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Comment by snejad123 | Hacker News Reader

Off the top of my head:

When paired with a robotic medium, we'll be able to automate most pattern driven jobs like construction, welding, surgery, anything really that doesn't require human element to it and is more of a pattern matching behavior.

This is extremely revolutionary and will put a ton of people out of work. Any pattern-dependent job that does not require human interaction will be at risk, even coding (as we've seen by GPT-3's ability to generate code). Lawyers, sales people, cops, these jobs will be ok, but there will be less demand for humongous medical teams, software teams, etc. Bc all the entry-level work can be handled by AI, and just need some QA from a few engineers.

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This is a wildly optimistic take on what AI can accomplish, and a misunderstanding of the difficulties in all those tasks. If AI can do the first set of jobs, it will be able to replace sales people, cops, and lawyers too. But there's nothing, yet, to indicate that there isn't a wide gulf between the current state of the art and the kind of generalized intelligence you're talking about.

Yes but for jobs that require emotion like sales, the current Neural Network paradigm is just not gonna cut it. I am never buying from a robot, it’s missing an element of the mind that we still haven’t even categorized the biological side of, even if it sounds like a “real person”.

The state of the art of today’s DNN, I agree, is far away. But the peak of today’s architecture is yes, replacing construction, welding, and surgery. Those actually might happen quickly.

Besides, the more imminent threat to "our jobs" is not artificial intelligence but the brutal combination of globalization and the increasingly effortless ability to work remotely. If it doesn't matter anymore where the person behind Slack or Zoom is located, then why should they be in the same country. Before AI catches up to our jobs, the jobs will already have been taken away from us by the forces of globalization.

I mean it can already replace certain tasks done by sales people, cops and lawyers.

Three lawyers with the right set of tools (e.g. for discovery, writing legal briefs, etc.) can be more productive than twenty lawyers.

That would be revolutionary! Like others in the comments, I haven't seen evidence that this can be done with today's technology. But I would be happily be proved wrong, and would love to learn more.

All that from today's AI? The best I've seen from today's AI is a few gpt-3 articles that are clearly in the uncanny valley and a car which may or may not mistake an exit ramp wall for a passing lane.

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