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Anthropic Chief of Staff: These next 3 years might be the last few that I work

49 points by Dowwie 2y ago

keiferski 2y ago
These “AI will end all jobs” takes never seem to understand that a significant portion of the economy is driven by hype, celebrity, social pressures, and competition. People do not follow certain content creators because they are the most economically efficient and provide the “best” information, they follow them for largely human reasons. And as long as putting in more work leads to being more successful in this realm, jobs will continue to exist. Ergo I think the large shift will not be from jobs to no-jobs, but from jobs to entertainment-based jobs. In a world where everyone’s basic needs are met, the result is an attention-driven economy, not no economy.
- djmips 2y ago
  >attention-driven economy. yuk
- vsnf 2y ago
  Also, it's hard for proponents, often those in AI companies, to avoid coming off as either buying into their own hype, or otherwise just pushing the marketing for their product. The AI person is so convinced that AI will be so good that it might end work as we know it? Maybe, but it's also good for pushing the bull case for his company.
- georgemcbay 2y ago
  There are an awful lot of currently employed people who are neither remotely entertaining nor creative-minded enough to fill a more behind-the-scenes role for someone who is (assuming jobs like that even exist in this hypothetical near-future massive employment shift).
  - portaouflop 2y ago
    IMO this market is already beyond saturated. I am easily able to spend 24/7 consuming content that I like - and I have very specific niche tastes, but even there enough content exists basically until the end of time. I could see this work if we develop even more exotic and creative tastes, creating even more hyper-specific niches and tiny communities around them.
- jonahbenton 2y ago
  The thing I laugh about is the ignorance of these pieces of the first reason people organized and built the bases of law and economies- to control what we now call real estate. RE is the basis and reasons for nation states, militaries, assets and the whole financial system- from which this person expects there to issue UBI. Jobs only exist when that whole system is stable. There is and always will be better and worse property around this unique globe. This will be exacerbated by climate challenges. An AI enhanced country will simply take control of desirable property of another weaker state, with predictable outcomes for the humans involved. The assumption that "we" will just get past that transition is a rich one, that is, one only a rich person can make.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > People do not follow certain content creators because they are the most economically efficient and provide the “best” information, they follow them for largely human reasons. You recon? I think most of this today is algorithmic, while for most of the 1900s it was effectively a lottery. > Ergo I think the large shift will not be from jobs to no-jobs, but from jobs to entertainment-based jobs. In a world where everyone’s basic needs are met, the result is an attention-driven economy, not no economy. Peacocking will still be thing[0], but I don't expect it to go the way you describe. Even with your assumption, we cannot all be creators. At best we can signal to each other how "refined" we are, that we "have good taste", but we'd already passed from the age of writing poems or playing instruments as a primary way to woo others to one of sharing mix-tapes before I was born (and from mixtapes to playlists now). Instead, I think we may have a world where the super-rich pay for humans to be valets to show they can afford it, where those humans themselves are "forced to get by" with robots who do a better job of it, in much the same way and for much the same reason that a $20 Casio F-91W keeps better time than a $20k Rolex or a $200k Omega (and of course, your phone or smartwatch is constantly syncing with someone else's atomic clock). [0] and indeed, I think this is the only correct argument for the claim "AI can't ever make art": to the extent that the point of art is to be an expensive signal (rather than merely "pretty"), then AI can only be that when it's unaffordable. I think the conflict between "is art the signal" or "is art the stuff" is a similar pattern to the arguments over "if a tree falling when nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" being secretly about "does 'sound' mean the vibrations in the air or is it your qualia caused by that?"
- EGreg 2y ago
  And you don’t seem to understand that AI influencers are already here, and are generating far more accounts and amassing far more followers than actual people. And also actual people (including onlyfans models) who used to fake the real connection by using men (like the Tates) to type it are now using AI and bots. The sea shift will come When people on both sides (not just the influencer side) PREFER multimodal AI to dumb texting. And then you don’t need the human model herself anymore because the AI model is far more versatile (in commercials too). Followers and engagement is a gameable metric, so expect capitalism to slowly favor AI in everything. If an AI model can ingest millions of publicly available videos and back up its points with the best B-roll and clips, it can also convince better than a team of 3 people. Even if its argument is bullshit. As you said, it’s not just about truth and results, it’s about follower counts and clout! So it’s not just about losing jobs, it’s also misinformation at scale, across many accounts. Enjoy the brave new world! I am talking about only what’s there NOW and possible with CURRENT technology.
  - keiferski 2y ago
    I’m pretty unconvinced by the AI influencer idea. Most of them are just niche aggregator type of things, not accounts with real influence. By the time AI can replicate a streaming live video, devices and platforms will have already implemented real-identity features. Remember that the platforms themselves don’t benefit from AI content dominating everything and are pretty incentivized to ensure that content is from real people.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      I don't buy any of that. Well, except for "most are just", which is plausible. > platforms will have already implemented real-identity features FB already has this, in theory, but that doesn't stop people scamming with it. Those policies didn't even stop people organising a genocide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_controversies#Incitement_of_human_rights_abuses_in_Myanmar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_co... > Remember that the platforms themselves don’t benefit from AI content dominating everything and are pretty incentivized to ensure that content is from real people. These platforms themselves are AI. Even when the posts are made by humans — and posts don't need to be "real time" nor do they need to be video — the feed is algorithmic to maximise your attention, and the choices of which advert to stick in front of your eyes are chosen algorithmically to maximise revenue… and even before the use of LLMs for copy and diffusion models for images, the ads themselves are AB tested by the businesses to see which have the greatest effect.
- HumblyTossed 2y ago
  The idea that with AI everyone’s basic needs will be met is rubbish. The current mindset is you don’t work you don’t deserve to eat or go see a doctor. That isn’t going to change anytime soon. 8 people have as much wealth as the bottom 50% of the entire world. The machine that created that disparity won’t stop.
- tivert 2y ago
  > Ergo I think the large shift will not be from jobs to no-jobs, but from jobs to entertainment-based jobs. And that, in and of itself, is dystopian. Furthermore, there's far more inequality in "entertainment-based jobs" than other types of work. Everyone can't be an influencer, period, and it should be blindingly obvious to anyone who's lived in the world that not everyone can be an entertainer. > In a world where everyone’s basic needs are met, the result is an attention-driven economy, not no economy. "AI" will not bring us to "world where everyone’s basic needs are met." We lack the ideological foundations for that (and if we had them, everyone's basic needs would already be met. It's far more likely that we just get a bigger homeless problem, with people trying to scrape by living in sewers (like they already do! https://www.nzz.ch/english/the-misery-of-the-homeless-in-las-vegas-living-in-tunnels-ld.1708954 https://www.nzz.ch/english/the-misery-of-the-homeless-in-las...).
jonahbenton 2y ago
The absurd and useless vantagepoint of a 25 year old living inside the apex of a world unique privilege bubble. The false utopianism echoes of a Brave New World playing itself out again in real time.
- zarathustreal 2y ago
  Absurd and useless? I disagree. Everyone has a unique perspective and something to teach. It’s your problem if you can’t take advantage of that.
  - jonahbenton 2y ago
    Of course. Her own perspective is her own. But that wasn't that piece. That piece was her trying to tell a larger story. In doing so, she started from her own quite significant ignorance and tried to infer from that a larger story. There is little value in that progression. In talking with other young folks I see echoes of her misunderstandings. A lot of this is the tool vs oracle discussion. I think there are significant risks where young folks see LLMs as oracles, where they really are better understood as tools. However, many young people don't have the experience to make that distinction.
- portaouflop 2y ago
  young people bad
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
stefcoetzee 2y ago
Where's my flying car?! ;) The universe is an interesting place. Certainly won't complain if there's more time in the day to get lost in its details. There's still so much to do, however. Fully open to the upside of artificial intelligence, but cautiously so. I fear it is invoked as a kind of deus ex machina. In my view, it is a multiplier and not a substitute.
- detourdog 2y ago
  Computers are just a tool considering the computer more than tool is distorting the relationship between user and tool.
- kozikow 2y ago
  Flying car essentially exists - it's called helicopter. It's just uneconomical to do actual flying cars due to costs and fuel inefficiency. Flying cars will happen when if we have breakthroughs in battery technology and potentially energy generation.
detourdog 2y ago
I enjoy "working" on ideas. I will always enjoy working on ideas. I don't work in AI specifically but did purchase "The Society of Mind" by Marvin Minsky and followed OpenCYC. I read this story and thought that the author is too close to subject. I'm sure what he is working on is impressive but the real trick with technology is having it work in the real world. Outside of large rent seeking business plans what practicalities will this provide for the everyday human? The best I can see coming from AI is that large corporations phone systems may start to provide quality responses. I feel that training AI on the internet is not as productive as it may seem. The internet is an artificial environment almost entirely dominated by commercial content. I'm not surprised AI can appear quite smart in those confines. The stumbling block I see is the integration with the outside world. This is domain with sentient creatures with unique ideas.
symfrog 2y ago
We work with LLMs on a daily basis to solve business use cases. From our work, LLMs seem to be nowhere close to being able to independently solve end-to-end business processes, in every use case they need excessive hand holding (output validation, manual review etc.). I often find myself thinking that a use case would be solved faster and cheaper using other ML approaches. LLMs for replacing work in its entirety seems to be a stretch of the imagination at this point, unless an academic breakthrough that goes beyond the current approach is discovered, which typically has an unknown timeline. I just don't see how companies like Anthropic/OpenAI are drawing these conclusions given the current state.
- detourdog 2y ago
  I think you are using LLMs exactly right. The corporations need LLMs to be extra special to support valuations.
- camillomiller 2y ago
  Oh I can see how. It’s called hype marketing and it’s needed to justify the bubble they are inflating.
- ben_w 2y ago
  The developers may well be Clever Hands-ing themselves, seeing capabilities that the models don't really have. But the… ah, this is ironic, the anthropic principle applies here: > From our work, LLMs seem to be nowhere close to being able to independently solve end-to-end business processes If there was an AI which could do that, your job would no longer exist. Just as with other professions before yours — weavers, potters, computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) — and there are people complaining that even current LLMs and diffusion models forced them to change career. > I just don't see how companies like Anthropic/OpenAI are drawing these conclusions given the current state. If you look at the current public models, you are correct. They're not looking at the current public models. Look at what people say on this very site — complaining that models have been "lobotomised" (I dislike this analogy, but whatever) "in the name of safety" — and ask yourself: what could these models do before public release? Look at how long the gap was between the initial GPT-4 training and the completion of the red-teaming and other safety work, and ask yourself what new thing they know about that isn't public knowledge yet. But also take what you know now about publicly available AI in June 2024, and ask yourself how far back in time you'd have to go for this to seem like unachievable SciFi nonsense — 3 years sounds about right… … but also, there's no guarantee that we get any particular schedule for improvements, even if it wasn't for most of the top AI researchers signing open letters saying "we want to agree to slow down capabilities research and focus on safety". The AI that can take your job, that can "independently solve end-to-end business processes" may be 20 years away, or it may already exist and be kept under NDA because the creators can't separate good business from evil ones any more than cryptographers can separate good secrets from evil ones.
viking123 2y ago
So just by scaling more they think they will get to AGI? My guess is that it will need something new, maybe a new Nobel prize worthy discovery. It will be interesting to see how history will view the LLMs of today.
- CuriouslyC 2y ago
  The problem is that they haven't even defined AGI, so how are we supposed to research and engineer our way there?
EdwardDiego 2y ago
"Our product is so awesome, it'll even put me out of work". Sure. Not like you have an economic reason to advance this point of view to drive sales to Anthropic over other LLM providers.
monkeydust 2y ago
Yea I dunno. I had to do me expenses this morning and one task is to split out the bill into Room, Taxes and Dinning. I asked gpt-4o to handle and it was a few dollars short. I then asked it to check and be careful and it produced A/B alternative response where A was actually correct when it figured out it's calculation was short of the provided total in the bill. It could not be trusted to get it right first time and hence I had to do the calcs as well as check it's response - so rather than making me more productive it made me worse. A rule based system might have been better or perhaps loading the data into a DB or data frame and getting it to produce the SQL and run that instead. Either way this simple task could not be solved by the best LLM model out there.
- JasonBee 2y ago
  GPT can’t do math, don’t we already know this? It’s a predictive engine, not a computational engine.
  - viking123 2y ago
    But it will become AGI if we just feed it more data right
- kmlx 2y ago
  i think you need to prompt it to use statistical analysis. it will then run python to figure out the result.
- fock 2y ago
  I think most people are buying into the hype because search for information has just become baaaaad due to uuuhm ... incentives and the current crop of LLM provides a good view into all information available (also behind paywalls...) on the internet in any language. That way it works great if you want to solve programming problem X for which there is a library and it also works if you want to know which companies built bicycles in Poland pre-1990. It also was very confident in answering what happened to the factories. Just that some of the factories didn't exist and some of the new companies it mentioned came very close to what google search would return... (aka unrelated advertisement)
throwaway71271 2y ago
In this highly dimensional chaos, every outcome is almost as likely. From 'civil war' to 'everyone is chilling at the beach all day', from 'we have robot servants' to 'we are the robot's slaves (possibly without us even realizing)', from 'all prices go to zero' to 'there are robot cars with guns patrolling the streets'. You can get in a spiral of more and more fear and hopelessness and anxiety, and you can of course go up a solarpunk stairwell. My advice is to relax and take advantage of what AI can do right now, don't think too much about the future, we have reached the steep part of the S curve, so tomorrow is yesterday as Terrance McKenna says. I spent most of my free time studying, because now chatgpt allows me to study any subject and I can ask it stupid questions when I don't understand something in a lecture. I literally take a screenshot (with youtube captions enabled) and ask it to clarify, and then watch the video again. Having youtube and chatgpt is godsend. Having access to Andrej Karpathy and Richard Feynman, Leonard Susskind and Carl Jung, you can even hear Erwin Schrödinger himself speak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCwR1ztUXtU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCwR1ztUXtU .. what a time to be alive! There is a saying: its never as good or as bad as it seems.
- iLoveOncall 2y ago
  The most likely outcome is that nothing meaningfully changes.
DebtDeflation 2y ago
The biggest impact for AI in terms of employment will be in the customer support (Call Center) and employee support (IT Help Desk and HR Support) functions. The second biggest impact will be at the lower levels of the software development functions (QA Engineers/Testers, Technical Writers, Business Analysts, Junior Devs). Outside of those areas, minimal impact over the next 5 years. Even within those two areas, I predict 30-40% productivity gains but it will not all lead to reduced headcount, more than half of it will lead to increased expectations as all innovations do. One other observation is that what's leading to much of the recent angst is CEOs engaging in mass layoffs to meet Wall Street expectations and publicly attributing it to AI when in fact the work is just being moved offshore or not being done at all (until there's a big public failure and it resumes).
spicyusername 2y ago
"My product is amazing" - Man who is responsible for hyping product
shafyy 2y ago
"Person who works at 'AI' firm hypes up 'AI' for no apparent selfish reason". Nothing to see here.
pyrrhotech 2y ago
It's a bit ironic that knowledge work will become obsolete before blue collar work. I disagree with the author that it will become completely obsolete in the next 20 years (although certainly in the next 200), but it will change significantly and there will be a massive downward pressure on knowledge worker compensation as the barriers to entry have been decimated. On the other hand, good luck getting your AI to unclog your sink, remodel your kitchen or fix your AC any time soon.
- viking123 2y ago
  I mean if you think it a bit forward, if you really have a general system that can mostly obsolete all knowledge work, I don't think the leap to having some sorts of robots would be that many years away. These general agents could be taught to control the robots and perform different things, or they could even do that research by themselves. Also if most of knowledge work is gone, these people are either unemployed and have no money to spend basically or retrain to some blue collar roles which would push down wages if there is more supply of the workers. It's very hard to actually predict how it all will end up in that case
the_real_cher 2y ago
"It does seem that, overall, unemployment makes people sadder, sicker, and more anxious." This is such a perfect description for how rich people view the rest of us.
dangus 2y ago
I will point out that even if the author is 100% correct (which other comments here have been great at disputing), that still doesn’t explain how all the hairdressers and physical therapists and restaurant servers and line cooks are going to be losing their jobs. Even truck drivers are somewhat safe because even if you get self-driving working perfectly, you still might want a human to physically operate parts of the truck that a computer can’t interact with, because a computer doesn’t have any hands with opposable thumbs that can adapt to an infinite set of situations. E.g., Truck drivers who deliver Pepsi and Frito Lay aren’t going to be replaced by self-driving because driving isn’t really most of the job.
- pylua 2y ago
  Hypothetically, If a large part of workers no longer have income how would those roles be supported? Surely there would be reduced demand that would lead to those roles disappearing as a full time position.
avidphantasm 2y ago
I’m sorry to be ageist, but at 25 I thought lots of things were going to change the world, but they didn’t. I hate to break it to 25-year-olds, but the world is far more complex, messy, and beautiful than most of you can conceive of.
the_real_cher 2y ago
I asked gpt4o to output some test questions for what I'm studying. Then I put one of the questions back into GPT to ask it to explain which of the 4 multi-choice answers was correct. GPT said the correct answer was answer C then output something completely different than any of the four options it gave me originally. I find GPT very useful yet at the same time it has reliability issues to the point where I wouldn't trust it without another person to look at its output and verify on important issues. I'm not really a machine learning scientist but this unreliability seems baked into the core of how it runs as it doesn't have 'human reason' it's just word location statistics. Maybe reliability will happen in the future?? Ir maybe it will remain like a knowledge worker drill gun instead of a screwdriver and enhance people's work.
- danielbln 2y ago
  "Do a web search / run this on your code environment and vakidate your previous replies" works pretty well woth tool-enabled LLMs.
  - the_real_cher 2y ago
    apparently not with trying to figure out how many R's are in the word strawberry.
    - danielbln 2y ago
      Web search no, code execution yes.
jprete 2y ago
If the author can only write this depressingly about the world they're building, maybe she should stop helping to build it?
croes 2y ago
Just like a driver license is unnecessary because we have fully automated driving cars since 2019. Oh wait...
re-thc 2y ago
This fails to account for the fact that it's people working that keeps the economy going. If AI do replace more and more workers there will be less flowing back to the economy. At some point there won't even be companies needing AI.
fundad 2y ago
What am I missing? We know executive’s who make shit up like this can be replaced by software instances that make shit up. I thought the point is people want influence.
shrubble 2y ago
Important thing drug dealers and other salesmen know: "don't get high, off your own supply" ...
precompute 2y ago
You could assume the writer has insider info, but that attitude is a bit outdated these days. If Anthropic does have an advantage, it isn't a very significant one. The vast majority of research is public and most, if not all, big discoveries "circulate" around the economy. If we're looking at how competent "AI" systems will have to be in order to take over all of programming, we'll have to wait for them to topple over almost all other white collar jobs before coming to this one. You could ascribe this to the "First they came for X ... then they came for me and no one was left" viewpoint, but considering the progress we've had since 2021 and the fact that this field is way more popular and hence "stickier" and slower means progress will slow and newer ideas will have to push through waves of mediocre-but-popular and technologically-regressive-but-economically-viable ideas. It seems very unlikely that in 3 years all white-collar jobs will be replaced. Computer hardware is gold in this new boom, and 3 years isn't a significant amount of time for hardware development (considering how consumer and enterprise hardware development goes hand-in-hand in this field). In fact, all the progess visible in 3 years has likely already been decided upon. What most people fail to realize is that LLMs indeed are stochastic parrots, but the internet is so much more vast than they can fathom. It has data on almost EVERYTHING. ALL of that was fed into this recursive architecture that then became half-decent to talk to. To visualize a LLM, imagine a never-ending "net" of information. To reach from one point to another, LLMs can't make a straight line -- they make a sphere with its center at the starting point and when it connects, the volume is the amount of data is has to compute during training. It's a very inefficient algorithm! Filtering and sorting and labelling data is a difficult task and is something that isn't focused on enough. The end result (training on massaged data) is given undue importance because it's easy and accessible. There simply isn't enough time in 3 years to train models or to re-filter/sort/label data that will make this author's predictions come true. As usual, the "hard limit" for tech is human mental capacity. Most people can not learn a new language after 20. Most people are not very good at reading. Changing these stats takes centuries of good education and nutrition. 3 years is little to nothing. After losing your job (primary income stream) the biggest hurdle isn't "saving face" but rather figuring out how one's going to afford to put food on the table and pay off bills. There isn't going to be UBI in 10 years, because efficiency gains lead to major, society-wide human discontentment because of the pyramid's base becoming wider. Hoping for a near-flat structure is utopian. Thinking it'll come across without a war is even more fantastic. Taiwan's chip competence seems to be the bedrock of our modern civilization, and before getting giddy for UBI one should realize that maybe sometimes it's all just too good to be true and might come crashing down any second.
lz400 2y ago
I wish it were true! I for one would welcome our new AI overlords. But mostly I'm just shocked at extremely smart people like Tegmark or Hinton giving these apocalyptic and sci-fi visions of LLMs taking over the world credit.
bobosha 2y ago
I disagree with the bulk of the comments thus far that this is too far-fetched. I believe that AGI, and some of the scenarios the author proposes are possible and society needs to be aware of this likelihood. "The general reaction to language models among knowledge workers is one of denial." - FTA
nunez 2y ago
> There are obviously other vital questions, like how people will be able to meet their material needs. Many have examined this question, with no final answer yet adopted as official policy for this contingency by any government. I am instead going to do something that may feel like cheating. I will go ahead and assume that people can meet their financial needs through universal basic income or other transfers and will solely concentrate on the question of whether people can and will be happy—or at least as happy as they are now—without work. You've gotta be fucking kidding me with this. We can barely agree on whether service workers should receive tips, let alone what a Universal Basic Income will look like at even a municipal level. You can't wave that away. I really do not understand the exuberance to rush to a post-work future where AI controlled by private corporations meets most of our needs. I cannot see a future in which this doesn't end with mass unemployment and neofeudalism. Case in point: Avital is Chief of Staff to the CEO of one of the most valuable and well-funded companies in tech right now. They stand to make significant fortunes if/when Anthropic undergoes a financial event. They will absolutely benefit from the increased worker pool that mass unemployment will create.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ZeroGravitas 2y ago
This seems almost a parody of the people working on self-driving cars announcing that their teenager will never have to learn how to drive.
SebFender 2y ago
[dead]

49 points by Dowwie 2y ago

These “AI will end all jobs” takes never seem to understand that a significant portion of the economy is driven by hype, celebrity, social pressures, and competition. People do not follow certain content creators because they are the most economically efficient and provide the “best” information, they follow them for largely human reasons. And as long as putting in more work leads to being more successful in this realm, jobs will continue to exist. Ergo I think the large shift will not be from jobs to no-jobs, but from jobs to entertainment-based jobs. In a world where everyone’s basic needs are met, the result is an attention-driven economy, not no economy.

djmips 2y ago
>attention-driven economy. yuk
vsnf 2y ago
Also, it's hard for proponents, often those in AI companies, to avoid coming off as either buying into their own hype, or otherwise just pushing the marketing for their product. The AI person is so convinced that AI will be so good that it might end work as we know it? Maybe, but it's also good for pushing the bull case for his company.
georgemcbay 2y ago
There are an awful lot of currently employed people who are neither remotely entertaining nor creative-minded enough to fill a more behind-the-scenes role for someone who is (assuming jobs like that even exist in this hypothetical near-future massive employment shift).
- portaouflop 2y ago
  IMO this market is already beyond saturated. I am easily able to spend 24/7 consuming content that I like - and I have very specific niche tastes, but even there enough content exists basically until the end of time. I could see this work if we develop even more exotic and creative tastes, creating even more hyper-specific niches and tiny communities around them.
jonahbenton 2y ago
The thing I laugh about is the ignorance of these pieces of the first reason people organized and built the bases of law and economies- to control what we now call real estate. RE is the basis and reasons for nation states, militaries, assets and the whole financial system- from which this person expects there to issue UBI. Jobs only exist when that whole system is stable. There is and always will be better and worse property around this unique globe. This will be exacerbated by climate challenges. An AI enhanced country will simply take control of desirable property of another weaker state, with predictable outcomes for the humans involved. The assumption that "we" will just get past that transition is a rich one, that is, one only a rich person can make.
ben_w 2y ago
> People do not follow certain content creators because they are the most economically efficient and provide the “best” information, they follow them for largely human reasons. You recon? I think most of this today is algorithmic, while for most of the 1900s it was effectively a lottery. > Ergo I think the large shift will not be from jobs to no-jobs, but from jobs to entertainment-based jobs. In a world where everyone’s basic needs are met, the result is an attention-driven economy, not no economy. Peacocking will still be thing[0], but I don't expect it to go the way you describe. Even with your assumption, we cannot all be creators. At best we can signal to each other how "refined" we are, that we "have good taste", but we'd already passed from the age of writing poems or playing instruments as a primary way to woo others to one of sharing mix-tapes before I was born (and from mixtapes to playlists now). Instead, I think we may have a world where the super-rich pay for humans to be valets to show they can afford it, where those humans themselves are "forced to get by" with robots who do a better job of it, in much the same way and for much the same reason that a $20 Casio F-91W keeps better time than a $20k Rolex or a $200k Omega (and of course, your phone or smartwatch is constantly syncing with someone else's atomic clock). [0] and indeed, I think this is the only correct argument for the claim "AI can't ever make art": to the extent that the point of art is to be an expensive signal (rather than merely "pretty"), then AI can only be that when it's unaffordable. I think the conflict between "is art the signal" or "is art the stuff" is a similar pattern to the arguments over "if a tree falling when nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" being secretly about "does 'sound' mean the vibrations in the air or is it your qualia caused by that?"
EGreg 2y ago
And you don’t seem to understand that AI influencers are already here, and are generating far more accounts and amassing far more followers than actual people. And also actual people (including onlyfans models) who used to fake the real connection by using men (like the Tates) to type it are now using AI and bots. The sea shift will come When people on both sides (not just the influencer side) PREFER multimodal AI to dumb texting. And then you don’t need the human model herself anymore because the AI model is far more versatile (in commercials too). Followers and engagement is a gameable metric, so expect capitalism to slowly favor AI in everything. If an AI model can ingest millions of publicly available videos and back up its points with the best B-roll and clips, it can also convince better than a team of 3 people. Even if its argument is bullshit. As you said, it’s not just about truth and results, it’s about follower counts and clout! So it’s not just about losing jobs, it’s also misinformation at scale, across many accounts. Enjoy the brave new world! I am talking about only what’s there NOW and possible with CURRENT technology.
- keiferski 2y ago
  I’m pretty unconvinced by the AI influencer idea. Most of them are just niche aggregator type of things, not accounts with real influence. By the time AI can replicate a streaming live video, devices and platforms will have already implemented real-identity features. Remember that the platforms themselves don’t benefit from AI content dominating everything and are pretty incentivized to ensure that content is from real people.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    I don't buy any of that. Well, except for "most are just", which is plausible. > platforms will have already implemented real-identity features FB already has this, in theory, but that doesn't stop people scamming with it. Those policies didn't even stop people organising a genocide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_controversies#Incitement_of_human_rights_abuses_in_Myanmar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_co... > Remember that the platforms themselves don’t benefit from AI content dominating everything and are pretty incentivized to ensure that content is from real people. These platforms themselves are AI. Even when the posts are made by humans — and posts don't need to be "real time" nor do they need to be video — the feed is algorithmic to maximise your attention, and the choices of which advert to stick in front of your eyes are chosen algorithmically to maximise revenue… and even before the use of LLMs for copy and diffusion models for images, the ads themselves are AB tested by the businesses to see which have the greatest effect.
HumblyTossed 2y ago
The idea that with AI everyone’s basic needs will be met is rubbish. The current mindset is you don’t work you don’t deserve to eat or go see a doctor. That isn’t going to change anytime soon. 8 people have as much wealth as the bottom 50% of the entire world. The machine that created that disparity won’t stop.
tivert 2y ago
> Ergo I think the large shift will not be from jobs to no-jobs, but from jobs to entertainment-based jobs. And that, in and of itself, is dystopian. Furthermore, there's far more inequality in "entertainment-based jobs" than other types of work. Everyone can't be an influencer, period, and it should be blindingly obvious to anyone who's lived in the world that not everyone can be an entertainer. > In a world where everyone’s basic needs are met, the result is an attention-driven economy, not no economy. "AI" will not bring us to "world where everyone’s basic needs are met." We lack the ideological foundations for that (and if we had them, everyone's basic needs would already be met. It's far more likely that we just get a bigger homeless problem, with people trying to scrape by living in sewers (like they already do! https://www.nzz.ch/english/the-misery-of-the-homeless-in-las-vegas-living-in-tunnels-ld.1708954 https://www.nzz.ch/english/the-misery-of-the-homeless-in-las...).

jonahbenton 2y ago

The absurd and useless vantagepoint of a 25 year old living inside the apex of a world unique privilege bubble. The false utopianism echoes of a Brave New World playing itself out again in real time.

zarathustreal 2y ago
Absurd and useless? I disagree. Everyone has a unique perspective and something to teach. It’s your problem if you can’t take advantage of that.
- jonahbenton 2y ago
  Of course. Her own perspective is her own. But that wasn't that piece. That piece was her trying to tell a larger story. In doing so, she started from her own quite significant ignorance and tried to infer from that a larger story. There is little value in that progression. In talking with other young folks I see echoes of her misunderstandings. A lot of this is the tool vs oracle discussion. I think there are significant risks where young folks see LLMs as oracles, where they really are better understood as tools. However, many young people don't have the experience to make that distinction.
portaouflop 2y ago
young people bad
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

stefcoetzee 2y ago

Where's my flying car?! ;) The universe is an interesting place. Certainly won't complain if there's more time in the day to get lost in its details. There's still so much to do, however. Fully open to the upside of artificial intelligence, but cautiously so. I fear it is invoked as a kind of deus ex machina. In my view, it is a multiplier and not a substitute.

detourdog 2y ago
Computers are just a tool considering the computer more than tool is distorting the relationship between user and tool.
kozikow 2y ago
Flying car essentially exists - it's called helicopter. It's just uneconomical to do actual flying cars due to costs and fuel inefficiency. Flying cars will happen when if we have breakthroughs in battery technology and potentially energy generation.

detourdog 2y ago

I enjoy "working" on ideas. I will always enjoy working on ideas. I don't work in AI specifically but did purchase "The Society of Mind" by Marvin Minsky and followed OpenCYC. I read this story and thought that the author is too close to subject. I'm sure what he is working on is impressive but the real trick with technology is having it work in the real world. Outside of large rent seeking business plans what practicalities will this provide for the everyday human? The best I can see coming from AI is that large corporations phone systems may start to provide quality responses. I feel that training AI on the internet is not as productive as it may seem. The internet is an artificial environment almost entirely dominated by commercial content. I'm not surprised AI can appear quite smart in those confines. The stumbling block I see is the integration with the outside world. This is domain with sentient creatures with unique ideas.

symfrog 2y ago

We work with LLMs on a daily basis to solve business use cases. From our work, LLMs seem to be nowhere close to being able to independently solve end-to-end business processes, in every use case they need excessive hand holding (output validation, manual review etc.). I often find myself thinking that a use case would be solved faster and cheaper using other ML approaches. LLMs for replacing work in its entirety seems to be a stretch of the imagination at this point, unless an academic breakthrough that goes beyond the current approach is discovered, which typically has an unknown timeline. I just don't see how companies like Anthropic/OpenAI are drawing these conclusions given the current state.

detourdog 2y ago
I think you are using LLMs exactly right. The corporations need LLMs to be extra special to support valuations.
camillomiller 2y ago
Oh I can see how. It’s called hype marketing and it’s needed to justify the bubble they are inflating.
ben_w 2y ago
The developers may well be Clever Hands-ing themselves, seeing capabilities that the models don't really have. But the… ah, this is ironic, the anthropic principle applies here: > From our work, LLMs seem to be nowhere close to being able to independently solve end-to-end business processes If there was an AI which could do that, your job would no longer exist. Just as with other professions before yours — weavers, potters, computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) — and there are people complaining that even current LLMs and diffusion models forced them to change career. > I just don't see how companies like Anthropic/OpenAI are drawing these conclusions given the current state. If you look at the current public models, you are correct. They're not looking at the current public models. Look at what people say on this very site — complaining that models have been "lobotomised" (I dislike this analogy, but whatever) "in the name of safety" — and ask yourself: what could these models do before public release? Look at how long the gap was between the initial GPT-4 training and the completion of the red-teaming and other safety work, and ask yourself what new thing they know about that isn't public knowledge yet. But also take what you know now about publicly available AI in June 2024, and ask yourself how far back in time you'd have to go for this to seem like unachievable SciFi nonsense — 3 years sounds about right… … but also, there's no guarantee that we get any particular schedule for improvements, even if it wasn't for most of the top AI researchers signing open letters saying "we want to agree to slow down capabilities research and focus on safety". The AI that can take your job, that can "independently solve end-to-end business processes" may be 20 years away, or it may already exist and be kept under NDA because the creators can't separate good business from evil ones any more than cryptographers can separate good secrets from evil ones.

viking123 2y ago

So just by scaling more they think they will get to AGI? My guess is that it will need something new, maybe a new Nobel prize worthy discovery. It will be interesting to see how history will view the LLMs of today.

CuriouslyC 2y ago
The problem is that they haven't even defined AGI, so how are we supposed to research and engineer our way there?

EdwardDiego 2y ago

"Our product is so awesome, it'll even put me out of work". Sure. Not like you have an economic reason to advance this point of view to drive sales to Anthropic over other LLM providers.

monkeydust 2y ago

Yea I dunno. I had to do me expenses this morning and one task is to split out the bill into Room, Taxes and Dinning. I asked gpt-4o to handle and it was a few dollars short. I then asked it to check and be careful and it produced A/B alternative response where A was actually correct when it figured out it's calculation was short of the provided total in the bill. It could not be trusted to get it right first time and hence I had to do the calcs as well as check it's response - so rather than making me more productive it made me worse. A rule based system might have been better or perhaps loading the data into a DB or data frame and getting it to produce the SQL and run that instead. Either way this simple task could not be solved by the best LLM model out there.

JasonBee 2y ago
GPT can’t do math, don’t we already know this? It’s a predictive engine, not a computational engine.
- viking123 2y ago
  But it will become AGI if we just feed it more data right
kmlx 2y ago
i think you need to prompt it to use statistical analysis. it will then run python to figure out the result.
fock 2y ago
I think most people are buying into the hype because search for information has just become baaaaad due to uuuhm ... incentives and the current crop of LLM provides a good view into all information available (also behind paywalls...) on the internet in any language. That way it works great if you want to solve programming problem X for which there is a library and it also works if you want to know which companies built bicycles in Poland pre-1990. It also was very confident in answering what happened to the factories. Just that some of the factories didn't exist and some of the new companies it mentioned came very close to what google search would return... (aka unrelated advertisement)

throwaway71271 2y ago

In this highly dimensional chaos, every outcome is almost as likely. From 'civil war' to 'everyone is chilling at the beach all day', from 'we have robot servants' to 'we are the robot's slaves (possibly without us even realizing)', from 'all prices go to zero' to 'there are robot cars with guns patrolling the streets'. You can get in a spiral of more and more fear and hopelessness and anxiety, and you can of course go up a solarpunk stairwell. My advice is to relax and take advantage of what AI can do right now, don't think too much about the future, we have reached the steep part of the S curve, so tomorrow is yesterday as Terrance McKenna says. I spent most of my free time studying, because now chatgpt allows me to study any subject and I can ask it stupid questions when I don't understand something in a lecture. I literally take a screenshot (with youtube captions enabled) and ask it to clarify, and then watch the video again. Having youtube and chatgpt is godsend. Having access to Andrej Karpathy and Richard Feynman, Leonard Susskind and Carl Jung, you can even hear Erwin Schrödinger himself speak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCwR1ztUXtU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCwR1ztUXtU .. what a time to be alive! There is a saying: its never as good or as bad as it seems.

iLoveOncall 2y ago
The most likely outcome is that nothing meaningfully changes.

DebtDeflation 2y ago

The biggest impact for AI in terms of employment will be in the customer support (Call Center) and employee support (IT Help Desk and HR Support) functions. The second biggest impact will be at the lower levels of the software development functions (QA Engineers/Testers, Technical Writers, Business Analysts, Junior Devs). Outside of those areas, minimal impact over the next 5 years. Even within those two areas, I predict 30-40% productivity gains but it will not all lead to reduced headcount, more than half of it will lead to increased expectations as all innovations do. One other observation is that what's leading to much of the recent angst is CEOs engaging in mass layoffs to meet Wall Street expectations and publicly attributing it to AI when in fact the work is just being moved offshore or not being done at all (until there's a big public failure and it resumes).

spicyusername 2y ago

"My product is amazing" - Man who is responsible for hyping product

shafyy 2y ago

"Person who works at 'AI' firm hypes up 'AI' for no apparent selfish reason". Nothing to see here.

pyrrhotech 2y ago

It's a bit ironic that knowledge work will become obsolete before blue collar work. I disagree with the author that it will become completely obsolete in the next 20 years (although certainly in the next 200), but it will change significantly and there will be a massive downward pressure on knowledge worker compensation as the barriers to entry have been decimated. On the other hand, good luck getting your AI to unclog your sink, remodel your kitchen or fix your AC any time soon.

viking123 2y ago
I mean if you think it a bit forward, if you really have a general system that can mostly obsolete all knowledge work, I don't think the leap to having some sorts of robots would be that many years away. These general agents could be taught to control the robots and perform different things, or they could even do that research by themselves. Also if most of knowledge work is gone, these people are either unemployed and have no money to spend basically or retrain to some blue collar roles which would push down wages if there is more supply of the workers. It's very hard to actually predict how it all will end up in that case

the_real_cher 2y ago

"It does seem that, overall, unemployment makes people sadder, sicker, and more anxious." This is such a perfect description for how rich people view the rest of us.

dangus 2y ago

I will point out that even if the author is 100% correct (which other comments here have been great at disputing), that still doesn’t explain how all the hairdressers and physical therapists and restaurant servers and line cooks are going to be losing their jobs. Even truck drivers are somewhat safe because even if you get self-driving working perfectly, you still might want a human to physically operate parts of the truck that a computer can’t interact with, because a computer doesn’t have any hands with opposable thumbs that can adapt to an infinite set of situations. E.g., Truck drivers who deliver Pepsi and Frito Lay aren’t going to be replaced by self-driving because driving isn’t really most of the job.

pylua 2y ago
Hypothetically, If a large part of workers no longer have income how would those roles be supported? Surely there would be reduced demand that would lead to those roles disappearing as a full time position.

avidphantasm 2y ago

I’m sorry to be ageist, but at 25 I thought lots of things were going to change the world, but they didn’t. I hate to break it to 25-year-olds, but the world is far more complex, messy, and beautiful than most of you can conceive of.

the_real_cher 2y ago

I asked gpt4o to output some test questions for what I'm studying. Then I put one of the questions back into GPT to ask it to explain which of the 4 multi-choice answers was correct. GPT said the correct answer was answer C then output something completely different than any of the four options it gave me originally. I find GPT very useful yet at the same time it has reliability issues to the point where I wouldn't trust it without another person to look at its output and verify on important issues. I'm not really a machine learning scientist but this unreliability seems baked into the core of how it runs as it doesn't have 'human reason' it's just word location statistics. Maybe reliability will happen in the future?? Ir maybe it will remain like a knowledge worker drill gun instead of a screwdriver and enhance people's work.

danielbln 2y ago
"Do a web search / run this on your code environment and vakidate your previous replies" works pretty well woth tool-enabled LLMs.
- the_real_cher 2y ago
  apparently not with trying to figure out how many R's are in the word strawberry.
  - danielbln 2y ago
    Web search no, code execution yes.

jprete 2y ago

If the author can only write this depressingly about the world they're building, maybe she should stop helping to build it?

croes 2y ago

Just like a driver license is unnecessary because we have fully automated driving cars since 2019. Oh wait...

re-thc 2y ago

This fails to account for the fact that it's people working that keeps the economy going. If AI do replace more and more workers there will be less flowing back to the economy. At some point there won't even be companies needing AI.

fundad 2y ago

What am I missing? We know executive’s who make shit up like this can be replaced by software instances that make shit up. I thought the point is people want influence.

shrubble 2y ago

Important thing drug dealers and other salesmen know: "don't get high, off your own supply" ...

precompute 2y ago

You could assume the writer has insider info, but that attitude is a bit outdated these days. If Anthropic does have an advantage, it isn't a very significant one. The vast majority of research is public and most, if not all, big discoveries "circulate" around the economy. If we're looking at how competent "AI" systems will have to be in order to take over all of programming, we'll have to wait for them to topple over almost all other white collar jobs before coming to this one. You could ascribe this to the "First they came for X ... then they came for me and no one was left" viewpoint, but considering the progress we've had since 2021 and the fact that this field is way more popular and hence "stickier" and slower means progress will slow and newer ideas will have to push through waves of mediocre-but-popular and technologically-regressive-but-economically-viable ideas. It seems very unlikely that in 3 years all white-collar jobs will be replaced. Computer hardware is gold in this new boom, and 3 years isn't a significant amount of time for hardware development (considering how consumer and enterprise hardware development goes hand-in-hand in this field). In fact, all the progess visible in 3 years has likely already been decided upon. What most people fail to realize is that LLMs indeed are stochastic parrots, but the internet is so much more vast than they can fathom. It has data on almost EVERYTHING. ALL of that was fed into this recursive architecture that then became half-decent to talk to. To visualize a LLM, imagine a never-ending "net" of information. To reach from one point to another, LLMs can't make a straight line -- they make a sphere with its center at the starting point and when it connects, the volume is the amount of data is has to compute during training. It's a very inefficient algorithm! Filtering and sorting and labelling data is a difficult task and is something that isn't focused on enough. The end result (training on massaged data) is given undue importance because it's easy and accessible. There simply isn't enough time in 3 years to train models or to re-filter/sort/label data that will make this author's predictions come true. As usual, the "hard limit" for tech is human mental capacity. Most people can not learn a new language after 20. Most people are not very good at reading. Changing these stats takes centuries of good education and nutrition. 3 years is little to nothing. After losing your job (primary income stream) the biggest hurdle isn't "saving face" but rather figuring out how one's going to afford to put food on the table and pay off bills. There isn't going to be UBI in 10 years, because efficiency gains lead to major, society-wide human discontentment because of the pyramid's base becoming wider. Hoping for a near-flat structure is utopian. Thinking it'll come across without a war is even more fantastic. Taiwan's chip competence seems to be the bedrock of our modern civilization, and before getting giddy for UBI one should realize that maybe sometimes it's all just too good to be true and might come crashing down any second.

lz400 2y ago

I wish it were true! I for one would welcome our new AI overlords. But mostly I'm just shocked at extremely smart people like Tegmark or Hinton giving these apocalyptic and sci-fi visions of LLMs taking over the world credit.

bobosha 2y ago

I disagree with the bulk of the comments thus far that this is too far-fetched. I believe that AGI, and some of the scenarios the author proposes are possible and society needs to be aware of this likelihood. "The general reaction to language models among knowledge workers is one of denial." - FTA

nunez 2y ago

> There are obviously other vital questions, like how people will be able to meet their material needs. Many have examined this question, with no final answer yet adopted as official policy for this contingency by any government. I am instead going to do something that may feel like cheating. I will go ahead and assume that people can meet their financial needs through universal basic income or other transfers and will solely concentrate on the question of whether people can and will be happy—or at least as happy as they are now—without work. You've gotta be fucking kidding me with this. We can barely agree on whether service workers should receive tips, let alone what a Universal Basic Income will look like at even a municipal level. You can't wave that away. I really do not understand the exuberance to rush to a post-work future where AI controlled by private corporations meets most of our needs. I cannot see a future in which this doesn't end with mass unemployment and neofeudalism. Case in point: Avital is Chief of Staff to the CEO of one of the most valuable and well-funded companies in tech right now. They stand to make significant fortunes if/when Anthropic undergoes a financial event. They will absolutely benefit from the increased worker pool that mass unemployment will create.

deleted 2y ago
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ZeroGravitas 2y ago

This seems almost a parody of the people working on self-driving cars announcing that their teenager will never have to learn how to drive.

SebFender 2y ago

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