Politics is a safe bet
.
Tbh, a lot of the fears of AI taking over all the jobs is hyperbolic. On the one hand, politicians, analysts, pundits and others love to bring up statistics that show that automation has consistently resulted in net job creation, as every new technology created also creates new, previously completely unknown and nonexistent niches which need to be filled with workers.
But also, and this, funnily enough, everyone seems to be trying to avoid, is the fact that there's already tons upon tons of "bullshit jobs" that not only could be easily done by AI/robots already, they have no other reason to exist in the first place apart from providing some schmuck a place in the workforce.
For more and more people, work appears to serve no purpose. Is there any good left in the grind?
www.newyorker.com
And why this professor thinks we need a revolution.
www.vox.com
en.wikipedia.org
The author contends that more than half of societal work is pointless, both large parts of some jobs and, as he describes, five types of entirely pointless jobs:
- flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, store greeters;
- goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, or to prevent other goons from doing so, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists;
- duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive;
- box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers;
- taskmasters, who create extra work for those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals.[3][2]
There's already absolutely no reason for those types of work to exist in the first place, so I doubt that they'd disappear all that quickly due to advances in the AI.
Really, this is all that's going to happen.
Some new niches will be created, offering useful and actually important work for people. Along with that will also be created a lot of new bullshit jobs that have no reason to exist other than that some random guy can be proud of himself for having a job, some bullshit jobs might disappear but a lot will survive, and a lot of what used to important work positions will join the ranks of bullshit jobs.
This (from the Wikipedia link):
YouGov undertook a related poll,
[5] in which 37% of some surveyed Britons thought that their jobs did not contribute 'meaningfully' to the world.
Will probably double or so and apply worldwide, with some 80% of global workforce knowing that, in the age of AI, their work has no impact and no reason to exist, and everything will continue slowly sludging forward with a lot more people than before knowing that they have no real impact on the world around them.
I was thinking about going into writing but now I think it's pointless since chatgpt will be able to write a thousand times better than I ever could in just a few years. Even most programmers will be replaced within the coming years. Shit is looking bleak.
Tbh, as someone who writes for fun, I'd say that this will likewise always be a possibility. Chatbots might write better than you, but you never know when the regulators will decide to nerf them (a
lot of writers are already angry at the way ChatGPT and other OpenAI products have been nerfed in this area so far), plus, people are already using the chatbots to increase the amount of text they can write, rather than being replaced by them. Stephen King is known for writing for six hours straight just about every day. Very few people can match that, but thanks to chatbots and other LLMs, basically any random guy could now have as large a body of work as he does, maybe even larger
.
Also, the thing is, there is absolutely no such thing as an unread story. No matter what you write, the moment you put it on the internet, people are bound to read it and at least some are bound to like it. Then, it's only about putting out more and more, and increasing the amount of those who like what you write.
And that's not even getting into the fact that, at this point, we're legit some months ago at most from human artists labelling their work as fully human-created, with competitions and so on truly doing their very best to weed out anything AI-created they might find, with human-created content becoming prized just for being human-created.
