AI will augment people more than it will replace people for the foreseeable future.
Anyone who tells you otherwise has a shallow understanding of the tools and hasn't built anything more than demo projects.
Anyone who tells you otherwise has a shallow understanding of the tools and hasn't built anything more than demo projects.
Humans are on the cusp of learning that just like everything else so far, there is nothing special or unique about the meat version of intelligence. In fact it's likely hilariously weak compared to purpose constructed general intelligences. Similar to a bird racing a jet, a cheetah against a V12, or horse pulling against a truck.
Your takeaway seems to be software will always do things ahead of when we expect, whereas my takeaway is we're incredibly bad at guessing what sorts of tests and benchmarks mean software will be able to totally replicate, best, and replace human reasoning and decision-making. Beating games, predicting protein folding, forming reasonable-sounding paragraphs, and scoring high on the LSAT have all turned out to not be enough.
was it consensus among experts? How did you measure it?
Some work requires direct human level control. Other work just requires a human in the loop. We've already exploited most of the things that can be automated without human level reasoning, and LLMs have made inroads on a whole bunch of things that do require reasoning.
Augmentation - any significant force multiplier applied to individuals - will result in individuals performing more work or producing more output while the overall workforce is reduced in size. Corporations exist to maximize profit, not to provide meaning and worth to human existence.
AI is taking us to a place where human labor is detrimental to value. Hourly wages won't be sensible in the face of software that can do any cognitive work a human can, for orders of magnitude less cost and overhead, with no feelings or rights to account for. Current economic models won't make sense at all without scarcity of labor, intellectual and otherwise.
No profession is safe, and things will only accelerate from here. We should probably start thinking about what a social contract means in a post-scarcity world. What does money mean? How should resources be fairly allocated if working for money is actually counterproductive even if companies were willing to hire you? What does the market look like if it's irresponsible to allow fallible human control over a task which can be performed to a higher level of quality and consistency for orders of magnitude less cost?
It won't happen all at once. It might take a few years, or it might just pop up and happen this summer, or it could take decades, but AI replacing human jobs is a zero sum game. Once machines can more efficiently and effectively perform any cognitive task that any human can achieve, it's no longer strictly economical to pay humans for those tasks. We'll either have to do pretend-work so we can justify paying humans for work that's less cost effective than paying a machine, or we'll need some sort of Universal Basic Income. I'd love to see alternative ideas, but there don't seem to be any.
We're in a very interesting period of human history.
We will not create ENOUGH new jobs.
They think this is like going from loss of blacksmith jobs when fewer horseshoes were needed to jobs gained in huge Ford motor factories.
If we don't protect our resources and enable basic income, we will find ourselves banging on the gates of robo guarded walls begging for food.
In terms of work, with zero-friction reallocation, of course automation is a good thing. There are tons of other things which need to be done besides packing boxes in a warehouse or driving people around. But we don’t have anything like perfect reallocation, and we don’t have business models for many of the things which need to be done.
To put it in perspective when I was learning about neural networks in ~2009 it was still actively debated in the field whether neural networks were even the right paradigm for general intelligence. Back then one even knew how to make deep neural networks work well. They sucked so bad and had sucked for so many decades that most in the field just assumed that they probably weren't going anywhere without some significant advancements.
Then in the early 2010s the field exploded after a few minor algorithm tweaks allowed deep neural networks to really begin working. But even then they kinda sucked at a lot of tasks outside of niche applications like image recognition. But then a few years later we made a few more algorithmic improvements and suddenly we had pretty decent chatbots. And then a few years after than OpenAI created GTP-3.
What I'm saying is that basically went from most experts in the field doubting whether neural nets would even work to GPT-3 in about 10-12 years. That's absolutely insane progress.
With this rate of improvement the "foreseeable future" is probably less than a decade away. Assuming progress continues at this pace I strongly suspect we'll have LLMs able to beat the best humans in software development in 5 years.