Musk: How do we find meaning in life if A.I. can do your job better? | Hacker News Reader

Musk: How do we find meaning in life if A.I. can do your job better?

cnbc.com

Don’t worry, when you’re struggling just to survive, you won’t be worrying about “meaning”.

Define “better”. Define “better for who”.

I think the sentiment roughly translates to AI, one way or another, replacing whatever it is you were doing for work and making your contribution obsolete. It is surprising that he genuinely seems to worry that even his contributions can be obsolete.

But that's kind of a point still. Obsolete means it's of no use anymore. But to who?

Take Sisyphus. Who, or what, does his task serve? Himself? Someone else? Something?

1/ The output of the job is not obsolete, otherwise, we wouldn't even run a machine to produce it. So the machine needs to be maintained/worked on, it turns out. Only the maintenance job may also be way more boring/soulless that the actual task given to the machine. Without maintainers, the machine is nothing.

2/ The "meat" of the job/activity may still be of higher interest for the person doing it. If I enjoy doing something, can it ever become obsolete?

3/ The same "meat" of the job, or even its output, may ever be significant only if a human does it (art is interesting _because_ it is produced by someone/a human I can relate to, because it _says_ something I can relate to - otherwise, it becomes as tasteless as a chewing gum after some time).

4/ The income/consequence a person gets in return for her job is not obsolete either. Only the one with the money/capital found a more affordable way of getting it done - but economically in the short run, only - it may very well have higher order consequences that happen to make the move more costly - but still it depends what game one is playing - if short-term benefits is all you play, you're definitely fine.

The worry is still easy to understand I think. Suppose you are a programmer or a project manager and you have come to think that your skills are valuable, i.e., they are rare and someone will pay for those skills so you find opportunities to participate in the economy. Suppose further you believe that some AI programs will be able to produce the programs you could produce, it makes sense to be worried as you would immediately think will you be laid off and have trouble finding ways to participate. This is the same phenomena every disruptive breakthrough puts communities of people through every so often.

That said, as I said I find the discussions on AI generally incoherent. I do not believe programmers or teachers will be obsolete in the foreseeable future (probably ever) nor is it a bad idea to put certain jobs into the hands of machines; a lot of the jobs are terribly boring and should be replaced. I would guess that whatever the disruption, we are likely open new rooms to develop new skills that we'll see over time.

As a side point yes I agree in some areas, like art, people will always find more value in originality and creativity coming from a human. I'm convinced we will always find what Monet did more beautiful than what some robot can do. But that doesn't apply to other fields like programming, or product management, or cleaning.

I tend to find the discussion around AI, AGI, ChatGPT doomsday somewhat incoherent and try not to follow them. But, I found Elon Musk's reaction in this interview to the question of "What would be your advice to children in the era of AI?" quite interesting and genuine. At the dawn of every transformative technology many people from all walks of life must have asked the same question and now even Elon Musk seems to be asking this same question to himself.

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