The thing a lot of people fail to understand about many technologies is that they don’t always eliminate ALL of something.
The internet didn’t eliminate all of almost any job, but it significantly reduced the number of people working in many jobs.
Significant impacts reductions have been felt in:
- Mail delivery
- Retail workers
- Newspapers
- Landline Telephone Services
- Photograph printing
- Encyclopedias
- Movie theaters
- Video Game Arcades
and more
All new technologies eventually displace obsolete jobs. But crucially, they usually do it slowly enough that the workers whose jobs are being obsoleted aren’t all sacked virtually overnight (i.e. society has the time to evolve relatively peacefully) and more of the new and better paying jobs are created for newer generations.
The internet is no different. My Grandpa was a telegraph operator. My Father worked for AT&T installing landlines and I’m a computer guy. Both their jobs are virtually gone and mine will be soon. But I did manage to make a career out of it.
The first real, violent disruption is happening now however: AI is on the verge of obsoleting a MAJORITY of all jobs within a few years, and no new jobs are really created to replace them. Society will be deeply uprooted and won’t have time to prepare for the shift. A lot of people will lose their jobs with no alternatives to put food on the table. That’s a recipe for war.
It’s hard for me to imagine AI taking over a majority of jobs even in 10 years. My boss at my last job had me print Excel files for him so he could look at the hard copies. And he was only like 38. I think people on lemmy overestimate how tech savvy people are. I worked in the construction industry and even office side, people were barely tech literate. No way will they be able to utilize AI when so much of their business is still on hard paper.
AI & AGI have me kinda terrified because of how we worship the rights of ownership especially in America.
Some major company will own the AI/AGI and will have the right to all of the profits it generates. Combining AGI with the advancements of robotics, pretty much any job that could justify the expenditure of the robot and AGI will be eliminated. With how we treat the rights of ownership and with how the ownership class sees the rest of humanity, the only future I see is a future where “we have too many people” is the only conversation and not because we can’t feed them or house them, but because there isn’t enough work for them to “earn their own living.” The ownership class will never accept “giving” anything away to help people that “aren’t productive.” You’re not a human, you’re a profit generating labor machine.
So: Work or Die!™ Now with 95% less jobs!
Fun future. :(
AI & AGI have me kinda terrified
If you’re young, you should be.
I’m not and I’m nearing the end of my professional career. Even if I get the sack tomorrow, I’ve had a very good run. And I have other skills that simply can’t be replaced by AI or robots, so I’m not really worried. Concerned, yes. But not worried.
But I know I won’t have any retirement, that’s for damn sure. Still, it beats not having any professional prospects from the get-go.
A lot of print media is dead. Magazines have shriveled up. Newspapers are dying.
I don’t think the Internet provided an equivalent replacement.
Yeah, a lot of traditional media really did get clobbered by the Internet.
considers
I think that some of what did that in was access to user-driven forums and other social media. Reddit. And, well…us here on the Threadiverse.
Used to be that if you lived in a small town somewhere, you probably didn’t have much ability to connect up with people and businesses and stuff that shared your interests. Not a large pool to draw from. But you could have a magazine for a given hobby. You’d have some people expert in the field to curate material. User input could be provided in the form of letters. Companies serving the field could promote their products.
In large cities, maybe you could have a club for shared interests, meet sporadically. But outside of that, not a lot of options.
But once you introduce online forums, suddenly people with particular interests can be connected from all over the world. And while, yeah, you don’t necessarily have paid people full-time contributing content on the forum (though websites elsewhere can be linked to), there’s enough overlap that you just don’t need that.
Some of it is that companies (or hobbyists) can just put up their own websites, and they can be searched for and linked to from places like those forums. I don’t need a magazine to make me aware of company X having some new offering any more.
It doesn’t completely fill the same role, but I think that there’s enough overlap that it more-or-less replaces most things that magazines did.
And to some extent, magazines still exist, just in the form of websites with digital editions. Like, National Geographic is a thing — actually, they still do a print edition too — but they have a subscription website.
Sitting here and chilling with experts who have decades of experience and might just laugh me out of the room IRL is a miracle. Fuck magazines by that standard. And don’t even get me started on the people who live near me.
I think we might be through the worse of the (non-government-driven) press collapse, too. From what I’ve heard the digital subscription model is working well.
the amount of people who provide help for free on forums that could easily charge like 200$ an hour for consulting is crazy
Postal workers have takes a significant cut with the popularisation of email.
The saving grace for postal services is the rise of online stores like Amazon. They all shifted from delivering mail to delivering parcels.
