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How long will it be until we realize AI is detrimental to society? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Here in the USA, you have to be afraid for your job these days. Layoffs are rampant everywhere due to outsourcing, and now we have AI on the horizon promising to make things more efficient, but we really know what it is actually going to be used for. They want automate out everything. People packaging up goods for shipping, white collar jobs like analytics, business intelligence, customer service, chat support. Any sort of job that takes a low or moderate amount of effort or intellectual ability is threatened by AI. But once AI takes all these jobs away and shrinks the amount of labor required, what are all these people going to do for work? It's not like you can train someone who's a business intelligence engineer easily to go do something else like HVAC, or be a nurse. So you have the entire tech industry basically folding in on itself trying to win the rat race and get the few remaining jobs left over.....

But it should be pretty obvious that you can't run an entire society with no jobs. Because then people can't buy groceries, groceries don't sell so grocery stores start hurting and then they can't afford to employ cashiers and stockers, and the entire thing starts crumbling. This is the future of AI, basically. The more we automate, the less people can do, so they don't have jobs and no income, not able to survive...

Like, how long until we realize how detrimental AI is to society? 10 years? 15?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I see you point; but not even 200 years ago the people couldn’t imagine most people working in other “industries” than agriculture.

Historically, most people worked in agriculture. (I’m not sure of the percentage, but it was >80% IIRC, but we can take a low estimate at 50%).

Nowadays less than 5% of the world population works in agriculture, due to increases in automation (machinery that can plow and harvest), and better understanding of the process (more efficient use of land).

While some of that turned out to be bad for the environment (who knew biodiversity is good, actually?), it did free up most of the population to do other things.

I hope it’s not “AI” that will automate the future (because of the huge energy costs to the environment), but automation more generally could help us free more time for passionate pursuits.

Jobs like software engineer didn’t even exist a century ago, and who knows what kind of new jobs will be created in the next 100?