7 ms·

>What will be a viable career in 20 years? Will the concept of a “career” even make sense by then? I think AIs have made some amazing incremental process, but

>What will be a viable career in 20 years? Will the concept of a “career” even make sense by then? I think AIs have made some amazing incremental process, but I feel like the fears of being made obsolete are still premature. If you needed to pick though, learning the thing that's replacing you is a good start, so pick AI research or development. For that to be non-viable as a job or career, AIs would need to have the ability to build and improve themselves, and at that point, it's game over, man™. None of these AI things are going to replace politicians, governments, or economies, and so you still have a vast amount of soft skill careers available as well.

chrisco255 4y ago
Really I would think that politician would be one of the easiest roles to automate. It's a very simple algorithm that votes yes based on whoever gives it the most money.
- vsareto 4y ago
  Getting them to hand over their jobs is the hard part :)
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
Those jobs aren't being replaced by AI because the people in charge don't want them to be replaced. It's not the AI they should be worried about, but society shifting the paradigm and rendering half of all bureaucracy across the globe obsolete. Endless bikeshedding is deemed very important amongst its practitioners, and is pretty lucrative to boot. Even when we never measured the benefits.
api 4y ago
Every AI I have tested requires the user to become clever and proficient at getting it to generate good results. Programming with AI is going to just elevate the level of the programmer cognitively just like compilers and high level languages did. It will be an even higher level of abstraction at which developers can operate. These things are powerful tools but just tools. Same with the “art generators.” So far I see nothing capable of autonomous reasoning at a level that would actually replace the tool wielding operator. Someone still has to hold the hammer.
ben_w 4y ago
While I would agree that the fears are in many cases premature, 20 years is a long time in tech while being short enough to matter for careers. By 2042 we’re likely to have single-atom transistors in consumer devices, while people mid-career now are likely to be retiring or getting radical life extension to confuse all this even further, and newborns today will be just about to graduate from universities. Will we have AI as general-purpose and flexible as a human, even if only limited to an IQ of 85? Dunno, but even limited to that IQ an AGI would render about 15% of the population permanently unemployable, which would be enough to cause all sorts of social and political problems by itself. But I think the limit on AGI right now isn’t compute resources, it’s that we don’t know the right algorithms to make the AI we have as data-efficient as humans (or even, AFAICT, dogs, cats, or mice).
- bumby 4y ago
  >Will we have AI as general-purpose and flexible as a human, even if only limited to an IQ of 85? While I agree to a certain extent on this premise, there will still be some areas that AI won’t replace because humans also have an emotional value component. Consider if you’d rather have a massage from a robut or person. Or, if you are infirm and would prefer a caretaker who is human or machine. It’s not just a matter of processing data when humans are emotional creatures. If anything, AGI may free up humans to focus on human relational jobs which we’re much more evolved to be good at and value.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    > Consider if you’d rather have a massage from a robut or person. Or, if you are infirm and would prefer a caretaker who is human or machine. Sure, I’m also implicitly assuming robotics will improve. At some point — don’t know when — we can’t tell the difference any more, and at that point, the humans indistinguishable from machines are likely to be made redundant by the machines.
    - bumby 4y ago
      I’m saying there’s something innately different emotionally about interacting with a human. So if you know it’s a machine, it will inherently change the subjective interaction. If you’re saying that it wont matter because we will get to a point where humans and machines are indistinguishable, that’s implying robots will be emotional and no longer just processing data in the way we currently think of AGI. Essentially it means they will be conscious with subjective experience of their own or just philosophical zombies. Both are essentially fictitious thought experiments at this point.
grantcas 4y ago
[dead]

chrisco255 4y ago

Really I would think that politician would be one of the easiest roles to automate. It's a very simple algorithm that votes yes based on whoever gives it the most money.

vsareto 4y ago
Getting them to hand over their jobs is the hard part :)

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

Those jobs aren't being replaced by AI because the people in charge don't want them to be replaced. It's not the AI they should be worried about, but society shifting the paradigm and rendering half of all bureaucracy across the globe obsolete. Endless bikeshedding is deemed very important amongst its practitioners, and is pretty lucrative to boot. Even when we never measured the benefits.

api 4y ago

Every AI I have tested requires the user to become clever and proficient at getting it to generate good results. Programming with AI is going to just elevate the level of the programmer cognitively just like compilers and high level languages did. It will be an even higher level of abstraction at which developers can operate. These things are powerful tools but just tools. Same with the “art generators.” So far I see nothing capable of autonomous reasoning at a level that would actually replace the tool wielding operator. Someone still has to hold the hammer.

ben_w 4y ago

While I would agree that the fears are in many cases premature, 20 years is a long time in tech while being short enough to matter for careers. By 2042 we’re likely to have single-atom transistors in consumer devices, while people mid-career now are likely to be retiring or getting radical life extension to confuse all this even further, and newborns today will be just about to graduate from universities. Will we have AI as general-purpose and flexible as a human, even if only limited to an IQ of 85? Dunno, but even limited to that IQ an AGI would render about 15% of the population permanently unemployable, which would be enough to cause all sorts of social and political problems by itself. But I think the limit on AGI right now isn’t compute resources, it’s that we don’t know the right algorithms to make the AI we have as data-efficient as humans (or even, AFAICT, dogs, cats, or mice).

bumby 4y ago
>Will we have AI as general-purpose and flexible as a human, even if only limited to an IQ of 85? While I agree to a certain extent on this premise, there will still be some areas that AI won’t replace because humans also have an emotional value component. Consider if you’d rather have a massage from a robut or person. Or, if you are infirm and would prefer a caretaker who is human or machine. It’s not just a matter of processing data when humans are emotional creatures. If anything, AGI may free up humans to focus on human relational jobs which we’re much more evolved to be good at and value.
- ben_w 4y ago
  > Consider if you’d rather have a massage from a robut or person. Or, if you are infirm and would prefer a caretaker who is human or machine. Sure, I’m also implicitly assuming robotics will improve. At some point — don’t know when — we can’t tell the difference any more, and at that point, the humans indistinguishable from machines are likely to be made redundant by the machines.
  - bumby 4y ago
    I’m saying there’s something innately different emotionally about interacting with a human. So if you know it’s a machine, it will inherently change the subjective interaction. If you’re saying that it wont matter because we will get to a point where humans and machines are indistinguishable, that’s implying robots will be emotional and no longer just processing data in the way we currently think of AGI. Essentially it means they will be conscious with subjective experience of their own or just philosophical zombies. Both are essentially fictitious thought experiments at this point.

grantcas 4y ago

[dead]