[Bjorkbat]

First, I’m kind of surprised that low/no-code tools, as well as outsourcing, weren’t an existential threat well before AI. Like, anyone can create a website nowadays, and yet it’s never been a better time to be a web developer.

I think we underestimate the difficulty of our jobs, or perhaps we underestimate the chance that something better will take its place. Perhaps a bit of both.

The other thing that helps me sleep at night is that I really don’t believe that AGI is as near or inevitable as people make it out to be. I don’t necessarily think models will simply get better with more data and I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that we’ll just somehow figure out intelligence. When I think about AI’s bitter lesson, that nothing has really worked better than scale and data, I take that as a sign that we really don’t understand intelligence. I don’t take it as a sign that “scale is all you need”. Maybe to a certain point, but for AGI? I don’t know man.

Of course, suppose I’m wrong and we create AI that’s smarter than your typical software developer and costs the equivalent of pennies an hour. In which case, well, game over, but I don’t think I’ll feel like much of a loser. Sure, there goes my job, but the economy also probably gets wrecked in the process for a variety of factors. Massive unemployment aside, there’s also the fact that paying for software is kind of stupid when you can just pay a competent AI to make it for you or use some open source alternative made by people pooling AI resources together. This is kind of a big deal considering that tech companies basically carry the stock market. I haven’t even touched on the damage done to the rest of the economy by the existence of intelligence-on-demand for cheap. Either the government considers drastic measures and a radical rethinking of economics, or they ride out the worst economic crisis in history and try to figure out which holy cow gets cut from the government budget now that tax revenue is in free fall. Despite how little faith I have in the government, I trust their self-preservation instincts will kick in and they’ll resort to taking certain socialist economic policies more seriously.