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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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It's not like it's coming only for doctors after all, it'll burn down a swathe of professions in short order.

I am actually going back and forth on this. On the one hand the tools are amazing, but the inertia of bureaucracy and regulation can be onerous indeed. Plus I wonder how well the models will work in fine-tuned environments. Most of the business cases would rely on GPT-4 being trained in a very narrow or niche field/topic.

What makes you so positive that so many jobs will be destroyed in short order?

Define short order? I think we'll see job loss in as little as 5 years, when it becomes glaringly obvious that AI models are almost omnicompetent, if not outright superhuman at most tasks.

At that point, it's entirely regulation that keeps job loss at bay, and many professions will simply automate away a significant chunk of their work, causing a crisis at entry level positions, and plenty of deskilled individuals who have no expectation of rising through the ranks as that would cost too much.

Yeah I definitely think massive economic shocks will happen in the 5-10 year range. Honestly I hope things get shaken up quickly so that western governments are forced to enact some sort of social program or face mass unrest. Otherwise we could be in for a real dystopia as labor gets devalued.