Ask HN: What will happen if AI is mature and people have little work to do?

[xiaoyu2006]

Three years ago I asked the same question (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35327092), and the landscape has changed since then. Just say that even the most AI skepticism people will have to admit that with recent models, even open source ones, LLM is already a valuable intelligence resource, at least in the right hands. Of course we are nowhere near AGI yet, but no theorem can assert that AI will not be at least as good as human; neuro-networks can fit arbitrarily complex function. If human thought, based on the physical structure of brain, is computable, then some computer program can certainly take advantage of that. Even if there is some weird physics that yields non-computable properties, there is also no stop of building such a computer to take advantage of that law and thus have an AI on top of it too.

Some disciplines are invulnerable to AIs, such as math or art, where human comprehension and expression is the product itself. But how about others such as engineering where "if it works it works"? There are certainly engineers who love engineering but instead of "here is some AI tools that lets you focus on your main, non-trivial tasks", they are getting "you can certainly do that, but AI will complete faster and with less money". (A lot of people had trivial work that can already largely be replaced by AI by now.) AI might take a large portion of fun out of these fields. Maybe they will degrade to sports or specialized handcrafts, just like running (sports) or sewing (handcrafts) in modern world.

I wrote https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49578280#49579794 several days ago, but on second thought I can't even convince myself. We have to admit that sometimes we want to do something because it is hard, or never done before. External incentives are also totally valid options.

[entrepy123]

That's a present/future that we get to (try to) invent, AFAICT.

Is that a lot of responsibility? Yes. Is it ours? Also yes.

I get the sense a lot of people just want to be told what to do. This is one of the times that we actually have to do some invention with intention, IMO.

[robinpie]

https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

[dlcarrier]

I predict that in five years, half the businesses currently running in the US will be bankrupt or merged into another business, and in ten years, the same will happen again. I can pretty confidently make this prediction, because it's what has been happening for most of our lifetimes.

Most of the work new technology replaces is work we made up after we invented tractors and power looms and no longer needed to perform physical labor. Most of what humanity does isn't required to survive or even thrive. Even before LLMs, when jobs in our lifetimes have been lost to automation, it wasn't because a welding robot replaced someones factory welding job; it's usually an office job that's getting replaced because a company started using software to do something that an office worker had been doing by hand.

Walk into an accounting office at any small to medium sized business that has been around for a while and does their accounting in-house, and you'll find people looking at a number on the computer, typing it into a calculator to do the math, then entering the result into the computer. We switched from paper to computers a career lifetime ago, but that doesn't mean everyone, or even most people, have adapted their work flow. When that job is outsourced to a third-part accounting firm, it's cheaper because they're using spreadsheets and enterprise resource management software the way it was meant to be used, not because they're paying their workers less. Likely, they're paying more. For most companies, this could have been done in the 90's or even 80's, but they tend to adapt slowly, so change more often comes from old companies or departments being replaced by a completely new company that built themselves around the technology.

Pretty much every technology advancement has been what militaries call a force multiplier. It means that an individual or small group can do a job that used to take a larger group, but it doesn't mean that zero people can do what one person was doing alone. This increase in worker productivity leads to people doing things they wouldn't have been able to do before, which makes more room for us to make up new jobs.

Also, art is the fields most sensitive to income loss from this, because it decreases the barrier to entry, and gatekeeping is often the only thing making art expensive. A creative director can lead a group of artists to create a complex and expensive project, but as worker productivity improves, what was a creative director role becomes an individual role creating complex projects for cheap. It used to take a team of people to produce works like radio programs, game shows, documentaries, educational videos, and the like, but as technology has improved, a single person with a few hundred to thousand dollars of equipment has the capitol to produce a one-man podcast or YouTube channel that rivals what those teams did decades ago. Of course not everyone that tries will be good at it, but a lot more of the people that are good at it will try than would have tried in the past, and listeners and viewers now have far more options for a given quality of content, so the value of that content has decreased. That worker isn't worse off, because the income isn't being split between an entire team, but it does mean the workers that would have formed the rest of the team need to adapt.

Granted, the only reason that content has value at all is because we don't have to spend most of our waking hours plowing fields and weaving clothes.

[johndear223]

Communism