Cynical view: without new regulation in the area of AI, it will reduce the value of labor in many domains and completely eliminate the need for it in many others. Profits will go to companies like OpenAI, unemployment will rise and people will be left to fend for themselves, and it's exactly what's going to happen.
AI runs on electricity, which we can produce a joule directly of for much cheaper than we can produce a joule of food to feed a human on. This is a fundamental consequence of thermodynamics. It will eventually require us to ask ourselves whether we are willing to arbitrarily prioritize our own species over the cheaper to run alternative.<p>We human beings, however, have both the first mover advantage and a natural instinct to preserve both ourselves and our ingroup. So I don't ultimately see this law as being hard to pass. Enforcing it is another issue, but mostly also
solvable issue via financial bounty systems.
My personal anecdote:<p>Parents recently sold their $1.5M+USD house (2021) to the owner of an online transcription/translation company (human staffed) -- an "expensive rich house" where they live.<p>The free Whisper.app (works on Mac, including Intels) delivers the new homeowner's entire company product [transcription/translation] about 40x faster than real-time-playback, which is hundreds of times faster than any human employee could listen and translate. For FREE.<p>I expect to see new owner's forclosure notice any moment. Certainly human worker(s) still check over the translations, but for most [potential] customers a perfect document is not necessary, particularly considering Whisper.app is FREE to use off-line [1]. An absolutely incredible piece of software — runs lighting fast on my M2Pro.<p>[1] <a href="https://openai.com/research/whisper/" rel="nofollow">https://openai.com/research/whisper/</a>
If what I do as a seasoned software engineer becomes redundant because of "artificial intelligence", so be it. Then I'll need to learn more, which I am! I'm not in the business of stiffening technology like an oil baron.<p>I do understand that IP, for example using an actor's likeness via CGI+AI, is a very real issue that needs to be addressed.
One thing that's very likely to happen is that major economies (US, EU, China, India, etc.) will start to isolate. Because AI will have such a profound effect on the competitiveness of companies and the regulatory environment between these blocks will be so different their respective companies are all potentially at risk. Within months let's say a US based and entirely AI run company could quickly supplant all European companies in the same field because the respective European companies don't have the computing power or expertise to compete or can't fire the now redundant workers due to some trade union influence. Rather than allowing all those European companies to be replaced there will be intense lobbying to effectively shut out any non-EU companies. AI will effectively end globalization with the exception of basic commodities trading.
The risk of exposure in emerging and low market economies is significantly lesser than advanced economies according to this report . The nature of work in advanced economies by comparison then is going to significantly change. If 60% of jobs in advanced economies are at risk am surprised with statements from these countries that they are well equipped and ahead of the curve to deal with it . Is anyone seeing anything tangible being proposed and planned to deal with apart from educating people to use this technology? Or is this all a prelude to another AI winter I wonder as we start to make these forecasts and raise expectations
By now I think many people have seen my takes on this forum regarding AI and know I'm an enthusiastic skeptic. I think the capability of this technology is being exaggerated to the benefit of the large corporations that have made huge investments in it. I think a lot of the so called AI experts have put their eggs in the basket of throwing a shit load of data at a pretty limited number of relatively simple models. I think a lot of the people trying to apply AI to every field they can get their hands on are non-experts in that field and lack the knowledge and skill to know if their AI is any good or if it's just dogshit. I think LLMs will never be reliable enough for applications where correctness matters and we're never going to solve the hallucination problem. I think the people telling you we can solve those problems are trying to sell you something. I think the end result of all this bullshit is going to be a lot of wasted computational cycles and an entirely undeserved devaluation of knowledge work until the MBAs trying to fire all their knowledge workers realize they've made a huge mistake. I think this technology is going to make the internet worse and the biggest beneficiaries are the charletans and liars that never cared about truth in the first place.
Related: AI to hit 40% of jobs and worsen inequality, IMF says. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38997636">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38997636</a> (96 comments)
I too remember 2017 and headlines about millions upon millions of people being replaced by robots around 2025. I even saw videos of little bots peforming the job of baristas, trucks self driving, and all sorts of other crazy things. Not that they are not doable but you know, they are difficult to implement by people that have no clue how things work, let alone how humans interact.
> one of the things that sets AI apart is its ability to impact high-skilled jobs<p>Am I the only one that fundamentally disagree with this? AI rather impacts low-skilled white collar jobs. Or the "low skill" part of a high skill job. For a dev one example is AI is good at writing the boilerplate for you.
Well IMF just keep tabs on the AI billionaire/millionaire underling production rate every quarter. If it's going up then AI is definitely doing something dumb and unnecessary. To fix track them down and ship them off to China's jack ma center of reeducation. And humanity will be just fine.
This coming from the IMF blog (?!), i.e. the head of a vile institution like the IMF writing about a bubble-y subject like AI while everyone else is economically and socially struggling, is the next level of late-stage capitalism. These guys and ladies are losing it, they're losing all contact to the reality on the ground.