I keep coming back to this thought. Maybe it’s how I was raised, but knowing that I’m doing something useful to other people / humanity is the entire point.
When a machine can do everything better than we can, then what do we derive meaning from?
I usually get out of the existential dread by thinking that we’re still some time away from the issue, and that there will still be some pursuits left, like space colonization. But it’s not fully satisfying.
He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry, or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who’d taken a notion to help out for a while.
“Of course I don’t have to do this,” one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. “But look, this table’s clean.”
He agreed that the table was clean.
“Usually,” the man said. “I work on alien – no offense – alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that’s my specialty… like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalog, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But… the job’s never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get reevaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled… but” – he slapped the table – “when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you’ve done something. It’s an achievement.”
“But in the end, it’s still just cleaning a table.”
“And therefore does not really signify anything on the cosmic scale of events?” the man suggested.
He smiled in response to the man’s grin, “Well, yes.”
“But then, what does signify? My other work? Is that really important either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway” – the man laughed – “people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And,” the man said with a smile, “it’s a good way of meeting people. So where are you from anyway?”
It definitely is (and I would encourage that even).
But such resistance cannot be luddite if it actually wants to win. Therefore, its goal cannot be "no AI", but rather "AI used for the benefit of society".
My grandmother-in-law especially enjoyed our visits, engaging her in conversation, she delighted in serving us a lovely hot pot of tea. We would give her a few days notice so she could bake a cake, later she just bought one.
Thanking of yourself as "redundant" limits your view of a human to that of a machine, and in doing so you are doing humanity a great disservice. I'd recommend reading the Culture series for a vision of a future where AI has essentially taken over and humans can live out their lives as they want instead of as they need to.
You don't need "companies". You need enough customers to buy/support your work so that you get a living out of it.
Being a software developer is a _facet_ of your work. You (unconsciously perhaps) do many other things around/with it that the most efficient AI today cannot do alone. And AGI is still far on the horizon, if not a mirage.
> What if you WANT to have a career or a job which is now done exclusively by AGI?
> If AGI takes my job as a software developer, my career is finished. I don't know what else to do.
Do you want to have a software developer career for the sake of having a software developer career (because you enjoy it), or are you worried about your livelihood?
Use your imagination a little... There are endless things you can do. I don't understand this mindset. Especially if you are intelligent enough to be a competent software developer, you have the capacity to do a LOT or at least in my experience you probably do.
It depends; if you do that job or career for fun, then keep doing it!
If you do that job because you like contributing to society and not because you like the job itself, then find another way to contribute to society.
Even in a scenario where all jobs are taken by AGI (a utopia if we can get rid of capitalism and wealth, but a dystopia if the billionaire class is the only one that benefits), you could do something as profound as raising children, or something as social as organizing music and art festivals.
But there are people who already doing what you are currently doing. Also they do it waaaay better. If this does not make you redundant, why would AI do it?
No they don't. There is a very limited supply of developers who are better than me.
I am talking about a future where we have a practically infinite supply of cheap AGI software developers that are vastly superior to the smartest human being who ever lived.
And where do you find the energy technology required for that to happen?
Hint: it's not on the radar, but if you account for several fundamental breakthroughs in energy production, storage and transport, and all that while having positive side-effects on Earth's ecosystem, within the next 50 years.
Totally agree, IF an AGI can fully replace/improve on the work of developers, it's definitely cheaper.
But: 1/ cheaper isn't always affordable either.
2/ who will engineer/maintain/steer AGI once AGI takes the job? once you make that leap, there's no way back, no one to understand the machine that makes the stuff we rely on.
And that circles back, in some way, with the debate about AI-generated art: there's no human component in it, there's no understanding, no feedback loop, no conversation.