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How long will it be until we realize AI is detrimental to society? (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Here in the USA, you have to be afraid for your job these days. Layoffs are rampant everywhere due to outsourcing, and now we have AI on the horizon promising to make things more efficient, but we really know what it is actually going to be used for. They want automate out everything. People packaging up goods for shipping, white collar jobs like analytics, business intelligence, customer service, chat support. Any sort of job that takes a low or moderate amount of effort or intellectual ability is threatened by AI. But once AI takes all these jobs away and shrinks the amount of labor required, what are all these people going to do for work? It's not like you can train someone who's a business intelligence engineer easily to go do something else like HVAC, or be a nurse. So you have the entire tech industry basically folding in on itself trying to win the rat race and get the few remaining jobs left over.....

But it should be pretty obvious that you can't run an entire society with no jobs. Because then people can't buy groceries, groceries don't sell so grocery stores start hurting and then they can't afford to employ cashiers and stockers, and the entire thing starts crumbling. This is the future of AI, basically. The more we automate, the less people can do, so they don't have jobs and no income, not able to survive...

Like, how long until we realize how detrimental AI is to society? 10 years? 15?

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 4 days ago (2 children)

At some point society will need to realize that traditional work that is handled by automation (whether AI or not) isn’t necessary and economic systems will have to change.

I’m not an expert by any means, and I just don’t see this happening in the near-term. My opinion is that for now (the short-term at least) it’ll just widen the gap between rich and poor.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 4 days ago

Yeah, industrialization didn't end the world and complete automation won't either unless we decide to roll over and die instead of changing things so people benefit from the automation instead of suffering because of it.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago

Automation should be a good thing. If we can have things that need to happen be done more efficiently with less work we absolutely should. But we should distribute the results of those efficiency gains fairly, which is where the current system fails.