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I'm no AI expert, I don't have a lot of domain knowledge but what irks me about reading through this entire blog post is the idea that we are hinging on a defin

I'm no AI expert, I don't have a lot of domain knowledge but what irks me about reading through this entire blog post is the idea that we are hinging on a definition of AGI that apparently accounts for 95% (!) of "economically valuable work" while basically not talking _at all_ about the trades. No mention of construction, manual labour, mechanics, welders, painters, nothing! Is the author trying to say that all that work falls into the 5% left over after you replace the stock brokers, programmers, artists, etc.? I understand no offence is meant, but this feels extremely naive. At best the work programmers do is in the minority of "economical valuable" work that we strongly rely on for our world economies to keep chugging along. Quick and dirty searches show that some 12% of employed people are in healthcare in the USA, 9% in leisure and hospitality, and 2% in education. 23% of people in the USA are employed in economically valuable work that is very personal, and very difficult for technology to fully replace. Sorry if I'm rambling, I think I just did not enjoy the complete lack of mention of blue-collar workers here. I don't think I'm yet in the camp betting on AGI coming out of the woodworks in the next few decades.

idopmstuff 3y ago
I totally agree with this - it always seems like sort of a weird omission when people talk about AGI doing 95% of work without any discussion of robotics. It seems very obvious that you need bipedal robots (or a lot of different types of robots) to hit that number. Do these AGI predictions assume that we'll have those by the time they hit AGI? Or is the word "knowledge" supposed to be implied before the work "work"? Either way, it's clearly inaccurate to say that AI on its own can do all productive work without physical embodiment.
- jsharf 3y ago
  If we have intelligent AI that can automate programming, then making really good robots will not be a problem. While not trivial, actuators and power systems are not the reason why we don’t have robots that can do all manual labor for us. Software is the reason, and the same kind of software that’s learning to code (machine learning) can also be adapted to washing dishes, folding clothing, doing craft labor or previously human manufacturing jobs. Accelerating programming and information jobs also means accelerating the creation of robots that can do these trade jobs
  - idopmstuff 3y ago
    Totally - but is the AI development of robots included in the timeline for what you're calling AGI? Can we get to AGI without having those robots, and then the AGI designs them? I think they'll ultimately go hand in hand - this is more just a question of what we're defining AGI to be and whether robotics should be mandatory as part of the stated definition around doing 95% of work.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      The AGI will have to run the robots, problem solving when things go wrong is what allows humans to run large organized endeavors without getting stuck, you need AGI to do that for generalized work. Before AGI robots will only be able to handle tasks with very simple error scenarios, and will still need humans to look after them for the rare cases where things go more wrong.
- spywaregorilla 3y ago
  One good robot arm that a below minimum wage gig worker carries around. edit: he can also turn the crank to keep it powered maybe
  - matt_heimer 3y ago
    Or the minimum wage gig worker is the robot. If we ever get neural interfaces working well maybe the AGI could control our motor functions. Maybe not full control, I don't think most people would be comfortable with that but think of shooting a gun. If the worker points the gun in the right general direction and the AGI add some fine tuning to turn them into an expert marksman...what army wouldn't turn all their conscripts into marksman? Basically the aim assist bots in video games but for real world. It could be used to let gig workers perform surgery, play in an orchestra, be actors in a movie.
    - spywaregorilla 3y ago
      robot arm is cheaper
- matt_heimer 3y ago
  I'm not sure that the physical embodiment needs to be robotic in nature. I'm a physically abled home owner and need to repair my hvac or plumbing. Instead of paying for someone in the trades to come out and do the work for me why can't I just put on a pair of augmented reality glasses and have the AGI use me? The camera and my voice inputs should allow the AGI to diagnose the issue, order needed parts, and then instruct me using visual overlays and audio prompts on completing the repair.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    Having just done a half-assed plastering job, I will answer that with "because a lot trades needs practiced skills, not just the knowledge". Sure, it'll be one more thing that eats into bits and pieces of what we need trained labour for, but it won't eliminate it.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    >why can't I just put on a pair of augmented reality glasses and have the AGI use me? [meme time] Oh god, oh fuck, we're going full Manna. [/meme time] https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 For those have have not read Manna, this is a huge portion of the premise of the story that AI helmets turn us into automatons that allow the AI to further automate our jobs until we are all unemployed and destitute.
    - matt_heimer 3y ago
      Thanks - I should have worded that better. I'd like an AGI that helped to augment my abilities, not control me. But its still an AGI replacing a trade person, having a master plumber standing over my shoulder was more of what I was thinking of. The AGI having the knowledge is a form of control I guess but it seems acceptable to me. I hadn't seen manna before, thanks for sharing. There are some good thoughts there. The bit about girls liking Manna because it doesn't hit on them was excellent. The dad character had some good points too. The examples do seem a bit over the top (likely to drive home the premise). But honestly the verbosity seemed excellent for a new hire scenario. As long as it dynamically scaled down the verbosity of the instructions to match what was needed by each individual user would it really be awful if the managers got replaced? It is a fine line, the tech being used to add to our knowledge vs making us dumb robots. If it could be kept to teaching, certain types of management, and gamified checklists it wouldn't be the downfall of the human race. However I could easily see it getting to the point where customers are talking to the AGI mounted on your head instead of you and that is scary.
anonzzzies 3y ago
I think the idea of most is that at the time we have AGI, we will robots designing robots that will ‘fix’ AI for the trades.
- oblio 3y ago
  Ah, yes, that second most famous AI operator after the tensor, the handwaver.
  - anonzzzies 3y ago
    Sure, but that’s what the ‘believers’ usually say.
ChatGTP 3y ago
The belief is that once the AGI is here, the possibilities are endless for disrupting absolutely every aspect of our life and society, the end of human history is what I've hear Open AI folks say. There will be zero work, humans will be completely useless economically and we'll just have to hope that some how, all of this wealth is fairly distributed and we don't lose our minds from feeling completely useless. What you can't imagine happening now, will be possible by deploying the AGI. Things we can't even dream of will be possible. It will be all chaotic and completely unpredictable over night. Eternal life ? No problems, pickup the phone and place your order. What's appealing about this? I don't know, but billions and upon billions are being poured into it and many "smart" people are striving for it.
- kiba 3y ago
  We don't know what will be at the end of this. It seems that the OpenAI folks are endlessly pursuing the technology of AGI without actually working on making sure that AGI benefit "all of humanity." They haven't even articulate what it means to benefit all of humanity.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    That's what's so insane about it all :)
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    OpenAI is a cult. I dont quite understand why they are given so much airtime other than wanting to depress tech wages and drive traffic. Their products dont work as advertised and are built on theft.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      Everyones products/lives are built on theft. I mean you paid for that alphabet right, and understanding those forces of physics?
      - gumballindie 3y ago
kiba 3y ago
I am more concerned about people abusing AI technology to generate spam, fake, and trick people, resulting in an almost entirely useless internet and polluted information space. Maybe it's for the best that we start meeting each other in meatspace.
osrec 3y ago
I agree that it doesn't account for blue collar workers, but it wouldn't surprise me if the balance, purely in terms of financials, was actually that unbalanced. I'm not saying it's correct or fair that a trader sat at his desk can contribute £20 million to a country's "output", while a builder, working his backside off could maybe add £100k, but that's the world we live in...
- pixl97 3y ago
  If you're a builder manager you can make more, but if you look at residential housing, the people at the bottom aren't making shit. Mostly it is a poorly regulated, non-unionized, highly dependent on under the table pay industry. But anyway about it, if there is suddenly an influx of manual/physical labor poured into the market, labor prices will drop far below the living cost and all hell will eventually break loose.
tomNth 3y ago
"reading through this entire blog post" ? Is "The Physically Embodied Bear" "95%+ will include taking physical, real-world actions." not a mention of "construction, manual labour, mechanics, welders, painters" and "blue-collar workers" ?
- vallode 3y ago
  The paragraph was my exact problem, hundreds of words but the entire world of AI interacting with the world physically is boiled down into an assumption that "by the time we get there, we'll get there". It just doesn't seem realistic? Especially with predictions/hunches like the ones found in the article. Others seem to mention it is a sort of feedback look, once we get to 50% AGI I guess that AI itself can help us overcome the physical limitations. I'm sceptical that it is as simple as that, but at the same time can see it as very much possible. How much do current AIs contribute to their own development? Likely quite a bit, but then again I don't know any AI researchers to ask.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    >How much do current AIs contribute to their own development? Really a pretty fair amount these days as AIs can contribute to their own training data. In addition they've got pretty good at measuring their own success. In the past for example, if you had a robot hammer hitting a nail, you'd have a person judging the quality of the strike, but now you can face a few cameras at it and self judge far better. Yea, you still need some people around, but the amount required has dropped a lot.
lovecg 3y ago
Yeah by that definition we already eliminated 95% of economically valuable work from 1700s. Very few people do farm work nowadays.
spywaregorilla 3y ago
The more technology can do, the less the workers do, the less workers get paid. Being a servant to people with money is better than being part of their furniture though.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  On the other hand , things should get cheaper and more accessible ?
  - spywaregorilla 3y ago
    Minimum wages are always going to be defined by scraping by. Definitionally that's just where they get pushed both in terms of wages and prices. But yes, removing skilled labor and replacing it with unskilled labor does mean more perks for the wealthy.
    - ChatGTP 3y ago
      I guess this assumes "AI" is a containable entity ? I mean, why can I not get my SuperSmart5000 robot to self improve and then use it's intelligence make my situation better? Personally, I think this is why open source AI efforts are so important. If we're going to get wiped out by AI, I hope it's an open source AI that does it.
      - spywaregorilla 3y ago
        because you have no particular resources to leverage
plipt 3y ago
I agree with you, however when talking about jobs that are relegated to the physical world like the trades, I dont think it safe to assume that robotics wont also benefit from the AI advancements. Thereby eventually encroaching on those jobs as well. The following is a recent video from the youtuber "Two Minute Papers" about some researchers (Clemens Schwarke, Victor Klemm et al.) who have created a highly mobile autonomous robot running software trained via simulated reinforcement learning models. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnpm-rJfFjQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnpm-rJfFjQ i think it demonstrates the potential for the kind of motile finesse that could be used by robots to complete trades-like tasks.
jandrese 3y ago
Isn't this what Tesla is trying to achieve with Optimus? They were just demonstrating fine grained control using "AI" training to perform human scale tasks. The big idea is that they are human size so they can be slotted in for any task that is currently performed by people without needing any special accommodations. I personally don't think they'll be economically viable in the foreseeable future, but they do represent a possible bridge to ubiquitous robot labor.
htrp 3y ago
> I'm no AI expert, I don't have a lot of domain knowledge but what irks me about reading through this entire blog post is the idea that we are hinging on a definition of AGI that apparently accounts for 95% (!) of "economically valuable work" while basically not talking _at all_ about the trades. No mention of construction, manual labour, mechanics, welders, painters, nothing! A good chunk of the value in the "trades" is in the experience and in the management. If I can make anyone a painter by giving them a headset [1] and having an "AGI" model tell them exactly how, where, what to paint, how much of the value is the model collecting and how much of it is left for the human being? [1] https://www.ptc.com/en/resources/augmented-reality/infographic/smart-glasses-and-ar-devices-to-pair-with-ptc-vuforia https://www.ptc.com/en/resources/augmented-reality/infograph...
gumballindie 3y ago
> No mention of construction, manual labour, mechanics, welders, painters, nothing! I have the strange feeling that it will be those jobs that will be automated further. There is no need for manual workers in construction - you can have bots build houses, and bots painting them inside. Mechanics are like to be phased out by EVs, there's not even a need to manually change wheels and tires. Everything they do can be automated, and will be automated.
mewpmewp2 3y ago
I imagine 5% could easily be work where you want an actual human being, not because they are better than AI, but because they are a human being, and that is what you are wired to want. I'm pretty sure 95% in that definition would include trade workers. 5% could be something like teachers, babysitters, because you want children to have that human to human connection. I think it could be thought of as "95%+", meaning even if computer is more intelligent, we'll still want humans because they are humans for some things, because we, ourselves are humans and that's what we want. Things like healthcare should be fully automated, except for a small percentage again. You have a health problem, you go in, you don't need that human connection unless you have a very specific need, some of the times.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
If you stuck an AGI inside a Boston Dynamics robot and trained it on a trade I suspect it could replace much of that trade. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ Not an easy problem, but the assumption is that AGI makes solving such problems tractable. Japan has been working on healthcare robots for decades. I think the key word is that the robots "could" replace 95% of economically valuable work, not that they will. Using an example from today: we can and have replaced fast food order takers with kiosks, but there are still a lot of people employed as fast food order takers because that's what customers prefer.
- joshspankit 3y ago
  Yes, but... There are unknown issues down that road. Given 1000 years AI could probably replace all work, but I think we’re all on the same page of “could AI replace 95% of work within a timespan that’s meaningful to people alive today?”, and in that term the realization of an AI-powered machine doing all manual labour (even an AGI one) still has a too many unknowns for a meaningful answer. We were “going to have flying cars in X” for a long time, but it turned out that building a flying car was not actually the problem that needed to be solved in order to make them viable.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    It is also not necessarily what people want. I do think social mobility from being able to work is something people want. I think AI researchers want to feel important and like they have purpose. As they start to realize that will all vanish once they invent AGI, it will be interesting to see how they proceed. I think human augmentation is far more attractive and will be a more popular field of endevour, if we workout how to get better at it.
randyrand 3y ago
He clarifies later that he is including physical labor (robots).
karmakaze 3y ago
I thought that it was assumed the blue collar work was believed to be attainable much sooner than AGI, so then only the intellectually complex work would remain for AGI to solve.

idopmstuff 3y ago

I totally agree with this - it always seems like sort of a weird omission when people talk about AGI doing 95% of work without any discussion of robotics. It seems very obvious that you need bipedal robots (or a lot of different types of robots) to hit that number. Do these AGI predictions assume that we'll have those by the time they hit AGI? Or is the word "knowledge" supposed to be implied before the work "work"? Either way, it's clearly inaccurate to say that AI on its own can do all productive work without physical embodiment.

jsharf 3y ago
If we have intelligent AI that can automate programming, then making really good robots will not be a problem. While not trivial, actuators and power systems are not the reason why we don’t have robots that can do all manual labor for us. Software is the reason, and the same kind of software that’s learning to code (machine learning) can also be adapted to washing dishes, folding clothing, doing craft labor or previously human manufacturing jobs. Accelerating programming and information jobs also means accelerating the creation of robots that can do these trade jobs
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  Totally - but is the AI development of robots included in the timeline for what you're calling AGI? Can we get to AGI without having those robots, and then the AGI designs them? I think they'll ultimately go hand in hand - this is more just a question of what we're defining AGI to be and whether robotics should be mandatory as part of the stated definition around doing 95% of work.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    The AGI will have to run the robots, problem solving when things go wrong is what allows humans to run large organized endeavors without getting stuck, you need AGI to do that for generalized work. Before AGI robots will only be able to handle tasks with very simple error scenarios, and will still need humans to look after them for the rare cases where things go more wrong.
spywaregorilla 3y ago
One good robot arm that a below minimum wage gig worker carries around. edit: he can also turn the crank to keep it powered maybe
- matt_heimer 3y ago
  Or the minimum wage gig worker is the robot. If we ever get neural interfaces working well maybe the AGI could control our motor functions. Maybe not full control, I don't think most people would be comfortable with that but think of shooting a gun. If the worker points the gun in the right general direction and the AGI add some fine tuning to turn them into an expert marksman...what army wouldn't turn all their conscripts into marksman? Basically the aim assist bots in video games but for real world. It could be used to let gig workers perform surgery, play in an orchestra, be actors in a movie.
  - spywaregorilla 3y ago
    robot arm is cheaper
matt_heimer 3y ago
I'm not sure that the physical embodiment needs to be robotic in nature. I'm a physically abled home owner and need to repair my hvac or plumbing. Instead of paying for someone in the trades to come out and do the work for me why can't I just put on a pair of augmented reality glasses and have the AGI use me? The camera and my voice inputs should allow the AGI to diagnose the issue, order needed parts, and then instruct me using visual overlays and audio prompts on completing the repair.
- vidarh 3y ago
  Having just done a half-assed plastering job, I will answer that with "because a lot trades needs practiced skills, not just the knowledge". Sure, it'll be one more thing that eats into bits and pieces of what we need trained labour for, but it won't eliminate it.
- pixl97 3y ago
  >why can't I just put on a pair of augmented reality glasses and have the AGI use me? [meme time] Oh god, oh fuck, we're going full Manna. [/meme time] https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 For those have have not read Manna, this is a huge portion of the premise of the story that AI helmets turn us into automatons that allow the AI to further automate our jobs until we are all unemployed and destitute.
  - matt_heimer 3y ago
    Thanks - I should have worded that better. I'd like an AGI that helped to augment my abilities, not control me. But its still an AGI replacing a trade person, having a master plumber standing over my shoulder was more of what I was thinking of. The AGI having the knowledge is a form of control I guess but it seems acceptable to me. I hadn't seen manna before, thanks for sharing. There are some good thoughts there. The bit about girls liking Manna because it doesn't hit on them was excellent. The dad character had some good points too. The examples do seem a bit over the top (likely to drive home the premise). But honestly the verbosity seemed excellent for a new hire scenario. As long as it dynamically scaled down the verbosity of the instructions to match what was needed by each individual user would it really be awful if the managers got replaced? It is a fine line, the tech being used to add to our knowledge vs making us dumb robots. If it could be kept to teaching, certain types of management, and gamified checklists it wouldn't be the downfall of the human race. However I could easily see it getting to the point where customers are talking to the AGI mounted on your head instead of you and that is scary.

anonzzzies 3y ago

I think the idea of most is that at the time we have AGI, we will robots designing robots that will ‘fix’ AI for the trades.

oblio 3y ago
Ah, yes, that second most famous AI operator after the tensor, the handwaver.
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  Sure, but that’s what the ‘believers’ usually say.

ChatGTP 3y ago

The belief is that once the AGI is here, the possibilities are endless for disrupting absolutely every aspect of our life and society, the end of human history is what I've hear Open AI folks say. There will be zero work, humans will be completely useless economically and we'll just have to hope that some how, all of this wealth is fairly distributed and we don't lose our minds from feeling completely useless. What you can't imagine happening now, will be possible by deploying the AGI. Things we can't even dream of will be possible. It will be all chaotic and completely unpredictable over night. Eternal life ? No problems, pickup the phone and place your order. What's appealing about this? I don't know, but billions and upon billions are being poured into it and many "smart" people are striving for it.

kiba 3y ago
We don't know what will be at the end of this. It seems that the OpenAI folks are endlessly pursuing the technology of AGI without actually working on making sure that AGI benefit "all of humanity." They haven't even articulate what it means to benefit all of humanity.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  That's what's so insane about it all :)
- gumballindie 3y ago
  OpenAI is a cult. I dont quite understand why they are given so much airtime other than wanting to depress tech wages and drive traffic. Their products dont work as advertised and are built on theft.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Everyones products/lives are built on theft. I mean you paid for that alphabet right, and understanding those forces of physics?
    - gumballindie 3y ago

kiba 3y ago

I am more concerned about people abusing AI technology to generate spam, fake, and trick people, resulting in an almost entirely useless internet and polluted information space. Maybe it's for the best that we start meeting each other in meatspace.

osrec 3y ago

I agree that it doesn't account for blue collar workers, but it wouldn't surprise me if the balance, purely in terms of financials, was actually that unbalanced. I'm not saying it's correct or fair that a trader sat at his desk can contribute £20 million to a country's "output", while a builder, working his backside off could maybe add £100k, but that's the world we live in...

pixl97 3y ago
If you're a builder manager you can make more, but if you look at residential housing, the people at the bottom aren't making shit. Mostly it is a poorly regulated, non-unionized, highly dependent on under the table pay industry. But anyway about it, if there is suddenly an influx of manual/physical labor poured into the market, labor prices will drop far below the living cost and all hell will eventually break loose.

tomNth 3y ago

"reading through this entire blog post" ? Is "The Physically Embodied Bear" "95%+ will include taking physical, real-world actions." not a mention of "construction, manual labour, mechanics, welders, painters" and "blue-collar workers" ?

vallode 3y ago
The paragraph was my exact problem, hundreds of words but the entire world of AI interacting with the world physically is boiled down into an assumption that "by the time we get there, we'll get there". It just doesn't seem realistic? Especially with predictions/hunches like the ones found in the article. Others seem to mention it is a sort of feedback look, once we get to 50% AGI I guess that AI itself can help us overcome the physical limitations. I'm sceptical that it is as simple as that, but at the same time can see it as very much possible. How much do current AIs contribute to their own development? Likely quite a bit, but then again I don't know any AI researchers to ask.
- pixl97 3y ago
  >How much do current AIs contribute to their own development? Really a pretty fair amount these days as AIs can contribute to their own training data. In addition they've got pretty good at measuring their own success. In the past for example, if you had a robot hammer hitting a nail, you'd have a person judging the quality of the strike, but now you can face a few cameras at it and self judge far better. Yea, you still need some people around, but the amount required has dropped a lot.

lovecg 3y ago

Yeah by that definition we already eliminated 95% of economically valuable work from 1700s. Very few people do farm work nowadays.

spywaregorilla 3y ago

The more technology can do, the less the workers do, the less workers get paid. Being a servant to people with money is better than being part of their furniture though.

ChatGTP 3y ago
On the other hand , things should get cheaper and more accessible ?
- spywaregorilla 3y ago
  Minimum wages are always going to be defined by scraping by. Definitionally that's just where they get pushed both in terms of wages and prices. But yes, removing skilled labor and replacing it with unskilled labor does mean more perks for the wealthy.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    I guess this assumes "AI" is a containable entity ? I mean, why can I not get my SuperSmart5000 robot to self improve and then use it's intelligence make my situation better? Personally, I think this is why open source AI efforts are so important. If we're going to get wiped out by AI, I hope it's an open source AI that does it.
    - spywaregorilla 3y ago
      because you have no particular resources to leverage

plipt 3y ago

I agree with you, however when talking about jobs that are relegated to the physical world like the trades, I dont think it safe to assume that robotics wont also benefit from the AI advancements. Thereby eventually encroaching on those jobs as well. The following is a recent video from the youtuber "Two Minute Papers" about some researchers (Clemens Schwarke, Victor Klemm et al.) who have created a highly mobile autonomous robot running software trained via simulated reinforcement learning models. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnpm-rJfFjQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnpm-rJfFjQ i think it demonstrates the potential for the kind of motile finesse that could be used by robots to complete trades-like tasks.

jandrese 3y ago

Isn't this what Tesla is trying to achieve with Optimus? They were just demonstrating fine grained control using "AI" training to perform human scale tasks. The big idea is that they are human size so they can be slotted in for any task that is currently performed by people without needing any special accommodations. I personally don't think they'll be economically viable in the foreseeable future, but they do represent a possible bridge to ubiquitous robot labor.

htrp 3y ago

> I'm no AI expert, I don't have a lot of domain knowledge but what irks me about reading through this entire blog post is the idea that we are hinging on a definition of AGI that apparently accounts for 95% (!) of "economically valuable work" while basically not talking _at all_ about the trades. No mention of construction, manual labour, mechanics, welders, painters, nothing! A good chunk of the value in the "trades" is in the experience and in the management. If I can make anyone a painter by giving them a headset [1] and having an "AGI" model tell them exactly how, where, what to paint, how much of the value is the model collecting and how much of it is left for the human being? [1] https://www.ptc.com/en/resources/augmented-reality/infographic/smart-glasses-and-ar-devices-to-pair-with-ptc-vuforia https://www.ptc.com/en/resources/augmented-reality/infograph...

gumballindie 3y ago

> No mention of construction, manual labour, mechanics, welders, painters, nothing! I have the strange feeling that it will be those jobs that will be automated further. There is no need for manual workers in construction - you can have bots build houses, and bots painting them inside. Mechanics are like to be phased out by EVs, there's not even a need to manually change wheels and tires. Everything they do can be automated, and will be automated.

mewpmewp2 3y ago

I imagine 5% could easily be work where you want an actual human being, not because they are better than AI, but because they are a human being, and that is what you are wired to want. I'm pretty sure 95% in that definition would include trade workers. 5% could be something like teachers, babysitters, because you want children to have that human to human connection. I think it could be thought of as "95%+", meaning even if computer is more intelligent, we'll still want humans because they are humans for some things, because we, ourselves are humans and that's what we want. Things like healthcare should be fully automated, except for a small percentage again. You have a health problem, you go in, you don't need that human connection unless you have a very specific need, some of the times.

bryanlarsen 3y ago

If you stuck an AGI inside a Boston Dynamics robot and trained it on a trade I suspect it could replace much of that trade. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ Not an easy problem, but the assumption is that AGI makes solving such problems tractable. Japan has been working on healthcare robots for decades. I think the key word is that the robots "could" replace 95% of economically valuable work, not that they will. Using an example from today: we can and have replaced fast food order takers with kiosks, but there are still a lot of people employed as fast food order takers because that's what customers prefer.

joshspankit 3y ago
Yes, but... There are unknown issues down that road. Given 1000 years AI could probably replace all work, but I think we’re all on the same page of “could AI replace 95% of work within a timespan that’s meaningful to people alive today?”, and in that term the realization of an AI-powered machine doing all manual labour (even an AGI one) still has a too many unknowns for a meaningful answer. We were “going to have flying cars in X” for a long time, but it turned out that building a flying car was not actually the problem that needed to be solved in order to make them viable.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  It is also not necessarily what people want. I do think social mobility from being able to work is something people want. I think AI researchers want to feel important and like they have purpose. As they start to realize that will all vanish once they invent AGI, it will be interesting to see how they proceed. I think human augmentation is far more attractive and will be a more popular field of endevour, if we workout how to get better at it.

randyrand 3y ago

He clarifies later that he is including physical labor (robots).

karmakaze 3y ago

I thought that it was assumed the blue collar work was believed to be attainable much sooner than AGI, so then only the intellectually complex work would remain for AGI to solve.