AI is coming for the professional class. Expect outrage -- and fear.

[Celerity]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/29/ai-professional-class-low-skill-jobs/

https://archive.ph/4DULg



I was born in 1973, just as the American economy was going to hell — though I cannot accept all the blame. It was the twilight of the 20th-century manufacturing boom that had almost managed to compress the whole country into one vast middle class and, for reasons beyond my control, that boom was unraveling. Inflation was headed into double digits as labor productivity began to decline, economic growth swooned, unemployment rose and manufacturing employment tipped into the final descent toward its current sub-10 percent share. This turnaround devastated workers and communities, and even college-bound kids like me absorbed the sadness — through songs such as Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” and Billy Joel’s “Allentown,” through shows such as “Roseanne.” As we entered the electorate, it became a major force in our politics, as the Clintons tried to steer the economy toward a global, postindustrial future.

Voting for Bill Clinton, I believed his answers were correct. Trade and automation made Americans better off overall, even as they displaced some manufacturing workers. What we needed to do was finesse the adjustment, primarily by sending more kids to college to capitalize on the growing wage premium — 40 percent when I was born, 60 percent when I graduated college, and closer to 80 percent today. Older workers who weren’t ready to become college freshman could be retrained for booming service sector jobs. I still think our prescriptions were broadly correct. But as artificial intelligence starts coming for our jobs, I wonder how well the professional class will take its own medicine. Will we gracefully transition to lower-skilled service work, as we urged manufacturing workers to do? Or will we fight like hell to retain what we have, for our children as well as ourselves?

For I suspect AI is coming for a lot of professional class jobs, despite how many people I hear say a machine can never do what they do. We’re accustomed to think of automation as primarily displacing the working class, but as economist Daron Acemoglu wrote in 2002, “the idea that technological advances favor more skilled workers is a 20th-century phenomenon”; in the 19th century, steam-driven machines replaced a lot of skilled artisans, and AI currently looks to be pointed in a similar direction. If you work with words and symbols, AI can already do a surprising amount of what you can do — and it is improving with terrifying speed. As a Bloomberg News headline put it in February, “AI Is Driving More Layoffs Than Companies Want to Admit.” And though the numbers aren’t enormous — Bloomberg cites one source that found 4,600 AI-related layoffs during the previous nine months — that’s a pretty big number considering that ChatGPT was released to the public only in November 2022. It’s going to get bigger still.

As with previous rounds of automation, good jobs will be created as well as destroyed, and even those who don’t get them will enjoy broadly rising prosperity. But that was also true for manufacturing workers displaced by the China shock — as people like me kept telling them. A report last year from the Congressional Budget Office notes that though incomes “increased most among households in the highest quintile” between 1979 and 2020, average incomes increased in all quintiles. Yet as they kept telling us, people don’t care only about their role as consumers; they care about their role as producers and, more broadly, about their relative place in society. For the working class, that place has been eroding, in relative terms, for decades. The kinds of jobs many of them now occupy — in retail, say, or on the lower rungs of the health-care system — have less social status than the old manufacturing jobs even when they pay as well. And they often require a combination of servility and soft skills that wasn't demanded on an assembly line.

snip

[jmbar2]

1. We need serious discussion about how humans will earn a living in this hellscape

If all employment income is sucked out of the economy, how do they propose society will continue to subsist?

The purveyors of this technology should be held to account to devise scenarios for entire populations surviving without employment income.

[area51]

2. This is one of the reasons why we need both a Universal Basic Income in the US,

along with universal healthcare.

[jmbar2]

9. I agree - and it must be paid for by those who are extracting wealth from the masses

[Kid Berwyn]

3. The world needs ditch diggers, too.

Now there are A.I. robots for that.



When will A.I. replace the owners?

[hlthe2b]

4. My area is medicine. I have long used tools to aid with creating diagnostic and treatment algorithms...

so to this extent, I (very) tentatively believe that AI can be helpful. But I am terrified if it is unleashed--just as I am in the broad arenas of online information, journalism, and legal advice--without very close scrutiny of physicians, surgeons, epidemiologists & researchers for medical purposes--and editors, journalists, and lawyers for the latter. Getting back to medicine--the arena of medical liability will be turned on its head. And having seen enough poorly written "advice" columns in recent years--prepared by medical journalists but no longer consistently edited by science and medical professionals--the thought of AI taking it on and EVEN ADVISING patients... scares the living hell out of me. It should you too.

[Johnny2X2X]

5. Just wait by until they actually invent AI

Then that will be something.

[brush]

6. I worked as an art director for newspapers and magazines...

and just as I was completing typing this sentence it occurred to me that my profession has already been devastated by the demise of newspapers, magazinnes and print jobs in general over the last couple of decades...and that's because of the advent of the internet, and that has happened before AI has even gotten started displacing such professional supervisory editing, editing, writing, reporting, art directiing/esthetic evaluation positions as programming has already done much of that, and I have tos say the standards of print journalism has not moved/kept up with/ transferred to the online world as strenuously as it was practiced in the print world.

Such as it is, life goes on, excellence doesn't always, and large language models that AI uses can still result sometimes in gibberish as cannibalization of the models can happen.

There's still hope, not for the jobs and professions lost, but for the needed vast expansion of the models and hope for improvement from the sometimes nonsensical output.

Oh, I should mention that a guaranteed basic income is going to be essential or it won't be the machines/AI revolting, it'll be the humans (usless eaters?) who they replaced.

[GPV]

7. AI can't replace teachers, IMHO.

[Johonny]

8. It can

It just won't be very good at it. AI can replace a lot of jobs. Can it do them better? Or is better a cost versus quality thing? In many professions AI can do a crappy job for cheap and that is attractive to companies that don't demand quality.

[jmbar2]

10. I was an instructional designer before retiring

In the past, training was painstakingly constructed to be based around competencies, and to be taught live to facilitate human interactions. When online learning came along, it became cookie cutter modules that can be created by AI.

The result is that almost information can be spit out using online modules. However, few people stick with them - they have a high quit rate. And you really can't train a lot of skills this way.

Kids' experience with online learning during the pandemic showed a lot of academic losses due to these factors.

So even if there are jobs left, investment in human capital is on a downward slide. I pity future generations.