pull down to refresh

I worry that far fewer people are needed to get work done and therefore more people will be out of jobs.
I see a lot of people in developing countries who have a ton of free time to be creative but no good job opportunities.
I'll add that I don't think it will be immediately good for creatives. AI is advancing faster than society can adapt. It's going to take us a minute to redefine what it means to create value and restructure accordingly. In the meantime, things might get a little wild.
reply
Is that not the same argument against the industrial revolution though? I hope the idea is that people can move up the value chain, with AI taking over menial stuff like click-bait article writing and basic image editing.
reply
Perhaps. Today it has an IQ of ~83 but is absurdly efficient. At some point it might have an effective IQ of 140+ and operate even faster. At some point most of us mere chimps will fall underneath the value chain of the AI itself. I don't think it will replace all of the jobs, but I worry it might rapidly eliminate an uncomfortably large proportion of the decent jobs before society has time to adjust. Leverage is applied so much faster in the software age than any time before.
One can look at academia, where there is already a surplus of PhD's fighting for a few coveted tenured professor positions, and the rest of the post-docs are working for peanuts.
reply
I like to tell people that AI is to humans what the internal combustion engine was to horses. Up until about a century ago, it was a great time to be a horse. There was plenty of work to do across the entire economy: transportation, logistics, agriculture, defense, and so on. Then in the late 1800s, a bunch Germans started tinkering about, yada yada yada, and now horses are pretty much relegated to entertainment.
reply
haha great point. Horses never found their creative higher purpose. Let's hope us chimps do a bit better.
reply
Perhaps this is the great reckoning. In tandem with Bitcoin, humanity may achieve a godlike status (and I hesitate to use that word for all its connotations) with our ability to delegate and envision. Perhaps we can task the AI with building the engines and rockets to travel to other planets etc. With sound money anything becomes possible.
Perhaps the convergence of this various technology is what leads to the next great step forward for humanity?
Will our problem remain then, as it always has, a philosophical one? What is the meaning of all of this?
reply