alt Hacker NewsPeople are not simple machines or animals. Unless AI becomes strictly better than humans and humans + AI, from the perspective of other humans, at all activities, there will still be lots of things for humans to do to provide value for each other.
The question is how do our individuals, and more importantly our various social and economic systems handle it when exactly what humans can do to provide value for each other shifts rapidly, and balances of power shift rapidly.
If the benefits of AI accrue to/are captured by a very small number of people, and the costs are widely dispersed things can go very badly without strong societies that are able to mitigate the downsides and spread the upsides.
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Workshopping this tortured metaphor:
AI, at the limit, is a vampiric technology, sucking the differentiated economic value from those that can train it. What happens when there are no more hosts to donate more training-blood? This, to me, is a big problem, because a model will tend to drift from reality without more training-blood.
The owners of the tech need to reinvest in the hosts.
I'd be more worried about the implicit power imbalance. It's not what can humans provide for each-other, it's what can humans provide for a handful of ultra-wealthy oligarchs.
I was trying to phrase something like this, but you said it a lot better than I ever could.
I can’t help but smile at the possibility that you could be a bot.
I'm optimistic.
Banks used to have rooms full of bank clerks who manually did double-entry bookkeeping for all the bank's transactions. For most people, this was a very boring job, and it made bank transactions slow and expensive. In the 50's and 60's we replaced all these people with computers. An entire career of "bank clerk" vanished, and it was a net good for humanity. The cost of bank transactions came down (by a lot!), banks became more responsive and served their customers better. And the people who had to do double-entry bookkeeping all day long got to do other, probably more interesting, jobs.
There are a ton of current careers that are just email + meetings + powerpoint + spreadsheet that can go the same way. They're boring jobs (for most people doing them) and having humans do them makes administration slow and expensive. Automating them will be a net good for humanity. Imagine if "this meeting could have been an email" actually moves to "this meeting never happened at all because the person making the decision just told the LLM and it did it".
You are right that the danger is that most of the benefits of this automation will accrue to capital, but this didn't happen with the bank clerk automation - bank customers accrued a lot of the benefits too. I suspect the same will be true with this automation - if we can create and scale organisations easier and cheaper without employing all the admin staff that we currently do, then maybe we create more agile, responsive, organisations that serve their customers better.