As a layman (as with most people here), I think this is a good article that summarises the current research on AI's impact on labour markets. The website itself seems like a reliable source.
These points made sense to me: it is impossible to predict what will actually happen, we need better pro-level tools for AI assistance (e.g. Copilot, writer autocomplete, ControlNet) rather than AI as a full replacement, and we need better and clearer paths to retraining and job mobility.
I disagreed with only one point in there: that research is needed for ways to compensate people for the use of their creative works, but that is solely because of my pro-free-cultural moral views. The rest of the article is still good.
> pro-free-cultural moral views
Mike Montero would like a word
"Who in this room is now, or has at some time, been in creative services?
"Who here has, at some time, had trouble getting paid by a client for work they were doing?
"Raise your hand if any of these are familiar to you:
"'We ended up not using the work.'
"'It's really not what we wanted after all.'
"Alright. Who's familiar with Goodfellas?
"Alright. 'We got somebody internal to do it instead.'
"'Fuck you. Pay me.'"
"'Fuck you. Pay me.'"
Hmm. I recognise the similarities ("pay me") but I also see differences ("pay me for work done", as in the video vs "pay me for replicating my work", as in IP laws).
Free culture isn't against the former (therefore this video doesn't actually address the point), but is against the latter, as being restricted from replicating work harms culture and innovation as a whole (e.g. memes and fan art being technically illegal), and imposes a large cost on the public.
That said, I'm not fully against IP laws, just that it should be limited to 14 years and only in situations where it is necessary for the production of it in the first place (e.g. articles behind paywalls). I believe I have a right to an opinion on this as a member of the public, as IP laws are a compromise between the public and the creators. It's not some natural human right.
In this moral view, if AI trains on my HN comment for example, copyright shouldn't come into play because I didn't require it to produce this comment. I had other incentives to write this comment.
As a counter-example, no one cares about statistical analysis (what AI is) when it's just building a corpus, doing classification, or even generating GPT-2 level text etc. It's only when it becomes a threat to jobs when people panic. This reveals the real problem: it is about jobs, not data. And so the solution: financial support, equal education and job retraining. Not expanding copyright laws to cover analysis as well.
> This reveals the real problem: it is about jobs, not data.
I think you're selling "it is about jobs, not data" a little short here.
Let me start off by saying I work on AI for healthcare, my first IRB protocol that contemplated computer vision is from 2012. I'm not an OG, but I've been working on this stuff for a while, and I'm very bullish.
On the flipside, my wife is a pediatric occupational therapist, she works with autistic kids. Kids in the Bay Area. Her clients are Google machine learning engineers. The major issue with jobs is not so much the monetary value of the work, although that's an important secondary outcome.
Humans need an occupation. Occupation is the purpose of life. Long before money was a thing, we needed purpose. Even kings and their courtiers, before money, needed occupations. We need to be doing something. People change their occupations from time to time. It doesn't have to be a job. It could be a hobby, in some cases. Even kids want to contribute. Even infants, as soon as they understand and can, will reach out to console or delight their caregiver. But we need to feel like we are giving back. Our minds and muscles atrophy if we are not occupied.
If we attach everything to solar power and let the machines run the world, we'll end up some version of the blob people in Wall-E's Buy n Large spaceships. The reward at the end of the movie was the people getting off the space ship, thanking the robots for giving them back purpose, mainly to restore their planet.
Purpose and occupation are about so much more than money.
> being restricted from replicating work harms culture and innovation as a whole
I believe that there is no "one size fits all" answer to this, and failing to get in front of that in discussion, harms the resulting thought. The societal situation of an individual using their talent to make arts or design, alone or in self-selected teams, is not the same as large companies who run market systems and have attorneys and accountants to aid that over time.
Lots of excited people argue against copyright and then go directly to the story of the Mickey Mouse image.
It is precisely because copying is so, so different than creating, that the situations within the breadth of this topic are not, and should not, be comparable.
"A great society is judged by how it treats the least of its members" very much applies to working arts and crafts adults IMHO.