AI is different

> Moreover, companies could be less willing to pay for services that their internal AIs can handle or build from scratch.

Companies have to be a bit more farsighted than this thinking. Assuming LLMs reach this peak...if say, MS says they can save money because they don't need XYZ anymore because AI can do it, XYZ can decide they don't need Office anymore because AI can do it.

There's absolutely no moat anymore. Human capital and the shear volume of code are the current moat. An all capable AI completely eliminates both.

It's a bit scary to say "what then?" How do you make money in a world where everyone can more or less do everything themselves? Perhaps like 15 Million Merits, we all just live in pods and pedal bikes all day to power the AI(s).

Carpenters, landscapers, roofers, plumbers, electricians, elderly care, nurses, cooks, servers, bakers, musicians, actors, artists...

Those jobs are probably still a couple decades plus off from displacement. some possibly never, And we will need them in higher numbers.. and perhaps it's ironic because these are some of the oldest professions.

Everything we do is in service of paying for our housing, transportation, eating food, healthcare and some fun money.

Most goes to housing, healthcare, and transportation.

Healthcare costs may come down some with advancements in AI. R&D will be cheaper. Knowledge will be cheaper and more accessible.

But what people care about, what people have always cared about, remains in professions that are as old as time and, I don't see them fully replaceable by AI just yet - enhanced, yes, but not replaced.

Imagine a world where high quality landscaping exists for the average person. And this is made possible because we'll live in a world where the equivalent of today's uber driver owns a team of gardening androids.

Or perhaps in the future everyone will work in finance. Everyone's a corporation.

Ramble ramble ramble

Isn't this exactly the goals of open source software? In an ideal open source world, anything and everything is freely available, you can host and set up anything and everything on your own.

Software is now free, and all people care about is the hardware and the electricity bills.

What? Robotics will have far more ambiguity and nuance to deal with than language models, and they'll have to analyze realtime audio and video to do so. Jobs are not so clearly defined as you imagine in the real world. For example, explain to me what a plumber does, precisely and how you would train a robot to do so? How do you train it to navigate ANY type of buildings internal plumbing structure and safely repair or install for?

I'm skeptical of arguments like this. If we look at most impactful technologies since the year 2000, AI is not even in my top 3. Social networking, mobile computing, and cloud computing have all done more to alter society and daily life than has AI.

And yes, I recognize that AI has already created profound change, in that every software engineer now depends heavily on copilots, in that education faces a major integrity challenge, and in that search has been completely changed. I just don't think those changes are on the same level as the normalization of cutting-edge computers in everyone's pockets, as our personal relationships becoming increasingly online, nor as the enablement for startups to scale without having to maintain physical compute infrastructure.

To me, the treating of AI as "different" is still unsubstantiated. Could we get there? Absolutely. We just haven't yet. But some people start to talk about it almost in a way that's reminiscent of Pascal's Wager, as if the slight chance of a godly reward from producing AI means it is rational to devote our all to it. But I'm still holding my breath.