[dghughes]

I can't read the entire article but I can guess its meaning. My grandfather (born in 1901) used to go out to western Canada each fall for the harvest. Tractors then because affordable and fewer people were needed until it was mainly all just tractors and a few people. With generative AI it's sort of a tractor that still needs people but not as many. The former farm workers will need to find other work as will people displaced. The tool is only as good as the information available to it and how that mess is filtered and made into something valid.

A few years ago in college we discussed AI and the instructor showed a video regarding AI or rather AGI. The point is super intelligent AI is a far off problem it's AGI just like an average Joe which will be a problem for workers. You can have a million instances of Joe AGI working 24/7/365 doing call center work, programming, reservations, any job not requiring physical contact.

[Loughla]

>The former farm workers will need to find other work as will people displaced.

This sentence makes me concerned for the future.

Most small towns that used to rely on agriculture (in my area of the US at least) are hollow. Poverty, drug abuse, and all the problems that accompany.

So if that's the future with AI. . . . Uh oh.

[48864w6ui]

Agriculture mechanized in the 1920's, and by the 1960's US Federal ag policy was already "get big or get out".

If we are seeing problems in former farm country now, a century later, it suggests people are far less flexible than economists wish they were.

(Fwiw I was just reading a blurb at the feed store about autonomizing both tractors and their attached machinery)

[wwweston]

Not only that, but industrialized agriculture is a brief experiment on the scale of human history. So along with the way it's made food less scarce and enabled socioeconomic transformation, it's not clear how healthy or sustainable it actually is.

Blithely approaching knowledge and creative work and trades and manual labor in the same way is probably going to have all kinds of unintended consequences that include employment but go well beyond it.

Especially if we start with the premise that while the model is valuable and deeply dependent on training data, we shouldn't make any attempt to structure the value derived so it finds its way back to the training data.

[CamperBob2]

(Shrug) Humans have better things to do than farm.

Have you found your real purpose? Is something stopping you from pursuing it? Yes? Well, AI researchers are trying to fix that. If they succeed, you won't have to spend the rest of your career doing a robot's job.

[Loughla]

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic.

But the one two punch of losing ag jobs to corporations and then losing white collar jobs to AI is just too much.

What else is there? I can't pursue my purpose if I can't afford to eat.