I'm legitimately starting to wonder what white collar workers will even do in 5-10 years.
This just Year 1 of this stuff going mainstream. Careers are 25-30 years long. What will someone entering the workforce today even be doing in 2035?
This just Year 1 of this stuff going mainstream. Careers are 25-30 years long. What will someone entering the workforce today even be doing in 2035?
This might lower the barrier of entry but it's basically a cheaper outsourcing model. And many companies will outsource more to AI. But there's probably a reason that most large companies are not just managers and architects who farm out their work to the cheapest foreign markets.
Similar to how many tech jobs have gone from C -> C++ -> Java -> Python/Go, where the average developer is supposd to accomplish a lot more than perviously, I think you'll see the same for white collar workers.
Software engieneering didn't die because you needed so much less work to do a network stack, the expectations changed.
This is just non technical white collar worker's first level up from C -> Java.
I suspect the real driver of the shift to AI will be this and not lower cost/efficiency.
But that's what 95% management is for. If you don't have humans, you don't need majority of managers.
And I know of plenty of asshole managers, who enjoy their job because they get to boss people around.
And another thing people are forgetting. That end users AKA consumers will be able to use similar tech as well. So for something they used to hire a company for, they will just use AI, so you don't even need CEO's and financial managers in the end :)
Because , if software CEO can push a button to create an app that he wants to sell, so can his end-users.
The same thing they're doing now, just with tools that enable them to do some more of it. We've been having these discussions a dozen times, including pre- and post computerization and every time it ends up the same way. We went from entire teams writing Pokemon in Z80 assembly to someone cranking out games in Unity while barely knowing to code, and yet game devs still exist.
There's two ways this goes: UBI or gradual population reduction through unemployment and homelessness. There's no way the average human will be able to produce any productive value outside manual labor in 20 years. Maybe not even that, looking at robots like Digit that can already do warehouse work for $25/hour.
An AI coder will always be around, always be a "team player", always be chipper and friendly. That's management's wet dream.
Companies start going from paying lots of local workers to paying a few select corporations what's essentially a SAAS fee (some are already buying ChatGPT Plus for all employees and reducing headcount) which accumulates all the wealth that would've gone to the workers into the hands of those renting GPU servers. The middle class was in decline already, but this will surely eradicate it.
I can be very confident about this because it's just about the strongest finding there is in economics. If this wasn't true, it'd be good for your career to stop other people from having children in case they take your job.
Well, in times past, kings have been known to do this.
But more generally, you raise an interesting point. I think your reasoning succeeds at dispelling the often-touted strong form of the claim ("AI can do my job better than I can therefore I will lose my job to AI") but doesn't go all the way to guaranteeing its opposite ("No possible developments in AI could result in my job being threatened"). Job threat level will just continue to depend on a complicated way on everyone's aptitude at every job.
So that could be productivity decreases, rises in energy prices or interest rates, war, losing industries to other countries…
I mean I don't know, maybe you're right and this will Jevons us towards even more demand for AI-assisted jobs but I think only to a point where it's still just AI complementing humans at being better and more efficient at their jobs (like LLMs are doing right now) and not outright replacing them.
As per your example, bank tellers are still here because ATMs can only dispense money and change PINs, they can't do their job but only leave the more complex stuff to be handled by less overworked humans since they don't have to do the menial stuff. Make an ATM that does everything (e.g. online banking) and there's literally nothing a bank teller needs to exist for. Most online banks don't even have offices these days. For now classical brick and mortar banks remain, but for how long I'm not sure, probably only until the next crisis when they all fold by not being competitive since they have to pay for all those tellers and real estate rents. And as per Grey's example, cars did not increase demand for horses/humans, they increased demand for cars/AGI.
I don't think you should listen to Youtubers about anything, though all I know about that guy is he has bad aesthetic opinions on flag design.
Besides I don't see the market difference of having to pay to maintain a horse with feed, healthcare, grooming, etc. which likely costs something on a similar order as paying a human's monthly wage that gets used in similar ways. Both come with monthly expenses, generate revenue, eventually retire and die, on paper they should follow the same principle with the exception that you can sell a horse when you want to get rid of it but have to pay severance when doing the same with a person. I doubt that influences the overall lifetime equation much though.
That's slavery, so only if they're bad at it. (The reason economics is called "the dismal science" is slaveowners got mad at them for saying slavery was bad for the economy.)
> Besides I don't see the market difference of having to pay to maintain a horse with feed, healthcare, grooming, etc. which likely costs something on a similar order as paying a human's monthly wage that gets used in similar ways.
The horse can't negotiate and won't leave you because it gets a competing offer. And it's not up to your what your employee spends their wages on, and their wages aren't set by how much you think they should be spending.
Jevons paradox might result in much more demand for AI labor, but not necessarily human labor for the same types of work AI can do. It might indirectly increase demand for human services, like fitness trainer, meditation teacher, acupuncturist, etc. though.
The few companies that will still exist, that is - many of them won't, when their product becomes almost free to replace.
I actually think that if we get to a superintelligent AGI and ask it to solve our problems (e.g., global warming, etc.), the AGI will say, "You need to slow down baby production."
Under good circumstances, the world will see a "soft landing" where we solve our problems by population reduction, and it's achieved through attrition and much lower birth rate.
We have met the enemy and he is us.
Now maybe we can actually maintain growth with less people through automation, like we've done successfully for farming, mining, industrial production, and the like, but there was always something new for the bulk of the population to move and be productive in. Now there just won't be anything to move to aside from popularity based jobs of which there are only so many.
It's like how, in 2003, if your restaurant had a website with a phone number posted on it, you were ahead of the curve. Today, if your restaurant doesn't have a website with online ordering, you're going to miss out on potential customers.
API developers will largely find something else to do. I've never seen a job posting for an API developer. My intuition is that even today, the number of people who work specifically as an API developer for their whole career is pretty close to zero.
Similarly, in the future, there may be no more "apps" in the way we understand them today, or they may become completely irrelevant if everything can be handled by one general-purpose assistant.
HN has a blind spot about this because a lot of people here are in the top %ile of programmers. But the bottom 50th percentile are already being outperformed by GPT-4. Org structures and even GPT-4 availability hasn't caught up, but I can't see any situation where these workers aren't replaced en masse by AI, especially if the AI is 10% of the cost and doesn't come with the "baggage" of dealing with humans.
I don't think our society is prepared.
If you roll over a 75, roll an additional d10 to find out your multiplier score (as in, a 10x programmer).
There's a whole lot of work in tech (even specifically work "done by software developers") that isn't "banging out code to already completed specs".
I mean, I thought that website frontend development would have long since been swallowed up by off-the-shelf WYSIWYG tools, that's how it seemed to be going in the late 90s. But the opposite has happened, there have never been more developers working on weird custom stuff.
Look at how much more graphic design is starting to happen now that you can create an image in a few minutes.
So it means we’ll get more development projects because they’ll be cheaper.
And yes I do realize at some point we’ll still have a mass of unemployed skilled white collar workers like devs.
Photoshop doesn’t take photographs, so of course it hasn’t displaced photographers. It replaced the “shop” but the “photo” was up to the artist.
The irony is, Photoshop can generate photos now, and when it gets better, it actually will displace photographers.
Every scenic view, every building, every proper noun in the world has already been photographed and is available online. Photographer as "capturer of things" has long been dead, and its corpse lies next to the 'realist painters' of the 1800s before the dawn of the photograph and the airbrush artists of the 50s, 60s and 70s.
However, my newborn hasn't, hot-celebrity's wardrobe last night outside the club hasn't, the winning goal of the Leaf's game hasn't, AI can't create photos of those.
And the conceptual artistic reaction to today's political climate can't, so instead of that artist taking Campbell Soup Cans and silkscreening its logo as prints, or placing the text, "Your Body is a Battle Ground" over two found stock photos of women, or perhaps an artist hiring craftspeople to create realistic sexual explicit sculptures of them having sex with an Italian porn star; an artist is just now going to ask AI to create what they are thinking as a photo, or as a 3D model.
Its going to change nothing, but be a new tool, that makes it a bit easier to create art than it has been in the last 120 years, when "Craft" no longer was defacto "Art".
We're in truly unprecedented territory and don't really have an historical analogue to learn from.
You might as well be worried the invention of the C compiler hurt jobs for assembly programmers.
And I actually thought photographers were extinct a long time ago by every human holding a cellphone (little to no need to know about lens apertures, lighting/shadows to take a picture). Its probably been a decade since I've seen anyone hauling around photograph equipment at an event. I guess some photographers still get paid good money, but they're surely multiples less than there were 10-20 years ago.
The NLP (Natural Language) is the killer part of the equation for these new AI tools. Simple as knowing English or any other natural language, to output an image, an app or whatever. And it's going to be just like cellphone cameras and photographers, the results are going to get 'good enough' that its going to eat into many professions.
Computing has always been a generalist technology, and every improvement in software development specifically has impacted all the fields for which automation could be deployed, expanded the set of fields in which automation could economically be deployed, and eliminated some of the existing work that software developers do.
And every one one of them has had the effect of increasing employment in tech involved in doing automation by doing that. (And increased employment of non-developers in many automated fields, by expanding, as it does for automation, the applications for which the field is economically viable more than it reduces the human effort required for each unit of work.)
Also, we told we were going into an age where anyone with $3000 for a PC/Mac and the software could edit reality. Society's ability to count on the authenticity of a photograph would be lost forever. How would courts work? Proof of criminality could be conjured up by anyone. People would be blackmailed left, right and center by the ability to cut and paste people into compromising positions and the police and courts would be unable to tell the difference.
The Quantel Paintbox was released in 1981 and by 1985 was able to edit photographs at film grain resolution. Digital film printers, were also able to output at film grain resolution, this started the "end of society", and when photoshop was introduced in 1990 it went into high gear.
In the end, all of that settled and we were left with, photographers just using Photoshop.
I'm picturing something like as an intreraction I'd like to have:
"Hey, do you mind listening to this song I made? I want to play it live, but am curious if there's any spots with frequencies that will be downright dangerous when played live at 100-110dB. I'm also curious if there's any spots that traditionally have been HATED by audiences, that I'm not aware of."
"Yeah, the song's pretty good! You do a weird thing in the middle with an A7 chord. It might not go over the best, but it's your call. The waves at 21k Hz need to go though. Those WILL damage someones ears."
"Ok, thanks a lot. By the way, if you need anything from me; just ask."
"We need to do a big calculation, so your HBO/Netflix might not work correctly for a little bit. These shouldn't be too frequent; but bear with us."
Go ride a bike, write some poetry, do something tactile with feeling. They're doing something, but after a certain threshold, us humans are going to have to take them at their word.
The graph of computational gain is going to go linear, quadratic, ^4, ^8, ^16... all the way until we get to it being a vertical line. A step function. It's not a bad thing, but it's going to require a perspective shift, I think.
Edit: I also think we should drop the "A" from "AI" ...just... "Intelligence."
Ironically, this is created by some of the most intelligent people.