s/ai/loom/ the sentiment is always the same and it doesn't work that way. Worry about concentration of wealth and power, sure, but automation never net removed jobs from the economy it makes more.
Automation does remove jobs, but so far it's done so on a small scale compared to what AI will do. On the other hand, AI will remove jobs on a large scale on an order of MAGNITUDE more than other automations.
The argument of drawing an analogy with the loom is weak. As technology progresses, the power of it in its scope increases, and computer technology is much more wide-reaching than the loom. Unfortunately, analogy only goes so far.
At some point, there may indeed be more jobs. But even then, they will be (to the human mind) quite meaningless, such as the maintenance of AI machines and of such speciality that people will lose all hope in life by doing them.
What that means depends how much the AI costs to run.
Assuming the hardware stays working long enough to amortise to a rounding error, $100,000 per year at $0.05/kWh is 228 kW (and by extension $10k/year is about 23 kW), so a "good enough" AI can "afford" to draw a lot of electricity while still being cheaper than many experts, or to draw more electricity than most households while still being cheaper than per-capita income in 15 of the G20 countries.
On the other hand, if the best we can figure out how to do while giving it human-level generality is an IQ of 85, and it's a thing that runs on 1 kW, that makes 16% of humans uncompetitive even at the UN "abject poverty" threshold, while smarter people can still be gainfully employed.
Current AI is neither, as it's a combination of absurd training costs, low inference costs, and being very good at specifically and (IMO) exclusivity at the things we use to define "intelligent", but also without the stuff we don't count as "intelligence" because approximately every human has it and it's not a differentiator.
I don't expect a cost efficient bookshelf cleaner robot any time soon (or even a robot vacuum cleaner that works in non-trivial settings).
But even so, I find the idea of exhausting earth rather morally reprehensible. There are beautiful life forms on earth such as birds, bears, fish, and flowers that don't deserve our carelessness. Should we not treat them with some basic level of kindess and compassion also?
But, when automation was new, didn't they say it would automate everything? And it turns out that...it didn't?
It seems that pattern is somewhat likely to repeat...
Agriculture: from 70% of people working in agriculture to 25% in the 70s to 2% now.
Most other physical work, by volume follows the same trajectory.
Everything is meaningless
It was commonly thought that the planet would run out of food until the Wheatbelt was developed.
The fundmental shift is changing the mindset.
- Away from deriving economic tasks from logical goals developed over historical time.
- Into and towards, Men guesstimating and taking risks in bold new directions for global innovation.
The gloomerism is getting kind of boring and unrewarding tbh. We need better criticisms of the future, these "total-meaninglessness" jabs don't hold water.
Also, I am not advocating TOTAL meaninglessness. I am advocating a new way of life that does not include AI, that's it. I never said everything is doomed. I think humans have a chance but that we should proceed WITHOUT AI. That's it.
Imagine that everyone who's in replaceable fields simply grew up to be scientists, and entertainers. Those were basically the only fields left to go into, and scientists are more like project managers directing AI towards finding solutions to specific goals, and making new discoveries, etc...
We could fix a shit ton of issues with 70% of the population being scientists or science adjacent in their "careers" which that word is more like "life's work" or a hobby, than what it is today.
The electrification of the planet is massively reducing the costs to support life. We buy and sell flipped bits to each other and renew our car batteries from home solar. You could live like a monk, automated hydroponics, electric everything and probably not notice the majority of service collapsing except sewage and water.
Water is a weird one because it's often not 'destroyed', just pumped around the ecosystem by natural forces or power plants and dirtied in the process. Developing cheaper water cycling methods could push costs even lower.
The mathematics of finite resources depends heavily on who is doing the mathematics. The pre-wheatbelt guys couldnt guess what was going to happen next.
AI is just a better tool. It has changed the relationship to work, like a car means we no longer ride horses. But we still use cars to do the same thing horses did. The categories have not changed as much as everyone is afraid of. Get out of trivial work, aka working in grammar, rhetoric and logic, and you'll probably feel a lot safer.
What will those jobs be? They will unlikely be creative jobs, since most of those will be taken over by AI. Perhaps there will be a few creative jobs left (I sincerely doubt AI will be able to write the next Dostoyevsky novel in my lifetime, but you never know). But even IF there are a few creative jobs left, they will be rather miniscule. Thus, the only jobs left will be the kind that is already increasing today: some small cog in a massive corporate scheme that somehow has not yet been automated yet.
I believe there are at least some alternatives, such as: we could form a new conglomeration (perhaps a union or cartel of sorts) of people who refuse to use AI in their business, and who refuse to do business with anyone using AI. Obviously, it would take some effort, but maybe it's possible. In this union, we would operate society normally, but with a code of ethics that prevents the use of advanced AI and maybe other dangerous technologies, and we would develop a more sustainable way of living that involves sustainable farming and being more reliant on each other instead of letting massive, soulless tech companies control us.
I am formulating a more detailed proposal but that's the gist of one of my ideas.
This doesn't make sense to me. If AI eliminates most creative jobs, yet there are still humans who can do better (modern Dostoyevskys) would it not make sense for businesses to hire creative people to "out creative" their competitors, who just use the AI?
AI can probably already write a serviceable beach novel.
So far...
Jobs that require human contact might be good. Babysitter, massage therapist, counselor, police officer, waiter, nurse, aesthetician, etc.
Hard to say with certainty though.
I’m not sure if that model would scale up to “uses all tech except pledges to not use advanced AI”, because the unifying thread of religion has a somewhat unique level of power that mere commercial pledges seem to not have, but it would be worth looking into the existing practices as a potential model and trying to project the good and bad that would come from it.
That’s true for more limited forms of automation - e.g. the loom, heavy industrial machinery, even computers - as people just move on to other jobs and society gains a net improvement in productivity.
AI, specially AGI (which is the endgame for AI), is a different matter. It’s not specialised. “General” is literal in its name. It could do nigh every job. There will be no jobs for everyone being displaced to move on to.
Also, looms are a deceptive example because weaving is still skilled labour. Chances are if you can learn to weave good quality cloth you'll be capable of retraining into another skilled trade. The same can't be said for "unskilled" labour, your 50-year-old factory line workers displaced by automation aren't going to be re-training as graphic designers and web devs. Now apply that not to a specialized machine that screws lids on water bottles really fast, but to a machine that can do any desk job a moderately competent white collar worker can do, and you'll see we have a problem.
This is more like a magical typewriter, and it's coming for all white collar jobs.
I don't actually think this is impossible as in some ways, mobile phones and other wearable devices are probably the first steps to get there.
Who knows?