Interesting is the question about physical labor. The economics of pushing atoms in the physical world is nowhere near the economics of pushing electrons (bytes), so if you are not part of group 1 (entrepreneurs) or group 2 (investors), doing physical work is something that will earn you some money (I also expect care work to stay, since people will probably prefer for a long time to have humans care for them). But this means that still group 1 and 2 will be the big winners, paying some money to group 3.
Where do you disagree? Where do you see a different outcome? I’m curious to learn about your thoughts
You will also see long term affects in the industry as the pre-AI generation leaves the market.
It was already hard for entry level developers to break the can’t get a job <-> don’t have experience cycle. It is even harder now.
Before there was always some simple busy work that senior developers didn’t have time to do so you would hire a junior level developer who needed to be told exactly what to do. LLMs are already as competent as a junior developer. Why hire them?
I see the next level of hallowing out to be mid level experienced “ticker takers” who just take well defined business use cases off the board and do the work. For non software companies, a lot of that work has already been outsourced to SaaS offerings where businesses hire a consulting company to do the implementation (various ERPs, EHR/EMR systems, Salesforce, ServiceNow, etc)
Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god Thamus, who lived in the great city of the upper region, which the Greeks call the Egyptian Thebes, and they call the god himself Ammon. To him came Theuth to show his inventions, saying that they ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. But Thamus asked what use there was in each, and as Theuth enumerated their uses, expressed praise or blame, according as he approved or disapproved.
"The story goes that Thamus said many things to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, "This invention, O king," said Theuth, "will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered." But Thamus replied, "Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.
"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
- Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b
How many phone numbers do you know in your head versus when you were younger? I know three phone numbers from memory - my wife’s, my mom’s (she has had the same phone number since I was born) and an aunt that lives at my grandparents house since they passed and she has the same phone number.
When you go to a new city, do you try to find your way around like you use to or do you use GPS?
Absolutely. I find myself sometimes being tempted to just ask Claude for the most vanal things. It's going to get more and more tempting.
People use AI a little here and there but nothing much will have changed due to it. Mostly more work for people needing to correct AI mistakes.
The general level of productivity will rise, and most of the benefits of that increase won't be seen by the workers. 8(
I've read a few stories about parents questioning the over-use of AI from their child, adding to that I've seen my fair share of adult who cannot do anything without asking ChatGPT first.
It's not the same old boring responses which bring more uncertainty.
It's obvious but it's not that obvious that you would likely get it from current ai reasoning models.
Reading these have validated some of my points. https://pastebin.com/y1i6KiY1
I don't want to mislead anyone. Neither do I want to cause trouble to myself or to anyone else. Things can be troubling.
I am open to posting it but I would like to discuss it with someone on HN before doing so.
That will get worse when you need fewer non seniors
A lot of smart people, including myself, find the argument convincing, and have tried all manner of approaches to avoid this outcome. My own small contribution to this literature is an essay I wrote in 2022, which uses privately paid bounties to induce a chilling effect around this technology. I sometimes describe this kind of market-first policy as "capitalism's judo throw". Unfortunately it hasn't gotten much attention even though we've seen this class of mechanisms work in fields as different as dog littering and catching international terrorists. I keep it up mostly as a curiosity these days. [1]
That future is boring; our current models basically stagnate at their current ability, we learn to use them as best we can, and life goes on. If we assume the answer to "Non-aligned ASI kills us all" to be "No", and the answer to "We keep developing AI, S or non-S" to be "Yes", then I guess you could assume it would all work out in the end for the better one way or another and stop worrying about it. But we'd do well to remember Keynes: In the long run, we're all dead. What about the short term?
Knowledge workers will likely specialize much harder, until they cross a threshold beyond which they are the only person in the world who can even properly vet whether a given LLM is spewing bullshit or not. But I'm not convinced that means knowledge work will actually go away, or even recede. There's an awful lot of profitable knowledge in the world, especially if we take the local knowledge problem seriously. You might well make a career out of being the best informed person on some niche topic that only affects your own neighborhood.
How about physical labor? Probably a long, slow decline as robotics supplants most trades, but even then you'll probably see a human in the loop for a long time. Old knob-and-tube wiring is very hard to find expertise around to distill into a model, for example, and the kinds of people who currently excel at that work probably won't be handing over the keys too quickly. Heck, half of them don't run their businesses on computers at all (much easier to get paid under the table that way).
Businesses which are already big have enormous economic advantages to scaling up AI, and we should probably expect them to continue to grow market share. So my current answer, which is a little boring, is simply: Work hard now, pile money into index funds, and wait for the day when we start to see the S&P500 start to double every week or so. Even if it never gets to that point this has been pretty solid advice for the last 50 years or so. You could call this the a16z approach - assume there is no crisis, things will just keep getting more profitable faster, and ride the wave. And the good news is if you have any disposable capital at all it's easy to get a first personal toehold on this by buying e.g. Vanguard ETFs. Your retirement accounts likely already hold a lot of this anyway. Congrats! You're already a very small part of the investor class.
[1]: [url-redacted]
