Comments by "Persona" (@ArawnOfAnnwn) on "Will the Job Market Collapse Due to Artificial Intelligence?" video.

  1. You can have a tiny team of humans managing such a factory, which churns out hundreds of thousands of product units.
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  2.  @blusox6486  Not always. There is also reduced full-time working hours in places too. But what the video doesn't acknowledge is that it was the result of labor activism and government legislation - companies didn't do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
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  3. Ah of course, ye olde Luddite story. Why am I not surprised to hear the neoliberal Visual Economik trot out that classic tale? Automation DID kill off a lot of jobs - in the primary sector i.e. in agriculture. And then in the secondary sector i.e. manufacturing. So we all moved on to the tertiary sector i.e. services. Well what's next? There is no further sector of the economy. If more service sector jobs are automated, where is mass employment going to come from next? I've never heard any economist come up with a good answer, apart from a handful of small scale ideas like how everyone is going on nowadays about 'prompt writers', which btw advancements in AI (like AutoGPT) already trying to render obsolete. We used to say humans could focus on what humans are good at, namely the creative fields - and now AI has undermined them before any of the others. In any case we don't need a few new niche job titles, we need new sources of MASS employment. So far the only significant answer that gets trotted out is a massive expansion of the healthcare sector caused by population aging - basically loads of younger folks caring for old folks. The part about automation adopting companies creating jobs actually shows something else that is worrying about AI - consolidation and concentration of power. Companies that didn't automate were driven out of business, while companies that did ate up all their market and expanded, hence were responsible for most new job creation - at the cost of making them ever more dominant parts of the economy. Indeed this process stops working once the market has already been fully consolidated (an oligopoly) and expansion opportunities reduce (which is more likely in the future now thanks to separate rising phenomenon - de-globalisation and protectionism). AI by its very design fits right in with that. The supplier effect mentioned right after is also threatened by de-globalisation btw - most job creation by multinational giants is in poor nations. Then there's the truly funny section of the video talking about reducing working hours, backed up by a graph showing the same. It's funny cos it makes it seem like companies did this out of the goodness of their hearts now that technology meant they didn't need workers to work as long (which btw contradicts the earlier part of the video which shows they used the new capabilities to ramp up production, a far cry from them relaxing their workforce). No, working hours have reduced because labor movements pushed for it and govts. slowly got onboard with it. This mechanism relies on labor, especially low-level mass labor, being just as necessary for future corporate success, which AI directly undermines. The other reason why it happened is due to more and more work being based on hourly wages and/or contract or gig arrangements - and in those cases less hours worked directly translates into less income earned.
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  4.  @tomislavkusanic5572  Economics Explained just made a recent video that deals with that kind of argument. It doesn't quite hold up I'm afraid.
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  5.  @danilolabbate  No it won't. Universal income requires govt. income. Govt. income requires taxation. And who're those govts. going to tax? Not the laid off workers. It'll be the very corporations controlling the AI powered production chains, who'll steadily migrate to the lowest tax rate bidder as they have no need of local labour pools anymore.
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  6. We don't need genuine AGI in order to threaten the livelihoods of a lot of people. We just need automation to be able to do the tasks it's able to handle at least as good as a human and/or at a fraction of the cost of a human. If we've managed to make an artificial computing entity that is generalizable enough to be able to do that in a lot of cases, it's good enough to be able to have that effect. Past improvements were all extremely narrow. What makes these AIs different is that they're getting wider and wider by the month.
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  7. Physical labor work (especially outside of factories) has almost nothing to do with AI. That's waiting for advancements in general purpose robots (what Boston Dynamics does, NOT what OpenAI does) to breakthrough and, crucially, become cheap enough. That hasn't happened - yet. AI is about replacing humans in many mental tasks, not outdoors physical ones. Those are for robots.
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  8. The difference is we don't have or need as many of you as we have and need normal users of those automated processes. Almost no one is saying every last job will disappear, just that a lot of them will be rendered obsolete.
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  9.  @JHM52  Economics Explained made a video recently that showed why this isn't true at all. I suggest you watch it. There's a reason even this video did not choose to use that argument to defend AI advancement.
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  10.  @danilolabbate  Watch that Economics Explained video that I alluded to above. It deals with that 'no customers' argument that's doing the rounds.
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  11.  @thedownunderverse  Capitalism Doesn't Need Consumers on Economics Explained.
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  12.  @thedownunderverse  And sorry. You can blame Susan 'No Dislikes' for me not li***ng it directly.
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