Well, I did first propose a hypothetical situation with a capable PM who really understood the industry, but then allowed that, in the real world, PMs are often less knowledgeable and capable than one would like. I’ve worked with both types, and the latter is more common.
Sure. QA jobs won’t go away anytime soon. And yes, I know there will be some new jobs that spring up that involve working with AI in order to produce desired, tailored results from it.
But I’m skeptical of the optimists who say that there won’t be any job loss, just new types of jobs working with AI. I mean, I hope they’re right, but-- say a company has an IT team of 20 programmers. With an AI writing code, what are they going to need? Maybe one or two of those programmers switch to writing parameters to feed into the AI, and a few more programmers to check the code output and do any necessary rewrites. So maybe 5 programmers retained out of 20. What are the other 15 going to do-- find a job at another company doing parameter inputs and code rewrites? They’re competing with a job market glut of the 75% of jobless coders from other companies.
Ha, hadn’t heard the brothel idea. But maybe not so much call centers yet, as peccavi pointed out:
Current AI is very good at putting facts together and writing very coherent paragraphs of copy, but it’s understandably not so good at nuances of human emotion and interaction. I said in another AI thread half-jokingly that one job that’s not in danger is comedian / comedy writer. I’ve seen plenty of unintentionally funny content writtern by AI, butI don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard an intentionally funny joke that an AI wrote.
I haven’t heard about this specific robo-brothel, but the concept of sex-robots (or at the very least sexy robots) has been around almost since the concepts of robots. I’ve read a number of articles and discussions around the (soon to be not so) hypothetical use of sex robots, virtual girlfriends, and other forms of AI companionship. Proponents point out that they may serve a useful function in helping to alleviate loneliness. Perhaps. But to me it seems more like such uses of AI would be alleviating boredom, not loneliness.
To me, that seems like a more problematic consequence of AI than “people losing their jobs”. Most people’s jobs suck and what they are really concerned about is losing their livelihood. There are known ways to address that.
But a world consisting of millions of largely unemployed or pointlessly employed people living isolated existences, constantly being entertained by AI driven media, companionship, and even sexual gratification seems hopelessly sad and lonely to my sensibilities.
And I’ve seen enough sci fi or just real world to know that such technology is not going to be uniformly applied globally. I can definitely envision enclaves of super-advanced AI driven societies of hedonistic, narcissistic, socially retarded wealthy elites and masses of low-tech struggling poor eking out a living on the periphery of society (because it’s only in like EVERY sci-fi film). So that won’t create any long term issues.
Actually, I think that’s probably one of the FIRST jobs that will be replaced. At least, the first couple of tiers of script-readers whose only real function is to screen clueless callers from wasting the time of people who actually know anything. “Have you tried rebooting your system, sir or madam”?
Wrong tense. The reason so many companies have text-chat help now instead of voice (or at least, try to push their text help so heavily and hide away the voice number) is so they can hide the line between the chatbots that do most of the work and the few humans who occasionally need to step in.
You’re probably right… it has already happened. But GPT-bots may push things a bit further up the tiers.
I am very concerned about the propensity of current bots to just make up totally bogus answers. Like my brother-in-law who will, at the drop of a hat, give you a long, detailed and almost completely wrong ‘explanation’ of a topic he knows nothing about.
True. The concept of robots as we think of them goes back to the steam men of the 1860s, which were introduced in fiction and then demonstrated on stage by inventors and charlatans. (Artificial humans go back much further, of course.)
Historians have traced sex robots back to a French novel called La Femme Endormie published in 1899 and quite explicit. Less advanced “rubber women” were available in Paris at the time for those with Venus staturia or a fetish for representations of humans.
Sexbots will be perfected and be accessible at less than luxury prices, because a market exists. Some humans will lost their jobs because of them. Hard to imagine a world in which they will replace humans entirely, but nobody knows the future.
Phone sex seems to be a thing. Apparently some people will pay to talk to someone about erotic activities?
Don’t get it myself, but it’s probably fairly harmless. And of course an AI chatbot can simulate anything, with appropriate sound effects, I suppose.
Eh, probably not, because that’s not the sort of thing they’re good at. You note their propensity for inaccuracy, but it’s not so much that they’re inaccurate, as that accuracy is completely irrelevant to how they work. They’re bullshitters through and through, like your brother-in-law. And there’s apparently a lot of demand for bullshit, and the ChatGPT family stands poised to fill that demand. But there’s also a lot of demand for straight information without bullshit, and while that demand might also be met by bots, it won’t be by ChatGPT-style bots.
Some have commented on the ability of these to replace news-writers: Just feed them the list of facts, and they’ll write up a nice polished article from them. But that’s really just more bullshitting: The important part is the facts that you prompt the bot with. Give me a news “article” that’s just the same list of facts that you used to prompt the AI writer with, and that’s a news source I’d be interested in reading.
@Omar_Little, OK, so there are some crazy folks out there. She’s at least not as crazy as the woman who married the Berlin Wall, though.
I remember when we first got office computers on our desks. The Boys from Fairlawn, OH came out and took us all to lunch. “It’s a new world now, get used to it. We are going paperless.”
Followed a few weeks later by the delivery of pallets, and pallets, tons really, of green and white pin-fed computer paper. Everything had to be backed up on printouts before reliable memory storage was accepted. I should have bought stock in a paper company.
“It is a new AI world boys.” No. It is not going to work out the way everyone seems to expect. AI could just as easily create a whole new group of jobs, perhaps entire new industries. This is what I expect.
I think what I find concerning is that sexbots are just one of many “dehumanizing” use cases I keep hearing about for AI and robotics. If humans are using robots for sex, companionship, care for children and old people, and basically take the place of normal interactions, sort of begs the question of what’s the point of having humans around? Technology has already made activities like dating and jobs highly transactional. Doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to convert those transactions to an AI.
Pundits have complained that social media is replacing human interactions. AI may increase that loss or speed it up but we are on that course. Is there any evidence that AI will be a qualitative change rather than a quantitative change? Other than that the former makes for better clickbait?
Re: accounting, I recall my father saying that it took X people Y days to close the books for a time period, and that both people and time were reduced substantially by PCs. But I don’t remember the specific numbers. But the headcount didn’t decrease that much because they ended up doing more. Modeling and projections.
