Comment by akramachamarei
6 days ago
I think, like other disruptive inventions of the past, there will be pain for many, but it will pass. Society will grow and adapt. There's some statistic somewhere I will paraphrase and/or botch that goes like: 90% of the jobs people have today didn't exist 50 years ago. I think no one can imagine what possible opportunities will manifest in the future. It's a lot easier to imagine everything that might go wrong because we evolved to see a sabertooth in the rustling leaves.
>90% of the jobs people have today didn't exist 50 years ago.
We also have 100% more people on the planet than we did 50 years ago.
> I think, like other disruptive inventions of the past, there will be pain for many, but it will pass
I agree. We can only hope that it'll be folks like Sam Altman who'll be feeling the pain, and not the 99%.
Why do you think so in the specific case of hypothetical improved LLMs that can do a large fraction of the kind of intellectual work humans are tasked with?
I think in such a state, there will no way up, not way to success, no way to real autonomy for ordinary people, maybe you'll even have actual oligarchal rule, since so few people do anything contributing to the economy with their labour.
Really, I don't know. But there is that underappreciated concept of "elastic demand" which I will gesture at even though I'm only casually acquainted with it. It's related to the vernacular fallacy of the economic Pie, as if it's a static thing that doesn't grow and shrink. I suspect, as the cost of producing things, including intellectual, knowledge-based products goes down, that we may just end up demanding more of these things, or better kinds.
I might look at the example of AI art. Artists were/are freaking out about it, worried that they'd lose business. I think they probably have, for some of the more utility cases for art like promotional material. However, a lot of the new consumers of AI art were not buying human art before. Some of the people making little personal projects, posting YouTube videos, making indie games, would never have paid artists to make assets for their things because it wouldn't be worth the money. I have personal experience with this on the consumer side.
Of course, when AI can do what you do for a job, it won't just be attracting currently unpaying, potential customers. Still, I'm not too confident our predictive skills as a society to say what will or won't happen. Like has happened before, many situations and opportunities will arise that will be utterly unanticipated.