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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

How far are we from reliable AI? One that could, for example, handle 80% of office jobs without screwing up more than humans?

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That's kind of jumping a few steps ahead; it assumes that we know 80% of office jobs can be fully automated already. And if that were the case, we'd have non-AI software doing that already. I mean we do, but it's not causing people to lose jobs en masse.

(it probably did cost jobs, but more the kind that a job like data entry was replaced by OCR)

There are likely huge unmeasured inefficiencies built in to many companies. You hear anecdotes of people whose job for years has been to perform a particular task, which could be either automated or performed more efficiently (by orders of magnitude) by someone more capable.

So on the one side, there’s huge opportunity for automation and job cuts. On the other, if the companies haven’t noticed the inefficiency so far, then…

Hard to say, because jobs and processes will adjust to accommodate AI strengths and deficiencies, as AI usage increases.

It's similar to how automation in manufacturing works: we may start with augmenting the human workers with machines improving some parts of the process, but eventually the process itself gets redesigned around the machines.

Society is completely changed if that happens and humanity should be setting up backup plans to handle this potential. I did see Trump mention he's going to meet with AI companies who want to propose giving all American's stock which could be one way this money driven society continues when tons are no longer working.

Another concept I thought was AI is irrelevant without our content, so AI should pay all humans to access all the content we create daily (voice & text conversations we have with each other, as well our photos and videos). We choose what to publish to our websites (everyone has one, but AI agents cant access it without paying for access to our websites). I wrote more about this concept on my substack https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans... ... just one thought of keeping this money economy going when so many coud no longer are working cause the white collar jobs are gone.

Walled gardens harvest all that data for free and humans keep on feeding it

Ah well people would be feeding their own personal sites more and less to none to Facebook. It's like finally getting paid to post your content on facebook, which that walled garden and others could be a thing of the past. While the web remains open (not owned by any entity) and becomes even more the backbone of society/humanity. As for how we all get paid maybe crypto another open source system pays us and or humans can choose to use a Cloudflare or something like that.

The issue with any UBI proposal is two fold. For one, initial payments will see inflation making them always need to be higher. And for two, this inflation mechanism is basically a bribe that companies are paying to humanity in order to keep their position in control of the earth's resources and not see a destructive revolution.

There will be a threshold point where companies decide it will be cheaper to just cull the human population and no longer pay these bribes. Maybe they can do it without a bomb dropped; make people convinced they are too hard up to reproduce or even just sterilize them without them realizing it via water or food supply. If we are truly in the "job free" period then there will be no trained experts to even appreciate what is happening, because why would anyone get expert training if you cannot do anything with that knowledge anymore?

> There will be a threshold point where companies decide it will be cheaper to just cull the human population and no longer pay these bribes.

What company will be the first to offer assisted suicide as part of a termination package?

There is no reliable data on how many of these jobs shouldn't exist at all, even without AI

Yeah, before we worry about a "coming intelligence explosion", we should first try to avoid a stupidity explosion...

I'd say somewhere between 2-20 years, provided the current rate of research and compute investments.

My guess would be 15 years. But I think it will take longer than that before people actually replace office workers with AI.

The scary part is that it doesn't need to be reliable. I mean look at the direction of vibe coding. We went from caring about efficiency to just saying screw it, 100k lines of code as long as it ships a day sooner. Look at ai emails and calendars. Ai marketing. Ai, in its present state, is already taking people's jobs. It is already good enough. None of these jobs we have really actually need the precision we assume we bring to the table over AI. And company leaders are beginning to appreciate that.

We are in a very dangerous position. Frogs in hot water now with the boiling point on the near horizon.

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