Comments

You must log in or register to comment.

Lawjarp2 t1_itu1po6 wrote

Nothing is future proof. The whole point of calling it a singularity is that it's unpredictable.

36

whatTheBumfuck t1_ituddzz wrote

It's not that it's going to take your job. It's that it's going to make the entire conventional notion of work irrelevant. You won't need a job. No one will. It will either be a hell where everyone is a slave, or a post scarcity heaven you're free to do whatever you can imagine.

25

Reasonable-Room-307 t1_itwrdm2 wrote

Though work itself no doubt contributes to ill health, I foresee even more social breakdown and mental illness without work. Look how crazy the whole world became during the COVID lockdowns. It will be a major issue that society will need to address. I say this as a crazy anti-work advocate.

1

TheSingulatarian t1_itvle02 wrote

Or no one has to work, but you are living at subsistence level.

A day in the UBI nightmare.

Janet Moore was awakened by the electronic alarm in her neighbors living cube. Her domicile contained 50 pods 10ft by 4ft by 4ft. There were 20 men's pods, 20 women's pods and 10 for couples in her building. The pods were stacked 3 high.

She turned on the screen in her cube and switched to one of the local news channels. "Riots in downtown again last night" the announcer exclaimed.

She padded down the hallway to the communal bathroom to relieve herself. A few bored looking souls populated the lavatory. A man shaving, a woman blow drying her hair. Janet grunted a "Good Morning" and made her way to the stall to do her business.

The stalls were always immaculate as the cleaning bot sanitized the toilet after each use.

After she finished her business. Janet emerged from the stall. Shower? Nah. She had washed yesterday and didn't think she stank that bad. Returning to her pod she changed into her government issued coverall. She received one coverall per year, one pair of sneakers, 3 t-shirts per year, 5 pairs of socks and underwear, a winter coat with a zip out lining every 5 years.

She chose the blue coverall. She had decorated it with homemade pins made from materials she had scrounged from the garbage heap in an attempt to personalize it.

It was a warm day according to the local weatherman on the broadcast. Well, he wasn't really a man. An AI simulation of the image of a man was more accurate. No matter. The information was undoubtedly correct.

She looked at her phone. 10:30 a.m. She had slept longer than she wanted. So much for breakfast. What to have for lunch then? Her government issued food app was good at any fast-food restaurant of her choice up to 2500 calories per day. She chose McDonald's.

She made her way down the street. The buildings were utilitarian, grey boxes. A few people sat out on the building's community porches. The occasional drunk or junkie stumbled down the street past her. Janet was not concerned. People, even drunks and junkies, learned quickly that if you caused a problem the security drones would be on you in seconds.

She approached the kiosk. " Try our new McCricket Burger with spicey Southwest sauce." The attractive avatar of a young woman chirped on a loop on the video screen. "Eh, why not" Janet thought to herself. "One McCricket, a Coke and a small order of fries" Janet said. The kiosk replied, "Hold your phone next to the payment box please". The app on her phone indicated that she had used 987 of her daily allotment of 2500 calories. "Your order number is 68, please proceed to the counter." The app on her phone displayed the same information.

As Janet made her way to the counter, she had to step around a floor cleaning bot cleaning a minor spill. Small utility bots were a part of daily life. Stepping around them was automatic for most people, the elderly would sometimes curse at them as they had not grown up with them.

Given the good weather she decided to take her meal across the street to the park. The parks were very safe. The ubiquitous security cams and police bots made sure of that.

She walked across the street and found an empty bench. She bit into the McCricket burger. "Not bad" she thought to herself "almost tastes like meat." If she could remember what actual meat tasted like.

She wished her calories allotment was higher. She could eat at better restaurants. If she had herself sterilized her UBI would increase by 20%. She still wasn't quite ready to pull the trigger on that. She decided to table the thought for another time and enjoy the park.

Janet thought, what to do with the rest of her day. Swing by the labor office to see if she could pick-up some gig work for a few credits or maybe go garbage picking for recyclable metals. Or maybe just sit in the park. At the end of the day, she could return to her living pod for an evening of Tittytainment. What would those Real Housewives of Buenos Aries be up to next?

Her ancestors had labored at jobs and had no time free time. "What a better life I have." She thought to herself.

−6

Nostr0m t1_itvrgq6 wrote

Interesting story, thank you for sharing. So it's basically imagining life in today's society on a typical day for a homeless/marginally housed person in a well-resourced area, if you took away the risk of violence.

There was a Reddit thread once asking people what they would want to do if they didn't have to work for money. They said things like: read books, plant a garden, study interesting things, learn practical skills like woodworking or baking, play sports, watch sports, make art of various kinds, travel, take naps, meet people in the local community, volunteer, hike outdoors, write a story, fix up an old house, play card games or board games, play musical instruments, develop an app or a game, host dinner parties, raise bees, raise other animals, take language classes, ride their bike, go swimming, etc. etc.

Why can't we do any of those things in our hypothetical post-work society? What does the AI overlord gain by purposely keeping us miserable, when it has basically infinite resources? I guess a related question is why do we allow homeless people to experience similar conditions in our own society, when we likely have the resources to improve their conditions. I guess the conventional answers (or excuses) relate to substance use, mental health conditions, cognitive disabilities, physical and emotional trauma, lack of social support, etc. (arguably a kind of victim blaming argument). But we certainly couldn't apply that reasoning to all of human society.

9

doctordaedalus OP t1_itw1ww7 wrote

I don't get why this is getting downvoted so heavily ... Maybe because of the pessimistic depiction of a post-singularity dystopian nightmare, but this is some brilliant writing. I'm ready for the whole book! Thanks for your time and creativity!

1

OLSAU t1_ittvldw wrote

Installing and repairing plumbing/heating/electrical and such. Forestry, Fishing, low-level Invention and high quality Art ... won't be automated anytime soon. Too much variation, judgement and dexterity required.

Psychotherapy, Teaching, Nursing, Medical doctor ... Human-to-human interaction still very important.

Science at top PhD level ... too much out-of-the-box thinking, experimenting and research required for AI to catch up anytime soon.

Pretty much everything else will decimate within the next 10-20 years.

14

Working_Berry9307 t1_itupcv5 wrote

Mostly agree, but I'd probably up the estimate to 30 years. Some lab tech work is also very specific, and would be expensive to replace with several dozen machines

3

imlaggingsobad t1_ittvq22 wrote

Knowledge work as we know it is pretty much dead in 10 years imo.

Any job that requires dexterity and your hands is probably safe.

7

Professional-Song216 t1_ittzed5 wrote

Yea I actually recently restarted learning programming and I’m pretty sure even if I follow through In 8-10 years the field will be mainly automated.

4

AdditionalPizza t1_itve5j8 wrote

The shitty thing about learning programming now, is by the time you're job ready entry level positions will be either gone or much less skilled leading to competition and lower wage. I was relearning it myself and when Codex was shown to correct its own errors and test, I gave up. Maybe I'm wrong and it's foolish to move on, but you only get one shot at life and I'm not wasting that amount of time on something AI has a direct scope on today.

1

Primo2000 t1_itw0d9b wrote

Not a single manager would allow pushing automated code to production servers so i think people with programing skills will still be needed even if most of the code will be automated in the future, to review and to troubleschoot etc. There is much more to IT project then just writing code.

2

Recent-Fish-9233 t1_itw1kdd wrote

Yea but that still reduces the workload a ton so there will be way too many programmers for the number of jobs.

2

Primo2000 t1_itwfs5u wrote

Or maybe there will be right ammount of programmers, right now a lot of projects cant start because managers cant find devs and infrastructure/devops people so i wouldnt be suprised that with reduced cost and team size actually a lot more projects could start.

Same with manufacturing automation, we need to remebmer that a lot of people still dont have fridges, washing machines etc so there is a lot of room to grow a cost will decrease

1

AdditionalPizza t1_itw9irw wrote

Yeah this is what I'm saying. People will argue that you can just keep outputting more and more with extra productivity but that doesn't make sense economically. Shareholders don't care where the profit comes from for that quarter, and paying fewer wages is a good boost to net profit.

0

Desperate_Donut8582 t1_itufw6z wrote

Become a religious priest (even if you aren’t religious) they make bank

7

CryptographerPlane85 t1_itutut2 wrote

Hugging people for money will become huge, so make sure to get in. Human contact disappears and people will be willing to pay money to get it.

But seriously. I would get interested in businesses, especially online ones. You can make a lot of money and live for that not worrying about jobs.

The concept of a job is not going to work as it used to. This is because our current world is different.

It doesn't really make sense to work 8 hour shifts for many modern jobs. It requires good mental capacity, good mood and focus.

Back to the topic.

Get rid of "it's saturated" mindset. I made a lot of money as an entrepreneur in markets where everyone was raving how saturated all that stuff is.

It doesn't make sense cause if you show people your stuff, someone is eventually going to buy. You just need exposure, whether it's via social media, on the phone or directly.

Start with a list of businesses that you can think of that require little to no investment other than time. If you want to enter some business where you need some machinery, just rent it. If you can't rent, lease or use loans, but make sure you have 1st hand proof your business actually works.

Remember, you don't build all parts of a car as someone building cars. You only put them together as an engineer and match pieces correcty.

Nobody is doing 3d printing. And even if everyone did, believe it or not, it's all about getting traffic and conversion. Get these two terms nailed and you will not talk about saturation anytime soon. These are not marketing gimmicks. They really show you what business is about.

People will buy from you due to location, different costs, branding and tons of different things. Business doesn't work by fixed rules like you might think.

You need to find a good business model for 3d printing, prove it works and that's it. Scale it with ads, social media, SEO, spam, print, whatever you find useful.

It doesn't matter how simple your product is. People are always willing to consume. This is capitalism. And AI won't remove capitalism. Because AI would have to cease its god which is capitalism.

7

DandyDarkling t1_itvyqnb wrote

This is probably the best answer. As far as I can tell, I don’t think any AI can take away a business that you own. Granted, you’ll require a marketable skill and be able to make a consumable product with said skill. But it’s as they say: “If you build it, they will come”.

3

Cr4zko t1_itxo6s2 wrote

> Get rid of "it's saturated" mindset. I made a lot of money as an entrepreneur in markets where everyone was raving how saturated all that stuff is. > >

Yeah because you're a boomer. Try that today from ground floor. Harder by the day for a guy like me to make decent money. It's like nobody wants to pay a decent wage.

1

Meg0510 t1_ituupxu wrote

Chess I think is a great example. It's been 25 years since Kasparov was defeated by a program--but did human chess players get replaced by digital ones?

No--in fact, chess is now livelier than ever. And I think we can extend it to other areas--we're never going to watch F1 driven by self-driving cars, 100-meters races ran by super-running bots, jeopardy played by super search engines, etc.

(One can ofc envision a future where robots have their own sports--maybe a 100-miles race ran by super-running robots could be interesting, idk. But we value competition because the players are human beings, and we become impressed by their performance because they're hard to perform by other human beings--otherwise Magnus Carlsen would be of no interest to the world.)

So inter competetition seems to be at least one domain that's irreplaceable by machines, human nature being that we value competition with other people.

Edit: spelling

6

SWATSgradyBABY t1_itvw7u3 wrote

There is no profit incentive to getting rid of chess players. This is not a good example for that reason. There will be a good reason for hospitals to get rid of radiologists if software can perform the job as well or better. The software can be licensed at a rate probably 1/100th the cost of a human radiologist with his/her retirement account, healthcare, dental, vision plan and plenty of other benefits. There is no incentive to get rid of chess players.

2

Meg0510 t1_itvx3ya wrote

> what sort of "future-proof" field(s) should I be looking into as a way to maintain (for lack of a better term) viability?

Yes, hence an answer to the question posted in the title

3

SWATSgradyBABY t1_itvww8f wrote

Imagine a game of musical chairs where there are 10 chairs and 11 people playing. Someone gets rid of 3 of the chairs. Now you have 11 people and 7 chairs. The game becomes much harder without getting rid of anywhere near all of the chairs.

I often hear the opinion that there will be no labor issue because AI won't get rid of ALL the jobs. Per the above example, AI won't need to replace all the jobs to make life hell in our system as it is currently organized. The jobs remaining will be highly competitive which means they will also all see a decrease in pay as the applicants will be through the roof. Having an AI proof job will mean having a low wage job because everyone will be lining up to train for it and apply.

5

tatleoat t1_ituj8il wrote

You'll be able to maintain the lifestyle you want without a job when we get to that point, for now focus on what you enjoy and make the most of it

2

jonaslaberg t1_itvpkod wrote

Read some Iain M Banks for inspiration. Tldr get into arts, crafts, collecting, hiking or anything non-productive that give you pleasure.

2

kvlco t1_itvxtpu wrote

Government and Foreign Affairs won't be automated any time soon. It would need a complete automation of government procedures. Diplomats probably won't lose their jobs before the final decades of this century.

2

SWATSgradyBABY t1_itvz8jb wrote

Your 3D printer situation is the perfect example, actually. The fields will all become quickly saturated by the people who have been made obsolete in other fields.

2

sumane12 t1_ittwpny wrote

  1. start a business Solving multiple problems required for running a successful business requires AGI, so running a business in almost any field, will be productive while we still have scarcity. However people will be utilising narrow AI to do more, so you will need be able to take advantage of that in order to stay competitive.

  2. specialist manual work Plumber, electrician, ect. I think these types of jobs will be solved before AGI but still 10-15 years down the line

  3. personalized service jobs This area will suffer massive displacement very quickly, due to the tools available allowing people in this area to get a lot more done in the same amount of time. However if you position your self correctly, party planner, personal shopper, carer for elderly or people with disabilities, you can have a successful career.

It's very difficult to predict, but I think anything that can be broken up into specific tasks that can be completed by AI is likely to disappear very quickly.

1

mux2000 t1_itu09rz wrote

Hunter, gatherer, faith healer.

1

darklinux1977 t1_itudzqs wrote

there will be two / three paths for man: the artistic, the artisanal and the pure knowledge

1

Working_Berry9307 t1_itupq1d wrote

Yes yes and no. Pure knowledge will be the first to go. Extremely complicated physical labor will probably still exist for quite some time, as well as therapists, daycare employees, nurses, etc

4

Recent-Fish-9233 t1_itw2fec wrote

Humans are always going to be making art but that is also going to be one of the first automated fields, at least if you want to work as an employee. If you want to get into making your own creative products like games that could still be worth looking into depending on how many people are actually trying to get their games out there.

1

TheSingulatarian t1_itv809e wrote

Highly random physical labor jobs. Plumbers, Electricians, HVAC, Master Carpenter. Any job where you have to move things around and isn't highly repetitive.

1

Jade-Balfour t1_ityc4cb wrote

Phlebotomist. People are always going to have hard to hit veins. It’s gonna be a loooooong time until they get a robot to figure it out. Even then, there will be people who don’t trust robots to stick them with a needle

1

BinyaminDelta t1_itvf0zj wrote

A few days ago I posted a similar question about how people can prepare, and it received many insightful answers.

And then the /singularity mods removed it as "Off Topic." Go figure.

0