A.I. Is Here! What's your opinion?

That Time article is a fair take on it. It's kind of refreshing to be honest. Another side that I don't hear about often enough is all the workers that are going to be replaced by AI. It's already impacting software companies. Mid-level experienced programmers are getting laid off because entry-level programmers using AI apparently can do the same job for less money. The real catch with that scheme is that the code AI makes isn't easy to understand which means a bug is harder to find.

I work in the academic library field and it is starting to make inroads in my field too. I'm close to retirement and expect my job to be replaced by AI after I retire. It's a culmination of things leading to this: demographics suggest fewer students in higher education, thus less tuition money; state funding continues to drop factoring in inflation; attacks from right-wing ideologues who are now in control of the federal government. Universities have little other alternatives.

So, what is going to happen to the working class in 10 or 20 years? AI has its deepest impact on white collar workers, but blue collar workers are also being replaced by automation probably also run by AI. Sure, there will be some that will adapt to this fast-changing environment and find success, but it's hard not to see how grim this all looks.

Not so easy to smash up the machines as it was hundreds of years ago (and that didn't work anyway). Blake had it right with his 'Dark Satanic Mills' comment.

^I'm not going to suggest we get political, so this is a PURELY (US) HISTORICAL comment. The transition away from jobs centering on manufacturing with an implication of shifting the unskilled workforce towards skilled jobs likely involving computers really began with Clinton, and has somewhat continued through most of the 21st century here in the States. But now even computer-skilled workers can get replaced by AI. And often times data entry jobs are now just AI training. We've been unwittingly succumbing to crowd-sourced AI training for years whenever we have to do those Captcha things to prove we're human.