I’m not an AI techie and I’m not well educated on LLMs/AI in general. The issue I’m having is the dichotomy between how people talk about it. I’ve heard completely opposite ends of the spectrum. From AI is quickly becoming advanced enough to threaten human society, all the way to its a glorified dictionary/search engine that can’t really do much of anything. I know Lemmy has a steep anti-AI slant. But, can someone talk about this in a way I can wrap my head around why the divide seems so big?



This figure keeps getting thrown around and it is completely wrong. From the BLS, out of the 159 million non-farm workers in the US, only 1.47 million (less than 1%) work in ‘Truck transportation’, and not all of those individuals are ‘truck drivers’. And, while ‘factory workers’ is very vague, the entire manufacturing sector - which includes far more people than just ‘factory workers’ - employs 12.6 million (7.9%).
The entire trucking and manufacturing sectors don’t even amount to 9% of the US workforce, let alone just ‘factory workers and truck drivers’.
Source: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t17.htm