If AI gets to a point where it’s as advanced as you’re describing, 99% of everyone reading this comment will have a job that’s rendered obsolete with 1% of people employed (to manage the AI) leading to a massive concentration of wealth to the very few people necessary to manage the AI and its inputs/outputs.
In such a world, what value do us engineers provide, if any?
Is that because billionaires "give [you] money out of the goodness of their hearts"? Are you unemployed because all those farming jobs have been eliminated? Obviously not. Rather, the efficiency gains of modern infrastructure have simply made your labor that much more valuable.
That’s literally the plot of Atlas Shrugged, not real life.
It's already happened once. 99% of farming jobs that existed a few thousand years ago now long gone. Are we all unemployed and starving because of that? No, in fact we're all far more wealthy than we would have been before all that technological progress was made. We just don't think of it as wealth, and instead complain that the guy next door has more than us and the government ought to do something about that, because he clearly wouldn't be that rich if not for all this darned technological progress taking our jobs.
This just doesn't make sense. If there's something I can (want to and capable of) work on that's 100x more valuable than what I'm doing now, why isn't somebody hiring me to do that now?
The farming example goes like this -- you may think food is less valuable than your phone because it costs less. But that's just because supply is greater and it costs less to produce, so the cost is lower.
Similarly, if some AI is capable of writing better software than I do now, I don't get to choose another job that pays 100x. It's just that my current job will cost less, and if I continue doing my work, it will be rewarded at 1/100x due to competition from cheap AI. Perhaps I'll be flipping burgers at restaurants and it will be 100x pay compared with writing software. I won't be getting 100x more wealthy though!
That's like asking why 2000 years ago the farmers didn't just buy a tractor and a combine and do their farming that way, since that would have generated so much more value. The technology doesn't exist right now, we're talking about a scenario where it will.
> Similarly, if some AI is capable of writing better software than I do now, I don't get to choose another job that pays 100x. It's just that my current job will cost less
Correct, assuming that it's only writing software that gets automated, and nothing else. Society as a whole will be wealthier by virtue of being able to afford more software, but not 100x wealthier. But if 99% of everything gets automated, the jobs that remain (and the new ones that get created as a side-effect) will indeed pay 100x more in terms of real purchasing power. Whether you think of that as "this job is 100x more valuable" or "everything else costs 99% less" is just a matter of perspective.
We would do systems engineering at the domain level. And when AI can do that, we don't have to worry about jobs anymore.