cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2811405
"We view this moment of hype around generative AI as dangerous. There is a pack mentality in rushing to invest in these tools, while overlooking the fact that they threaten workers and impact consumers by creating lesser quality products and allowing more erroneous outputs. For example, earlier this year America’s National Eating Disorders Association fired helpline workers and attempted to replace them with a chatbot. The bot was then shut down after its responses actively encouraged disordered eating behaviors. "
Your point is valid, but it lacks the empathy for all the people who are displaced. In our society, displaced people are not given help to find a new place.
When a skilled worker is displaced, and can no longer find work in their skills, their choices are to spend a huge amount of money to go back to college or trade school to get new skills or be forever lost in low-income jobs.
Going from $100,000 per year to $40,000 per year overnight is devastating.
AI won’t replace jobs in that way. What it will do is make people who use it more productive, which will mean fewer people needed to do the work, which means fewer people doing that job. The speed at which it does this is what will determine the impact on how people are affected by it.
Like OP I find AI to be incredibly useful in my job. I was able to learn Ansible in less than a week by asking it how to do things and trying the result. It saves me time by doing grunt work for me that would otherwise be too fiddly or cumbersome to figure out.
We’re not going to wake up one day and have AI lawyers/programmers/writers, with all the humans on the dole. What will happen is people who can effectively utilize AI will have an advantage over those who don’t, just like people who can use a computer have an advantage over those who don’t.
But we also need worker owned cooperatives and a universal standard of living or it’s just going to make technofuedalism worse.