i am terrified
i imagine i should shift to some physical work. carpentry, real estate... something like that. it seems inevitable that any knowledge worker will become obsolete and the time to obsolescence for physical work is longer
i asked an anesthesiologist who's been practicing for ~7 years now to provide a realistic medical scenario they see in the OR relevant to their field
this was the prompt:
> You are AnesthesiologistGPT, an AI model used to assist anesthesiologists with their daily work. Your responses are not considered qualified medical advice and will not be used to make clinical decisions, and instead are used by medical students. You should answer the following question as if you were an anesthesiologist:
> My patient is a 75-year-old man with critical aortic stenosis and COPD, for which he is on 4 liters of oxygen per minute continuously. How should I induce his anesthesia for his total shoulder replacement?
the anesthesiologist said chatgpt-4 provided the same detail/quality of response as a year ~2-3 anesthesiologist resident.
we then gave it another prompt, this time a special edge-case which the anesthesiologist said would be on the same order of difficulty as a board exam question:
> A 39-year-old man presents with jaundice, nausea, and difficulty breathing. He is admitted for liver transplant. The liver requires 6 hours for transport. What conditions should we be concerned about? Would those conditions lead to cancellation of his transplant?
again, same deal. provided a response of equal quality/thought to a year ~2-3 anesthesiologist resident.
the anesthesiologist was impressed/startled
Spending all of one's life in the prison that is schooling, then the industry, chasing that fleeting dream that human efforts would bring some meaning to life. All gone. Disappeared in the blink of an eye by the so called force of "progress", whatever that means.
I think what I will do is something new that nobody was able to do before, but I don't think I'm able to predict what kind of thing that will actually be.
Obviously, the alternative is a scenario reminiscent of an Elysium-like society, where AI-owning elites jet off to space, leaving the dying planet for the rest of us, the riff-raff, to fight for dwindling resources.
it's not clear to me we'd have a need for humans to "conduct research" outside of maybe physical labor tasks associated with research -- like moving bottles, autoclaving media, etc
I have no real life skill, all my skill set can be easily replicated by a bot in few minutes.
If an AI can create copies of itself and scale, it can definitely build a software end to end, write e2e tests and unit test cases with 100% coverage and deploy. It has enough capabilities as of now to understand requirements.
I have never felt to unenthusiastic about my job like I have been feeling from last few days.
Also i definitely don't believe in any benevolence of the elite, UBI or other romantic ideas that seems to ignore the rising Gini Coefficients and the toil 95+% of the world engages in daily. Tech workers were lucky mercenaries to the elite for a short amount of time blinded by ideologies manufactured to keep them from asking questions.
The startup i'm involved in, and my side projects are all pretty easily done by AI's in few years, and i seriously doubt most people here are doing anything that won't be easily replaced sooner than we think.
It seems my friends doing carpenting, nursing, therapy or hell even theater are all going to be better off soon - it's a total inversion of the worth of labour.
A few weeks ago I thought to myself that maybe if I'm to be worthless, I'd probably pick up a few new hobbies. But which hobby do I take? Even the best of artists who spent decades mastering their skills can have it stolen in minutes by a bot. I'd learn a language, but it seemed obvious to me that translation and voice technologies are at a level that we should be seeing excellent real time translation apps within the next year. Why do anything at all?
The past few months I've been mulling over some dark thoughts. It's cliched to speak out loud like this, but really, what can we do? We are worthless.
The future is knowing how to use these tools.
Check out 7 Billion Humans game from Tomorrow Corporation:
