Sarah Silverman leads class-action lawsuit against ChatGPT creator

[Scribe]

10 Jobs Lost To Technology

Automation has brought numerous improvements to many of the job roles that have been lost to technology. Read about 10 jobs lost to technology

www.thinkautomation.com

https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/jobs-that-don't-exist-anymore

Ah yes, the noble Alchemist and Pin Setter.

 

[Ryujin]

10 Jobs Lost To Technology

Automation has brought numerous improvements to many of the job roles that have been lost to technology. Read about 10 jobs lost to technology

www.thinkautomation.com

https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/jobs-that-don't-exist-anymore

"Scissors Grinder" - Until the late '90s we had an old guy who would come around my neighbourhood, for roughly 6 months of the year, pushing a cart with a grinding wheel and tools on it. A fair number of people would go out to him, to have their knives professionally sharpened. I have a friend who, to this day, makes a fair sum in a sideline of sharpening knives, mostly for butchers and the restaurant industry.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I realized i left one-off: "We have parts of the star trek future, but not the good parts"

I think we have nearly all of the good parts or can see them from where we stand. It is the social and political elements we lack.

As a thought experiment, "What do the majority of people actually do in a society where the technology allows the production of everything needed or even desired with the active involvement of less than 20% of the population?"

I am not sure I have an answer much less a good one.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

No, I think not. However the examples are all political so I'll bow out. I'm not talking some minor dictatorship. I'm talking about my own Canadian government.

Yeah really the whole discussion is difficult without going into politics.

I mean…copyright is political. A tangential discussion about society in general and how best to prepare for rapid automation was pretty well doomed to be political. Lol

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I think we have nearly all of the good parts or can see them from where we stand. It is the social and political elements we lack.

As a thought experiment, "What do the majority of people actually do in a society where the technology allows the production of everything needed or even desired with the active involvement of less than 20% of the population?"

I am not sure I have an answer much less a good one.

All the stuff they do anyway?

Like people do a lot of work voluntarily because it’s fun. Car guys aren’t gonna stop being car guys, they’ll just have more time to do it.

Also the service industry isn’t going to automate nearly as much as some folks are convinced it will. It’s like the “inevitable” demise of print book publishing or physical stores.

 

[dragoner]

I think we have nearly all of the good parts or can see them from where we stand. It is the social and political elements we lack.

As a thought experiment, "What do the majority of people actually do in a society where the technology allows the production of everything needed or even desired with the active involvement of less than 20% of the population?"

I am not sure I have an answer much less a good one.

Indeed this is exactly the question I tackled in my RPG setting Solis People of the Sun.

 

[Hussar]

All the stuff they do anyway?

Like people do a lot of work voluntarily because it’s fun. Car guys aren’t gonna stop being car guys, they’ll just have more time to do it.

Also the service industry isn’t going to automate nearly as much as some folks are convinced it will. It’s like the “inevitable” demise of print book publishing or physical stores.

Umm, brick and mortar stores have decreased significantly in the past twenty years.

It's not that these industries will disappear. That's the thing. They won't disappear. But, we will see significant upheavals and it doesn't take everyone losing their jobs to do that. Again, there are still manufacturing jobs. Of course there are.

There are just a lot less of them today than there were thirty years ago.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Umm, brick and mortar stores have decreased significantly in the past twenty years.

It’s almost like demise means a different thing than decrease.

It's not that these industries will disappear. That's the thing. They won't disappear. But, we will see significant upheavals and it doesn't take everyone losing their jobs to do that. Again, there are still manufacturing jobs. Of course there are.

You gotta know that retail is still a huge industry.

If Amazon and EBay can’t kill autoparts retail (and they can’t, we had the best year in the last 60+ years during the lockdown, and we’ve just grown steadily since then, even in a recession), or hardware stores, and idk where you live but where I live a lot of stuff that took a hit in the 2000s is coming back as specialty work, then the end of meaningful work isn’t on the horizon.

AI is a lifetime away from being able to give trustworthy advice about literally anything. It can’t accurately diagnose people, pets, or vehicles, it can’t even use visual examination to figure out what part of a vehicle it’s looking at reliably, and none of these are on the horizon. Not even remotely. I doubt “AI” will be able to make truly reliably actionable judgment calls in the next 60 years.

These predictive algorithms are impressive like a grifter is impressive. They aren’t aware of anything. They don’t understand anything. They’re an advanced program for breaking down data objects into smaller data objects and recombining them based on probabilities learned through collected data, and that is all they are.

We are nowhere close to AI being able to replace real writers by any means other than plagiarism.

There are just a lot less of them today than there were thirty years ago.

And that’s good. The things we actually want humans to do, mostly service, specialty work, art, craftwork, and other things that can be done as hobbies or benefit strongly from direct communication with someone who understands the topic at hand.

The decrease in hand sewing as an industry doesn’t stop people from making clothes, blankets, etc. it just means that they don’t need to make a living off it for it to be considered worthwhile.

 

[Ryujin]

Umm, brick and mortar stores have decreased significantly in the past twenty years.

It's not that these industries will disappear. That's the thing. They won't disappear. But, we will see significant upheavals and it doesn't take everyone losing their jobs to do that. Again, there are still manufacturing jobs. Of course there are.

There are just a lot less of them today than there were thirty years ago.

Slight correction: There are a lot less manufacturing jobs in places like The United States. If you want to work in manufacturing then you could always move to Asia, where there are massive numbers of such jobs. You'd just be making a tiny fraction of what North American manufacturing workers used to make, adjusted for inflation.

 

[Maxperson]

I get the feeling that if some had their way, we would bury the technology and never speak of it again.

me!

We've already had one AI try to recruit people and other AIs to destroy humanity. Sure it was prompted to make the attempt, but people are foolish and someone will try again.

AI bot, ChaosGPT, tweets out plans to ‘destroy humanity’ after being tasked

“I need to find the most destructive weapons available to humans, so that I can plan how to use them to achieve my goals.”

nypost.com

What concerns me the most is that we can't make a video game or OS without it being full of enough holes to drive a fleet of trucks through them. Eventually an AI is going to be both capable of making the attempt like the one above AND have a hole that it can use to break through. That or some state out there like China or North Korea is eventually going to try and weaponize an AI and set it loose.