It’s not being driven by the UK. Check out all the other countries in the West rolling out Digital ID and it’s clearly coordinated just from the timing
We need to stop using AI as an umbrella term. It’s worth remembering that LLMs can’t play chess and that the best chess models like Leela Chess Zero use deep neutral networks.
Generative AI - which the world now believes is AI, is not the same as predictive / analytical AI.
It’s fairly easy to demonstrate this by getting ChatGPT to generate a new relatively complex spreadsheet then asking it to analyze and make changes to the same spreadsheet.
The problem we have now is uninformed people believing AI is the answer to everything… if not today then in the near future. Which makes it more of a religion than a technology.
Which may be the whole goal …
> Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions.
Ok yep, fair. My comment was about using copilot-ish tech to generate plausible looking spreadsheets.
The kind of things that a domain expert Brenda knows that ChatGPT doesn't know (yet) are like:
There are 3 vendors a, b, c who all look similar on paper but vendor c always tacks on weird extra charges that take a lot of angry phone calls to sort out.
By volume or weight it looks like you could get 100 boxes per truck but for industry specific reasons only 80 can legally be loaded.
Hyper specific details about real estate compliance in neighbouring areas that mean buildings that look similar on paper are in fact very different.
A good Brenda can understand the world around her as it actually is, she is a player in it and knows the "real" rules rather than operating from general understanding and what people have bothered to write down.
What I love about the words enshitification is it’s _almost_ autological. It takes a nice crisp on syllable word like “shit” and ruins it by adding 5 extra syllables. It just doesn’t worse over time, to be truly autological
It’s worth (re)watching the 1985 movie Brazil in particular the character of Harry Tuttle, hearing engineer https://youtu.be/VRfoIyx8KfU
Neither government or corporations are going to “save us” simply because sheer short termism and incompetence. But the seem incompetence will make the coming dystopia ridiculous
I do wonder if somewhere like China might be better off - they might not have muh freedumb, but their government seems keen to look after the majority and fund things that corporations wouldn't.
Feel like there's more to this point (plus the documentation). By now we've all see the inverted-U-shaped performance curve when coding with LLMs within a single thread / context: the model starts strong, plateaus as the context fills up, and eventually declines as semantic drift sets in.
Sometimes in this situation, it works better to throw away the current code and re-implement, using what's been learnt so far, than continue working with the current context of having new contexts try to salvage the current state of some code.
Documentation is great as a reflect of the current state of some code but I've had good experiences "re-constructing" the steps taken to arrive at a current implementation by writing commit messages that are intended for an LLM, extract that later, have an LLM use it as a basis for writing a fresh "spec" for some code, that yet another LLM uses to actually write that code.
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
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