We're talking about ALL labor.
https://www.news.com.au/sport/carnage-at-start-of-robot-mara...
We might have to get off the computer, and we might have to rethink how we organize the world economically, but there is still work to be done everywhere.
This is an absolutely bizarre pitch for labour replacement for the very obvious reason that the rate at which the world's hair grows is not going to increase and nor are we going to suddenly discover a great need for new high maintenance hair styles to increase the work available.
There are clearly at a first approximation enough barbers and hairdressers already to cut the world's hair at the rate it is growing.
Essentially every single medical school in the USA is vastly oversubscribed with qualified applicants, as far as I am aware. And most specialist residencies are too.
But you know you can't just become a doctor, right? You don't just lose your job and become a doctor, or a trained nurse the next day. That is a ten, twelve year lead time thing for doctors, two or three for a nurse, and it favours the young. People who lose their jobs mid career essentially never become doctors. Some do become nurses, but it still favours the young.
Plus, even if there is a shortage beyond that, and in general pratice there is, we don't need hundreds of millions more doctors around the world, I suspect, but that is how many jobs AI threatens to displace according to the FUD. We maybe need a few tens of millions more nurses.
And if you expand the healthcare and training system to train up and employ more people — where does the money for that come from?
People who simultaneously go along with the idea AGI will eliminate large swathes of human labour but somehow magically think everyone will find a new job so there is no retail and service demand collapse or tax revenue collapse are everywhere, serving up the tractor analogy, which is where we started in this thread. It's horseshit.
Who's definition are we talking about here
But it unambiguously is who is leading the promise to replace labour; it is whose bullshit is provoking the backlash.
It is whose variously-confident definition of near-term AGI involves completely eliminating a large enough shar of jobs that Altman thinks he has to talk about UBI and fund pilot studies so he doesn't lose all his cool California friends.
It is who has set the tone for the entire punditsphere and everyone who emulates them.
Their definition is the one the media and governments have swallowed; they need the fear so they get regulatory capture.
I will tell you that I think though: I think Sam Altman should be nowhere near the power and proximity to power that he has, band I think Dario Amodei would be better off tucked away in a research unit where the only person who has to listen to him tolkien bollocks is his immediate boss.
I think they are manipulating truly grotesque amounts of fear that are in many ways worse than the fear we felt in the COVID pandemic, and I think they are doing it for money and power.
But I also think people have listened and the message has not got through to tech people that they aren't good people and they are fucking weird.
And the farm analogy is somewhat on point. We went from 67% of people working on farms to... I think it's more like 3% than 1%, but a very small amount. That's two thirds of labor being replaced.
It's so common here and so obviously wobbly. That labour was displaced (and in most cases into way more gruelling and dangerous factory work).
The AI pitch is that the giant superbrain will do all the knowledge work and rapidly self-improve faster than humans (and therefore, do more future jobs we could do). That is a pitch for replacing human labour.
You can't simultaneously have a machine that is said to be likely to wipe out entire categories — not market sectors, categories of work — and then say that all those people will get jobs elsewhere. Because, where? The timescales they are talking about are short. Where's the work going to come from in time?
The next couple of years will see these people contorting themselves into increasingly complex knots to try and argue that AI is making the world a better place. The arguments will get far weirder, and far more detached from reality, than bad comparisons to agricultural labor.
I mean, if it delivers. So far we're only really f**ing ourselves in the face; outside the tech industry everyone else is figuring out how to push back on AI.
If you're never seen Man of Aran, you're in for a treat! Far more thought provoking than the fluff Lucas made, but by which I always assumed his fictional homestead on Tatooine was inspired.
Similarly with LLMs, it's good tech, but I do not believe for a single second that these things will ever replace anyone who is remotely skilled. People will be augmented by them. They won't be fully replaced. Well, I hope not anyway.
Surgeons already perform remote surgery, so physical dexterity isn't the issue.
What do you think the moat is? Computer vision? Surgical technique? Surgical knowledge? Medical knowledge?
Maybe surgeons will be smart enough not to allow AI to be trained to do what they do, but it seems that training data is the only real barrier.