I consulted for three different large organisations over the last 14 months. All of them chose to let their workforce know that the management are "looking into using AI". In all three cases one of the first questions during all-hands town halls was "are we getting replaced by AI?" People are freaking out and managers are loving it, because they have shifted people's attention from how little they are getting paid to fearing being replaced by a hallucinating algorithm. So, based on my limited experience, I would argue that AI is a wage rise suppression tool, not a labour replacing tool.
Any technology is fundamentally a labor replacing tool. Isn't that the whole point of "technology"?<p>Society will adapt. As it always has. Most Americans no longer work on farms or factories either.
As I hear about AI replacing workers, I think back to the short story “Manna”<p><a href="https://marshallbrain.com/manna1" rel="nofollow">https://marshallbrain.com/manna1</a>
I really worry that we're discussing these topics like idiots. I totally understand why you would look at a peice of technology that can enable 1 worker to do the work of 5 and panic. But... we're not living in Dickensian Britain. We <i>know</i> what happens when technology enables massive productivity improvements and the answer isn't mass unemployment. We're not living in some dystopia where typewriters caused mass unemployment.<p>I actually think to a large extent the corporate world is putting the cart before the horse. Unemployment is at an historic low, wages are growing fast and so this is a great story to tell as to how you're going to continue to exploit labour to enrich capital.
More than a year into ChatGPT and… unemployment is at historic lows.<p>I don’t remotely see the present generation of LLMs as being “labor replacing tools.” I’m aware of empirical work which shows them to be useful <i>complements</i> to human judgment, not substitutes for the same. I’m also aware of one study showing (iirc) less work for illustrators on an online job board. That latter case is the only case im aware of where workers have been replaced though if you have citations to actual empirical evidence for job <i>losses</i> please comment!<p>An alternative theory: Part of what AI CEO’s are doing is <i>marketing</i> their products. If you want to get investors and customers to pay your very expensive compute bill you’d better sell your product. You can sell your product by claiming it can replace workers. That doesn’t mean it can do it. If the current generation of LLMs can replace workers, that is not obvious.<p>Perhaps some future generation might be, but that will require something fundamentally different than what’s currently available. (And no I don’t think “more data” is enough.)
> The tech and media industries—which are uniquely exposed to the threat of AI-related job losses—saw huge layoffs last year, right as AI was “coming online.”<p>This is one of those cases where correlation isn't causation. The actually meaningful thing that came online were interests rates which people discovered can actually be above zero, and one thing that went offline was the pandemic.<p>AI as it currently exists is not a job replacing tool, it's a <i>task automation tool</i> and in that capacity no different from any other tool. And companies don't actually fire people when tasks get automated, they give the more productive employees more tasks so they can make the company more money.