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Notes -
I don't really disagree that this is how the arc of progress is turning, but it does seem a bit ridiculous to worry about what your job is going to be if AI attains intellectual supremacy over humans.
It seems to me that there's really only two possible paths forward; either AI remains jagged in capability like current LLM's and the standard economic arguments about technology hold, or we develop an AGI that represents a perfect labor substitute (it seems hard to believe that an intelligence-complete AGI could not develop sufficiently advanced robotics) and every economic and political assumption grounding society made under the assumption that humans are required for production starts collapsing.
Suppose for a minute that today's models will hit a wall of zero marginal returns tomorrow. This would not mean that AI agents would not still get better. After all, it seems unlikely that we have already figured out the best way an agent should split a problem into different subproblems, for example. Given that overhang, it is not obvious to me that the median office worker will still be able to earn a living using their brain in the equilibrium state.
Sure, in the long run, an AGI might prefer something more reliable than biodrones, but that might take a decade to build at scale. If you build robots, you have long, complex supply chains which will take time to fully automate and scale up (at least for an AGI which is only slightly smarter than humans are). By contrast, knowledge workers are easily replaced, once your LLM can do the job, you can spin up a zillion instances. Also, hitting the wall will mean that we will have tons of GPUs which can be bought for pennies on the dollar from the companies which were betting on FOOM.
Of course I could also be wrong and LLMs could always remain subpar compared to the median human in certain relevant intellectual skillsets. Or I could be wrong and we will get FOOM and be all turned into paperclips.
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