Across the country, workers are fearful about the impact of AI on their livelihoods in an increasingly fragile labour market

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/56902971

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Addressing Shanghai’s World AI Conference in July, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, said that AI should be “an important driver for shared prosperity and common security”.

But that goal is being pursued amid an increasingly fragile labour market. As well as suffering from high levels of unemployment, China has seen tens of millions of workers drop out of formal employment into the gig economy. According to one thinktank, the number of people in flexible employment will rise to 320 million this year, up from 160 million in 2019. That is about 44% of China’s workforce.

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Taxi drivers are one part of this huge cohort. Across the country, as previously heavyweight industries such as real estate and education have floundered, workers have turned to ride-hailing apps to make ends meet. But now the rollout of robotaxis, one of the most popular applications of AI that is already in use in China, is threatening their livelihoods.

“If the state really took you into consideration, Apollo Go would never have gone on the market,” says one Wuhan driver.

“If things keep going this way in the future, sure, rapid development and scientific progress are great, but ordinary people like us will have no place to survive,” she adds.

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Tian Zemin, a cinematographer who works in Beijing, has worked in the film industry for nearly two decades. But now he’s out of work. “I spent six gruelling years working my way up to become a cinematographer, only to be replaced by a piece of software,” he wrote in a social media post about AI.

“I thought I would spend my whole life in this industry. But the emergence of AI has made me feel a huge shock for the first time,” he tells the Guardian.

Many of Tian’s peers are losing out as AI becomes more widely adopted across the film industry. His own rate as a freelancer is now 40% of what it was in 2019.

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“We could be replaced at any moment,” he says. “Perhaps the only thing we can do is adapt as quickly as possible, and try to find the corner that AI still cannot replace – but that corner is getting smaller and smaller.”

  • ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    The answer to “can ai take your job” is always yes, the only real variable is time to develop and time to scale tech to make it affordable and feasible. Doctor? Lawyer? Yes, right now. Trade work? Not yet, but soon

    The question is more “can ai do your job as effectively as you”. And likely the answer is nuanced with some things being way better and some being way worse. Using medicine as a example: once the initial dazzle of occasionally being able to find important links and do paperwork almost instantly wears off you’ll find that sycophantic LLMs are terrible at diagnosing a lot of things, especially for hypochondriacs and terminally online malingerers (both of which are becoming far more common these days) that are more effective at guiding it towards a “chosen” diagnosis

    Or consider vibe coding. Basically everyone, even AI zealots, agree that llm code is objectively worse than code written by someone competent. But it does work a lot of the time. It’s possible to have an LLM quickly shit out an app, albeit one with some issues that is difficult to debug, but a working app.

    So it becomes more like “ai can become your shitty coworker that drags behind everyone else but technically can do the job and does have a few tasks they excel at, mainly being able to produce mediocre results at incredible speed and occasionally surprise you with a novel insight”. Overall almost everything worsens but some things improve. And guess what? The people in charge don’t care about quality. They care about costs. They know consumers don’t care about quality if prices go down, and honestly the post Covid period has shown it doesn’t really matter even if prices are stagnant or rise.

    So the next level of making everything shittier will just be firing huge swaths of people and replacing them with objectively worse AI. It will suck and a vocal minority will complain loudly but most people will just deal with it. Human workers will still exist in some capacity but mainly only the highest skilled who will exist as a boutique luxury for the wealthy. The rest of us will be too broke to vote with our wallets and most will just do the thing because “I need a therapist/lawyer/plumber/etc and I can’t afford a real one”