I came across this article in another Lemmy community that dislikes AI. I’m reposting instead of cross posting so that we could have a conversation about how “work” might be changing with advancements in technology.
The headline is clickbaity because Altman was referring to how farmers who lived decades ago might perceive that the work “you and I do today” (including Altman himself), doesn’t look like work.
The fact is that most of us work far abstracted from human survival by many levels. Very few of us are farming, building shelters, protecting our families from wildlife, or doing the back breaking labor jobs that humans were forced to do generations ago.
In my first job, which was IT support, the concept was not lost on me that all day long I pushed buttons to make computers beep in more friendly ways. There was no physical result to see, no produce to harvest, no pile of wood being transitioned from a natural to a chopped state, nothing tangible to step back and enjoy at the end of the day.
Bankers, fashion designers, artists, video game testers, software developers and countless other professions experience something quite similar. Yet, all of these jobs do in some way add value to the human experience.
As humanity’s core needs have been met with technology requiring fewer human inputs, our focus has been able to shift to creating value in less tangible, but perhaps not less meaningful ways. This has created a more dynamic and rich life experience than any of those previous farming generations could have imagined. So while it doesn’t seem like the work those farmers were accustomed to, humanity has been able to shift its attention to other types of work for the benefit of many.
I postulate that AI - as we know it now - is merely another technological tool that will allow new layers of abstraction. At one time bookkeepers had to write in books, now software automatically encodes accounting transactions as they’re made. At one time software developers might spend days setting up the framework of a new project, and now an LLM can do the bulk of the work in minutes.
These days we have fewer bookkeepers - most companies don’t need armies of clerks anymore. But now we have more data analysts who work to understand the information and make important decisions. In the future we may need fewer software coders, and in turn, there will be many more software projects that seek to solve new problems in new ways.
How do I know this? I think history shows us that innovations in technology always bring new problems to be solved. There is an endless reservoir of challenges to be worked on that previous generations didn’t have time to think about. We are going to free minds from tasks that can be automated, and many of those minds will move on to the next level of abstraction.
At the end of the day, I suspect we humans are biologically wired with a deep desire to output rewarding and meaningful work, and much of the results of our abstracted work is hard to see and touch. Perhaps this is why I enjoy mowing my lawn so much, no matter how advanced robotic lawn mowing machines become.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true.
My job started as a relatively BS job. Basically, the company I work for makes physical things, and the people who use those physical things need to create reports to keep the regulators happy. So my first couple years on the job was improving the report generation app, which was kind of useful since it saved people an hour or two a week in producing reports. But the main reason we had this app in the first place was because our competitors had one, and the company needed a digital product to point to in order to sell customers (who didn’t use the app, someone a few layers down did) on it. Basically, my job existed to check a box.
However, my department went above and beyond and created tools to optimize our customers’ businesses. We went past reporting and built simulations related to reporting, but that brought actual value. They could reduce or increase use of our product based on actual numbers, and that change would increase their profitability (more widgets produced per dollar spent). When the company did a round of cost cutting, they took a look at our department ready to axe us, but instead increased our funding when they saw the potential of our simulations, and now we’re making using the app standard for all of our on-staff consultants and front-and-center for all new customer acquisitions (i.e. not just reporting, but showcasing our app as central to the customer’s business).
All that has happened over the last year or so, so I guess we’ll see if that actually increases customer retention and acquisition. My point is that my job transitioned from something mostly useless (glorified PDF generator) to something that actually provides value to the business and likely reduces costs downstream (that’s about 3 steps away from the retail store, but it could help cut prices a few percent on certain products while improving profits for us and our customers).
I disagree with your assertion that many jobs exist because people need jobs. I think jobs exist because even “BS” job create value. If there was a labor surplus today, jobs would be created the lower cost of labor acquisition makes certain products profitable that wouldn’t otherwise be.
That said, I am 100% a fan of something like UBI, though I personally would make it based on income (i.e. a Negative Income Tax, so only those under $X get the benefit), but that’s mostly to make the dollar amount of that program less scary. For example, there are ~130M households in the US (current pop is 342M, or about 2.6 people per household). The poverty line is $32,150 for a family, and sending that out as UBI would cost ~4.1T, which is almost as much as the current US budget. If we instead brought everyone to the poverty line through something like NIT, that’s only ~168B, or about 4% of the current budget.
Regardless of the approach, I think ensuring everyone is between the poverty line (i.e. unemployed people) and a living wage (i.e. minimum wage people) is a good idea for a few reasons:
Giving people a backup plan encourages people to take more risks, which should result in more value across the economy.