The AI boom is screwing over Gen Z | ChatGPT is commandeering the mundane tasks that young employees have relied on to advance their careers.::ChatGPT is commandeering the tasks that young employees rely on to advance their careers. That’s going to crush Gen Z’s career path.

  • Obsession@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    The fucked up part isn’t that AI work is replacing human work, it’s that we’re at a place as a society where this is a problem.

    More automation and less humans working should be a good thing, not something to fear.

    • Sheltac@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      But that would require some mechanism for redistributing wealth and taking care if those who choose not to work, and everyone knows that’s communism.

      • dmention7@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        So much this. The way headlines like this frame the situation is so ass-backwards it makes my brain hurt. In any sane world, we’d be celebrating the automation of mundane tasks as freeing up time and resources to improve our health, happiness, and quality of life instead of wringing our hands about lost livelihoods.

        The correct framing is that the money and profits generated by those mundane tasks are still realized, it’s just that they are no longer going to workers, but funneled straight to the top. People need to get mad as hell not at the tech, but at those who are leveraging that tech to specifically to deny them opportunity rather than improving their life.

        I need a beer. 😐

        • starcat@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          money and profits generated by those mundane tasks are still realized, it’s just that they are no longer going to workers, but funneled straight to the top

          Workers should be paid royalties for their contributions. If “the top” is able to reap the rewards indefinitely, so should the folks who built the systems.

    • P03 Locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      Exactly. This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with UBI.

      But, the rich and plebes alike will push AI as the Boogeyman as a distraction from the real enemy.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        There’s this bizarre right-wing idea that if everyone can afford basic necessities, they won’t do anything. To which I say, so what? If you want to live in shitty government housing and survive off of food assistance but not do anything all day, fine. Who cares? Plenty of other people want a higher standard of living than that and will have a job to do so. We just won’t have people starving in the street and dying of easily fixable health problems.

        • P03 Locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          We also have to be careful of how people define this sort of thing, and how the wide range of our current wealth inequality affects how something like UBI would be implemented.

          In the rich’s eyes, UBI is already a thing and it’s called “welfare”. It’s not enough that people on welfare can barely survive on the poverty-level pittance that the government provides, but both the rich and slightly-more-well-off have to put down these people as “mooching off the system” and “stealing from the government”, pushing for even more Draconian laws that punish their situation even further. It is a caste of people who are portrayed as even lower scum than “the poors”, right down to segregating where they live to “Section 8” housing as a form of control.

          UBI is not about re-creating welfare. It’s about providing a comfortable safety net while reducing the obscene wealth gap, as technology drives unemployment even higher. Without careful vigilance, the rich and powerful will use this as another wedge issue to create another class of people to hate (their favorite pastime), and push for driving the program down just as hard as they do for welfare.

          • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 year ago

            The differences between UBI and “welfare” are perhaps subtle but very important IMO.

            In Australia there’s an entire industry around punishing and humiliating people that need welfare. It’s just absurd and unnecessary. UBI avoids any of that by just making the entitlement universal.

            We have “job network providers” which IMO do not provide any value to anyone. Suppose in a particular region there are 4,000 unemployed people and this particular week there are 400 new jobs. To receive welfare you need to be working with a job network provider to find a job. However, those job network providers aren’t creating any jobs. One way or another 400 people will probably get a new job this week. They might help a particular person tidy up their resume or whatever but they’re not actually finding jobs for people. Their only purpose is to make receiving welfare a chore, it’s absurd.

            There’s also people stuck in the welfare trap. As in, if I don’t work at all I get $w welfare, but for every $1 I earn I lose $0.50 from $w, so why would I work a shitkicker job flipping burgers for effectively half the pay.

          • CoderKat@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Yeah, modern welfare isn’t remotely enough to match the spirit of UBI. It’s structured so that you have to have a job. It’s not enough to live by at all. And bizarrely, there’s some jobs where they’d actually be worse than welfare because min wage is so crazy low in many parts of the US.

            And even if you’re on disability, you’re gonna have a hard time. It pays barely enough to maybe scrape by if you cut every possible corner.

            No form of welfare is close to being livable for the typical recipient. At best, they usually give you some spending cash while you live with friends or family. Maybe if you’re really lucky you can find that rare, rare subsidized housing and manage to just barely make ends meet.

            By comparison, most proponents of UBI want it to be livable. Nothing glamorous, admittedly, but enough to live a modest life. Enough that if there’s no jobs available you qualify for (or none that will pay a living wage, at least), you’ll be okay.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s not even a new thing either.

      It used to be that every single piece of fabric was handmade, every book handwritten.

      Humans have been losing out on labor since they realized Og was faster at bashing rocks together than anyone else.

      It’s just a question of if we redistribute the workload. Like turning “full time” down to 6 days a week and eventually 5, or working hours from 12+ to 8hrs. Which inflates the amount of jobs to match availability.

      Every single time the wealthy say we can’t. But eventually it happens, the longer it takes, the less likely it’s peaceful.

      • dustyData@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        But eventually

        There’s no eventually, people have been killed, murdered and harassed whilst fighting to make it a reality. Someone has to fight to make it happen and an “eventually” diminishes the value of the effort and risks put forth by labor activists all over the world throughout history. It didn’t happen magically, people worked really hard to make it so.

      • Bazoogle@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Where are you that 7 days a week 12 hour days is full time? That’s literally just always working. Standard full time in the states is 40 hour work weeks.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There are both dystopian (a tiny Elite owns the automatons and gets all gains from their work and a massive unemployed Underclass barelly surviving) and utopian (the machines do almost everything for everybody) outcomes for automation and we’re firmly in the path for Dystopia.

    • legion02@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The problem, as it almost always is, is greed. Those at the top are trying to keep the value derived from the additional efficiency that ai is going to bring for themselves.

    • Galluf@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This was exactly the problem that Charles Murray pointed out in the bell curve. We’re rapidly increasing the complexity of the available jobs (and the successful people can output 1000-1,000,000 times more than simple labor in the world of computers). It’s the same concept as the industrial revolution, but to a greater degree.

      The problem is that we’re taking away the vast majority of the simple jobs. Even working at a fast food place isn’t simple.

      That alienates a good chunk of the population from being able to perform useful work.

    • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Precisely, the hill to die on is to socialize the profits, not to demand we keep the shitty, injuring, repetitive task jobs that break a person’s back by 35.

      You don’t protest street lights to keep the lamp lighters employed. The economy needs to change fundamentally to accommodate the fact that many citizens won’t have jobs yet need income. It won’t change, but it needs to.

      So we’ll keep blaming the wrong thing, technology that eases the labor burden on humanity, instead of destroying the wealth class that demands they be the sole beneficiary of said technology and its implementation in perpetuity to the detriment of almost everyone outside the owner class. Because if we did that, we’d be filthy dirty marxist socialist commies that hate freedumb, amirite?!