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Jim Kavanaugh, CEO of World Wide Technology, told CNBC that people are “too smart” to accept artificial intelligence won’t alter their work environment.
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Business leaders shouldn’t “BS” employees about the impact of AI on jobs, Kavanaugh said, adding that they should be as transparent and honest as possible.
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Kavanaugh, who has a net worth of $7 billion, stressed that overall he’s an optimist when it comes to AI and its ability to improve productivity.
You’re missing the point.
There are never, for all practical purposes, jobs that get recovered by disruptive technology. This is why Luddites existed for the industrial revolution and why neo-Luddites exist today. Those lost jobs? They’re lost for good. And if you let typical western “dog-eat-dog” capitalism continue the damage from this will only mount.
Those manufacturing, farming, etc. jobs that gutted working class America? They didn’t get replaced by “learn to code” jobs. The same will happen when AI replaces workers (even with inferior copies). The Luddites had a point (and it’s not the one that people seem to think it was).
@ZDL @ladicius
It’s important for everyone to understand this. Thank you for spelling it out so clearly.
At the same time, it’s also important for everyone to understand that the Luddites lost. They lost every single war over every single technology they ever tried to protect their lives and livelihoods from. They always have, and they always will.
If we are going to SURVIVE, our survival strategy can’t rely on either ‘replacing’ jobs OR preventing disruptive technology from destroying them.
I’m not sure we can say that the Luddites lost, nor that they always will.
The actual followers of “Ned Ludd” lost, sure. But they were the first in a loooooooooooooooooooooooong line of labour activists who fought for the rights and dignity of the working class. The inheritors of “Ned Ludd” are why we had 40-hour work weeks. They’re why we had weekends. They’re why we had a middle class with all the economic benefits this brings to all (including the short-sighted monied classes). The Luddites lost the battle and won the war
Well, at least until labour in the USA and to a slightly lesser extend Canada and the UK (and likely Australia as well, by appearances) got complacent and greedy and allowed the monied classes to systematically dismantle all that the Luddites’ descendants had built up. So right now the Luddites have become beleaguered and have lost their power. The governments service the monied classes instead of the people.
But this will change. The only choice, really, is will it change in another orgy of violence or will cooler heads prevail?
Personally, since I don’t live in the affected areas, I’m fine either away. You might have a specific direction you want to lean in, however.
@ZDL
I spoke too broadly; I apologize.
I didn’t mean to say that they didn’t make a lasting positive impact on labor and consumer rights.
All I meant to say was that the technologies they opposed still exist and are now indispensable and (mostly) positive features of the industrial economy.
The victories you describe are positive and massive; my argument is that victories like those are possible and desirable (and necessary!) while winning a Butlerian Jihad is none of those things.
They didn’t oppose technologies. They destroyed the visible manifestations of employee abuse which happened to be technological (stocking frames and threshing machines). They were labour activists who did “collective bargaining by riot” since there was no legal framework for collective bargaining at the time (and indeed the law was often against any efforts of the working class to organize and improve their lot).
Their particular cause failed (c.f. law being onside with the abusers), but they laid the groundwork for the future of labour.
So this brings us to modern times. Nobody (sane) is against “AI”. (“Scare quotes” because we don’t have AI yet and likely never will in my time nor in the next two generations’.) They’re opposed to so-called LLMs, one specific brand of “AI” (a.k.a. Generative AI or as I prefer to call it Degenerative AI). And the reasons to oppose it are multifold.
And the thing is, they can’t be meaningfully improved upon. Each rendition of ChatGPT, for example (which, incidentally, is a near-homophone for the French “chat, j’ai pété” which I will never unhear), has diminishing returns on the quality of its output. ChatGPT 1 to 2 was a huge leap. 2 to 3 was a smaller leap. 3 to 4 is almost indistinguishable for casual use. 4 to 4o<insert alphanumerical soup here> even less improved.
All while the computational power to run each increasing rendition goes up exponentially.
So LLMs in particular are technology that needs to be killed, now. Not in some Butlerian Jihad, but in terms of just fining the motherfuckers foisting it upon us and cramming it into every orifice they can find with fines well in excess of 100% of gross revenue.
That specific field is lost. “There aren’t enough jobs” has never been more than a short term issue, while the technological progress idiots complain about is constantly moving the standard of living massively forward.
This iteration of “AI” won’t replace workers long term because it doesn’t work. But when we get to the point where it actually can, the standard of living will, once again, be massively better across the board as a direct result of the ability to do more work with less effort.
It’s a “short term issue” … but the people without jobs? Living in desperate poverty?
THEY. ARE. PEOPLE. NOT. STATISTICS.
If you’re going to introduce disruptive technology that renders a huge fraction of the populace unemployable, or even that just relegates a huge fraction of the population into low-paid, low-quality jobs plan for them as well, not just the fucking billionaire bank accounts!
That means perhaps making the billionaires pay more tax, say, to provide a buffer for the disrupted people. They can buy their next superyacht a year or two later.
There are other jobs. Adapting and changing is part of life.
Every technologically advancement throughout history has resulted in the floor, ceiling, and median quality of life significantly advancing in short order. There isn’t a group who isn’t better off very quickly as a result of the change that was always inevitable.
Change isn’t bad.
Spoken like a true techbrodude that.
Change isn’t bad, absolutely. As long as you view people as statistics, not as human beings.
But when you’ve had the job that kept you and your family fed and comfortably housed for decades suddenly vanish on you, that’s a change that’s bad. When that change guts your finances so you have to move your family into a shithole tenement that squeezes you for rent while your food turns into cheap, mass-processed, nutritionally dubious pap.
This is doubly so if it happens on the tail end of your life so you’re not realistically able to be retrained and re-employed.
But those are just statistics. Just numbers that flow on a screen. While in reality there’s human misery you carefully look away from so that you can point to comforting numbers.
But here’s a question for you: if things are always better off after a change, why are the people who cheerlead for such change so super-against any attempts to mitigate the impacts with a small sliver of their benefits!?
You don’t just learn, get a job, and be set forever. That’s not the real world. It’s not supposed to be the real world. You develop yourself, apply that development to getting a job, then keep learning and keep developing yourself to be ready for the next opportunity.
The real world isn’t stable, and companies fail with or without technological advances. All your anecdotes are just that, and things that are happening every day with or without progress.
Less people will be starving in 2-3 years with every meaningful advance in tech. Progress makes the world a better place at every level of the ladder. The Luddites were terrible people actively working to make the world a worse place, to try to maintain their own monopoly. But a hell of a lot more people had access to warm clothes when their insane nonsense got put down and clothes became easy to mass produce.
Again, that isn’t LLMs because LLMs have functionally zero value. But even the poorest of the poor are better off when technology changes industry, and yes, new skilled jobs have always come back quickly.
It’s easy to hide behind simple statistics and I’m with you in the beginningAI can help increase efficiency to bring overall more people out of survival poverty. That’s excellent.
However, we’ve seen in the US at least, that the last decade or two of economic progress has been marked by an increase in service level jobs. Looking just slightly deeper shows us a decrease in solid middle class jobs, a decrease in typical income, a huge portion of people are worse off even if some overall stats are better. Then what happens if ai replaces driving and warehouse people and fast food? What’s left?
The last decade has been those “middle class” jobs moving to China/India and providing way more of them with jobs that pull them from starving to not starving.
You can debate policy stuff of offshoring and whatever, but globalization isn’t removing jobs. It’s moving them. It’s completely separate from technology making labor more efficient.
Tell me, how does sociopathy actually feel?
How does if feel ignoring the billions of future people you’re actively trying to fuck over by preventing progress that makes their life better, because you think helping people today by making their lives better is a bad thing?
Continuous learning is part of your responsibility as a human. Your one example of someone losing their job would be fine if there weren’t also thousands of other people starving who get better access to food by the same progress. Statistics are people. They’re just the people you’re ignoring to make the world a worse place.
That’s how sociopathy feels? Weird.
@conciselyverbose @ZDL We can’t wait until we change the rules to disincentivize predatory invasive tech
Every such change in the past has eventually resulted in vast improvements. However take a closer look at history and you’ll see that those disrupted mostly don’t recover, and it takes a couple generations to see the improvement. Those buggy whip manufacturers generally couldn’t get another job equivalent to theirs, and it wasn’t until their grandkids that people were overall better.
The AI revolution is theoretical so far so we can each offer whatever predictions we want. The thing is previous industrial revolutions replaced muscle: a machine can work harder and more continuously than people. However there always needed to be people. Each could do more with the help of the machine but there were so many things a machine couldn’t do that as efficiency improved it always opened more opportunity for people.
But what can people do that AI can’t? My prediction is to lump it in with other advanced automation. As automation gets smarter and smarter, there’s less need for people: the smart automation takes over more supervision. We know AI also has a place in creativity: that’s what generative ai is. It may be bad but it’s already on par with the dregs of the internet and will only get better. And we know that ai can make decisions: machine learning used to be central to ai until it worked.
Machines already took place of muscle and focus. various forms of smart automation and AI can start making inroads (and already have) on supervision, imagination, and decision making. Even if it doesn’t go far up those trees, most of the jobs are in the bottom branches. What type of role is left for humans that machines, automation or ai can’t handle? Theoretically not much is left.
Think back to the scare over self driving. If that works, that’s a huge safety and efficiency improvement, but it’s also millions of jobs. What else will those millions do, especially if other jobs at that level of skill are also being automated. It would be a huge disruption. If ai is able to take all the jobs predicted, that’s most of them and no one will have any better options. Even if it ushers in a new golden age, that will take a couple gneberations, and it might not if there’s no role left for humans that can’t be automated
Luckily ai sucks now. It does some amazing things and I’m in awe at recent progress. It does seem to have come far enough to be a useful tool in some places but luckily for us is far from being able to replace humans. However the potential is there, and approaching fast
Every one of them raised the floor very quickly. The increase in travel made way better quality of life available to way more people. But this isn’t the Middle Ages. You don’t need to enslave yourself to someone for a decade before you can get a new job.
LLMs can’t do anything. “AI” will eventually replace jobs, but LLMs (the current “AI” everyone is spending through the nose on) can’t actually do anything.
Self driving will be a great thing that saves lives exactly as quickly as it’s implemented. It’s not really connected at all to the current “AI” LLM bubble, though, because again, LLMs don’t work.