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AI

AI Hitting Labour Forces Like a 'Tsunami', IMF Chief Says (yahoo.com) 90

AI is hitting the global labour market "like a tsunami" International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said on Monday. AI is likely to impact 60% of jobs in advanced economies and 40% of jobs around the world in the next two years, Georgieva told an event in Zurich. From a report: "We have very little time to get people ready for it, businesses ready for it," she told the event organised by the Swiss Institute of International Studies, associated to the University of Zurich. "It could bring tremendous increase in productivity if we manage it well, but it can also lead to more misinformation and, of course, more inequality in our society."
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AI Hitting Labour Forces Like a 'Tsunami', IMF Chief Says

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  • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Monday May 13, 2024 @05:43PM (#64469845)

    Because AI cannot do anything that needs understanding and if you sack the people that are doing that part it will become a massive problem and may even kill your organization.

    • by Nrrqshrr ( 1879148 ) on Monday May 13, 2024 @06:06PM (#64469883)

      That's the great tragedy of modern society, though. Most "labor" currently done doesn't need understanding anyway. Hell, most of that labor is busy-work that allows people to earn a wage.
      When you look at most people doing administrative work, when you look at the whole managerial class as an example, when the separate the star developer from the other 9 freeloaders on the team... What exactly are you supposed to do with the rest of them? A burger king cashier won't suddenly become an engineer, a 49 years-old pencil pusher whose entire job is to read and compile emails won't suddenly pick up a new career...
      Sadly if a "good enough" AI is also "good enough" to replace even 5% of our current workforce, we're in for a fun ride.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        True. My take would be that no-clue, no-insight AI with specific, restricted training may be able to replace up to 20% of all workers. Not like full replacements, but things like where you keep 2 people of a team of 10 for the things AI cannot handle and sack the other 8. 20% job-loss with no replacements in a short time is on the level that can definitely destroy a society. Personally, I have not even applied for a job in about 25 years, I always got asked so I have no fear for me. But I am in no way repre

        • Some ideas I put together on all that circa 2011 (with the help of others):
          https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-... [pdfernhout.net]
          "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice

          • The IMF needs one financial crisis or hot-spot after another to justify its budget, expensive travel for the elites working there and its relevance in the media.

            I'm OK with NGO bodies as long as they 1) fully open their books with detailed financials, 2) fully open their staff's compensation, travel miles, meals paid, retirements benefits promised/paid, 3) take a percentage risk of all loan projects so that they have to wager 5% of their yearly budget on all of the loans outstanding and if a loan misses a p

            • Nowhere in the article did it mention if the IMF head was paid to speak at the Switzerland based university.

              Given that this was not a conference and not a round table panel, most likely the IMF head, she got first class travel, five star meals and hotel all the way.

              Consider that the next time a news article has " Speaking at the Economic Club of NYC warns about the upcoming recession". In most cases, they are a PAID SPEAKER at the event and that the speech is massaged for the audience.

              Honest journalism wo

    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday May 13, 2024 @06:07PM (#64469885)
      And while pretending that's not the case might help you cope, it won't help you keep your job.

      This isn't about "AI", this is about automation. The AI boom has CEOs looking top to bottom to automate everything and anything they can. And 40+ years of monopolies and mega mergers mean they don't care if quality suffers. You can't go somewhere else, they own that "somewhere else"

      I get that /. is full of old codgers, but most of us aren't retired and can't for at least another 10, 20 years. You need to do something about this or you're going to end up homeless. And you're probably American, most of us are, and we do *not* treat the homeless well. Our red states are working on laws to round them up and send them to labor camps.
      • by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Monday May 13, 2024 @06:23PM (#64469911)

        Thats the bit that worries me. I'm a year off the big 50, I'm not as robust physically as I was when I was 20 and doing physical labor jobs to pay my way through university, and nobody is going to hire a guy for non labour job that'd probably take a few years to to up to speed in a field I'm unfamiliar with yet. I dont have youth on my side, and I still have a good decade left before I'm anywhere close to financially stable enough to retire thanks to spending my 20s in academia, and my refusal to get involved with managent stuff (I did project management for a bit, and hated it with a passion. I do science, its what I enjoy)

        We still have a good year, two if we are lucky, before AI can mostly replace coders, it doesnt have to be inventive, it just has to be able to replace the grunt work aspect, and most of us are well aware that 99% of commmercial computing is more or less the same thing on repeat. We're fooling ourselves if we think most of that cant be automated.

        Strange times ahead, boys and girls.

        • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Monday May 13, 2024 @06:56PM (#64469985)

          As to coders: No. AI cannot replace coders. A studente in my coding class summed it up nicely to me just recently: For a coding problem AI gives him 10 answers, 9 of which are well-sounding crap and one which is somewhat reasonable. This is for _very_ _easy_ stuff, taught in the first year. Now, if I do a simple web-search for the same question, I get about the same, but with fewer bad results and the explanations of the original authors attached. I prefer that and I always learn some things on the side when I do that. Hence AI does not even make coding faster, really. If you are _smart_ and can filter those 9 BS answers out, it may reduce what you need to know to code competently a bit. But that is it.

          • As a teacher though it's inherent that you care about the quality of the code, the concern is plenty of businesses do not share that care of quality. Especially the people who will get fat pay bumps for cutting their payroll.

            "Why do even have that IT guy? He doesn't do anything and everything is working fine!"

            • by gweihir ( 88907 )

              Primarily, I am still an IT security expert. Look at what happened, say, to Microsoft in the last 18 months. Code quality will be a question of survival in the not too distant future.

              • Here's to some optimism and hoping you are correct. It would be nice to see companies doing this pay the price the markets are supposed to make them pay.

                • by gweihir ( 88907 )

                  Indeed. Enshittification is a fact of life for enterprises. But on the level of a whole society it is not sustainable.

                • But I think that actually facing the problem head on is more than we as humans are capable of doing. The scale of the problem is up there with climate change. It's just more than most people can take in. Also the solutions contradict everything we were taught during the 4/14 cycle of our lives.
                  • by gweihir ( 88907 )

                    Well, the possibility that we will get basically a very long global information war were only isolated systems are secure exists. The outcome of that may well be a civilization that is mostly low-tech and not networked. But there _are_ better systems than currently used in the mainstream and there are quite a few people that can do competent system administration. The question is really one of the dynamics we are facing, with people trying to move to better installations, better systems and out of the main

                  • Why isn't AI used to give answers that help address climate worsening?

                    • Because we already have the answers.

                      AI cannot implement them for us, though.

                    • That's not really what I mean, the answers like how to efficiently capture carbon and methane, is different to getting the AI to answer how to efficiently implement or profit from the solution. Or how to present the solution as a marketable gain.

                      I don't see it being used this way, because that'd be a massive market to tap and you'd be at one end of a chain this is almost unwilling to change or stop feeding you something that you can profit from.

                    • AI has no answers to unanswerable questions. There is no way to efficiently capture CO2 and methane. The only sensible thing is to avoid pumping it into the atmosphere.

                    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

                      AI cannot give answers that do not already exist. Essentially, AI is just better search and better automation. It has no agency, no creativity, no insight. You are looking for answers in the wrong place.

                  • We fucked it up, we have the means to figure it out on our own.

                    The real problem is that we have a bunch of willful dumbasses who've been trained to be willful dumbasses because it was convenient for their masters. It's not a matter of physical capability. They just don't want to because they've been told all their lives they don't have to.

                    Well guess what? Reality called and it said they have to, or die. Damn be what their so-called "betters" want. Which is for them to go quietly into that good night. No
                    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

                      Well, I think people choose to be willfully dumb all by themselves. But yes, for many (most?) of their descendants, this intentionally being dumb will mean an early death and/or no prospects of any kind at all.

              • I can't think of anything. I'm sure if you're deep into the security there's something but whatever it was it wasn't a big enough deal to make it into the regular news cycle. In other words it didn't really matter.

                If it doesn't knock Donald trump, Palestine or Ukraine off the news cycle then whatever it is isn't big enough to warrant not automating things.
                • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @12:36AM (#64470387)

                  MS had what was essentially a Cloud Master Key stolen in mid-2023. They still do not know how it happened. The most likely scenario they have had them doing essentially everything wrong. Oh, and becasue they do not know how the attackers got in, they may not have been able to fix the attack vector. Apparently they did some fine press-work to minimize the reporting, probably helped by most of the press not understanding what the issue is. After all it is not like some reactor building blew up or some planes flew into a pair of towers. But yes, it matters very much.

                  Here is a link: https://www.cisa.gov/resources... [cisa.gov]
                  The CISA report is about as bad as it can be.

              • Personally, I look at AI as the tool for perfect job security.

                Quite seriously, if you thought the cargo-cult programmers that "write" their code by copy/pasting from Stack Exchange answers were a godsend for security, providing low hanging fruits for those of us who need a quick success, AI will provide a veritable smorgasbord of crappy, insecure and barely compiling code that will make the average junior who has no idea what he's doing look like a seasoned veteran.

                • This answer is very fitting considering your username. Crisitunity! [youtube.com]

                • by gweihir ( 88907 )

                  Well, yes and no. If society crumbles around me because IT stops working left and right, having a secure job is not that much of an advantage. On the other hand, if this is a slow process (and not, say, Azure getting fully hacked again, but this time by somebody that know how to do damage and wants to do it), I expect doing some interesting work will never be a problem unless I go into dementia.

          • That's because all those broke students are using GPT-3.5. GPT-4 is massively better.

            I am crazily more productive with its help, and I don't really use it to write code as such--it's more of a debugging accelerator, code reviewer, and interactive programming manual.
            • by gweihir ( 88907 )

              If you are "crazy more productive" with it, then your productivity never amounted to anything and still does not.

              • Of all the things you could say about me, that's the least accurate. I once scratch-built the full transaction handling & billing system for a retail electric provider in six weeks--no off the shelf code, no off the shelf frameworks, etc., and it handled $millions without error in a heavily regulated environment right out of the gate. I did this singlehandedly, and it's not even one of the really radical stories I've heard other people tell about my exploits.

                One of the things I've noticed about incom
                • I've had the opposite experience. Plenty of people who can't program telling me about all the amazing things they managed to code with GenAI. Every time I got to see one of those amazing things, I thanked the heavens that I don't have to work on, maintain, or fix that mess.

                  The really good programmers that I look up to, all were quickly done with their GenAI coding experiments, because they are competent enough to debunk the generated code for the nonsense it most often is. I once tried to have GPT-4 generat
                  • You make my point for me.

                    The best uses of LLMs in programming have to do with code review, debugging, and such--not generating code. The smarter people I know use it this way, and it's an incredible productivity enhancer.

                    Same thing for writing: it's a wonderful editor and it's great for both spitballing ideas and refining them. Expecting it to write finished copy is goofy.
          • One analogy I've heard... If it ai were invented 50 years ago, but drones didn't exist yet for another 40 years. Then fast forward to like 2010 and you tell AI to make a drone. It would have advanced a lot in that time but it still wouldn't know how to make the drone because it conceptually didn't exist yet. Somebody would have to teach it. Might not be the best analogy, but it gets the point across. AI can do a lot of things, but even in the business automation space, no matter how good it gets it still n
          • by BigZee ( 769371 )
            I can't say this for certain as it's not my area of expertise. However, from what I've read, it would seem that AI is going to have its own "Moore's Law" and that we will see exponential growth in performance/capability/reliability at around every year. Yes, it's too early to say the cycle or even if this will be valid but it could quite easily be the case that within just a few years that AI is significantly better at coding.
            • by gweihir ( 88907 )

              Actually, no. LLM-type AI is limited by training material. It likely has already peaked and will never get as good again as it is now.

        • by Hasaf ( 3744357 )
          Another over 50 here, closer to 60 than 50. I saw the writing on the wall. I looked around at the job I was doing and I didn't see many old guys. Management by metrics tends to push them out. . . churn and burn.

          I now teach at a middle school. No, it isn't great. What it is, is relatively secure. I already own my home, and I can keep tinkering my 07 Toyota on forever, particularly since I regularly ride my bicycle to school.

          I know, everyone looks down on muddle school teachers. I am at the point where
      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Well, I fully agree that current "AI" does just barely meet the requirements for "automation" (it is not really reliable enough for it), but the problem is that a lot of the traditionally needed calibration and adjustment work for automation has gotten massively easier due to a much improved NLP interface. That means a lot of jobs are going away, probably more than society can survive.

        • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @12:01AM (#64470367)
          LLMs aren't the threat. The threat is that they have convinced CEOs that automation is worth doing and they are investing a huge amount of money into that automation. Not everything will succeed but a lot of it will and even knocking 10 or 20% out of the job market is enough to fuck all of us.

          You're thinking black and white All or nothing were every job gets automated away. But we don't need to automate even 10% to gut the middle class the rest of the way. People who lose their jobs to automation don't just put a gun to their head and pull the trigger they try to retrain and start competing for your job. That lowers your wages and forces you to work harder and try to move up and the cycle continues.

          It's a death spiral for the American middle class. And the only way out of it is wealth redistribution that makes service sector economies work but we've spent the last hundred years telling people that be distributing wealth is morally reprehensible. Even though we did a ton of it while the baby boomers were growing up.
    • Understanding or reliability or accountability or physicality.

      Demographics taking hard to replace boomers out of the working population and mass immigration taking more of the diminishing working population to provide asylum/family-reunification migrants services has far more impact than AI. Then again, that's exactly the type of misinformation they truly fear.

      Only AGI will make any real difference ... and we need it fast.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Only AGI will make any real difference ... and we need it fast.

        1) We do not need it
        2) Nobody knows whether it is even possible to create AGI. Not in the next few decades certainly as we do not even have theory how to do it. Remember that what LLMs do is based on theory that is more than 50 years old.

        • Insect biomass collapse. Mass migration, demographic collapse, social media etc. destabilising society. Putler in a war on EU door step. US and China in a new cold war, with Taiwan as a possible source for it going hot. Gain of function research still widespread after a lab leak created a global pandemic, with the technology for genetic manipulation spreading. Fossil water exhaustion and subsidence. Soil depletion and other forms of land degradation. Climate change, eventually.

          Civilisation needs a saviour.

          • Hey.

            If you're looking for a monolithic saviour then you're not looking for a technological solution. Please listen to the people who actually work with the tech and who don't work for an invested party.

            • How is tech going to save South Korea and easter Europe from their demographic implosion? Flying insect biomass is dropping at multiple percent per year, how is tech supposed to save the food web? How can tech prevent Pooh from wanting to make his stamp on history before he dies like Putler the Great?

              Only through a singularity level shift and AI taking over as a benevolent dictator can a miserable collapse of civilization be prevented. We're running into too many walls in decades, not centuries.

              • AGI is a form of technology. It's really hard to dispute this.

                I'm sorry but I think you've thought yourself in to a religious hole here, and I don't think giving up responsibility and passing it to deus ex machnia will actually fix non-computable problems in a volumetric non-narrative universe.

          • by gweihir ( 88907 )

            Ah, you are one of _those_! Hahaha, no, there is no indication either that should AGI be possible and we find out how to do it, that the result would be smarter than an average human, i/e/ still pretty dumb. Also, we have some very smart people in the human race. Do you see them get put into power? NO, they are mainly seen as a problem and a nuisance. You think that would be different with AGI?

            • Pretty much this.

              We have plenty of idiots in charge who know exactly that they could never make the same living with a honest job because they simply lack any marketable skill other than bullshit peddling.

              Why should they relinquish control to AGI if they already refuse to make room for more capable humans?

          • Insect biomass collapse. Mass migration, demographic collapse, social media etc. destabilising society. Putler in a war on EU door step. US and China in a new cold war, with Taiwan as a possible source for it going hot. Gain of function research still widespread after a lab leak created a global pandemic, with the technology for genetic manipulation spreading. Fossil water exhaustion and subsidence. Soil depletion and other forms of land degradation. Climate change, eventually.

            "Human sacrifice! Dogs and c

    • Because AI cannot do anything that needs understanding and if you sack the people that are doing that part it will become a massive problem and may even kill your organization.

      Remember it is MBA's idea that you don't need to understand an industry to lead a company in that industry? It may very well turn out that management is the role that is most easily replaced with ChatGPT. After all, if you feed a whole lot of management communications into an LLM, you will very likely get a an AI that say things that is indistinguishable from a real exec.

      Why pay millions every year for a human CEO when an AI with a one-off cost can do the job just as well? AI also will eliminate the risk of any possible scandal, blackmail, or misconduct of a human CEO.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Well, maybe. A CEO needs agency, even if a complete asshole and idiot. AI does not have that. Maye to emulate your typical CEO just throwing facts about the company in there in an automated way would be enough though.

      • Well, AI is pretty good at spouting rubbish and hallucinating. Sorry, "having vision".

        AI is already at the level where it could replace C-Levels and boards.

    • Because AI cannot do anything that needs understanding and if you sack the people that are doing that part it will become a massive problem and may even kill your organization.

      No, that is part of the plan: you fire your expensive scientists/authors/journalists/artists/coders/analysts/etc... and then contract them as cheap "editors" to "clean up" the AI output. They are still doing the same job using the same expertise, but at a lower wage. This already happened ten years ago to translators.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        That works only for 3rd rated and maybe 2nd rated people. If you have any dependency on a higher level of skill, you are screwed with that approach. But yes, that is a valid argument as many "experts" are not actually that good.

    • Companies going belly-up because management followed a fad it didn't understand isn't exactly something that I could consider bad.

      Let Darwin be right, at least in the market. If you're too stupid to live, you shall perish.

    • by vbdasc ( 146051 )

      Because AI cannot do anything that needs understanding and if you sack the people that are doing that part it will become a massive problem and may even kill your organization.

      Unfortunately, there are many people whose job doesn't require understanding and they could be replaced without much problems for the organization (but a massive problem for the whole society).

  • Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Monday May 13, 2024 @06:15PM (#64469899)

    What does "impact" even mean? 60% of Westerners will lose their jobs? In the next w years? Or in some vague way they will come into contact with nest-word-guess-fake-AI?

    It's a silly and ridiculous claim on its face. Most jobs are physical labor of some sort and have nothing to do with computers. Even in places like fast food where a -few- companies are buying computer driver fryers that is still a tiny fraction of the working population "impacted".

    The original article provides no reference for this outrageous and extraordinary claim. It just quotes random dumb person spewing nonsense from thin air.

  • by NotEmmanuelGoldstein ( 6423622 ) on Monday May 13, 2024 @06:27PM (#64469915)

    ... little time to get people ready for it ...

    The people who won't be replaced by an AI, you mean. Yes, most work is by rote and even most knowledge jobs is picking the best-fit tool or process (a decision tree and fudging the data). Remember the 80/20 rule: That means a lot fewer employees will be needed in most offices because a decision-tree is enough. (That's what a LLM is, a tree grown by statistical iteration, not programmatically built branch by branch.)

    What happens to all the people who now don't have enough to pay the mortgage or repay the car loan? Governments around the world aren't talking about how they're getting ready for the people now less valuable than the answer spat-out by a piece of software.

    At the moment, we need more young people to look after all the old people (or, a Logan's Run massacre). Bits of paper from a computer aren't going to fix that. So there may be jobs for all those ex-paper-pushers, after all. Again, the government isn't getting ready for that: In fact, the amount of paperwork required to look after old people (or babies, toddlers, children and young teens) is immense. Getting people into such jobs will take a lot of resources. The government will be its own worst enemy in the coming job revolution.

    • I don't think so, I think that is the plan but what I think will actually happen is when AI comes in it will be much easier to create screeds of useless documents, which someone will then have to interpret. I am not sure but going on what technology has done in the past that is what I would expect.

      For example has all the automated answering of telephones made the experience more or less pleasant, or faster? For me its a no, its just one more layer to go through to get my problem solved.

    • What happens to all the people who now don't have enough to pay the mortgage or repay the car loan?

      The same thing that has always happened: They will be ejected from society, denied a place to live, denied food, until eventual death through exposure. Better make sure you are not there!

  • by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Monday May 13, 2024 @06:35PM (#64469939)
    To me, it is clear that Generative AI, like ChatGPT, is just Roomba for knowledge work. It's interesting...fun to play with...expensive, and in the end, nothing is replaced. No one fired their maid because they own a roomba. If you can rely on a Roomba alone to clean your house, I am confident you weren't paying a maid before you bought one.

    If you're paying money to have knowledge work done today, it needs to either be really accurate, like legal work or technical writing, or really compelling, like writing a good story or ad slogan. ChatGPT is super-fancy autocomplete with an astronomical carbon footprint. Most things it can plausibly do, you weren't paying much money to do today.

    If your task is so mindless that you can tolerate ChatGPT's error rates and hallucinations, you probably outsourced it to the lowest bidder overseas already or just aren't paying anyone to do today (think translations to obscure languages).

    It is my opinion that if you think ChatGPT and its competitors can make a massive dent in the 1st world labor market, you either are lying and trying to sell your AI solutions....or really never bothered to look at them much or try them out.
    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday May 13, 2024 @07:02PM (#64469995)
      Regardless of what you call it having AI in the news has every single CEO looking top to bottom in their organization for places they can automate. Things that they just dismissed as impossible to automate they are now pushing hard to get automated.

      Remember that old joke about, go away or will replace you with a small Perl script? We have a good laugh at that because we knew that there was a ton of shit we could automate with a handful scripts given a little bit of money and time.

      Well guess what, every single CEO on the planet is now going to deploy the scripts and automation tools. Try to imagine what's going to happen when 10 or 20% of people lose their jobs to a massive automation balloon. Do some googling and you will find it 70% of middle-class jobs lost since 1980 were lost to automation not outsourcing.

      We're going to see something like 15 to 20% permanent unemployment in a society that is socially and economically built for full employment. In addition to collapsing the wages of anyone who still works you're going to have massive social turmoil.

      Christ it's like nobody here watches Star Trek. I get the deep space nine wasn't the most popular show but you should at least know about it's time travel episode
      • Regardless of what you call it having AI in the news has every single CEO looking top to bottom in their organization for places they can automate. Things that they just dismissed as impossible to automate they are now pushing hard to get automated. Remember that old joke about, go away or will replace you with a small Perl script? We have a good laugh at that because we knew that there was a ton of shit we could automate with a handful scripts given a little bit of money and time. Well guess what, every single CEO on the planet is now going to deploy the scripts and automation tools. Try to imagine what's going to happen when 10 or 20% of people lose their jobs to a massive automation balloon. Do some googling and you will find it 70% of middle-class jobs lost since 1980 were lost to automation not outsourcing. We're going to see something like 15 to 20% permanent unemployment in a society that is socially and economically built for full employment. In addition to collapsing the wages of anyone who still works you're going to have massive social turmoil. Christ it's like nobody here watches Star Trek. I get the deep space nine wasn't the most popular show but you should at least know about it's time travel episode

        By your logic, factories would be dark. We've been automating things since the turn of the century. What could be more valuable than a factory that runs itself? While automation has reduced headcount, what could be simpler than a simple factory? If you're making a single size of bottle, for example, why hasn't that been fully automated? We WANT to automate, but we can't. Life is too complex. The problem is too hard. Look at Roomba or even robotic lawn mowers. What could be easier than automating m

        • by labnet ( 457441 )

          and don't really do anything better than a conventional drip coffee machine

          Spoken like a true American...
          Drip coffee, the effluent of the coffee world!

          • and don't really do anything better than a conventional drip coffee machine

            Spoken like a true American... Drip coffee, the effluent of the coffee world!

            I ground Ethiopian Yirgacheffe that I roasted in my kitchen and brewed in a Hario V60 and am sipping right now...I'm a coffee nerd and Americans know our coffee!!! :) ...cheers!

        • Haven't you been paying attention to the ongoing disappearance of once-plentiful manufacturing jobs?
          • ...and they're coming back because most companies realized that was a mistake and it costs more to manufacture most items in China today than the USA...a lot of that is admittedly due to better technology and automation, but times are great for blue collar work and the USA is re-industrializing...more factories are being opened than closed. There's actually a labor shortage in that sector during the Biden Administration, both because of actions taken while he was in office, like the CHIPS act as well as th
            • I belong to some machinists' groups on Facebook, and the universal lament is that the trade is dying.

              What's left are low-paid ($20-30/hour) and lower-skilled operators servicing CNC machining centers. This is true in many other fields too. This has been the story of technology, especially over the last 40+ years I've been paying attention to it: there are a few big winners and a growing proportion of losers.
        • see here [siemens.com]. No, not every factory is a "dark factory" but there's more than enough of them to be a thing.

          70% of all middle class jobs were taken by automation [businessinsider.com]

          Just because you haven't been hurt by it doesn't mean millions of other people, including some you probably care about, haven't.
          • see here [siemens.com]. No, not every factory is a "dark factory" but there's more than enough of them to be a thing.

            ...doesn't mean it makes sense. Germans and Americans LOVE technology and LOVE automation. Elon Musk tried to automate his factories and had to backtrack because it was too difficult to build a robot that could match a human being. If that piece of shit has that much money to blow on Twitter...and this was his peak of fame before the world learned he was as shitty anti-semite, so his board would have gladly followed his vision....let's be real...Musk would have gone for it if there was a chance. He is n

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      The trouble with ChatGPT, etc. is that it was trained on the web. You can't do that an expect accurate results. But the same technology trained on curated datasets is pretty damn good. It's doing molecular modeling about as well as people, better in some areas.

      Remember, ChatGPT is a LANGUAGE model. And it does a fair job of that. It doesn't understand what it's talking about, but it handles language pretty well. Meaning...now that requires (at least) training against real world data rather than intern

      • Remember, ChatGPT is a LANGUAGE model. And it does a fair job of that. It doesn't understand what it's talking about, but it handles language pretty well. Meaning...now that requires (at least) training against real world data rather than internet babblings.

        Roombas do great in optimal conditions as well. Why do hotels still have people clean their floors? The point is that we're promised potential and I will wager we'll be hearing about this potential our entire lives, without replacing the human factor...just like roomba

    • Try using GPT-4 (not 3.5) as a coding assistant and then see what you say. It's amazing in the right hands.

      I also kicked an attorney's ass with its help a couple of weeks ago. That was pretty sweet and so was the $5k check. Now I'm handling some trust matters (legal filings and such) with its assistance, it's massively helpful and saves a ton of time. I'm also not paying another goddamn attorney $400/hour just to screw things up and $400/hour more to fix their screwups.
  • ChatGPT makes more mistakes than the drunkest of employees on a cold Monday morning.

    Maybe replace telemarketers? There do seem to be millions of those based on the rate they harass our family.

  • Most of these idiots trying to tell us AI is going to take our jobs have an IQ lower than a steaming pile of cow dung yet they still have jobs bullshitting.

  • Good enough is good enough. And when it comes to digital work, AI now delivers 100% in the "good-enough" department. I personally expect 90% of jobs in media production to vanish in the next 12-18 months.

  • Unemployment in the USA is 3.90% .. lower than it has been, because most jobs can't be done at all by AI, and most that can be, can't be done unsupervised

    • https://www.shadowstats.com/al... [shadowstats.com]
      "May 2023 ShadowStats Alternate Unemployment increased to 24.7% from 24.6% on top of U.6 increasing to 6.7% from 6.6%"
      "The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers. The U-3 unemployment rate is th

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