visarga t1_it6lzdv wrote
Reply to comment by Down_The_Rabbithole in If you believe you can think exponentially, you might be wrong. Transformative AI is here, and it is going to radically change the world before the Singularity, and before AGI. by AdditionalPizza
> physical laborers, especially the underpaid ones like janitorial work, cleaners and miners will be the last jobs to be automated away, not the first.
Automation is coming for everyone, artist, programmer, office worker or physical laborer.
I guess you haven't seen this model - From Play to Policy. With just 5 hours of robot free play they trained a model to control a robotic arm in a kitchen environment. In other words, learning to act (decision transformers) seems to work really well. I expect robotic dexterity to improve quickly. It's just 3-4 years behind text and image.
Related to this I think we'll see large models trained on the entirety of YouTube learning both desktop skills (like automating computer UIs) and robotic skills (like carpentry, cooking and managing a house environment). Massive video models have been conspicuously missing, probably too expensive to train yet, but look for them at the horizon to start popping out.
There's a whole wealth of information in audio-video that is missed in text and image, exactly the kind of information that will automate the jobs you think are safer. And besides video, the simulation field is ramping up with all sorts of 3D environments to train agents in.
DungeonsAndDradis t1_it6vo7b wrote
When I need to do something around the house, I pull up YouTube. There are thousands of videos on every home maintenance task. When we can get AI trained on YouTube tutorials, we'll have robots making coffee in no time.
visarga t1_it8on9t wrote
The recent Whisper model is rumoured to be created to transcribe all the text from YT in order to feed the next iteration of language modelling.
AdditionalPizza OP t1_it6vmqy wrote
>Automation is coming for everyone, artist, programmer, office worker or physical laborer.
I won't speak for them, but personally when I talk about this I mean intellectual or digital jobs go first, I mean they go first and not long after robotics is there. Labour jobs will inevitably need more logistics to replace, as its not just software a company can install. I won't pretend to be able to predict that, but I think it won't be much longer after there's already an unemployment crises on our hands. It won't really matter at that point.
I don't think full automation of everything will happen that quickly, but it really doesn't need to be full automation. It needs to be 10 to 15% of the workforce jobless with no skills outside of their extinct domain.
phriot t1_it6zsrz wrote
>but personally when I talk about this I mean intellectual or digital jobs go first, I mean they go first and not long after robotics is there.
I work in Biotech, and this is the major reason I think I'm going to try and stay at the bench as long as possible. As soon as I'm able to do most of my work from home, like writing reports, and/or most of my time is spent managing others, that's when I feel like my job is at major risk in the 5-10 year range. (I get the point of this post, that maybe capability will come quicker than I think, but I'm also pretty confident that there will be a transition period where AI will augment, rather than replace, knowledge workers.)
At least my wife is a teacher at a fancy preschool. I am fairly confident that rich people will want humans teaching their kids for longer than other professions will last.
brosirmandude t1_it7auks wrote
Yeah I wouldn't have thought this a year ago but my partner is a librarian and probably has way better career security than I do.
AdditionalPizza OP t1_it734wc wrote
>I'm also pretty confident that there will be a transition period where AI will augment, rather than replace
Yeah don't get me wrong. I don't even mean full automation at first. I mean automation that increases efficiency. Job losses will start to become more and more commonplace starting in 2025. All while LLM's are assisting in break through after break through. We don't need full autonomy of the work force, just enough that we can't expect our current system to work at all.
Redvolition t1_it7zfhk wrote
I believe paper publishing scientists will be amongst the last to be replaced, albeit the lab technicians and assistants doing less innovative work will be far sooner. By the time AI can publish scientific papers to the point of replacing scientists themselves, this is it, we already reached the singularity.
Problem is, this type of innovative work likely requires minimum >120 IQ, which is 1 in 11 people. If you don't reach that cutoff, the remaining options will mostly be traditional manual jobs requiring <100 IQ, or those that benefit from physical human interaction, such as therapists and prostitutes. Basically the middle class, middle cognitive demand jobs for people between 100 and 120 IQ will be eradicated.
If it is difficult to monetize a career in entertainment now, it will be an order or two of magnitude harder in the future, due to competition with AI generators and performers.
Even assuming you have the AI to control robots, the raw materials and fuel to power them cost a lot of resources, and manual laborers are amongst the cheapest, so as long as the robots remain costing more than 4 or 5 years worth of wages, which adds up to 150k to 300k USD in America, plumbers, electricians, and housekeepers will keep their jobs.
We are heading towards a society in the 2030s being stratified as such, in order of wealth:
- Capitalists (~1%)
- Entertainers and Performers (~0.05%)
- Innovation STEM jobs (~5%)
- Management and administration (~5%)
- Physical interaction jobs (~5%)
- Manual labor jobs (~30%)
- UBI majority (53.95%)
visarga t1_it8pdf2 wrote
> It needs to be 10 to 15% of the workforce jobless with no skills outside of their extinct domain.
The number of job positions the economy supports is not hard capped at some maximum value. It's not a zero sum game, more robots doesn't mean less people. But as soon as we get the fruits of this technology we can raise our expectations, and we raise much faster than automation can automate. Just expecting clean air, good food and basic necessities for everyone is a hard task, I bet we'll still be working until we accomplish it.
AdditionalPizza OP t1_it8v9c1 wrote
>The number of job positions the economy supports is not hard capped at some maximum value.
No, you're right that it isn't. But I think time plays a large factor here. If suddenly enough people's employment is displaced, and automation is gobbling up enough jobs, then we have a case of more unemployed people per month than new human viable jobs created per month. It may very well settle itself, but if the rate is high enough it won't matter. You can't have a large portion of society unemployed for very long, chaos ensues.
Unless of course there's a lot of menial labour jobs to go around, that probably will result in the same situation though. I think in a situation where we have physical robots able to do labour, it's well past the point of society needing to change.
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