alt Hacker NewsHow far are we from reliable AI? One that could, for example, handle 80% of office jobs without screwing up more than humans?
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Hard to say, because jobs and processes will adjust to accommodate AI strengths and deficiencies, as AI usage increases.
It's similar to how automation in manufacturing works: we may start with augmenting the human workers with machines improving some parts of the process, but eventually the process itself gets redesigned around the machines.
I'd say somewhere between 2-20 years, provided the current rate of research and compute investments.
Yeah, before we worry about a "coming intelligence explosion", we should first try to avoid a stupidity explosion...
There is no reliable data on how many of these jobs shouldn't exist at all, even without AI
My guess would be 15 years. But I think it will take longer than that before people actually replace office workers with AI.
Society is completely changed if that happens and humanity should be setting up backup plans to handle this potential. I did see Trump mention he's going to meet with AI companies who want to propose giving all American's stock which could be one way this money driven society continues when tons are no longer working.
Another concept I thought was AI is irrelevant without our content, so AI should pay all humans to access all the content we create daily (voice & text conversations we have with each other, as well our photos and videos). We choose what to publish to our websites (everyone has one, but AI agents cant access it without paying for access to our websites). I wrote more about this concept on my substack https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans... ... just one thought of keeping this money economy going when so many coud no longer are working cause the white collar jobs are gone.
That's kind of jumping a few steps ahead; it assumes that we know 80% of office jobs can be fully automated already. And if that were the case, we'd have non-AI software doing that already. I mean we do, but it's not causing people to lose jobs en masse.
(it probably did cost jobs, but more the kind that a job like data entry was replaced by OCR)