Artificial Intelligence and The End of Work

[fishslayer]

But but but....huh?

 

[Holdmybeer]

From the WaPo today: The 184 year old Cleveland Plain Dealer is now using AI to write selected articles. The paper which once employed 400, now employs 71. Another Turing Test, if you can't tell the difference, there is no difference.

 

[Boat Bum]

^ Funny how that doesn't work with lab diamonds.

 

[Rosy]

From the WaPo today: The 184 year old Cleveland Plain Dealer is now using AI to write selected articles. The paper which once employed 400, now employs 71. Another Turing Test, if you can't tell the difference, there is no difference.

Our local paper had a writer named Lindsay who was terrible. She could barely form a sentence. No subject-object alignment whatsoever. I could always tell if she wrote a story without even looking at the by-line because I would nearly have a stroke trying to read it.

I don't support replacing people with AI but if the people can't be bothered to be capable at their jobs, I can see why companies would do it.

 

[Holdmybeer]

^ Funny how that doesn't work with lab diamonds.

The diamond industry simply put more money into convincing us diamonds are forever, even though they’re fundamentally just common ordinary gem stones.

 

[Boat Bum]

Yes, thank De Beers.

 

[Raydawg]

^ Funny how that doesn't work with lab diamonds.

We just cashed in some old gold jewelry and was amazed that many pieces fetched more than what we paid for it years ago.
Some had diamonds, and they were pretty much useless, 1/3 carat of so so jewelry grade solitaire, 5 bucks.....
We hung onto most of them at those prices.

 

[GypsyR]

On topic, I see where "Square" just laid off 4000 employees and makes no bones about that they were replaced by AI.

As for "robots" building houses, I can actually visualize that. Near me are two companies building vacation homes and "tiny houses". All actually construction takes places inside "factories" in controlled environments. Having seen some of that assembly I can easily picture the same general kind of robots that build cars building those. Someone just has to decide it's worth the investment in machinery.

The vacation home people build subassamblies which are then trucked to the house's site and basically assembled there versus "built from scratch". Most houses can be built in chunks small enough to fit on trucks and shipped to the site. The vacation home people have already figured out how to do most of that. I can see less and less human involvement being needed as years go by and homebuilders invest in more technology.

I've seen where "houses" are being "3D printed" on site with concrete. The early efforts are so far awkward and rather primitive but I can see the technology taking over stuff like pouring foundation slabs at the least.

 

[Holdmybeer]

The largest truck assembly plant in the world is the Mercedes Benz operation in Worth, Germany. It is highly roboticized but also employs 11,000 people. The difference in our economy and the German without getting into the weeds of it is "Ordo". The unions in Germany are termed ordounion, the economy is ordoeconomy. 1/3 of all over the road trucks in Germany and 1/5 in Europe come out of the plant which rolls a finished truck out the door every 130 seconds. The quality control processes on the plant floor are rigorous, exhaustive and are meticulously recorded during every phase of the build. If there's a failure down the road they can go back and pinpoint the cause of the cause of the cause......a process which they borrowed from Toyota. In the Toyota plant if any worker on the line discovers a problem in the build, they can shut the line down and the line cannot resume until the cause of the cause of the cause ( " The Toyota Way") is determined and corrected.