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Down_The_Rabbithole t1_it6k83u wrote

Reply to comment by phriot in If you believe you can think exponentially, you might be wrong. Transformative AI is here, and it is going to radically change the world before the Singularity, and before AGI. by AdditionalPizza

The real issue I see even on places like r/singularity. Is that people don't update their world views according to new developments quickly enough.

For example The papers around large transformer models released in the last 6 months have completely changed the automation timeline and outlook of what areas are going to get automated first.

Yet people on r/singularity largely still have this now-outdated view that careers like drivers, restaurant workers, miners and factory workers will be the first to be automated away.

In reality it's digital intellectual work that is going to be automated away first. Digital Artists, Programmers, System admins, Lawyers, Clerks and basically everyone that sits in an office manipulating data in some way or another through a computer will be automated away in the first round of automation.

As a software engineer for close to 20 years myself with a firm grasp of modern AI systems the path to how the entire software engineering field will be automated away in just the next 5-10 years is clear as day. Yet a lot of the people I work with and even on places like r/singularity people just flat out reject this possibility, partly because it hits their ego so it's easier to go into denial. But also because they already had their views set on other fields being the first ones to go and new developments rapidly changing that view needs some time for people to properly settle before they come to accept it.

I see constant irrational rebukes for why programmers "are never going to be replaced" like how coding is just a small part of programming, not recognizing the fact that the entire Client specification -> Product ownership -> Problemsolving -> Coding -> Delivery pipeline of the entire software engineering industry is at risk of being automated. We're not talking about merely code completion here. We're talking about AI better being able to identify and specify the needs of the client in question and better able to provide a solution in a shorter but more importantly, more effective way.

Humans won't be able to compete in the digital field anymore and physical laborers, especially the underpaid ones like janitorial work, cleaners and miners will be the last jobs to be automated away, not the first.

The next couple of years is going to shook most of the developed world to its core as the mainstream starts coming to this realization. Software Engineers and other highly educated professionals aren't ready to face this truth on this subreddit of all places, let alone the vast majority of regular people.

I predict we're going to have a very rocky ride as people aren't able to accept this when we will most likely start to see the very first signs of intellectual labor replacements implemented next year, 2023 already.

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AdditionalPizza OP t1_it6v5e7 wrote

This is exactly what I'm saying. It's time people stop making excuses based on how we were thinking 5 years ago.

This is happening, and it's happening now. We all waited for this, it's just happening in a way we didn't expect. But in hindsight this makes so much more sense. The digital jobs should be the first to go. Yes they take high human skill, but we should've had the foresight that high human skill != high AI skill. AI are born digital. They are masters of intelligence.

With that being said, robotics are going to feel this effect as well. I think we can agree when we say intellectual jobs go first, it's not first by a mile. They're first on a scale of months to a year or 2. Implementation of robotics in the real world is a challenge we can't really predict at this point though.

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visarga t1_it6lzdv wrote

> physical laborers, especially the underpaid ones like janitorial work, cleaners and miners will be the last jobs to be automated away, not the first.

Automation is coming for everyone, artist, programmer, office worker or physical laborer.

I guess you haven't seen this model - From Play to Policy. With just 5 hours of robot free play they trained a model to control a robotic arm in a kitchen environment. In other words, learning to act (decision transformers) seems to work really well. I expect robotic dexterity to improve quickly. It's just 3-4 years behind text and image.

Related to this I think we'll see large models trained on the entirety of YouTube learning both desktop skills (like automating computer UIs) and robotic skills (like carpentry, cooking and managing a house environment). Massive video models have been conspicuously missing, probably too expensive to train yet, but look for them at the horizon to start popping out.

There's a whole wealth of information in audio-video that is missed in text and image, exactly the kind of information that will automate the jobs you think are safer. And besides video, the simulation field is ramping up with all sorts of 3D environments to train agents in.

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DungeonsAndDradis t1_it6vo7b wrote

When I need to do something around the house, I pull up YouTube. There are thousands of videos on every home maintenance task. When we can get AI trained on YouTube tutorials, we'll have robots making coffee in no time.

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visarga t1_it8on9t wrote

The recent Whisper model is rumoured to be created to transcribe all the text from YT in order to feed the next iteration of language modelling.

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AdditionalPizza OP t1_it6vmqy wrote

>Automation is coming for everyone, artist, programmer, office worker or physical laborer.

I won't speak for them, but personally when I talk about this I mean intellectual or digital jobs go first, I mean they go first and not long after robotics is there. Labour jobs will inevitably need more logistics to replace, as its not just software a company can install. I won't pretend to be able to predict that, but I think it won't be much longer after there's already an unemployment crises on our hands. It won't really matter at that point.

I don't think full automation of everything will happen that quickly, but it really doesn't need to be full automation. It needs to be 10 to 15% of the workforce jobless with no skills outside of their extinct domain.

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phriot t1_it6zsrz wrote

>but personally when I talk about this I mean intellectual or digital jobs go first, I mean they go first and not long after robotics is there.

I work in Biotech, and this is the major reason I think I'm going to try and stay at the bench as long as possible. As soon as I'm able to do most of my work from home, like writing reports, and/or most of my time is spent managing others, that's when I feel like my job is at major risk in the 5-10 year range. (I get the point of this post, that maybe capability will come quicker than I think, but I'm also pretty confident that there will be a transition period where AI will augment, rather than replace, knowledge workers.)

At least my wife is a teacher at a fancy preschool. I am fairly confident that rich people will want humans teaching their kids for longer than other professions will last.

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brosirmandude t1_it7auks wrote

Yeah I wouldn't have thought this a year ago but my partner is a librarian and probably has way better career security than I do.

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AdditionalPizza OP t1_it734wc wrote

>I'm also pretty confident that there will be a transition period where AI will augment, rather than replace

Yeah don't get me wrong. I don't even mean full automation at first. I mean automation that increases efficiency. Job losses will start to become more and more commonplace starting in 2025. All while LLM's are assisting in break through after break through. We don't need full autonomy of the work force, just enough that we can't expect our current system to work at all.

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Redvolition t1_it7zfhk wrote

I believe paper publishing scientists will be amongst the last to be replaced, albeit the lab technicians and assistants doing less innovative work will be far sooner. By the time AI can publish scientific papers to the point of replacing scientists themselves, this is it, we already reached the singularity.

Problem is, this type of innovative work likely requires minimum >120 IQ, which is 1 in 11 people. If you don't reach that cutoff, the remaining options will mostly be traditional manual jobs requiring <100 IQ, or those that benefit from physical human interaction, such as therapists and prostitutes. Basically the middle class, middle cognitive demand jobs for people between 100 and 120 IQ will be eradicated.

If it is difficult to monetize a career in entertainment now, it will be an order or two of magnitude harder in the future, due to competition with AI generators and performers.

Even assuming you have the AI to control robots, the raw materials and fuel to power them cost a lot of resources, and manual laborers are amongst the cheapest, so as long as the robots remain costing more than 4 or 5 years worth of wages, which adds up to 150k to 300k USD in America, plumbers, electricians, and housekeepers will keep their jobs.

We are heading towards a society in the 2030s being stratified as such, in order of wealth:

  1. Capitalists (~1%)
  2. Entertainers and Performers (~0.05%)
  3. Innovation STEM jobs (~5%)
  4. Management and administration (~5%)
  5. Physical interaction jobs (~5%)
  6. Manual labor jobs (~30%)
  7. UBI majority (53.95%)
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visarga t1_it8pdf2 wrote

> It needs to be 10 to 15% of the workforce jobless with no skills outside of their extinct domain.

The number of job positions the economy supports is not hard capped at some maximum value. It's not a zero sum game, more robots doesn't mean less people. But as soon as we get the fruits of this technology we can raise our expectations, and we raise much faster than automation can automate. Just expecting clean air, good food and basic necessities for everyone is a hard task, I bet we'll still be working until we accomplish it.

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AdditionalPizza OP t1_it8v9c1 wrote

>The number of job positions the economy supports is not hard capped at some maximum value.

No, you're right that it isn't. But I think time plays a large factor here. If suddenly enough people's employment is displaced, and automation is gobbling up enough jobs, then we have a case of more unemployed people per month than new human viable jobs created per month. It may very well settle itself, but if the rate is high enough it won't matter. You can't have a large portion of society unemployed for very long, chaos ensues.

Unless of course there's a lot of menial labour jobs to go around, that probably will result in the same situation though. I think in a situation where we have physical robots able to do labour, it's well past the point of society needing to change.

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brosirmandude t1_it7am4u wrote

As one of those digital knowledge workers who's likely going to be automated away in the first wave, I honestly have no idea how to prepare myself or my family for any of this.

I think I might switch to focusing on building my skills in games and entertainment. When the amount of humans needed for digital work drops, the need for them to find joy in other things probably rises.and hobbies like games or TCGs seem likely to stick a bit longer due to social aspects.

But even that is longer term. Short term I really still don't know how to deal if there's mass layoffs and the government takes literal years to rekon with that.

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blueSGL t1_it7tzvt wrote

I've already seen people generate images for their RPG campaigns using Stable Diffusion, how many rule/campaign books will a LLM need to crunch through before it can spit out endless variations on a theme for your favorite system (or act as a major accelerator for those creating them already)

Edit: actually lets expand on this.

What happens when a sufficiently advanced model gets licensed for fine tune to paying companies and Wizards of the Coast feeds in the entire corpus of data they control and starts using that to create or help create expansions and systems and the former creators shift to editors.

Now do that for every industry that has a text backbone somewhere in it. e.g. movie/tv scripts, books, comics, radio dramas, music video concepts, and so on.

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AdditionalPizza OP t1_it7z0r3 wrote

I would suggest trying something that is self sufficient, more so than an "employable" skill.

Take it up as a hobby now, and if you truly are in the first wave, you'll maybe have some totally unrelated skill you can use for passive income in a market that isn't entirely dictated by IT.

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overlordpotatoe t1_it6r5o3 wrote

I hope we find ways to make this a good thing. It should be a good thing that if you want to make something, you don't have to spend hours manually coding it.

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phriot t1_it71izf wrote

>I predict we're going to have a very rocky ride as people aren't able to accept this when we will most likely start to see the very first signs of intellectual labor replacements implemented next year, 2023 already.

Won't most people just use these tools to increase their productivity for a while, before management realizes that the workers can just be replaced? I feel like that could take at least several years to play out, or do you think we're already at that point?

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brosirmandude t1_it79qjc wrote

>We're talking about AI better being able to identify and specify the needs of the client in question and better able to provide a solution in a shorter but more importantly, more effective way.

Gets even more interesting when the client in question gets their wants and needs from an AI system.

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purple_hamster66 t1_it8u5wp wrote

Meh. The innovation and discovery programmers do simply doesn’t have the million examples that other digital fields have. Where are you going to get the training data on how a programmer interacts with a client? How about most of my clients who say they “don’t know what they want but know when they see it”? What type of mass training can you possibly collect on this activity?

It’s easy to mimic software that goes “when I click here, make this object red”. It’s much harder to ask a different question of a infinitely-patient mom than of a doctor who will give you 5 minutes of their time. Imagine an AI running a focus group where they don’t even control the conversation, and knowing that they need to interrupt with the right questions and/or comments, but without even having seen a focus group before. Because every client is different in the same way that moms, docs, and focus groups differ.

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ActuaryGlittering16 t1_itdjha0 wrote

Strongly doubt lawyers are getting automated away anytime soon. They’ll just have a lot more tools to work with when researching and drafting documents.

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futebollounge t1_itw39ay wrote

They don’t due to regulatory reasons. But they sure as hell can be

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ActuaryGlittering16 t1_itx0aze wrote

They won’t though. Every single person born before I’d say 2010 is already adapted to a world where there isn’t this tech. The blue collar worker who gets in a car wreck is going to want to talk to a human being. That’s not gonna change anytime soon regardless of the advancements.

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futebollounge t1_itx1x02 wrote

Your statement doesn’t make sense to me. That might be true for every person born before 1980.

Also, if you’re in a car wreck and talking to insurance, you won’t even tell that it’s just an AI talking to you, so you won’t care.

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ActuaryGlittering16 t1_itx3g01 wrote

That’s fine. That’s still billions of people who will want to deal with human lawyers.

If you’re in a car wreck and the insurance company offers you $50K for $300K worth of damage are you just going to call an AI out of the blue? Who will operate the AI law firm? Who will be licensed to help you?

I agree that in time everything will be automated away but the comment I initially responded to argues this is happening to attorneys in a few years. No way in hell. Try 15-20 years.

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futebollounge t1_ityc6ya wrote

True. But I still think it’s largely due to regulation and lobbying that will fight tooth and nail to keep it that way.

Otherwise people would only want a human lawyer if they have a winning track record over an AI lawyer.

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