AI & Jobs

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cork

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I was watching the news earlier and they did a story on the effects of AI on future jobs. They singled out accountancy as being under threat.

I feel that AI will usher in significant changes but I feel people have transferable skills going forward.

RTE news : Almost a third of jobs could be negatively impacted by AI

www.rte.ie

Almost a third of jobs could be negatively impacted by AI

New Government research on the impact of artificial intelligence has found that around 30% of workers are employed in roles that are at risk of being replaced by AI.
www.rte.ie www.rte.ie
 
Usually when you dig into these things it turns out they meant 'book-keeping' rather than 'accountancy'.
 
Protocol said:
There has never been as much automation as today.

There are widespread labour shortages today.
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That is the paradox.

If someone suddenly invented a tractor back in the day, there would probably have been panic about mass unemployment.

But people find work to do.

The problem as I see it is that there is a risk of an even bigger divergence between 80% of people on minimum wage and 20% earning very good salaries.

Brendan
 
Gordon Gekko said:
I suspect that AI won’t take people’s jobs but instead people who know how to use AI will take jobs from people who don’t.
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I work in a service organisation. All we produce is words, numbers, and pictures.

There’s a staggering ignorance of what AI technology can do never mind how to use it.
 
AI will have a massive impact on Healthcare (diagnostics& imaging, wearable devices, drug development etc.). Most of what a GP does can be done with AI in conjunction with AI.
Manufacturing has already been automated and AI will accelerate that but most of the jobs that can be automated out have already been removed.
It is service industries and banking/finance/accountancy which constitute the low hanging fruit for AI at the moment.

The Industrial Revolution meant that women with young children didn't have to work outside the home. Before that, in what were mainly agrarian societies, nearly all women worked outside the home. That may have been on their own small holding or weaving or whatever but they still worked.
What we are seeing now will have just as much of an impact on how we work, who works and who has to work.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
The problem as I see it is that there is a risk of an even bigger divergence between 80% of people on minimum wage and 20% earning very good salaries.
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The taxation system which has evolved in most of the world works on the assumption that labour creates a substantial proportion of wealth and so we tax it accordingly. What we are seeing now is a move away from wealth being created in that way and a corresponding imbalance in our taxation structures resulting in a concentration of wealth away from working people. AI will accelerate that move.
 
I fear that worrying about the impact of AI on jobs is a bit like worrying about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Inequality would increase in that it will be winner takes all and whoever owns the best AI will briefly take all, but that window could turn out to be quite small because you can't control something that is magnitudes smarter than you. Once an AGI can self improve it will rapidly overtake human intelligence and we won't be able to contain it. That is what is referred to as the technological singularity and it isn't a tin foil hat theory unfortunately, it's a very real concern of people who work in the field. There is a good analogy in the book 'Our Final Invention' of humans trying to contain an AI 1,000 times smarter than them being like mice trying to keep humans imprisoned. If you think about all the technological progress in the last century, an AGI system that is on 24/7, networked and connected to all the data in the world might make the equivalent next leaps in scientific discoveries in months, weeks or days, and keep improving so it makes more discoveries even faster, it will be exponential. We don't know what an AGI 1,000 times smarter than a human will figure out about us and our role in the universe, best case it might keep us as pets, I guess the UBI model is the nearest economic model there. Worst case scenario, it figures out some end goal that needs our matter in the same way we use animals for clothes and meat.
 
Gordon Gekko said:
And when it becomes self-aware, will the cybernetic organisms that come hunting us look like Arnold Schwarzenegger?
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It would probably just use very tiny executioner robots - nanorobots, or a virus.
Unlikely to look like Arnie - there would be no point as they would be too small to see!
 
Is there any role for more automation and AI in construction, to help build more houses?
 
Must admit, I've some concerns about AI getting out of control - and yes, I've seen Terminator, I, Robot etc., but I'm ultimately thinking about a situation where AI starts making "logical", but bad decisions
 
RonnieShinbal88 said:
I fear that worrying about the impact of AI on jobs is a bit like worrying about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Inequality would increase in that it will be winner takes all and whoever owns the best AI will briefly take all, but that window could turn out to be quite small because you can't control something that is magnitudes smarter than you. Once an AGI can self improve it will rapidly overtake human intelligence and we won't be able to contain it. That is what is referred to as the technological singularity and it isn't a tin foil hat theory unfortunately, it's a very real concern of people who work in the field. There is a good analogy in the book 'Our Final Invention' of humans trying to contain an AI 1,000 times smarter than them being like mice trying to keep humans imprisoned. If you think about all the technological progress in the last century, an AGI system that is on 24/7, networked and connected to all the data in the world might make the equivalent next leaps in scientific discoveries in months, weeks or days, and keep improving so it makes more discoveries even faster, it will be exponential. We don't know what an AGI 1,000 times smarter than a human will figure out about us and our role in the universe, best case it might keep us as pets, I guess the UBI model is the nearest economic model there. Worst case scenario, it figures out some end goal that needs our matter in the same way we use animals for clothes and meat.
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Agreed, we should launch a preemptive Butlerian Jihad.
 
MrEarl said:
Must admit, I've some concerns about AI getting out of control - and yes, I've seen Terminator, I, Robot etc., but I'm ultimately thinking about a situation where AI starts making "logical", but bad decisions
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If AI gets trained as badly as the current LLMs, we could be in trouble.
 
If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow enobled and no-one dares criticize it.
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Pierre Marie Gallois
 
Protocol said:
Is there any role for more automation and AI in construction, to help build more houses?
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Have you not been reading the posts? Sure we'll all be dead. That's climate change, the impending pension crisis and the waiting lists and A&E problems all sorted out.
 
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