Italy Allocates Funds To Shield Workers From AI Replacement Threat - Slashdot

Italy Allocates Funds To Shield Workers From AI Replacement Threat

›

• 2 hidden comments

• • Re:

    This kind of training and assistance is exactly what governments are for. When industries vanish, individuals left behind frequently don't have the resources or the knowledge to get themselves over that hump to become employable. We have never held the tech industry responsible for the damage it causes to an economy., Heck, we've never held any industry responsible for the damages they have caused except for maybe tobacco and asbestos but even then, the compensation was a rounding error on their revenue.
    • 1 hidden comment

    • • Why are governments responsible?

        Because *everyone* is negatively affected by mass layoffs or job losses so as a public society the public can alleviate that negative far more effetively than individual action.

        This reasoning smacks of socialism to me

        Except you gave no reasoning and just made one one up in your head to argue against. textbook "everything i don't like i socialism"

        can't afford to do this long

        Sure they can, you've given no reason it can't. It's a math problem and other countries are doing it (and the US is wealthier than those)

        US welfare experiment showed

        The US welfare programs have worked and actually worked well, the issues are that we arent doubling down on those successes and expanding these programs.

        just let businesses do what they do best

        Markets are great, for most things, most of the times but not for everything and markets and businesses require regulation and oversight. Adam Smith knew it, Keynes knew it, Friedman knew it, it's a built in function of capitalism. Only shysters and conmen will tell you it isnt.

        Everyone being equal never works.

        Good thing nobody is talking about that except the voices in your head.

        It just means "taking from the rich"

        The rich have lot's to give and have benefitted by the nature of being rich the most from the combined power of societies economic output. Marginal utility of money is in fact a thing. They will still be rich.

        Tax them, they will leave

        The wealthy are already more than capable and welcome to move to the nation that does not charge taxes. I mean, you can live in the USA and pay $0 in taxes. Oh, you want to live a life and operate a company that benefits from the combined wealth, stability and utility society provides but not contribute to it? Well, sorry but too-fucking-bad.

        • Re:

          the welfare system, the taxation, the government controling the supply and price of money, business regulations, this is what caused the economy to come to this very sad state of affairs. At this point the system will keep devouring itself and will not stop until it destroys everyone, destroys all savings, investments and businesses. The correct thing to do of course is to stop government spending, to stop all forms of welfare, social security, medical expenses paid by government, all of it. Get rid of bu

    • I'm not disagreeing

      I'm saying it's too little, too late.
      
      We're not going to go all Spartan though. Rather than try to do some kind of total equality (that people will revolt against) the focus should be on making sure everyone has access to a comfortable lifestyle. Everyone earns that much by virtue of being a citizen.

  • Re:

    It doesn't need to be full on socialism. If you have shares in a robotic factory company that provide dividends that's the capitalistic equivalent of getting a salary without working. Think of it as owning a vending machine.

• Re:

  It's more than they need to protect workers from the "threat" of replacement by AI.

  You're a reasonable person. Take a look at this [stephenwolfram.com]. It's a bit long, but it should clear up any misconceptions you might have about what these sorts of programs can do. That article doesn't talk about computational power, but it doesn't look like they're Turing complete, despite a few papers making that dubious claim. (For reference, we know that an ordinary feed-forward NN is not.)

  What is disruptive here isn't the technolog

  • I more or less know what the programs do

    they're basically overblown search engines that can do really well made human readable results.
    
    The trouble is that many economies transitioned to "service" economies when all the manufacturing jobs went to China to take advantage of cheap labor and lax environmental regulations (e.g. "Cancer Villages").
    
    So the disruption in a country like mine (America) is going to be a lot more. There's a ton of customer service jobs that'll just go away. We're already not doing great economically thanks to out of c

    • Re:

      Lots of things...

      I'm not convinced that these things will have any significant impact on customer service jobs in the US. We've been automating and outsourcing those jobs for decades. They're really only applicable on the front line anyway, much of which has already been automated. Though even that doesn't come without risk. Bots like this can very easily go "off-script" and output something incorrect, embarrassing, or harmful.

      While globalization is a net good, concentrating production like we've been do

• Not a lot, or perhaps too much

  Should they be?

  Assuming "they" is the government, I don't know why they'd have some particular insight as to the future economy and the motivations of soon-to-be-unemployed workers. Looking at the recent past, the push to turn coal miners into rudimentary coders is looking neither successful nor effective, given the coding capabilities of ChatCPT.

  The best course of action is for all workers to be aware that their job (or even their entire job function) may be obsolete tomorrow. This is generally a prudent i

  • Re:

    Considering that most workers have several different job types in their working career, the process of retraining and career changing has been a continuous process for a long time.

    Well, I dunno....I mean, most everyone I've ever known...while they worked different jobs say High School through College....once out of college they pretty much knew what they were going to do and got "real jobs" and pretty much stuck with that same line of work all the rest of their lives.

    I'm guessing that's somewhat the norm

• Re:

  They don't need jobs. A job is basically a form of welfare anyway, so give 'em UBI. And yes, a job is welfare.. if you have a job it's because you have a skill that enables you to gather resources. That skill is the welfare. If you were born on a planet where you couldn't obtain resources, you'd still want to live wouldn't you?

  • Re:

    if you have a job it's because you have a skill that enables you to gather resources. That skill is the welfare

    What you're overlooking is the causality of incentives. Even if we are ultimately automatons, it's still true that we respond to carrots and sticks. If everybody shares equally in the fruits of labor regardless of who performs it, then no labor will be performed and nobody will have anything to live on.

    Similarly you could argue that under equal conditions one person commits a crime and another

    • Re:

      I hear this sort of fear mongering a lot from folks scared to death that we may not all remain slaves forever to the largest wealth holders on the planet. I'm not sure why. Nobody wants to just do nothing. If we were provided for, I've got huge lists of shit I want to work on that are either creative in nature (books, music, CGI art) or fixing up the house / yard in ways I don't have time to do today. Not to mention the volunteer work I'd like to have more time for. This concept that "being taken care of" i

      • Re:

        I've got huge lists of shit I want to work on that are either creative in nature (books, music, CGI art) or fixing up the house / yard in ways I don't have time to do today.

        Unfortunately none of those are the things you need to consume to survive. (Or does doing CGI and/. imply you working part-time at Foxconn?)

        How is what you want different from the USSR? I can almost hear you rolling your eyes, but it was tried, and it failed.

• Re:

  Also the upcoming wave of layoffs isn't going to target unskilled workers. It's going to make skilled ones so efficient that one of them will do the job that needed two, five or ten before.

  I've already read several reports of people doing creative writing stating that their job description has totally changed from writing to feeding chatGPT with a correct set of queries and then editing the output, which doubled, tripled and quadrupled their output.

  • Re:

    Editing GPT text is also work and takes at least half as much as writing it from scratch. Same for code generated by Copilot. There is no current AI that can make due without human in the loop today, and not for lack of trying. Self driving cars have been trying for 14 fvcking years.
    
    What I expect to happen is to see competition steam up, and humans being the differentiator between successful and failing companies, as the AI is the same for everyone. It's like electricity or Google search - not a competit