Comment by spaceman_2020
2 years ago
I'm legitimately starting to wonder what white collar workers will even do in 5-10 years.
This just Year 1 of this stuff going mainstream. Careers are 25-30 years long. What will someone entering the workforce today even be doing in 2035?
Even if we get Gemini 2.0 or GPT-6 that is even better at the stuff it's good at now... you've always been able to outsource 'tasks' for cheap. There is no shortage of people that can write somewhat generic text, write chunks of self contained code, etc.
This might lower the barrier of entry but it's basically a cheaper outsourcing model. And many companies will outsource more to AI. But there's probably a reason that most large companies are not just managers and architects who farm out their work to the cheapest foreign markets.
Similar to how many tech jobs have gone from C -> C++ -> Java -> Python/Go, where the average developer is supposd to accomplish a lot more than perviously, I think you'll see the same for white collar workers.
Software engieneering didn't die because you needed so much less work to do a network stack, the expectations changed.
This is just non technical white collar worker's first level up from C -> Java.
Never underestimate management's thirst for elimiating pesky problems that come with dealing with human bodies - vacations, pregnancies, office rivalries, time zones, and heck, unionization.
I suspect the real driver of the shift to AI will be this and not lower cost/efficiency.
> management's thirst for elimiating pesky problems that come with dealing with human bodies
But that's what 95% management is for. If you don't have humans, you don't need majority of managers.
And I know of plenty of asshole managers, who enjoy their job because they get to boss people around.
And another thing people are forgetting. That end users AKA consumers will be able to use similar tech as well. So for something they used to hire a company for, they will just use AI, so you don't even need CEO's and financial managers in the end :)
Because , if software CEO can push a button to create an app that he wants to sell, so can his end-users.
My strong belief is that if someone wanted to halt AI development, they should attempt to train AI replacements for managers and politicians, and publicize it.
[Guy who draws blue ducks for a living]: DAMNIT!
He can always sell that as an NFT!
"Next piece we have for sale: the OG Blue Duck, from before the AI Summer age. Made by a true master of the genre. Do I hear a $100?"
Giving it away would be nicer.
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>What will someone entering the workforce today even be doing in 2035?
The same thing they're doing now, just with tools that enable them to do some more of it. We've been having these discussions a dozen times, including pre- and post computerization and every time it ends up the same way. We went from entire teams writing Pokemon in Z80 assembly to someone cranking out games in Unity while barely knowing to code, and yet game devs still exist.
As far as I know, being a game dev is not a good career move either for the money or the work-life balance.
Yeah but the point is what amount of work a game dev is able to do. The current level of games were just impossible back then or it would require a huge number of teams just to do something quite trivial today.
It never was.
Yeah it has been quite the problem to think about ever since the original release of ChatGPT, as it was already obvious where this will be going and multimodal models more or less confirmed it.
There's two ways this goes: UBI or gradual population reduction through unemployment and homelessness. There's no way the average human will be able to produce any productive value outside manual labor in 20 years. Maybe not even that, looking at robots like Digit that can already do warehouse work for $25/hour.
More than efficiency and costs, I think the real driver of AI adoption in big corp will be the reduction of all the baggage human beings bring. AI will never ask for sick days, will never walk in with a hangover, never be unproductive because their 3 month old baby kept them up all night...
An AI coder will always be around, always be a "team player", always be chipper and friendly. That's management's wet dream.
I don't think humans will stay competitive long enough for that to even matter, frankly. It's a no brainer to go for the far cheaper, smarter, and most importantly a few magnitudes faster worker. On the offshoot that we hit some sort of inteligence ceiling and don't get ASI tier models in the next few years then that will definitely do it though.
Companies start going from paying lots of local workers to paying a few select corporations what's essentially a SAAS fee (some are already buying ChatGPT Plus for all employees and reducing headcount) which accumulates all the wealth that would've gone to the workers into the hands of those renting GPU servers. The middle class was in decline already, but this will surely eradicate it.
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> UBI or gradual population reduction through unemployment and homelessness
I actually think that if we get to a superintelligent AGI and ask it to solve our problems (e.g., global warming, etc.), the AGI will say, "You need to slow down baby production."
Under good circumstances, the world will see a "soft landing" where we solve our problems by population reduction, and it's achieved through attrition and much lower birth rate.
We have met the enemy and he is us.
What if you can have one biological child. One day, you will die, so it's -1 +1. Equals out. If you want more, what about adoption? There's kids out there that need a home. Seems fair to me.
Unfortunately we've made the critical mistake of setting up our entire economic system to require constant growth or the house of cards it's built upon immediately starts falling apart. It sure doesn't help that when this all becomes an active problem, climate change will also be hitting us in full force.
Now maybe we can actually maintain growth with less people through automation, like we've done successfully for farming, mining, industrial production, and the like, but there was always something new for the bulk of the population to move and be productive in. Now there just won't be anything to move to aside from popularity based jobs of which there are only so many.
Yes, imagine being a HS student now, deciding what to do 5-6-7 years from now.
The options are: - be pretty - have fine motor skills - have wealthy parents
I thought those were already the best choices?
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Pretty is nice, but not everyone wants to whore themselves on the internet.
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have pitchforks and torches to revolt
The only safe bet now is menial, manual work, as it's too expensive to automate in non-assembly-line cases.
Work will just move to a higher level of abstraction.
I'm wondering the same, but for the narrower white collar subset of tech workers, what will today's UX/UI designer or API developer be doing in 5-10 years.
Once the context window becomes large enough to swallow up the codebase of a small-mid sized company, what do all those IT workers that perform below the 50th percentile in coding tests even do?
HN has a blind spot about this because a lot of people here are in the top %ile of programmers. But the bottom 50th percentile are already being outperformed by GPT-4. Org structures and even GPT-4 availability hasn't caught up, but I can't see any situation where these workers aren't replaced en masse by AI, especially if the AI is 10% of the cost and doesn't come with the "baggage" of dealing with humans.
I don't think our society is prepared.
> Once the context window becomes large enough to swallow up the codebase of a small-mid sized company, what do all those IT workers that perform below the 50th percentile in coding tests even do?
There's a whole lot of work in tech (even specifically work "done by software developers") that isn't "banging out code to already completed specs".
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If you make it cheaper then people will do more of it.
Look at how much more graphic design is starting to happen now that you can create an image in a few minutes.
So it means we’ll get more development projects because they’ll be cheaper.
And yes I do realize at some point we’ll still have a mass of unemployed skilled white collar workers like devs.
What specific test do I take to know my percentile?
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UX/UI designers will use AI as part of their jobs. They'll be able to work at a higher level and focus less on boilerplate. That might mean fewer UX/UI jobs, but more likely the standard for app UX will go up. Companies are always going to want to differentiate their apps.
It's like how, in 2003, if your restaurant had a website with a phone number posted on it, you were ahead of the curve. Today, if your restaurant doesn't have a website with online ordering, you're going to miss out on potential customers.
API developers will largely find something else to do. I've never seen a job posting for an API developer. My intuition is that even today, the number of people who work specifically as an API developer for their whole career is pretty close to zero.
Today, your restaurant's custom website largely doesn't matter, as ordering is done on delivery apps, and people visiting in person look at things like Google Maps reviews. Only reservations are not quite as consolidated yet.
Similarly, in the future, there may be no more "apps" in the way we understand them today, or they may become completely irrelevant if everything can be handled by one general-purpose assistant.
What did photographers start doing when Photoshop was released? They started using Photoshop.
Except this is the first time we have a new "generalist" technology. When Photoshop was released, it didn't reduce employment opportunities for writers, coders, 3D designers, etc.
We're in truly unprecedented territory and don't really have an historical analogue to learn from.
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The analogy doesn’t hold and this comment won’t age well.
Photoshop doesn’t take photographs, so of course it hasn’t displaced photographers. It replaced the “shop” but the “photo” was up to the artist.
The irony is, Photoshop can generate photos now, and when it gets better, it actually will displace photographers.
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Exactly. When the train really gets rolling, us humans shouldn't eschew the value of being able to interact with the intelligences. For such quaint problems we'll have, it probably costs close to 0 effort to answer a question or two.
I'm picturing something like as an intreraction I'd like to have:
"Hey, do you mind listening to this song I made? I want to play it live, but am curious if there's any spots with frequencies that will be downright dangerous when played live at 100-110dB. I'm also curious if there's any spots that traditionally have been HATED by audiences, that I'm not aware of."
"Yeah, the song's pretty good! You do a weird thing in the middle with an A7 chord. It might not go over the best, but it's your call. The waves at 21k Hz need to go though. Those WILL damage someones ears."
"Ok, thanks a lot. By the way, if you need anything from me; just ask."
Whatever you want, probably. Or put a different way: "what's a workforce?"
"We need to do a big calculation, so your HBO/Netflix might not work correctly for a little bit. These shouldn't be too frequent; but bear with us."
Go ride a bike, write some poetry, do something tactile with feeling. They're doing something, but after a certain threshold, us humans are going to have to take them at their word.
The graph of computational gain is going to go linear, quadratic, ^4, ^8, ^16... all the way until we get to it being a vertical line. A step function. It's not a bad thing, but it's going to require a perspective shift, I think.
Edit: I also think we should drop the "A" from "AI" ...just... "Intelligence."
Yeah, this feels like the revenge of the blue collar workers. Maybe the changes won't be too dramatic, but the intelligence premium will definitely go down.
Ironically, this is created by some of the most intelligent people.
We're just gonna have UBI
Totally. I think UBI will be the "energy meter" of the future. Like in a video game. You get xxx dollars or whatever. Buy whatever you need, but the cap is to make sure you don't act foolish. Your UBI tank gets replenished every month, but if you blow it all on a new bicycle and kitchen upgrade for your house, you can't continue on to buy a bathroom renovation or whatever. You have to wait.
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