Ask HN: Whats Your Take on How AI Will Impact Our Future?

Look at this chart of Productivity Change in the Nonfarm Business Sector 1947-2023.

https://www.bls.gov/productivity/images/pfei.png

What you would expect if you read all the media hype about new technology is that there would have been massive increases in productivity in the last 15 years compared to earlier years. Instead productivity increases were significantly greater before then.

I expect AI will be similar. I expect there will be some areas where it will have major impacts, but most areas will continue on about the same.

One of the things my several decades on this planet has taught me is that "the more things change, the more they stay the same".

For example, people like to say that computers or the internet have changed the world. In some ways they have, but in most ways, for most people, the world is not very different at all from what it was before those things. We just have some new toys in it.

This is what I expect from AI once all of the dust settles. Mostly more of the same as it ever was. There will be winners and there will be losers, but on the whole...

If you look say five years out, hiring a contractor for the majority of intellectual tasks will mean hiring an AI agent. Humans will not be able to compete.

5 to 10 years out a similar thing will happen with robots and anything involving physical labor or appearance.

Society will need to be restructured.

I think that a lot of basic business/office tasks will probably get replaced almost entirely by AI. Making stock images, writing text for product descriptions or company sites, making basic code updates... there probably won't be many jobs for humans involving this sort of work going forward.

Website/app design and development for small companies could go the same way too. We've already got platforms like Squarespace and Shopify replacing the work agencies and freelancers used to do there, and I suspect AI in these sorts of platforms will lower the bar to working on these types of sites even further.

I don't see it having much of an effect on other fields just yet though. As much as AI replacing lawyers and doctors and engineers is something that's on the cards, it's probably still a good 5-10 years off at least, especially given how unreliable our current systems are and how damaging the consequences of screwing up are in some of these fields.

I do worry about its effects on the media though. People are already bad at fact checking stories they hear online, and we've already had cases where blatantly incorrect information has spread like wildfire due to AI. Fact is, I'm worried that even journalists won't be able to tell the difference between real and fake media if things keep getting more advanced like this...