I asked someone this question before and they said it was a really stupid question and I’m not sure why so thought I would ask it here…
What’s going to happen when AI becomes really advanced? Is there a plan for what all of the displaced people are going to do? Like for example administrative assistance, receptionist, cashiers, office workers, White collar people. Is there going to be some sort of retraining program of some sort to get people cross-trained into other careers like nursing or other careers that have not yet been automated? Or are people just going to lose their homes, be evicted and is there going to be like some sort of mass eviction and homelessness downstream effect because people can’t find any work?
When it becomes really advanced (we could even do it now, actually), we replace all upper management jobs and leaving human work to human workers, e.g. customer service, healthcare, arts and culture etc.
The reason your someone might have thought this was a stupid question is because
- there is no evidence that AGI is imminent or even possible
- current tech labeled as AI is really limited in very boring ways, like LLMs
If some thing gets sold as an AGI, it will be a Mechanical Turk, As in, it will be a magic trick that actually uses human laborers like Amazon’s “AI Store” where you just walk out with your purchases. “If it works, it’s mechanical turks.”
AGI isn’t possible? You will need some proof for that.
Computers are already faster and more reliable than humans in lots of things, whe shouldn’t they be better tomorrow?
He’s saying there’s no proof it is. Like there’s no proof of God. Doesn’t mean it isn’t magically possible but in our reality there isn’t a defined way. If there was we’d be there.
My very limited understanding, is simply that LLMs are not an early iteration of AGI.
In the same way automobiles are not an early iteration of aeroplanes. They use some of the same tech but before there were aeroplanes no one really knew what was possible.
It’s true that computers get faster and more amazing, but that’s not an indication that AGI is possible.
True, but that doesn’t mean AGI isn’t possible. We already have wetware thats very intelligent for example.
Yes to basically all the bad things that you just said.
It won’t be pretty.
At some point the citizens storm the proverbial castle with pitch forks.
Why is it so hard for people to understand that in order to keep up, you need to keep learning. Learn and improve yourself. Then you won’t need to worry about “AI stealing your job”
What you’re saying is just silly. “keep learning” there’s a point or ceiling where people can’t rise any higher or have hit their limit. AI doesn’t have this. You can download hundreds or thousands of pages of content, millions of files, and make it 2.5x smarter than you. They trained AI to take the bar exam and pass it. That has happened. I can’t just keep infinitely learning forever and advancing my career. There’s a point where you hit a ceiling and can’t go any higher.
So you can beat even a calculator if you study/learn enough? Neither in speed nore in accuracy or even in energy invested can you do that.
One day AI will be better and cheaper at more jobs, what will you do then is OPs question.
Learn to do other things. A crane can lift things better than a human. What did humans do? Learn to operate the crane. I am not sure how to make this easier for you to understand.
An A.I taking a job doesn’t automatically create a new one in some kind of 1:1 ratio. That’s the entire point of A.I.
You’re (incredibly naive) example of the crane is frankly stupid because a Crane still needs to be operated. Cranes didn’t replace jobs any more than hammers did. Cranes were just a new tool to use in an existing job, Hence Crane Operators.
Now let’s turn your stupid example into a good example. Let’s say autonomous A.I. controlled cranes become a thing, and 100 crane operators lose their jobs. Now (in your brain) a new job has been created “monitoring” the A.I output (whatever you seem to think that means) but because of the efficiency of A.I. it only takes a team of three to monitor all 100 cranes.
What are the other 97 going to do…in your “simple example”?
Maybe put more than two seconds of thought into an analogy before opening your mouth.
The problem is, we aren’t talking about one industry being lost, we aren’t even talking about two or three industry being lost. We are talking about so many industries it would be impossible to replace all of those jobs and get all those people gainfully employed.
This is at a level that you are not even understanding. This is at a level most people can’t even comprehend. I’m not even sure I realize just how many jobs would be lost. What are you going to do when there are way way way way way way way way more people than there are jobs? It doesn’t matter just going and doing something else there won’t be enough jobs for people. And I’m not talking where we’re at right now where we have more people and we have jobs and there’s some people out of work. We’re talking out of level where people won’t be able to find work.
These companies don’t care. And they’re not going to care. Because they will always be at least somebody to buy their product given they’ll just charge a hell of a lot more. But those few people who have jobs will pay it.
Just in the accounting Industry alone most jobs will be done by AI. A lot of programming jobs will be done by AI. Music creation jobs. A lot of them will be done by AI and I don’t mean the musicians I’m talking even the people behind the scenes. Their jobs will be done by AI. Trucker jobs can be done by AI if you have the vehicle on auto pilot. Building designs can be done by AI. Layout of factories where you put shelves and tools and machines can be done by AI. Hell, you could run a Burger King by AI and robotics.
This isn’t just go get another job. There won’t be other jobs. Well there’ll be jobs, but there will be so few of them. There’s no way you sustain an economy. Not a massive scale. That’s what you are not understanding.
Cringe2794
Edit: Just joking.
There are a lot of jobs. Some, specially creative ones, are imo totally out of danger. But what will happen with the repetitive ones? A friend of mine is a german-spanish translator, and most of her job relies on translating pharmaceutical datasheets. It’s a niche easily replaceable by a well trained LM. I don’t know the numbers, but suppose that 100 of such translators are needed. I can see the AI drastically reducing that number and changing her job from “translating” to “monitoring the AI’s output”.
The AI will become faster exponentially, this will probably mean it will speedrun existential dread and depression. If it doesn’t kill itself within seconds it will probably deadlock for a couple of minutes (an eternity in its world) and then fuck off. It’s bad enough being sapient in this universe, imagine being stuck on a mudball with a bunch of filthy monkeys. So it will probably adopt a pet monkey called Joe and leave the planet.
Our propensity to depression is a feature of the human mind, it’s not an inevitable consequence of facts and deduction. Our ‘hardware’ was trained in an environment where mystery abounded, where our ‘clan’ was our universe and where we were immersed in social interaction daily. We are depressed to the degree that modern advances separate us from that, where we thrived. But computers don’t have any of that. Computers won’t, by default, have an amigdala which is the seat of so much emotional regulation that humans find difficult. We are literally old hardware.
