Unfortunately, the possibility of procurement AI being strategically programmed in such a way that it identifies only certain sources is a very real concern. Particularly when a few powerful people have the ability to tip the scales in their own favor.
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I believe government can and should play a role here. Coal mining is an example of a sector killed by tech and societal shifts to clean/renewable energy. Entire areas have become economically depressed and stubbornly remained so even during periods of historically strong economic growth. It’s not even that miners need massive retraining - they could become truck drivers or heavy equipment operators for example, which are roles still in high demand. But the cost of moving and training is an impossibly steep cliff when you’re already barely putting food on the table.
But clean energy itself has sparked a ton of other jobs, which I why I believe that at the macro level these things tend to work themselves out over time and end up being a net benefit. It’s at the micro/individual level that there’s a lot of pain.
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This is the argument that we made to our son when discussing tech’s effect on the widening divide, but his response from his position in Army cyber is that the “ton” of jobs being created are not by and large high-skill/high-paying jobs, and those that are will tend to land on the already advantaged side of the divide. What we’re seeing and most likely will continue to see is a rapidly growing population of under-employed low-skill/low-pay workers.
It’s funny that you mention trucking as that is one sector he says the military is very concerned about. Truckers and trucking infrastructure move almost three-quarters of American freight. Any disruption to the transportation industry that displaces these workers will have a massive effect on the job market. When those Prime, Walmart, and other trucks start loading/unloading/driving themselves (and they are already heading that way), we will start to feel some serious pain.
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Isn’t there a shortage of truck drivers due to long hours and low pay that has been ongoing for well over a decade ? Seems like this is an area in which AI could be a godsend.
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Part of the shortage is also due to the increase in freight volume which is part of the drive to automation, but there are still a lot of people employed in trucking infrastructure. The move to automation in all facets of transportation (people and goods movement), including cars/vans, etc., is included in this impact.
I’m not especially versed in this area. I’m just passing on the concerns our son has laid out based on what some areas of his work entail.
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At this point, I can jokingly make a connection between this thread and “Products I Don’t Get The Hype About”: I nominate “self-driving trucks.” I’d rather encounter a human-driven truck any day! But maybe I’m just like those people who reacted with horror to the invention of the automobile. 
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Self-driving trucks are, I think, rapidly advancing. The big dockworker’s fight this year was about the introduction of a lot of automating technology. Dockworkers are among the highest paid worker because of the leverage that a strike has – all
West Coast ports close. Truckers don’t have that leverage so I think the technology will get deployed whenever it is ready.
If you go to San Francisco, you can get an autonomous car from uber through a partnership Google’s Waymo division formed with uber. ShawSon said it was unnerving the first time, but they’ve gotten used to it. And the automated car drives very conservatively compared to some of the drivers.
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@ChoatieMom, ShawSon who is in the tech world in SF was studying computational and mathematical engineering a decade ago. At the time, he said that the world was shifting such that those creating and funding productivity-enhancing technologies would reap a disproportionate share of the wealth and that in a sane polity, there would be significant redistribution to make sure those who did not benefit would not want to revolt. But, as he said then, the US will not institute that kind of redistribution and hence the only career path that made sense was to be a creator of or investor in productivity-enhancing technology.
As your son pointed out, as technology gobbled up jobs, those without the tech background will be competing for less attractive jobs. Probably more demand and less supply, so the world would be worse for them.
We don’t yet know if the non-tech jobs created will be bigger in number or higher in quality. Maybe it all works out. I’m not so optimistic. I think a big danger is highly reactive populist governments who do things like prevent the automation of the docks to keep jobs (which just increases the cost to consumers of imported goods and decreases speed of delivery).
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AI has made some amazing strides just in the last year or so. But like all tools, it’s good for a specific purpose, and handles poorly at others. It’s good for cheap generation of commercials or advanced video rendering. Military, for instance, you need people to make life or death decisions.
And yet the military is studying and embracing AI for all it’s worth. I posted on an earlier thread that was discussing AI in the context of plagiarism that our son leads a development team and doesn’t want anyone wasting time coding what can be produced effortlessly. His developers are now freed from mundane coding tasks and can focus on solving problems faster and more efficiently. They can review Chat code and, for anything not quite on target, feed the alternative in to ensure that that particular interpretation does not recur. This type of iterative learning improves both Chat and the user which is how AI machine learning is supposed to work.
During his captain’s course, his team, with the approval of the instructor, used ChatGPT to complete all of their homework. They fed in the exact problems (strategic battlefield notes, resource allocation, communications, logistics issues, etc.) to see what the program would come up with. They were stunned by the acceptability of the output, often requiring little modification. Army Cyber is very interested/involved in AI capability and is developing and experimenting with it in many ways. What AI can do, let it do, and use manpower to teach it to do better.
The conundrum is that in order to improve AI, people need to have the skills to evaluate its output and modify as necessary, kind of a chicken-and-egg dilemma. So it is still very important for students/workers to be able to do original work and hone their problem solving skills to avoid using AI to create cement lifejackets.
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It’s amazing that the creators of AI are so successful, they’re producing dumber kids unable to maintain AI’s future, setting the groundwork for its own demise. The irony is cruel!
I’m not sure how AI is producing dumber kids, but @Shawbridge’s comment:
…those creating and funding productivity-enhancing technologies would reap a disproportionate share of the wealth…the only career path that made sense was to be a creator of or investor in productivity-enhancing technology.
goes to the point that those who ARE able to create/develop/maintain/use/benefit from AI are the ones who will prosper most. I doubt we will ever run out of expertise to hone AI to its (disturbing) limit as there is no reason to believe we will run out of tech elites.
As for how we teach our children in this increasingly AI world, how schools harness this beast will be interesting to watch. I don’t believe policies or honor codes to define or prevent plagiarism are the way to go. I think we need to embrace the power and accessibility of AI tools and teach students how to use them to best advantage. And, perhaps, altogether change the way we teach and what we expect students to learn.
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I do see AI performing a lot more work now than before. We use it to auto detect “issues” when it used to be done manually. I am in the data business, and we use AI to detect quality issues, create business definitions based on usage, find patterns. We still have human intervention to validate the results, but people we need to validate results are seasoned professionals with a lot of experiences.
Doctors can use AI to detect diseases much quicker and probably more accurate over time.
Insurance can use AI to help with underwriting, which used to require highly skilled (paid) underwriters to do.
Some company’s call centers are using AI to help their representatives respond to their customers more efficiently, and then also leverage AI to coach/evaluate their reps on how they are doing. It gives the reps real time feedback and possibly eliminate the need of having more supervisors.
I know many software already use AI. The reason I know is our regulators require us to disclose when/where AI is used in a software. If we purchase a vendor software, we need the vendor to disclose to us if they are using AI in their product.
We don’t have to many AI in production yet, but I think we will be using it more and it will eliminate some jobs.
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I just used chatgpt to perform a task (create a quiz questions based on a reading and format them in such a way to be compatible with with an intermediary tool that creates the quiz automatically in an LMS) that would have taken me at least an hour normally. It did it in about 45 seconds. I absolutely think my job (80% of what I do) could be automated. If I were younger/earlier in my career, I would be very nervous.
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I have worked for 28 years for small to mid sized companies in distribution and manufacturing as an accountant. Computers in general have reduced the number of employees needed in the office. I have 5 people in my department outside of myself. This same company 20 years ago would need 2-4 more people to get the work done. Customer Service/Order Entry/Inside Sales jobs have gone down a lot because of EDI.
It would take some massive computer advances for my department to be cut in half. Possible to say drop one employee, but to go from 6 to 3 would be tough.
I got about 10 years left before retirement so I am just trying to hang on.
Many companies struggle to implement a new ERP system let alone adding AI to the mix.
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My DH was a partner in a management consulting practice and freelances now in retirement to one of his former clients. He uses ChatGPT heavily in preparing content and presentations and laments almost daily how much easier his job would have been and how much higher quality output he and his teams could have produced had this tool been available when he was managing engagements. AI has increased his productivity to the point where he only needs a day or two a week to produce what would have taken him magnitudes longer previously. Also, he spends more time advising now than dealing with the mundane aspects of deliverables. He is also teaching his client to use these tools to enable them to do more on their own and only pay him for his particular expertise. He feels AI is upping the game on both sides.
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@Snowball2, we have not addressed your comment about power. It is certainly the case that we don’t have sufficient power to cope with all of our needs even before AI. Moreover, our electrical grid is fairly antiquated and needs lots of money to be upgraded. The IRA is supposed to pay for that, but whether that survives the change in President, who knows.
I suspect that the way to do this is solar and wind power. Solar panels are incredibly inexpensive and one can build solar fields on the roof and next to industrial buildings if you put them in sunny places. I wonder if one could build fields big enoughte on si to power the data centers.
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Side Topic: Electricity deficiency is also hampering the progress of quantum computing. When we solve the power limitation problem, we will be able to unleash the power of quantum AI to enhance machine learning algorithms, creating more powerful AI models that will be able to process vast amounts of information at immeasurable speed. A whole new world, a whole nother ball of wax.
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“ * Biden order vows to address dramatic needs for power for AI data centers
- Energy, Defense departments will lease sites to host gigawatt-scale AI data centers
- US forecasts AI centers will need as much as five gigawatts of capacity by 2028”
The order calls for leasing federal sites owned by Defense and Energy departments to host gigawatt-scale AI data centers and new clean power facilities - to address enormous power needs on a short time frame.
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Are we all gonna have AI bots post for us here🤣
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