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Could AI be the next big thing without impacting the economy and labour market?
Computers revolutionized the construction industry. CAD software makes it far easier to draw buildings and share the drawings. Phones makes communications vastly easier. Instead of a worker getting stuck or having to physically find someone they can make a video call. Manuals and documents are freely available online. Online shopping makes order parts cheaper and easier while allowing builders to press prices. Accounting, scheduling, recruiting sales and other supporting activities are easier with computers. Even on the construction site computers control machines. A modern truck is full of software.
Yet the productivity in the construction industry has flat lined and is if anything declining. Land prices can take some blame but renovating a building has not become cheaper.
Could we see similar effects with AI? A company in 2035 has completely automated customer service, AI drafts contracts, does sales and codes. We may have self driving cars and humanoid robots. Yet we might see barely 2% GDP growth and no real boom in productivity. Why has the tech sector revolutionized work without dramatical increases in productivity and can the results be better in the coming 20 years?
I expect any breakthroughs in the physical domain to lag significantly - customer service, contracts, sales and coding will be automated, but no self-driving cars and humanoid robots*, and the humans that were formerly in those jobs will be pushed into somewhat less cushy replacements that make use of their skills but also involve some hard-to-automate real-world component - assembling and maintaining bespoke machinery, driving cars, installing cabling, etc. There is a certain possibility that this correlates closely with the jobs that have already been bullshittified, to an extent that the metrics of success in them are now also bullshit - ChatGPT may be a 100x more productive legal brief writer than the human it replaces, but more and better legal briefs could amount to somewhere between a little more and infinitely less productivity. Meanwhile, the humans freed up by this to do more productive work like driving deliveries may not actually be that great at those jobs, so you get something between a slight improvement and a net negative change to baseline productivity while also having to contend with an overall productivity tax from social upheaval (as large strata of the population curb their consumption due to uncertainty or personal socioeconomic drop).
* Always seemed obvious to me once you take away human conceit. In the former domain, you are fighting to outperform maybe 40000 years of evolution; in the latter, some tens or hundreds of millions.
I think it's at least worth considering the other direction too. "What jobs are not currently worth paying a human to do, so nobody does them?"
One place that IMO would be unsurprising (and is probably happening, if quietly) is ML for trash sorting. It's not really worth paying someone to pick recyclable cans from the trash can (something something minimum wage and homeless people redeeming bottle deposits, but that isn't really at-scale anyway), but it seems like something AI could do without hazard pay.
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Also the physical jobs have been getting automated since the invention of the domesticated ox, the wheel, the lever, the steam engine and the assembly line. So what you are left with is the hardened core of physical jobs that are the hardest and least efficient to automate.
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