I am not sure that we are not presented with a Catch-22. Yes, life might likely be better for developers and other careers if AI fails to live up to expectations. However, a lot companies, i.e., many of our employers, have invested a lot of money in these products. In the event AI fails, I think the stretched rubber band of economics will slap back hard. So, many might end up losing their jobs (and more) anyway.
Even if it takes off, they might have invested in the wrong picks or etc. If you think of the dot com boom the Internet was eventually a very successful thing, e commerce did work out, but there were a lot of losing horses to bet on.
If AI fails to continue to improve, the worst-case economic outcome is a short and mild recession and probably not even that.
Once sector of the economy would cut down on investment spending, which can be easily offset by decreasing the interest rate.
But this is a short-term effect. What I'm worried is a structural change of the labor market, which would be positive for most people, but probably negative for people like me.
Yes, it's bad. Because we're all dying of cancer, heart disease and auto-immune disease, not to mention traffic accidents and other random killers that AI could warn us about and fix.
I don't mind losing my programming job in exchange for being able to go to the pharmacy for my annual anti-cancer pill.
Fair point on improvements outside of garbage generative AI.
But, what happens when you lose that programming job and are forced to take a job at a ~50-70% pay reduction? How are you paying for that anti-cancer drug with a job with no to little health insurance?
Which is completely detached from reality. Where are the social programs for this? Hell, we've spent the last 8 months hampering social systems, not bolstering them.
>Yes, it's bad. Because we're all dying of cancer, heart disease and auto-immune disease, not to mention traffic accidents and other random killers that AI could warn us about and fix.
Is this really a useful argument? There is clearly potential for AI to solve a lot of important issues. Anybody saying "and has this cured x y or z?" before a huge discovery was made after years of research isn't a good argument to stop research.
It is in the face of naive, overoptimistic arguments that straight up ignore the negative impacts, that IMO vastly outweigh the positive ones. We will have the cure of cancer, but everyone loses their jobs. This happened before, with nuclear energy. The utopia of clean, too cheap to meter nuclear energy never came, though we have enough nukes to glass the planet ten times over.
Stop pretending that the people behind this technology is genuinely motivated by what's best for humanity.
What's the benefit for the AI masters to keep you in good health? Corporate healthcare exists only because it's necessary to keep workers making money for the corporation, but remove that need and corpos will dump us on the streets.
Even if AI could help, it won’t in the current system. The current system which is throwing trillions into AI research on the incentive to replace expensive labor, all while people don’t have basic health insurance.
I mean, that presumes that the answer to generating your anti-cancer pill, or the universal cure to heart disease has already been found, but humans can't see it because the data is disparate.
The likelihood of all that is incredibly slim. It's not 0% -- nothing ever really is -- but it is effectively so.
Especially with the economics of scientific research, the reproducibility crisis, and general anti-science meme spreading throughout the populace. The data, the information, isn't there. Even if it was, it'd be like Alzheimer's research: down the wrong road because of faked science.
There is no one coming to save humanity. There is only our hard work.
Cool. Tell that to my 35 year old friend who died of cancer last year. Or, better yet, the baby of a family friend that was born with brain cancer. You might have had a hard time getting her to hear you with all the screaming in pain she constantly did until she finally mercifully died before her first birthday, though.
Cancer is just aging like dying from tetanus or rabies is just aging. On a long enough timeline everybody eventually steps on a rusty nail or gets scratched by a bat.
If you solve everything that kills you then you don't die from "just aging" anymore.
If not for everything else that kills you first, then tetanus and rabies is an affliction of the old.
But of course it's not, because we have near-100% cures for both. Just like we should have for every other affliction, which would make being old no longer synonymous with being sick and frail and dying.
>I don't mind losing my programming job in exchange for being able to go to the pharmacy for my annual anti-cancer pill
Have you looked at how expensive prescription drug prices are without (sometimes WITH) insurance? If you are no longer employed, good luck paying for your magical pill.
You are losing your job either way. Either AI will successfully take it, or as you no doubt read in the article yesterday, AI is the only thing propping up the economy, so the jobs will also be cut in the fallout if AI fails to deliver.
Except one is recoverable from, just as we eventually recovered from dotcom. The other is permanent and requires either government intervention in the form of UBI(good luck with that), or a significant amount of the population retraining for other careers and starting over, if that's even possible.
But yeah, you are correct in that no matter what, we're going to be left holding the bag.
Exactly. A slowdown in AI investment spending would have a short-term and tiny effect on the economy.
I'm not worried about the scenario in which AI replaces all jobs, that's impossible any time soon and it would probably be a good thing for the vast majority of people.
What I'm worried about is a scenario in which some people, possibly me, will have to switch from a highly-paid, highly comfortable and above-average-status jobs to jobs that are below avarage in wage, comfort and status.
> Except one is recoverable from, just as we eventually recovered from dotcom.
"Dotcom" was never recovered. It, however, did pave the way for web browsers to gain rich APIs that allowed us to deliver what was historically installed desktop software on an on-demand delivery platform, which created new work. As that was starting to die out, the so-called smartphone just so happened to come along. That offered us the opportunity to do it all over again, except this time we were taking those on-demand applications and turning them back into installable software just like in the desktop era. And as that was starting to die out COVID hit and we started moving those installable mobile apps, which became less important when people we no longer on the go all the time, back to the web again. As that was starting to die out, then came ChatGPT and it offered work porting all those applications to AI platforms.
But if AI fails to deliver, there isn't an obvious next venue for us to rebuild the same programs all over yet again. Meta thought maybe VR was it, but we know how that turned out. More likely in that scenario we will continue using the web/mobile/AI apps that are already written henceforth. We don't really need the same applications running in other places anymore.
There is still room for niche applications here and there. The profession isn't apt to die a complete death. But without the massive effort to continually port everything from one platform to another, you don't need that many people.
The idea that AI is somehow responsible for a huge chunk of software development demand is ridiculous. The demand for software has a very diverse structure.
