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.
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.
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.
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.