Jfc this site is the worst. Use your words instead of drive by downvoting.

There are jobs AI can't easily come for... not always nice ones, but either too physically fiddly or too cheap to bother automating.

But jobs go "extinct" all the time. My ancestors going back generations were sugarhouse labourers. That job's gone, but the lineage isn't: we just do different things now.

The pattern seems pretty consistent: raise the floor (dishwashers, CNC machines, laundry), and people tend to climb to higher levels of abstraction. The real question is who captures those productivity gains; and historically, it isn't the workers.

Shoes are the classic example. Automation made them cheaper and accessible to everyone. Then, once the market was captured, mid-tier became the ceiling and anything above it got expensive again. Nobody won except the owners.

I console myself with the fact that without a functioning economy, AI will implode since capital will dry up. Then all of the investment in data centers, R&D, etc. will never be recovered. Then we'll be back to rational thinking? Maybe?

Corporations exist for one purpose: to get as much money as possible. Side concerns, which can range from "not destroying the environment" or "not destroying the economy," are objectively not their goal, nor do they consider them their responsibility. Those are things "someone else" should worry about.

AI destroying all jobs is similar to a nuclear arms race; these companies don't want to eliminate everyone's ability to buy things, but they don't want to be the only entity without that ability, so ...

Things like "jobs" and "careers" are so integral to society that we can't really imagine what society would be like in a world where people don't have any clear purpose. That's why you won't get a definitive answer. The whole idea of a singularity is that people don't have the faintest clue what day to day life would look like after.

We often to choose to believe that a singularity can't happen, because we don't know what that even means. We can't answer the simple question. So it definitely better not happen, that would be very inconvenient.

If they don't need your labor, and they don't need you as a customer, and they don't care about you as a person... where does that leave you?

[to be clear, I think post-scarcity, even in knowledge work, is a lot further off than most ai-doomsayers or ai-worshipers who take statements from people like Altman and Musk at face value]

Envisioned another way, the future of labor might look the way it did for laborers over 100 years ago, before major industries unionized; making 'Amazon-bucks' that can only be redeemed at the 'Amazon company store'.

There was unfortunately no Q&A in the lecture, as probably the one question I would have asked him was this: What if the Luddites had gotten their way? What do you imagine our society and world would be like right now?

It's not meant to be a trick question or a "gotcha" question. Society would indeed have been different. Maybe it would be all wonderfully Star Trek utopia and we'd have found a win-win for everyone. Or maybe we'd just be not nearly as technically advanced as a society as we are now.

Musk's entire history on this planet betrays him to be a profoundly selfish individual with perilously little regard for anyone else. Musk and his ilk (Trump, Bezos, Page, Ellison, Thiel, etc) are more likely to see you ground up into Soylent Green than to offer largess like UBI.

By the time you find out that their promises of UBI are empty it’s too late to do anything about it.

Americans are fine with low taxes for billionaires and don't mind high inequality as one of their core beliefs is that upward class mobility is achievable and they might also get rich.

I mean yeah, obviously. You can’t trust a word out of either of their mouths.

An alternative possibility is that the models become much cheaper and their use becomes more ubiquitous which would be helpful.

Every week was a struggle to eat and the cost of living has significantly increased since then.

I guess the question is what is the terminal percentage of people who can’t afford to exist?

The industrial revolution created a hell on Earth for workers for the better part of a century.

Yeah, and the people suffering are not going to like that. If people are afraid of being in that group, then they will not be very happy about it.

If you put yourself in the shoes of someone suffering from AI, how comforting do you think your observations here are?

> AI is an incredibly powerful technological shift in our way of life but where is the net employment hit taking place? Unemployment numbers remain stable.

At this point, a lot of AI is hot water rather then powerful shift in our way of life.