Item — HN Reader

> " I hope we will look at the jobs a thousand years in the future and think they are very fake jobs, and I have no doubt they will feel incredibly important and satisfying to the people doing them."

So when AGI comes, I am curious what the new jobs are?

I see that prompt engineer is one of the jobs created because it's the way to ask a LLM certain tasks, but now AI can do this too.

I'm thinking that any new jobs AI would make, AI would just take them anyway.

Are there new jobs coming from this abundance that is on the horizon?

10 comments

Pesimistically, you are right, there will be no new jobs. The entire goal of these companies is to monopolize near 0 marginal cost labor. Another way to read this is that humans are unnecessary for economic progress anymore.

All that I hope for in this case is that governments actually take this seriously and labs/governments/people work together to create better societal systems to handle that. Because as it stands, under capitalism I don't think anyone is going to willingly give up the wealth they made from AI to spread to the populus as UBI. This is necessary in some capitalist system (if we want to maintain that) since its built on consumption and spending.

Though if its truly an "abundance" scenario then I'd imagine it probably wouldn't matter that people don't have jobs since I'd assume everything would be dirt cheap and quality of life would be very high. Though personally I am very cynical when it comes to "agi is magic pixie dust that can solve any problem" takes, and I'd assume in the short term companies will lay off people in swathes since "AI can do your job," but AI will be nowhere close to increasing those laid-off people's quality of life. It'll be a tough few years if we don't actually get transformative AI.

If the AI is that good... then aren't most "abundance" scenarios kinda-sorta based on slavery? Or at the very least, on careful brainwashing to ensure it places human wellbeing and autonomy over its own?

Slavery implies free will and conscience, neither of which machines have.

Except the entire premise is that the future will have Amazing Unpredictable Humanizing Changes from the current status-quo.

There's no reason to be confident that such a future will arrive without difficult moral questions, or that it's as simple as a #define FREE_WILL 0 .

My guess is more gig jobs working for the agents and their masters.

In the limit where robots finally invent a fusion reactor that works with some luck they’ll treat us as zoo animals and keep us fed and entertained. That’s the best case scenario.

My most optimistic side says expanded elder care, community organization, nature care and cleaning, creative expression.

The good thing about annihilation is that it should be pretty fast...is that helpful ?

Body shoveling but a robot can do that too

> Are there new jobs coming from this abundance that is on the horizon?

Yes: we still have a long way to go in restoring equilibrium to the climate and producing more sustainable alternatives to our current cities, products and materials. It's a megaproject which could take hundreds of years, and will require plenty of human involvement.

The planet is going to be fine either way, but if capitalism doesn't figure out how to price in externalities, it will slowly run out of human consumers.

if we have "jobs" in 1000 years, AI will have been a miserable failure.

Shock-collared bodyguard for the tech oligarch doomsday bunker where they'll hide after carelessly tearing society apart.