Wrong again
It is amusing, to students of human pain, that “AI” is costing so many jobs in firms like Amazon, Intel, Meta, and Microsoft. Of course they make more money the more people they fire. And in places like California, where “soft tech” is in charge of the economy alongside the soft heads, the economy is absolutely doomed. All the economic sages who told America to stop making things, for we could simply do “concepts” and export the dirty manufacturing jobs to low-paid peasants in the third world, were (as I first predicted one-half of a century ago) precisely wrong. For Donald Trump and I have been seeing through this moronic error for a long, long time.
We turn our collective half-attention back to the “Internet of Things.” Writing, joking, or even hallucinating in algorithms is work machines can do much better, often by factors of a million times, whereas the design and composition of physical goods, by workers merely using AI as engineers used to use their slide rules, would seem to have a future.
Best of all, the AI machines will usefully design AI machines, with detailed schemata, including perhaps some better routing, leaving us humans out of the loop. We get to use instead our distinctively superior interpersonal skills, here in the earth-world, where we do many uncomputerized things such as eat, and hang out with beers. The now increasingly jobless “expertise” people were last heard from predicting that the new schtick — machines that need more electrical power than you can shake a stick at — are about to take over. But nothing that can be gently unplugged is about to take over anything. About all this new technology will achieve, or rather compel, is the partial replacement of coal, hydro, petrol, and incidentally most solar photovoltaic panels and all wind turbines, with cheap and clean nuclear reactors.