Comment on Impact of AI on White Collar Indian Work: An Analysis of ‘Bullshit Jobs’.
tal@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
It concludes that “estimates about the magnitude of labor market impacts (by AI) may be well above what might actually materialize.”
I can believe that in the short term. Especially if someone is raising money for Product X, they have a strong incentive to say “oh, yeah, we can totally have a product that’s a drop-in replacement for X in 2-3 years”.
But I am much more skeptical about that in the long term. That being said, I also think that if you have AI that can do human-level tasks, it’s going to change society a great deal. I think that the things to think about are probably broader than just employment; like, I’d be thinking about things like major shifts in how society is structured, or dramatic changes in the military balance of power.
Solemarc@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I’d agree that in the short term, AI is overhyped and in the long term, who really knows.
One thing I’ve always found funny though is that if we have AI’s that can replace programmers then don’t we also, by definition, have AI’s that can create AI’s? Isn’t that literally the start of the “singularity”, where every office worker is out of a job in a week and labourers only lasting long enough for our AI overlords to sort out robot bodies?
tal@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
Well, first, I wouldn’t say that existing generative AIs can replace a programmer (or even do that great a job at assisting one, increasing productivity). I do think that there’s potentially an unexplored role for creating an LLM-based “grammar checker” for code, which may be a larger win in doing debugging work that would normally require a human. But, okay, set that aside – let’s say that we imagine that we have an AI in 2025 that can serve as a drop-in replacement for a programmer, can translate plain English instructions into a computer program as well as a programmer could. That still doesn’t get us to the technological singularity, because that probably involves also doing a lot of research work. Like, you can find plenty of programmers who can write software…but so far, none of them have made a self-improving AGI. :-)
Solemarc@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I agree with you, it was more of a commentary on “what would happen if we had AGI tomorrow”.
We’ve been 3 months away from AGI for a few years now and it’s debatable if we’ll ever get there with LLM’s. Looking into the results of AI tests and benchmarks show that they are heavily gamed (tbf, all benchmarks are gamed.) With AI though, there’s so much money involved, it’s ridiculous.
Fortunately it looks like reality is slowly coming back. Microsoft’s CEO said that something like “AI solutions are not addressing customer problems.” Maybe I’m in a bubble but I feel like overall, people are starting to cool on AI and the constant hype cycle.