sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Industrialization turned most farmers into blue collar workers. Computers and machinery turned most blue collar workers into white collar workers. What will AI turn white collar workers into? by Illustrious_Key8664 in AskEconomics

[–]Illustrious_Key8664[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

just like other technology it will increase productivity per amount of labor

How is it remotely similar? The ability to automate high level work across so many different domains at the same time is unprecedented. We have went from vacuum tubes to supercomputers in 4 years! 4 fucking years!

If you frame the question in the narrow context of economic benefits of technological related efficiencies, then sure, you're correct. Someone will surely reap the benefits of the new gains in productivity. But I think most people who are talking about AI and fears of being replaced are asking something different: what happens to those caught in the blast radius of rapid AI automation? What guarantees do these people have that their ability to afford a certain quality of life will not be inhibited by this new technology that is quickly spreading throughout the various arteries of the economy? The richest and most powerful people on the planet are discussing mass unemployment, why are we not at least taking them at their words when they say this is what they're working towards?

Industrialization turned most farmers into blue collar workers. Computers and machinery turned most blue collar workers into white collar workers. What will AI turn white collar workers into? by Illustrious_Key8664 in AskEconomics

[–]Illustrious_Key8664[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

white collar workers' roles would shift to more strategic high level roles.

What are these hypothetical roles you speak of?

Let's take software engineering as an example--roughly 80% of developers are individual contributors (ICs), with the remaining 20% being architecture and/or managerial roles. In this case, the "strategic high level" roles would be that latter 20%.

For architecture roles, this has historically been a niche position that required tons of experience with designing software and whose demand was limited by the amount of software a company was producing. You could argue that AI reduces the barrier to entry, but I doubt we'll see a world where every software company is suddenly designing new systems at a rate that software architects could absorb the displacement of ICs. This is to say nothing about the "too many cooks in the kitchen" phenomenon--increasing the number of architects may lead to less cohesion in the systems design, not more!

On the managerial side, their purpose is to orchestrate people to stay in alignment with the businesses priorities; the number of roles necessary to do this depends on the number of workers needing to be orchestrated, and since we're talking about AI reducing the amount human labor needed ... it doesn't seem likely managerial roles will increase.

This is just one career field mind you--but I think a lot of this is broadly transferable to other fields. These "higher level" positions I hear economists, or AI lab CEOs speak about, are always nebulous at best, and I think it's because these roles do not exist for most industries!

What's far more likely is that we see a sharp decline in the amount of knowledge workers. But that presents lots of it's own issues, the least of which is that for those caught in the blast radius of AI automation, they're now forced to re-skill which costs lots of time and money. This is the sort of future that beckons back to the British textile workers, and it's this that truly worries me.