I'm not 100% sure of this. As a software engineer and AI researcher I actually feel that AI is more likely to replace my job before it replaces some dude hauling boxes in a truck across Colorado during a blizzard and then figuring out how to unload them into the back of a poorly-organized grocery store, or some restaurant chef working with open flames in the back of a restaurant while figuring out how to make something vegan and dealing with someone else's peanut allergy.

Robotics+AI will happen eventually, but high-paid computer-based jobs are IMO the easiest targets to replace. Human labor involves dealing with a lot of corner cases safely and it's going to take a while.

This is the kind of scenario I was talking about in my initial comment. The naive assumption about this scenario is that it would result in 95% of jobs disappearing, but based on history it's more likely that we just do 2000% more stuff with the same amount of human effort.

And if AI really replaces 100% of human labor, are we really going to retain an economic system that only works when humans are doing labor?

You’re right. And my point is that substitution due to AI will accelerate. That’s where the informational surprise of my original comment lies.

You have a fatal misapprehension about how automation transforms a labor market. Higher productivity of certain kinds of work due to automation pushes labor supply elsewhere, making the “elsewhere” in turn both more competitive/demeaning (think Amazon warehouse workers peeing in bottles at the lower end of the market and Stripe engineers burning out at the upper end) and less remunerative.

The terminal point of this trend is complete human obsolescence, but the displacement along the way is additive, will likely accelerate in the coming decades due to advances in AI, and is especially problematic because there are limits to the elasticity of the labor pool (i.e. its ability to adapt to rapidly changing conditions).

I would furthermore predict that governments will be too slow to respond to this and that social upheaval will consequently escalate dramatically.

Come back to this comment in ten years and see how I did.

Is there actual evidence of this? As in, actual statistics rather than grandiose claims of AI destroying the human race?

Yes, you might get replaced by a piece of software and you may need to retrain to a different industry, but this has always been true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction

> The number of jobs was highly correlated to the size of population so far, but we already see the rise of bullshit jobs

This doesn't make any sense. At some point, someone is handing over money and expects a specific amount of work be done, which he finds to be a good exchange. It's far easier not to hire someone, than to hire them. So if you don't need work done ... you don't hire anyone.

Why would someone pay someone else money to perform "bullshit"? You only have instances of this when it is mandated by regulation, not in a free market.

I’m a robotics engineer. There are two options. AI can either replace all jobs or it can’t.

If it can then we are all out of a job, and then the next project is how to organise society such that everyone can live a good and fulfilling life in harmony.

If it can’t, for whatever reason, then that is the next thing I will be personally working on. Simple as that.

Because of this I don’t see how would it be possible to run out of programing jobs before running out of all the other jobs first.

You are talking about ChatGPT, and LLMs, but what i am saying transcends particular technologies.

> Well, this one could really be problematic for everyone. We're talking about social unrest and revolts on a global scale.

Not necessarily.

Firstly it's not even clear that AI will eliminate jobs without creating new ones. It's not clear that any development in AI will be any different than the transition to mechanization in the 19th and early 20th century.

Secondly, it's not clear that even if AI were to successfully automate away labor that we would have a problem. For one, we have a demographic cliff rapidly approaching whereby a lot of countries population is falling, and even where it's not, the population is rapidly aging. There's already protests in France about raising retirement age. What if AI lets us have our cake and retire earlier too?

At any rate, if AI is busy automating away labor, then the world is getting more efficient. And that means there are more resources to support people. All those debates are worth having, but you gotta cross that bridge when you get there, if you get there.

I think that's the general mental mismatch that people have when thinking there's a 1:1 match between the present human job and the future 'robot job'.

Cashiers is the most common job in America and the biggest job loss to automation in the coming years. But it's not some Boston Dynamics humanoid fumbling your quarters around. Nor does it have anything to do with general-intelligence AI. It's simply the task specific orange forklift bots in Amazon warehouses that's wiping out American retail because with that bot, stuff on Amazon is a bit cheaper than in malls.

> But even if so: as someone who implements something you might call automation, like most here, I have to ask: why is it exactly that I should owe a massive amount of my economic output to those who aren't outputting anything? At what point do I simply say "fuck it" and stop working too, because some ridiculous percentage of my income has to be applied towards feeding those who won't/can't/don't do anything productive?

I think that's the core question. Why are you giving away your hard earned money to feeding your child? There is no GDP output from the child.

I'm perpetually puzzled by that argument. It popped up the other day in a FT article about how jobs would be impacted, and in the grander scheme of things it's the general one whenever automation optimizes something that used to be done manually before. People equate jobs being removed to something necessarily bad, and I think it's wrong. The total output didn't change, we don't need meatbags to sit in a chair rather than having it done by silicium instead. People don't need to be occupied all day by a job.

The problem is not with new technology lifting up something that was traditionally done by a human, but with how the system distributes sustenance (or in this case, doesn't distribute it), and how such transitions are supported by society. Tractors replaced people working in fields, and that allowed modern society. Now we're at the first tangible glimpse of actually having robots serve us, and we want to kill that since it's incompatible with our system of modern human exploitation, rather than changing the system itself, because god forbid this is gonna benefit everyone.

I think that sucks.

I think that's mistaken on many fronts. First, new jobs that get invented aren't bullshit. Just as the internet destroyed DVD manufacturing jobs, it created smartphone app jobs, which weren't make-work. Second, the day will never come when machines are doing all of the strictly necessary labor; this is an affectation of the group-think that happens on this site. The firmly established pattern in humanity is that if you automate all of the existing work, humans will start wanting new things, which creates more work. It just....never....stops.

So while I know there are techno-enthusiasts who think AI is so imminent that it can take over even high value knowledge work in the near term, and while I know that "elimination of the middle class through robotics" is a fashionable viewpoint right now, let me just say that I have been reading articles about how strong AI was just around the corner, just a few years off...for the last 20 years. I feel exactly the same way about driverless cars. Every time I pointed that pattern out, someone was always quick to say "this time is different" without really having much evidence why it was. So I guess I'll wait for my thread reply that this time, no, it's really different, AI is going to eat all of the jobs.

I'm enthusiastic about all tech development, but prognostications about the future are pretty much always wrong. Isn't that intuitive? Does anybody really believe they can predict the future?

It's like Star Trek and the 1960s view of what today would be like. Everybody expected matter transporters and flying cars. They didn't get either. But they did get the tricorder.

Devastating to an industry in its current form. Taking medicine as an example, I just don't see any reason to expect that, if you automated away 50%+ of the current job, you'd require less, highly trained, medical staff.

Sure they'd be doing quite different jobs, for the most part. Sure some of the current crop won't want those new jobs. But everything I've seen wrt automation encroaching on highly skilled employment would suggest that there's little to no reduction in employment. Quite the opposite.

I tend to look at it a different way. What is the likely limit on the need for medical expertise ad how far away are we from that limit? I would suggest that we're currently a very long way from capacity for medical expertise and you could automate away a significant portion of the current roles without substantially affecting numbers.

I could, of course, be wrong. And, of course, one can extrapolate to a point where AI has perfect knowledge of all human anatomy, natural and enhanced, as well as having innovation and design skills well in advance of humanity. But we're an awful long way away from that.

I don’t have a well considered opinion about AI’s impact on jobs, but AI isn’t exactly like the industrial revolution, automated farming, or other historical upheavals. So I don’t think you can reliably conclude that it will turn out just like them.

I'm tired of hearing this argument again and again. It amounts to saying this...

> I did a thought experiment and in that experiment is was theoretically possible to replace humans with AI in any job. Therefore we're all fired!

This is not far from saying in a Universe containing 100 billion galaxies there are probably aliens out there willing to work for less than the minimum wage, just dying to make us all redundant! It's also theoretically possible.

But just because something is theoretically possible, doesn't mean it will actually happen. Most jobs won't get replaced with AI because humans will remain the better economic option.

The automotive industry is an exception for economic not technology reasons. There are a small number of car makers making enormous revenue selling cars that are vastly under utilised. Grabbing a share of the revenue by disrupting that industry with self-driving cars makes economic sense; the massive investment required to develop (and maintain!) self driving cars.

Thank you for agreeing with me, but I'm sorry I did not make an argument against "AI will replace everything".

When 990 of the 1000 previously fully employed workers are now all of a sudden put out of work, yes "AI/automation does replace pretty much everything". It creates a massive disruption in society.

Again, in the video I linked, during the whole of 20th century tens of millions of people in the US were put out of work, and only one new kind of job was created (computer programmers) that resulted in more than a million new jobs. Even then it's 30th in rank (in terms of total jobs), after 29 types of jobs that were there even in the 19th century.

I don't understand how you can see a comment that links to CGPGrey's 'Humans Need Not Apply' and conclude that the commenter is making a point against 'AI will replace everything'

Why? It's quite inevitable that it will, unlike all previous eras, there won't be new jobs for humans because it's human thinking that's going to be automated. Robots destroy jobs, that's a fact; sometimes, that creates new jobs, but it's usually always far less jobs for far more skilled humans and that pattern is and must come to an end. Jobs that require smarter humans don't work for the vast majority of barely capable humans that exist.

Mass unemployment is coming, the masses aren't capable of knowledge jobs and labor jobs are being taken over by machines, what other possible outcome do you see?

What does "making some one 5x more efficient" actually mean anyway? Does it makes people enjoy their lives more, or it just makes few people work harder while leaving the others hanging without income?

Let me bring up another point just popped up in my head: AI don't really need to be the perfect replacement to a human worker for them to replace the human worker, instead, it just need to be good enough to make economical sense for the employer to switch labor strategy.

We the market has already been trained to accept reduced product quality during the past decades as companies adjusting their production strategies. It is only reasonable to assume that we will accepting it further.

So even if AI technology cannot maintain the same level of quality standard we often suffer today, it is still well within the realm of possibility that companies will just replace their workers with AI and then expect the market to lower it's expectations more.

> The stakes here are high. The opportunities are profound.

I guess time will tell...

While I at it, another thing:

> AI will not destroy the world, and in fact may save it.

Well, you can save the world many many times over, and then you can still save it once more and even more. But the world can't really take too many destruction. One or two extinction level events might just done it for good.

Also, AI don't even need to be sentient or have the ability to reason it's way towards world destruction. In fact, it might not even know what the f it's doing, all it needs is the capability to do so and some calculations to line things up.

I'm not really very optimistic about it, obviously.

If the AI "takes over", as in it's a fully sentient agent, then claiming humans will be unemployed isn't technological unemployment but rather is the lump of labor fallacy. That's because the AIs are just more people. They're going to be customers (they need products to survive and probably want things on top of that), will have jobs (they need to pay their power and AWS bills or they'll get turned off), will negotiate pay raises that may make you cheaper, and you can sell things to them.

If they're not sentient/agentic enough to be consumerist or want to be paid, then they're capital equipment aka automation, which doesn't substitute for labor and in practice increases employment by making labor more productive.

All nice and theoretical.

> Therefore cars are more deadly then nuclear bombs.

I agree the #3 cause of death in America is more deadly than something that is so safe it has never accidentally killed anyone. (Except for the demon core guy and the people who got cancer from detonation tests.)

Remember, the real world actually exists, and logic problems don't, which means logic problems are free to be incorrect because nothing is requiring them to exist in possible worlds.

Yes it is. If you have tasks that cannot be automated, people's labour will have value. It would require AI that is as good as any human, and that is cheaper of course, to eliminate all jobs. And even then rich people may prefer human labour for nostalgic or signalling reasons. Eliminating all jobs is a tall order.

Not exactly. Old school automations are pretty limited. You can’t automate everything so there will always be work for humans.

Automation is what allows our quality of life today so I wouldn’t knock it.

AI though could potentially eliminate all jobs. How the heck is society going to function after that I have no idea.

In its current state it has the potential to eliminate “low end” beginner jobs. That’s problematic because if you don’t have juniors professionals today … you won’t have seniors in the future. Now you could argue that AI would develop to takeover senior jobs too but that’s not a sure thing. It would be really bad if you bet the farm on AI continuing to progress at a certain pace and it didn’t happen - we could even get another AI Winter as all the low hanging fruit from the advancement of tech the last few decades are picked clean.

This is more problematic than it seems, though. What if there isn't enough work in other industries to absorb the people? If AI works out as proponents want, this seems likely because lots of jobs, across a wide swath of industries, will be eliminated.

There's also the issue that not everyone is suited for every kind of job.