I don't think people appreciate the mass disruption of a shift like this happening across so many industries all at the same time. This sort of professional shift works when automation comes for a subset of a single sector, but we're looking at an everywhere all at once situation. How many plumbers are we going to need, exactly?
I also don't think people appreciate the absolute social turmoil that will occur as a result of this because of our complete lack of planning for it.
Afraid you won't have a useful job due to the rapid rise of AI replacing vast amounts of knowledge workers? Get to work building guillotines. You won't be able to sell them for very much but you can make up for it in volume.
To the wealth class: Massive amounts of people don't just quietly disappear when they suddenly can't feed or house their families because they've been automated out of a job.
People are very good at creating work. Every time tech creates a paradigm shift and people cry that there will be not enough work, the exact opposite happens.
Exactly, we’ve been automating the living crap out of almost everything for hundreds of years, but employment has never been higher. Automation leads to higher productivity, cheaper goods and services, increased need for technical skills, thus higher wages and higher demand.
Of course there can be some painful periods of adjustment, but that’s often caused by misguided policy trying to hold back the tide and delay the inevitable.
Ultimately yes, full no holds barred human level AI may well render human labour obsolete, but we’re a very long way away from that.
I know some people think LLMs are close to that already, but no, not even remotely close. I do believe strong AI is possible and maybe even inevitable. They’re a huge step forward, and are easily the biggest advance towards strong AI in my lifetime, but these things are just tools.
We have been automating at the beginning of the production chain , mostly.
This is the first automation that targets directly knowledge workers, and hit almost all of them but those in profession where error can cause people deaths.
Traditionally knowledge workers were the bulk of the middle class, because well it takes 30 years to produce one and not all make the cut, so they are paid market prices instead of minimum wages.
And by that nature, knowledge workers cannot reinvent themselves overnight, there will nowhere left to go for them.
Maybe lawyers and medics and a few other can entrenche themselves with legislation, but if you are a knowledge worker in a non union field things look scary.
Real human level strong AI would be that, but the LLMs we have now are nowhere close. They are just a powerful new software tool in the hands of specialists.
Maybe GPT10 might get there, but I suspect we’ll quickly reach diminishing returns with current and near future architectures.
This is a real hand wavy way to look at it. How about on the individual level? How is an individual affected by this and can you put yourself in their shoes?
I can’t tell you which individual people will lose their jobs, or even which specific jobs will end up being cut and why. Can you? We’re both just making different estimates of the likely overall effects. I’m basing mine in the known historical effects of automation on economies and employment, and the fact that previous arguments that were all doomed by it have every single time turned out to be false.
No, nobody can and that’s the point. Except the flaw in your thinking is your applying what happened in the past to the present. Nobody has every automated a human brain before, they mostly automated muscles away. This time is different so therefore you cannot assume that since a welding robot didn’t destroy the world that AI won’t. Automation and AI are not the same and we should quit calling it as such.
I certainly won’t claim that capitalism is immune from abuses or failures. It’s undeniable that it has its failures. But criticising its failures is one thing, while criticising it as a failure is another. To make the latter claim credibly you’d need to argue for a better alternative that either further minimises or eliminates the flaws. What is it?
When people cry that there will be not enough work, the exact opposite happens.
Nevermind that these people aren't crybabies - and that it is incredible condescending to paint them as such.
More fundamentally - what you're asserting as a self-evident fact is massively contradicted by what is probably the single largest sea change in many Western countries in the last 50 years - the systemic disappearance of solid middle-class jobs (and at least some form of community in many places), due exactly to these nifty "paradigm shifts" you are referring to.
Right. The last time a labor saving device came around, letting you do in 2 hours what it used to take 8 to do, it didn't give you 6 hours of vacation, it just meant you were more productive over your 8 hour day. If your job is now 90% "copy and paste into ChatGPT", you're still getting paid to know what to type into it.
Then again, I'm also reminded of a story of a homebuilder, hiring two workers. Together they held up the material and one of them measured the hypotenuse. Well, after someone showed him the Pythagorean theorem, the boss no longer needed the two workers to hold the materials up, and so sent one of them home. That day's labor market didn't expand to hire the guy who's job was replaced by a calculator. Does that extrapolate to the whole labor market, over a longer period of time, given a calculator for words?
In the US at least we have used every technology that increases productivity to keep hours of labor constant and make the rich richer. Millions of Wal-Mart workers have to do a year of hard labor just to earn the cost of a set of new tires for the CEO's 10th supercar.
> Millions of Wal-Mart workers have to do a year of hard labor
Working at Wal-Mart would be miserable in many ways, however nothing I've ever seen their employees do is even 10% of what I'd call "hard labor". Probably even their warehouses are not even close to farm/ranch/factory labor people associate with that term.
These jobs are not hard on the back, they are hard on the soul. Tilling a field can feel rewarding at the end of the day. Dealing with the living nightmare that is most Walmart shoppers is soul crushing.
Your viewpoint is rather callous. Just standing on your feet bored out of your mind can make even the most hardy miserable.
Agreed. I don’t know if I could be on my feet 8 hours a day like when I worked retail. When you work in a big box store it’s easy to walk 8+ miles a day.
If the Walmart employees aren't needed, Walmart would just fire them. They're still there because their work is still required, as people are continuing to buy more stuff from Walmart. It's not some conspiracy to keep hours of labor consistent, the workers aren't getting paid 8 hours just for no reason.
First of all the LM002 is not what many would call a "Supercar". At least not modern day. An actual supercar, the Ferrari 296GTB, uses Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tires, the same tires you would put on a Porsche. Or your WRX. Further I looked up the CEO of walmart, he doesn't drive an LM002
Even the Lamborhini Revuelto uses Bridgestone Potenza Sport tires which clocks in at about $500/each
I'd say biggest displacement would be in
IT,
Insurance/Financial Services,
Creative,
legal,
Thats not even 10% of the work force
and it would prob. take a decade for it to fully play out.
It is only a displacement if one assume that the total demand will remain the same, that professionals will be replaced by the cheaper AI while the total volume of work needing to be done remains steady. Take law, there are a great many legal activities that are not done today because of the cost of entry. AI will make lawyers cheaper. That will meant previous tasks that were forgone due to costs will now be financially possible. A small claim that wasn't worth a lawyer's time today will, in a future of cheaper AI-supported lawyers, be financial viable. Complex legal structures like trusts or life estates, once only available to the élite, may now be available to all. The next result may be an actual increase in the demand for lawyers as the total pool of work increases, both AI-possible and that which AI cannot do.
So too for complex accounting/insurance structures.
This isn’t the greatest example as there’s some glaring issues. With more small claims taking up the court’s time then how will we have time to litigate actual important matters? Will we then have to result to AI judges? Slippery slope.
Also customer support, and various flavors of clerical and administrative work.
Under the BLS classification scheme, these jobs are sprinkled around under various industrial categories such as medical, logistics, business services, etc. they add up to a large number of jobs in the aggregate (probably another 10%)
I think we still do not know exactly how it will shape our sociaty, but one thing is for sure, the products businesses will make with the help of AI, people have to buy them in the end. If they have no money how will people using AI benefit.
I also don't think people appreciate the absolute social turmoil that will occur as a result of this because of our complete lack of planning for it.
Afraid you won't have a useful job due to the rapid rise of AI replacing vast amounts of knowledge workers? Get to work building guillotines. You won't be able to sell them for very much but you can make up for it in volume.
To the wealth class: Massive amounts of people don't just quietly disappear when they suddenly can't feed or house their families because they've been automated out of a job.