alt Hacker NewsLet me put it like this: I expect AI to replace much of human wage labor over the next 20 years and push many of us, and myself almost certainly included, into premature retirement. I'm personally concerned that in a few years, I'll find my software proficiency to be as useful as my chess proficiency today is useful to Stockfish. I am afraid of a massive social upheaval both for myself and my family, and for society at large.
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Here “much of” is doing the heavy lifting. Are you willing to commit to a percentage or a range?
I work at an insurance company and I can’t see AI replacing even 10% of the employees here. Too much of what we do is locked up in decades-old proprietary databases that cannot be replaced for legal reasons. We still rely on paper mail for a huge amount of communication with policyholders. The decisions we make on a daily basis can’t be trusted to AI for legal reasons. If AI caused even a 1% increase in false rejections of claims it would be an enormous liability issue.
> massive social upheaval
You don’t even need AGI for that though, just unbounded investor enthusiasm and a regulatory environment that favors AI providers at the expense of everyone else.
My point is there are number of things that can cause large scale unemployment in the next 20 years and it doesn’t make sense to worry about AGI specifically while ignoring all of the other equally likely root causes (like a western descent into oligarchy and crony capitalism, just to name one).
There are other bounds here at play that are often not talked about.
Ai runs on computers. Consider the undecidability of Rices theorem. Where compiled code of non trivial statements may or may not be error free. Even an ai can’t guarantee its compiled code is error free. Not because it wouldn’t write sufficient code that solves a problem, but the code it writes is bounded by other externalities. Undecidability in general makes the dream of generative ai considerably more challenging than how it’s being ‘sold.