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AI Businesses

ECB Paper Says AI is Threatening Wages, But Not Jobs So Far (reuters.com) 42

Posted by msmash from the vantage-view dept.
The rapid adoption of AI could reduce wages, but so far is creating, not destroying jobs, especially for the young and highly-skilled, research published by the European Central Bank showed on Tuesday. From a report: Firms have invested heavily in AI leaving economists striving to understand the impact on the labour market and driving fears among the wider public for the future of their jobs. At the same time, employers are struggling to find qualified workers, despite a recession that would normally ease labour market pressures. In a sample of 16 European countries, the employment share of sectors exposed to AI increased, with low and medium-skill jobs largely unaffected and highly-skilled positions getting the biggest boost, a Research Bulletin published by the ECB said. But it also cited "neutral to slightly negative impacts" on earnings and said that could increase.
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ECB Paper Says AI is Threatening Wages, But Not Jobs So Far More

ECB Paper Says AI is Threatening Wages, But Not Jobs So Far

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  • I accomplish more, and there is a never-ending supply of requirements in coding, so ...
    • and fire some of your coworkers. Or fire you. Assuming you have a boss. If you're an independent contractor (a real one, not somebody who does an "independent contract" with the same company for 20 years, that's an employee w/o benefits) your client will push you do to more with less and you'll have to in order to compete.

      Rather than a future were automation makes us work less we're facing a dystopia where we literally compete to see who gets to work. We're all competing to see who gets enough hours of

      • What happened if you didn't earn a living 10,000 years ago? Or 2000? Or 50? That.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • To add to your comment.
            For much of the Middle Ages, and in most of Europe, serfs worked fewer hours per month than we do now.
            They had way more holidays than the average American worker too.
            The Industrial Revolution was the beginning of people spending every waking minute of every day working.
            • Comment removed based on user account deletion

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by jbengt ( 874751 )

                Many studies have shown the 32 hour workweek produces just as much productivity as the 40 hour workweek. Good luck getting your company to try it though.

                It was easy to get my company to let move to a 32 hour work week. All I had to do was take a 20% pay cut. And the 3-day weekends every week are a lot more gratifying than I really thought they'd be.

            • Jevons paradox indicates that increased efficiency by itself may not reduce fuel use. Wider roads don't ease congestion. It's all because of latent demand surging.

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by viperidaenz ( 2515578 )

            You too could live in a society where you only had to work 10 hours a week.

            You wouldn't have the computer you're using right now, or the house you're living in, or access to medical care, or transport, or running water, or a sewage system.

          • Civilized existence requires more labor than feral existence. Maybe our hunter-gatherer ancestors did have more free time, but they lived shorter lives, were much more vulnerable to disease and starvation, had no-one but themselves to protect them from predators and rival tribes, and did not have books or computers or online forums or mathematics or cars or air conditioning or plumbing or video games or movies or orchestras or dental care or any of a million things we have to make our lives enjoyable and m

          • Small side comment: without agriculture, there was no way to have specialisatio, to get away from the hunter gatherer lifestyle. Of course hunter gatherers needed weapons such as bows, slingshots and such. Homo sapiens sapiens has always been resourceful. But more complex technology could only be achieved by more specialisation. I found Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel a good read.
            As for technology, cooking predates Homo Sapiens Sapiens, without cooking our food wouldn't supply enough energy for our

      • become and inmate and the state pays $20K-120K /Year.
        and if they need lots of meds and doctors that can go way up.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ranton ( 36917 )

        Your boss will eventually notice [you are more productive] and fire some of your coworkers. Or fire you.

        That is only true if there isn't more work which becomes economically viable to do that wasn't before AI. I just got done with a meeting where we had over 50 initiatives asking for funds, and only about half of them will make the cut. A combination of low ROI or simply a limited yearly budget means we cannot do everything that would provide value to the company. If the implementation cost for each project was cut in half, we would probably do all of them. No one would be out of work, the company would just

        • This. People underestimate latent demand. We can always want more than we could automate. We get accustomed to anything and still want more.

      • Really good ending comments. We are truly in a situation that could get really scary. 10,000 years ago someone without use to some other group would go off in the woods, live free off the land, hunt fish, claim anywhere as their property. Now every piece of property is owned by someone, the capacity to do that no longer exists. People try, but the tent cities get burned, cleared out, etc. You earn a living by making money for the people who own everything. If you cannot do that you die. We should remember m

        • You forget this time is different - now everyone has AIs in their pockets. So we're empowered. What can we do with it? Can we build some kind of self reliant lifestyle without jobs? We need solar, robotics, AI and our own hands.

      • In order for anyone to live, someone must grow the food. That is reality itself, mother nature, requiring labor from us in order to survive.
        And then there is clothing production, housing production, electricity production, and on and on. All of these things require that human workers work in order for us to have them.

        So, are all those workers our slaves? Of course not! They need a reason to deliver the fruits of their labor to us. And that reason is simple: we work for them!

        That is where the phrase "ea

    • I was intrigued by your comment, and went to Bing Chat and asked it some simple programming questions. I didn't find it a particular time saver, and it steadfastly refused to actually write any code - it would only do the variable declarations, including something like 150 unnecessary parameters with mystery names like "K1,K2...K149, K150". I tried a bunch of variants, and it steadfastly held on to the original. Si I am not too impressed with at least the Bing Chat version of it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ranton ( 36917 )

        I haven't used Bing Chat to help with coding, but I have used OpenAI and Microsoft Copilot. I haven't found it useful to write production code, but it is useful in learning something new. It has absolutely made it quicker for me to learn a new language / framework /etc.

      • Bing Chat is particularly limited and handicapped, the bigger models are better and more expensive than free but can help write boilerplate code (stuff you really should use libraries for) and occasionally suggests the correct library which you can then (with a proper IDE) download, install and import automatically. It gives you decent suggestions from manuals and online code samples. It will not write a complete program by any stretch (unless it is very simple school-level task like a sort algorithm) and e

      • I use GPT 4. I find it has useful accuracy; Bing and the others are not accurate enough yet. I also use it like a search engine. I can ask questions of it in an interactive manner. I perform 75% of my searches via GPT 4 now that it can search the web in real-time - Google and the others are my second choices for discovering information. Of course I am always aware that the results can be faulty, just like Google, but I like it better because I don't have to drill down into the websites and scan for the info

  • won't be free forever.

    Eventually you'll have to pay to use them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      won't be free forever.

      Eventually you'll have to pay to use them.

      Maybe. Or they'll be ad-supported. Or you'll buy a computer and download the software and run it locally. Not everything has to be done as a service on a server somewhere.

      And even ignoring that, there's no assumption that the user will be the one paying to use AI. It could just as easily be the case that somebody else pays for AI. For example, if you go to a restaurant and order through the drive-through window, you might be talking to an AI. You're not paying to use that AI (except indirectly); the r

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by laktech ( 998064 )
        The AI that is remarkable will be accessible to only those that pay massive amount of money. The current-day version of this are educated people. Only capitalists can purchase their time to create value. The rest of us will get the reduced, censored, and gated version. You'll be limited to how you can interact with it. This is akin to having limited freedom of speech. In my view, what the current world order should be concerned about is that AI will grant an individual the ability that of a think-tank to
      • Just one thing: you can't download a Google or a FaceBook, but you can download a LLaMA or Mistral and run it on your laptop or phone.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          Just one thing: you can't download a Google or a FaceBook, but you can download a LLaMA or Mistral and run it on your laptop or phone.

          You can't download a Google-like technology, because it would be infeasible for everyone to spider the entire Internet themselves, both in terms of the storage requirements for the user and in terms of the bandwidth requirements for both the user and the web server owners.

          But you absolutely could download a Facebook-like technology, assuming you get rid of groups (replacing them with online forum websites) and pages (replacing them with actual business websites). There's no reason why Facebook has to be a

  • so we'll all just become slaves working 60+ hours a week and living 10 to a hovel. Well, that put my mind on easy. Now if I can just get one of those Syndicate style brain implants from Mr Musk I'll be set for life!

    • time to go UNION!

      • #64039263? There are 69million+ ./ usernames? No wonder there are so many ID10T's here.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          #64039263? There are 69million+ ./ usernames? No wonder there are so many ID10T's here.

          Yeah, it seems that some of those idiots can't tell the difference between a comment ID and a user ID.

      • Unions aren't just for collective bargaining they also form voting blocks that can get public policy that helps protect their members.

        There is strength in numbers.

  • This is just basic economics. Right now, in most fields, AI is mostly being used to enable less skilled workers to do a job. This reduces the value of skilled labor, thus depressing salaries, but doesn't actually replace people.

    The point where that changes is the point where the AI can completely do the job on its own, e.g. robots making food in a fast food kitchen. As long as the cost of the hardware amortized over its expected life is higher than the cost of the workers, they'll keep using workers. A

    • That would be true in a static market. But new technologies tend to change markets. It's not a zero sum game as you imply.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        That would be true in a static market. But new technologies tend to change markets. It's not a zero sum game as you imply.

        In theory, yes. But it takes time to create new categories of jobs, and those new categories have to be things that AI can't do for you. At this point in our world's history, it's unclear what those could possibly be.

        There's almost nothing that can't plausibly be manufactured by machines. There's nothing that can't be farmed by sufficiently AI-powered machines. The only reason the overwhelming majority of physical labor jobs exist is because the bots cost too much, and when the bots get cheaper, there w

  • A job that costs me more to do it than I earn from it is a job I cannot accept. It would be akin to someone selling a product below cost.

  • Think of all the stuff you can put in your resume now that you have AI to help you. The only qualification you need is basic intelligence and the ability to follow instructions. Granted that is a rare skill nowadays.

  • There are many older people who just assume that there will be jobs for unskilled people, so that has encouraged some to believe that getting a better education and skills is not necessary. You see a LOT of people out there, even to this day, that feel that developing job skills isn't necessary, because they can find some low level job or just "find work", but then never put much effort into learning how to do the job well. Those are the people who are at risk of having their jobs taken away by AI or eve

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