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Comment by kadushka | Hacker News Reader

None of these links provide any guesses about the impact of AGI on unemployment rates. By AGI I mean AI that is as smart and as capable as an intelligent and highly educated human. What will happen when in a few years companies realize that AI systems do a better job than their human employees?

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Probably a similar transition to the Industrial Revolution, but much faster. Laborers had to learn skills that machines weren’t better at.

Any work that is information based is probably in for a dramatic shift.

But maybe some areas that are less vulnerable: - Experiences (food, travel, accommodations, events, sports) - Manual labor (carpenters, plumbers, roofers) - Human connection (caregivers, therapists, teachers, coaches) - Public service (government, police, fire, healthcare) - Executives (CEOs, entrepreneurs)

The Industrial Revolution completely changed the world, but there are still many tasks where a human is better/faster/cheaper than a physical machine, so it didn’t replace everyone. My guess is that there will be some niche domains where humans are preferred to AGI.

Sure. But transition to new professions will be a lot slower than layoffs. We are likely to face unprecedented unemployment rates for at least several years before people learn new skills, and meanwhile AI keeps improving and automates more and more professions (manual labor, public service, etc). Are you sure new professions will appear faster than old ones disappear?

You might be right. I don’t know if new professions will appear though. My guess is that people will transition to those existing fields that are less likely to be dominated by AGI.

Tech has already disrupted industries like travel agencies, print journalism, video stores, bookstores, stock brokers, movies, etc.

And you can see it coming for truck drivers, cab drivers, narrators and voice actors, etc.

So we’ve already lived through a taste of it, but this round will be much broader and much faster IMO.

ALL of these links mention it, maybe you didn't read all the material, the Blair Institute I linked as a whole in depth section just on it, in fact if you cntrl F "unemp" you'll find half the site turns yellow. The whole McKinley report starting at page 7 is about nothing but job market shifts for 10+ pages, and If you look at the OEDC report, you'll find lots of referenced to it, AND the ability to find further research (Mokyr et al., 2015).

I searched for AGI and I didn’t find it, perhaps I missed it? Could you please point me to any discussion of the impact of AGI on unemployment rate?

You're right, I am incorrect I didn't account for your nuance. My bad.

I'll try to dig it up later but that was what I'd been reading on the final part of my comment, I'l try to find the report because it was good (I'll reply to my this comment later tonight if I find it) - but the reports I've read that kinda allude to that is more messaged as "AI automation is deeper than we expect" (I don't know these labour market economists are using the term AGI) - and the most recent recent stuff (late 2024) is basically saying our measurement criteria is wrong so we don't know what is going to happen at all too bad so sad.

Telephone operators is the one most people go to because it happened quickly and it was a lot of people, but there was also a lot of manual work generally available back then.

The report from Tony Blair institute is pretty good, unfortunately they write:

AI capabilities, however, are fast evolving. The next wave is expected to be “strong” or “general” AI (AGI). AGI applications will exhibit more autonomy, be able to adapt to different contexts and not be limited to specific tasks – similar to human capability. Beyond this, AI systems smarter than any individual human (“artificial super intelligence”) and systems smarter than all humans (“the singularity”) are possible further in the future.

For the purposes of this project, we exclude these more advanced versions of AI because their disruptive potential is so great and they are still thought to be some decades away.

Anthropic released some related economical analysis today: https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-anthropic-economic-index - looks interesting.

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