I'd like to keep this serious and based if possible. Where do we think we go with Ai in 10y ?
Doom thinking is very much in my head but I'd like more opinions, I appreciate 10y is a long horizon.
The only reference I have is self driving(take it as a possible business framework not literally)
- Black cabs: Highly experienced job, higher fees/margins - You pay for the knowledge and experience. Not anybody can do it, you need to be skilled.
- Low cost rides(Bolt/Uber/etc) - To boil it down, still a hard job but barrier to entry is low, i could do this as well. If you take sat nav apps away probably 90% of the fleet won't be efficient at all or working. Low margins. underpaid labour. No employee leverage.
- Waymo(to launch soon in the UK) - let's assume it goes full automated driving. No human, no employee, biggest gain for the consumer(possibly) - barrier to entry for a business high as it's not something you can build overnight, no drivers employed.
Again take this as a possible Ai evolution, not the literal thing, a framework that could apply to other jobs in services.
E.g. Trains could be automated too, it's an easier problem to solve than driving but unions have fought back but for how long ? Govt and society totally unprepared for large industries requiring less people. The ones says universal income...think again not happening. We haven't touched on military aspects of this because that is another level to explore.
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I think it's either gone in the bin with the other boondoggles or someone actually creates AGI, at which point it's anyone's guess whether it keeps us as pets or exterminates us as an infestation on its planet.
Stupid idea. Our main value is our intelligence and cooperation, if we create something better at that than we are, we will cease to be the top of the food chain.
Sound unrealistic? Would you let an inferior species vote? How about rabbits? They're closer to us than we will be to an AGI within a very short timescale from its creation.
Yes the best case is the AI indulges us and keeps us as pets (like the Culture novels).
Tbh, that might be better than what we have now, democracy, autocracy, monarchy...always seems to end up with an absolute monster in charge sooner or later.
Yes the consideration is that an AI could be pretty ruthless ruler (even if it was fair), not being capable of sentiment or empathy. But we seem to manage that well enough on our own.
Yeah I reckon it would do a better job than the present incumbents.
Or the next lot😂
Hopefully the AI believes in God and decides to look after us as Gods creations or something
I have mostly packed up my previous job now - I’m a Mastering Engineer. AI tools have been around for a while, and even today the issue isn’t that they are as effective as an experienced professional, but that more and more customers are happy to settle for “meh, it’s good enough.”
We’re seeing the same thing with graphic design more recently. AI images are not going to match an experienced designer, but the cost difference is so large that the quality of what’s acceptable is dropping.
The issue isn’t that your job is safe until AI is as good as or better than you, it’s that someone would rather pay £2 for work that’s mediocre but passable, than £150 for work that’s polished. It creeps up gradually as more and more people pass that tipping point.
I may spout what people will see as doom, but I wonder if AI/Robotics improves at an exponential rate then it may change society for the better. It might be a little bit if a bumpy ride.
I mean, retail, warehouse, bus, train, taxis, fast food to name but a few things,
That’s a lot of jobs gone, massively reduced with no place for these people to go or jobs to go into.
Governments are very unprepared, as usual. They’d better prepare for some unrest.
This is why I’m not stressing over it. Either things level out, or they don’t and society is completely transformed.
Even if that transformation is bad, not much I can do about it.
“One day we shall die. But all the other days we shall be alive.”
The thing is you can’t really just get rid of all jobs without costs of products also dropping significantly. Businesses need customers, if they don’t have customers then even implementing full AI will never break even.
That’s what we saw during the Industrial Revolution, a lot of people lost jobs but as a result you can also now buy products everyday that your great grandparents would’ve seen as a massive investment and luxury. Things like furniture and new clothes.
The problem will be a very painful transition period.
Maybe they’ll keep on just enough slaves.
They’re not thinking this far ahead or even care to. They’ve already hoarded enough wealth, which may or may not be pointless/worthless in the future.
Who knows. We all have to wait for the impact and see what the next 5-10 years looks like, but it is effecting things now and it’s moving quite rapidly behind the scenes.
Those people aren't just going to become unemployed and give up. Everyone will try to retrain and flood other job markets like the trades and care work, driving down wages for those sectors.
I think your best bet in the coming years is to be a teacher in a "physical work" area and profit from the massive re-training boom.
How can you flood other jobs, when there just aren’t other jobs?
Retrain. Do you know how expensive that can be and time consuming? Retrain to what, another profession that’s been affected by AI or a role with limited/little jobs?
Why go into trades, when it is and will be flooded and you’ll be fighting for either work or scraps?
Only so much care work out there.
Exactly, and there will be a limitless supply of workers which will cause all jobs not affected by ai to go straight to minimum wage.
You won't be worried about how time consuming it is to retrain if you're unemployed.
Why go into trades or care work? Simple, because there will be nothing else. The other option is to sit at home and cross your fingers that the government will give you enough money to feed your family. People will get bored of having nothing to do and having no money.
You completely miss the point. There are only so many jobs available or work (trades) available. This is across all industries. AI may not only reduce those jobs to 0 or reduce the number of jobs a company needs a human to do.
Less accountants, less admin staff, less warehouse staff, 0 bus drivers, 0 taxi drivers, 0 food delivery drivers, checkout people, shelf stackers, graphics designers, illustrators, animators, sales (not a bad thing), marketers, coders, artists, translators, copywriters, legal secretaries, engineers, architects, servers, lecturers. Long haul drivers, train drivers, tube drivers.
If a business can reduce staff, they will.
Unemployment will always be at a certain % that percentage may just be a HUGE amount higher in the future.
So yeah, go into care you say as that’s all there is. Well. All the care jobs have gone. We have no need for another electrician and why would you retrain for min wage in a job that takes 2/3 years to train for and there is little work around as that market is flooded.
You completely underestimate what AI/Robotics can POTENTIALLY effect in a short period of time and the STRONG desire if companies to reduce their biggest outgoings..Wages.
It’s slowly happening g now in all of the above and every company is looking at how they can implement AI to reduce their biggest outgoings number of people they need.
Go into care…Everybody is looking for care work, there is no care work left.
I didn't miss the point at all, all of those jobs will be replaced at different rates.
We aren't all deciding a date where everyone just quits and hands their job over to ai.
There will be a long period of time where there are some jobs still done by humans while others are replaced, and everyone will want those jobs and will retrain to get them.
A minimum wage job is better than sitting at home doing nothing and starving to death for the rest of your life, so people will do that.
Yep, that was my whole point about care work.
You seem to be agreeing with me, while trying to disagree somehow, lmao fairly impressive.
In aging UK (and rest of world), undertaker might be a good career move, especially with the boomer generation dying off over the next 30 years
Any industry that has critical safety involved won't be implementing within 10 years, no where close.
Legal frameworks aren't even in place and the processes needed to validate such systems are only theorised in the realms of academia. There is no consensus on how it should be done and considered acceptable.
Look to the past for your answer.
Outsourcing production to China was a disaster as far as quality went. I maintain my own cars and when Chinese parts began to enter the market, the quality collapsed. Many would fail after months, sometimes weeks.
If you asked people in industry back then, whether companies would accept sub-standard products to save on production costs. You would have been told no, it was a stupid thing to suggest. The damage to their reputation and brand would cost far more than the production savings.
My point is, we are seeing similar arguments over AI. AI isn't a threat to jobs because no company will replace quality human staff with AI slop. It would cost them more and destroy their reputation.
History suggests such arguments are wrong. We all bought Chinese slop because it was cheaper and I am willing to bet companies using AI to cut costs will wipe out quality firms, even if the work they produce is poorer.
Though that leads to the other cope. My job is safe because they will need me to fix the slop from the AI.
True but employers will use that as an opportunity to reclassify your job as low skilled and shift you much closer to minimum wage.
This has already happened with translation work. The pay for fixing AI slop translations is much lower than the pay for a human to do the translation. Even if fixing the slop takes just as long.
Seen as lower skilled, so it costs employers less.
So I think the AI future is going to be very bleak.
I suppose the bigger question is, how will governments support people when AI takes over.
AI isn't a bad thing. It could be great. The problem is corporate greed. Theoretically, it should mean some people wouldn't need to work, and can spend time with their families, etc. But then where does their support to do that come from? People still need money. And governments still need people to pay taxes.
So, I don't think they would allow it to 'take over' industries because it wouldn't benefit anyone doing so. Not unless the governments of the world decided to let people mooch of them whilst AI does all the work.
Rather than pay attention to doomer and booster nonsense I would suggest looking at industry or academic opinion. I would recommend Rodney Brooks predictions as a, he is a very grounded academic and b, nobody has deployed more robotics into working environments than he has.
I'm sorry but if you really want a pragmatic view of these things then doomer and booster nonsense is not going to be helpful. The growth is not exponential, AGI is not a thing to be taken seriously, nor is a supetintelligence that will "indulge us as pets" (ffs).
If anything current, or realistic growth of current AI, might slowly-as in over the course of decades- take us from the operators of machines to the observers of machines in some industries. As for driving jobs, it is still messy and it is very difficult for fully autonomous vehicles to be deployed in wide uncontrolled environments and to deal with edge cases in those environments (see Waymo recently in a power cut in the US).
As someone who works in accounting, a lot of people in cushy boring but middle class accounting jobs have no clue how easily their role can and will be replaced by AI, including auditors, if companies like Deloitte continue down the route of using AI (with mistakes) and then defending themselves for charging a few hundred $k for an AI short essay.
Anything to do with financial reporting and AP/AR and invoicing will be completely gone by 2035, if not even 2030.
Fwiw the reason that trains aren’t being automated is because it would take a huge investment in things like signalling and gov isn’t willing to spend that.
Yes. Part if the reason self driving cars are popular with governments is because they won't need to build new infrastructure. They probably have another 10 to 15 years to make autonomous vehucle viable in all locations, environments and handle edge cases better, before they go back to the drawing board.
It's at the top of the hype curve currently and real use will bed in over the next 5-10 years. I work in foresight and the number of technologies set to disrupt everything has been so hyped over the last 20 years of social media. 3d printing, ar,vr, block chain, self driving vehicles and on.
There's the famous paper from 2013 that said 47% of all jobs will be automated that had lots of assumptions that were wrong.
https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/the-future-of-employment
Don’t look at UK if you are trying to figure out what could be achieved with AI in 10 years. Look at China and US. Some of the comments claim that it’d be impossible to apply AI in some industries, whilst actually massive use of AI is already a reality in those industries in another country.
This country is nowhere near leading in AI. What in reality will happen is that this country will reactively follow others in the next 10 years in terms of AI. Changes will be more like ‘forced’ to happen.
I work in web hosting. We are currently using AI to help diagnose and solve issues.
We are already using AI to build out new systems and features.
It's not that much of a stretch to have the AI hooked in directly - instead of copy+pasting and have it diagnose and fix any issues as they occur. Essentially a self healing system.
All it will need is a single manager to give the AI some direction.
Look to the money to get a sense of where things are going. Google and meta aren't investing billions and buying black cab companies. Sure, there are lots of small cool, sexy projects like this that are catching the headlines. But the big AI companies have not tried to buy uber or london cabs. These companies take over the full supply chain whenever they intend to get involved. AI will impact industries where it can do something much cheaper than humans, or that humans can't currently do very well.
The place they are spending billions? massive data warehouses. Where do they hope to recoup those investments? industries that are dataheavy with buyers on a global scale. Cyber security, defense, marketing, financial analysis, surveillance.
We will mostly see the impact of AI as the internet moves into its next phase of a 'push' service as opposed to it's current 'pull' model. We will also see it automate tasks for governm,ent and multinational corporations.
Massively overblown.
Automated driving is nothing but a string of over hype and broken promises.
Automated train driving is not possible. Its functional on a closed circuit low speed line such as the DLR. The current cost estimates to get the entire tube automated is£ 60bn+, and again the tube lines are pretty much fully segregated and don't have to worry about other public infrastructure.
Realistically AI will not get much better. There's no path from the current models to AGI and frankly they are running out of data to improve current models on
We need to remember that a lot of AI is being powered and thrown into the mix by companies trading on the stock market. If their interest wanes realistically AI development would slow.
I also have to say despite these AI helpers being really helpful they can also be really inaccurate for simple tasks.
I think you're wrong.
The mistake you're making is to assume newer AI systems would have to work like the sort of system on the DLR. Expensive because you have to modify the entire infrastructure to make self driving trains work.
However if a company could offer a train, which could drive itself using exsiting signalling infrastructure? That would be a game changer.
Even if the train itself was much more expensive, the investment is still for one train, not ripping out the entire signalling system. If such a train could run with other driven by humans, the cost is further reduced.
Yes but by the time we have anything advanced enough to do this we would have fusion and teleportation.
Don't be silly, we are already close to building such a train.
No we are not. It's not even slightly close. It's not even "in the next 30 years" close.
That is a cope, a self driving train is not that difficult to design.
Comparing it to impossible technology, like a teleporter, is laughable.
On the trains aspect - AI has no impact. The technology for self driving trains has existed for 60 years with an ever increasing roll out (Victoria, Jubilee, Northern, District, Circle, Met, Central and H&C lines of the tube, parts of the Elizabeth line and Thameslink, DLR).However, due to the safety risks involved in carrying around 100s of people in a 100 ton metal tube, there will always be a person on board to make sure nothing goes wrong. Even if AI was somehow used, there would still be a person as a final safety backstop.
Two flaws with this argument.
The first is the assumption AI trains would work like the tech used on the likes of the Victoria line, which dates from the 60's. Where all of the infrastructure has to be built to allow driverless trains.
With AI you could put the tech in the train, not the rest of infrastructure, massively reducing costs.
Second is, the assumption you would need a highly qualified driver to act as a safety backup. When all you would really need is a person in the cab ready to press a big red stop button if something goes wrong.
They don't need to know how to actually drive the train.
We have not automated trains yet.. which only go one way. These self driving cars are a gimmick.
I can see cars being automated as they're much lower stakes. A train though? Never mind the union, you have an issue with the AI model's accuracy and then the morals and blame. Blame in particular is an important part of society. Deleting a model won't satisfy anyone.
Then you also have an issue with cyberattacks. It would be a mistake to not have a human in the loop who is able to overwrite any function. This one is a whole can of worms on its own and it will only get worse as hostility from China, Iran, Russia, NK, etc. increases.
It’s a tool, a useful one, but that’s all it is.
I think the AI bubble will go pop in the not too distant future, and people will stop trying to shoehorn AI into everything as the investment dries up.
At that point AI will find its place and then people will just carry on as normal. AI is going to replace low level jobs, but whether this will be temporary and people will go back to hiring humans like Klarna (https://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2025/05/18/business-tech-news-klarna-reverses-on-ai-says-customers-like-talking-to-people/) or the jobs will change as people learn how to work with AI I couldn’t say.
On the Basic Income Front you need to consider the big picture.
What makes our economy tick? Money. Companies produce goods and services and consumers buy them. For companies to be profitable they need to balance cost against price. Which is where AI comes in. It reduces cost (workforce) making the company more profitable.
But the thing everyone forgets is the other side of the equation. If people have no jobs, they have no money. If they have no money, they can’t buy goods and services. No money = no consumers. No consumers = no profit. No profit = no company.
If AI takes over, something will be needed to keep consumers able to consume. Which is where Universal Basic Income comes in.
I kinda think an underrated aspect is any time you pay someone to provide a properly formatted letter or other 'writing' service. Do I need to pay a solicitor/will writer hundreds of pounds an hour when a properly trained AI could do it in seconds for a fraction of the cost? Essientally you just need enough confidence in it that an underwriter would cover the liability.
Self driving transport is interesting - airlines and passengers pay lots of money for a human flight crew but in reality a computer flies the aircraft for 98% of the flight and could probaly do the whole flight if needed. No-one is ready for a human not to be in the loop though.
There are lots of menial jobs an AI could do but we really are waiting for robotics to catch up.
AI job displacement is happening now. Look up gdpval and gpt5.2 getting 70.9% on it. It's means most white collar workers are already unit cost dominated.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Discontinuity-Thesis-Ends-Economy-Know-ebook/dp/B0G58QYCMS/ I wrote a short book about it, only 99p to explain it. The theory is grim but the logic is unbreakable. The book is also free to download on the website too.
Emad Mostaque also explains what's happening. The first part nails what's happening too. Not convinced his solutions will work but he gets the diagnosis spot on. https://ii.inc/web/the-last-economy
"The logic is unbreakable": nothing like writing your own reviews.
haha what a whopper
Can you break it.
Cheaper stuff displaces more expensive stuff.
I'm not even engaging. You lost me at your first claim. Cheap opportunitism.
Maybe because you can see it.
Cheaper stuff displaces more expensive stuff.
GPT5.2 can do 70.9% of economically worth while takes same or better 11 times faster and 100 times cheaper.
Therefore humans get displaced.
The logic is unbreakable. I'm not suggesting anything profound. Cgp grey said it 11 years ago with his humans need not apply. Check out the video on YouTube.
So OpenAI creates its own benchmark and bang, human work is worthless. That is the basis of your logic; OpenAI marketing swill. You really don't need to tell anyone that you're doing nothing profound. Paroting boosters in a 99p E-book. Honest to god.