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Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

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Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#71

Post by ben_w »

raincole wrote: post #43
BirAdam wrote: post #23

If all jobs were taken by AI in a short time span, the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs. This is an unlikely scenario. Not all things will be made/run by AIs in a short time. It is far more likely that specific jobs in specific industries will be taken by AI, and AI will slowly take the labor market. This will drive down p…

There are millions of jobs that can be fully automated with 20th century technology but are still done by humans today because 1) third world labor is just too cheap 2) unions and other job protection policies. Therefore the scenario where 'all jobs being replaced in a short time span' is simply impossible.

Sometimes that delays it.

But when the tech is good enough and cheap enough then the picketing unions find their only barganing chip, that of witholding their labor, has become a toothless threat: no matter how long and hard a person of the profession "computer"* refuses to work for me for daring to have an unauthorised "electronic brain"**, the absense of that labour will not cause me any loss.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

** https://archive.org/details/electronicbrainh00cook/mode/1up

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#72

Post by kelseyfrog »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #42
kelseyfrog wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the services that are intractably human: educators, judges, lawyers, social workers, personal trainers, childcare workers. Those will suffer the Baumol effect and their prices will rise to extraordinary levels.

One would assume - if this were to happen - that supply and demand would bring prices back down, as everyone would rush to those fields.

Our increased efficiency producing manufactured goods, technology, food, and clothing has already produced this effect in healthcare, education, childcare, and more. That's how the effect works.

The only question is, are we prepared to deal with the social ramifications of the consequences? Are we ok with new crises? Imagine the current problems dialed up 10x. Are we prepared to say, "the market is in a new equilibrium, and that's ok"?

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#73

Post by ben_w »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #38
BirAdam wrote: post #23

If all jobs were taken by AI in a short time span, the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs. This is an unlikely scenario. Not all things will be made/run by AIs in a short time. It is far more likely that specific jobs in specific industries will be taken by AI, and AI will slowly take the labor market. This will drive down p…

Except the services that are intractably human: educators, judges, lawyers, social workers, personal trainers, childcare workers. Those will suffer the Baumol effect and their prices will rise to extraordinary levels.

There's already examples of lawyers offloading work to ChatGPT even though they weren't allowed to. Also educators (and students), though if all other work is automated, what's there to educate for, and how would the prospective students pay?

Social work, childcare, for now I agree:

My expectation is that general purpose humanoid robots, being smaller than cars and needing to do a strict superset of what is needed to drive a car, happen at least a decade after self driving cars lose all of the steering wheels, and the geofences, and any remote safety drivers. And that's even with expected algorithmic improvements, if we don't get algorithmic improvements then hardware improvements alone will force this to be at least 18 years' between that level of FSD and androids.

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#74

Post by myrmidon »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #62
BirAdam wrote: post #23

If all jobs were taken by AI in a short time span, the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs. This is an unlikely scenario. Not all things will be made/run by AIs in a short time. It is far more likely that specific jobs in specific industries will be taken by AI, and AI will slowly take the labor market. This will drive down p…

If machines did all the repetitive, labor intensive, productive work, including building more machines, the natural consequence would be a very disruptive rethinking of economics. Post-scarcity is only a disaster if money exists. People would still work, but as a hobby, not as a way of survival. Think of it as if in a few generations, everyone had the motivations of a rich junior, for better or worse. IMO, this is a…

"Disruptive rethinking of economics" is a very optimistic way to put this IMO.

The big problem I see is that there is little incentive for "owners" (of datacenters/factories/etc) to share anything with such hobbyist laborers, because hobbyist labor has little to no value to them.

All the past waves of automation provided a lot of entirely new job opportunities AND increased overall demand (by factory workers siphoning off some of the gained wealth and spending it themselves). AI does neither.

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#75

Post by akoboldfrying »

scottyah wrote: post #14
wincy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like it’s time to become a Michelin Star chef. Or a plumber.

Seems like entertainers/influencers are doing the best.

No doubt the top influencer is doing better than the top plumber, but I'd say the median plumber is streets ahead of the median influencer.

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#76

Post by evilantnie »

ori_b wrote: post #11
saberience wrote: post #3

ChatGPT, please summarise this long essay by Stephen Wolfram into a couple of pithy sentences: TLDR: AI won’t “end work” so much as endlessly move the goalposts, because the universe itself is too computationally messy to automate completely. The real risk isn’t mass unemployment—it’s that we’ll have infinite machine intelligence and still argue about what’s worth doing.

Why would we argue if the machine is better at knowing what's worth doing? Why wouldn't we ask the machine to decide, and then do it?

There are infinite things worth doing, a machines ability to actually know what's worth doing in any given scenario is likely on par with a human's. What's "Worth doing" is subjective, everything comes down to situational context. Machines cannot escape the same ambiguity as humans. If context is constant, then I would assume overlapping performance on a pretty standard distribution between humans and machines.

Machines lower the marginal cost of performing a cognitive task for humans, it can be extremely useful and high leverage to off load certain decisions to machines. I think it's reasonable to ask a machine to decide when machine context is higher and outcome is de-risked.

Human leverage of AGI comes down to good judgement, but that too is not uniformly applied.

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#77

Post by kelseyfrog »

p1esk wrote: post #41
kelseyfrog wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the services that are intractably human: educators, judges, lawyers, social workers, personal trainers, childcare workers. Those will suffer the Baumol effect and their prices will rise to extraordinary levels.

The best educator I’ve ever had is ChatGPT.

How scalable is that in the sense that teachers have been obsoleted and we can run zero-staff schools?

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#78

Post by oops »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #72
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One would assume - if this were to happen - that supply and demand would bring prices back down, as everyone would rush to those fields.

Our increased efficiency producing manufactured goods, technology, food, and clothing has already produced this effect in healthcare, education, childcare, and more. That's how the effect works. The only question is, are we prepared to deal with the social ramifications of the consequences? Are we ok with new crises? Imagine the current problems dialed up 10x. Are we prepared to say, "the market is in a new equilibri…

Healthcare, education and childcare are either free or affordable in almost all developed countries.

Even in places where these services are expensive, it does not seem to be because the workers are highly paid.

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#79

Post by raincole »

mips_avatar wrote: post #20

Outside of America people aren't really stressed about AI. Like you go to Vietnam or Vienna they mostly just think that they will have a good life with AI. It's uniquely American to believe that your life will end when AI takes your job. The problem isn't the AI it's that your access to basic rights is intermediated by a corporate job. American's need to decenter their self worth from their jobs. Like when I quit Mic…

> your access to basic rights is intermediated by a corporate job

Lmao. America has worse social welfare than most developed countries, but it's still a heaven compared to most of the world. What you can find in food bank is a feast for billions of people on this planet.

American people are stressed about AI because American people are expensive. Like hella expensive. So the incentive to replace American workers is very strong.

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#80

Post by danaris »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #38
BirAdam wrote: post #23

If all jobs were taken by AI in a short time span, the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs. This is an unlikely scenario. Not all things will be made/run by AIs in a short time. It is far more likely that specific jobs in specific industries will be taken by AI, and AI will slowly take the labor market. This will drive down p…

Except the services that are intractably human: educators, judges, lawyers, social workers, personal trainers, childcare workers. Those will suffer the Baumol effect and their prices will rise to extraordinary levels.

The big tech AI barons absolutely claim that their LLMs can replace educators, judges, lawyers, and personal trainers. I've seen some vague claims about childcare robots, but for whatever reasons anything that's not pure software appears to be currently outside their field of vision. They're unlikely to make any claims about social workers because there's not enough money in it.

No; the services that seem most intractably human, at least given the current state of things, are very much those in personal care roles—nurses, elder care workers, similar sorts of on-the-ground, in-person medical/emotional care—and trades, like plumbing, construction, electrical work, handcrafts, etc.

Until we start seeing high-quality general-purpose robots (whether they're humanoid or not), those seem likely to be the jobs safest from direct attempts to replace them with LLMs. That doesn't mean they'll be safe from the overall economic fallout, of course, nor that the attempts to replace knowledge work of all types will actually succeed in a meaningful way.

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