[awb]

We’ve seen tech completely eliminate jobs like phone switch operators and lamp lighters.

And it’s decimated other professions like manual agriculture, assembly line jobs, etc.

It seems like people are debating whether the impact of AI on computer-based jobs will be elimination or decimation. But for the majority of people, what’s the difference?

[yoyohello13]

I think the comparisons to lamp lighters or whatever don't quite capture why this is so much worse. The training for those jobs was relatively low. You don't need a decade of school to become a lamp lighter.

So if the white collar bloodbath is true. We have to tell a bunch of people, who have spent a significant portion of their lives training for a specific jobs and may be in debt for that education, to go do manual labor or something. The potential civil unrest from this should really concern everyone.

[ffsm8]

You honestly think it's gonna take more then a few years until everything else to follow?

Seriously, once something is able to do 90% of a white collar workers job, general ai has gotten far enough for robotics to take over/decimate the other industries within the decade.

[yoyohello13]

Seems like that would make the civil unrest worse not better.

[Peroni]

>And it’s decimated other professions like manual agriculture, assembly line jobs, etc.

When Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line, production went from hundreds of cars to thousands. It had a profoundly positive impact on the secondary market, leading to an overall increase in job creation.

I've yet to see any "AI is gonna take your job" articles that even attempt to consider the impact on the secondary market. It seems their argument is that it'll be AI all the way down which is utter nonsense.

[naijaboiler]

Humans beings can not run out of economically valuable things we can do for one another. Technology can change what that thing is profoundly though.

[monknomo]

What do you think the secondary market for knowledge work is?

[cootsnuck]

More knowledge work. It's disheartening for me to see so many people think so little about their own abilities.

There's a reason we can still spot the sterile whiff of AI written content. When you set coding aside, the evidence just hasn't shown up yet that AI agents can reliably replace anything more than the most formulaic and uninspired tasks. At least with how the tech is currently being implemented...

(There's a reason these big companies spend very very little time talking about the power of businesses using their own data to fine-tune or train their own models...)