I really want this to be true, but honestly it's really hard. What makes you think this won't be eaten too within the next year based on the current s-curve-if-not-exponential we are on?
Not the poster, but, for example, some people invested heavily in self driving cars (which could be seen as a subset of AGI) and it is much more limited than what we were promised.
My guess is that (as in most fields) the advancements will be more convoluted and surprising than the simple idea of "we now have AGI".
Re-skill to what? Everything is going to be upturned and/or solved by the time I could even do a pivot. There's no point at all now, I can only hold onto Christ.
If you believe that everything will be solved by the time you can pivot, what will we need jobs for anyway? I mean, the bottleneck justifying most scarcity is that we don't have adequate software to ask the robots to do the thing, so if that's a solved problem, which things will remain that still need doing?
I don't personally think that's how it will go. AI will always need its hand held, if not due to a lack of capability then due to a lack of trust. But since you do, why the gloom?
Way I figure, or what I worry about anyhow, is most of the well paying jobs involve an awful lot of typing, developing, writing memos or legal opinions.
And say like LLMs get good enough to displace 30% of the people that do those. That's enormous economic devastation for workers. Enough that it might dent the supply side as well by inducing a demand collapse.
If it's 90% of all jobs (that can't be done by a robot or computer) gone, then how are all those folks, myself included, going to find money to feed ourselves? Are we going to start sewing up t-shirts in a sweatshop? I think there are a lot of unknowns, and I think the answers to a lot of them are potentially very ugly
And not, mind, because AI can necessarily do as good a job. I think if the perception is that it can do a good enough job among the c-suite types, that may be enough
I'm a student, so all pivots have a minimum delta of 2 years, which is something like a 100x on current capabilities on the seemingly steep s-curve we are on. That drives my "gloom" (in practice I've placed my hope in something eternal rather than a fickle thing like this)
What he meant is that if this really happens, and LLMs replaces humans everywhere and everybody becomes unemployed, congratulations you'll be fine.
Because at that point there's 2 scenarios:
- LLMs don't need humans anymore and we're either all dead or in a matrix-like farm
- Or companies realize they can't make LLMs buy the stuff their company is selling (with what money??) so they still need people to have disposable income and they enact some kind of Universal Basic Income. You can spend your days painting or volunteering at an animal shelter
Some people are rooting for the first option though, so while it's good that you've found faith, another thing that young people are historically good at is activism.
The scenario that is worrying is having to deal with the jagged frontier of intelligence prolonging the hurt. i.e
202X: SWE is solved
202X + Y; Y<3: All other fields solved.
In this case, I can't retrain before the second threshold but also can't idle. I just have to suffer. I'm prepared to, but it's hard to escape fleshy despair.
There's actually something you can do, that I don't think will become obsolete anytime soon.
Work on your soft skills. Join a theater club, debate club, volunteer to speak at events, ...
Not that it's easy, and certainly more difficult for some people than for others, but the truth is that soft skills already dominate engineering, and in a world where LLMs replace coders they would become more important. Companies have people at the top, and those people don't like talking to computers. That is not going to change until those people get replaced.
Say there used to be 100 jobs in some company, all executing on the vision of a small handful of people. And then this shift happens. Now there are only 10 jobs at that company, still executing on the vision of the same handful of people.
90 people are now unemployed, each with a 10x boost to whatever vision they've been neglecting since they've been too busy working at that company. Some fraction of those are going to start companies doing totally new things--things you couldn't get away with doing until you got that 10x boost--things for which there is no training data (yet).
And sure, maybe AI gets better and eats those jobs too, and we have to start chasing even more audacious dreams... but isn't that what technology is for? To handle the boring stuff so we can rethink what we're spending our time on?
Maybe there will have to be a bit of political upheaval, maybe we'll have to do something besides money, idk, but my point is that 10x everywhere opens far more doors than it shuts. I don't think this is that, but if this is that, then it's a very good thing.
So far it has seemed necessary to compel many to work in furtherance of the visions of few (otherwise there was not enough labor to make meaningful progress on anyone's vision). Probably at least a few of those you'd classify as drones aren't displaying any vision because the modern work environment has stifled it.
If AI can do the drone work, we may find more vision among us than we've come to expect.
Seems inevitable once multi-modal reasoning 10x's everything. You don't even need robotics, just attach it to a headset Manna-style. All skilled blue collar work instantly deskilled. You see why I feel like I'm in a bind?
