I used to think creative jobs (arts, writing), programming and science will be last to automate, but this year completely destroyed my confidence in that.
Stable diffusion, DallE, Midjourney produce absolutely beautiful paintings, drawings, renders, photos of sculptures. We have AIs that write movie scripts, book plots. We are starting to get AIs that are okay at making music. We have transformer models that generate textured 3D models.
On the programming side we have Copilot, which can't yet replace a programmer, but it's definitely a first confident step.
On the science side we have AI tools that fold proteins, predict material properties of novel materials, the wet lab work is getting automated too.
I find it hard to name an area of human work that can't be automated. And not even work, any human activity.
It looks like all the problems that can be solved in software, will be solved first. Robotics will be lagging, but not very far behind. Once we perfect artificial muscles, it's game over. The rest is software and scaling everything up.
I feel like this take is a lot like saying that the invention of a car is going to obsolete the profession of carriage drivers. The job of a carriage driver isn't to drive a carriage, it's to drive a vehicle. It's the same with all of these new technologies you've listed: they alter the job description, but don't remove the job.
There are two opposing forces that determine the net change
- Greater productivity. A single carriage driver can now drive a bus, so fewer carriages are needed
- Lower costs/ higher demand. Everyone who walked can now afford the bus, so the number of drivers goes up even if fewer drivers are needed per traveler.
Yeah. Look at the millions of words written on tweaking prompts.
And while SD is very impressive, it’s going to be a long time before it’s producing high res imagery, at least without ready access to lots of data center grade hardware)
Mundane writing jobs might be automated soon, perhaps. But truly creative jobs?
Do you honestly, really would want to read a 1000 novel written by an AI even if I assure you that is as good as what an average human could do?
Now we are all wowed with Stable Diffusion and what not, ok. But give me a library stand with 999 decent AI books and 1 human book, I pick the human.
I want to talk to the human behind the pages, feel the human behind the pages. I don't want a random number very efficiently generated by a machine. Who cares!
If something is entertaining enough to capture people’s attention, and is also infinitely abundant, it will probably undermine the market for higher quality, higher cost alternatives. AI doesn’t have to be as good as traditional media to destroy it - it’s more likely to be competing with Tik-Tok for attention.
But in the long run it probably _will_ be as good as traditional media, and instantly customisable to your tastes to boot. I suspect it will be a difficult pill to swallow, but we are likely over-estimating the depth and complexity of our souls, just like every other AI task. Some people will still insist on human-authored works and swear they can tell the difference. Money will still be made putting humans on stage to perform. Older generations will insist everything is worse and will possibly be right. I’m sure there will be several billion deprecatingly self-referential AI retellings of Prometheus and Pandora to show us what a bad idea it all was.
So I am also very torn about this. A big part of art is actually knowing the "history" of the author? (Just for this I am not quite lumping coding into Art just yet as I still code to solve hard problems - bit like fixing up a car - than having to impress others).
I am big into Carnatic music (a form of south indian classical music with a ton of intricacies and improvisation). The actual songs that most performers perform on stage had actualy been written by a handful of folks 3-5 centuries ago. And without any judgement, the style has a lot of homogenity to it and several folks have created compositions (in the past 50-100 years) which mimic a lot of the original style and yet acceptance of them in public performances is limited ("oh its another X wanna be").
You can confidently bet that James Patterson's team is already using GPT3. For better or worse, he has been the Henry Ford of novel production and modern technology like GPT3 is exactly the force multiplier the team would want to adopt.
Perhaps contrary to popular believe, I think the jobs that have survived thousands of years will likely survive another 50, even when all automatization included:
- teachers
- writers & artists
- doctors
- farmers
- builders
- scientists
- what people say is the oldest profession in the world
It is the relatively new jobs (< 100 yrs old) that face more uncertainty: they perhaps have proven themselves worthy in the last decades (and they are booming right now), but might not be resilient enough for world that is coming. It is not only about automation, but adaptability to quick / disruptive changes.
- programmers
- traders
- journalists
- marketers
However, I wouldn't call this a "prediction". I think very few jobs will actually disappear completely.
I guess most HN readers are aware of it by now, but if anyone isn't this is basically the idea of the Lindy Effect [0] -- counter-intuitively, in many cases age is a good predictor of future life span.
> ounter-intuitively, in many cases age is a good predictor of future life span.
So people making swords was a job for 30 000 years but for some reason the Lindy Effect does not work with that one? That kind of logic does not work at all with all the jobs that disappeared in the 19th and 20th century.
that's exactly why it's counter-intuitive! Obviously it can't be right forever, but at any given moment if you need predict the minimum future life span of a book, framework, language, job, country, whatever and you have very limited information it turns out that just predicting the thing's age will often be a reasonable prediction -- probability is hard!
Weapon smiths might be gone but weapons manufacturing is as big or even bigger than ever in history. So until humanity does a fundamental shift and stops all armed conflicts, it is as safe job as any.
> I think the jobs that have survived thousands of years will likely survive another 50
That's a strange assumption. So the world will completely change but for some reason only these ones will remain intact and untouched? Btw most farmers are out of job compared to the early 20th century. Now a single farmer produces what 100's or more produced before.
So, we're agreed then that farming as a profession remains?
I'm smack bang in the middle of a large agricultural region and while farm areas are larger than ever before they are multi million dollar (in annual cash flow) family businesses still.
They have massive sheds, small fleets of machinery, WAN's and storage, welding shops, silos .. and are still extended family businesses that are crying out for more boots on the ground.
The nature of farming has changed and will continue to change, but there will continue to be farmers; the robot that fixes the robots will get bogged and need repair itself.
Exactly, farming is a good example.
It was the dominant economy sector 100 years ago, and still is in many countries. Right now less than 2% of world population works on farming, if I am not mistaken.
But all the massive improvements, all the low hanging fruit it's gone - at least when you look at the next 50 years.
The more something is optimized, the harder is to optimize it harder.
No way, our food will come from 'labs' aka giant grow warehouses etc in 50 years. The only 'recognizable' farmers, ie tiling the soil, milking cows, herding sheep, and so-on, will be subsisting in poor countries or will be organic artisans.
Innovation is at an inflection point for our food system.
But the solution then was just to cut down more forests and throw some more chemicals in the soil.
That's not going to work any more, and the tech for indoor farming, LEDS, vertical farming, biotech (heme, cells feeding on co2 and electricity) etc, is just now becoming viable.
I love the logo. I've been using the glider for years, but just learned about Eric Raymond's racist tirades and the like, and was looking for something to replace it with.
If its okay with you, I'll change it up a little bit (maybe change the color or etc), and use it for my personal projects?
I would have replied on the linked comment above, but its so old replies are turned off. Hope your hackerspace is still going strong : )
Yes sure, totally forgotten I'd posted that, for anyone else the logo is here https://imgur.com/ba7o9i0
The different shades were meant to represent different kinds of people coming together at our hackerspace which is sadly no more, and green for growth obviously, but feel free to change it around to suit.
It animates (in the game of life) up and to the right BTW, unlike Raymond's version which goes down...
interesting you say writers and artists would survive over programmers when AI has practically threatened all writers and artists livelihood as of recent.
I hear people say this, but I haven't seen any concrete examples of AI generated art actually threatening the entire art industry. Sure, AI can generate me a nice pic to use for my blog post, but are game studios ready to fire all of their concept artists?
Well, the _entire stock image industry_ has surely been disrupted. If you relied on stock imagery last year as your primary source of income, you may be out of work come next year.
I disagree. By definition, AI can generate average-ish work, but not new, disrupting, expressive work.
It would have never come up with cubism, magic realism, or any innovation that makes art, art.
They will improve at requiring less training data, less energy, come up with more likely possible works, polish out edges, sure.
AI can imitate, period. It is not small feat. It is a fantastic achievement that can be used for good.
By definition, AI can generate average-ish work, but not new, disrupting, expressive work.
The vast majority of people working full time as 'artists' are paid to quickly produce "average-ish" work to spec and on time. Nobody (to a first approximation) hires artists to produce capital A Art.
If you want to get semantic about it, we could say the illustator and graphic design jobs (often done by artists) will be lost rather artist jobs.
It'll just become even more of a bimodal distribution of income than at the moment. There will be hundreds of thousands of people writing for free in communities, with whatever anti-AI policing they need to make that work for them, and a few dozen celebrities who make a living from writing.
Right?
I don't think, however, that any competent writer or artist feel threatened by AI outputs at all. The threat comes for others abusing AI to misuse their name and steal their work. That is a legitimate concern.
It depends: is a programmer the same as the people who automated looms? designed steam engines? Because if we are, then we have some life left in us yet!
we are driving towards an axiom here I believe. IMO the only way programming will change is the set of tools we are going to use on a daily basis, but no matter how evolved AI is going to be the need to formulate features in a formal manner will always be a requirement. Think of lawyers for instance. To a certain degree they are programmers acting within the boundaries of the law. Basically they are glueing together modules. I think programmers fate will be similar to that
Reasons all the same: difficult to automate with AI due to non-repeating nature of work. However repeating parts will be automated, hence GP likely to be a bot, also things like co-pilot will replace most web-devs. also houses can be mass built in container-like pods and stacked. so this is very nuanced. check-mate cheeky comment section.
will not survive:
retail worker non-luxury goods
delivery driver in cities with regular grid-like streets aka most of the US
truck drivers between cities
Twitter content moderator
Reasons all the same: easy to automate with AI due to repeating nature of work.
I think the common theme is that if you want something nice like seeing a human doctor, some personlised service, or a nice brick house you are going to see a human. But this will cost tremenduously. So rich people will interact with humans for most services/products while poor people will be interacting with bots. It's already happening (auto-bot callcentre helplines). Overall very distopian.
yes laying bricks in a long straight line is automated. Laying bricks in more intricate ways would take a lot more time.
Also the machine still has to have human super vision and they seem to clean the mortar.
We're getting closer to automate programmer's job too though. In the end it's a text problem - get a textual description (ticket) and generate code that fits it. We have models that can generate non-repeating art, why not non-repeating code?
Programming in 50 years would be then formulating the textual description accurate enough to the AI will not create garbage. So basically what programming already is.
Also fixing or at least iterating the corner cases and bugs that AIs generated. Someone needs to be there to tell AI to repeat what they did until solution generated is correct.
...but once you get your "textual description" to be as exact as it needs to be so code can be generated from it directly, it will be basically indistinguishable from code.
>> I think we're getting close to strong AI there though, so I don't see it happening any time soon.
It's unclear which clause is meant to be negative or positive here. If we're close to strong AI, systems which ask clarifying questions would be close as well, no?
Sorry. To be clear: I think strong AI is "fifty years away" and has been for seventy five years.
So yeah, an expert system that can read a natural language description of a feature and ask questions until it has enough detail to generate the code is science fiction in my opinion.
Having said that, maybe it could be achieved in a limited domain, SHRDLU-style. But that's just a way to deal with the ambiguity by excising it.
It doesn't have to be exact, no more than your input to Dall-E should be exact. Give the AI some understanding of intent of the project, some automatic metrics that will check AI's job quality and let it optimise against it. If AI doesn't generate what you wanted on the first run, correct it and let it learn. Basically what you would do with a junior developer.
Programming is as much encoding a domain and human communication as it is computation. If you can automate the first two, which is what you're claiming will happen, then all of human knowledge work could be automated. Call me skeptical.
The issue is that natural language is often ambiguous. So what you want is to define a formal language that takes out the ambiguity.
Over the last decades, we have grown from writing assembly languae, towards ever more generic languages, that allow us to express the same idea with less effort.
I see programming advancing in this direction. It will still require training to 'speak' the formal language to communicate with computers, but it will always become easier and easier, only leaving computer scientists as a niche occupation to actually build the layers supporting the higher levels.
good luck explaining an enterprise sized system to an AI, validating all the use cases match the requirements ... and don’t forget our best friend: change. This will be a full time job
Kinda yes, in a more serious sense, there will be new roles for humans
to play with respect to moderating technologies;
"Bladerunners" might not be exactly what P.K Dick imagined, but maybe
not so far off.
If we take AI to be the science fiction vision we seem to wish for
then it will require managing, stewarding, planning, opposing,
judging, teaching, healing, hunting down and deactivating, sabotaging,
negotiating with....
Bricklayers became architects, surveyors and town planners as
complexity increased in the construction world. Cities evolved to have
traffic wardens and police... but the same has yet to really mature in
digital technology. We imagine all these benefits of "smart cities"
and "digital working" - many ideologies that have been around since
the 1970s. Yet software engineering is still in its infancy with
respect to civic function, ethics, rights and responsibilities,
remedies and rules.
We have a more or less laissez-faire free-for-all market economy that
produces isolated "goods". The failure of this default model can be
seen in the tombstones of the Google graveyard. And, while it was a
driver of innovation for some time, it isn't really working out in the
big "civic" sense, and we certainly cannot rely upon centralised mega
monopoly Big-Tech to do the right thing (except in a William Gibson
style techno-fascist dystopia).
So I think many timeless jobs will adapt so that technologies can fit
into our society, as welcome, well-managed friends, rather than
allowing them to take-over our society. Maintaining that balance will
be a new frontier for human intellectual labour in teaching, legal,
planning and policing functions.
I wonder if I infosec would still be a thing? I see a lot of improvements in security which if they catch on in that time will make things a lot more secure.
I think what people miss on this thread is a lot of jobs will still be around just paying less with less people doing them.
50 years is too far ahead for me to predict anything. Although in IT, I think networking folks would be the last to go, not because you can't automate stuff but because short of a utopia, politics means different networks will exist and by definition networking connects stuff so computers can't fix themselves if they can't connect outside of a failed segment and technical burdens mean networking changes will be last to happen (basically no one uses ipv6 in private lans now for example).
I think the global south's prosperity will mean a lot more software jobs, just not in the west.
In the short term, I see retail getting decimated. Customer service is horrid and people who work those jobs complain endlessly. If AI is capable it would be much better to deal with than people. I have this idea of a completley unmanned (except one maintenance person) restaurant for example. I manned retail will always be there but there is huge room for unmanned retail. Not now but maybe in 10 years robots that clean up a mess, fold cloths and deliver meals to a table will be a reality (although my idea would have the meals delivered to tables without needing a robot).
The police,politicians and lawyers will be plenty even 1000 years from now in my opinion.
It depends on the resources peak (Oil Peak, Gas Peak, Lithium Peak, Minerals Peak...).
Our modern societies maintain themselves via energy consumption, if the energy production problem is solved, then the societies will evolve to more automation and removal of the low specialization jobs. But if we cant produce enough energy to cover the demand, then our societies will go back to previous levels of development and knowledge jobs will achieve the employment levels of the XV century.
Well look into the past 50 years. Consider all the massive technological innovations. What I think you will see is truly enormous inertia. For example in 1975 Business Week Magazine predicted the paperless office. So tell us how long ago it has been since you saw paper used for information transmission (in other words not packaging)? Weeks? Months? Last time was when your Grandma sent you a birthday card 3 months ago?
No.
"The average American office worker uses an average of 10,000 sheets of office paper per year."
Nowadays it looks like we are getting close to autonomous vehicles - but it was the same 20 years ago - I predicted then that drivers as a profession will disappear soon - and it still didn't happen.
Like many people have already noticed: we overestimate what can be accomplished in the short term and underestimate what can be accomplished in the long term.
Almost all "jobs" will still exist, but will be different. "AI" and automation will make these jobs more efficient, but not replace them.
AI in the creative domain (art, music, writing, programming) will not replace the activity of crating and inventing. People still need to drive these tool, have a skill in controlling them, curate the output. Designers will still have a job to do.
People will still work in retail, maybe fewer on the checkout (thats already happening). People will still deliver parcel to your front door, the "last mile", just more efficiently with more automation in the rest of the process.
That not to say there wont me fewer people doing these jobs, in some cases dramatically fewer. But they will still all exist.
The question should be "what do our lives look like in 50 years time?". Are we still working 8 hour days 5 days a week? Do we still travel on "holiday" 1-2 times a year for a couple of weeks? This is where I think we will see the biggest change, the ways work slots into our lives, not the jobs that exist.
Unless there is a major disruption, in 50 years we will have hit hard the limits of earth natural resources (in terms of metals/minerals/oil) and the consequences of climate change so it's very difficult to predict how the world will be. My guess is that once the system reaches some kind of new equilibrium, jobs will be mostly low-tech and very similar to 1 century ago : farmers (with permaculture), bakers, people who repair stuffs, blacksmiths (but with far less volume of production compared to the industrial world we live in today and mostly simple/repairable/low-techs stuffs : hammers, bikes, shovels, plows...).
Actually no it does not sound very good and I hope I'm wrong : I wish there would be some major discoveries that would still enable us to keep some degree of comfort / food safety / health safety (and a little bit of fun with high-tech for us geeks :) and restore our half-destroyed environment while still being 8 billion people on earth, but at the moment I am extremely pessimistic about the social and environmental consequences of oil/metals depletion * climate change, and how that transition (or collapse) will be handled (or not handled) to reach such a new equilibrium (where my guess is that anyway people will have to live with low-tech, whatever this means in terms of comfort/longevity/...).
Remember that the sustainable world (horses, sustainable agriculture, sailboats, windmills, medicine with herbs, low techs... that many people somehow idealize today) is precisely the one we left 2 centuries ago with the industrial revolution, and there were understandable reasons for that : fossil fuels are infinitely more concentrated than renewables, and all the industrial development they allowed enabled to secure food and health safety, holidays, etc. But now humans are addicted and dependent on those fossil fuels (in particular to sustain 8 billion people on earth), discovering that the party is over will leave us with an extremely bitter hangover. It's just a pity that humanity stupidly wasted all those resources and destroyed their environment so quickly while a different and less greedy economical/political model would have enabled us to live good lives for centuries...
Survive: Lawmakers, lobbyists, lawyers, judges; even journalists, although they might not be called that anymore - influencing public opinion will always be valuable enough to be done for some kind of money. Also surgeons, simply because trust in robots will never (and should never) be high enough to let them cut humans unsupervised as a matter of routine.
Not survive: people making advertising jingles, or drawing shop signage. That sort of low-effort, barely-creative work will be taken by stats-driven programs ("ai").
Isn't the lawyer job 90% looking up past cases, documentation, contracts, etc. The part where you go in front of a judge and dramatically defend your client is a very slim sliver of it.
That's the paralegal's job. The lawyer chooses what makes sense to use among the options the paralegal digs up, using judgement to interpret the actual case and relevant law.
Plumbers, HVAC technicians, Electricians - not only will they survive, they will never be outsourced to cheaper countries. And since Gen Z seems to have little interest in working with their hands, I suspect there will be an acute labor shortage in the trades that continues to drive their already high incomes, higher. As an added bonus, there is no need to all flock to the same handful of overpriced cities.
Petrol stations will disappear, they'll get replaced by petrol delivery companies which will simply deliver petrol for your vintage vehicle, possibly with some sort of subscription.
I can see the petrol stations near the city centres becoming multi storey parking lots with electric chargers, and the ones on the outskirts becoming cafés with electric chargers. I'm fairly certain battery swapping won't become a thing, people take the piss when it comes to stuff that isn't theirs, just look at the city scooters debacle.
Transportation and freight cargo will likely remain, right? Heavy Machinery (excavators, loaders, etc) will likely not transition to electric. I agree that it looks like a diminishing demanded job, but we'll probably have ICE vehicles and machine still for a long time, right?
If we can fully automated building a car, which to me is comparatively low bar compared to AI for other things. Couldn't we also in 50 years design cars that could be dissembled in reverse and then broken parts replaced by automation? So ship car to automated workshop, it removes the parts replaces what is broken and put it back together...
Well, we really didn’t have computers much at all in 1955. That was 67 years ago - what jobs have disappeared since then? Lots of new ones appeared, though, as new “things” appeared and needed to be wrangled. And given the world started from zero, we’re not going to have as much change in tech +50 unless the discontinuity appears.
I think this will depend hugely on the "where" part of the question. For instance I think self driving technology has near zero chance of being successful in places like Europe in the next 50 years. Streets are not built in grids and are super narrow with a lot of "complex" rules like multi lane roundabouts. Europe also has a lot of common sense driving with unspoken rules. Take a narrow road with two way traffic. It's common that both cars would drive at each other and both drivers see a gap where they know that one of the two cars will sideline to let the other car past it. Sometimes a car is already tucked aside and gives the oncoming car a light signal to indicate that they give them priority. Sometimes this is more formal, where you have narrow bridge crossings where there is an official traffic sign that tells who has priority in case of two cars coming at each other and so on. Then there are so many other things like height restrictions due to low bridges and so much more. Observing the "progress" that self driving cars made in the Valley it is clear that it would be a catastrophe anywhere else in their current state.
Having said this, I think we will see a lot more "service" jobs in the future. The wealth gap is widening and there will be more people with a lot of disposable income and many people who will want to make a small cut from those people by providing all sorts of services:
- intimacy (non sexual), this is already a thing in Tokyo where you can pay someone to cuddle with you or hug you
- friends to hire (e.g. someone to go to the theatre, etc.), again already a thing in Japan
- someone to stand in a queue for you in places where you can't make a reservation, Apple stores, etc. (already seen in some places)
- getting paid for a surrogacy pregnancy, for couples who want children but the women is too "busy" for being pregnant
- etc.
There is no end to the creativity of those "service" jobs. Initially it will be weird but in 200 years people will think it's a normal job, just like we think it is normal for someone to file the dead skin of your feet today, cut your nails or wax someone's harry back.
The most secure job will be Doctors and other medical professionals. People are getting older and every human being will require medical treatment in their lives and still we will all die from some medical condition. Healthcare is 100% immune to all other external factors such as how well the economy is doing or what not. People are always ill and the population will still grow to approx. 12 billion before it will start to decline and until then there will be an ever growing pressure on the medical sector. Any technology in that sector will see huge growth if they are not completely sh*t.
Stable diffusion, DallE, Midjourney produce absolutely beautiful paintings, drawings, renders, photos of sculptures. We have AIs that write movie scripts, book plots. We are starting to get AIs that are okay at making music. We have transformer models that generate textured 3D models.
On the programming side we have Copilot, which can't yet replace a programmer, but it's definitely a first confident step.
On the science side we have AI tools that fold proteins, predict material properties of novel materials, the wet lab work is getting automated too.
I find it hard to name an area of human work that can't be automated. And not even work, any human activity.
It looks like all the problems that can be solved in software, will be solved first. Robotics will be lagging, but not very far behind. Once we perfect artificial muscles, it's game over. The rest is software and scaling everything up.