AI and the Automation of Work

No, because what he described actually works.

Clothing used to be hugely expensive:

https://www.bookandsword.com/2017/12/09/how-much-did-a-shirt...

> So the shirts of humble servants at Henry VIII’s court cost between 3 and 10 days’ income. That would be similar to someone who earns 10 dollars or Euros an hour spending 240 to 800 dollars or Euros on an item today. (Of course, in the 15th and 16th century, people spent much more of their incomes on food, fuel, and clothing than they do in Europe or European settler societies today, and much less on rent, transportation, and medical care … but it seems that most people could make or obtain one or two new shirts every year or so).

https://www.bookandsword.com/2021/05/08/how-much-did-a-tunic...

> In the Edict, the simplest linen tunic could be sold for up to 500 denarii, whereas a linen weaver was to be paid 20 or 40 denarii per day plus maintenance. Fine linen tunics could be sold for up to 7,000 denarii. Elsewhere in the Edict, workers without maintenance (food and possibly fuel and shelter) earn about twice as much as those with. So a linen weaver would need to work for (500 / 2×40 to 500 / 2×20) 6 to 12 days to earn the price of the simplest linen tunic. That is not so different from the 3 to 10 days’ income for a worker to buy a shirt at the court of Henry VIII of England, considering that the ancients did not have spinning wheels. The linen tunics in 301 CE were probably woven as one rectangular or cross-shaped piece and sewed up the sides and under the arms, whereas the English shirts were cut and sewed from long pieces of cloth, but that is another story.

These days, you can buy a shirt for a much smaller amount of money, so you have more money to spend on other things, and the economy can grow. This isn't a new concept; in fact, it's so old, we tend to forget how things were before it took hold with the birth of industrialization and automation.

>What's the point of research if some AI might do it better than me in 10-20 years?

You said you enjoy learning and working.

Ask a random college freshman in computer science to write a backtracking sudoku solver with coroutines and/or fibers in their language of choice. Oof, only 1 out of 10 can do it...? I guess 9 out of 10 college freshmen aren't generally intelligent? (I mean, I certainly wasn't very intelligent as a college freshman, but I'm pretty sure that's not the way you're using that word here).

Anyways, these kinds of strawmen always baffle me in regards to AI.

Insert random pseudo trivia that most of the general population wouldn't be able to do, see the AI fail at that specific task. "What did I tell you? The AI definitely isn't generally intelligent yet!"

Everybody is out to prove AI isn't intelligent without first defining what intelligence even is. And when other people rightly point out it can do a lot of stuff, they point to some specific task that it gets 90% of the way there but doesn't get perfect and then triumphantly declare AI isn't intelligent. Crazy.

Sigh classic LLM -- without you, the expert, I can't quickly tell from the code / output how the answer the LLM produced is wrong. I also asked it to solve sudoku by "propagating constraints" and the answer seemed to work for me :/ Again, I'd guess the soln produced is wrong because I trust you more than the LLM but I don't have the mental horsepower to figure it out without resorting to tests & debugging.

It's not ChatGPT what we should be putting in our forecasts, but its successors. And, from what I have been reading, our AI folk are coming with better performers all the time by chaining multiple neural networks, "making modular brains", so to speak. Any argument that starts by saying "ChatGPT is very bad at X, humans will always do X," is flawed IMO.

So I think that any job that can be done by a non-human is up for grabs, but for the sake of the argument, let's restrict it to manual jobs where being human doesn't matter. For example, a kitchen clerk at a burger joint doesn't need to be human, as long as it does all the tasks it needs to do and doesn't put anybody in danger. A security guard at an airport can be a machine gun with wheels, it is more intimidating that way. Picking up coffee cherries from a coffee tree can be done by a machine which is smart enough.

But assume that there are jobs "high in the ladder," for amazing engineers and creatives super-charged with AI powers. The problem is that not everybody can climb that ladder. And that's a problem we are already seeing. Right now, if you are highly qualified, you have no trouble getting a decent job. But if you are not, you are fighting for 10 USD/hour shifts somewhere. Imagine if 90% of those shifts are gone. Compound that with our social media (and AIs optimizing for engagement there in) making our kids a little dumber by stealing their attention for long periods of time.

It doesn't look good.