Is this a sufficiently clickbait title, you think? Still, I do kinda firmly believe this is the case ⸺ that AI's overarching goals are rooted in the desire to replace paid, job-holding humans with much cheaper automation. There's no way to tell how many fewer jobs will be available in five years, but I reckon the damage will be great and the numbers very high.
This isn't too surprising. It costs a lot of money to build up and train AI and even more money to power it every minute of every day. It takes so much energy, in fact, that Microsoft is having Three Mile Island resurrected so it can use the energy produced there to cover (some of) their AI systems and data centers! Use the best energy source humanity knows about and has access to to power homes and lower electricity costs for regular folks? No way! AI is far more important than the people of this country.
Given the steep cost of massive AI datasets, it's naturally mostly being done by massive corporations with revenues in the billions. And what do such corporations love doing more than anything else? Reducing the workforce to increase revenue. In the name of efficiency, productivity rates, and stakeholder value, some humans will have to go. After all, they've got to recoup the losses on building and training and running the AI at the very least!
This seems not too dissimilar to the technological revolution that turned factories from lines of people into lines of robots, but the scale of it has the potential to be far greater. Not every company is doing something as crazy as building cars or complex appliances, but all of them use computers to do countless other tasks that people are currently doing that could be outsourced to AI.
I've heard pro-AI folks call it a "force multiplier" because of its theoretical ability to allow a single person to have the production output of several more persons. This is cool in a vacuum, I guess, because it means you can get more of your work done ⸺ or the same amount done in less time. But if one programmer with AI can produce as much as four programmers doing things the "old fashioned" way, that necessarily implies three living, breathing, need-money-to-survive humans are no longer needed. I find myself being obsoleted in real time, and I'm too old and dumb for such nonsense.
From the perspective of us, the regular people, AI is a kind of enshittification of personnel. There will be fewer job opportunities for us, and just like with the AIs that write and do our art for us, we'll be left doing laundry and dishes. The opposite is seen from the top-down perspective of the corporates who are only concerned with making a buck or three billion. For them AI is some sort of beautifuckening that allows them to downsize while maintaining or increasing current output.
This Post-Harambe Timeline we've wandered our way into sucks bigly. That was the day this world in this universe lost its way, and it's been downhill ever since. I'm not ready for what's coming next, and I'm not sure if humanity at large is either. I'm actually fine with human work being obsoleted by AI if, and only if, it comes with a guaranteed basic income for every of-working-age citizen. Unfortunately, I'm living in America, and in America, you're on your own.