Like every previous invention that improves productivity (cf. copiers, steam power, the wheel), this wave of AI is making certain forms of labor redundant, creating or further enriching a class of industrialists, and enabling individuals to become even more productive.
This could create a golden age, or a dark age -- most likely, it will create both. The industrial revolution created Dickensian London, the Luddite rebellion & ensuing massacres, and Blake's "dark satanic mills," but it also gave me my wardrobe of cool $30 band T-shirts and my beloved Amtrak train service.
Now is the time to talk about how we predict incentive structures will cause this technology to be used, and what levers we have at our disposal to tilt it toward "golden age."
Capitalists have openly gloated in public about wanting to replace at least one profession. That was months or years ago. What are people doing in response? Discussing incentive structures?
SC coders paid hundreds of thousands a year are just letting this happen to them. “Nothing to be done about another 15K round of layoffs, onlookers say”
Also, these productivity gains arent used to reduce working time for the same number of people, but instead to reduce the number of people needed to do the same amount of work. Working people get to see the productivity benefits via worsening material conditions.
Coding may be a limited exception, but even then the AI's job is to be basically a dumb (if sometimes knowledgeable) code monkey. You still need to do all the architecture and detailed design work if you want something maintainable at the end of the day.
I mean, I know what you are getting at. I agree with you on the current state of the art. But advancements beyond this point threaten everyone's job. I don't see a moat for 95% of human labor.
There's no reason why you couldn't figure out an AI to assemble "the architecture and detailed design work". I mean I hope it's the case that the state of the art stays like this forever, I'm just not counting on it.
> There's no reason why you couldn't figure out an AI to assemble "the architecture and detailed design work".
I'd like to see that because it would mean that AI's have managed to stay at least somewhat coherent over longer work contexts.
The closest you get to this (AIUI) is with AI's trying to prove complex math theorems, where the proof checking system itself enforces the presence of effective large-scale structure. But that's an outside system keeping the AI on a very tight leash with immediate feedback, and not letting it go off-track.
Great, let them try. They'll find out that AI makes the human SC coder more productive not less. Everyone knows that AI has little to nothing to do with the layoffs, it's just a silly excuse to give their investors better optics. Nobody wants to admit that maybe they've overhired a bit after the whole COVID mess.
Even the most pointless bullshit job accomplishes a societal function by transferring wages from a likely wealthy large corporation to a individual worker who has bills to pay.
Eliminating bullshit jobs might be good from an economic efficiency perspective, but people still gotta eat.
Of course that comes with its own set of problems, e.g. that you will lose training, connections, the ability to exert influence through the job or any hope of building a career.