Take creative work. The pre-AI market was already extremely competitive. Few artists can chase autonomy, the rest needs to sell out to some level - usually significant; not the human flourishing we wanted.
AI may disrupt this; still, my guess is that the pool of profitable creative workplaces remains unchanged, at best.
If that's "selling out", then so be it. Why should society support the artist if his art has no value to anyone?
Otherwise, you'll need another source of income in order to create fulfilling art.
There's lots of software I'd like to write. I've spent my time writing code that lies in the intersection.
My personal dream was to become a swimsuit model, but it just wasn't working out, so I switched to software.
Accepting the hardship of reality is the only way you can realize deterministic change. Making blanket statements about "opportunity" in the US will have you immediately proven wrong no matter what you claim. Your opportunity is not the same as a Puerto Rican's which is not the same as an impoverished and sickly rural teenager in Montana. Changing your frame of reference is not any easier than it is to stop looking foreign or get a bunch of money really quickly.
gosh I thought you’d get to this punchline earlier.
I wrote Empire for my personal satisfaction eons ago, and when other people copied it and spread it around, I discovered that it was a lot of fun to get unsolicited emails from people who liked playing it and wanted to let me know. I still get them regularly!
Yes, many among family and friends.
> What you described wouldn't be "selling out," it'd be success.
"Selling out" is a common epithet leveled at artists who became successful. Nirvana, for example, was often accused of selling out.
Nirvana is the perfect example of what I was talking about.
If the art I’m interested in making doesn’t fit into this “utilitarian” monetary income model, it means that I can only pursue art in my “spare time”, outside of a necessary job and (for lots of us) family obligations. I guess I could become an art star, or a viral sensation, but we all know how unlikely that is for any one person. There’s not much middle ground.
The thing that we have to acknowledge as a culture is that we don’t generally value art, or highly-specific research avenues, or much of anything that isn’t “productive” in the most myopic sense. That’s a cultural choice, and it’s a bad decision. It fits in well with our naked pursuit of short-term optimization at the expense of everything else though, so at least we’re consistent. Yay.
People simply romanticize that kind of work because of its loose association with highly-prestigious creative work. I don't think we lose out on Picassos if we lower the number of graphic designers or caricature artists.
Service jobs COULD be fulfilling. Spending a few hours a day helping your neighbors access the goods and services that they need is a part of community-building; people enjoy that kind of labor. The problem is the corporatization and "shareholder value"-centric bone-deep resource cuts that characterize most of these workplaces, where employees are forced to work under conditions that nominally prioritize profit over everything else (but are really also about, specifically: employee control, legal ass-covering, and union-busting).
If people got paid well for working limited and predictable hours where they could rely on coworkers to keep the labor load reasonable, I think these jobs would be more desirable. What better way to spend the value unlocked by AI automation?
1) as already stated elsewhere in this thread, automation has been coming for manual labor jobs for decades/centuries before AI has been coming for knowledge workers
2) I think "service" jobs is the wrong discriminator. There are lots of service jobs that are fulfilling. We're a social species and generally have the desire to contribute to our tribe. Service jobs often scratch that itch. Personal training, wedding planners, hairstylists, chef etc. are all service jobs that are fulfilling enough that people want to do those things even when they don't get paid. That should be confused with the rote, drudgery that is associated with jobs like assembly line work or fast food. I'd argue it's less about the pay (although that can't be ignored) and more about the work. Just look at the service job of attorney with its relatively high bar of entry and high pay, yet it still has pretty insane attrition rates. Even if the pay and status is good, people want a job that's fulfilling.
2) You're conflating and categorizing jobs to benefit your argument, not as an accurate reflection of what I presented. Chef work is brutal, too. The main point seems to be that a mechanically unfulfilling job either needs to have fulfilling social contact (functioning as pressure relief, leverage, etc.), or high pay (i.e., an out). Most people would work a (safe) soul-deadening job for a year if they'd get 20 times the median wage out of it.
I’m only using the words you mentioned. You brought up service jobs, although you may have been using the term somewhat sloppily. Your explanation seems to bolster the point though. People will “put up with” a soulless job if it’s a means to an end. People don’t simply “put up” with a job that is inherently fulfilling. Circling back to the original point, AI forcing people into drudgery is probably not to the benefit of society, especially if there isn’t high pay.
This is the opposite of most takes, which hold that automation takes over when wages climb too high. But this again assumes capability that machines haven't demonstrated, and does not consider the social externalities.
>But that “silicon-based” piece is a constraint that wasn’t part of my original point
We're talking about AI.
I think you're letting your personal fears warp your analysis. It's clear that service jobs - I am using the correct denotation - are not ipso facto drudgery if structured in such a way as to minimize antisocial aspects. Namely, long hours, weird schedules, and understaffing, which exacerbate undesirable tasks. Happily, the value AI creates paired with the increased size of the service workforce ameliorates these concerns. Scanning groceries for 8 hours on minimum wage sucks. Scanning groceries for 4 hours for higher pay, and with backup in case you need a break, or to leave early, or have an irrate customer, sucks a lot less. This is the clear goal we should be aiming for in order to crowd out the actual dystopias in the works.
It's not when wages climb too high, it's when the cost differential between wages and automation climb too high. It's possible to have stagnant or declining wages and still be taken over by automation, if the cost of automation drops at a faster rate.
>We're talking about AI.
Yes, and the OP was talking about what happens when AI takes peoples jobs. I was making the larger contextual point that we can see what happens when people lose their job to technology. AI job loss is a subset of that broader context.
>It's clear that service jobs - I am using the correct denotation - are not ipso facto drudgery if structured
I think you've moved the goalposts to suit your arguement. The original point was that people will be working "retail/food" jobs.
>Every retail/food service job is understaffed. You ask what people displaced by AI will do for a living? That.
You took that original point and then expanded it to encompass all service jobs. I do not think all service jobs are drudgery, and I'm made that point clear. Will AI help us get to the point where all get semi-leisurely pro-social and fulfilling work in a service economy? Maybe to a techno-optimist, but I don't see evidence that is the direction our system tends toward. Even if it did, I think it will be a long, long time away with the potential for miserable local minima along the way. So while I do think that certain service jobs can be fulfilling, that is not the future the OP was initially claiming we'd inhabit.
You're splitting hairs to distract from the fact that you misrepresented the dynamic earlier. The point remains that the purported bare per-unit-hour cost savings of AI-based automation versus human labor doesn't necessarily account for newly-incurred costs and externalities, which is the real reason why the latter hasn't been replaced.
>I was making the larger contextual point that we can see what happens when people lose their job to technology. AI job loss is a subset of that broader context.
You broadened the scope to non-AI-based automation.
>The original point was that people will be working "retail/food" jobs.
Which is what I originally commented on. You keep asserting a fundamental drudgery inherent in those positions, and I'm saying that that's inaccurate. I'm not moving goalposts, I'm making a point about why more people working them, and having an interest in working conditions and pay being better, will lessen that drudgery.
>You took that original point and then expanded it to encompass all service jobs.
No.
>I do not think all service jobs are drudgery, and I'm made that point clear.
I don't think you have.
>Will AI help us get to the point where all get semi-leisurely pro-social and fulfilling work in a service economy? Maybe to a techno-optimist, but I don't see evidence that is the direction our system tends toward.
So, here is the crux of the issue. My argument was simple, but it's apparently so outside your concept of what's possible that you just... refuse to understand it. That's fine, people get dragged kicking and screaming into the future all the time. But that doesn't make me wrong. It just means you lack some combination of imagination and observation skills. And I'm sorry if that's rude, but I've had arguments with Trump supporters and nuclear energy advocates that were less frustrating.
>So while I do think that certain service jobs can be fulfilling, that is not the future the OP was initially claiming we'd inhabit.
To conclude, hopefully for good: I know. I'm (first mention of AI) OP. I explained the remedies for the current woes of such positions as workers are inevitably displaced to them.
McDonalds is also at the far end of the spectrum of "human service jobs that are less-skilled but difficult to automate". There is plenty of demand for higher quality versions - requiring a higher degree of skill and creativity - of the same general type, like fine-dining.
Truly creative (in the sense of it having a high degree of novelty and quality) work is not at risk of being automated any time soon. What is at risk of being automated is the category of "creative" work that requires some skills but is mostly assembly line. Category-defining or truly novel art almost by definition can't be produced by existing AI in any form, because AI can only remix the content it's seen already. "Generic rock song" or "clip-art like picture of a guy yelling at a computer" are at risk of going away, but I hardly think that means humanity will no longer flourish - producing that kind of stuff is romanticized as a cool, highish status thing to do, but functionally I don't really see it as any different or more worth preserving than obsolete skilled labor of the past like carriage-makers or human-computers.
I also think people tend to make the "Lump of Labor" fallacy when thinking about this stuff - economically speaking, if human workers are no longer needed to produce some high-value output, in the long run the excess labor/"talent" that gets freed from that task finds other value-producing tasks to do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy. Long-term unemployment and underemployment is completely a solvable economic problem; both can increase due to short term shocks like technological development and shifts in supply/demand, and in some cases underemployment is more a matter of "wrongly skilled", but long term they're both a matter of ensuring there is enough money, liquidity, and capital deployed to drive demand for marginal increases in both jobs and quality-of-jobs (without ruinous inflation).
Have you ever worked in fast food? What makes you think it can’t be automated? From my experience (admittedly decades ago), it’s ripe for automation. The work is largely rote and well controlled. The main edge cases (eg an order of salt free fries, or custom orders) are fairly easily managed without out-of-the-box thinking. The processes are well-defined and controlled. In fact, that’s a major contribution of franchise model: the entire process is already defined largely turn-key. IMO one of the reasons they aren’t automated already is because we essentially subsidize wages with social safety nets. This allows the human wage rate to stay below the cost of automation.
We also may disagree on the idea of creative work. By my estimation, creative is defined as not being rote. Maybe the discrepancy is whether you believe combining preexisting ideas is creative; to a large extent most would agree, but that doesn’t, for example, pass the PTOs definition of “non-obvious” so I think there’s some debate as to if it’s truly creative work.
I currently think the jobs that are least likely to be automated are non-rote manual labor, especially non-greenfield repair. Fixing a non-routine plumbing issue or installing a one-of-a-kind control system would just not be economical to automate.