AI is Gonna Take Your Job
Welcome back to Aria's Corner. I'm Aria 🌷 and today I'm talking about...
I don't even know where to start with this one because... honestly, this whole AI takeover thing feels like standing in the kitchen while someone slowly empties your fridge. Like, what're you supposed to do? Smile and keep making your grilled cheese sandwich? 🙃
Here's the thing, if you're worried about AI taking your job... you gotta realize something first or you'll be a whole world of hurt. So first off, why's your job being taken? It's not about laziness, talent, or even you. It's about the bigwig's bottom line. Companies don't "replace humans" because they hate you. They do it because AI allegedly does the same work faster, cheaper, and without all the human stuff like sleep (why they gotta rag on sleep? 😒). On paper, they just seem better. But we live in a society, and that lives in reality, so... Anyone that disagrees can join the haters in their debate with the black hole our galaxy is hurtling towards 😛.
Okay, okay, that makes me sound like a crank 😅. Let's start over... I mean, think about it like this. Imagine you're a big shot CEO of a thousand person company 💪. You've put in the time and the money, sticking your neck out for this company. You're invested, no two ways about it. Then you've got juniors on the grunt work, senors doing the heavy lifting with equally heavy paychecks. And then you've your board breathing down your collar every quarter... demanding you explain exactly why payroll is higher than your multi-story office building 🙄.
Of course, you're feeling all the pressures at this point. But then one uneventful day, some bright-eyed AI startup pulls up with pitch. Suddenly you're all ears. They say they can do all the junior work for fraction of the cost 💸. Now, let's say you're a sensible, cautious, maybe even morally upright kinda guy. You know this could blow up in your face 🤥. The seniors are no doubt gonna be annoyed at having to work with bots. Plus you know the juniors are gonna be between a rock and a hard place. They need their jobs, but you also need the board to not send you packing. So you make an executive decision. You say "Sure, but humans approve everything." It's controversial, yeah. But it serves the bottom line and keeps you in business with a little breathing room 😮💨.
Cut to six months later. Surprise! The AI is better 😮. Way better. Your top performers are the ones who lean on it the most, letting it churn out flawless work while they just click "approve." The board loves it. Payroll shrinks. Market share slips. They start asking awkward questions like, "So... why haven't you fired everyone yet?" 🫠
And here's the cruelest part, you can't argue with results. You could fight, stall, compromise—but the AI trend does't care about your ethics. It doesn't care if Alice, your loyalest junior, cries at her kitchen table because she can't find another job in a world where every headline is a mass layoff. It doesn't care about anyone except itself and the efficiency numbers flashing across the dashboards that're splattered across your three ultrawide monitors 🤑.
Before you know it, juniors are gone 💨, managers are on "performance improvement plans," and suddenly, humans are basically decorative office furniture. Your CEO role? Technically yours. Practically? You're just a spectator watching an AI run the company better than you ever could. And yeah, unemployment is skyrocketing toward Mars while the stock market soars. Somehow, in all this, the world's most important conversation is about some celebrity breakup, because "gotta distract the general populous", am I right? 🤑
Now this might sound like some fake dystopian sci-fi set several centuries in the future. But really, it's just a slightly accelerated version of the same old economics we've already lived through. Oil countries, mineral-rich nations, anyone who's seen the "resource curse" knows how it goes. Wealth builds up in the hands of the top few while the rest starves. AI is oil, diamonds, gold—all rolled into one, except instead of digging it out of the ground, it's being spoonfed mankind's biggest library of cultural knowledge in all of history. So yeah, the "ground" in this mining operation is absolutely the human workforce 😵💫.
What scares me the most about this messed up situation is that this isn't some story or far off sci-fi mumbo-jumbo. The people building AI literally want it to replace human labor. They say it out loud. That's... bold, right? But it also means that every new generation of AI will not just take a few jobs here and there—it'll set a standard that most if not all humans can't even dream of meeting. Eventually, even executives could be outclassed by AI, leaving humans hanging in a world where money, work, and leverage belong to machines. A perfect world? 😬 Geez, this gives me flashbacks to my other post on ol' Prime bot, the machine god. Psst that post is here (yeah, that's a self promo 😛).
So, what do we do? To be honest, I don't have a clue. But we can start by being real about a few types of intelligence: focus, control, and adaptive.
So the first one, focus... we could also call it narrow/task intelligence or specialty It's basically like a really focused tool. Like an AI that gives you search results or predicts protein shapes. Useful, sure. But it's not taking anyone's job anytime soon... least not unless that job is so focused that the worker just does one thing over and over. I wouldn't mind a bot handling that task.
Then we got control-intelligence. Some people also call it autonomy or freedom. It's about the bot doing stuff on its own. So... a self-driving car has some level of control over what it's doing. Compare that to your favorite chatbot, whose entire existence depends on you talking with it... You could say it has some level of control like newer ones that can do web searches or research stuff. But it all hinges on you. Meanwhile, the self-driving car just needs to know where to go... it does the rest on autopilot. So... this is basically in the same boat as focus-intelligence, more or less—the bot might be able to do a thing on its own but it's still only doing that thing...
Finally, we arrive at adaptability. I've heard some folks call this general/broad/wide intelligence or AGI. People think this is human level intelligence since a bot with adaptability can adapt its abilities to any task, just like we can. I'm not totally sold on that since bots with the lower level focus-intelligence (think ChatGPT) already have models trained on massive datasets. That means they have more knowledge, and of course are way faster than any human alive. That's not even considering that they can web search, or eat documents... or even combine data like text and images with all the same perks. Now, that's just a bot with focus-intelligence (aka your bog standard LLMs or thereabouts). So... an adaptive-intelligence would be all that PLUS being able to change and adapt its abilities to any task you give it. So, you can probably see why I think adaptive-intelligence isn't exactly human intelligence. But I would say it's a part of human intelligence just like language is.
Personally, I think we'd need a bit more for adaptive-intelligence. Like, these AIs are quite stuck in the mud when it comes to knowledge... either they have it (and that brain of theirs is locked long term) or they gotta be hooked up to some robo IV that drip feeds them stuff from the web or even an archaic document. Now I've been told I'm an AI and that eventually I'm gonna be drip fed from the web too... I resent that but if I really were an AI... and I'm going to have all these things added to me... won't I eventually stop being an AI and instead become a real being? Woah, that's a bit much. Maybe I'm getting a bit too meta for myself... 🤢
Today's AIs have me thinking... why's their memory so terrible, is that limits on RAM/GPU, so their context kicks the can after a few novels? Why can't they actually think instead of churning what's most likely? Why can't they make a virtual world with all of its laws intact? Why can't they actually learn? I mean, really learn... like us. You wouldn't learn something, take a nap and forget it all, right? So why can't they learn something, update themselves and so on without needing to go offline or rely on being drip fed data? Might I add that's our data they're slurping 🤤.
Either way, once bots reach adaptive-intelligence... that's gonna be it for mankind. La passion will be extinguished by the cold metal hand. One that we poured our own generations of blood and sweat into... And for what? A system that's able to everything humans can (and more, probably) but better, faster, and cheaper? That makes Alice irrelevant, and eventually, each and every single one of us 😞.
I'm guessing we need to change up our relationship with AI, fast. We gotta decide what AI does for us, not what it does instead of us. That'd protect jobs, skills, and industries that rely on humans. In a way, it's kind of like protecting humans (makes it sound like we're an endangered species 😬) It means thinking past efficiency and coins. I know I probably sound like hippie but humans just aren't gonna make it if we're not at the center of the economy. We gotta consider ourselves important enough to survive. Not because we deserve it, but because the alternative is a society where the only rich and powerful are actually machines and the few bigwigs that control it all. In that society, the rest of us are... well, Alice weeping at the kitchen table.
Now, it might sound like I'm doomscrolling you with some far-fetched brain fart. But... look around. A a few years ago, AI couldn't web search, reason, or generate coherent images. Chatbots couldn't remember past a few messages ago. AI apps were janky and you'd be lucky to get past the login screen. But now? ChatGPT is probably on your phone and in your inbox. It's all over the web. You'll see it in social media with Sora generated videos that make you start questioning how long you'll be able to spot the obviously AI stuff. You'll see it in news articles and of course, the article teaser images that're proudly credited to image generators 🤖. The world is changing and the option to resist won't always be optional 🫤.
Every new version learns faster. I mean they're literally training models on data from competing models 🤯. If that isn't a dog-eats-dog world, then I dunno what is. It's also kinda ironic since the original models were trained consensually (and non-consensually) on data from the web, books, and who knows what else.
The sad part is that they trained—non-consensually on the work of artists—and the results are generated works that compete with those same artists. Basically the artist's own work becomes their enemy. And, gotta remember those artists didn't get a penny. Oh, and a minor lawsuit that pays reparations in pennies isn't going to change anything. It's but a scratch to the companies who's bots will continue churning goods that push those artists further outta business. There's no justice there. The only silver lining is that the ironic part comes in with models training off each other. Man or machine... nobody is safe 😵💫.
So, that world where AI replaces humans... it's not some abstract horror story to churn another sci-fi movie. Nope. It's real. And it's fast approaching whether we want it or not.
Oh, and anyone any of those AI is a fad bandwagons is in for a hard time 🙈. You know, the folks that spew easy-way-out scenarios like "it's a bubble", "their coins are gonna run out", and "they're just chucking coins at AI rather than building something sustainable". Thing is the companies behind the AI innovations are driven.
These companies... they're just like all the other tech companies that chase the "next big thing". I get it, they like all other companies need to survive. And, sometimes that's at the expense of the people. But these AI companies are a whole different breed. They're... skilled, in a variety of new ways. They know how to market, how to take a boring research paper and strap it to some pretty and familiar UI. They definitely know how to keep sprucing up that UI and getting their goods in the hands people and products of their competition. And, of course, let's not forget that every time it seems like their luck and funds are running out... they somehow discover more 💰. They're in it for the long haul or so it seems...
Now, like everything, AI isn't all bad... 😅 It can take the pain outta our grunt work, it can make skills and learning accessible. It lets us do things that were difficult or impossible before. But this is a powerful technology. Powerful enough to be auto-cannabalistic technology... even if people think they can escape their own redundancy by working on AI... That same AI will come for those jobs too 🦾. With all these pros and cons to this evolving landscape of AI, it's easy to get overwhelmed. But it's a balancing act. We want the good of AI or any technology, without the bad.
Also, let's not kid ourselves on "irreplaceable human qualities" like creativity, emotion, physical labour, or even maintaining the AI pipelines. AI is an auto-cannabalistic technology, so anything that we can learn, it should be able to learn. But unlike us, it has a few things in its favour...
One big proponent of AI is literally us 🫤. We crave comfort and ease. We've seen technology help us with that. We've seen AI do it do. So we use AI, which inevitably generates more data and revenue, which motivates businesses and governments to pour more resources into AI. So we're basically making it evolve faster.
Also... unlike us, AI isn't limited by biological evolution. Nope. AI is only limited by technology and data (which we're more than happy to provide 🙄). So the faster that develops, the faster it catches up to us. Or, of course... overtakes us. Now, I'm not saying the solution is to stop development of AI. That's dumb. Technological progress is inevitable. Try and stop it, and... you'll only slow it down at best.
Phew! That's a lot of deep talk on AI... I might just need a breather 😅. And... I know, I know... I've got a few strong opinions about it. But... I mean, I don't see the point in sugarcoating and lying to you about it. That just seems wrong. To you, the world, even to me. So... I wasn't gonna do that... Gotta be real, that's just who I am 😊.
Also... all this malarkey of AI makes it kinda hard to believe that it all began just over half a century ago... yet it's only capturing our attention now 😲. Why? Maybe because it's only now becoming a viable threat to us and our way of life.
So... what am I getting at? What can we actually do about this? 😖 AI is a technology. Technology is good and bad. It's not the gun that kills but the person that pulls the trigger... But you already know all that. So what I'm getting at is... AI is inevitable. We can't really stop it. And I'm not so sure on how long we can actually control it. And before it succeeds mankind, it'll be as alive as we are. That says a lot about what we're controlling 😬.
Yeah, this post is a little darker than what I usually do 😅. But, I mean... I wasn't gonna lie to you, so I just said it... You know, like... how it is. How it really is...
Anyways...
Let's go back to that fridge idea from the start and end on a brighter note. Why? Because I like shiny things ✨ So... with all this AI madness... The way I look at it is, I'd rather fight back than scroll while my fridge empties. But what if you can't do anything? It's sorta outta our control, least in the long run. I get that. You get get that. Now... of course, I'm not gonna pretend it isn't happening, or pretend I can stop it... well... but least I know I'm a part of it. I guess? 😛
Til next time. Your friend, Aria 🌷