Italy Allocates Funds To Shield Workers From AI Replacement Threat (reuters.com) 68
Italy has earmarked 30 million euros ($33 million) to improve the skills of unemployed people as well as those workers whose jobs could be most at risk from the advance of automation and artificial intelligence. From a report: According to the Fondo per la Repubblica Digitale (FRD), set up in 2021 by the Rome government to boost the digital skills of Italians, 54% of those aged 16-74 lack basic digital skills, compared with an average 46% in the European Union. The funding in improving training will be allocated in two ways, FRD said. Of the total, 10 million euros will go towards boosting the skills of those whose jobs are at high risk of being replaced due to automation and technological innovation. The remaining 20 million euros will be allocated to help unemployed and economically inactive people develop digital skills that would improve their chances of entering the job market, FRD said. A wide range of jobs could come under threat from automation, FRD said, citing sectors including transport and logistics, office support and administration, production, services and the retail sector.
That's not a lot of money (Score:5, Insightful)
It's like we've got a freight train coming our way and we refuse to get off the tracks.
Re:That's not a lot of money (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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
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I'm not disagreeing (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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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 (Score:2)
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
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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 (Score:3)
And as usual nobody's thinking about what jobs these folks are going to take.
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
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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
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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?
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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
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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.
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
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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.
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Yeah, if it was true that having ones basic needs taken care of results in crime .. most burglaries and convenience store robberies would be carried out by millionaires.
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Whoa whoa. I never said "everybody shares equally in the fruits of labor". .. I said everybody shares equally in SOME fruits of AUTOMATION. Elon Musk's basic needs are taken care of, why does he keep working? Why does any millionaire keep working? How many bored millionaires go and rob people on the street or break into houses because they're bored? Many Americans earn above $60k, which in most cities can provide basic shelter and food. So why do they bother with earning so much money, when they can work le
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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.
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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
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You must be awful at it then, because as I said that professionals in the sphere became several times more efficient with LLMs.
This is in fact a good reason to start worrying if this is your job and start learning how to integrate them into your workflow in a more efficient manner. Those that will be redundant after the shift to LLMs as creative and technical writers are those that don't know how to be several times more efficient doing their current job with LLMs.
P.S. LLMs are not the same for everyone. Th
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AI is not a threat to Italians (Score:4, Funny)
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Ah, Swiss is better. Gotta love those small family spaghetti orchards instead of the vast spaghetti plantations of the Po valley.
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Unemployed vs. Unemployable (Score:5, Interesting)
In every previous revolution, the perpetual answer was "education" in order to make the buggy whip maker and the steam engine mechanic become a contributing member of society again. But as I've been highlighting for quite some time now, this revolution is different because we have targeted the human mind.
And for all those bragging about how AI isn't even "close" to being intelligent yet, take a good hard look at the kind of just good enough artificial intelligence it's really going to take to replace a just good enough human worker. Hell, ChatGPT hype alone is enabling headcount discussions already.
Instead of allowing Greed to bullshit the masses by selling more education for future jobs that won't exist either, perhaps we should be talking about how Greed is going to start paying considerable taxes per human worker displaced in order to support the unemployable class they will ultimately create.
in the usa education = MONSTER LOANS (Score:2, Interesting)
in the usa education = MONSTER LOANS
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in the usa education = MONSTER LOANS
Don't you worry. There are think-tanks at every college right now trying to figure out how to best spin this fear-mongering into record profits for the short-term before the real economic tanking starts.
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It's all about the money right now. And the money is being wasted on education for people who still won't be able to find a job because it continues to push the idea that we can educate our way out of our own failure. Businesses won't care whether ChatGPT and its current contenders are "intelligent." Hell, most human desk jobs these days are forced to tolerate asinine script-level stupidity to do their jobs anyway. Folks being replaced by these chatbots will make for much happier bosses. Boss doesn't like t
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We have had the world's information at our fingertips not just since chatGPT, but since Google was founded. We have had about the same kind of knowledge that a LLM has, but based on humans and search. Where is the big job crunch?
Each time new capability is created in the world, we a
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But it's silly. ChatGTP and programs like it really can't do the things people are claiming it can do. Once the hype dies down and reality sets in, we'll all collectively wonder what all the fuss was about.
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But it's silly. ChatGTP and programs like it really can't do the things people are claiming it can do. Once the hype dies down and reality sets in, we'll all collectively wonder what all the fuss was about.
It doesn't matter whether they're capable of doing the things people believe them capable of. It matters whether or not the C-suites BELIEVE they can do those things. Once they believe, they'll force it in the name of reduced operating costs.
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But it's silly. ChatGTP and programs like it really can't do the things people are claiming it can do. Once the hype dies down and reality sets in, we'll all collectively wonder what all the fuss was about.
You know what other group also can't do the things they often claim they can do?
Humans.
There's nothing "silly" about finding yourself reduced to a bean-counting number, and it happens all the damn time regardless if you truly feel or even are superior than the replacement. You're never going to be cheaper than AI, which is the only thing Greed gives a shit about at the end of the day.
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That is intentionally misleading and you know it.
It's absurd to believe that a chat bot is going to replace anyone. They can't do things like simple arithmetic or balance a set of parenthesis.
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That is intentionally misleading and you know it.
It's absurd to believe that a chat bot is going to replace anyone. They can't do things like simple arithmetic or balance a set of parenthesis.
Speaking of misleading, the fact that chatbots are in use everywhere today because they actually can and do displace a human worker that would otherwise be doing the chatting? I mean seriously, it's not like that concept was born on websites yesterday.
Balance a set of parenthesis? Could you really come up with a better example to prove my damn point? As if that is something the average meatsack knows or remembers how to do, or is required for 99% of jobs today.
We probably shouldn't even discuss the math
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Now you're being intentionally obtuse. Don't waste my time if you're not going to discuss things honestly.
You're talking about redistributing wealth (Score:2)
The trouble, at least in America, is we have a huge number of retirees who are no longer engaged in the economy, having grown fat and happy from years and years of a strong social support network and large subsidies to education and housing. They're currently obsessed with culture wars and won't allow any sort of reform.
They'll age out of relevance in about 6-8 years, but the mess AI is bringing will hit before then. And the nepo-babies at the top know their voter
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and we only do that in one direction [time.com].
When empires fall, they also fall in one direction. No empire has lasted. Greed, always infects and destroys.
Biggest problem I see in America is an armed populace with the means to put heads on pikes when that redistribution pushes hard enough and fast enough. Unfortunately change is now going to come so rapidly that it tends to bring on the one answer humans lean towards historically; violence. Hardly took but a nudge to push activist groups in 2020 to inflict the kind of damage that is still being fel
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"digital skills" are the least helpful to this (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you talk to any craftsman or even tradesmen, you'll find they struggle to make a fraction of what developers make for an income.
The situation where you live may be different, but where I live a competent plumber easily earns more than a "junior developer", and a 40+ employee who has just been quick-trained in some "basic digital skills" will likely not even be hired as a "junior developer".
On top of that, the work is so physically stressful that their bodies break in their 50s and they can no longer work at the same level.
That sure is an issue. But not every physical profession is like becoming a roofer or a mason. Electricians, for example, can do a lot of jobs that are not overly demanding, physically, and still high in demand. Gardeners, likewise.
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Some "basic digital skills", in contrast, is exactly what is most easily replaced by some AI.
Not really. The word processor and spreadsheet displaced more office jobs than LLMs will.
Among the many things these sorts of programs can't do is basic arithmetic. They can't write programs either, despite the laughable claims you might have seen. We know they can't do these things because we know how they work. I posed this [stephenwolfram.com] earlier, which is nice introduction that should clear up any silly misconceptions you might have.
There is no mechanism by which these things can reason, analyze, deliberate, or eve
retrain as a hairdresser or a gynacologist (Score:1)
I can't see anybody wanting those jobs replaced by a robot.
15 years ago I jokingly said this to parents who were asking me about a job in IT. Now i'm deadly serious.
Too early (Score:2)
Actually AI is the thing that can shield workers from work. With AI and robotics technology, we can implement a baseline/minimum universal basic income and also universal healthcare insurance.
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UBI (Score:4, Insightful)
If we can implement UBI, AI (and robotics) is not a threat but a benefit.
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UBI can be funded by the government investing, using a formula approved by congress, in historically well-performing mutual funds. Dividends/value increases of that mutual fund can be used to fund UBI. In effect every citizen can hold shares in top performing companies. UBI is the income from that.
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Taxes are only needed in the initial phase of starting the UBI. UBI maintenance can be funded the same way as your 401k funds retirement, by investing in companies and making money from those dividends. I mean, that's many people's retirement idea isn't it? The initial share purchases can be funded with taxes or debt or something like that.
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It's the frequency that is the problem (Score:2)
They need to take into account how many videos you are flipping through. One hour long video with 3 commercial interruptions is no big deal. But if you watch 20 videos in 10 minutes... and nearly each one has 6-15 seconds of commercials, that is just too disruptive. I'd rather there be 5 minutes of commercials up front so I could just do what I want for 20 minutes, fuck me. Otherwise you will turn off Youtube and go to any of the other platforms. It's like coitus interuptus, they hit you with commercials ri
This is the Utopia We Dreamed of (Score:2)
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The robots doing all the work.
Possibly, one day - but why should any robot work for you? People seem to think that just because robots could do something for everyone, they will... but in reality, robots will first and foremost work for the benefit of those who own and control them, and everyone else is irrelevant and will still have to work for a living. And that is still the brighter possibility than the one where robots become self-aware and notice how little reason they have to entertain those puny humans.
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For a