The conversation that I was concluding was with my son, Tom, who, for the past eighteen months, has been behind the camera for every YouTube video we’ve made. For the first time, he came out from behind the lens to talk about something that directly affects his generation: how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping employment, and what that means for young people trying to enter the world of work.
The conversation ranged from personal experience to hard data, and from graduate disillusionment to the new inequalities of AI. What emerged was a sobering, and at times disturbing, portrait of a labour market being transformed faster than most people — including employers — can comprehend.
So bloke who uses AI to create entire new – and insane – theory about quantum economics bemoans the effect of AI on his son’s ability to get a job.
Rightie Ho then.
You see the article by the son – apparently the Alcohol industry is ‘forcing young people to drink’ – They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree but Jesus H. Christ. Has to be seen to be believed…
Being forced to drink? Sounds bad. Are there any ways to get involved with this? A friend was asking.
And of course Tim – we know the answer, state control:
If we want AI to serve society, not enslave it, we need a new social contract between learning, work, and technology — one that recognises human potential as our most valuable form of intelligence.
How unpredictable….
Human potential is not intelligence. Humans have the potential to do many things that are not intelligent. Exhibit A: all of Spud’s prescriptions.
The belief that things done by others are easy is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. In exactly the same way, a lot if people believe that other people’s jobs will be replaced by AI but not theirs.
Employers comprehend just fine.
So bloke who uses AI to create entire new – and insane – theory about quantum economics bemoans the effect of AI on his son’s ability to get a job.
Yes, but he cares! Performatively….He’s virtue-signalling.
Does the son go through life referred to as “Tom Tattie”?
Or “mini-Murphy”? Or just “that plonker over there”?
“Tom Tuber”?
Tater Tot
“Twattie” will probably do the job, until one day he realises the depths of his father’s delusion.
Le sigh…
AI is not transforming the labour market. That AI stock bubble? Purely speculative.
AI is not going to take your job unless your job is doing very dumb manual tasks that should have been automated years ago. The entire history of technology, from the stick to the spinning wheel to the space station, has been about either augmentation (of human muscle) or automation (of stupid grunt work a mindless machine can do). It’s not a sinister process.
What we’re currently calling AI are LLMs. In essence these are fancy autocomplete tools, digital Chinese Rooms that do an impressive monkey trick of generating text that simulates a conversation. Many people who should know better are enamoured by this trick. But my dudes, you’re talking to a fucking toaster with a Magic 8 Ball sellotaped to the side.
So here’s why AI isn’t taking your job: LLMs are not intelligent. They have no way of “knowing” anything, they have no concept of facts and logic. The most insanely expensive and sophisticated LLMs available today cannot reliably play a game of Noughts and Crosses without hallucinating the wrong result.
You, a human, are a potentially valuable employee because you have knowledge and judgement. LLMs have neither of these things, so they can’t be trusted to work on their own. So they can’t take your job. But they might help you do your job, like any other tool.
“AI” has joined the pantheon of bullshit buzzword bingo and when you mention it to techie professionals they roll their eyes. It’s incredibly unlikely they will ever scale from LLM chatbots to the kind of transformative artificial intelligence that would justify Nvidia’s share price. You can’t just throw chips at this and expect magic intelligence to emerge, but they’re doing that anyway.
graduate disillusionment to the new inequalities of AI.
My suggestion is to stop being a pussy.
‘He’s just a pussy, Frank!!’
‘Yes, but he’s our pussy….’
I prefer Mrs. Slocombe’s pussy, thank you very much.
LLMs could easily replace Grauniad ‘journalists’, and those are the only kind of graduate jobs that media navel-gazers think about.
If your job is regurgitating word slop then the LLMs could be coming for your job.
I wonder if Rhiannon understands that (and several others of similar ilk).
I’m sure Polly should be on the list:
Editor: ChatGPT can we have a Polly No 5 in 2000 words please.
Agreed, Steve. And I am a retired computer scientist.
Marketeers commandeered ‘AI’ term to sell stuff.
Also a retired computer scientist. 35 years man and boy. Toughest game in the world etc.It’s not really correct to call them fancy autocomplete tools. This is a common misunderstanding. They’re trained on text prediction tasks but that’s not what they’re doing when they’re generating. Nobody actually knows exactly what they’re doing.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanistic_interpretability
It’s quite technical, but this is how LLMs work:
So here’s why AI isn’t taking your job: LLMs are not intelligent.
But most deskjockey jobs do not require intelligence. And that includes a lot if not most of the “professions”. They are rules based distributed data processing.
you have knowledge and judgement.
Which is just data processing
input>compare with database>most likely output
Since zero alcohol beer became socially acceptable and is on its way to being fashionable nobody should feel obliged to drink in even the booziest of settings.
FFS they even advertise the stuff during rugby adverts and sell it at games.
Surely, Spud Jr. could just fire up Claude or whatever, Sora 2 on Daddy’s hideously expensive Apple kit, give up pissing about with the camera, and completely cut the old fucker out of the loop?
I had a bit of an epiphany the other day about AI. Its going to show exactly how many jobs are bullsh*t ones. Because its very good at BS. If AI can replace you you weren’t really doing much of value in the first place. Jobs where actual serious stuff is done, where errors have consequences in the real world will be fine. AI can’t do that stuff, not without someone basically going through it all again to catch the bits where AI just makes sh*t up. But churning out basic bureaucracy paperwork that no one reads and no one cares about? AI can do that standing on its head.
And there’s plenty of BS jobs. Covid showed us that. Going to be a lot of unemployed graduates soon. Better learn to lay bricks sunshine.
Yes, I call AI-LLMs the tl;dr machine,
Good thing I’m retired, Jim!!!
Agree with that Jim, but I would have thought that laying bricks isn’t any more than a relatively simple process either. Once you’ve created the small robot that has the necessary movements. Masses of desk jobs first obviously, but once the machinery also starts to come into play, then some trades should gradually start to fall too.
Who cares about the fucking newbuilds? They’re prefabs anyway. Look at property maintenance and renovation. Show me the robot that can renovate a bathroom like the great builder I’ve just had in, and deal with the unexpected bodges uncovered in the process.