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AI IT

How Will AI Transform the Future of Work? (theguardian.com) 121

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Guardian: In March, after analysing 22,000 tasks in the UK economy, covering every type of job, a model created by the Institute for Public Policy Research predicted that 59% of tasks currently done by humans — particularly women and young people — could be affected by AI in the next three to five years. In the worst-case scenario, this would trigger a "jobs apocalypse" where eight million people lose their jobs in the UK alone.... Darrell West, author of The Future of Work: AI, Robots and Automation, says that just as policy innovations were needed in Thomas Paine's time to help people transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy, they are needed today, as we transition to an AI economy. "There's a risk that AI is going to take a lot of jobs," he says. "A basic income could help navigate that situation."

AI's impact will be far-reaching, he predicts, affecting blue- and white-collar jobs. "It's not just going to be entry-level people who are affected. And so we need to think about what this means for the economy, what it means for society as a whole. What are people going to do if robots and AI take a lot of the jobs?"

Nell Watson, a futurist who focuses on AI ethics, has a more pessimistic view. She believes we are witnessing the dawn of an age of "AI companies": corporate environments where very few — if any — humans are employed at all. Instead, at these companies, lots of different AI sub-personalities will work independently on different tasks, occasionally hiring humans for "bits and pieces of work". These AI companies have the potential to be "enormously more efficient than human businesses", driving almost everyone else out of business, "apart from a small selection of traditional old businesses that somehow stick in there because their traditional methods are appreciated"... As a result, she thinks it could be AI companies, not governments, that end up paying people a basic income.

AI companies, meanwhile, will have no salaries to pay. "Because there are no human beings in the loop, the profits and dividends of this company could be given to the needy. This could be a way of generating support income in a way that doesn't need the state welfare. It's fully compatible with capitalism. It's just that the AI is doing it."

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How Will AI Transform the Future of Work?

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  • The same thing will happen that always happens whenever there is a large advance in automation. Namely, that everyone else except management will be made redundant. This has been the easily observable trend since the 1960's.

    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      This makes a lot of management redundant, because one manager will be able to do the job of ten. AI will do a lot of mundane clerical stuff, while manager will be able to actually focus on management.

      • As a manager I did very little clerical stuff. I had admins for that and there wasn't all that much of it anyway which is why they spent so much time on Facebook, shopping, and gossiping.

        Managers attend meetings 70%, manage 25% and do other shit 5%.

        • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          That sounds very much like an IT job.

          Most managerial jobs aren't IT jobs.

          • This is a techie nerd site.

            • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

              I should've probably been clearer on this. I'm specifically referencing management, not IT management.

              The entire theme of the discussion is that this enables automating a lot of things for people who do not think in terms of system automating as programmers do. And most people in IT are at least exposed to programmer style system automation thinking, and so it's often easier for us to craft processes in how we do clerical things.

              If you go outside IT, you'll quickly discover that this isn't true for most peo

    • by Dadoo ( 899435 )

      everyone else except management will be made redundant

      Odd that historically, technology improvements usually force people to work more. I imagine the same will be true this time around.

  • One human with this tool is going to do the job of two or more humans. We aren't going to get robots doing the jobs by themselves.

    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      I think so too, but a lot of SV types genuinely believe that current stage of AI is just a stepping stone in birthing process of AGI. Effectively an artificial consciousness.

      That will automate almost everything as it becomes godlike.

      Whether they're right, or just being religious nutjobs is something that only time will tell.

      • by dvice ( 6309704 )

        I think most people are too focused on ChatGPT and LLM. There is a lot of work that could be automated without any AI at all.

        For example ordering food for a daycare center is currently done by a human in my home town, there are allergies, participation numbers etc. to take care of at, but this is still something that could be easily automated without any AI. I think that it has not been automated either because people don't understand that it can be automated, or there are simply no programmer available to

        • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          As long as automation needs a programmer, it's not going to be done for anything but most scalable and most high value added things.

          This is actually one of the primary advantages of current gen AI. It removes the need for programmer to automate simple things.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by dvice ( 6309704 )

      AlphaFold 2 is one AI tool. It has already solved 200 000 000 protein structures. Traditionally one scientist can spend years solving one protein. So this one, very specific tool that does only one thing, did the work of 200 000 000 scientists. Of course this is just a single task, the researchers still got their jobs and most likely as research became cheaper, it will just increase the amount of jobs in the research.

      But AlphaFold 3 will be different, as it can be used to invent new medicine. It won't just

      • No, AlphaFold 2 predicted 200M structures. The distinction is critical. A scientist running homology models on his own probably can’t crank through as many as fast as an automated pipeline, but it is a lot more than 1 per year. Also, the predicted structures are of varying quality and there is significant bias in the classes of proteins represented. So you don’t have some 20,000 structural biologists out of a job, you have 20,000 structural biologists able to focus on the harder and more impactf

    • One human with this tool is going to do the job of two or more humans. We aren't going to get robots doing the jobs by themselves.

      If one human is going to TAKE the jobs of two or more humans, just how high do you really think the unemployment rate needs to get in order to create mass chaos, making all of society unstable? The number is a lot lower that most assume.

  • It will enable high tier professionals who do mostly mundane and boring clerical stuff, but have to apply their actual expertise 1/5-1/10 of their work time to shrink the amount of time needed to spend on mundane and boring clerical staff to near zero.

    Meaning a lot of jobs for highly skilled professionals will become a lot less boring.

  • by khchung ( 462899 ) on Sunday July 14, 2024 @08:05PM (#64625369) Journal

    AI companies, meanwhile, will have no salaries to pay. "Because there are no human beings in the loop, the profits and dividends of this company could be given to the needy. This could be a way of generating support income in a way that doesn't need the state welfare. It's fully compatible with capitalism. It's just that the AI is doing it."

    What kind of fool would still believe this lie in this day and age?? In the past 40 years, how much of the gain in employee productivity went to the pockets of C-suites and shareholders, vs how much went to the salary increase for the employees? Why the f**k would the shareholders not take 100% of the profits from the AI company when there is no employee to pay?

    Just take any companies that made obscene profits last year, how many of those gave a significant portion of their profits to "the needy"? Why would they start doing that simply because they have fewer or zero employees?

    • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 14, 2024 @08:17PM (#64625399)

      Sounds like someone forgot to attend their "Trickle-down Economics" class.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Yeah the companies had record profits and they sacked people:

      https://www.calcalistech.com/c... [calcalistech.com]

      Since the beginning of the year, 141 technology companies have laid off 34,300 employees, despite most of them displaying excellent financial results. So why are workers still being fired, even when all the data indicates that it's time to go back to hiring?

      https://finance.yahoo.com/news... [yahoo.com]

      Most companies won't give enough of the needy some of the profits (they might give a trickle). Someone has to make the companies do it. Hence "basic income".

      Trickle down economics don't work well for the poor and needy. It has to be closer to a gush down, not a trickle... ;)

    • Except I don't believe in the given part. It has to be taken. At the barrel of a gun if need be. The ruling class are always threatening you with violence. If you don't do as they say they take your job away and then you're homeless and then you die from the elements and/or starvation, whichever one gets you first. If you're troublesome they toss you in a prison and then force you to work and if you don't they pay someone a pittance to torture you until you do or they just kill you outright.

      The underlin
    • Exactly. Almost never in the history of the world has major power and wealth simply been given away.

    • by Lobo42 ( 723131 )

      Hard to see why any company -- AI or not -- would ever decide to do this on its own.

      It's always worth remembering, in these thought experiments, that publicly-traded companies are *already* a loose form of "AI." They combine multiple human intelligences (sometimes thousands) into one decision-making machine, and the decisions they use "shareholder value" as the value function they optimize against. These companies *do not* give away money to charity, they return money to the shareholders -- people who forme

    • The fundamental question is: At what cost will we and our machines - including AI - produce universal abundance?

      We would have it today if it weren't for planned obsolence. But even though there is that, we _do_ have it to quite some extent. I live in a first world country ( Germany ) and by many metrics it is for me way cheaper not to work and spend my time searching for cheap affordable instances of the things I want rather than working and buying them at retail price. I'm a Software expert and the last fe

    • AI companies, meanwhile, will have no salaries to pay..Just take any companies that made obscene profits last year, how many of those gave a significant portion of their profits to "the needy"? Why would they start doing that simply because they have fewer or zero employees?

      Kinda funny when you think about how you answered your own question. Companies only made those “obscene profits” because they paid salaries to the humans also known as their entire customer base. As more companies become AI powered companies, they’ll ironically care about the unemployable needy about as much as they care about making obscene profits.

      The greedy, could become the needy. In need of a human customer base enriched with buying power, not merely a UBI welfare base “enric

  • Don't worry we can all get a job like Kruger's in Elysium https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
    One of the more memorable movie villains
  • by rally2xs ( 1093023 ) on Sunday July 14, 2024 @09:32PM (#64625453)

    This: "profits and dividends of this company could be given to the needy." flies in the face of history. Throughout mankind's struggle, there has always been those that have acted to amass great wealth and power. Before capitalism, they did it via conquest and plunder. During capitalism, they achieve it by serving their fellow man. But if someone thinks a company owned by human being is going to "give profits and dividends of this company to the needy," I have this bridge I'd like to talk to them about.

    The end goal would be the machines totally serving us, with no miners, workmen, etc. anywhere in the loop that need paid. Then we somehow get the robots for free, get their manufactured goods and services for free, because no one in the loop needs to be paid.

    Of course I have no idea what you do with the folks who are determined to "get ahead" much as Genghis Khan did in the past, or what Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos do now. Their predatory instincts may be difficult or impossible to contain. Then what?

    An eqaully insidious problem would be that with the robots doing everything, what kind of goals and pursuits would humans pursue. I mean, simply to fight boredom, if no career paths are open to anyone due to the robots doing everything? Sports and games? Maybe, but I'm not sure.

    • During capitalism, they achieve it by serving their fellow man.

      So while I'm by no means a full on communist you really do need to read up on the continuing history of imperialism...

      America is very much an "imperial core".

      As for the end game, it has a name: techno-feudalism. Imagine if you had the Star Trek no money world but it was a dystopia instead. That's what Gates & Bezos (and the ones you probably like too, like Elon) are after.

      Remember, if nobody's poor, nobody's rich either.

  • Nobody fricken knows the future. Eventually I do expect bots to grow smarter than humans, barring WW3, but the pace is unknown. AI has improved in fits and starts in the past, and thus I'm guessing it will do the same in the future.

    You youngbee's probably don't remember the AI bubble of the 80's. If this pattern continues, it will hit dead ends, be stale for a while, and then another breakthrough will shift it a step or two up the ladder.

    Some argue the difference is that the 80's bubble produced too few use

    • Capitalism will adapt to this just fine. No socialism required. AI companies will compete with each other, and the price of what they sell will drop like a rock. Meanwhile, there are plenty of jobs that will continue to be done be humans for a very, very, very long time.

      Returning money to shareholders will return the profits to the population. As long as our tax rate is reasonably progressive, the system will be stable and FAR more productive than socialist models.
      • Capitalism will adapt to this just fine. No socialism required. AI companies will compete with each other, and the price of what they sell will drop like a rock. Meanwhile, there are plenty of jobs that will continue to be done be humans for a very, very, very long time.

        All it will take, is Good Enough AI to displace tens of millions of Good Enough Human Workers. Doesn’t take Perfect AI by any means. What they sold humans with every industrial revolution before, was the idea that you can “go get an education” to find a new profession after your buggy whip job became extinct.

        Today, AI is coming for the human mind. The thing getting replaced the human worker, and there isn’t a damn thing they can go and “education” themselves out of to

    • There are things which improve AI, so as the parent mentions, it will leap ahead... then hit a wall. For example, we saw that with basic neural networks, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms. All, which are quite useful -- for example, getting a "good enough" answer to the Traveling Salesman problem in Big-O being O(n) instead of O(n!). No, the 200 node answer isn't going to be something you can prove, but if it rattles long enough with genetic algorithms, a fitness function and some mutations, it will get to

  • Nell Watson, a futurist.... She believes we are witnessing the dawn of an age of "AI companies" ... at these companies, lots of different AI sub-personalities will work independently on different tasks, occasionally hiring humans for "bits and pieces of work". These AI companies have the potential to be "enormously more efficient than human businesses", driving almost everyone else out of business, "

    Sounds like this "futurist" has been having long conversations with chatbots without understanding what they are interacting with (shades of that Google engineer who was convinced the chatbot he was working with was sentient and tired to hire it a lawyer). There is nothing in any AI technology that currently exists that supports the notion of these AIs running companies in any fashion much less being "enormously more efficient than human businesses". AI personalities, that actually have intentionality and

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Management will just use this for more offshoring. Say someone needs a project done. In the past, it would require a good dev to write it from scratch. Now, the guys who hire/fire think it just takes someone who formerly used StackOverflow and copy/pasted stuff to hit a LLM, put in what is wanted, copy/paste the code, then start debugging it. They will view that with AI, there is no need for rockstar developers, just novice-level people from a shop in Bangalore who can copy, paste, do a Git commit and G

  • Stick to plumbing. Everybody poops and AI isnâ(TM)t going to unclog your toilet.
    • Stick to plumbing. Everybody poops and AI isnâ(TM)t going to unclog your toilet.

      AI will control the robot deployed in the septic line that will not only unclog the line, but inspect and repair it without breaking ground.

      If plumbing was immune to technological advance, we’d all still be shitting in outhouses. Stop assuming AI or automation will be that dumb. The world still has human ditch-diggers, but the world also has specialized machinery that does that job ten times faster than any human too.

  • with extra steps.

    "Because there are no human beings in the loop, the profits and dividends of this company could be given to the needy. This could be a way of generating support income in a way that doesn't need the state welfare. It's fully compatible with capitalism. It's just that the AI is doing it."

    If we have a centrally planned economy run by a gestalt of specialist AIs ensuring that the transactions generate positive outcomes for the population, with which ever subsystem of the AIs generating the mos

  • by t0qer ( 230538 ) on Sunday July 14, 2024 @11:41PM (#64625609) Homepage Journal

    Bay area / Silicon Valley native. Lived here 51 years and I've seen a lot of booms and busts. Took the wife to lake merced today (we live in the south bay) then to the ferry terminal in SF for dinner. Driving home down the 101, there was no shortage of billboards touting "EASY AI" selling a variety of AI services, but there was also no shortage of for lease signs, or worse, empty buildings without for lease signs.

    It jogged a memory. I remember during the 2000 busts real estate companies were asked to not hang "FOR LEASE" on the side of buildings down the 101, fearing it might create a feedback loop that would put economic recovery further out of reach. I started having some thoughts and talking to the wife about it.

    Prior to 2000, everything was going to "BE ON THE WEB!" CEO's would just say those magic words, and VC would literally be throwing money at them. I worked for a company where I got to sit with the CEO as he pitched investors for more money. The investors were just an old retired couple seeing the country in their RV, I would have guessed the greatest generation (the WWII folks) My CEO dazzled them with a presentation, a polished prototype built from stainless Sheetmetal (it was a medical device) and they just cut a fat check on the spot for $100k. He'd pretty much do this daily, all folks in similar age groups.

    I'm sure those folks are dead now, as this was close to 30 years ago, or in a memory unit. The current income source of VC for AI is the boomers, but after that you have GenX... Me.. my wife. We paid like, $500k for our house, compared to our boomer parents who paid $20 or $30k. We're fucking broke, we're not gonna gamble on any fast talking VC bullshit, get the fuck out of here.

    You know who's financially worse off than GenX? GenZ, millenials, and maybe even Gen Alpha. They won't have a penny for VC.

    AI will be the last big hurrah of venture capital being funded by suckers with no idea of how technology works. I don't see it being sustainable for the next decade. Glad I'm almost retirement age, and glad I'm working in government now.

    • Yes, those whose parents didn't buy their house will remain poor. But those whose parents benefitted from the house price inflation caused by the Nimbys will be fine, thank you as will their children when the grandparents give the kids enough to get started in housing. And a significant proportion of them will be in a position to invest when they get to be in their 50s.

      As a matter of interest, how did the couple who invested $100k get on with that investment? Always fascinated as to whether they lucked out

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The problem for gen Z is that their parents already had the support from their grandparents, and are stuck with massive mortgages that mean there aren't big pools of cash to help them get on the housing ladder.

        The only way forward is to force house prices down, but of course that's unpopular with the people who already own them. Especially if they bought recently and have a big mortgage.

        • by t0qer ( 230538 )

          Ya as we drove through Woodside I explained to my wife how disgusting it is wealthy people trick the public by using "Nature conservation" to prevent themselves from having any neighbors, or *GASP* a view of other houses. I told her I wouldn't mind if they increased the housing supply, and our house ended up only being worth what we paid for it, she wasn't impressed by my altruism to say the least :D

          Fixing the housing supply is only one side of the coin though, we also have to start moving these jobs out o

      • by t0qer ( 230538 )

        Company tanked less than a year later. CEO moved our offices from Sunnyvale to Alameda in an attempt to get us to quit, and a lot of us did.

  • When the automation of cotton production destroyed the jobs of home working weavers etc, there was a lot of disruption. In due course new jobs did emerge. The question is: 'why should this time be different?' At the moment Western economies are running at close to full employment - indeed with less unemployment than was believed possible only a few years ago. The working age population is falling...

    The process over the next few decades may be messy, but we're far better equipped to manage it well than they

    • by dvice ( 6309704 )

      You are right that we are better prepared. As a humanity, there is no problem for us to feed everyone even if automation increases.

      But the question is, will we do it? Or in other words. "Why should I give money to those who don't work at all?".

      In practice the problem is how do we tax people. Obvious answer is to tax companies, as even if they automate, they will still generate profit, which can be taxed. But if you tax companies heavily, they will move to another country that has less tax. This would be rea

    • When the automation of cotton production destroyed the jobs of home working weavers etc, there was a lot of disruption. In due course new jobs did emerge. The question is: 'why should this time be different?'

      Because you’re not thinking about how this IS different from every revolution we’ve had before disrupting jobs. The answer before every time was “go learn something else”. AI is coming to replace the human mind, making humans not merely temporarily unemployed, but permanently unemployable. That, is how this is different.

      The It's not time to panic. Yet.

      I’m sure they said that for decades after Orwell wrote what is now known as a fucking instruction manual for Governments. Given what 1984 predicted, I

      • Last time round that included railways, new items manufactured in factories etc. In 1800 those would have been inconceivable. The question is whether it is reasonable to assume that no such new jobs will emerge this time.

        I would note, having been there, that there was similar concern back in the 1970s when the prospect of automation leaving most factories staffed by nobody was widely feared.

        You may be right - but it's remarkable how demand for new goods and services does emerge.

        • by dvice ( 6309704 )

          > in the 1970s when the prospect of automation leaving most factories staffed by nobody was widely feared.

          And after 1970, US has only lost 1/3 of the factory employees (yes, only 1/5 of that to automation, but on the other hand, they are increasing automation in China also). Change is even more radical if you take population increase into account. 8% of US population worked in the factories in 1970. Now that is 3.6%. And it will continue to decrease especially now when we are starting to get robots that

        • You may be right - but it's remarkable how demand for new goods and services does emerge.

          And because I may be more right than wrong (based on Greed’s behavior for the last thousand years), nothing you’ve said is really relevant when looking at the “last time” that has never targeted human employment like AI is preparing to do.

          The only thing ‘remarkable’ in the future, will be the worlds oldest profession making quite a desperate comeback.

          • The number of workers in agriculture has fallen precipitously since the introduction of mechanisation. Historically most people lived and worked in the countryside. The shift to cities has been remarkable.

            The question about AI is whether it will actually be deployed at the sort of speed that will cause mass disruption, or will its effects be cushioned by delays, inadequate investment etc. Computerisation has taken a LONG time as did electronification. It would be surprising - though possible - if AI arrives

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          The question is whether it is reasonable to assume that no such new jobs will emerge this time.

          It is. All waved before increased productivity and created new goods. For example, the automatic loom made clothing cheap enough that people bought more and that meant tailors, shops and logistics provided new jobs after time of actual upheaval because so many jobs were gone. All "AI" can do is automate bureaucracy. That does not create new, better or more goods that anybody wants. It just replaces people while the same (or worse) services are being provided. And that is why this time is fundamentally diffe

          • But the Luddites had no idea that those new types of jobs would emerge.

            You're assuming that AI is only good for bureaucracy. Many of the stories about it achieving scientific breakthroughs do not equate to bureaucracy.

            I understand your pessimism. You may be right - but it's really too early to say.

      • by dvice ( 6309704 )

        There are obviously some doomsday scenarios where only the rich can live a good life, but I think that it is more likely that at some we have so much automation that just declare the end of work and the end of money. At which point everything will become free and work is something you do only if you want to, as it is mostly done by robots anyway. Because I don't think that there are that many humans who prefer the doomsday scenario over utopia.

        But the trick is how do you survive during this chaotic time unt

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Sure. But look at the _numbers_ of these jobs. They are nowhere near replacement rate. More like 1%.

  • ...especially about the future. So The Grauniad fancy themselves as futurologists now? How cute!
  • This isn't real AI yet. But maybe it's coming soon. And robotics aren't far behind; arguably, they're actually ahead. So maybe we could start to recognize that sufficiently bright artificial minds in sufficiently sturdy and dexterous artificial bodies would, at almost any price point, make human workers entirely unnecessary, and thereby instantly end economics as we know it. So we need to focus our mental efforts on having the new economics ready to go as soon as possible.
  • how can ai take jobs (permanently) if it relies on just a few companies providing the ai services and those aren't making a profit?

    eventually either the cost of ai will have to be raised to make a profit or these services will end.

    either way, the risk to employment drops. right now it may look cost effective to switch to ai, but that's based on an unsustainable ai subscription cost. and if the general public doesn't directly buy in to subscribing, spreading the real sustainable cost over a smaller subscr

  • the license fees will be enormous!

    These days, it's $10-50 per month per user. Soon it will be that much per customer. Whatever the metric, AI tools will *not* be a bargain. And that will slow adoption.

  • It should be replaced by AI.

    The only people falling for this stuff, are people who haven't really explored what AI can and can't do.

    Getting it to work is actually very, very hard, as McDonald's figured out. https://techxplore.com/news/20... [techxplore.com]

Dennis Ritchie is twice as bright as Steve Jobs, and only half wrong. -- Jim Gettys

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