AdditionalPizza OP t1_it6vmqy wrote on October 21, 2022 at 11:15 AM

Reply to comment by visarga 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

>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 on October 21, 2022 at 11:59 AM

>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 on October 21, 2022 at 1:33 PM

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 on October 21, 2022 at 12:30 PM

>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 on October 21, 2022 at 4:22 PM

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 on October 21, 2022 at 7:14 PM

> 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 on October 21, 2022 at 7:54 PM

>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.