My friend dubbed this effect "AIrony"
Most of this country checks out their own groceries and AI has started stocking shelves.
Creative industries are becoming commodities due to tooling.
All I can come up with when I search for safe jobs is athletes, politicians, and live music performers.
Anything where the point is specifically human effort rather than the actual result, plus ones that set their own rules.
So yes, athletes and politicians; for the moment also prostitutes (pending better bioprinting, not because it's in either category); but also some art — not all art, just the art where the point is to show off how rich you are; most live music was automated away a century ago, what remains is likely also the category of art where the expense is the point.
However, Transformers movies and equivalent "art as a product" will be made by algorithm or GenAI, if they aren't already.
So also doctors, lawyers, teachers, soldiers and government workers.
It's not that they can't be replaced by AI, they just won't legally be allowed to.
Teachers cannot be replaced by AI if you see them as more than just "knowledge passing". If you think the human component of the teacher-student interaction is fundamental, as I do, teachers won't be replaced, though they may use AI to assist them.
What is the "human component" to teaching? How can't that be solved via AGI? AGI can do human emotions, current AI already can pretty well for most things.
The "human component" to (good) teaching is human beings teaching other human beings to be human. A teacher is not a mechanism for offloading knowledge into a child-shaped container.
You learn that before you enter school, school teaches you how to be less human and more robotic.
That's a very cynical take, and in my opinion, false too.
You can find examples of bad anything everywhere, including teaching. What you describe hasn't been my own experience as a child, nor my silblings', nor my own children.
> You learn [to be human] before you enter school
Hard disagree. You never stop learning how to be human till the day you die, but your most important formative years in this sense occur during childhood and early adulthood.
https://old.reddit.com/r/notebooklm/comments/1fr31h8/noteboo...
* there's disagreement about each letter, and treating them as boolean values rather than continuous.
But I want human teachers behaving truly human to students, not something that can act "disturbingly capable of emotions" or fake it. AGI is nowhere near this (and there's no good definition of what AGI is, anyway).
Again, the human component is an essential part of the teacher-student relationship. Teachers are not simply offloaders of knowledge. Just like I don't want parent-like robots nursing and raising children (raising humans and being raised by them is essential to the human experience), I don't want teacher-like robots "disturbingly capable" of acting as if they have emotions.
Think of it this way: a sociopath [1] is a human that can act as if they had cooperative/empathetic feelings towards other humans, when in reality acting callously in their own self-interest all the time. Would you want a sociopath teaching children? I wouldn't; whether the sociopath can pass knowledge well and can fake as if they had normal human emotions won't sway my opinion.
Real human connection is what makes us human. AIs are not human by definition. Therefore, AIs cannot replace humans in those situations where human connection matters. And we shouldn't want them to either, because otherwise what's the point of existence? Asimov's fictional planet of Solaria was a dystopia, not something to aspire to.
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[1] or the pop culture understanding of them, anyway. Let's not get caught up in definitions.
On "should we":
I agree completely.
I've previously made a similar example with sociopaths, when people are incredulous as to the risks of an un-aligned AI.
I've also previously averred that the first time we attempt a brain upload, we're likely to know so little about how our minds function that the upload will have every possible mental health disorder simultaneously, including many that we've got no words for because they're incompatible with life.
On capabilities:
> But I want human teachers behaving truly human to students, not something that can act "disturbingly capable of emotions" or fake it.
If you can't tell, does it matter? Students have been learning from increasingly capable simulacra of human intelligence and emotion since no later than the invention of writing, possibly even earlier with art.
LLMs are good enough to be interesting, and good enough to fool a lot of people a lot of the time, even if last year's models weren't passing Turing test scenarios where people were actively looking for them. (But also, in those tests, humans rated other humans as human only 2/3rds of the time: https://arxiv.org/html/2405.08007v1). Although the newer models are generally better, I don't want to claim if they're specifically, at this task, better than the old models — still, that's how close they were on the only formal test I know of, rather than the mere vibes of listening to them synthesising a voice and me being surprised they'll um and err now.
> AGI is nowhere near this (and there's no good definition of what AGI is, anyway).
I made the parenthetical point myself. LLMs, however, are absolutely there.
Think of it this way: neither one of us can tell by the other's words that the other is not an LLM, all we can do is trust because we're on a forum where it would be rude to use one.
> whether the sociopath can pass knowledge well and can fake as if they had normal human emotions won't sway my opinion.
Sure, but you also wouldn't be able to determine if you're looking at a sociopath or someone with normal human emotions.
> Real human connection is what makes us human.
Para-social relationships say otherwise. Fictional characters, let alone the actors portraying them. The electoral popularity of sociopaths in democracies. Shallow demagogues. Art from generations long-dead. These things give the illusion of a real connection — to the extent there's any connection, it's all one-directional.
> AIs are not human by definition. Therefore, AIs cannot replace humans in those situations where human connection matters.
(Parenthetically: would an uploaded human mind, count as human? I don't know).
But it doesn't matter if they're human or not. Dogs and cats often provide a similar connection (both growing up as a companion, and a being to look after as an adult, though the dog owners I know really don't like anyone treating dogs as "fur babies"), as do TV shows: to the extent that the "connection" part matters, it doesn't need to be human; to the extent that the "human" part matters, it doesn't have to be real.
> And we shouldn't want them to either, because otherwise what's the point of existence? Asimov's fictional planet of Solaria was a dystopia, not something to aspire to.
The trouble with fiction is that it's as much of a shallow echo as current LLMs themselves: yes, it can produce an emotional affect, but for every Asimovian Solaria there's a Banks' Culture where the AI have us thrive.
Both are unsound examples upon which to base actual expectations: even if we happen to develop down one or other of those paths, they are written to be interesting not plausible, and the similarity is mere coincidence.
> [1] or the pop culture understanding of them, anyway. Let's not get caught up in definitions.
I tend to agree, though I feel there's an irony here somewhere — shared human connection on the basis of common understanding of a shared meme about the mental processes of a sub-group of humans that's being Othered in the same way as LLMs… but I can't put it into words. And it would be super ironic to ask an LLM to try to do so for me, so I won't.
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Don't mistake the map for the territory; but also don't forget you can learn the territory from the map.
Any given AI may be a mere simulacra, a P-zombie mimicking our inner world without having one of its own, but that doesn't mean the model isn't good enough to learn from.
I guess I'm indeed arguing more from the "should we?" angle first, though I think human connection does matter and is currently not fakeable (not by LLMs). It's harder to argue my point because people can (and have) formed strong attachments to "AIs" as simple as ELIZA. I don't doubt there are people out there who can form a strong bond to a Tamagotchi "pet". That's really a human trait, to see "someone" where there is none, or very little of it. In a way, AI (or the companies marketing, anyway) has a dangerous potential to hack and exploit this human tendency to attribute feelings or personality to stuff.
To be clear, I'm not disparaging AI tools or saying AI has no place in the classroom as a tool to assist teachers.
I'm arguing that this won't replace teachers -- the original comment I replied to argued the ony reason AIs won't replace teachers is legal, but I disagree -- because teachers are not "teaching tools"; they are much more than that. A teacher is not a machine with coffee and questions as input, and lessons or disciplinarian actions as output.
> But it doesn't matter if they're human or not. Dogs and cats often provide a similar connection (both growing up as a companion, and a being to look after as an adult, though the dog owners I know really don't like anyone treating dogs as "fur babies")
I know you said not to look at works of (scifi) fiction, but have you read Philip K. Dick's "Precious Artifact"? Your mention of dogs and cats brought it to mind; if you've read it you'll know why :)
No, those are all subordinate to the whims of the leaders.
That said, I should have been clearer and said "leaders" rather than simply agreeing with the word "politicans": a military general who seizes power may have a different title, that title doesn't matter, it is the power that is the point.
Right now most of us are in democracies where the government answers to the people, and the people could set any law requiring any given job be done by humans — but that's not automatically guaranteed going forward, many democracies have falled in the past.
Any job that requires general purpose hands and feet to to "real work". Like the thousands of people fixing infrastructure right now everywhere after Helene.
https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2022/asimov-programming-and-th...
Well, until AGI, of course. But then we're probably all toast anyway
Of course, they're going to destroy their companies when they layoff their developers and replace them with under-skilled prompt engineers. But by then, the damage will be done, both among the employers and the employees.
If you have equity in an AI etc company, you'll be flying.
Wealth concentration may increase, barring a revolution.