This video of David Attenborough narrating a programmer’s life shows Hollywood actors were right to be afraid of AI::If you’ve ever wanted acclaimed broadcaster and documentary filmmaker Sir David Attenborough to narrate your life, you’re not alone — and you don’t have to keep merely wishing for it anymore.
We’re all right to be afraid of AI. But we shouldn’t be afraid that it can do voice over, we should be afraid that it will take everyone’s jobs and the government won’t implement UBI fast enough.
Hot take: I think there’s not a great deal to fear even for most common people. Technological innovation has always stolen away jobs from somewhere, but the large majority of people are still finding work despite the human population exploding drastically over the last century as that happened.
Because realistically, if only a few people are working and earning money, then there’s no one consuming to feed the shareholders’ desire for unsustainable infinite growth every quarter. It would hurt the economy as much as it does the people in it, and that’s the one thing that regulators actually care about.
A lot of it is how fast AI can wipe out industries. Most technological breakthroughs took time, something like this could literally be overnight. We need time to adapt.
Probably half of all office jobs out there could be replaced by a few hundred lines of javascript or python operated by one person replacing a team of 20. I had to write my email address on a paper form today. Paper. And it’s been what, half a century since technology at least an order of magnitude more efficient has become accessible to companies?
Technological breakthroughs can happen at breakneck pace, but industries WILL take decades to fully adapt, because the inertia of old capital can drive established but inefficient processes for a very long time until capital dries out, while on the other hand there are only so many startups popping up every year to leverage new efficiencies (and even fewer successful ones, not least of which because VC spending is aimed at buzzword-laden bullshit rather than anything actually meaningful… crypto-metaverses ain’t putting anyone out of a job any time soon).
I’m talking about the industries like the original post. I don’t foresee AI replacing office workers overnight, it’s far too costly for that.
What I’m scared about is that we could all have pocket medical and legal advisors, pocket instruction manuals for any device or vehicle, we could all have a pretty great personal, financial and life planner in our pockets that could provide real equity in society by giving people access to these tools who really could benefit. But instead we will lose it because we were told to be afraid of something because other people couldn’t maintain gouging us
Capitalism 101:
And so on.
I do think it will improve life for some but for others it will suck. Example: it much, much easier and cheaper to give each gig worker a micro-managing AI voice I their ear than it is to replace workers with robots (work in Amazon warehouse if you don’t believe me). And job automation in white collar sectors will mean more people are taking gig economy jobs.
Maybe it will be cool. Show up at a construct site, sign in, and get told what to do to help frame a house with no real skills (“take a stack of studs to the location on your HUD”). You are now making money without needing other people to supervise that much (skilled framers still do most if it but you keep them more productive). And you could do that for two hours and hand off to the next person.
So really it’s the inevitable failure of government to be worried about.
So, its capitalism we should be afraid of…