It has well replaced journalists, artists and on its way to replace nearly both junior and senior engineers. The ultimate intention of "AGI" is that it is going to replace tens of millions of jobs. That is it and you know it.
It will only accelerate and we need to stop pretending and coping. Instead lets discuss solutions for those lost jobs.
So what is the replacement for these lost jobs? (It is not UBI or "better jobs" without defining them.)
Did it, really? Or did it just provide automation for routine no-thinking-necessary text-writing tasks, but is still ultimately completely bound by the level of human operator's intelligence? I strongly suspect it's the latter. If it had actually replaced journalists it must be junk outlets, where readers' intelligence is negligible and anything goes.
Just yesterday I've used o1 and Claude 3.5 to debug a Linux kernel issue (ultimately, a bad DSDT table causing TPM2 driver unable to reserve memory region for command response buffer, the solution was to use memmap to remove NVS flag from the relevant regions) and confirmed once again LLMs still don't reason at all - just spew out plausible-looking chains of words. The models were good listeners, and a mostly-helpful code generators (when they didn't make silliest mistakes), but they gave no traces of understanding and no attention for any nuances (e.g. LLM used `IS_ERR` to check `__request_resource` result, despite me giving it full source code for that function and there's even a comment that makes it obvious it returns a pointer or NULL, not an error code - misguided attention kind of mistake).
So, in my opinion, LLMs (as currently available to broad public, like myself) are useful for automating away some routine stuff, but their usefulness is bounded by the operator's knowledge and intelligence. And that means that the actual jobs (if they require thinking and not just writing words) are safe.
When asked about what I do at work, I used to joke that I just press buttons on my keyboard in fancy patterns. Ultimately, LLMs seem to suggest that it's not what I really do.
>Trades people only work after having something to do. If you don't have sufficient demand for builders, electricians, plumbers, etc... No one can afford to become one. Nevermind the fact that not everyone should be any of those things. Economics fails when the loop fails to close.
Many replaceable
> Police officers
Many replaceable (desk officers)
Ford didn’t support a 40 hour work week out of the kindness of his heart. He wanted his workers to have time off for buying things (like his cars).
I wonder if our AGI industrialist overlords will do something similar for revenue sharing or UBI.
I don't think so. I agree the push for AGI will kill the modern consumer product economy, but I think it's quite possible for the economy to evolve into a new form (that will probably be terrible for most humans) that keep pushes "work replacement."
Imagine, an AGI billionare buying up land, mines, and power plants as the consumer economy dies, then shifting those resources away from the consumer economy into self-aggrandizing pet projects (e.g. ziggurats, penthouses on Mars, space yachts, life extension, and stuff like that). He might still employ a small community of servants, AGI researchers, and other specialists; but all the rest of the population will be irrelevant to him.
And individual autarky probably isn't necessary, consumption will be redirected towards the massive pet production I mentioned, with vestigial markets for power, minerals, etc.
In reality, if there really is mass unemployment, AI driven automation will make consumables so cheap that anyone will be able to buy it.
This isn't possible if you want to pay sales taxes - those are what keep transactions being done in the official currency. Of course in a world of 99% unemployment presumably we don't care about this.
But yes, this world of 99% unemployment isn't possible, eg because as soon as you have two people and they trade things, they're employed again.
Ultimately, it all comes down to raw materials and similar resources, and all those will be claimed by people with lots of real money. Your "invented ... other money" will be useless to buy that fundamental stuff. At best, it will be useful for trading scrap and other junk among the unemployed.
> In reality, if there really is mass unemployment, AI driven automation will make consumables so cheap that anyone will be able to buy it.
No. Why would the people who own that automation want to waste their resources producing consumer goods for people with nothing to give them in return?
Uh, this picture doesn’t make sense. Why would anyone value this randomly invented money?