"... they could pass laws establishing and funding retraining programs that teach workers how to work alongside AI systems"
Computers were billed as the entryway to the future to the masses in the 90's and 2000's. So we got things like "send everyone to college" and ITT Tech. That didn't work, but a lot of money was wasted and a few people made a lot of money. This will be a repeat.
Right now, AI has the potential to increase productivity. Work that's done by 10 people without AI, can be done by 5 people with AI. So 5 people can be laid off. But soon, companies will realize that rather than laying off half of their workforce, they can simply produce twice as much as before.
In reality, the AI productivity boost is nothing close to 100%. Maybe 10% per year. That could translate in 5% layoffs, 5% increased output. Nothing extraordinary compared to other times in history.
The detail many seem to forget is that "AI" is Artificially Inexpensive. It must eventually turn a profit, or collapse. Once providers start charging what they must to remain solvent, and/or the output is burdened with advertising, the gains, real or perceived, will likely evaporate.
And this is just now. Inference costs are plummeting, because models are becoming more and more efficient. I can get 6 tokens/second on my local Ollama from GPT-OSS-20B using only CPU, and I can get 11 tps from Qwen3-30B. This was unthinkable 6 months ago. I am quite certain I'll get faster speeds 6 months from now and faster still 6 months later. Model architectures are becoming better and better, and models with the same number of parameters are becoming smarter and smarter.
Yet they are not reliable enough to follow simple real world commands or learn from examples given reliably. They haven't improved at all on this respect
Now imagine most white-collar jobs gone too, our cracked democratic institutions finally crumbling, and survtech and repressive police everywhere to squash protesters and dissidents... I've coined a term for a way to get out of that dystopia, if we manage: The Grim Revolts[^1]. I hope it remains the fiction of my feverish mind that it's supposed to be, and that we do manage to find good ways to prevent things from spiraling.
[^1]: https://w.ouzu.im/
If AI continues at its current trajectory of being an incrementally improving blog post generator, then the only losers here are the big investors.
southernplaces7•3mo ago
Then, there's seeing government use it in its own disgustingly parasitical ways for accelerated mass surveillance, and to not even mention the absolute flood of utterly brain-dead spam sludge content that has flooded all social networks, online searches and just about every corner of the internet (including my inbox, thanks mom and friends who have no clue how to distinguish Ai slop from anything in the least bit valuable)
And I just want a large part of it to burn and die back. I'm with the artists and real photographers on this one.
Rant over.
causal•3mo ago
DamnInteresting•3mo ago
Our modern view of the Luddites is not a fair shake. The Luddites were not opposed to technology in general, they merely (and understandably) opposed having their own livelihoods replaced by automation.[1] It's a familiar sentiment in these times.
Incidentally, I'm not implying that you don't know what the original Luddites were about; I add my comment for the benefit of anyone else who may be unfamiliar with the backstory.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite