There's three important beliefs at play in the A(G)I story:

1. When(if) AGI will arrive. It's likely going to be smeared out over a couple months to years, but relative to everything else, it's a historical blip. This really is the most contention belief with the most variability. It is currently predicted to be 8 years[1].

2. What percentage of jobs will be replaceable with AGI? Current estimates between 80-95% of professions. The remaining professions "culturally require" humans. Think live performance, artisanal goods, in-person care.

3. How quickly will AGI supplant human labor? What is the duration of replacement from inception to saturation? Replacement won't happen evenly, some professions are much easier to replace with AGI, some much more difficult. Let's estimate a 20-30 years horizon for the most stubborn to replace professions.

What we have is a ticking time bomb of labor change at least an order of magnitude greater than the transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy or from an industrial economy to a service economy.

Those happened over the course of several generations. Society: culture, education, the legal system, the economy, where able to absorb the changes over 100-200 years. Yet we're talking about a change on the same scale happening 10 times faster - within the timeline of one's professional career. And still, with previous revolutions we had incredible unrest, and social change. Taken as a whole, we'll have possibly the majority of the economy operating outside the territory of society, the legal system, and the existing economy. A kid born on the the "day" AGI arrives will become an adult in a profoundly different world as if born on a farm in 1850 and reaching adulthood in a city in 2000.

1. https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-...

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semi-extrinsic 4 days ago | parent [-]

Your only reference [1] is to a page where anybody in the world can join and vote. It literally means absolutely nothing.

For [2] you have no reference whatsoever. How does AI replace a nurse, a vet, a teacher, a construction worker?

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saltcured 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

For the AI believer who has an axiom that AGI is around the corner to take over knowledge work, isn't that just "a small matter of robotics" to either tele-operate a physical avatar or deploy a miniaturized AI in an autonomous chassis?

I'm afraid it's really a matter of faith, in either direction, to predict whether an AI can take over the autonomous decision making and robotic systems can take over physical actions which are currently delegated to human professions. And, I think many robotic control problems are inherently solved if we have sufficient AI advancement.

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kelseyfrog 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What are you talking about? This is common knowledge.

Median forecasts indicated a 50% probability of AI systems being capable of automating 90% of current human tasks in 25 years and 99% of current human tasks in 50 years[1]

The scope of work replaceable by embodied AGI and the speed of AGI saturation of vastly under estimated. The bottle necks are production of a replacement workforce, not retraining human laborers.

1. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.08579

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l33tbro 4 days ago | parent [-]

Work is central to identity. It may seem like it is merely toil. You may even have a meaningless corporate job or be indentured. But work is the primary social mechanism that distributes status amongst communities.

A world of 99 percent of jobs being done by AGI (which there remains no convincing grounds for how this tech would ever be achieved) feels ungrounded in the reality of human experience. Dignity, rank, purpose etc are irreducible properties of a functional society, which work currently enables.

It's far more likely that we'll hit some kind of machine intelligence threshold before we see a massive social pushback. This may even be sooner than we think.

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int_19h 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Have you considered that perhaps tying dignity and status to work is a major flaw in our social arrangements, and AI (that would actually be good enough to replace humans) is the ultimate fix?

If AI doing everything means that we'll finally have a truly egalitarian society where everyone is equal in dignity and rank, I'd say the faster we get there, the better.

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kelseyfrog 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Pretend I'm a farmer in 1850 and I have a belief that the current proportion of jobs in agriculture - 55% of jobs in 1850 would drop to 1.2% in 2022 due to automation and technological advances.

Why would hearing "work is central to identity," and "work is the primary social mechanism that distributes status amongst communities," change my mind?

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l33tbro 4 days ago | parent [-]

People migrated from the farms to the city. They didn't stop working.

	▲	kelseyfrog 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		My apologies if you thought I was arguing that a consequence of AGI would be a permanent reduction in the labor force. What I believe is that the baumol effect will take over non-replaceable professions. A very tiny part of our current economy will become the majority of our future economy.