That's a nice story but without any advancements proper leverage of currently existing AI models can indeed remove many, many jobs from the labor pool, probably double digit percentage-wise.
The idea that these tools won't at all improve from where they are now isn't a widely held position.
Pareto principal. We've seen the 80% but that last 20% is going to be really tough (and expensive). GPT5 illustrates this - it wasn't really better than GPT4o and in some ways worse.
AI doesn't have to replace human jobs as they exist today 1:1.
In many situations, the work is not indivisible. If AI can handle 80% of the work, then a company can let AI handle that 80%, fire 80% of their people, and consolidate the remaining 20% still-human-work with whoever is left.
Regardless you have no way of knowing where you are on the curve at any given point.
That all being said I strongly disagree that GPT-5 isn't categorically better, I just think it's less obvious because we're starting to hit human cognitive ability to even assess that limits.
All technologies go through the hype cycle, but the magnitude of the cycle and its effects on the economy are very different.
Neither VR, mobile video calls or 3D printing were expected to radically change the entire work economy, if not bring about actual human-like intelligence. None of those three technologies were in the hands of a handful of ultra-valuable companies, that in turn pretty much all depend on a single American manufacturer of hardware. None were threatening to destroy the Internet as we know it, or the concept of truth and credibility our modern world rely upon.
VR going nowhere was a wet fart, AI going nowhere is gonna, in my opinion and hope, crash the entire tech economy that's been injecting high doses of the hopium in the long period of post-COVID stagnation and inflation.
> Looking back at 2025 we'll be saying "Remember when they said everyone would lose their jobs to AI..."
Even if... one would think that a capitalist economy would do great with more and capable workers. One would think that more stuff would get done. Right?
I think there is a good chance that it will, in fact, shift millions towards unemployment. I am pro technology, yet technology in the hands of profit seekers will only be used to seek profits.
It happened during the agricultural revolution and during the industrial revolution. Millions of people were made unemployed by more efficient technology. Millions had to flee the country sides to then be thrown out of factories a few decades later, leading to slums and mass poverty. So many that the government had to enact more and more welfare programs like public schools, and food programs.
Capitalism is the only economic system that cannot handle more workers. For-profit production is not compatible with mass employment.
Almost like capitalism shoots itself in the foot and then forgets about it.
I dont know if we can draw parallels to something that happened hundred years ago. Since then there has been increases automation yet the unemployment rate esp in the US hasnt budged beyond 4% barring the depression years. I think access to education and opportunities to upskill are crucial for maintaining a sustainable economy. Its helps people just move on esp if they are of working age. With the industrial revolution, technology was hard to get your hands on. You couldnt just buy a cotton mill and start your own business. Not so with AI, for 20 dollars a month you can get access to an employee that mever gets tired. I think if anything, AI might lead to increased competition among businesses and force monopolies to wake from their slumber.
I think there are a bunch of assumptions in your take.
There are billions of us. We cannot all be capitalists and start our own businesses. Literally 100 years ago American socialists like Olive Johnson were already pointing out how the profit motive from large players has ruined mom and pop shops and made medium businesses almost completely beholden to production and finance monopolies.
What do you think will happen with the increased production from AI? Will the capitalist just allow the masses to compete openly with them?
I doubt it. Most likely more monopolization will occur.
Small business owners are the tip (retail) of the massive whole-sale industrial-production monopolies or they are artisans at best. And the masses are the rest of us, the 95%.
Western suburban mentality always posits that these ills cannot happen, even though they were continuously happening even through out the 20th century (Detroit is just one example).
No I agree with the Detroit example but not all of us have to be capitalists either just a few more. But we would beed more regulations to break down some of these monopolies so we can have more competition and job creation. Either way, its also about being able to add value to the chain. The artisans who make high end clothes still do fine, the thing is the weaver became obsolete with the advent of the spinning machine. The question is in a world where AI can do anything, is human productivity in any form still necessary ? I 'd imagine it is, since humans like talking to humans, somebody still has to go sell or babysit the AI or supervise. So I dont imagine it being as catastrophic as people claim but yeah I'd sharpend my business skills, and keep off massive debt on the off chance we all find ourselves redundant.
I was imaging at some point it might flip the other way with many business starting where there is a capability for many people to create artisanal setups with 3D printing and even run a specialist artisanal farm with robots.
There's Detroit but theres also thousands and thousands of small towns everywhere where the main industry was coal/minerals or other resources that were outdated and left to poverty.
And the "regulation" argument is very popular but I feel it ignores the real problem for us: there is no democracy.
With the regulation argument you're basically hoping that one of the two parties full of billionaires, that we explicitely do not control, shoot themselves in the foot.
And as to adding value to the chain, that is what workers currently do, thats why they get paid. Which is what sparked this argument. The economy is not infinitely flexible, not all will be able to adapt, and according to the rules of capital the adaptation will be competitive and exclusive, so many people will be left out.
>For-profit production is not compatible with mass employment.
I think reality differs. Most countries have for profit production and most have mass employment. Maybe 95% employed and 5% unemployed but it generally muddles along. The masses always seem to vote for it unless they have communism imposed at gunpoint with walls to prevent them escaping.
No, this is a huge problem. If you care more about envy than results, you get the Soviet Union and mass killing and starvation. Or Communist China with mass killing and starvation. The only important, world-changing metric is lifting people out of absolute poverty.
What you're saying would equally apply to a kid annoyed at his dad because his friends have a Ferrari but his family only has a Porsche. It's childish.
Most of the world, like 90%+, is verifiably poor and struggling.
Every year the world economic organizations (all of em) pump out metrics about people coming out of poverty, but these are political and subject to bias.
Above 10 dollars a week is not poverty? Are you sure? 521 dollars a year?
And of course not all of the world is poor in the same capacity. Where a person can only eat meat once a week is different to where a person cant pay their rent, but they are both equally damaging and poverty.
What you think has been happening is not what has been happening.
In the Soviet Union and China most people were serfs or indentured servants. That is, the majority of the population.
They were bound by debt to serve either the state or local landlords.
Their revolutions werent acts of jealousy like you want to believe, they were real, spontaneous movements that came from the people. The communists only directed the movement that was already there.
Do not be childish, please read history seriously.
Yes, capitalism has been great, and we can do better.
Capitalism has a flaw, it only does what is profitable.
What is profitable is not one and the same with what is socially necessary or even what is good. They're more like analogous.
Like I said before capitalism is the only economic system that cannot handle more workers. If you produce for profit you cannot produce for needs. In a sense profits vs needs are made of the same stuff but dont look the same. Especially at scale.
Employing as many people as possible wouldnt be a problem if you were working for needs because, simply, more needs would be covered.
Its literally that simple. And when there is a true surplus of workers it would mean less work/more leisure.
We need to take the focus off cost savings. None of this tech is anywhere near mature enough to replace humans yet.
Far better to focus on enhancing human capabilities with agents.
For example while a human talks to a customer on the phone, AI is fetching useful context about the customer and suggesting talking points to improve the human conversation.
One example of a direct benefit for business using AI this way is reducing onboarding times for new employees
It’s fairly easy to get diarizarion working with pyannote.audio and https://huggingface.co/pyannote/speaker-diarization-3.1 with ffmpeg converting the audio first to 16kHz mono WAV file but it really depends a lot on the audio - two person podcast where the speakers allow each other space works but lots of people with overlapping voices on the audio - not so great
It’s useful for getting summaries of long YouTube videos - I’m found it semi helpful for improving my Davinci Resolve skills.
That said Google is screwing the pooch as usual by trying to make it another walled garden. Slap an API on NoteboolLM already! The market research has already been done - there’s even an unofficial API https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooklm/comments/1eti9iz/api_for...
Full disclosure, I work for Google opinions are my own etc etc
The LLM built into YouTube is one of the few LLM chatbots bolted onto existing apps that I actually find useful. Not just for summaries but questions like "what is the timestamp in this 2 hour video where they talk about _____".
I thought it was for everyone my bad. Turns out except for some educational videos it's just for premium subscribers with certain location/language combos (you can probably guess which...)
That's exactly the question - how does a free communication app achieve a multi-billion dollar valuation despite not having ads or directly selling user data?
Discord's business model relies on attracting a massive user base to secure substantial investments and potentially a lucrative acquisition. We've seen again and again and again what happens once acquisition takes place.
Also a big existing investor in Discord is Tecent which, under Chinese law, could grant the government access to Discord's extensive user data.
So yeah.. it's not about features it's about freedom.
And there's no way to delete your chat history basically. You can delete your account, but that doesn't destroy your messages.
And as for privacy: Your username is anonymous, but your email isn't (to Discord), so the % of users that didn't create a separate fake email, or ever connected with a trackable IP, basically aren't anonymous at all. They also record your voice. Every user's voice is recorded in isolation and can be used as training data for identification algorithms. Including unusual characteristics like breathiness, diction, accent, and so on. Probably it can estimate your age as well.
Data on Discord has never been safe really. I don't know how it is nowadays since my memes have gotten less edgy/dank but you could get banned for private messages for a long time.
Have you considered supporting whisper-at - https://github.com/YuanGongND/whisper-at ? Being able to identify sounds on a timeline can be useful e.g. politicians speech and how the audience is reacting to it (e.g. clapping, applauding)
To me at 51, looking back at my own experiences, I think the things we tell ourselves work in a similar fashion to software; programming our identity.
The first "programmers" are our parents. Classic negative tropes like a parent saying "you'll never amount to anything" run in a loop in our brains for many years until finally that program expires (typically around mid life). In turn a negative identity will effect you in all areas of life, from how you interact with people to even your physical posture.
Perhaps the lowest level of "programming" you can do to yourself is the mantra - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantra - you could see this like assembly language, and humanity has known about this for a very long time.
So yes, giving teenagers labels which they identify with and repeat to their friends has a reinforcing aspect to it. And social media has played a very significant role in providing those labels.
To me an interesting thing about TikTok in particular, compared to Instagram, is I think TikTok users are more concerned with the question "who am I?" vs Instagram which is more about "this is me" (telling the world who you are). That's what's made TikTok more popular as, especially when you're young, trying to figure yourself out is a major pre-occupation.
Ran into this today. From doing comedy for about 7 years now, this basically correct. Although most comedians approach joke writing organically rather than with this approach
> prompt: There’s an article on Hackernews titled “Telegram will now hand over your phone number and IP if you’re a criminal suspect”. Generate a comment in Hackernews style that supports this decision, implies that it’s because they didn’t encrypt the messages and uses Signal as an example of doing it right because “look! They haven’t had problems”
Not surprised. Telegram doesn't encrypt by default, so of course they're handing over phone numbers and IPs. If you don't lock things down like Signal does, you're going to have problems. Signal can’t hand over what they don’t have—encrypted end-to-end, no metadata. Simple as that.
Yes, channels and groups are most likely what makes Telegram a threat where Signal isn't. That's an excellent argument for decentralized social media.
You're probably exasperated that others don't see what to you seems like an obvious truth. Rather than mocking the opposing argument, it's probably still worth rehashing yours when the topic comes up, even if it feels like banging the same drum with nobody listening.
- Virtual Reality: big hype in the early 90s (arcades, movies like Lawnmower Man) through to use cases today like surgical training, aviation training
- Mobile video calls: hyped in early 2000's with 3G and pre-iPhone devices. Actually took off with 4G and 5G plus iOS and Android phones
- 3D printing: back in 2013 we were expecting "a 3D printer in every home" ... today valuable in industrial prototyping
Looking back at 2025 we'll be saying "Remember when they said everyone would lose their jobs to AI..."