Yeah we all thought machines would automate menial labour allowing us to focus on creativity and passion. Looks like it’s the exact opposite.
My one hope is that the price of goods becomes so low due to AGI/automation, that the uselessness of labor in the economy won't matter. People can still be materially prosperous even with a meagre UBI (and it will be meagre because people have no political power in a post-labor society where the only thing that matters is capital).
Agreed. My concern isn’t really remotely about any of the accomplishments of generative AI. Frankly in my daily life I’d welcome readily available access. As it stands now it’s sort of a mixture of analytics and creativity without consciousness as we best understand it, so GPT itself isn’t going to murder me and take over the world.
The real issue is who owns these things, how you access them, how effects will ripple through a labor based economy, and how we’ll adapt (or not) our current economic system. As it stands for awhile we’ve been catering to the capital ownership group. If that doesn’t have a change in direction then I fear the implications of much of this in daily life. There’s still a fair bit of specialization and domain knowledge needed to leverage these tools to understand the questions to ask (I.e prompts to generate both around LLMs and the context of information fed to them) but they can certainly in many cases behave as multipliers that could reduce the amount of staff needed in some creative roles or eliminate some all together.
This isnt a new dilemma as arguably technology has been shifting the labor market for centuries, the question is how and if it can reshape well this time or if we need to fundamentally rethink these concepts of labor and capital ownership. That’s my major concern.
We're discussing a hypothetical post-labor future in 5-40 years. We probably shouldn't predict the economic theory of this future by looking at recent trends. Recent trends are driven by business-as-usual things like supply chain disruptions. But we're still near full employment, so we're not on the gradient to realized post-labor just yet. Post-labor economics (and politics) will probably be radically different, all the economic assumptions we take for granted go out the window.
It doesn’t look the opposite, it looks it automated even what we all couldn’t think of, and did that first.