Sam Altman wants you to be realistic. The OpenAI CEO was speaking frankly to the Atlantic when he wanted to put the AI optimists’ ideas to rest.
“Jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop” as the result of AI, Altman says, but they will be replaced by the jobs of the future:
Altman imagines that far better jobs will be created in their place. “I don’t think we’ll want to go back,” he said. When I asked him what these future jobs might look like, he said he doesn’t know. He suspects there will be a wide range of jobs for which people will always prefer a human. (Massage therapists? I wondered.) His chosen example was teachers. I found this hard to square with his outsize enthusiasm for AI tutors. He also said that we would always need people to figure out the best way to channel AI’s awesome powers. “That’s going to be a super-valuable skill,” he said. “You have a computer that can do anything; what should it go do?”
…Previous technological revolutions were manageable because they unfolded over a few generations, but Altman told South Korea’s youth that they should expect the future to happen “faster than the past.” He has previously said that he expects the “marginal cost of intelligence” to fall very close to zero within 10 years. The earning power of many, many workers would be drastically reduced in that scenario. It would result in a transfer of wealth from labor to the owners of capital so dramatic, Altman has said, that it could be remedied only by a massive countervailing redistribution.
The Atlantic
While I’m not going to discount the need for more equitable wealth distribution, I think that, if there is any tragedy here, it will be the “many, many workers” in the “world where…much of the population requires regular UBI payments to survive.” I fear that many workers simply will not want to work with AI. They will lament that AI “took” their old job, while refusing to reskill for their new one.
As smaller and smaller language models enable AI development and inference on smaller and smaller device platforms, AI access will increase proportionally. Language models exist to run on Raspberry Pi, and people are running LLMs on their phones – not counting the 100 million-plus mobile users of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. As the AI access curve flattens, more and more workers will gain familiarity with AI and will become accustomed to using AI to achieve daily levels of productivity now thought impossible.
But this is only true of that segment of workers who are open-minded enough to embrace new technology. There are still Gen X and Boomer workers out there who have never had a computer in the home. Could they have afforded a Chromebook or something over the years? Undoubtedly many of them could have. But it was their conscious decision, made long ago, to not gain the same level of tech familiarity as a personal computer user.
Up to 1 in 7 American adults don’t have a smartphone, up to 39% of seniors. For many of these people, this decision is certainly conscious: Could they have one if they wanted? Most likely. Do they want one? Probably not.
AI is already proving a divisive flashpoint in American culture. From artists’ concerns of plagiarism and copyright infringement to revenge porn, AI is either being blamed for (or being actively used to commit) horrible injustices. Memory is not ephemeral – many of the same people who are decrying AI today are the same people who will be complaining of “lost jobs” in 10 years, while deleting “spam” emails from AI training programs. They will scream “operator” into every customer service line until age 120.
They don’t like AI, they don’t want it, they won’t work with it.
The elevator operator of yore is the example often given for replacement by technology, but were their skills restricted to pressing elevator buttons?
I don’t think many workers will need to be permanently displaced as a result of AI – but I do see job titles being lost. The elevator operator of yore is the example often given for replacement by technology, but were their skills restricted to pressing elevator buttons? Could the same skill set not be used by a concierge, a personal assistant, a chauffeur? The elevator operator cultivated skills of personability, customer service, and grace under fire – the elevator was just the means by which he attained those skills.
Workers who flatly refuse to learn how to interact with AI, to learn how to best use AI to sharpen or augment their existing skills, will be pining for the “good old days” of 2019 for the rest of their lives, and will lament how “AI took their job”. The workers who re-evaluate their skillsets, who realize that their skills need only to be reapplied in new contexts and ways – no, they’re not just someone who filled in spreadsheets all day, they solved financial problems! – will never be replaced by AI. They may get new job titles, they may find themselves “suddenly surrounded by” AI, but they will continue to flourish by demonstrating the skillsets they’ve been cultivating this whole time.
AI will only make such workers better, and prove – there’s no replacing them.
