OpenAI Research Says 80% of U.S. Workers' Jobs Will Be Impacted by GPT
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1) the profit is distributed to as many people as possible (say UBI)
2) we find things to fill our time with apart from work.
Problem one is likely solvable over the long term. Problem two may become a challenge for many. Work often adds meaning to peoples life. Feeling like you can't contribute anything meaningful to society may effect mental health. On the other hand, we may find time to take care of younger and elder people; spend more time with friends etc.
I think a big question will be, how fast the changes happen. A quick destruction of jobs without 1) or 2) will lead to negative consequences in the mid-term.
It's not in the interests of capital to solve it.[0] Having high unemployment means cheaper labour. People have argued that capitalism should be replaced for more than a century, yet nobody's successfully displaced it.
[0] Obviously mass unemployment is bad for the economy in general, which would also ultimately impact capital, but for some reason that always seems to be a lesser concern.
The rich will be living in their towers with the lucky few allowed to serve them and get paid a pittance, while the rest of us are starving in the streets.
There is no single capitalism but many different flavors (US vs European welfare states).
But fewer consumers of your products who are also earning less which means you can’t make up for it via higher prices. Taken to the hyped extreme AI means total economic destruction for labor and capital. In fact, unless it achieves self generation and maintenance of all supporting infrastructure and industrial inputs before this occurs then it’s the end of AI.
This is a consequence of potentially collective, uncoordinated action. It's possible that every individual company says "it makes no sense to be paying this much for labor, i'm getting cheap AI/robots" and fires a ton of people everyone else be damned, and then runs into lower demand later because everyone else is doing it. So everyone acts in their immediate interest to be collectively worse off, not unlike... a bank run!
The quest for meaning is perhaps the lifeline for Meta's VR ambitions. If there's nothing left to do in the real world, people will get lost in endless generative content.
Humanity ends with people playing VR farming simulator.
I could see a future when the bulk of humanity lives in "the Matrix" voluntarily, eh?
For some, that other thing will be another leisure activity.
For others, it will be something like what we now see as work in one form or another, whether that be helping people in ways that robots and AIs can't, doing research, or even just doing some work that robots can do, because some people like to do it, and some people like to have a human doing it for or with them.
For others still it will be art: painting, writing, creating video games, becoming an actor or comedian, whatever.
Humans are not well-adapted to having nothing productive to do. If a given human wants to continue to do purely leisure activities, it is often because they have been so exhausted and abused by our current system that their body and brain needs the time to heal.
For owners, managers, others in authority, control is the daily game, not optimizing for some ideal commons. Violence is common and so are crooked lawyers and corrupt decision makers.
Unpleasant and low-paid work will continue and perhaps increase, as pleasant and stable breeding grounds deteriorate and are further embroiled in conflict and vice. Many capable people, for pressure reasons, will double-down on authority, control, security and law-enforcement. Trapping and tricking other humans for profit will increase. Indentured servitude via debt and other means, will increase. AI will be used for this.
It was usual to kill natives to take their land.
It was usual to own slaves.
Worker rights have not existed in any form until somewhat recently.
Schools are available.
Violence has declined constantly.
We take the environmental protection much more serious now than 50 years ago (you could argue it's not enough, I'm talking about progress)
2) In my own little bubble, no one I know is particularly fulfilled by creating crud API's and gluing together microservices. I'd bet that with guaranteed financial stability finding meaning in life would become easier, not harder.
Monarchies have a history of getting taken down (in terms of power). They held an absolute power and a tight grip.
You could see money as a proxy for power, but that's only true as long as it's scarce and you can buy real power with it.
I've been a follower of your thinking patterns regarding 2) for a long time.
Life will be easier, no questions. But that's different question from the mental health one. Feeling useless is a pretty shitty feeling and a primer for depression.
I see the point you're driving at but the democratic institution of the US has explicit guard rails against this. We force presidents to step down because we _know_ that voluntary relinquishing of power is unlikely.
I do see money as a proxy for power. If you make enough of it you can influence public opinion, enrich or destroy education, buy twitter, etc.
The system will collapse on itself if most are jobless. You can't sell products if no one can afford them.
My biggest grip with UBI is it just redefines zero. The better solution would be to do away with capital entirely, have people democratically vote on what services they want, and then conscript if there aren't enough volunteers/robots/AI to provide those services. There seems to be this tendency to forget that labor is what matters, not capital. Capital is a means of exploiting labor, but if labor can be automated or democratically voted for than no one is exploited.
Second: UBI is a response to economic conditions, not a driver.
Once the machines can economically/productively outperform most of us, UBI is an alternative to just letting us starve in the street, or riot, or whatever.
The robots provide an economic cornucopia exactly by putting people out of work. Supply becomes effectively infinite but demand/purchasing power falls to zero (because everybody is out of work) so rescue the economy (and civilization) you just give people money.
The remaining farmers still need things like fertilizer, people who service machines, etc, and they still have to put in work themselves. In fact farmers are some of the hardest working people I know. But the trend is still true, there are less and less farmers who generate more and more output.
You definitely need some way to distribute those resources to farmers (and other industries) in a good fashion, and in history the market economy approach with pricing autonomy has proven to be the best way. So money will likely not go away in itself, but economy will be more about resources in the future than about work.
That being said, the economies of even the rich nations are still highly dependent on human output so it's still way too early to discuss about UBI, but if we should find ourselves in a situation where we have literally no use for the work output of large percentages of populations, then we really need to think about some way to distribute resources to them so that they don't starve/riot.
If you say that only millionaires should be able to live without working, then you should look at what makes that millionaire a millionaire: their 20 rental properties? worthless if nobody can afford them. Their 5 square kilometer fully automated farm? worthless if nobody can afford the food. Their 100 million investment into a big company? likely that company is also out of business if nobody buys from that company. Sure maybe yacht builders will continue to have a great time, but that's a fraction of the economy. A lot of current millionaires would be rendered quite poor in a non-UBI future, as a lot of wealth is generated from serving existing customers.
Speaking to point 2, I think it's likely that with a large number of people no longer feeling work stressors, we will gravitate towards meatspace small communities not substantially different from tribal communities or villages.
Those models of living were both very successful during periods of human existence when there were fewer hours devoted to labor.
The outputs from those communities will mostly just be self existence and social cohesion.
There will probably be a renewed interest in philosophy, theology, math, chess or other stimulating intellectual pursuits that have no direct economic stimulation. I think it will actually be a fantastic time to be an academic.
Many humans are very good at avoiding boredom through intellectual or artistic pursuit and for the rest there is neighborhood gossip and/or skydiving.
I'm not sure modern cities work for that though.
It is pure guessing at this point.
Self organized social community isn't that hard, given the right factors it's an inevitable emergent behavior. All we needed was a shared space to inhabit and time spent in proximity. Order and non-commercial community relationships spontaneously resulted, you wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of random fish from the same species dumped together in a tank started schooling, human sociality hasn't evolved out of us yet either.
I'm not saying everyone will do it, I'm not saying that people who grew used to social isolation over the last few years will ever participate, but we aren't so removed from the tribal/village time period that those evolutionary tendencies have been weeded out. Dunbars numbers and all the extrapolated implications still hold in my experience.
Quick google search shows that it is getting cheaper in the long term [1]
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...
If AI lowers the need to hire people by x% for a given project, then it doesn't just affect existing projects/companies. It lowers the barrier of entry for running such things for everyone. This means more people will be able to run similar ventures, and they all need the (100-x)%. In the long run, the amount of work available is not lower by x%, it could be lower or higher in general, although changes definietely happen, like in any disruption.
By having an assistant guiding you along this helps less capable people do jobs they might have struggled with before. It's not simply bigco firing people doing manual data entry spreadsheet type work but helping people otherwise stuck doing those jobs be capable of doing much more without a big investment in education, or the money to hire people to help them. Which has big implications for people starting small businesses and projects within existing companies which they didn't have the capacity to do on their own (or with a small team) before.
It's the usual story, more people generating higher output means more innovation, developing new niches/industries/product categories/etc at a higher rate, etc which means more jobs, not less, and more tax revenue for government.
Close to 100% of people in the developed world were “impacted” and “affected” by everything from television to cell phones. We didn’t all lose our jobs. Get a grip.
Impacted doesn't mean completely automate either, it can just be assisting, improving efficiency, better quality, etc. Of the 80% impacted they said GPT can help with only 10% of their work activities on average. So unless the other 90% of their job was doing nothing and GPT isn't automating the 10% I don't think they'll have to worry too much.
Pace of change is so rapid that I was simply shocked that nothing came to my mind other than the standard answers like doctors, police, or "skilled trades". Will they become trendy and prestigious again just like they once were (construction, welders, etc.)?
Finance? Will be disrupted. Engineering? Probably will be disrupted but a tad later. Middle management positions will be cut. Everything will be "disrupted" to some degree, but any professions where people spend their day sitting in front of a screen are the first ones to go. It's quite a monumental shift happening, and I'm even asking myself whether human judgment as the quintessential pillar of value will remain truly valuable any longer in the future? The final decisions surely are authorized by humans and their emotional component, but will it be of value in as much as it is touted to never be taken over by machines?
We as humans just live our lives while assuming risks and trying to provide value.
Anyhow, if you're not applying different forms of leverage (media, capital or human labor) in your endeavours, you'll never be "safe" and "well-off" in the long-term. These things are inevitably coming for us as we know it. Thought of positively however, these models and future ML tech are just a yet another huge lever for us to apply towards a variety of problems while being useful to one another...
P.S. We were recently visting a doctor who graduated recently and saw him using Google when looking through different symptoms of my partner. Maybe that's not such a "saint" profession to be safe from impeding automation either? Who knows...
I'm surprised to see "mathematicians" here, but what do they refer to? Mathematician as an academic position? As teacher? As consultant?
This is absurd.
It seems AI is looking for problem, where better and cheaper options would make infinitely more sense...
And, more to the point, mathematicians are often doing that work because they enjoy it. Even in the best case for GPT, with respect to most professional mathematicians, you've done the equivalent of automating away their Sudoku/Crossword time.
You might be able to replace some graduate student labor or post-doc labor, but a huge reason for doing that labor in the first place is to train new mathematicians... it's like the grad school version of automating a second grader's multiplication table: you can do it, and you are "automating" the second grader's labor, but you've kinda missed the point...
I wonder how many of the other categories are similar, where the tasks that are being automated are sort of pointless or even counter-productive to automate. Because automating those tasks disrupts the learning process between the professional and their customer, and that learning process is actually the primary product. Legal secretaries and accountants in particular come to mind. Even a lot of web dev work.
I'm kinda amazed how the tech crowd, usually marked by critical thinking and skepticism toward incredible claims, seems to guzzle OpenAI's marketing kool-aid completely unquestioned.
There's a reddit post with an AI with Steve Jobs voice giving Stallman's Ted talk which is out of this world.
So in the near future we will be able to take a bunch of videos and email and docs of your dead parent and the AI will reconstruct and you can plausibly talk with them.
So the tech is already here.
Of course, people that took the easy approach of just mindlessly repeating something and not trying to understand about what they were doing will be impacted too. If they try to keep what they were doing as always, still without trying to learn or use their experience in the new fields that will be opening, then they may be negatively impacted. But events like this one are the constant, not the exception, even for something as big as this promises to be.
I also question what "passions" take hold in a society where all of the work, including creative endeavour, is done my AI.
I know many employed folks who are depressed because their wasting their lives in meaningless corporate wage slavery. Should we optimize for the passionate or the passionless?
> I also question what "passions" take hold in a society where all of the work, including creative endeavour, is done my AI.
This is an attitude problem. I myself am learning to sketch, regardless of AI advancements, because I want to. If AI stops folks from pursuing their "passions" than that means they weren't passionate to begin with.
We should optimize for the scenario that brings forth the greatest level of widespread happiness. For those who feel like they are "wasting their lives in meaningless corporate wage slavery", is the better alternative for them to do nothing or be faced with an environment where there is not even the opportunity to contribute and potentially no social safety net to prevent despair?
> This is an attitude problem.
The "attitude problems" derived from the mass removal of things that people derive legitimate purpose in are exactly the kind of thing we should be worried about when it comes to AI and automation replacing work, because enough people with "attitude problems" about this kind of thing are a recipe for mass societal unrest.
> I myself am learning to sketch
Can you fill every waking day with sketching and other similar hobbies? Does sketching give you meaning and purpose? If so, that's great, but sketching isn't going to do it for the vast majority of people who derive a sense of purpose and accomplishment from productive work and being able to positively contribute to society, not to mention independently provide for themselves and their families.
https://emaggiori.com/chatgpt-fails/
(I don't know the author or the book.)
https://github.com/giuven95/chatgpt-failures
"Plausible explanations Lack of a world model
Models like ChatGPT do not have a "world model" in the sense that they do not have a comprehensive understanding of the physical and social world, and they do not have the ability to reason about the relationships between different concepts and entities. They are only able to generate text based on patterns they have learned from the training data."
Contemporary AIs are trained on data that is on the Internet. They're not trained on $company's customer service system or compliance framework.
Once they are, they will quickly reach an error rate that's below most workers. And they don't sleep, and they don't take breaks or need to be paid hourly.
And of course OSS always consumes, which means that even with fancy models from OpenAI and others, the OSS solution will likely be good enough for most companies.
Motivation: when computers came along, the automation paradox sucked in lots of folks, who are in their majority are "just making the system work". Most do lots of typing, clicking and copy and pasting, doing work-arounds and generally making the promised upside of the system a reality.
But those sucked in by the automation paradox will now be spit out. And it's going to happen fast, faster than we can invent new engagements?
They couldn't even confidently say, "improved", or "made easier".
Don't get me wrong: I'm glad they are at least responsible enough to dodge those lies. I just wish they would put less effort into being "the news", and more effort into accurately describing the features of their model to the general public.
It can certainly empower these jobs, but i still fin really hard to see a near future where these will be completely automated. Plus please try to talk logically with these tools, most of the times they will fail and alucinate with simple logical questions. You should never rely directly from these outputs, you still have the job to understand (have the knowledge) and verify them.
It clearly is a case of premature hype, these tools are not that capable as people want or fear to believe.
The keyword in your comment is "premature" hype. I'm betting that within this decade we'll see how far all this will be going and that's quite some change at a pace we haven't dealt with before. Let's see what you think in 5-10 years.
- When email was introduced, research showed that "80% of workers" would be impacted.
- When Gmail introduced predictive sentence completion, "80% of people" were impacted.
So please don't get concerned this will result in job loss.