Progress in AI shows little sign of slowing down. Last week, Tyler expressed amazement at the latest products from OpenAI. It’s impossible to know where all of this is going, and I don’t find it difficult to imagine either utopian or dystopian outcomes.
Yet one thing I’m confident of is that there’s no reason to worry about AI taking our jobs. Larry Summers has said that AI has the potential to replace “almost all forms of human labor,” particularly in white-collar professions. Noah Carl has more recently reviewed scientific literature showing that we’re getting to the point where LLMs can do most or all cognitive tasks at least as well as humans, and notes that the technology will only get better.
Optimists can reply that we’ve heard such arguments before, but humans have always turned out fine. Check out this graph of the US unemployment rate from 1901 to 2021.
Our era looks completely normal. There are few absolute lessons in history. But here is one that has as good a record as any: Luddites, or those who want to restrict technology for the sake of preserving jobs, are always wrong. They might seem to be correct if you narrow your focus to a very short time horizon or one small group or industry, but in no historical era would humanity have been better off in the long run by listening to them.
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Honestly, I have been waiting for this article all my life....as a doctor 30 years of being shut down every time I even hint at the really obvious (to me) fact that our jobs benefit us a million times more than they could ever benefit almost any patient....we are though on the edge of patients choosing the free AI with it's 98% accuracy over the human doctor with our 74% accuracy. Additionally no chance of being sexually abused, no power dynamic. Great point about the make work involved in infantilising everyone and setting up a structure where some humans arbitrarily decide what treatment other humans can have compared to a simpler automated system with some safeguards for the truly ridiculous etc. but my experience is that most patients are perfectly capable of interacting with a medical AI and choosing treatments based on that. Also, medical litigation collapses as you can't sue an AI and with that money in the system instead of lawyers' pockets we can all have all the MRIs and genetic testing we might want. Happy to be out of a job in a world where honesty rules, bring it on....the part of me that sees all this stuff feels very lonely so thanks for this article....
It's futile to regulate AI to save the jobs but nevertheless this piece is very much cope. White collar jobs will basically be gone in 5 years, there will simply be no need to use a human for any of them because humans will not have an economical advantage. At that point an accountant or software engineer can theoretically become a nurse or a nanny but they can't practice their original profession anymore. There will still be made up white collar jobs for sure, but not real ones providing economic value.
Regarding robotics, once you have an unlimited amount of robotics engineers you're gonna develop robots that replace manual labor. Then people remain very much like ants or giraffes or whatever and we must attempt to design the AI so that it chooses to keep us alive in the world.
The historical parallels in the article are weak. In the past, we replaced manual labor with mental labor and that's the majority of the economy. We can go back to manual labor but that will buy us 10 years tops. At that point the only relevant jobs are ones where it's especially valuable to be a human, which is not much.