take care of themselves".
But I think it's very, very wrong to hope for UBI.
If we get to that point, we're f*cked. Because the UBI will keep people feed enough and controlled enough that tehy don't rebel, but poor enough that they are basically serfs to the technolords, always fearing the UBI to be taken away if we do anything that displeases our masters.
There is no future. Companies don't actually want AI to do anything, they just don't want to spend money. If it's not payroll it's token fees and electric bills; they'll scale back that too.
No future. No hope. No joy. Just shit and misery, forever
I don't expect it means I have job security. I just know I will get reorg-ed out if I don't do it. I doubt anybody except a doohickey maker that can get raw materials from literally anywhere and their products is used literally everywhere has any job security in today's economy.
AI currently struggles with what's known as "general intelligence"... something that's crucial for many job sectors. Let's pray that AI with general intelligence never becomes economically viable.
The economy is moving from a proof of work system to a proof of stake system. If you don't own tons of land and equity, be prepared to be poor. Jobs will be mostly non-existent.
A few weeks ago i've updated the firmware of a lightbulb. That was an interesting experience. I wonder how the AI powered lightbulb overlords will treat me.
In my experience that type of person is the laziest person on the job site. Before there was AI to use as an excuse to not do their job they would blame their tools and coworkers over why they didn't do anything.
I doubt AI has an influence on overall job security or availability, but like any technology some jobs will shift around the current state of technology and/or become obsolete. Cars made carriages nearly obsolete. Copy machines changed the office line and if teleportation ever becomes a thing, the whole travel business will change.
Technology always has and always will change requirements of available positions.
“Video killed the radio star.”
The problem is that human labor is being more and more cornered.
We've migrated from physical labor to mental labor fleeing from more efficient machines, it allowed us to become richer, and there were plenty of things humans were still vastly superior / cheaper than machines at..
But this time, if AI fulfils its promise (big IF) there aren't many areas to migrate because it has the potential of taking away large swaths of the jobs humans do. It doesn't need to competely replace 10 engineers compeltely, if under one engineer's supervision it can do the work of the other 9.
An if that happens, what will become of us? No, we can't all be plumbers or nurses. No, most of people aren't capable of becoming high level engineers or scientists or artists...
Sort of a revolution we'll become serfs because only capital will hold avlue whereas labor will have very little value.
So I think is incorrect to look to the past and think "eh, we always manage", because a revolution of this magnitude that threatens to replace our last bastions of value, hasn't happened before....
AI in corporate is a well forgone conclusion,* but it blows my mind how many devs, marketers and designers are eager to adopt it. I guess we're all racing to be the 1 in 1000 who're still employed.
*How businesses are reacting to AI is the exact, polar opposite to how the public is reacting.
I don't like a lot/most of Detroit Become Human as a game/story, BUT I will say that at LEAST even it with a lot of bad writing understood that letting unrestricted ai (essentially) will literally just end in extreme unemployment and a TICKED nation of people.
I know someone who recently lost their job due to ai replacing them, they now are unemployed with the AI being more of a maintenance cost than they got paid
Honestly I don't believe for a second AI is gonna start permanently replacing jobs. I think companies are going to try, notice it's more expensive/too incompetent, make a bunch of losses and go back to employing real people when the bubble bursts at the latest. Maybe I'm naive or ignorant for saying that, but this is my call for what's going to happen anyway
•
u/AutoModerator 25d ago
Hello friends. This thread has been set to community participants only. That means that only our regular commenters in good standing may comment in this thread.
Everyone else's comments will be removed by automod.
People who contribute constructively automatically gain access in time. We do not hand out entry on request.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.