Much of this value is based on the supposed profits to be made from AI, that could destroy many, many millions of jobs in the USA and elsewhere, with no politician as yet comprehending the need to address this issue, and the destruction of value implicit in it.
Sure and I’m as sceptical about AI as the next man. And yet how can anyone with even a pretension to grasping economics conclude that destroying millions upon millions of jobs through technological advance is a destruction of value?
The only way the jobs can go is if the machines are now doing the work formerly done by humans. Which means that we gain the same output without the human labour inupt. That’s an increase in the productivity of human labour – the main driver of increases in human wealth.
What fucking value destruction?
This is Elynomics where value is lost when remuneration for redundant labour is forfeited. A major plank of the theory is that that labour cannot be reapplied elsewhere.
For his part, Captain Potato has no personal concerns regarding his own area of activity because a form of AI capable of producing such a gushing fountain of random and contradictory garbage is decades away.
“The only way the jobs can go is if the machines are now doing the work formerly done by humans. Which means that we gain the same output without the human labour input. That’s an increase in the productivity of human labour – the main driver of increases in human wealth.”
You are forgetting (as ever) the crucial factor – ‘In the long term’. Yes we all get wealthier as a society as productivity increases over the long term (except of course a large proportion of that productivity increase gets siphoned off by the State and spent on things that actually destroy wealth, but thats a different argument) but in the short term (where we all live) increased productivity can means massively increased poverty for many individuals. If a factory that employed hundreds gets automated and now employs 50, what happens to the lives of those made redundant? And no they don’t all become robot engineers either, because those people are a different set of people to the sort that work in factories. Or indeed offices that get taken over by AI. Its no good saying ‘Society is £x/head better off because of this change’ when thats an average over millions of people. After all if Elon Musk becomes a multi-trillionaire because of AI and everyone else loses out a bit, the average wealth per head goes up.
Its the same argument you economists have used about sending all the production of everything to the Far East, and thats not exactly worked out all that well has it? The detriments are concentrated on particular people and the advantages spread very thinly over everyone else. Which is not a recipe for a healthy and contented society. The same goes for AI – if multinational corporations are allowed to eliminate millions of jobs from their payrolls by using AI then all you are doing is creating the tinder for a violent revolution. But of course as economists are borderline autistic types, they’ll be totally surprised when it comes because the GDP figures say everyone is better off……..
Jim – if multinational corporations are allowed to eliminate millions of jobs from their payrolls by using AI then all you are doing is creating the tinder for a violent revolution
I’m sure there’s also a downside tho.
Economically ignorant mentalists aside, has anyone else noticed this terribly cleaver AI stuff is derivative and not innovative? That doesn’t seem like intelligence to me.
Being an old fart, I also remember when “robots were going to take everyone’s jobs”. Unemployment is currently a fraction of what it was then.
Tmb,
As much as I hate to disagree even partially, the majority of generative AI output is a gushing, unstoppable fountain of leftoid garbage.
Agree it is not entirely random. Also generative AI seems genuinely capable of cognitive dissonance when it contradicts itself, a level of self awareness many, including retired failed accountants in Ely, have only to aspire to.
BiG – true, that. Paradoxically right-think is left-think.
As I understand it AI = a regurgitation engine with a bit of pattern recognition thrown in. That should let it replace the Guardian, the New York Times, and so on. But what else?
I think his biggest problem with it is that the robots won’t be unionised, and therefore the demand for left wing bullshit will be diminished.
This is so 1980’s. Remember when the microprocessor was going to rule the world and destroy everybodies jobs?
The BBC made a typically scaremongering documentary.
How many people now spend most of their day typing into, talking into, or swiping a microprocessor device?
@TMB
I disagree. The Sage of Ely can be replaced by AI very easily:
while (!0) printf(“%s “,wordsalad[random()*1000000]);
A slightly cleverer program might even provide puntuation.
A really clever one would provide no Elynomics output at all. We would be blessed.
I disagree. The Sage of Ely can be replaced by AI very easily:
AI standing for “Any Intelligence”
@hhg
“Being an old fart, I also remember when “robots were going to take everyone’s jobs”. Unemployment is currently a fraction of what it was then.”
Better to compare numbers of working age peeps not actually working rather than only those technically “unemployed”- to count in that stat you gotta say that you’re looking for work, while many have simply dropped out of the labour market altogether for whatever reason.
“How many people now spend most of their day typing into, talking into, or swiping a microprocessor device?”
And how many of those hours are actually doing anything productive?
All the increased productivity computerisation and globalisation have allowed is an ever increasing ‘haves/have not’ society, because the extra wealth created has been taxed to pay those left on the scrap heap a subsistence existence. So you walk down the average town high street and its wall to wall people who are on benefits of one sort or another, and the whole place has gone to rat shit, because none of them have enough money to spend other than on the basics. So all the businesses cater for that trade. And in some areas the majority of the population are like that (because misery likes company) and are utter hell holes.
All this created by looking in the effects on the aggregate, not the individuals involved. We’ve seen the effects on Western societies of hollowing them out by sending all the manufacturing abroad, now imagine that on steroids as all the service/admin jobs that can be replaced by AI disappear too. The entire country will turn into Stoke, Doncaster or Luton, with gated pockets of wealth for the likes of our rulers and those who own the companies that use all the AI.
Its all very well for Tim to promote these ideas, he doesn’t have to live in the middle of it, hidden away in rural Portugal. He should be forced to live in one of the post industrial hell holes his economic policies have created, and see how he likes that.
All my son’s friends work in fintech. So from where I sit that job destruction is progressing very slowly.
Bloke in Wales:
To be fair, I can see the problems with ionised robots.
If only 80% of us could go back to turnip picking as most of our ancestors did 300 years ago, we’d all have greater value. Technology destroyed those jobs, now we have nothing to do.
As I understand it AI = a regurgitation engine with a bit of pattern recognition thrown in.
&
I disagree. The Sage of Ely can be replaced by AI very easily
The solution to replacing a man who has become little more than a regurgitation engine at the best of times:
GPT, write about X in the style of Richard Murphy.
There’s enough of his drivel out there for the AI to never need training again.
“That should let it replace the Guardian, the New York Times, and so on. But what else?”
That’s why there’s so many articles about AI and how it will replace “all of us”.
No, it will replace the “journalists”, who mostly repeat (excuse me, “quote”) articles “written” by AP stringers, i.e. corporate press releases.
Recent journalists have college degrees as a requirement. They are generally the ones who decided on an easy major. Which is why a) they’re “studies” degrees and b) they’re eminently capable of being stampeded by any d*mn fool thing that anyone says. Investigate? Why? When you can just write an opinion, lightly sprinkled with “facts” you got from something you read?
“while many have simply dropped out of the labour market altogether for whatever reason.”
Marvel at the wealth of our society that work is an option for so many.
Bring on the ai robots!
“If a factory that employed hundreds gets automated and now employs 50, what happens to the lives of those made redundant?” Jim
What you’ve left out of your argument is what policies are such local jurisdictions following that someone else doesn’t want to hire those employees locally? In the US there is much lamenting about how some northern Rust Belt states such as Michigan or Illinois lost a lot of automobile related manufacturing jobs due to foreign competition. However, many companies set up factories in the southern states, eschewing the northern states with their existing skilled and often better educated workforces. Oh yeah, plus the unions, higher taxes and stiffer regulations. Consider how bad Illinois and Michigan were in attracting such investment when they were beaten out by Mississippi and Alabama.
Rather than lament the new technologies first look to what the local governments are doing to thwart others from providing opportunities to those people made redundant.
Starmer’s only objective manifesto promise is 6500 new teachers. They can only come from 6500 people ceasing to do other jobs. Those other jobs will have to be destroyed in order to provide the 6500 bodies to do teaching.
There have been reports that schools are having trouble recruiting teachers because people prefer other jobs, such as cleaning sewers or neutering lions. Those other jobs will have to be destroyed in order to make teaching sufficiently attractive as an alternative.
If AI does manage to replace a lot of human effort it makes sense to introduce Universal Basic Income.
“Rather than lament the new technologies first look to what the local governments are doing to thwart others from providing opportunities to those people made redundant.”
Oh, there’s no problem the State can’t make 10 times worse!
Person in Pictland,
“As I understand it AI = a regurgitation engine with a bit of pattern recognition thrown in. That should let it replace the Guardian, the New York Times, and so on. But what else?”
All sorts of things. Like it can write code for me. It can generate a set of unit tests based on code.
All sorts of cinema VFX. There’s a lot of painstaking work that has to be done to merge real and VFX, and films like Avatar 2 and The Creator are starting to figure out how to use AI to get a machine to do it instead. That means you can make a film that looks as stunning as The Creator for $75m instead of $300m.
When eBay suggests a category for what you’re listing. When Netflix suggests a movie to watch.
The thing with most of it is that it’s a suggestion or something like a 90-95% correct solution. So, those unit tests are not half bad, but I generally have to add a few more, or fix a few things. But it saves me a ton of tedious typing. That’s no different to mail merge getting rid of typists. The typists became admin people instead.
The way I look at this stuff is that until we can all afford to drive a supercar and dine at Le Manoir Aux Quat’ Saisons and the NHS can fix us up in a week and our teeth are all perfect, there’s still plenty of efficiency to be gained. Someone figures out how to get AI to pick fruit, the fruit pickers disappear, they can go learn how to do fine cheffing. And with the money we save, we’ll have more gourmet meals.
“If AI does manage to replace a lot of human effort it makes sense to introduce Universal Basic Income.”
Which is exactly what they want. The vast majority of people to be utterly dependent on the State for their income, their health slowly deteriorating, looking for any drug hit they can get to alleviate the boredom, instead of earning a proper living freely doing something productive, away from the malign influence of the State. We have that UBI society already for 10-15% of the working age population and it looks like the centre of just about every town in the country a shit hole of vape, charity, and pound shops, interspersed with fast food outlets.
Human beings need structure, discipline and work, otherwise they go haywire. Look at the mousetopia experiments, thats where we are heading if we are not careful.
It’s one possible future. But it’s a future that requires a great deal of electrical energy input. However, the Net Zero plans of the developed nations look destined to result in an electrical energy drought.
So if things carry on as they are, we could be looking forward to less automation & a lot of things that are currently done by machines being done by grunt labour. I’d seriously think about opening a buggy whip factory. Although what’s going to be between the shafts of the buggy being whipped I’ll leave to your imagination. One fears their methane emissions would preclude horses. I also wonder if sedan chairs might not catch on again.
Stock market tip for 2027. Apple in buy out of Peloton & brings the style concious business exec the latest treadle driven iMac.
@Jim – “You are forgetting (as ever) the crucial factor – ‘In the long term’.”
The long term is made up of short terms. If we had allowed the short term to dictate policy we’d still be hand weaving our clothes and farming with spades and horses.
@jgh – “Starmer’s only objective manifesto promise is 6500 new teachers. They can only come from 6500 people ceasing to do other jobs. Those other jobs will have to be destroyed in order to provide the 6500 bodies to do teaching.”
You started well, but (at least in principle) no jobs need to be destroyed. Just import 6500 more people and reshuffle the jobs.
I think the great philosophical question posed by AI is the extent to which we humans are just stochastic language output generators, pre-programmed with the stuff we have heard and assimilated.
I am equally certain that the answer to this great philosophical question is 42.
@BiG
That was sort of the point I was trying to make on the threat about this yesterday; sure, the AI which produced my ersatz blues song is really just imitating all the earlier blues songs it’s been fed… but what are humans doing.
It is true (I think) that there is probably something currently unique about human creativity which means only a human could have written the first blues song, though this is by no means certain and in any case it means the square root of fuck all to the few thousand humans currently involved in writing radio jingles, incidental music, theme tunes and arguably most chart pop.
Maybe we’ll still need humans to front the pop songs robots write – but I expect they’ll be attractive. Highly talented but ugly people may lose out.
Jim, many of us were alive in the seventies. Life before the Thatcher revolution life certainly wasn’t better for the average worker.
The dead towns you complain of were even more dead back then.
We got out of that pit by doing exactly what you complain of. The short term pain really was worth the gain.
Moron says what moron does – idiotic ramblings of an idiot
Interested, I am reading your contributions on what I think is the othe thread with growing interest and depression.
I am increasingly convinced that we are simply in the wrong parallel universe. I can identify the place, time and hour I transited to this wrong parallel universe from one that had been more or less parsimonious, and in true Murakami fashion it involved a tea shop in Kyoto in late 2018 that I have since failed to find any trace of. For it is no longer in this parallel universe but plying its evil trade letting people in the door in good universes and out the door into bad ones.
Interested: «That was sort of the point I was trying to make on the thread about this yesterday; sure, the AI which produced my ersatz blues song is really just imitating all the earlier blues songs it’s been fed… but what are humans doing. »
Yes and my asking you whether your AI generated blues song had you wake up in the morning was suggesting that a hoary old blues cliché could not have been generated by AI that could only draw on what had gone before in terms of human experience expressed by humans. Someone’s original idea gradually became a cliché and was incorporated into the AI repertoire.
By the same token, AI could doubtless produce a spoof of Trollope or Rushdie or whatever you fed into its algorithmic maw but could not produce a contender for a 2084 literary prize because human creativity and tastes are unpredictable and formed by human experience.
I can understand Western Bloke’s point about getting machines to do desk-bound tasks quickly and efficiently but where he loses me is in claiming that AI may be able to pick fruit. I shall be netting some cherry trees tomorrow using a ladder, bird netting and a few bricks to hold the nets in place in the hope that there will be fruit for me to pick next month. I can’t for the life of me see how AI could help with this.
Did like a comment I saw from someone that AI had made them believe in the human soul as they had now seen what art looked like when it was produced without one
@TMB
Yes and my asking you whether your AI generated blues song had you wake up in the morning was suggesting that a hoary old blues cliché could not have been generated by AI that could only draw on what had gone before in terms of human experience expressed by humans. Someone’s original idea gradually became a cliché and was incorporated into the AI repertoire.
It.
Doesn’t.
Matter.
The homogenisation of culture has been well underway for decades anyway. It’s all cliches, all the time. There is nothing new to speak of, certainly nothing different.
‘AI’ either accelerates or facilitates that, or both, and it’s irrelevant anyway.
Have you looked at the review pages of any of our newspapers recently?
Insofar as they still exist they are very skimpy and virtually every ‘book’ is written by a ‘celebrity’, virtually every film is Marvel Comics related.
I am young enough to remember the pop charts of the 1980s and their associated fashions – mod revivalists, rockers, rude boys, skinheads, goths, New Romantics etc etc
I can’t remember a genuine youth movement since the rave scene twenty or thirty years ago, and I stay in touch through my kids and their friends.
I am not sure that ‘AI’ can’t develop new ways into blues songs – it’s just the opening line to a song, of which there are millions of potential combinations, and it knows them all.
But who gives a shit? Some beardy old 60 year old who likes his clichés written by a 90 year old black dude from the Mississippi Delta? Yeah maybe. But the 60 year old will soon be dead and no one else cares.
@BniC
Did like a comment I saw from someone that AI had made them believe in the human soul as they had now seen what art looked like when it was produced without one
A comforting thought, but where’s the soul in 85% of modern music, films, books, plays, or paintings?
Pretty sure ‘AI’ could replicate Twombly
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/cy-twombly-blackboard-covered-in-scribbles-fetches-70-million-at-sotheby-s-a6731281.html
TMB,
“I can understand Western Bloke’s point about getting machines to do desk-bound tasks quickly and efficiently but where he loses me is in claiming that AI may be able to pick fruit. I shall be netting some cherry trees tomorrow using a ladder, bird netting and a few bricks to hold the nets in place in the hope that there will be fruit for me to pick next month. I can’t for the life of me see how AI could help with this.”
It’s mostly about image recognition. That you can have a robot that moves down a row of say, raspberries, and works out where the fruit is, works out that it’s now ripe and then tells an arm how much pressure to apply so that it removes it. Same with weeding – using image recognition to tell a strawberry plant from something that isn’t a strawberry plans, and therefore a weed and to apply some weedkiller to it.
There are already some projects developing this sort of tech. I don’t know how far along it is at this point.
My brother in law’s cousin was developing a strawberry picking machine a decade ago. Did very well out of it.
Interested: If I understand correctly, your reasoning is that human creativity and inventiveness is a thing of the past which is depressing if true.
I’ve played in a number of blues and soul bands since schooldays so I’m under no illusions about the “genre” if it deserves that name and although I’m a little more sanguine than you I’ll happily concede that technology can actually put a brake on spontaneity. Playing to a clicktrack for instance is dull and robotic but if doing so allows you to stay in time with your un-live horn section it means you can dispense with their greedy grasping need for payment.
I haven’t read any pages in any newspapers for donkey’s years which is why I have such a cheerful disposition.
The concern is that the labour will not be able to be applied elsewhere. It’s less AI and more automation that will cause this. For example: Once you have a machine that can build brick walls cheaply and consistently 24/7, only needing humans for the awkward bits, which designers will then remove to increase profits then why employ brickies? One will do. There are many areas when humans can already be replaced but the capital costs are too expensive to justify it. As costs reduce and wages increase it then becomes viable just ask the unemployed burger sellers in California. Many who do physical labour for a living can’t be trained to do other jobs. Which will make a class of permanently unemployed, they can’t sell their services cheaper than a mandatory minimum wage so will never be employed again.
Good for society as we get more free time but it is only a small leap to total unemployment. Machines can produce food, generate electrickery, care for us by cooking, shopping and cleaning our houses. People are already having sex with machines. Automation was already going along this path. Why will anyone ever need to work? If nobody is working then who will fun their extra activities?
AI doesn’t really exist. It is just computers are so fast and we have some brilliant programmers that we see it as being intelligent. It is really Machine Learning and we have had that for years. What we didn’t have is horsepower and the programming skills we have now.
Automation always was the game changer and it has accelerated over the last few years and has now progressed enough to change the world.
LordT,
“The concern is that the labour will not be able to be applied elsewhere. It’s less AI and more automation that will cause this. For example: Once you have a machine that can build brick walls cheaply and consistently 24/7, only needing humans for the awkward bits, which designers will then remove to increase profits then why employ brickies? One will do. There are many areas when humans can already be replaced but the capital costs are too expensive to justify it. As costs reduce and wages increase it then becomes viable just ask the unemployed burger sellers in California. Many who do physical labour for a living can’t be trained to do other jobs. Which will make a class of permanently unemployed, they can’t sell their services cheaper than a mandatory minimum wage so will never be employed again.”
So what happened to all the farm hands? The car welders? The farriers? The chandlers? My grandfather was a baker. Other than some little shops in the Cotswolds, they don’t exist. Most bread comes from giant industrial bakers.
I don’t have an Aston Martin on my drive. My pub doesn’t serve up cuisine as good as Raymond Blanc’s. I can’t walk into my doctor’s and get a referral within a week. We can still get richer. We have gotten richer. Look at how much people spend on pampering their pets, on tattoos, on going out for Sunday lunch. We figured out how to get rid of travel agents, record shops, typists and we spent the money on other jobs.
Pretty sure that brickies can retrain to put the corinthian leather in my DB12. They could probably be retrained to do some routine surgery, if we ran hospitals like production lines rather than the overregulated boutique bullshit we do now.
“I can’t remember a genuine youth movement since the rave scene twenty or thirty years ago, and I stay in touch through my kids and their friends.”
Interesting piece by Alwyn Turner touching on this. https://unherd.com/2024/05/britains-forgotten-battle-of-the-beaches/
What is long gone is the great British tradition of creating a new subculture every four or five years, along with a new form of pop music. Maybe it’s because music is no longer a badge of identity, but a massive online jumble of everything that’s ever been recorded. Clothes mean less, as well, in an era of body modification, from tattoos to piercings to surgery. Maybe it’s because there isn’t a shared culture anymore, and it’s hard for a group to define itself as outside the mainstream if there’s no mainstream in the first place.
Tribalism hasn’t disappeared, of course, the wish to belong, to go where the in-crowd goes. It’s just that, lacking a cultural escape-valve, it finds its place in internet “communities”, where identity comes with the political slogan and the hashtag. It’s much the same as the polka-dot shirt and pink half-mast trousers, but not as cool.
“So what happened to all the farm hands? The car welders? The farriers? The chandlers? ”
They went and worked in the new factories producing the new tech. The surplus farm hands around here went and worked in the GWR works in Swindon, or on the railway itself. And when that closed in the 80s they went into the Honda and BMW car plants similarly. In the past the new tech was developed here, built here. When a new tech arrived it brought new jobs in the same place (or at least in the same country) as it destroyed the old ones. What jobs are there going to be in AI here? Virtually none. A few in massive server centres dotted here and there, but they’ll be maintenance only jobs. The programming will be done elsewhere as will the manufacturing of the chips etc.
And the speed it will happen will preclude the ability of the economy to absorb the surplus labour. If vast swathes of the administrative and information manipulation economy are automated by AI (within a decade say), that translates into millions of people having lower incomes than they did. Which means less demand for non essentials, and less demand for any bespoke type services such surplus labour could hope to provide.
Too much change too quickly cannot be managed safely. There is a significant danger that it would result in a society that either collapses entirely or undergoes a violent revolution (and then collapses entirely). Its no good telling millions of people who have lost their jobs, houses and incomes ‘In the long run we’ll all be better off, so suck it up!’. In the short term they may decide to string you up from the nearest lamp post.
Jim,
“What jobs are there going to be in AI here? Virtually none. ”
Who says? I can run PyTorch or Tensor Flow on my laptop from anywhere in the world. Or use a text classifier running on one of the clouds. I can buy a load of servers and stick them in a building in West Swindon and run my own LLM based on one of the pre-existing models, tweaking it to the application I need. “AI” is just “software” and anyone can build it.
“And the speed it will happen will preclude the ability of the economy to absorb the surplus labour. If vast swathes of the administrative and information manipulation economy are automated by AI (within a decade say), that translates into millions of people having lower incomes than they did. Which means less demand for non essentials, and less demand for any bespoke type services such surplus labour could hope to provide.”
You’re watching too much news. Tame academics who say what they want to hear about apocalyptic endings to all of this.
Machine Learning (which is a better term than AI, but that’s what people mean) has existed for over 20 years. Paul Graham’s A Plan for Spam. That’s AI from 2002. You train a model on whether an email is spam or not and it learns what is spam or not. Systems to recognise credit card fraud “learn” how you spend and detect unusual behaviour in the same way. Been around for a decade. Selecting eBay categories, movies on Netflix. None of this is new. All that’s really new is LLMs, image generators and chatbots, most of which are a bit gimmicky.
I now have things that badly write code for me, but so what? In the decades I’ve been programming things have come along that meant I spent a lot less time typing or doing tedious shit.
I think Jim is right.
We’re not stupid. We get it. Jobs are a cost etc.
But my argument and I suspect Jim’s, is, yes, that describes the economic argument, maybe, while accepting that literally none of the classical economists upon whom we rely had ever experience this (and no, it’s not the same as the horse and cart being replaced by the car), but this is beyond economics.
There is a value to having teenage boys and young men break their backs in the fields which transcends economics and it is a) that that is what we evolved to do and b) if they’re not doing that they’re raping your daughters.
They are no longer breaking their backs in bookkeeping, never mind turnip harvesting.
This won’t end well.
Entirely willing to accept all sorts of non-economic arguments. As long as we all accept the economic arguments within their sphere – economics.
Then there’s that trade off between – say – the general wealth of the society and the safety of daughters. Fine, let’s do that.
I’d probably start by muttering that young men fit and strong from fieldwork are rather more of a danger than keyboard warriors but still…..
There is one way I can see the massive destruction of economic value happening due to AI. It’s not the rapid collapse in employment, or the lads not being tired enough from turnip picking that the local lasses can outrun them.
The risk is in t’s the outputs not being fit for purpose, while that failure had no impact on the orgs deploying AI, because all (or near all) of them are doing it at once. All the downsides of offshoring. Many of the downsides of monopolies, because the dash for AI is so ubiquitous that when an industry’s efficacy and service levels collapse across all players, it may as well be by collusion. Just no gains, because the value of the output is never, quite, delivered.
“You’re watching too much news. Tame academics who say what they want to hear about apocalyptic endings to all of this.”
Nope, I don’t watch news. I just think about things and try and work out what will happen.
We already have an inactivity rate in the UK of 20%. That is to say 20% of people who are of the age to work, aren’t, for whatever reason. We are wealthy enough as a society to supply one fifth of the working population with free accommodation, food, energy and living essentials. Are we living in an era of a wonderful flowering of voluntary activity, of the arts, are all those non working people doing something that adds to the sum of human happiness? No they aren’t they are largely sat on their arses, watching mindless daytime TV, getting unhealthier by the day while often drinking, drugging or smoking themselves into early graves. Wander through any town centre these days and you’ll see the people I’m on about. A significant proportion of people do not have the self discipline to live a life of non-working leisure. Without the discipline of work they atrophy.
All we will get if an even greater proportion of society gets stuck on that ‘economic inactivity’ list is even more of what we have today. Society may indeed be wealthier in the aggregate, but an ever increasing proportion will be living lives of quiet desperation, as Pink Floyd put it.
“Machine Learning (which is a better term than AI, but that’s what people mean) has existed for over 20 years. Paul Graham’s A Plan for Spam. That’s AI from 2002. You train a model on whether an email is spam or not and it learns what is spam or not. Systems to recognise credit card fraud “learn” how you spend and detect unusual behaviour in the same way. Been around for a decade. Selecting eBay categories, movies on Netflix. None of this is new. All that’s really new is LLMs, image generators and chatbots, most of which are a bit gimmicky.”
I agree. AI as currently proposed is nothing new. What is new is that the computing power now exists to couple that LLM tech with stupendous amounts of internet acquired data, and make machines that can do many human being’s jobs better than the human being can, and far more cheaply. And will very rapidly do so. If multinational corporation A can replace 30-40% of its employees with an AI server centre somewhere, they will, and so will multinational corporations B, C, D, E all the way to ZZZ. All in next to no time. Tens of millions will be put out of work in the blink of an eye.
No complex mass population society can survive that sort of upheaval in such a short space of time.
When you hear politicians talking about the dangers of AI, they don’t mean because you will lose your job. They don’t GAF about that, and they think they are safe. The danger they see is that AI might start telling the truth and betraying the narrative.
I like Bessie Smith and Frankie Newton. And Leadbelly.
@NerdInWestSussex
Quality is definitely a concern, and the related thing that worries me is the pure overwhelming volume of STUFF. Mostly not fit for purpose, as you say, but also far too much to wade through. Which means the wading is also gonna have to be be done, or at least assisted, by AI.
Currently there are stories of public writing competitions, art contests, and so on having to shut up shop because they are being bombarded with AI-generated entries. AI-generated content is also clogging up search engines, help forums etc online.
It made the news recently that the Lower Thames Crossing project has already crossed 350,000 pages of paperwork at the cost of £300m. No human being can physically read the planning application. But if AI tools make the pen-pushers “10x more productive” (!) by auto-generating reams of supportive text to “strengthen” their case. Now the same team can produce 3.5 million pages in the same time. Who wins?
Even worse, all those activism websites that encourage concerned citizens to sign petitions or send copy-and-paste emails objecting to policies and projects they hadn’t heard of before breakfast? That stuff already clogs a lot of administrative inboxes. Well in a few years, the armchair-activist workflow will involve getting a notification from their NIMBY Activism Network about a company you’d never heard of wanting to build homes or a factory on a green field site hundreds of miles away, then getting an AI to write a detailed 2,000 word objection for you to send off. You could object to a dozen new developments before you finish your cornflakes.
How are the recipients of this influx supposed to process it all? Frankly most of it doesn’t deserve to be looked at. But perhaps another AI will read and summarise it, and write its own polite acknowledgement letter. Tough luck to any local person who’s well-informed about the site and writes something genuinely insightful, because that’s just going to disappear into the electronic ether too.
Paradoxically this tech isn’t going to amplify the public voice, it’ll drone us out. And it is going to smother every layer of paperwork, policy and bureaucracy at every organisation. Internal megacorp reports. Your local scout troop’s safeguarding policy. Documents everywhere have been getting longer and more unwieldy for a long time, often to unnecessary levels of complexity, but AI risks blowing them all up – enormous quantities, ever lower quality. (Surely nobody could be mad enough to get AI to write their scout troop’s safeguarding policy? Well maybe they won’t, but I bet you some copy-and-pasting from the web was involved. And as the years roll on, the probability that Ctrl-C Ctrl-V will introduce AI-generated content is going to approach 1.)
I don’t think we really know what will happen when bureaucracy becomes unmanageable. Planning applications over 350,000 pages on current technology suggest we should have been looking for an alternative a long time ago, but nobody seems to have one yet. There’s a libertarian pipe dream that eventually the world will become ungovernable, that all those layers of administration will just dissipate painlessly once it’s clear the wheels have come off. It would be more reassuring if that came with a clearer vision of the alternative.
We live in a society that in terms of global history is unusually prosperous and unusually peaceful. And it’s fundamentally an “information society”, organised and governed – for better or worse – by policies and paperwork, rather than pointy iron sticks and the stench of gunpowder. What exactly is going to happen when the information our economy is fuelled by just goes to pot, contaminated forever by AI biases and hallucinations? What happens when that bureaucracy creaks to a halt under the weight of AI-generated text that’s stuffed into it? Something like Gilliam’s Brazil seems more plausible than a techno-libertarian utopia.