| If it's any consolation, I suspect people worrying about job loses and a loss of meaning will soon realise these are minor concerns. What people always struggle to model with AI are the step functions that occur in capabilities as new algorithmic advancements are made. Historically those come maybe every ~5-10 years, although the pace has dramatically increase in the last decade and last 5 years. Most people right now are plotting a linear improvement over the several years as models get bigger, harnesses become more complex and capable, more people adopt AI for efficiency, etc. Some are adding small exponents, but most are fundamentally modelling wrong. What's more likely to happen is that in a few months someone at some AI lab will leak that they've made a breakthrough internally. Then another leak will come, and another. We'll know something big is going on because we'll see strange things happening within governments, then FOOM. We're likely now one more step function away from something that's not just capable of taking your job as an intelligent and knowledgeable human, but surpasses your ability so significantly that you can't even comprehend what's happening around you. This job concern is really just a concern perhaps of the next year, or maybe at a stretch, a few years. It's not the purposelessness or job-loss that should have you concerned, but the pandoras box that we're opening. Once that box is opened every problem bottlenecked by intelligence is solvable practically over night, and therefore the way the society will look in a decade is almost impossible to imagine. The problem of how to cure cancer is solved, but the problem of how to kill everyone with a super virus is too. The problem of how to cure alzheimers is solved, but so is the problem of how to hack the human neural activity is too. I genuinely do not understand how people still don't see what's coming, but I try to remind myself that these are the good problems and we should enjoy this for as long as it lasts. |