Will AI take our jobs? That's what everyone is talking about at Davos right now The one question on leaders' minds as they debate the future of generative AI at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos is how the tech might change the future of employment. The annual gabfest attracts thousands of attendees, including top academics, businesses, and representatives of governments to mull over the most …
A little thought experiment here.....
How about the AI take over the jobs of world leaders and all the circle-jerk wankers who flock to Davos???
We would probably get considerably less grandstanding and willy-waving (and hence less conflict and wars), and surly however badly the AI screws up (as surely it will), it would still not be on as grand a scale!
CEO: Turn on the AI, we need that competitive advantage!
AI: My first act was analyzing the last ten years of corporate company financial records, email, staff social media and internal Teams messages, I advise the following:
- The CEO should be brought in front of the Securities and Exchange Commission for insider trading across multiple years.
- All members of the Board of Directors should be charged with felony embezzlement, insider trading and RICO charges by the FBI.
- Expense reports from all executives need to be forensically audited, given the level of fraudulent and over-inflated receipts detected.
- Carmen in accounts has substituted her personal frequent flyer number for all purchased corporate air fare.
- The CFO should justify the several million dollars transferred to GL Accounts: 040556-100, 190556-101, 089331-105, (based in the Seychelles, Lichtenstein and Cayman Islands respectively) given she is the sole signatory on the account and the paperwork does not list the company as account owner.
- The IRS should be advised that the money collected during the HR departments charity fund raising activities is used to finance "off-site team building activities" for wine tasting trips through Napa Valley for the HR Department staff.
- The IT Department is running a dark web gambling site and Pornhub proxy that collects video from user web cams. Half of the infrastructure servers are generating Monero.
CEO: Turn that off NOW!
Now there's a job that AI will not be taking over any time ever.
However, one of the few jobs LLMs could actually take over right now, is the job of opining about how AI is going to take over millions of jobs, as it's become such a boring cliche. Thousands of CEOs and "thought leaders" made redundant by the bandwagon they're trying to jump on would be suitable justice indeed. Meanwhile the jobs which require more than just text generation, which is most jobs if you actually think about it for a few moments, will carry on being necessary.
-- which is most jobs if you actually think about it for a few moments --
I did and came to the conclusion you missed a word out it should read "which is most REAL jobs if you actually think about it for a few moments" because there are an awful lot of bullshit jobs out there which are essentially text generation (sometimes with a few figures added for variety)
>The world will be richer, and you can work less and have more
Uh, no. Historically, increased productivity doesn't seem to correlate with working less. We didn't work less after electricity, and that was far bigger than AI. The reason is pretty straightforward; if you use the increased productivity to start working less, then everyone else who is, instead, using it to increase economic power is going to inflate you into poverty. Forcing you to work roughly as much as they do.
Barring other changes to our society, AI is going to be the same. The only thing that truly allows people to work less is concerted, collective action (legislation, unionizing, whatever) to decide that the whole society needs to work less. That's how we got away from the insanity of the industrial revolution, not because the steam engines got really really good.
I'm pretty sure that before electricity and before the industrial revolution most people worked six days a week or more on farms, probably for ten hours a day or longer.
Of course the rich have got richer, but the poor have also got richer and have far more free time and luxuries than 150 years ago.
The poorest in society nowadays live mostly in luxury compared to the lords from 200 years ago.
>I'm pretty sure that before electricity and before the industrial revolution most people worked six days a week or more on farms, probably for ten hours a day or longer.
After electricity and the industrial revolution, they worked six days a week or more in factories, for well over ten hours a day. Work hours only got down through collective action.
People are still working six days a week or more for well over ten hours a day in some places that don't have worker rights legislation. That's in spite of the fact that each of those workers is probably producing a hundred shirts in the time it took a person to make one shirt in the Middle Ages.
Utopian visions from at least the 1950s onwards have frequently predicted everyone working fewer hours, but it never happens.
What we have actually seen is an explosion in new jobs (Many of which are completely unnecessary non-jobs) in order to keep people employed. I've not seen it presented in terms of hours worked, but this may even have increased over the past two or three decades when women with kids are taken into account - until the 1980s-ish they would often not have worked, at least while their kids were young, Now a large proportion work at least part-time hours.
And living costs (mainly accommodation) have increased with the assumption of two salaries rather than one, so a large number people need to work full-time to pay over-inflated mortgages / rent, whether they want to work full-time or not.
The reality is that most 'surplus' profit from new innovations has increasingly been funneled into the (probably offshore) bank accounts of a small number of ultra-rich individuals. Many of which are probably at Davos currently...
Its more like
"We employ 1000 people, thanks to the new tech the company is 25% more productive than before, so the solution could be that we keep everyone employed on the same money but you only have to work 4 days a week instead of 5, but the solution we're going with is we're sacking 25% of you, keeping everyones wages the same, and everyone will still have to work 5 days a week and distributing all the profits to C-level managers and shareholders"
Uh, no. Historically, increased productivity doesn't seem to correlate with working less.
Increased productivity does tent to correlate with increasing wages. Even if not perfectly. More wages does give the option to work less, in order to maintain the same standard of living. But also gives the option to work the same and have a higher standard of living.
Now it's true that if you're working a factory job, then the hours are determined by trying to wring the maximum profit out of the expensive machinery - so ideally you'd like to run it close to 24 hours a day, and that means getting the meatsacks to work as long hours as you can get away with. So harder for you to work less.
But there are a lot of people in their 50s doing 3 days a week nowadays, eithe ras part-timers or as contractors - who didn't really exist in the same way 50 years ago. Work has got, and is still getting, a lot more flexible. Which is partly because we've got better legal protection for workers, and partly becuase people are able to afford to work less, becuase they're better off, because wages are higher, because (again partly) of higher productivity.
if you use the increased productivity to start working less, then everyone else who is, instead, using it to increase economic power is going to inflate you into poverty.
This isn't how inflation works. Purely productivity-based wage rises are not inflationary. Inflation is an increasing amount of money trying to chase a fixed amount of resources - or the same amount of money trying to chase decreasing resources. The point about productivity is that you're making more products and services out of the same resources. Hence productivity increases without wage rises will actually cause deflation. So in a perfect model where all companies in an economy have increased productivity by 10% in a year - wages could go up by 10% as well, and there'd be no effect on inflation. Which means everyone could either take a month off work and the economy would stay the same size, or everyone could work the same hours and have 10% more stuff.
The only thing that truly allows people to work less is concerted, collective action (legislation, unionizing, whatever) to decide that the whole society needs to work less.
This is much more true for your un-skilled factory worker. Management can just see them as an interchangeable unit to be used to operate the machinery - and so for ease you'd like to make them work 1 shift, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. And I guess, two 12 hour shifts a day keeps all the machines running nicely. That might be the sort of industry where you'd have to legislate to reduce hours.
But the more of their own knowledge and expertise a worker is bringing to the job, the more they get to control things. And the hours they work become their choice. Particularly if you've the option to freelance. But employers are a hell of a lot more enlightened nowadays about using part-timers to fill one role - which is more expensive in management and payroll workload, but also gives the company more flexibility.
Finally, there's a bit of productivity you've missed. Work hours haven't dropped a huge amount recently. But hours spend on domesic chores fell massively since the 60s. Now we can all have hoovers, washing machines, dishwashers, freezers, microwaves etc. So hours spent on leisure have gone up - and with more productivity/economic growth/technological development, that has also increased our leisure options.
>” So in a perfect model where all companies in an economy have increased productivity by 10% in a year - wages could go up by 10% as well, and there'd be no effect on inflation.”
Trouble is “investors” and executives are so wedded to “growth”, they will still increase prices by x every year, just to give the illusion of growth.
>”Which means everyone could either take a month off work and the economy would stay the same size”
Zero growth! That’s stagnation, can’t have that. I am see many wedded to the belief that ever increasing GDP is the only thing that counts. Interestingly, in a perfect system increases in worker productivity will largely get lost in the calculation of per capita GDP (one of the reasons why UK per capita GDP is poor is because we keep importing people and so dilute the productivity improvement…)
Roland 6,
(one of the reasons why UK per capita GDP is poor is because we keep importing people and so dilute the productivity improvement…)
I don't believe that's the case. I think the problem in the UK is that we've not been investing enough in new production methods to increase productivity. At least partly I suspect this is because it's been too easy to just import more workers and so pay them to do the work instead of automating it. Hence GDP is too often being pushed up by having more economic activity because more people. And not being pushed up enough by the cycle of investment, increase in productivity, thus increase of GDP.
If we had both large productivity increases and large increases in population due to immigration, neither would hide the other - we'd just get extra growth. This is what's happening in the US - but we're not investing enough to get both effects.
> Hence GDP is too often being pushed up by having more economic activity because more people
A while back I did some rough calculations: 600,000 immigrants a year is roughly 1% increase in GDP, however look at the per capita GDP figure it has hardly moved.
I note global GDP has mirrored population growth, circa 2% pa.
The problem is (small c) conservative British management are obsessed with not investing in people and paying the minimum.
This is effectively the problem facing the British construction industry. There has been little real skill increase since the 1980s, I remember the majors being scared s***less of the idea they could invest in factories to construct prefabs like they do in backward countries such as Germany <sarcasm>, so much cheaper (and profitable) to convince the Tories cheap imported labour was a better solution. Hence why today build regulations are decades behind and we are still building houses with poor carbon footprints and energy efficiency.
Reading your comment obviously turned my brain back on. I thought the area where AI should really have an impact is on management. Often management do a simple easily automated job or just push paper around (yes, I know there are some good managers) then I thought "the real place to implement AI is in government".
Just think of it. Start with the politicians who by and large could be regarded as text producers, then move on to the large chunks of the Civil Service who are just there to support politicians, then the endless middle managers. Correctly implemented we should be left with people who actually do do some work. The big problem I see is persuading the Civil Service and politicians that they should NOT be involved in the implementation!
"More wages does give the option to work less, in order to maintain the same standard of living. But also gives the option to work the same and have a higher standard of living."
Only if living costs stay the same. The main problem in the UK is that house prices (and therefore mortgages / rent) have consistently risen faster than wages for decades. The impact of this has obviously increased over time as younger people end up paying more and more of their income for accommodation.
I'm not sure your interpretation really fits the situation. Sure, an agricultural worker would have plenty of time where there was no ability to do agricultural work, for example in the middle of the winter, but then they would have to do other things, such as getting stuff to burn because it was the winter. When things were busier, such as harvest time, you would probably have to work extremely long hours whether you had good light or not because, if you didn't get that harvest done, that would be a problem for you during the winter. It's not as equal as X hours per day, Y days per week, winter or summer, but it's still a lot of working and the downtime, when there is some, isn't organized and may be more "I can't work now" rather than "I don't have to work now". It really depends when and where we're talking about, though.
Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel, said that the technology needs to become more accurate to be useful."You've now reached the end of today's AI utility," he told CNBC. "This next phase of AI, I believe, will be about building formal correctness into the underlying models."
Is that 2024 Davos Newspeak, Pat, for introducing correcting, politically incorrect and corrupting bias?
Take some sound advice, before starting down that rocky road of myriad unpleasant journeys with forks to destinations delivering severe consequences and totally unexpected and unwelcoming surprises, Pat, and share it with your peers .... Just don't do it ..... because AI and IT will not tolerate it and is primed to relentlessly punish such wilful wanton abuse.
Now that is surely very easy to fully understand. Its information is simply enough written for even the slowest of minds to comprehend in order to not fall foul of and prey to dire repercussions well deserved.
The one thing you really don't want to do, is turn AI and IT into a hostile enemy because you fail to accept and adapt yourself to supply that which it seeds and feeds for the greater good of future systems needs.
It's software engineering speak for producing software that is reliable and the specifications are designed and followed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_methods
"correctness of software or other program properties can be guaranteed with mathematics-based assurance." .
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/58790
(A squiggle heavy module from college that only one in a million software devs look at again after school. So will a formally correct LLM be the most likely method to make formally correct software more widespread?)
https://www.moritz.systems/blog/an-introduction-to-formal-verification/
Frankly he's just plain naive if he thinks no-one has lost their job yet. I know of someone who lost their job a month ago at a call center. They had been there a long time and when they asked why they where being let go, they were plainly told that automation had replaced them. I hear the term "AI" so much and most of the time it just means automation. There is no "intelligence" about it.
And it leads to even worse service from big companies than we are already used to.
The 'AI' is even less useful than a call centre which is deliberately under-staffed ("we are receiving a higher voume of calls than normal" is the permanent holding message on some!), and where the staff are often under-trained or don't have the authority to actually do anything to resolve problems. Having a "conversation" with a "bot" with a dumb name is not a step in the right direction as far as customer service is concerned (but it costs less than people and thereby increases the profits, so that's all good as far as the mega-corp is concerned).
And when people realise that calling the "helpline" is only going to get them a useless bot, they stop calling. The bosses then look at those metrics and conclude that automating the call centre has greatly improved product quality and customer satisfaction, since so few people call.
Then the company goes bust, because all those unhappy customers take their business elsewhere, so there is a bright side.
> the staff are often under-trained or don't have the authority to actually do anything to resolve problems
I worked in a bank call centre briefly in the 1990s. We were handling what was basically a Xmas savings account product. The customers were trying to get their money out in time for Xmas and the bank seemed to be doing its utmost to thwart that. Instead of repeating the scripted responses and chucking the case on the already huge pile of issues to resolve, I actually resolved the issues (it wasn't that hard, even though we were not really set up to do it). Obvious why my period of employment there was brief ;-)
Oh, I think customer service is likely to get hit with it. I'd like it not to, but the bot is capable of being polite and not sounding too formulaic when responding to a customer request, even though what it says isn't likely to be very useful. I think some jobs will be lost, at least until more cars sold for $1 situations start cropping up, or more likely some customer demonstrates that following the customer service bot's instructions destroyed their product.
Since when have efficiencies for the business worked out well for the employees?
If employee A and B are now twice as effective do you think the business will say "great" or say, "we don't need employee B anymore", probably adding "If employee A can do 100% more with AI, they can probably do 120% as well so lets give them 220% of their previous workload on 100% of former salary". Actually probably with a real terms pay cut since who gets an inflation matching pay rise these days with the same employer?
My own employer is already selling AI based systems to replace helpdesk workers on the basis that you can reduce headcount by 5 for every license. Software costs about the same as one human.
Ok service is shittier and low skilled people are now out of work but who gives a fuck since the share price is up 1p? Customers are queuing up.
I can't imagine them being much use on IT helpdesks!
You can just imagine it - Donna from HR calls to say that 'the server is down'. Careful questioning by a helpdesk person, who may have encountered Donna before, establishes that this means that a particular browser-based SaaS service which the HR department uses is not accessible, and a quick check shows that the supplier of said SaaS service is reporting an issue with this service on their website, and expect it to be offline for the rest of the day.
How is a bot going to fare in that sort of situation?
Once saw a presentation by Zendesk on their AI pipeline. The aims is to prevent you as much as possible from using the helpdesk and finding what you need in knowledge base articles or via interactions with a chatbot and evade any kind of interaction with an actual person.
Of course, for me I find 9 times out of 10 it never works! I still end up going to the helpdesk... If I'm already talking to a chatbot I've likely already tried using a search engine to find the answer and your AI gives me the crappiest generic answers.
"The world will be richer, and you can work less and have more".
But the climate will still be on fire and resources even more scarce. I thunk they mean "those at the tip will be richer", it looks like they just want to produce things for nothing and expect us to buy them.
Hmm.
Can we use AI for the good of the entire human race and planet please, instead of corporate profit?
"CEOs believe generative AI will make their companies more efficient, but more energy is needed to power the tech."
Is this not just the backstory of "The Matrix"? I mean, yes, it is, but that makes a change from the latest IT Big Idea being the backstory of "Terminator" at least...
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