It's nowhere close now. 10 years ago we were nowhere close to generative AI. How will the AI landscape look in the next 10-20 years? There's a non-zero chance that it will be ready by then to replace many jobs.
With regards to generative AI replacing jobs, it seems to me that AI is best at replacing jobs I have a layman's understanding of, and AI is no good at replacing jobs I have a professional understanding in.
For example, I am not a lawyer or doctor therefore it seems trivial to me that AI will replace much of what lawyers and doctors do. Both boil down to reading a libraries worth of information and then making sense of it right? Bam, easy for AI.
However, I'm a professional engineer and I know how extremely complex and difficult computer science is to get right, especially at scale, therefore I'll eat my hat if in 10 years you can write "Create a facebook clone that can support 500 million simultaneous users" and the AI does anything but hallucinate nonsense that won't work. (There's also the reality that there is far more to large scale software than what can be typed into a computer or repeated by an AI, but hey, details).
I'll also point out that 10 years is not so long. 10 years ago Elon Musk told us AI was replacing driving and taxis. 2015 that feature was launched. 10 years later... not so much.
You attribute this to a 'bias of underestimating other people's jobs' I attribute this to a 'bias of overestimate our own jobs'.
Most programmer jobs do not involve facebook clones that support 500 million users. Most programmer jobs are boring crud apps for random companies in traditional industries. Just think of what the outsourcing mills in India produce, and how many people they employ, then think again about how many jobs generative AI replace.
Also, Hollywood rapidly organised to try to slow down AI. They could see, very evidently, how extremely rapidly AI was advancing, and how lethal the threat is to them.
Recall that we've had many eras of AI, going back into the '70s with expert systems and back propagation that led to neural networks that got a lot of investment in the '80s along with early machine learning and advances in speech recognition and computer vision. The '90s work spent a lot on probabilistic and Bayesian methods, SVMs and Q-learning, then we got big data and deep learning, and don't forget Siri and Roomba to round out the 2000s era, the one that came before the current regime.
What the next breakthrough and investment era will bring, we cannot say. It may be a minor leap or a major one. We just don't know.
Is that a claim or a question?
In either case, doesn't matter, as long as it's close to replace a swath of jobs - even if it's not some particular "large swath" it can't replace yet (or ever).
Doesn't have to replace all jobs to have a negative job market impact. Just more than can be reclaimed with new ones.
People who really KNOW what they are doing will command a very high premium because they'll be needed to do things that can't be done via AI tools, but everyone else is kind of screwed. Being the best at what you do was always a good idea, but it's about to be a requirement.
I mean, even some of the most basic jobs today require a university/college degree, when in the past a high school diploma would have been sufficient. It’s just moving the goal posts all over again.
It was the adoption of the Hopkins model and standardization of medical education— which focused on a mission of education, research and clinical practice— that led to a lot of medical advances that we have today.
My point, is that too much education (and its associated costs) can become a barrier to people joining industries/paying off their loans. Do you suggest doctors increase their education for longer than a decade? Maybe 2 decades of education would make better doctors, but is that really a net benefit to society? Not too mention, a good portion of a doctors education already is actually just learning on the job (while being paid a pittance).
Education (in the US), is not free (or even reasonably priced) and wages have stagnated for quite some time. All you’re doing is burdening people with more debt in order to still have to fight in a job market against their fellow humans as well as now AI.
If companies (or the government) took on training costs (like they often used to) and people were paid enough to make a comfortable living, then I wouldn’t even be discussing this. By all means, bring on the AI revolution.
But until we have some sort of safety nets in place to prevent all these people falling into poverty, requiring more educational investment and debt burden is not really a great solution for a large portion of the population. I mean, even a person’s healthcare is tied to being employed, and one of the political parties is still talking about repealing the ACA to this day, one of the only bills to actually try and tackle the absurd healthcare costs and coverage issues. More time in school would also just increase healthcare costs an individual would have to pay.
Judging from the present state of things, we’re nowhere near solving ANY of these issues that we are currently experiencing. Without proper guard rails, a rapid and wide adoption of AI is only likely to exacerbate these issues that our society is presently struggling with.
Nothing matters except the outcome. Let's say, hypothetically, that we invent something much closer to so-called "AGI" – I can guarantee you that many pundits and HN users will find reasons to believe it's not real and that it's crap or whatever. Why should anyone care? Plenty of people thought the Web was crap in the beginning, and now look at where we are. I don't see any reason to believe AI won't have some impact on jobs and the economy for the next decade. If it was total crap, no one would be using it, but all I know is tons of developers are using Copilot, and I'm using GPT-4 every single day. Are we all just spinning tops or is it actually being of some use to us?
That, or all the jobs go away and then no one has money resulting in a non-functioning economy :).
Lets say you need ditches dug and you need 100 people to do it. Lets say there's only 50 people that want to dig ditches. This is a market favorable to labor. Pay will increase and so will growth of technology.
But the moment the opposite happens the equation dramatically changes. If you have 50 jobs and 51 workers looking for jobs you can now get labor to fight with itself to see who will work for the least money.
>and others will find new jobs and/or start their own businesses.
Right, because there's going to be some magical market where AI isn't doing the same thing (maybe direct contact prostitution for a while?). And yea, lots of little businesses will pop up, and be very quickly ate up and consolidated by large businesses exploiting the interconnectedness of technology everywhere. The future doesn't look like the past in great number of ways because of this.
> then no one has money resulting in a non-functioning economy
This is a very serious risk. Typically this is why authoritarian states fall apart. And in the 'free west' we risk exactly the same with larger corporate consolidation effectively forming a quasi-authoritarian state via lack of competition, rent seeking behaviors, and semi-direct control of the government via lobbying.
* there is no longer a need for a working class
* there is no longer a need for a consumer class
If there is neither a worker class, neither a consumer class, there is no longer a need for an economy
There are just rich people waging war using drones to control access to resources to fullfil their own need. Most people would become utterly irrelevant here.
And of course if someone from e.g. India replaces you, I'm pretty sure they'll have a far greater "local social network" than whatever Silicon Valley can offer.
Also, even when working remotely, people tend to remember who did a good job and who they collaborated well or has some good skills - and when they start another company, or move to work elsewhere, they can still opt to bring them in, even if they've never gossiped next to the same watercooler.
Why does this need to be local? Even when I was working in the office a good chunk of my professional network wasn't for in the same city as me.
Yes, but rent also falls in now highly coveted due to work availability areas, since people can increasingly live everywhere.
There will always be people willing to do your job for cheaper as well as these that take 3x what you take and do half. Such is life.
Which of these do you think is the bigger threat to you?
If they can do your job roughly as well as you for half the cost, what's the employer's incentive to keep you around to do it?
I expect them to optimize for human wellbeing, a functional society, and a clean environment above cost, and then cost.
If the government is spending money on delivering X, they should do it as cost-effectively as possible, and the rest of the money can then be spent on other things or can remain in taxpayers pockets so they can spend it elsewhere.
If the government is going to try to achieve full employment with everything it does, it will just be a disaster.
We won’t have a field of lawyers, radiologists, programmers anymore, we will have one guy watching the machines. You can tell yourself you’ll be that one guy, but statistically you won’t.
> In a short essay published in 1930, the world’s most important economist, John Maynard Keynes, predicted that within 100 years, most people would be working no more than 15 hours a week.
We did not get this future. We got a future where both husband and wife have to work 40+ hour weeks for the same lifestyle. He did not envision the siphoning off of wealth that would characterize the 20th and 21st century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
Its a lie people want to believe.
Try telling people about the pace of AI advancement, scaling laws, how AI art managed to surpass 90% of human artists in 1 year. And it'll either result in visceral disgust, or complete indifference.
People do not care. Even if the flood has consumed the street, and is rising 1 meter per minute, they do not care. Unless the flood hits their front door, and wets their feet, they prefer to live their normal lives assuming everything tomorrow will be the same as today.
Hence all the AI messaging has become all about 'copilots', because that's the only message people want to listen to. There's plenty of extremely frank discussions by AI company CEOs, AI company staff, or even AI enthusiast forums, but people are utterly uninterested, and prefer to scroll tiktok and watch their TV.
Only when they actually encounter a bot a work that does 95% of their work, will they suddenly wake up, and organise, and demand a response. Hollywood managed to organize at an incredible speed to demand a slowdown to AI, but the water was at their necks already.
Now, its understandable why most people don't want to read about AI advancements. They have their lives, chores, children, weekend trips. They feel entitled to a life in statis, where revolutionary change doesn't happen unless they are the ones demanding it. Too bad reality doesn't work that way.
In the end, its individual choice, to go all in, to decisively steer your career path for a post-AI future, or pretend it doesn't exist, and enjoy their remaining years in their jobs in bliss. I will watch with fascination and horror what happens to the latter group.
Truer words have never been spoken.
My bottomwit approach: On an individual level, use AI as far as I can push it. Maximize individual productivity. Then dump the resulting profits into index funds, to hedge against when - not if - my own cognitive labor becomes near worthless by investing in the productivity of the entire Earth, broadly defined.
I believe this number will be < 1% of all workers. Most of the remaining will adjust to new reality with little bit of persuasion/force and understanding.
Last month I traveled to my home country and found people seem very happy and well adjusted in extremely polluted city where I was staying and even claimed since they moved to little less congested area (equally polluted!) life has become so much better. I found most people do not care or understand and some were fatalist in sense "this world has become a nasty hellhole anyway and if it ends along with them it will be all the better".
Another thing I noticed that in a world far away from intellectually challenging work in machine learning / AI etc a lot of workers' lives are already controlled by lot of simple computer programs. Computers are arbiters of truth in large part of third world where trusting people is hard but computer has no reason to lie. If computer tell someone how long they worked, how much to be paid and so on it becomes amenable to most parties.
Depending on economic status of countries I see government are already preparing for jobless future of most workers and looking to provide free ration/lodging/medicine etc. There will be mismatch of expectation between what people think they deserve vs what governments can provide. And thats where I believe AI etc will be greatly used identify those who wouldn't take to easy path of agreeing to what's given. This could go until population collapse or reach to level where it is just enough to support then prevailing economic system.