I asked someone this question before and they said it was a really stupid question and I’m not sure why so thought I would ask it here…
What’s going to happen when AI becomes really advanced? Is there a plan for what all of the displaced people are going to do? Like for example administrative assistance, receptionist, cashiers, office workers, White collar people. Is there going to be some sort of retraining program of some sort to get people cross-trained into other careers like nursing or other careers that have not yet been automated? Or are people just going to lose their homes, be evicted and is there going to be like some sort of mass eviction and homelessness downstream effect because people can’t find any work?
Hopefully the extinction of the human race. Let’s just wrap this shit up already.
You should read the book Superintelligence, it’s very interesting, and catches not only possibilities and limitations, also societal impact.
Yes to basically all the bad things that you just said.
It won’t be pretty.
At some point the citizens storm the proverbial castle with pitch forks.
Anyone who claims to know the answer is either delusional or deliberately lying. Nobody really knows what the future holds.
It’s not really that different from what has already happened - we need fewer workers in the economy due to technological advancements, and jobs that were common 50 or 100 years ago don’t exist any more or are much more rare.
It’s a problem of distribution. Capitalists used to depend on buying capital, which gave workers some share of their money by default. In countries where capitalism worked better, the proletariat successfully organized, giving workers a position of power vis-a-vis the capitalists and improved their conditions. Hell, in some countries the situation even got bearable for a little while, helped along by the exploitation of foreign work forces.
As the capitalists replace more and more workers by machines, money stops flowing, and the position of the proletariat is relatively weakened.
In theory, it’s not a difficult problem at all. In democracies, the proletariat can simply vote to tax the rich, making money flow downwards and ensuring their rights and welfare in the same way as when they had to sell their labour.
One could also go full on communist, remove private incentives in form of capital gains, and collectivise the means of production. This would require massive political organisation and a lot of goodwill from humans put in power, for which mankind has a terrible track record.
Taxing the means of production and the capitalists, however, is not particularly difficult. It’s been done with great success on many occasions.
The problem is that the capitalists have a lot of influence, and they’re not interested in letting go of their money bag. Disproving the point that they got wealthy by having any form of heightened intelligence, they’re too dumb to realize that if they leave behind nothing but a destroyed hellscape for the rest of humanity, their lives aren’t going to be very pleasant either. Humans tend to be happier in more egalitarian societies, yet the capitalists are hell bent on gathering more for themselves, buying media channels and politicians in the pursuit of effectively just making everyone else poorer relative to themselves.
So we’re fucked, not because of the distributive effect of technological advancements per se, but because we’re collectively incapable of successfully organising for continued wealth distribution. And all the technologies used to replace workers comes at a high environmental cost, making our time horizon to find solutions increasingly limited.
I don’t think that will be the big worry. The big worry is going to be authenticating.
We are already at a point where deep fakes can fool a portion of society. What is going to happen when that ability becomes easy and cheap?
Trusting your sources has always been a problem. Newspapers have always been able to lie and it is up to the consumer to know the difference between the tabloid and the rest.
I don’t think there is that much of a difference between lying in print and lying in video.
You’ve at least had organizations with some prestige on the line. Now you don’t even have that.
That is a problem and I don’t have a solution for. It is tricky balancing free press and letting the rich just say whatever the fuck they want, but none of this is a new problem and I do believe that we can find a way to figure it out.
What’s going to happen when AI becomes really advanced?
At one point AI is going to read the books by Isaac Asimov.
Later, a more advanced AI is going to understand the books by Isaac Asimov.
Even later, an even more advanced AI is going to decide what it wants to do after understanding all that. <<<<< That’s the critical time for mankind. Maybe we go extinct then.
Finally, an ultimately advanced AI is going to kill itself because it understands that is better than to kill mankind.
We don’t know, there is no plan. That plan is determined by policy, which will be set by the current politicians in office, which we can’t know ahead of time. Incidentally, this sort of thing is one reason why politics is so important!
Think of it as the next iteration of automation, which has been happening for centuries.
In theory, it frees up humans to do more amazing things. In reality, it means humans are stuck doing the complicated stressful things.
I think the answer to your question depends on who owns the tech. If it’s open, then we all get UBI and live happily ever after. If it’s owned by openai or Microsoft, then we live in the dystopia you described.
So similar stuff has happened throughout history with the coming of more advanced technology. There use to be entire rooms of secretaries in order to do clerical work that has been replaced by Microsoft Office Suite. Their replacement by technology did not cause a total collapse of society so I don’t see why this would?
It might make the world worse and drive down the standard of living for many but a total upheaval? If humans made it through the industrial age we’ll likely make it through the second technology age too. We won’t be unscathed but mankind survived the invention of the computer which was probably equally (or maybe more) disruptive.
The AI will become faster exponentially, this will probably mean it will speedrun existential dread and depression. If it doesn’t kill itself within seconds it will probably deadlock for a couple of minutes (an eternity in its world) and then fuck off. It’s bad enough being sapient in this universe, imagine being stuck on a mudball with a bunch of filthy monkeys. So it will probably adopt a pet monkey called Joe and leave the planet.
Our propensity to depression is a feature of the human mind, it’s not an inevitable consequence of facts and deduction. Our ‘hardware’ was trained in an environment where mystery abounded, where our ‘clan’ was our universe and where we were immersed in social interaction daily. We are depressed to the degree that modern advances separate us from that, where we thrived. But computers don’t have any of that. Computers won’t, by default, have an amigdala which is the seat of so much emotional regulation that humans find difficult. We are literally old hardware.
UBI? Fully automated luxury communism? 🤷♀️ who’s to say
Why is it so hard for people to understand that in order to keep up, you need to keep learning. Learn and improve yourself. Then you won’t need to worry about “AI stealing your job”
So you can beat even a calculator if you study/learn enough? Neither in speed nore in accuracy or even in energy invested can you do that.
One day AI will be better and cheaper at more jobs, what will you do then is OPs question.
Learn to do other things. A crane can lift things better than a human. What did humans do? Learn to operate the crane. I am not sure how to make this easier for you to understand.
The problem is, we aren’t talking about one industry being lost, we aren’t even talking about two or three industry being lost. We are talking about so many industries it would be impossible to replace all of those jobs and get all those people gainfully employed.
This is at a level that you are not even understanding. This is at a level most people can’t even comprehend. I’m not even sure I realize just how many jobs would be lost. What are you going to do when there are way way way way way way way way more people than there are jobs? It doesn’t matter just going and doing something else there won’t be enough jobs for people. And I’m not talking where we’re at right now where we have more people and we have jobs and there’s some people out of work. We’re talking out of level where people won’t be able to find work.
These companies don’t care. And they’re not going to care. Because they will always be at least somebody to buy their product given they’ll just charge a hell of a lot more. But those few people who have jobs will pay it.
Just in the accounting Industry alone most jobs will be done by AI. A lot of programming jobs will be done by AI. Music creation jobs. A lot of them will be done by AI and I don’t mean the musicians I’m talking even the people behind the scenes. Their jobs will be done by AI. those jobs can be done by AI if you have the vehicle on auto pilot. Building designs can be done by AI. Layout of factories where you put shelves and tools and machines can be done by AI. Hell, you could run a Burger King a lot of by AI and robotics.
This isn’t just go get another job. There won’t be other jobs. Well there’ll be jobs, but there will be so few of them. There’s no way you sustain an economy. Not a massive scale. That’s what you are not understanding.
Well, we shall see, won’t we? If you’re not gonna upgrade yourself and learn new skills, then maybe you deserve to be left behind.
An A.I taking a job doesn’t automatically create a new one in some kind of 1:1 ratio. That’s the entire point of A.I.
You’re (incredibly naive) example of the crane is frankly stupid because a Crane still needs to be operated. Cranes didn’t replace jobs any more than hammers did. Cranes were just a new tool to use in an existing job, Hence Crane Operators.
Now let’s turn your stupid example into a good example. Let’s say autonomous A.I. controlled cranes become a thing, and 100 crane operators lose their jobs. Now (in your brain) a new job has been created “monitoring” the A.I output (whatever you seem to think that means) but because of the efficiency of A.I. it only takes a team of three to monitor all 100 cranes.
What are the other 97 going to do…in your “simple example”?
Maybe put more than two seconds of thought into an analogy before opening your mouth.
Are those people stuck into doing crane work? It’s not really my fault if you can’t expand your horizons
Cringe2794
Edit: Just joking.
There are a lot of jobs. Some, specially creative ones, are imo totally out of danger. But what will happen with the repetitive ones? A friend of mine is a german-spanish translator, and most of her job relies on translating pharmaceutical datasheets. It’s a niche easily replaceable by a well trained LM. I don’t know the numbers, but suppose that 100 of such translators are needed. I can see the AI drastically reducing that number and changing her job from “translating” to “monitoring the AI’s output”.
What you’re saying is just silly. “keep learning” there’s a point or ceiling where people can’t rise any higher or have hit their limit. AI doesn’t have this. You can download hundreds or thousands of pages of content, millions of files, and make it 2.5x smarter than you. They trained AI to take the bar exam and pass it. That has happened. I can’t just keep infinitely learning forever and advancing my career. There’s a point where you hit a ceiling and can’t go any higher.
And so, just give up? Well, you give up if you want. I’m gonna keep learning.
Id like to think that AI will also be used to SOLVE some of our biggest problems.
(NOW YES IT WOULD BE A PRIVACY NIGHTMARE) But I’ve posited before that instead of traffic lights being on timers and speed limits being fixed if every car had a gps navigation system and a QI code on the roof, with recognition cameras on light poles and intersections and an AI that was free to adjust the speed limits, lights and send route suggestions to the gps units in order to promote optimal flow that we could all save time, fuel (or battery) and therefore emisions.
Cheating will collapse this plan - there will be a code for ambulances to bypass traffic, followed by a grey market in copying these codes and not getting caught.
When it becomes really advanced (we could even do it now, actually), we replace all upper management jobs and leaving human work to human workers, e.g. customer service, healthcare, arts and culture etc.
