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I just read a short article in an email newsletter that threw out this statistic with regards to automation in the food industry:
The article goes on to argue the point that due to all of the ‘quiet quitting’ and generally unsatisfied workers after the pandemic or over the last couple of years, automation will not be as big of a deal as we thought. I’ve seen this sentiment echoed a number of times recently where news outlets will talk about how all of the people worried about economic disruption from robotics and Artificial Intelligence don’t realize that it’ll actually be great because people hate working anyway.
I used to believe these claims when I was a disillusion young adult who hated working, but overtime I’ve gotten more and more skeptical. Many people I know take serious pride and work, and in fact for a lot of people their work is the most important thing in their life. I’m talking people who don’t even really need the money, or who claim that even if they had enough money to retire they would continue working just as much as they do now.
Is this recent trend of less engagement with work robust enough to offset the rise in automation of jobs? Is this just a cope from those who know their jobs will disappear soon? (Ie email newsletter writers)
Personally I’m surprised that artificial intelligence hasn’t gotten more flack than it has so far. I expected the lights to come out in full force and at least get some sort of ban on image generation (I know Getty or some other site has done this) but so far it seems that artificial intelligence is generally unopposed.
Any major salient examples of automation technology or artificial intelligence being banned to protect jobs?
For a while I'd thought we'd automate mundane labor first. Nobody want to work in accommodation and food service, so why should they have to?
Instead, artists and writers are getting the first taste. General intelligence is moving fast enough that "how mentally challenging is it?" seems unlikely to be the critical factor, and we should instead look at "how hard is it to describe your job as a collection of inputs and outputs?". Which is, at least to me, mostly opaque for most industries.
So it won't be just the grunt work. The AI reaper will come for a scattershot of occupations across many social classes, with little respect for how much pride people take in their work, with little insight as to whether you'll be next.
I think there will be pushback. At least until the road to luxury space communism is made clear.
The popular notion that writers, artists will be replaced by AI seems overblown. Look how much $ Substack writers are making now. If anything, we in a writing boom. Who knows though...maybe there will be a scandal in which a top author is revealed as just a bot/AI that parses existing work. I think AI will have a hard time understanding the nuance of language, which is an important part of writing. When I talk about the left vs. right, how can an ai know if i am talking about ideology or driving directions? Or rationalism vs. rational?
I suspect substack is rather on the high end of writing. Readers go to substack because they like an author's analysis -- e.g. Scott Alexander is in no danger of being replaced with a neural net. The automation target is more mundane: news and reporting (and propaganda), marketing copy, pulp fiction / erotica, ghost writing, and other assorted filler text. Screenplays are still pretty bad but they're on the they're on the gradient descent roller coaster now and won't stay bad for long.
In the meantime, I give you GPT-3:
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