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26 sats \ 4 replies \ @Undisciplined 13h \ parent \ on: Many people now think that AI is a mortal threat to jobs - are they right? econ
I'm reasonably confident in my short-term and long-term projections, but I have no confidence at all in any particular medium-term predictions.
Short-term: lots of change, which is very painful and messy
Long-term: enormously enhanced productivity will greatly improve standards of living
I think it's going to take longer for young people to launch out of subsistence living, unless they're willing to get out of the knowledge-producing industry and go back to physical labor.
I just don't see what value a young person with no domain-expertise brings to a knowledge industry anymore. I'd venture to guess that AI will outperform 99% of undergraduates on knowledge tasks in their first 1 or 2 years on the job. So why bother?
So it'll be harder for young folks to get a foot in the door. They may have to work longer at subsistence wages to build up a portfolio to show that they can do self-directed work, including orchestrating AI outputs to align with a business use case, before they'd get hired by a company. Or they might have to go the entrepreneurial route, which is probably a good scenario if more people were to do that.
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In times of rapid change, more entrepreneurship is really important. We need people hunting out the new profit opportunities.
I think we'll see another similar change, as we saw with electronic computing. Being good at arithmetic hasn't been a marketable skill for a long time. However, being a creative technical thinker became even more valuable.
Now, my guess is that being a walking encyclopedia will lose it's value, but productively using knowledge will be even more valuable.
Honestly, with how fat and sick our society has gotten, a tilt towards physical professions is not the worst thing in the world.
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It's interesting to remember that something like "being good at arithmetic" WAS actually a marketable skill years ago.
Now it isn't, of course.
It would be interesting to see how the job market changed with the advent of personal computing - when computers got cheap enough that most people and certainly all businesses could afford one. Were there people back then, very worried about how computers would replace them?
I imagine there were, but I don't really remember that. I think there was a big push to retrain laid-off factory workers as IT people, but I think that didn't work at all.
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I'm not old enough to remember it first hand, but I have heard people saying the conversation and concerns were similar to today with AI.
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