this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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You are making the same mistake I see a lot of people make when it comes to AI, which is looking at the status quo as a snapshot rather than a change over time.
The last widely reported on AI generated 'show' was the Seinfeld one from...checks notes...a few months ago.
The leap between what that was a few months back and this here is quite something.
So your "right now" may be true for today, but quite possibly by as early as the end of this year there will very much be something to worry about.
(Though really, there still won't be much to worry about, as the future will almost certainly be AI plus human efforts, not either or.)
I think you’re making the same mistake as people who thought self-driving cars would be here 5 years ago. You can’t just extrapolate out technological progress. The relatively easy things get solved first and relatively quickly but we may need a decade to solve some of the most challenging scenarios.
Self driving cars were here five years ago, which is when Waymo first had driverless cars on roads. Tesla had a wide release of FSD 'Beta' three years ago.
And there's a gulf of a difference on the speed at which hardware that has an 8 year average refresh cycle grows in a market and software that can reach a hundred million users in 3 months.
You’re right. We all love our fully self-driving cars and by 2026, chatbots will write longform narratives so beautifully, we won’t even need cars because we’ll all be transported anywhere we want to go by the magic of books.
Think the concern is AI+humans means a lot less humans needed to do the job
There are a few fields where there's capped demand so extra supply would mean less humans.
But I think people will be surprised by just how much of our economy is capped by supply, and what happens to niche demand as supply rapidly increases.
The people most in trouble are the ones that really suck at what they do, and whose only job security is constrained supply.
But at the same time, lowering transactional costs (in the sense of the essay "the nature of the firm") will mean a lot more opportunities for small and medium entrepreneurship around passion side gigs suddenly being economically viable as full time gigs.
In reality, the groups most screwed long term here are going to be larger corporations who lose the advantages of scale but are still weighed down by the hindrance of slow moving bureaucracy.