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Let's grant that there is no world-conquest abilities resident in super human intelligence. It's not implausible; I'm uncertain.
But most of your examples still fail to account for AIs impact. All of the human value you still see can be just as well done by AI wearing a human skin suit. People demand real art made by humans? Humans say they're making real art, but use AI to create it: human washing. Lawyers and doctors offering human accountability? Sure, but they'll still delegate all non-customer facing functionality to AIs: human washing.
Human charisma to act as an interface ends up valuable, but that's not that rare (at least compared to deep medical or legal expertise). Charisma will take a cut, but AI providers will take an even bigger cut. And that's all driven by math and software, areas where AI will unambiguously dominate. Welcome to your Anthropic overlords.
I don’t predict a demand for real art as much as 1) artists prefer full control over their work and 2) AI art is generally mediocre, so the subjective best art to most people will be human.
“A picture is worth a thousand words” vaguely captures the problem: generating just the right image and editing it to be correct will be harder than creating the image from scratch. Generating a random mediocre image that matches a paragraph description is easy, but not worth much: 1) artists want to express themselves and 2) people with taste want something beyond mediocre.
If AI becomes hyper-competent 2) won’t be an issue, but then the AI should be able to make a tool that lets artists express themselves very easy and quickly, so most won’t bother automating it further.
I expect them to use AI and provide at minimum only humanity, but they’ll still be hired by people with more money than they can spend just for that. People waste money on handcrafted furniture and cookware when (unlike art) what’s made in the factory is functionally strictly better.
For the art point, I don't see it. Even today, it seems falsified: work that's obviously heavily AI written has already won at least two significant literary awards. You might say that that doesn't represent particular brilliance on the part of AI beyond knowing how to flatter judges and the fads of the day, and I wouldn't even disagree, but if neither the elite nor the the hoi polloi can recognize and want to reject AI lit, what left is there? And that's with AI that has had essentially no work done to optimize it for the task of writing good literature.
Literature is just the first to fall; five years from now we'll have Shenzhen creating robots that can do the same for oil paintings.
Especially since it was “obvious” I’m skeptical those specific awards were ever worth taking seriously.
Likewise, obviously AI-generated blog posts frequently make the Hacker News frontpage, but I feel that reflects the declining quality of its userbase: the topic is actually often good, but the entire article is basically the title and maybe one or two details AI-expanded, a human-written article would’ve been better.
I have a simple test: AI can create art that is human-level to me when I like some work that is revealed to be AI (obviously or later). So far I have seen decent AI technical writing. I actually saw good pixel art I initially suspected was partly AI, but then I saw the artist livestreams so now I’m convinced it’s 100% human.
Obvious in the sense of scoring 100% on Pangram, as well as subjectively.
But, yeah, that's exactly my point. Self-appointed experts still choose it; and HN's userbase has been in a steep decline for years and gleefully eats it up. But how is the human artist to make a living or even get recognition, between the Scylla of stupid experts and the Charybdis of stupid anons?
It's still pretty obvious to people, above room temperature IQ and who care, what is LLM-generated and what is not. That's not enough to lead to human work being preferred; and, from here, things only get worse.
This is already a problem, has been before AI, and can become much worse without AI: companies overwork and underpay artists because otherwise they can find a faster, cheaper, sloppier-but-still-adequate replacement.
To fund and help artists, I believe it’s more productive to increase welfare, grants, or easy side-jobs, while reducing necessary effort and increasing background encouragement to create art, than attack AI which may replace them.
But not all experts are stupid. If the majority who are awarding grants or otherwise funding artists select AI work, that’s a problem, but I think even if they preferred AI they’d try to select humans.
The dream is that the brilliant, underappreciated artist is recognized by an expert, who elevates them and provides an audience. I don't think that happens except by occasional good luck, and most artistic "experts" are idiots, especially the ones who are legibly high status on the expertise hierarchy.
I suspect that after the embarrassing AI slop awards this year, most literary awards will start using Pangram or something similar as a first filter. Because, you're right, they do want to select humans. But it's just a matter of time until we have LLMs that are a bit better and less clockable.
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I can't wait for AI to fire all the humans from their jobs and then hire them back to replace it in the customer service role. FINALLY I WILL BE ABLE TO TALK TO A HUMAN BEING TO SOLVE MY PROBLEMS.
Only slightly more seriously, we're already in this dystopian future you describe (the AI is Excel).
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