Amazon has been using robots in their fulfillment centers for years now, and there are plenty of public videos out there on those processes. But I don't see how this would replace the use of humans in other critical aspects of fulfillment center operations.
Society will adapt. As it always has. Most Americans no longer work on farms or factories either.
Of course, if the labor replacing process is too rapid, then that could become a problem.
Economies are human constructs and can be changed with political will.
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.
We clearly live in different countries.
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 complements 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 losses please comment!
An alternative theory: Part of what AI CEO’s are doing is marketing 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.
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.)
Logically, employment may increase while people's standard of living may get worse at the same time?
Is there somewhere more specific data?
Other than that, I think I remember an article claiming that the introduction of thr personnal computers led companies to be able to generate the same revenue with less people. Like it used to be 8 employee per million USD and it got to 5. Then again, depends of the size of the average enterprise and the market size (which increases with population increase)
Yes it can and yes it is. I'm also baffled by people keep pointing out low unemployment like it's the be all end all of all arguments for economic prosperity.
Obviously sky high unemployment like in the great depression isn't great either but just because people are forced to accept any one of the abundant gig economy jobs, no matter how shitty, or even more than one job, due to the high CoL and low welfare, it definitely reduces unemployment numbers on paper, but is that ideal?
Maybe some jobs are so shit that people would rather bum around on minimum welfare than get dirty, tired and aching bodies just to only to make peanuts over welfare.
Maybe the median inflation adjusted take home wage of the employed person after subtracting essentials like rent, utilities, bills and food, would be a better metric to measure economic prosperity of the working class than collectively clapping at record low unemployment numbers.
AI or increases in labour supply doesn't typically result in reduced unemployment, rather it acts to push down wages. An increase in labour supply could even lead to people bidding over each other with time, so that the result is that people work more rather than less.
- Language translators.
- Video annotation, summary, transcription.
- Voiceover artists.
- Graphic designers.
- Warehouse inventory work.
- Personal tutors.
- Junior software engineers.
There will still be openings for these roles in the future, just as there are still openings for Personal Assistants (secretaries, which were once as abundant as teachers and truck drivers), and maybe even the occasional Draftsman.
I think what's going to happen is that AI will enable these kinds of jobs to be done much more often and in many more situations where they could not be feasibly be performed before, and the actual human job losses will be minimal in these areas.
At least for the near future, and it's hard to predict what may happen ten or twenty years from now.
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.
AI as it currently exists is not a job replacing tool, it's a task automation tool 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.
