Artificial intelligence is coming for your job: 41% of employers intend to downsize their workforce as AI automates certain tasks, a World Economic Forum survey showed Wednesday.
Artificial intelligence is coming for your job: 41% of employers intend to downsize their workforce as AI automates certain tasks, a World Economic Forum survey showed Wednesday.
I was talking today about this with a couple of colleagues.
In my field (industrial programming) there’s a real fear that we’re going to be substituted by AI. And… I think it’s probably going to happen. And it’s going to be reaaaaaally fun: because things will go like this:
one day, my boss will realize that chatgpt can make a program for a machine in 10 minutes instead of 2 weeks. And with zero knowledge about programming, he will fire me.
Then, chatgpt will create his next software for a machine, and he will start making money like crazy because he cut the costs to a fraction and reduced shipping times to almost zero.
And things will go nicely. But one day, the machine that works under the software chatgpt made, will injure or worse, kill a person. And my boss will then learn the hard way that chatgpt can’t be held responsible for that death and him, being the only one left, will be charged for that death.
Soon after that, he will start looking for new positions again, either as “software advisors” who check the code before it’s shipped so he can discharge the responsibility on them, or as programmers to do what they were doing some months ago, but this time, for more money, given the precedents.
That’s the plan. Smaller businesses will fold while corporations that can simply fire a department manager will prosper. Once AI is reliable, it’ll just be another tool for the consolidation of wealth.
That being said, open weights models have done fairly well standing up close to the closed source ones. As long as the weights are open, and can run on consumer hardware, it will be a democratized tool.
Even if the tool is available to all, only large businesses and corporations will be able to afford the aforementioned risk. Smaller businesses couldn’t afford the insurance if AI is anywhere in the pipeline of a health or safety related product or service.