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The safest job from AI may be writing

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

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Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#21

Post by porphyra »

curuinor wrote: post #17
phyzix5761 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equity trading is not zero sum. There are real businesses and assets behind the equities they represent that have actual value and produce actual money.

The business-building is not zero sum, but the trading is zero-sum, and the societal purpose of the thing is to provide liquidity

theoretically equity trading is about distributing stonks most optimally so that productive companies get more and less productive ones get less, improving productivity of society as a whole

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#22

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

I don't think there's any chance people will be employed to sell the output of their brains in 20 years, outside of "athletes", or whatever we end up calling people who think for sport. We mostly succeeded at doing this with muscles, and today there's no market for hauling rocks out of quarries manually. We're in the process of doing that for brains too.

AI will outdo people in all practical uses. We're already there for debugging and getting very close for coding, and we're in the middle of the largest investment in human history to expand that to everything else.

If we do a good job of alignment, AI will treat people like those cats "in charge" of train stations in Japan: our every need will be accommodated, but we won't be controlling things we don't understand.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#23

Post by LarsDu88 »

This feels premature. The thing about the LLMs people use today is that it's a handful of super expensively trained models serving 1000s of use cases ranging from frontier math to recipe planning.

We get to learn the foibles and language of Claude and ChatGPT as a result. The slop is almost detectable if you provide no steering prompts about story structure, narrative structure, or stylistic cues. And most writers are not finetuning the weights to their LLMs explicitly.

If you invest time into doing all that (not really trivial stuff), the results will be better.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#24

Post by quickthrowman »

curuinor wrote: post #17
phyzix5761 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equity trading is not zero sum. There are real businesses and assets behind the equities they represent that have actual value and produce actual money.

The business-building is not zero sum, but the trading is zero-sum, and the societal purpose of the thing is to provide liquidity

Derivatives (options, futures, swaps, etc) are a zero sum market, there is always a winner and a loser necessarily because the contracts have an expiration date.

The same is not true for trading equities, they are not zero sum. There are dividends, buybacks, companies will sometimes spin off a part or parts as separate companies that you get newly issued shares of stock from (GE splitting into parts is a recent example), public companies get taken private at a premium to the market price, etc.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#26

Post by ElProlactin »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #13

The safest jobs are the ones that can't be done behind a screen. I'm a technician and there's no robot that could replace me and there won't be for a long time.

Except that in the worst-case AI scenarios where a huge portion of the professionals who work "behind a screen" lose their jobs, the entire labor market will have to deal with that.

There's so much focus in the US on vocations but Americans have no idea how little mechanics, plumbers, etc. in other countries make. There are a variety of reasons for this but one of the biggest is that you can't charge $200/hour to fix a leak when $200 represents a double-digit percentage of a worker's monthly salary.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#28

Post by ElProlactin »

jimmyl02 wrote: post #12
enraged_camel wrote: post #9

The reason LLMs use the same cadence and cliches is that their RLHF does not emphasize writing well, the way it emphasizes, say, coding. And the reason for that should be pretty obvious: coding is where the big money is at. So the author may be correct, but for a different reason: unless writing starts being very valuable as a profession, it's unlikely the labs will spend significant resources making their AI models…

What's interesting is that we still read AI's output and that's still the primary interface between a human and the AI. Implicitly that means that writing is important and I think we're already starting to see this with the complaints around how Claude "talks"

Claude "talk" is particularly annoying if you're using Claude to perform a job function (write code, analyze a spreadsheet, etc.) but average people reading an ad, Facebook post, etc. don't really care from what I can tell. In fact, I think most of them have no idea what Claude "talk" is, even if some of them notice common patterns that have emerged recently.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#29

Post by metabagel »

a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #22

I don't think there's any chance people will be employed to sell the output of their brains in 20 years, outside of "athletes", or whatever we end up calling people who think for sport. We mostly succeeded at doing this with muscles, and today there's no market for hauling rocks out of quarries manually. We're in the process of doing that for brains too. AI will outdo people in all practical uses. We're already there…

There will always be creative superstars.
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