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DeepMind Co-Founder: AI Is Fundamentally a "Labor Replacing Tool"
- SilverBirch 3y agoI really worry that we're discussing these topics like idiots. I totally understand why you would look at a peice of technology that can enable 1 worker to do the work of 5 and panic. But... we're not living in Dickensian Britain. We know what happens when technology enables massive productivity improvements and the answer isn't mass unemployment. We're not living in some dystopia where typewriters caused mass unemployment. I actually think to a large extent the corporate world is putting the cart before the horse. Unemployment is at an historic low, wages are growing fast and so this is a great story to tell as to how you're going to continue to exploit labour to enrich capital.
- surfingdino 3y agoAI fact-checkers of the world unite!
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>wages are growing fast We clearly live in different countries.
- _Algernon_ 3y agoWe've gone from a single person being able to buy a house and feed a family, to two salaries in many cases not being sufficient in the past 50 years. While you're right that mass unemployment didn't happen, wage stagnation certainly did.
- true_religion 3y agoThis seems like a very American perspective. So may I suggest that wage stagnation came from no longer having a underclass of women and people of color to be underpaid for their labor, and frozen out from the general market? Additionally, the US went from being one of the few industrial nations to not have bombed our factories and streets to having competition from other countries. Americas golden age is not really a time with conditions that are easy to replicate.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>So may I suggest that wage stagnation came from no longer having a underclass of women and people of color to be underpaid for their labor, and frozen out from the general market? Wage stagnation is everywhere in the west, even more than in the US, and Europe didn't have an underclass of women and people of color 50 years ago in the prosperous times when a factory worker could buy an apartment and support a family, so let's not point the fingers there. Wage stagnation exists because all the fruits of increased productivity gains in workers' labor from the last decades have been skimmed at the top instead of trickled down to the workers in the trenches. Secondly, it exists because of the last 30+ years of corporate mergers and acquisitions have a concentrated a large piece of the pie of certain industries into the hands of only a few ultra-large players who get to dictate the global market in terms of wages and prices, due to the lack of competition, meaning workers have less bargaining power for wages and consumers less bargaining power for prices. Thirdly, globalization and lifting of trade barriers, meant that those few ultra-large players left after mergers and acquisitions, could tap into places that offered the lowest wages, lowest taxes, and lowest regulations in terms of environment and labor, enjoying all those benefits simultaneously instead of having to compromise, meaning they could have their cake and eat it too, resulting in massive more profits for them and a global race to the bottom for most of those working for them. >Americas golden age is not really a time with conditions that are easy to replicate. America is still living a golden age, due to being the world reserve currency, dominating the finance sector, the software sector (the only one with major growth and the most profitable), being land, energy and resource abundant, having no enemies at its borders, having the worlds biggest and most power-projecting military, and its citizens enjoy one of the highest purchasing power in the world. Is that not a golden age or what? Most countries would be happy to tick just one of those boxes, let alone all of them combined. I think some Americans often forget just how privileged they are compared to the vast majority of the world.
- leansensei 3y agoWhen the demand for labor continuously drops but the supply increases, what happens to the ability of labor to price higher?
- 3y ago
- alexwhb 3y agoWages may be growing… but buying power is definitely declining.
- elevatedastalt 3y agoWhen anecdotes disagree with data, double check the data.
- huitzitziltzin 3y agoMore than a year into ChatGPT and… unemployment is at historic lows. I don’t remotely see the present generation of LLMs as being “labor replacing tools.” I’m aware of empirical work which shows them to be useful complements to human judgment, not substitutes for the same. I’m also aware of one study showing (iirc) less work for illustrators on an online job board. That latter case is the only case im aware of where workers have been replaced though if you have citations to actual empirical evidence for job losses please comment! An alternative theory: Part of what AI CEO’s are doing is marketing their products. If you want to get investors and customers to pay your very expensive compute bill you’d better sell your product. You can sell your product by claiming it can replace workers. That doesn’t mean it can do it. If the current generation of LLMs can replace workers, that is not obvious. Perhaps some future generation might be, but that will require something fundamentally different than what’s currently available. (And no I don’t think “more data” is enough.)
- aatd86 3y agoI'm always wondering when people speak about (un)employment. Like ok non-farm payroll numbers may look good but what kind of jobs, for what kind of pay? Logically, employment may increase while people's standard of living may get worse at the same time? Is there somewhere more specific data? Other than that, I think I remember an article claiming that the introduction of thr personnal computers led companies to be able to generate the same revenue with less people. Like it used to be 8 employee per million USD and it got to 5. Then again, depends of the size of the average enterprise and the market size (which increases with population increase)
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>Logically, employment may increase while people's standard of living may get worde at the same time? Yes it can and yes it is. I'm also baffled by people keep pointing out low unemployment like it's the be all end all of all arguments for economic prosperity. Obviously sky high unemployment like in the great depression isn't great either but just because people are forced to accept any one of the abundant gig economy jobs, no matter how shitty, or even more than one job, due to the high CoL and low welfare, it definitely reduces unemployment numbers on paper, but is that ideal? Maybe some jobs are so shit that people would rather bum around on minimum welfare than get dirty, tired and aching bodies just to only to make peanuts over welfare. Maybe the median inflation adjusted take home wage of the employed person after subtracting essentials like rent, utilities, bills and food, would be a better metric to measure economic prosperity of the working class than collectively clapping at record low unemployment numbers.
- ls612 3y agoTractor company CEO: Tractors are fundamentally a “labor replacing tool
- malux85 3y agoWhich tool isn’t?
- schneems 3y agoA union signup sheet.
- surfingdino 3y agoI consulted for three different large organisations over the last 14 months. All of them chose to let their workforce know that the management are "looking into using AI". In all three cases one of the first questions during all-hands town halls was "are we getting replaced by AI?" People are freaking out and managers are loving it, because they have shifted people's attention from how little they are getting paid to fearing being replaced by a hallucinating algorithm. So, based on my limited experience, I would argue that AI is a wage rise suppression tool, not a labour replacing tool.
- janice1999 3y agoMy townhalls have been very different. My company introduced a harsh policy against AI, even local LLMs. The main fears were leaking IP & confidential information and contamination of code bases with poor or copyrighted code. That policy may loosen in future but I think it was the right move.
- alexwhb 3y agoI think in the short term that definitely makes sense, but long term… I think we’ll see more and more jobs be automated away. Look at what Amazon is doing with their new wheelhouse robots. In 2 to 5 years that’s going to become mainstream. Maybe sooner.
- bradknowles 3y agoWheelhouse robots? Could you be more specific? Amazon has been using robots in their fulfillment centers for years now, and there are plenty of public videos out there on those processes. But I don't see how this would replace the use of humans in other critical aspects of fulfillment center operations.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 3y agoTheir new robots are dexterous and able to automate much more complex tasks than the existing bots.
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- danpalmer 3y agoLet me guess which co-founder. Yep.
- Barrin92 3y ago> The tech and media industries—which are uniquely exposed to the threat of AI-related job losses—saw huge layoffs last year, right as AI was “coming online.” This is one of those cases where correlation isn't causation. The actually meaningful thing that came online were interests rates which people discovered can actually be above zero, and one thing that went offline was the pandemic. AI as it currently exists is not a job replacing tool, it's a task automation tool and in that capacity no different from any other tool. And companies don't actually fire people when tasks get automated, they give the more productive employees more tasks so they can make the company more money.
- mmh0000 3y agoAs I hear about AI replacing workers, I think back to the short story “Manna” https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
- mooreds 3y agoI think about this all the time. Economies are human constructs and can be changed with political will.
- RetroTechie 3y agoGreat read. Thx for that!
- drooby 3y agoAny technology is fundamentally a labor replacing tool. Isn't that the whole point of "technology"? Society will adapt. As it always has. Most Americans no longer work on farms or factories either.
- imartin2k 3y agoAlso, demographics and other changes (in many developed countries at least) mean we really need more labor replacing tools, as there’s simply a lack of human labor supply in many areas. Of course, if the labor replacing process is too rapid, then that could become a problem.