AI likely to displace jobs, says Bank of England governor
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0r9280gvelo
Posted by Tartan_Samurai
AI likely to displace jobs, says Bank of England governor
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0r9280gvelo
Posted by Tartan_Samurai
18 Comments
He is of course right:
What AI is good for is processing purchase orders without having a human touch them, planning manufacturing, and issuing pick lists. Robotics are behind so humans are still better at picking goods and say, doing assembly. So the bottleneck just moves. You can increase output if you have more humans doing manual work, which is what will happen, the low skill clerical job moving to manual work.
AI will take jobs, but there’s still plenty it can’t do that anyone can.
It really reminds me of American comedian Doug Stanhope talking about Mexican immigrants coming in who can’t speak English and coming even without half their clothes sometimes, and how if that person can take your job, maybe reach for a better job.
Anyone comparing AI to the industrial revolution or any other paradigm shifting pre-AI tech is sugar coating the situation.
Until now, we have invented things that made us far more efficient but still relied on human labour: you needed a human to design the loom, build the loom, operate it, maintain it, sell/transport/process its yield to become a usable retail product. Then you needed a human to buy that product.
What AI will *eventually* do is eliminate all those roles *except the last one*: the consumer. The problem is, most consumers can only consume because they’re selling their labour, so what happens to the entire system when the value of human labour approaches zero?
We are about to sever a link in the chain that underpins our entire way of life and we don’t have a plan. We need to talk about UBI, and we need to talk about it *right fucking now*.
Honestly, I think companies just want to reduce headcount anyway, they are just blaming AI.
I’m skeptical about AI improving productivity, like these tools have been in the wild for a few years now, where’s the growth? Where are the profits for companies adopting AI? Everyone seems to be using ChatGPT, or whatever, to write everything, but we don’t seem to be living in a booming economy.
Profits from the industrial revolution may not have been evenly split, but at least building factories created jobs, how can a trend that claims to reduce employment lead to actual growth?
It just seems to me to be a continuation of the trend of less money for workers, more money for investors. Wealth being concentrated in fewer hands.
Aren’t positions like his the sort that could be most easily done by an AI?
Our company implemented an AI to do ticket reviews to fail you on kpi. So it would review you on tickets time open, when the last update was, how the update was written, so on and so forth.
My argument to management was why they were weaponising an AI to make their staff look bad? Surely its a productivity tool not a tool to review the human element of the business.
So one of our team, using easily available AI tools built a competing AI that could review his queue, work out where he was risking kpis and then offer suggestions to ensure he doesn’t fail them and make his day more efficient.
All these AI tools are being handed to middle managers that only reason to exist is to harrass and make the employees miserable
Computer software and automated robots have already for decades taken over billions of jobs that humans would normally do. AI is just the icing on the cake.
Ahh finaly some good news A.I will replace bankers
AI needs to hurry up and take over tech support/IT positions/roles. Would massively increase efficiencies – currently ya put in a ticket and they take a week to maybe do something about it.
>AI *likely* to displace jobs
That is the plan. Corporations will always try to cut costs to maximise their profit margins. They don’t care about us. The only thing preventing them from doing this earlier was the lack of technological capacity. Now it’s a race against time (the digital gold rush) to automate as much as possible and to use the profits to expand their businesses and buy up the remaining resources before their competitors beat them to it. It’s why they’re all investing in AI and Data Centres.
There will always be greedy capitalists. That’s why it’s important to have more economic regulations and to vigorously enforce them. Not fewer regulations.
AI is likely to distance jobs… right. You been living under a rock for 5 years bro?
The way I see it
AI will augment a lot of jobs. What this means is one person will be able to accomplish more as AI is able to do a lot of the “busy work” while the human focuses on things that still need human oversight and input.
This means alot of jobs now will still exist, but the role will evolve, and there will be fewer of them.
Some jobs will be totally replaced. New jobs will also arise as a result of AI.
So there will be turbulence, but it’s probably not the cataclysmic wiping out of jobs en-masse either.
The internet bro’s and their tech made us stupider and it’s almost like social media was the first wave in dumbing us down, sowing polarisation and making it possible for those so desperate for productivity to embrace the new Trojan Horse from the same people who destabilised democracy. What could go wrong?
Feels like stating the obvious really.
Fortunately we have a strong manufacturing sector for redundant city workers to pivot to.
Sorry, in actual fact we have been closing the factories for the last 30 years because we are going to be a tech & service dominated economy.
Also Carbon Tax.
25% unemployment is going to be wild.
So, ultimately, will the government step in and limit/tax AI usage or just let it happen?
Government policy seems sold on embracing AI, under the illusion that AI will create more jobs than it displaces, while being a massive productivity multiplier.
Only a matter of time before AI policy will become a major election issue — possibly as soon as the next one. Generative AI looks set to decide the outcome, either way.
Tbf AI could probably do the BoE governors job a lot better than her could now.
Problem is there is already a lack of understanding and at same time over reliance in AI.
Too many execs think it’s an easy money scheme by unloading half their workforce in favour of AI, the UK has always been slow keeping up on the tech front when it comes to law or innovation. We’ll find ourselves in a new recession when the bubble bursts.
My company brought in AI tools this year which allow us (the researchers) to do the work of our tech team. A project that in 2024 would have taken our department 10 months to complete was finished in just 8 weeks. 0 tech team/developers involved.