81–90 of 151 posts
I thought everyone already knew this. IT, doctors, lawyers will be mostly gone. Probably most office worker jobs that I’m not thinking of. Best thing to do is become a nurse, that’ll be bulletproof until AGI makes progress on robotics.
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You could be right. I don't have enough knowledge in the field and I'm not sure 'trend predictions' work that well. Why aren't there autonomous vehicles already? Why does Waymo have to deploy them city by city? When I learned to drive I learned to drive - you didn't have to teach me how to drive in L.A , then San Francsisco, Then Pheonix etc. Is it only about Waymo being careful or are these things not yet good enoug…
> Why aren't there autonomous vehicles already? There’s a lot of reasons. Not in the order of importance, just what in the order of what comes first in my mind : 1. While Real World Interactions (robotics, autonomous driving, factories automation,…) are somewhat parallelizable with Purely Digital AGI (games, text, videos, programming,…), it is way more easy to do AGI first and Real World Interactions second. This is…
This is the most likely reason that we won’t see widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles in the next 30 years.
Around 120 people die in automobile accidents every day and people shrug. But if 12 people died in accidents caused by autonomous vehicles in a year (yes I changed units), they will quickly be banned.
Let’s chat about lawnmowers. There was a time when cutting grass was done with scythes, specially shaped swords. All day back and forth swinging the blade to get grass just the perfect length. Swing, take a step, swing. It was backbreaking labor in the sun. So lawns probably were quite expensive and having your own was probably pretty flashy, or maybe they were public, provided by the state to the people, or maybe bo…
Thing is when manual jobs got replaced we escaped to knowledge work. This time there is no equivalent. These lawnmower/textile worker analogies fall flat because this time might actually be different
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Good question. My hunch is most functioning governments will step in and create these jobs - because they are badly needed. .Even now at least half of economic activity is government created in many developed countries - so it will be more like 80%. But I have no crystal ball, I'm just speculating.
For that to happen we would need a paradigm shift on the main ideology behind most functioning governments: neoliberalism. It's not in the current sociopolitical/economical zeitgeist for governments to step in and create jobs, since the 80s we've moved towards privatisation, even very socially oriented governments like Western/Northern Europe are in it. To undo this flow into the other direction will take another gen…
Look at countries like France, quite crazy.
It feels to me like there'll start to be people retraining sooner rather than later. If you feel your job is threatened, you're likely to look at options that can't be easily displaced. I did a Physics degree and PhD and my 'backups' are going to do something in the very very regulated nuclear industry (currently crying out for people in the UK) or going into teaching. I think the people who will be most easily displ…
If an AI can do "most economically valuable jobs" retraining won't help. Unless you want to retrain for something that is not economically valuable enough to spend compute on it, and has having a human body as a non-negotiable prerequisite.
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Thing is when manual jobs got replaced we escaped to knowledge work. This time there is no equivalent. These lawnmower/textile worker analogies fall flat because this time might actually be different
Knowledge work is too broad a definition. There’s immense potential to reduce the “creative drudgery” in work - think background art, music for malls, first drafts of company comms… Some knowledge work has more leverage than other knowledge work. We don’t have a term for this distinction right now. But the low-leverage work will get automated, leaving us with more pleasant, higher-level, more creative jobs. This is j…
Some office Karen that calls google homepage „the internet“ and struggles using shift key to capitalize (true story) is not going to automate anything whatsoever in a world where even tech people struggle to keep up
Or put different yes jobs but at different level entirely. So we’re still going to be stuck with a huge societal problem of people displaced with no place to go
> But the low-leverage work will get automated
Is this accurate?
In my mind whether something can/will get automated is not linked to level of leverage it has.
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Thing is when manual jobs got replaced we escaped to knowledge work. This time there is no equivalent. These lawnmower/textile worker analogies fall flat because this time might actually be different
We all didn’t escape to knowledge work. Half the MAGA movement was the result of “rural America” not being able to adjust to the loss of factory work and manual labor.
My point is there is even less of a pressure relief valve this time.
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You could be right. I don't have enough knowledge in the field and I'm not sure 'trend predictions' work that well. Why aren't there autonomous vehicles already? Why does Waymo have to deploy them city by city? When I learned to drive I learned to drive - you didn't have to teach me how to drive in L.A , then San Francsisco, Then Pheonix etc. Is it only about Waymo being careful or are these things not yet good enoug…
> Why aren't there autonomous vehicles already? There’s a lot of reasons. Not in the order of importance, just what in the order of what comes first in my mind : 1. While Real World Interactions (robotics, autonomous driving, factories automation,…) are somewhat parallelizable with Purely Digital AGI (games, text, videos, programming,…), it is way more easy to do AGI first and Real World Interactions second. This is…
Yes there will be a crisis of meaning, in fact in most secular societies there already is one (how much meaning can you derive from preparing a balance sheet or handling customer support tickets?). Some societies will deal much better with unemployment - mostly religious societies. If we can create societies of abundance (where you get most services for pretty much free due to A.I) I think we will solve the crisis of meaning with family, friends, hobbies and really good next generation T.V and computer games.
In the grand scheme of things most of us understand we don't matter at all (at least I don't think I matter in any significant way, nor does humanity as a whole imo), but we do need a reason to get up in the morning, somewhere to go and interact with society. We matter to our families and close friends if it makes you feel better.
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I agree about not raking over old quotes, but people will. Any attempt to do what you are suggesting will be labelled "communism" or similar. Of course communism is not the only value system I remember an Yes Minister episode (I cannot recall which one) in which some one quotes that and Hacker guesses the source of the quote is Jesus. Not an unreasonable guess. The problem is that whatever values you base the justifi…
> what you are suggesting will be labelled "communism" or similar I am definitely not suggesting communism. What I laid out was the problem and how, without insurrection, it could be mitigated.