Reddituser45005 t1_iyznsdg wrote
It’s a mistake to view this as just a threat to unskilled labor. Yes, physical robots can replace unskilled labor in many cases but the same underlying technology will significantly impact skilled jobs. We are already seeing that. In my previous job, I was working with automated systems that replaced pharmacists and pharmacy techs. More and more legal research and documentation is being automated. The bulk of corporate white collar desk jobs that consist of shuffling and summarizing information and filtering it based on some particular knowledge set are in danger.
Djasdalabala t1_iz1c3l3 wrote
>It’s a mistake to view this as just a threat to unskilled labor.
Absolutely. In many cases it's the complete opposite: intellectual jobs are often easier to automate than manual ones.
Building a bot that can do *everything* a good plumber can do pretty much means cracking AGI. On the other hand, some very smart people do some difficult, but ultimately very narrowly-bounded tasks that a computer will do better.
As an extreme/forced example, look at chess: it's a "smart person" activity where computers utterly dominate.
antarickshaw t1_iz5gpt7 wrote
> Building a bot that can do everything a good plumber can do pretty much means cracking AGI.
Can do everything will not be the one replacing most unskilled jobs. Highly automated factories(think tesla) have been replacing unskilled jobs for almost a decade now, which is the reason manufacturing is coming back to US again. Service industry is also being targeted next (pizza) etc. Regarding plumbing, carpenter etc. more and more manufacturing will move to huge automated factories or 3d printers. Like the electronics revolution, we'll move to buying new stuff instead of repairing.
dgkimpton t1_iz0xlyk wrote
Indeed. It's only a tiny hop from "unskilled labour" (which is inherently badly named) to doing "skilled labour". Programmers like to joke that it's OK to make an AI because they will at least be needed to program the AI's... but fail to realise that a general purpose AI that can outthink a human will quickly become able to program itself. We'll be left only with manual labour, and even that for only a short period until robot bodies are cheap enough.
Doom87er t1_iz15gp8 wrote
As a person who works with AI believe me I am aware that a GAI could do my job a million times better than me.
However, a weak AI no matter how advanced will never magically become a GAI purely from becoming strong enough. A GAI is a completely different kind of AI that we are getting closer to, but the AIs coming out today are not that.
poobearcatbomber t1_iz3noi9 wrote
Ya I don't think engineers know what's coming. OpenAI can already write pretty damn good code.
maddogcow t1_iz25coz wrote
This is what I was thinking. I’d be willing to bet that it’s a threat to most jobs. People radically underestimate what machines are already capable of doing…. In regards to many things; humans are nowhere near as special as they believe they are
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