The people fretting about AI killing everyone are jumping the shark here.
You should be much more worried about how most people are going to respond to their jobs evaporating in the next ten years, and the same thing happening to the next job they were training to do before they can even finish training for it. The moment they realize that there is no way they can ever get ahead again is when they’ll start rioting in the streets. At that moment we either need to have a strong social safety net to basically pay people to exist, aka UBI, or the entire system is going to come crashing down.
Think that’s far fetched? I put together a very compelling POC with GPT4 yesterday that could replace an awful lot of call center employees. Couple it with speech to text and text to speech models that already exist and in five years I’d bet that call center employment is less than 10% of what it is today. I’d also wager that we’ve seen peak employment and wages for software engineers. ChatGPT was amusing but mostly harmless for programming. GPT4 is good enough to replace a junior engineer.
This is coming a lot faster than you think. Kids starting college today may find that there is no work left in their field of study by the time they graduate. GPT is moving that fast. Do you really think they’re just going to accept that? In 20 years, jobs will be the most valuable resource of all.
I’ve been joking-not-joking that the Butlerian Jihad might end up coming for all us programmers in the not-too-distant future, for exactly this reason. Could you really blame them?
I am most focused on this scenario. I could easily see 10%+ unemployment as this technology makes its way into society. Companies will just not need as many people as they did before, and will be able to move much faster than was possible previously.
We are not ready politically for this level of change - there needs to be serious study/discussion of UBI or other kinds of safety net.
All of this is possible with today’s technology- never mind whatever the ensuing developments are.
Our “consolation prizes” are an information weapon that makes “Cambridge Analytica” look like a preschool and a highly capable assistant/tutor/work generator that allows white collar professionals to multiply their productivity by 1.5x+. This is what we have today.
You should be much more worried about how most people are going to respond to their jobs evaporating in the next ten years, and the same thing happening to the next job they were training to do before they can even finish training for it. The moment they realize that there is no way they can ever get ahead again is when they’ll start rioting in the streets. At that moment we either need to have a strong social safety net to basically pay people to exist, aka UBI, or the entire system is going to come crashing down.
Think that’s far fetched? I put together a very compelling POC with GPT4 yesterday that could replace an awful lot of call center employees. Couple it with speech to text and text to speech models that already exist and in five years I’d bet that call center employment is less than 10% of what it is today. I’d also wager that we’ve seen peak employment and wages for software engineers. ChatGPT was amusing but mostly harmless for programming. GPT4 is good enough to replace a junior engineer.
This is coming a lot faster than you think. Kids starting college today may find that there is no work left in their field of study by the time they graduate. GPT is moving that fast. Do you really think they’re just going to accept that? In 20 years, jobs will be the most valuable resource of all.