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I think a lot of the jobs that go will be the ones that popped up recently. The low level white collar ones. Social media content writers for example. That tends to be a very well paid job compared with the skill necessary to do it and the benefits it provides. I imagine most of these jobs will just get replaced with something else that the AI can’t do and that only new grads will accept doing.

For your kids, I think you’re imagining more progress with AI than we’ll have in the next five years. I think the changes of the last 3 years will be much more impactful on new grads. I recently switched role and learning remotely is a lot more difficult for various reasons. I’m already well into my career so I imagine for new grads it will be incredibly difficult. I’d worry more about that than AI provided they’re going to college to study something “useful”.

If AI is the intern, how do the economics of entry level positions work? And if they don’t, how do people enter the workforce at all? More schooling? Only hire PhDs?

> If AI is the intern, how do the economics of entry level positions work? And if they don’t, how do people enter the workforce at all? More schooling? Only hire PhDs?

They don't, and in 10-20 years corporate leaders will bemoan the shortage of high-skilled experienced people that they created through their own decisions. Of course, they won't take any responsibility or change their approach, though.

> They don't, and in 10-20 years corporate leaders will bemoan the shortage of high-skilled experienced people that they created through their own decisions. Of course, they won't take any responsibility or change their approach, though.

It's a free rider/prisoner's dilemma problem.

If everyone cooperates then we all come out ahead. If you all cooperate while I defect then I end up even better (I don't have to train anyone). But if we all defect then we're fucked.

It used to be that there was entry level work that needed to be done by humans and so you didn't have this problem. If the entry level work can be done by AI then you need something else. Either government coordination and incentives to hire humans (this is the kind of things gov't is good at). Or people stay in education for longer/education becomes different.

I think the number of available jobs will probably shrink to the point where this isn't much of a problem.

This is discounting our innate ability to come up with new levels of abstraction, which happened so many technological revolutions before.

> This is discounting our innate ability to come up with new levels of abstraction, which happened so many technological revolutions before.

* Past performance is not indicative of future results.

Well, we have to work with what we have :-) It would be highly unlikely that something new violates the established trends over thousands of years.

It's not surprising that the human race has survived for this long - we always find ways to adapt, no matter what challenges history throws at us. This is what distinguishes us (and I suspect will always do) from the machines.

> It would be highly unlikely that something new violates the established trends over thousands of years.

What now? Established trends have been regularly violated over thousands of years.

> It's not surprising that the human race has survived for this long - we always find ways to adapt, no matter what challenges history throws at us. This is what distinguishes us (and I suspect will always do) from the machines.

You know what would count as an adaptation? Large fractions of population becoming immiserated and either dying off or living in poverty at the margins.

Mere survival is the wrong metric.

I think you're severely overestimating the abilities of this "AI" and underestimating the abilities of the human mind here :-)

However, if you'd like to be pessimistic on it I won't argue, I have that tendency too ;)

And to lighten up the mood, I highly recommend listening to this episode with Gary Marcus, where he invites experts in the field of humor to discuss how distinctly bad the LLMs are at explaining what comes naturally to us: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/can-ai-make-you-laugh/...

> I think you're severely overestimating the abilities of this "AI" and underestimating the abilities of the human mind here :-)

"This AI" seems perfectly capable of resulting of extending the kind of economic immiseration that has already affected many blue collar jobs into many types of white collar work (ironically enough, the kind of work those blue collar workers were told to pick up).

Past this iteration of AI, who knows if the advances will peter out, but it's foolish to assume things will be fine because other things were adapted to in the past. That's kinda like assuming you won't die before having kids because none of your ancestors did.

As said, I won't argue with pessimism here, but I think there're equally as many (if not more) causes for optimism ;)

> I think there're equally as many (if not more) causes for optimism ;)

List them.

I won't engage any further. I see that I won't be able to convince you in the opposite, so there's no reason for me to try to "defend" my argument :-) And your "command" is kinda rude, regardless.

> I won't engage any further. I see that I won't be able to convince you in the opposite, so there's no reason for me to try to "defend" my argument :-) And your "command" is kinda rude, regardless.

You mainly been making vague, unsupported assertions backed by emoticons. It's a stretch to call that an "argument," and arguable you haven't been really engaging from the start.

I don't think you can convince me because I suspect you don't really have any support or specifics for your position to provide.

As a matter of fact I do, if you read my comments in other threads, before jumping to conclusions without knowing me.

Regardless, I flagged your comment since it really doesn’t follow HN etiquette on respectful arguments.

> As a matter of fact I do, if you read my comments in other threads, before jumping to conclusions without knowing me.

Come on. If you have them formulated, you should have responded with them. It's not that hard.

> Regardless, I flagged your comment since it really doesn’t follow HN etiquette on respectful arguments.

Again, come on. The disrespectful thing is expecting someone to go on a scavenger hunt just to find out what you, some internet rando, should be saying in your half of a conversation thread.

It's also just bizarre for you to note you flagged my comment. Am I supposed feel intimidated or ashamed or something?

> You know what would count as an adaptation? Large fractions of population becoming immiserated and either dying off or living in poverty at the margins.

> Mere survival is the wrong metric.

People don't have to live in cities. Knowledge work has brought many people to cities and the absence of it will reverse that trend. It is welfare that keeps impoverished people living in cities.

> Established trends have been regularly violated over thousands of years.

I don’t think that’s true. The archetypal constructs of human cognition have been unchanged. Hence the enduring relevance of myths. It’s always the same stories playing out.

>> Established trends have been regularly violated over thousands of years.

> I don’t think that’s true. The archetypal constructs of human cognition have been unchanged. Hence the enduring relevance of myths. It’s always the same stories playing out.

I think you misunderstand. I didn't say everything has changed, just that many "established trends" have been.

I mean, at some point it was a well established trend that all humans hunted and gathered for their substance, then that trend was violated.

At some point, the trend of "we will find something productive to do with all these people who's jobs have been made obsolete" may be violated. And it seems like that's getting more likely the more rarefied the remaining valuable skills become.

If AI works out as proponents think, this is unlike any technological revolution in the past. It would be 100% uncharted territory.

But I'm basing my opinion on history as well. The focus will be on reducing costs, which means eliminating as many workers as possible.

Is there any reason to believe that AI won’t be able to create and leverage higher levels of abstraction faster and better than humans?

Also, most of the work that is produced is of poor quality anyway.

99% of writing is meh, so ChatGPT is not a downgrade.

99% of writing is meh? Ok, buddy.

Yes, you are right, I'm overly generous.

Between social sites, corporate BS and medias farms, it's more like 99.9999999999999999%.

The funny part comes when it won't be able to be improved anymore because of regurgitating its own content all over.

Couldn’t adversarial networks be used to continue to improve quality? I guess we could wind up with a bunch of humans in the loop to help guide learning improvements too, seeing as we’ll all be unemployed (sort of joking).

There’s only so much information content that exists on the Internet. There’s a limit to it, and one cannot simply produce more info once that limit is reached, it goes against the entropy so to speak. And then, “garbage in - garbage out”.

In addition, I think we’re living in a huge bubble and are sort of entitled enough to think that Internet = human knowledge. So many jobs and skills are simply not transferable even using human language (and even if they hire an army if “trainers”). This is one of the core problems with the current incarnation of “AI” - tacit knowledge has always been the stumbling block, even back in the expert systems days when everyone was thinking what we’re thinking will happen today.

So until the machines can somehow gain consciousness, autonomous and nimble movement, the will to live and all of the deep levels of the human mind that are outside language, I think we’ll be pretty safe :-) And for now, on all of these parameters they aren’t even close to a cat.

Exactly, AI can regurgitate all the beautiful sunsets it has been trained on. An artist experiences a sunset and is inspired to create things inspired by the feeling of a sunset. These things could be textiles, furniture, abstract art, dessert, any number of functional items the color of the sunset, a short story, a mimi series....The misconception is that creativity is created by studying and copying past creativity. Creativity comes from living experience and is applied thoughout all aspects of our lives. The belief that AI trains the same way humans do is a sad misconception of the human experience.

Right? I think it's just the Silicon Valley again and again trying to push its single-minded vision that computers should be used to "solve" all of our problems. They see everything as a nail with a "problem" to solve with their hammer, and completely disregard that there's life outside their bubble in the SV.

> I'm worried what kids just starting college now will face in 4-5 years when they're trying to start a career.

Why? Traditional family unit is over and generations are at war. Let them figure it out. Meanwhile let's not have kids without a clear plan for their future.

> Every bit of this article worries me. Not because I think it's coming for my job, but because it's coming for so many other jobs

This. Anyone who thinks that their job is safe is fooling themselves.

Text is 2D compared to face to face interaction. It's like assuming a video chat is the same as the real thing when there is so much data being lost.

Is it blindly optimistic to assume that people will eventually yearn for more genuine interaction, daresay truth?

Is it wrong to think that people gain purpose from other people, and that our mammalian instincts will not be so easily conquered?

Of course not. But I'm not talking about gaining purpose. I'm talking about being able to pay bills.

Okay. I'm talking about people particularly spending money on face to face interaction because they can clearly see everything else is subpar.

If your argument is that there won't be anyone to spend money, so even the jobs that AI can't replace won't be safe, then okay.

Temporarily, maybe, until misguided decision makers realize they could not feasibly replace people with a half-baked ‘AI’. And I do think we (the community lurking on HN) are living in a huge bubble - there’re so many more jobs out there that we have not even a slightest idea how to replace.

On top of that, the biggest unaddressed problem that everyone seems to pounce over is tacit knowledge - it cannot simply be transferred even between humans, using words, gestures or any other media. It can only be gained through the human experience, by doing stuff. It’s the same old problem from the expert systems days. So we cannot hope to replace them with AI, at least not until AI somehow becomes self-aware and gains all of the non-surface depths of the human mind, and lives through the same experience.