How will AI affects jobs?

Runawayfromtheworld

I know this is sad but I can’t sleep knowing one day I will be replaced by AI. The government keeps talking about how good AI is but not how AI will take people jobs and make people redundant. How worried should we been?

TELLIT01

Technology has changed jobs since the year dot.  Whether it be traction engines and tractors replacing horses, typewriters taking over from manual clerical work, machines taking over manual work,........  There is absolutely no point in worrying about things you have no control.

paradigital

I’d be about as worried as all the factory workers were when the automated assembly line was invented.  Or as worried as all accountants were when computers were adopted into small businesses.

“AI” may take some roles, but ultimately they will become a tool to assist people, not replace them in my opinion.

I say “AI” in speech marks because what we have now is not true AI, it’s a facsimile of intelligence, that seems capable of doing repeatable tasks quite well, but ask it anything remotely technical that requires an actual thought process and you can quickly tear it to shreds.  I’m not worried about being replaced any time soon.

400ixl

paradigital said:

I say “AI” in speech marks because what we have now is not true AI, it’s a facsimile of intelligence, that seems capable of doing repeatable tasks quite well, but ask it anything remotely technical that requires an actual thought process and you can quickly tear it to shreds.  I’m not worried about being replaced any time soon.

You are a few years out of date on that one. GenAI & Agentic AI has reasoning, memory and grounded correctly the ability to learn and make independent decisions. It is developing very quickly.

Been involved in projects in the last year alone that have removed hundreds of roles out of organisations and the roles that can be replaced are getting more and more complex all the time.

For most people it will be at tool as part of a multi agent organisation where there are automated and human agents working together. If you are not someone who gets it and works with it, you are one of those most at risk to be replaced by it.

It is no longer just the realm of Robotic process Automation and taking out repetitive tasks. 

MattMattMattUK

Runawayfromtheworld said:

I know this is sad but I can’t sleep knowing one day I will be replaced by AI. 

Will you be replaced by AI, or will the job you currently do be replaced by AI? The former is very unlikely, the latter is possible, depending on what your job is.

Runawayfromtheworld said:

The government keeps talking about how good AI is but not how AI will take people jobs and make people redundant. 

Technological progress has always made certain job roles redundant, it has never made people redundant. Those people left one job and moved onto a new one, apart from maybe a few who refused to adapt.

Runawayfromtheworld said:

How worried should we been?

Not very, if at all. 

One area I have seen AI impact is offshoring of admin tasks and basic first line customer service. Why pay a team of people in India to run your first line chat when AI can handle the basics? More complicated enquiries get pushed to real humans in the UK, but that happened before anyway and the AI is a cheaper, more reliable system, with better English. The same with admin, data entry that would get contracted out, there is currently a huge amount of data entry for invoicing that is done in the Philippines , but I know two large scale businesses who are trialling the basic part of that being brought back in house with an AI system, so far even on a Beta basis the AI makes fewer mistakes than the staff in Manilla.

On some projects I use AI to help me refine or iterate on ideas, it can actually be a good devil's advocate when I throw ideas at it.

I have also played around with LLMs and can very much see their limitations, we have fed them the sum of written human knowledge and they are still not very bright, what is worse, the more they interact with real humans the dumber they get if they are allowed to continue to learn. I am taking part in an AI project which is looking at new ways to train AI, not by feeding it vast amounts of data, but actually teaching it, it is quite interesting and it will be a year or more before it bares fruit in a publicly usable way, but it does have a transformative effect on the AI and shows the huge weaknesses in LLMs. That being said we are still a decade or more away from actually intelligent AIs, no matter how much processing power we throw at them they are limited by the way current computer systems operate, it may even require Quantum Computing to allow them to actually become intelligent, not because of processing power, but because of the way it can potentially allow for thought rather than modelling due to differences in processing design. 

DullGreyGuy

Employment related taxes represent almost 50% of the governments revenue, before any notable cull of the working person there will need to have been serious changes in taxation etc. Personally dont think we are there yet but think it will probably be more impactful than the automation of the production line etc. 

EnPointe

400ixl said:

paradigital said:

I say “AI” in speech marks because what we have now is not true AI, it’s a facsimile of intelligence, that seems capable of doing repeatable tasks quite well, but ask it anything remotely technical that requires an actual thought process and you can quickly tear it to shreds.  I’m not worried about being replaced any time soon.

You are a few years out of date on that one. GenAI & Agentic AI has reasoning, memory and grounded correctly the ability to learn and make independent decisions. It is developing very quickly.

Been involved in projects in the last year alone that have removed hundreds of roles out of organisations and the roles that can be replaced are getting more and more complex all the time.

For most people it will be at tool as part of a multi agent organisation where there are automated and human agents working together. If you are not someone who gets it and works with it, you are one of those most at risk to be replaced by it.

It is no longer just the realm of Robotic process Automation and taking out repetitive tasks. 

unfortunately as we repeatedly see with Generative AI it just makes stuff up   that sounds plausible to the ignorant 

Grumpy_chap

Runawayfromtheworld said:

I know this is sad but I can’t sleep knowing one day I will be replaced by AI. The government keeps talking about how good AI is but not how AI will take people jobs and make people redundant. How worried should we been?

No need to be worried.
Change will always happen.  There will always be new opportunities arise as a result of the change to fill the vacuum left by the change.
The proof of the pudding about everything being consumed by AI alternatives is this very thread, written on a forum to be responded to by fellow (living real life human) contributors.  If AI was anywhere near completing the full consumption of everything, questions to forums like this would surely be amongst the first to be capable of being fulfilled by AI.

When I was at primary school, we were promised a world where automation would do everything that we found chore-some, and would perform everything required to generate income, and we would all be left to simply enjoy a life of luxurious leisure and pleasure times powered by energy too cheap to meter.

Also, when I was at primary school, we were warned that the world would end in a pool of apocalyptic disorder and the total breakdown of civilised society and widespread cannibalism before we reached the end of our education.

The future is never as wonderfully idyllic as we are promised or as frightful as we are threatened it will be.