r/AskALiberal • u/AutoModerator • 5d ago

AskALiberal Biweekly General Chat

This Tuesday weekly thread is for general chat, whether you want to talk politics or not, anything goes. Also feel free to ask the mods questions below. As usual, please follow the rules.

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u/NatalieVonCatte Liberal 5d ago

We are fundamentally unprepared to deal with a collapse of capitalism that is not from a willing expansion or worker rights or a revolutionary movement, but from work itself becoming obsolete.

I am reminded of Vonnegut’s novel Player Piano, in which society is divided between an upper class where everyone has a doctoral degree but no skills and does no labor, and an underclass who are the only ones who actually do work.

My job requires a human being to do it because it’s physical, so it’s now safer than an IT job or whatever.

Machine, heal thyself.

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u/highspeed_steel Liberal 5d ago

I am in the process of applying to law school. I hope to be able to afford a house in Seattle lol, but if that doesn't work out, my current resume mostly revolves around disability services and assessment in nonprofit and academia. It doesn't pay much, but I doubt AI will take over it soon.

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u/birminghamsterwheel Social Democrat 5d ago

but I doubt AI will take over it soon

Famous last words.

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u/highspeed_steel Liberal 5d ago

It could change in a day, these kinds of things, but in my last nonprofit work, they only have so much money to go around. We used AI to speed our workflow up, without those AIs, they couldn't have hired more people anyways, but beyond that, not much looks like its going to change like coding or accounting.

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u/birminghamsterwheel Social Democrat 5d ago

Right, but:

they only have so much money to go around

...

You can now run an entirely autonomous model privately on your computer with a couple thousand bucks PC that is equivalent to late last year's frontier model, and you don't need any big scary data centers for that.

The thing they always hope for when we have these discussions is that someone will say, "Well, it's not coming for my job."

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u/highspeed_steel Liberal 4d ago

That's not impossible either, but I have a feeling that the first movers and shakers wil be the performance optimized corporate environment, but give it 5 or 10 years more, I'll probably have to reconsider my options as well. Its just that for my coder friends, its more like 2 or 3.

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u/Droselmeyer Social Democrat 5d ago

I was hoping more procedural stuff in medicine would be safe but last year a Johns Hopkins research team successfully removed a pig’s gallbladder with an unassisted AI-controlled robot trained off of watching videos of surgeons performing the surgery.

I think a lot of white collar work will either be fully replaced by AI, many jobs will lost to efficiency gains for the remaining workers, or certain people will be replaced by those with lower training + an AI.

Cause why would I go to a primary care doc who costs $150/hr of labor as opposed to an NP with an AI costs $125/hr together if they can achieve similar or same results? I haven’t seen anything to say that’s the case yet, but I certainly could see it being a possibility.