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What would be a good outcome for the automation of knowledge work?
Everyone’s been talking a lot about both the downsizing of the federal government, and the rapid improvement of LLM technology, such that the fake jobs are being cut at the same instant that more jobs are becoming to some degree fake. I don’t necessarily think that the US government should be a bastion of fake jobs, especially Culture War ones, but at the same time I wonder if there’s any end game people like Musk are working toward.
As far as I can tell:
Blue collar jobs are still largely intact. There’s about the same need as there ever was for tradesmen, handymen, construction workers, waste disposal, and so on. Most of the automation in those fields came from vehicles a century ago, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a push to leverage things like prefab construction all that much more. I personally like the new “3-D printed” extrusion style of architecture, but it doesn’t look like it actually saves all that much labor.
Pink collar: Childcare takes about the same amount of labor per child, but there are fewer children. Nursing is in demand, but surely healthcare can only take up so much of the economy. Surely? Retail continues to move online, and we continue to descend into slouchy sweatpants, parachute pants, and the oversized, androgynous look. I would personally like it if some of the excess labor went into actually fitted clothing, but haven’t seen any signs of this. Cleaning services seem to have more demand than supply, with an equilibrium of fewer things getting cleaned regularly than in the past, while continuing to be low in pay and prestige, so I’m anticipating more dirt, but little investment into fixing it.
Demand for performance based work seems to be going down. It’s just as good to listen to or watch a recording of the best person in a field than a live performance by someone less skilled. But were performers ever a large part of the economy?
Middle class office work, knowledge work, words, paperwork, emails: seems about to implode? How much of the economy is this? Google suggests about 12%. That seems like a lot, but nothing close to the 90% of farm work that was automated throughout the 21st Century. This article was interesting, about the role of jobs like secretary, typist, and admin assistant in the 20th Century. I tried working as an assistant to an admin assistant a decade or so ago, and was physically filing paperwork, which even then was pretty outdated.
The larger problem seems to be status. What kinds of work should the middle class do, if not clerk and word adjacent things? There seems to be near infinite demand for service sorts of work – can we have an economy where the machines and a few others do all the civilizationally load bearing work, while everyone else walks each other’s dogs and picks up each other’s food? My father thinks that there’s less slack in many of these jobs than when he was younger. I’m not sure if that’s true in general, or how to test it.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with a future where most people are doing and buying service work. The current trend of women all raising each other’s children and caring for each other’s elderly parents seems to not be working out very well, though.
This will come for blue collar jobs pretty soon too.
Consider meat processing: parting out chicken or pork carcasses is something that’s hard to automate. Every carcass is slightly different, and the nature of the tasks makes it hard to build a machine that will do this with good enough accuracy and low enough waste.
Now, imagine we have robots with flexible arms like humans. Current AI tech solves the image recognition problem, so that the robot understands the carcass like human does. It also solves explaining the purpose of the task, so that the robot understand the actual purpose of separating thighs or breast, instead of just mindlessly following the programmed moves. Lastly, it solves the reasoning part, so that the robot can plan the task independently for each carcass, and adjust to conditions as it proceeds.
All that remains is integrating these into one performing system. This is by no means an easy task: it will still probably take years before the finished product is cheaper and better than illegal immigrant. However, 5 years ago, the idea of training robots to part out chickens was complete science fiction.
Absolutely not. You think it's basically straightforward because you're human and you take your senses and capabilities for granted.
Imagine that you have to part out a chicken carcass but:
Unless you're planning to cut up the chicken with a circular saw, you also have to figure out how to analyse the structure of a carcass, and how the meat will react under manipulation. This data doesn't exist right now so you're going to have to train it on your own data, which means you need to find a way of obtaining and labelling that data.
EDIT: Sorry if this came across as harsh. I agree that we've gone from 'we have no idea how to approach this problem' to 'solving this is really REALLY hard'. Mostly what I want to say is that "Now, imagine we have robots with flexible arms like humans." is a much bigger deal than you think it is (and not theoretically solved as of now) and I think that training the relevant AI is much harder than you think it is.
I didn’t say it will be easy. What you describe are real problems. However, they are not as insurmountable as AI was 10 years ago. 10 years ago, there was relatively little investment in touch sensors, because even if you perfected them, there was little you could do with them. Now it is different.
My point is that AI advancements allow us to leap over solving problems by designing tool paths and configuration spaces, and onto solving problems by telling a robot “we need you to cut chicken, look how it’s done and imitate”.
This seems like the self-driving car redux. They improve, and they improve... and at some point they stop getting better because the remaining problems are intractable.
But the thing about self-driving cars is that they are already better than human drivers. There's just a huge wall of tradition preventing them from becoming much more widespread.
Meat processors aren't going to give a shit if robots can only attain 98% accuracy or something
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