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Ok-Cartoonist5349 OP t1_j9ae4jz wrote

A recent study published by Sortlist revealed that 1 out of 5 ChatGPT users are worried it could replace them and/or destroy their job. Meanwhile, more and more articles try to explain that, depite being really powerful, ChatGPT could never replace human workers - but it could greatly improve their productivity.

And what about all the opportunities it might create in the near future? This article looks at data labeling, or prompt engineering for instance, but there might be a lot of other options! What do you think?

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ItilityMSP t1_j9ao5xu wrote

Are you kidding? improving productivity is replacing jobs. Lawyer needs 3 paralegals to prepare for a case now he just needs one part time to validate ChatGPT output on relevant case law. Soon as it’s trained up he’ll be able to that himself, and have it create the arguments which he then vets. Work that took days done in an hour, charge for days until competition ramps up, minder to bring this up at the next bar meeting so we don’t under cut ourselves. Radiologist hospital we only need one part-time now to review and sign off on diagnosis, before we needed 4, the AI is better than he is at finding stuff, fortunately it can’t sign off yet.

Any repetitive knowledge work can potentially be replaced, even high level work like cardiologists (interpreting blood work,bp, ecg, echo cardiograms), engineering (bridge design, stress loads, hvac optimization) let alone bookkeeping, accounting, reviewing/marking student work.

So much paperwork will be able to be automated, and then just have a human oversea training and exceptions. What took 20 people will go down to one with an AI helper. Will a company keep on 20. It may keep on two for redundancy and crossover training in different depts.

If this productivity was shared across the economy and all workers we would be in a utopia, but that’s not how our system works.

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-Ch4s3- t1_j9as4sz wrote

You could have automated most office work 10 years ago, and people have talked a lot about it but for some reason it’s never fully realized.

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Tetref t1_j9bm2ti wrote

There was not enough computing power at that time. This time it´s different.

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-Ch4s3- t1_j9bpb1r wrote

No, there was. Most things don’t need fancy AI tools to automate. A lot of jobs boil down to moving data from a file/website through excel and to email or PowerPoint. That’s usually easy to automate and almost never automated.

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clay12340 t1_j9dlupu wrote

Are you missing the entirety of the data space in IT?

The reason those jobs aren't replaced is because the people replacing them right now are generally more expensive, though produce a more valuable end product. So the most import tasks in this category are constantly automated. It is essentially what I do all day. Brenda's performance spreadsheets just aren't important enough to be on the chopping block yet.

All that said AI/automation has been improving the process of doing that for some time. I don't think it will be ChatGPT, but every major tool that is involved in the data space is currently marketing on their AI tools. Mostly it seems to be a bit of stretch to call it AI. They are definitely at the point where the work I was doing 5 years ago in this space is largely gone and replaced by tools that do the bulk of the repetitive work automatically. Now large chunks of it are essentially just identifying the failures of the tool and resolving them or handling the more intricate edge cases.

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-Ch4s3- t1_j9dndab wrote

What I mean is that the diffusion of responsibility in large organizations is a feature. Automation will concentrate responsibility and liability, so organizations will resist it until the benefits are overwhelming.

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reidlos1624 t1_j9avw9r wrote

Thing is demand for a lot of what you listed hasn't dropped despite there being several tools to massively improve productivity. We've seen huge increases in productivity since the 50's and we are now at 3.5% unemployment. I'm not familiar with cardiovascular specialist demand but I am an engineer.

The decrease in manufacturing wasn't driven by automation so much as it's been driven by offshoring manufacturing to other countries. As an engineer who works in automation, demand for engineers is still super high even with tools and software that vastly improve productivity. From a labor perspective we are automating many jobs but only out of a need because there aren't enough people willing to work at the wage we offer.

Which brings me to another point, my bigger concern is wages not jobs. Wages have not correlated with productivity. While this is related it's not the same issue and some solutions are similar and others are not. The wage issue is a problem now, not some theoretical future decades from now.

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Hobbs512 t1_j9dnzwq wrote

Businesses have a habit of growing when productivity increases occur and they scale-up. But is it feasible for every industry and company to do this indefinitely? What if we start producing an over-supply of goods and services? Surely that would contribute to deflation no? Obv it's more complicated than just that tho. But of course a company in a capitalistic economy is going to take steps to increase profits and they don't do that as well when they start paying their employees higher wages.

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reidlos1624 t1_j9dwhcr wrote

Right, which is why I think we need to move past capitalism. Capitalism does some stuff really well (the whole problem of scarcity as seen by developments of industrialization and automation) but even Adam Smith saw the dangers of wealth being concentrated at the top and wrote about the duty of the government to regulate industry and capital. AI and automation may finally force us to change our perspective on the notion that profit is the only good thing and start focusing on the well being of the people, since that is the government's primary goal. We see right now how profits over people hurt the economy as the largest and wealthiest corporations record record profits while the inflation they created is sucking the middle and lower class dry.

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