This video of David Attenborough narrating a programmer’s life shows Hollywood actors were right to be afraid of AI::If you’ve ever wanted acclaimed broadcaster and documentary filmmaker Sir David Attenborough to narrate your life, you’re not alone — and you don’t have to keep merely wishing for it anymore.
Hot take: I think there’s not a great deal to fear even for most common people. Technological innovation has always stolen away jobs from somewhere, but the large majority of people are still finding work despite the human population exploding drastically over the last century as that happened.
Because realistically, if only a few people are working and earning money, then there’s no one consuming to feed the shareholders’ desire for unsustainable infinite growth every quarter. It would hurt the economy as much as it does the people in it, and that’s the one thing that regulators actually care about.
A lot of it is how fast AI can wipe out industries. Most technological breakthroughs took time, something like this could literally be overnight. We need time to adapt.
Probably half of all office jobs out there could be replaced by a few hundred lines of javascript or python operated by one person replacing a team of 20. I had to write my email address on a paper form today. Paper. And it’s been what, half a century since technology at least an order of magnitude more efficient has become accessible to companies?
Technological breakthroughs can happen at breakneck pace, but industries WILL take decades to fully adapt, because the inertia of old capital can drive established but inefficient processes for a very long time until capital dries out, while on the other hand there are only so many startups popping up every year to leverage new efficiencies (and even fewer successful ones, not least of which because VC spending is aimed at buzzword-laden bullshit rather than anything actually meaningful… crypto-metaverses ain’t putting anyone out of a job any time soon).
I’m talking about the industries like the original post. I don’t foresee AI replacing office workers overnight, it’s far too costly for that.
Humans always had more skills we hadn’t mechanized yet.
After proper AI - what’s left?
GPT and Stable Diffusion obviously aren’t Asimov-grade robotics, but they can already do a ton of stuff we thought would be the last vestiges of humanity’s unique talents. Right now it’s still kinda jank. But it’s been a year. Two or three, for LLMs. And in the middle of this ongoing explosion, we don’t even need human beings for porn anymore. Video’s gonna go from A Scanner Darkly to nearly flawless in the blink of an eye. All it takes is someone puzzling out the right shape of the network and then pointing a gigawatt of PCs at some DVD rips.
We’re talking about a loom for art. And chatbots that… work. There’s jobs that humans are still definitely better at, but a lot of them are the kind where you’re competing with silicone.