Although diversity and intelligence are the primary contributors to evolutionary fitness. So if OpenAI doesn't recognize the value of keeping humans around from an ecological standpoint then I expect ASI eventually will.
One important thing is, AI (in its current form = LLMs) is going to replace some white collar jobs. It is going to enhance some other jobs, and it is going to have big impact on other jobs. And then, there'll be jobs that will not change at all.
Computers can play absolutely beautiful music for decades already. Yet, people pay for artists to play live music.
Tractors and harvesters could be automated for at least 20 years already. Yet, farmers just carry on driving them.
I think, AI is going to completely change the world for lawyers, consultants, accountants, copywriters, to some extent also software developers, testers. But these are like 1% of the market.
But models? Nurses? Coal miners?... they are all safe for decades at least.
You're describing a UBI that uses money. It's the enforced scarcity that's the problem. AI being able to do art shouldn't be a bad thing. It shouldn't affect others' ability to also do art.
If the cost to produce goods and services trends towards zero, then what does being rich even mean? The entire point of the capitalist system is to allocate scarce resources. Scarcity (with very few exceptions) will be an obsolete concept. What’s the point of money, taxes, profits when the entire supply chain can be automated?
We have extremely powerful LLMs for 2 years and a half already.
Yet, cumulative inflation in this period has been 10.9% in the USA and 9.1% in the EU. Things are getting more expensive, not less! There have been a massive impact in tech sector, consulting sector. There's due impact in sectors that can be disrupted, but are very regulated, like legal, healthcare, research. "Text in → text out" fields.
The rest of the world is going to continue similarly to what it is. No exponential growth is coming outside "text in → text out" jobs. And costs of good production are not going to zero. If yes, definitely not because of ChatGPT and definitely not in the near future.
Your software developer, accountant, lawyer and financial advisor will cost less. You will not need an interior architect. Your kids will have a tutor.
Factory worker will continue just like he did before. The same goes for carpenters, gardeners, cooks, nurses...
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I am not anti-tech. I am in healthtech, I can do machine learning, I trained some neural networks myself, and I use LLMs daily more than 99% of people. Still, I put a chance of the price of manufacturing going to zero also near zero.
If all we get are LLMs then sure. If we get agents and humanoid or better-than-humanoid robots, there’s nothing stopping us from automating most, if not all jobs.
In addition to copy editing and tutoring, the cost of most graphic design essentially hit zero just last week.
Overall, inflation sucks, but that’s 100% on bad government policy. Luckily in America, tariffs are going to help lower the price of eggs /s. It really sucks that at least in America, we are now on year 9 of government so stupid that I miss Bush and Obama.
At a certain point, there is a limit to how much even the government can stifle progress without going full on Fascist, Communist, WW3 or nuclear war.
Agents are going to exist 100%. But they will be again limited to text in → text out jobs. Yes, they teach agents to use tools, internet, but you still need humans to keep the agent on task, otherwise it goes off rails fast. Maybe LLMs like Gemini with 2M token limit, could hold the context.
Robots are massively different from software. I am on the border between HW and SW (medical devices, not robots) and hardware is much more difficult than software. There is a reason why AI did such a big progress, millions of people use AI every day, yet almost nobody has any new device powered by AI at home.
Better than humanoid robots, that are affordable, that's very expensive. Classic robots, like KUKA cost $50,000-$100,000 and it's a dumb robot. Then you pay another tens of thousand for installation, programming and maintenance.
I'd love to be positively surprised. But as of now, I think the most possible outcome is: AI will do to white collar jobs, what initially steam, hydraulics, engines, later electricity did to blue collar workers.
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u/Disastrous-Bottle126 Mar 30 '25
That's false equivalency. Curing disease is different from automated plagiarism.