AI won’t replace humans, but humans with AI will replace humans without AI

I&#x27;ll use analogies with previous technologies.<p>Agriculture shaped humans to create buildings, create social classes with different levels of power, create armies, governments and rulers to protect themselves from other tribes. Gradually these grew up became empires and created monotheist religions to substitute animist religions.<p>The Industrial Revolution shaped humans and culture to move to cities, work in factories&#x2F;offices instead of home&#x2F;fields and to think in more abstract terms (math, written words, etc).<p>Cars shaped human society, governments and urban plans to be heavily dependent on roads and all the car assistance economy. Think Houston&#x2F;Los Angeles vs. Copenhagen&#x2F;Amsterdam.<p>Radio, television and publicity shaped our daily lives to consume a lot of crap we don&#x27;t really need, from cigarettes to diamond rings.<p>Social media shaped our political discourse into tribal stupidity and paranoia.<p>So just use basic Marshall McLuhan: the media is the message. Technology shapes humans and culture. AI will shape humans and culture. We just don&#x27;t know how.

With a field moving as quickly as AI right now, you should probably take any predictions over what it will be able to do and not do with a big grain of salt, especially if they are made for any timespan greater than the very near term future (months? weeks? That term will itself get shorter and shorter as time goes on).<p>Very few people, including the author of this study most likely, predicted a few years ago where AI would be today. That should tell you something.

This may be the case with AI today, but I’m doubtful it will be in the future.<p>Many of the problems with AI the author is using as premises to justify his thesis are already being addressed and working towards a solution for daily.<p>Nonetheless, even if humans are required, it would be 1&#x2F;50th or 1&#x2F;100th less, a sufficiently high enough reduction that the outcome would remain the same.

Did humans with computer replace humans without computer?<p>Did programmers with google search and stack overflow replace programmers without these?<p>It doesn&#x27;t and it won&#x27;t happen in any time soon.<p>How could humans with probabilistic LLM which cough up hallucination replace humans without it when the answer to my previous two questions are NO.

At a ratio of 10:1. This is bullshit framing designed to refocus people on human competition (which everyone gets trained for from school), just don’t look over at the robots who never sleep, never get worse, rapidly expand their capabilities, don’t need vacation, etc. Once people understand the robots will never stop replacing them, shit will get much more real.<p>Proof is in the earnings calls - see IBM dangling firing 30% of backoffice because of AI and begging shareholders to stick around for the payoff.

What AI will do is facilitate the creative process. Instead of painstakingly creating variations. AI will present us with ALL the variations. That, in a nutshell, is the power of generative AI.

I think Jensen Huang (or his sales team) came up with this quote first:<p>&quot;While some worry that AI may take their jobs, someone who is an expert with AI will.&quot;<p>He said this at the NTU Commencement Speech in May 2023.

Kind of a vapid piece overall but I do agree with the thesis. Whatever the limits of generative AI may be, or what adjunct and different technologies may come, I think the future will see something similar to the steam shovel or drill when it comes to AI and other “knowledge” enhancing tech. John Henry managed to beat the steam drill at a great expense, but it didn’t reduce the number of people laboring on tunnels - it just changed the skill set from a strong back to a strong engineering ability.

This is only true in markets in which increased efficiency = more success. Many markets do not function this way; e.g., the art market. Making more paintings more efficiently does not make you a better-known artist. In many cases, it actually hurts you.<p>I would bet that more markets become like the art market: dependent on &quot;intangibles&quot;, nepotism, personality, and other qualities that have nothing to do with efficiency, and therefore, won&#x27;t benefit that much from AI tools.

Serious question: has anyone ever read an original&#x2F;insightful thought in an HBR article?

For the most part I think it’ll mainly further Microsofts dominance in the office space. You can see this with the recent EU anti-trust and Teams, where it makes little sense for enterprise organisations to not chose Teams when they already have Office365 licenses. You see the same to some degree in RPA (robot process automation ) already. Why would your organisation shell out a couple of hundred thousand dollars for UIPath licensing when Power Automate is $15 a month and $250 for the big VM bots?<p>I think it’ll be the same with AI. GPT writes all our non secret documentation and it has a lot of options for use in non-programming automation as well. I know Microsoft is a major investor in it, but once those tools become basic Office365 tools then every other AI seller is going to become obsolete in many cases. It’ll be interesting to see how the world handles that dominance in the office space, because so far, we really haven’t.<p>So I think this is going to be much more a question of how we’re all going to be paying a Microsoft “tax” to use AI efficiently, than it’ll be about non-AI vs AI. I mean, you could probably use iSheets (or whatever the Apple Excel is called), Google Sheets, LibraOffice or similar, but I’ve never heard of an EU enterprise org that doesn’t use Microsoft Excel.

Let‘s assume for a moment that AI will replace humans _in the economy_. Then what? Well, either it fully does that, then it won‘t matter. We will allocate resources in a different way or there will be a revolution. Or it does only partially, leaving some (physical) labor. Then these jobs will pay well and people will go there.<p>For everything else AI will replace nothing. The economy is just a part of life and if AI really takes over it will be an insignificant part.

I laugh everytime someone posts an article with a definitive title ina field where nobody knows shit about what&#x27;s coming. Hear me Mr. Krugman?

Yeah, thats spooky, because the next step is Humans with neurochip will replace Humans with AI, and then AI will replace everything

People keep saying things like &quot;humans always adapt to new technology&quot;<p>Is that not the point here? Start at the basics - Agriculture has created a world where I cannot live off the land in my area. I would have to go to a location that is not dominated by an Agriculture focused society (condensed living with farms on the edges supplying food to the population via trade).<p>Look what happens to people who have nothing to offer for food. They become dependents of the state.<p>There is no reason to undermine the very real possibility that after another breakthrough or three in AI society is going to fundamentally shift in the impacted areas in a way where if you are not one of the AI people then you will have nothing to offer and thus you too will become a dependent of the state.<p>Hopefully non-ai society will remain able to function independently - with non-ai-boosted farms continuing to trade with non-ai-boosted workers. Maybe technological middle grounds get eroded and we see an explosion in Amish-style communities.<p>It is very possible however that the power of ai-based systems takes off and all the people involved with it simply completely ignore the rest of society, and the rest of society will be boxed out of the resources they need to live independently.<p>For centuries the ultimate reality check for ignore the needs of the many has been revolution. For all that time, surprise attacks, rebellion, physical power in numbers, etc, all existed.<p>Revolution is not going to be on the table with advanced AI. It&#x27;s arguably already off the table, but if one side has advanced AI (not even AGI) and the other doesn&#x27;t- its over. Automatic early threat detection, autonomous kill machines, control over all strategic resource and power generation, etc.<p>The only revolution still on the table is going to be political. We can absolutely succeed in preventing dystopia if we leverage the power of the state to actually be able to sustain 90% of the population becoming dependents

People mostly don&#x27;t get replaced, they adapt. LLMs are a faster but less reliable Google search. They will add to your work load because now you do more, faster. Technology increases the work load. Life with technology only gets busier and more complicated.

Most people act fairly mechanical at this point. Everyone is so busy out competing eachother, they might as well be sentient bots doing errands from their massive todo lists. Ai is just going to make everything more obscure and absurd.

Humans that are just as skilled as the average ones with AI will continue to be in demand. AI levels the playing field for a lot of people but the stars will still shine

For the most part maybe tru but at the low end of yhe job market I disagree.<p>My current robo&#x2F;vac&#x2F;moo does a better job more frequently than any human I paid to sweep the floor. The robot is less than a months wages and no paperwork.<p>One of the large employment sectors in our area is landscaping landscaping and I could see 75% of that labor going away.<p>The amount of manual repetitive labor available for humans is probably already dropping.

This take is so 3 months ago.

And Human with AI will be more efficient than human without AI. So there will be need for less humans for a given task. Therefore AI will replace humans, just not all of them. And that&#x27;s not new. The same thing happened with softwares and with machines. The solution : produce more goods or services. Until we have an energy crisis and we need to rationalize all this.

These MBA thought pieces are so behind the curve its embarrassing if not humiliating.<p>When your only real job (conditioned over a near-century of industrial capitalism) is to prepare warm bodies to populate stable corporate power hierarchies but society is reeling from challenge and disruption to strife and malfunction what exactly is your reason to exist?<p>Just take the very first sentence:<p>&gt; Just as the internet has drastically lowered the cost of information transmission, AI will lower the cost of cognition<p>Now investigate how the &quot;internet&quot; has worked out for individuals and corporates and apply the same to &quot;AI&quot;. What do the authors think about digital oligopolies, surveillance capitalism [1] and all that.<p>The digital (=information) incompetence of the corporate world is what has ushered the current dystopia in the first place. Business schools have profitably underwritten this gross mismanagement for ages.<p>Then this:<p>&gt; The best place to learn [...] is YouTube. YouTube has, oh my God, so many tutorials in so many domains.<p>Can somebody please pull the plug on this joke? Its too painful.<p>[1] Zuboff joined Harvard Business School in 1981 where she became the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration and one of the first tenured women on the HBS faculty

&gt;Even your spam killers. Remember how bad spam used to be for a while, and then overnight it went away? Because people deployed machine learning systems.<p>Didn&#x27;t mostly Bayes filter kill spam? Wouldn&#x27;t call that AI.

There&#x27;s not much of a distinction, multiple people will still be replaced by one because AI exists. I&#x27;m not saying it shouldn&#x27;t exist, but this sounds like word play to hide the impact.

Wait till people start getting cancelled and impoverished by having their AI accounts closed. Sure, they&#x27;re still free, but they won&#x27;t be able to get a job.

Am I the only one who finds these rambling interviews hard to read? Many articles already have too much fluff around the core information, but interviews are even worse.

I mean, &quot;humans with AI&quot; replaced &quot;humans without AI&quot; the moment AI was invented. Is that what passes for &quot;insights&quot; at HBR these days?

The net result, as we see with basic skills such as growing your own food, cooking, purifying water, building a shelter, fixing the tools you need, etc. is a bunch of adult babies that are completely dependent on others for their wellbeing.<p>I&#x27;m not saying we should all grow our own food etc. but it does seem as though we are headed to something where we make such a great system that we only breed weakness and helplessness.<p>Maybe that is the price of progress.

AGI will replace humans when it eventually arrives. The ability to copy paste and backup minds is too strong.

Someone has been reading Iain Banks.

Seems like people who are taller are going to replace me. And post about it on their socials

This is such a catchy term. Copium usually sounds very catchy.

It&#x27;s true in 2023.

&quot;Humans with AI will heavily profit from Humans without AI&quot;<p>FTFY

AI will replace humans. At what rate and when is the only question. The idea we don&#x27;t want that is only pitched by control hungry authoritarians who need subjects to define their existence by.

So we will become robots in a Ship of Theseus way.

keep telling yourself that