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This is not just for businesses but for everything in life.
For example, we all buy robot vaccuums, right? People even rearrange furniture to make sure it is compatible with the robot vaccuums. Everyone wants it to do more and be more reliable.
Are you ready for your Brave New World? :^)
Yes, of course. But it's also inevitable and overall good. If we stagnate then we are headed towards certain doom via climate change, nuclear war, an asteroid, a vulcano eruption leading to cooling and crop failure or a pandemic. If we are to survive and thrive long term we need to become true masters of our environment, and that means we need to be smarter, stronger and more productive. I think this is my main disco…
I'm not all that bothered about stopping AI progress, but if capital is overwhelmingly directed towards replacing blue and white collar workers with machines while climate change and every other existential threat is starved of capital then as a species we are doomed.
It's not like this is being done for the benefit of humanity either. Ask those same profit-obsessed oligarchs (or their media outlets) who are effusive about AI's ability to create a better future what will happen if the retirement age is raised in response or even kept the same. They 180 on their techno-jobs-killing-optimism so fast you will get whiplash: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dandoonan/2024/01/30/demographi...
The outcome of further automation will be to move even more capital under the control of an even smaller number of hands. It's that increasing inequality which is the problem, not AGI.
All major technological advancements have eliminated some jobs and created others. In general, producing more with less human input is how society becomes richer. Is it a tragedy that we no longer need telephone switchboard operators, ice cutters, and lamplighters? There were surely countless mini-tragedies as the people who made their livelihoods that way struggled with stagnant wages and unemployment, but the next…
We are doing both!
You are assuming people like to work, and jobs are something good. Without jobs, people will have less stress and more free time. They will spend more time on leisure activities, with their families, and so on.
Also jobs contribute to carbon emissions, we have to maintain cities, large offices, car makes CO2 for commute...
Sure, this won't be true for every role and organization, but for many this will definitely be true.
but from individual perspective I don't think that is the case. Since AlphaGo first time was released and beat world-class players, have all these players gone? not really, but it even promotes more people study Go with AI instead.
As a software engineer myself, am I enjoy using AI for coding? yes, for many trivial and repetitive works, but do I want it to take my coding works fully away such that I can just type natural languages? My answer is no. I still need the dopamine hit from coding myself, either for work or my for hobby time, even I am rebuilding some wheels other folks have already built, and I believe many of ours are the same.