Automation to replace every job under the sun, eventually
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Let's shift focus to how we can provide this in a world where not everybody has to work. (And we can start with the current situation where not everyone has work or can't work).
But all in all, what a silly article. Sure we have been automating all mundane work since time beginning, but the article doesnt really give credit to the sheer complexity of the tasks humans are capable. We are a product of billions of years of evolution so any neural network used to simulate our brains has a lot of catching up to do. But I guess as a CEO of AI startup you have to build up the hype with non-informative predictions like this. Thank goodness they didnt throw out dates for specific tasks to be fully automated. They dont really explain the major problems what stops us from doing these super-duper robots already.
Just like it ain't only "mundane" work that is being replaced [0].
Imho right now most of humanity is still in denial about the consequences of these changes, just like with climate change.
But in the long-term automation will leave us with a whole ton of "surplus humans" that will struggle to find any meaningful economic activity to engage in to finance their own survival.
Right now a whole economy exists around these mundane jobs: All of the warehouse workers [1], delivery personnel, and a ton of others do their "mundane" jobs in the logistics chain, because that's what they can do. For many people, their driver's license is the only real qualification they have. But in the long term, not even a pilot's license will be a qualification that ensures employment [2].
What happens to these people once autonomous driving becomes adopted on a larger scale? Are they all gonna start working at Boston Dynamics, creating more autonomous tools? Will they all learn to code and start writing apps? Will they become successful artists? I seriously doubt that.
Will they work in newly created auxilareily industries? Maybe a few of them, but the "new jobs created" from this will never make up the number of jobs lost because the change to automation is also an increase in efficiency of productivity, meaning that the same work can now be done with way less effort.
[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603431/as-goldman-embrace...
[1] https://youtu.be/5iV_hB08Uns
[2] https://pressroom.ups.com/pressroom/ContentDetailsViewer.pag...
Going forward I think whatever that is what makes us human will be our most prized commodity. In a world full of synthetic products it's the ones that are real which stand out. And if we can't tell the difference between synthetics and reals, well. I guess we are screwed then. Perhaps it's just the next step in our evolution to become one with the machine, legacy flesh-versions will be left as curiosities, put in museums.
And one of the most dangerous non-answers to it is this:
> Sure not everyone can make the change so I guess they'll end up doing maintenance work or something, social services or just sit on their ass playing video games.
Because it assumes that societies will properly respond to it with social reforms accounting for these changes. But unlike the automation trend, the social changes that need to accompany it are a far cry away from even being recognized as a requirement.
In that context I do not see a future where people without a job will be "sitting at home playing video games", it's far more likely that people will be living on the street and won't even be able to afford food, because their gig-economy job got replaced by a fleet of corporate bots, just like most other menial and low-income jobs.
Will such a society recognize that not everybody can find a meaningful [0] place to work? Will it maybe force people, to work underpaid just to keep up the appearance of "pulling them bootstraps"? I mean, there's already a whole lot of that going on.
Maybe it's just the pessimist in me, but I just don't see the kind of "utopia" emerging from this many people imagine it to be. At least not in the way we are currently going about it, where the societal impact of massive tech-advances is regularly relegated to something that will be fixed post-release.
But I think you are looking at this the wrong way.
Technology is the natural evolution of biological material which is currently being used as the information carrier of DNA.
Think of AI as the building block for a better information carrier of our DNA.
That's what is meant with inevitability in this context.
If you want to survive you don't have a choice.
Those entities that don't adopt automation will be outperformed and supplanted by those that do.
It's a similar phenomenon with many technologies. Many people opposed cars, looms, cell phones... what happened to them?
I agree with you in sentiment, however that last sentence contains a deceptive concept in it- who is the collective "we" that would have to do the deciding, and do they have a history of taking such choices?
In a more realistic sense of 'choosing' not to automate, it will largely come from disagreements over the subject itself. It will not be that all humans get together and decide it, but rather that a significant portion of humans won't have any part in it.
But from a pure historical viewpoint, inevitability is a fallacy.
Also, humans will eventually start improving their biological capabilities, so human level AI is a moving target.