Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work

Is this article an accurate reflection of peoples experience, or more generic LinkedIn click bait? I'm assuming the later with content like

>Substantial and ongoing improvements in AI’s capabilities, along with its broad applicability to a large fraction of the cognitive tasks in the economy and its ability to spur complementary innovations, offer the promise of significant improvements to productivity and implications for workforce dynamics.

I keep waiting for the industry shifting changes to materialise, or at least begin to materialise. I see promise with the coding tools, and personally find Claude and Cursor like tools to warrant some of the general hype, but when I look around for similar changes in other tangentially related roles I draw a blank. Some of the Microsoft meeting minute summaries are good, while the transcripts are abysmal. These are helpful, but not necessarily game changing.

Hallucinations, or even the risk of hallucinations, seem like a fundamental show stopper for some domains where this could otherwise be useful. Is this likely to be overcome in the near future? I'd assume it's a core area of research, but I know nothing of this area, so any insights would be enlightening.

What other domains are currently being uplifted in the same way as coding?

As a layman (as with most people here), I think this is a good article that summarises the current research on AI's impact on labour markets. The website itself seems like a reliable source.

These points made sense to me: it is impossible to predict what will actually happen, we need better pro-level tools for AI assistance (e.g. Copilot, writer autocomplete, ControlNet) rather than AI as a full replacement, and we need better and clearer paths to retraining and job mobility.

I disagreed with only one point in there: that research is needed for ways to compensate people for the use of their creative works, but that is solely because of my pro-free-cultural moral views. The rest of the article is still good.

AI is just one part of a larger and longstanding conversation about the future of work in an era of automation. We've long speculated that at some point we won't need the entire population to do all the work. Economists have talked about 20% of the population doing the work.

This can go one of two ways:

1. Fewer jobs will be used to further suppress wages. What little wages people earn will be used for essentially subsistence living. The extreme end of this is like the brick kiln workers in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. A lot of people, myself included, call this neofeudalism because you will be a modern day serf. The welath concentration here will be even more extreme than it is now. We're also starting to see this play out in South Korea; or

2. The created wealth will elevate the lowest among us so work becomes not required but a bonus if you want extra. The key element here is the removal of the coercive element of capitalism.

To put this in perspective, total US corporate profits are rapidly approaching $4T per quarter. That's roughly $60,000 per US adult. Some would call that the exploited surplus labor value.

Here's another number: we've spent something like $10T on the War on Terror since 9/11. What could $10T buy? Quite literally everything in the United States of America other than the land.

What's depressing is that roughly half the country is championing and celebrating our neofeudalist future even though virtually none of them will benefit from it.

I'm pretty certain that one of the first things we'll see is more jobs recording worker activity (computer activity, calls, video recording) as training data for future automation. Data from teleoperation of robots would be especially useful for physical tasks.

Speculation can be enjoyable, but given the rapid pace of AI advancements, where today's capabilities may be obsolete within a year, it's wise to approach any claims with a healthy dose of skepticism.