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> But Amodei argues that AI increasingly matches the full range of human cognitive abilities, so it will take away jobs drafting memos, reviewing contracts, and

> But Amodei argues that AI increasingly matches the full range of human cognitive abilities, so it will take away jobs drafting memos, reviewing contracts, and analyzing data that might otherwise emerge. A customer service rep who retrains as a paralegal would find AI waiting there, too. "AI isn't a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans," he wrote. A) This is a bunch of marketing hype disguised as performative commiseration. "Our product is so good we need to think about changing laws". Maybe that's true, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. We don't even know the true costs associated with AI or how much better it's even going to get. B) All of these previous inventions were also touted as "general labor substitutes" and none of them ended up being true. Let me make an alternate case - coffee in this country used to be an entirely automated process. Everyone has a dedicated coffee robot in their house. But our tastes have so shifted that now the average person gets multiple cups of handmade coffee a week. An entirely new job category called "barista" was introduced, and today we have over half a million of them. They are not high wage jobs, but they are comparable to something like the customer service rep job that Amodei is apparently worried about. Even if AI were to take away massive swathes of white collar jobs (I'm still skeptical), the historical expectation is that new, unforseen labor categories open up. Just like nobody inventing a computer thought QA tester or video game streamer or spreadsheet technician was going to be a job in the future. It's like an inverse Baumol's Cost disease - if AI does tank the value of all of these services, all of the services that require, I dunno - physical hands, go up in value. All of the niche things AI can't do suddenly become all the more valuable.

ef2efe 9mo ago
The point youre making is important - these geeks have no clue where things will land. The only person Ive seen involved in technology that was pretty good at predicting was Steve Jobs. But he wasnt really a geek, more of a hippie - meaning he had an understanding of people and society. Amodei definitely does not.
FloorEgg 9mo ago
I've also heard this referred to as jevons paradox. I use AI to build AI systems that are being used and paid for by real users. I'm in the trenches doing customer discovery, designing UX and producing product. Everything I do in my work either leverages AI or is built on AI capabilities. The LLMs we have today are not capable of replacing most human knowledge worker jobs, and it's not clear to me they will be anytime soon. They are powerful tools but they are not remotely as generally intelligent as people. The applications being built are more like power tools. The power drill and power saw didn't replace carpenters, it just enabled them to build more and faster. People see a language calculator doing things that seem super human and assume it will replace human knowledge work, but without realizing the actual range of human intelligence and how it contrasts to LLMs. There were people with the job title "calculator", and we don't have those narrow jobs any more, but there are more people using electronic calculators/computers to do calculations in their work than ever before. There are at least three important misconceptions in thinking that AI is going to replace all human labor anytime soon: - underestimating human intelligence - overestimating current AI and it's rate of progress - underestimating current unmet and future demand for getting stuff done Even if AI makes knowledge work 99% more efficient, it doesn't mean there will be 99% fewer knowledge workers... More likely it means that there will be 100x or more demand for knowledge work, and the demand for the human components will stay the same or even grow.
- legitster 9mo ago
  A good example of this happening was the introduction of the ATM. ATMs actually increased the need to bank tellers, because so many more people ended up opening or using a bank account once getting money in and out became more convenient. (Of course, the prestige and pay of being a teller did take a hit as well).

ef2efe 9mo ago

The point youre making is important - these geeks have no clue where things will land. The only person Ive seen involved in technology that was pretty good at predicting was Steve Jobs. But he wasnt really a geek, more of a hippie - meaning he had an understanding of people and society. Amodei definitely does not.

FloorEgg 9mo ago

I've also heard this referred to as jevons paradox. I use AI to build AI systems that are being used and paid for by real users. I'm in the trenches doing customer discovery, designing UX and producing product. Everything I do in my work either leverages AI or is built on AI capabilities. The LLMs we have today are not capable of replacing most human knowledge worker jobs, and it's not clear to me they will be anytime soon. They are powerful tools but they are not remotely as generally intelligent as people. The applications being built are more like power tools. The power drill and power saw didn't replace carpenters, it just enabled them to build more and faster. People see a language calculator doing things that seem super human and assume it will replace human knowledge work, but without realizing the actual range of human intelligence and how it contrasts to LLMs. There were people with the job title "calculator", and we don't have those narrow jobs any more, but there are more people using electronic calculators/computers to do calculations in their work than ever before. There are at least three important misconceptions in thinking that AI is going to replace all human labor anytime soon: - underestimating human intelligence - overestimating current AI and it's rate of progress - underestimating current unmet and future demand for getting stuff done Even if AI makes knowledge work 99% more efficient, it doesn't mean there will be 99% fewer knowledge workers... More likely it means that there will be 100x or more demand for knowledge work, and the demand for the human components will stay the same or even grow.

legitster 9mo ago
A good example of this happening was the introduction of the ATM. ATMs actually increased the need to bank tellers, because so many more people ended up opening or using a bank account once getting money in and out became more convenient. (Of course, the prestige and pay of being a teller did take a hit as well).