> Key to this view is our expectation that over the long run AI will create many new jobs even as it destroys existing ones.

Still waiting for anyone with this viewpoint to offer a single educated guess at what any of these created jobs might look like even in very broad terms.

All I ever see is basically a religious belief that surely something will arise.

I get that previous automation waves have lead to new jobs in the past, but automating knowledge and intelligence is just fundamentally a different thing than anything we have automated in the past and what exactly stops AI from taking those new jobs too as soon as the need for them is recognized?

1. AI weights managers - people whose job is to optimize model weights to yield highly specific outcomes

2. Agentic tourism - maybe you’ll be able to send your AI agent/robot to visit a place before you decide if it worth your time and investment

3. Vehicular trains on highways where vehicles going to similar destinations coordinate and move as a unit. There’ll be people optimising roads for this. E.g., exit lanes on highways are designed for a handful of cars to exit safely at a time. What if vehicular trains can be thousands of vehicles long like those going to Burning Man?

4. Hallucination historians - people whose job is to document how AI errors have led to changes in the course of history

5. Animal linguistics - people whose can finally study the correlations between how human and animal languages deliver the same information

6. People designing puzzles and challenges to keep AI engaged during routine maintenance

7. S3x workers who specialise in servicing AI bots

8. Cryptographers whose job if to encode content using non mathematical methods because math base cryptography has become a solved problem

9. Interior designers who specialise in humanised decor because everything else is now handled by AI

10. Lawyers who fight cases on AI’s right to participate in the world as equals of biologics

> All I ever see is basically a religious belief that surely something will arise.

Welcome to economics! Bullshit and conjecture all the way down.

> what exactly stops AI from taking those new jobs too as soon as the need for them is recognized?

Sample efficiency, energy efficiency and training data availability.

The current tech stack is around 6 orders of magnitude behind human capabilities. We have scaled up a paradigm that's been built out continuously for decades (transistors, matrix multiplication). To close the gap requires completely reinventing the entire stack (e.g. spintronics, physical graph traversal). The most advanced tech that is only theorized and not yet even proven is still 4 orders of magnitude less energy efficient than a human, and we have no idea how to get close to the same sample efficiency.

The question you are fretting won't matter for decades, and by then our culture, social and economic framework could be totally different than it is today.

Rather than worry about something so abstract and misunderstood, I would suggest focusing your time and attention on what is within your control here and now: who do you want to help, and how can you be of help, such that your efforts are sustainable and rewarding.

And if you really want to fret something at the edge of your control, fret about how AI is being used today to manipulate you and those you know into believing things that aren't in your best interest but are in someone else's best interest. If you aren't paying, you're the product. Most free media exists manipulate you, and if it has been designed to be addictive then it's virtually guaranteed.

I have been struggling with the same thing. Reading the other comments make me agree with you even more. The best I can come up with is two fold. First that humans will have jobs verifying the verifiers. That is, for important initiatives where something must be right, agents can be doing most if not all of the work, but it will still be a human’s job to investigate what was done and sign off on it. The second is that humans will still have to make agreements with other humans for resources, capital, and the like. Somethings will be scarce, others will become scarce. And humans will always own scarce things that other humans will need to use - and they won’t be making deals with machines.

Another frame I’ve heard is that people will only trust humans when it comes to their kids, health, and money. That’s the simpler view.

Okay, work with me on this, because its a stretch.

The new businesses created, might look very much like the old businesses that disappeared. But they're not focused on scale and profits. They're focused on an ideal of pushing the boundaries. Maybe a single craftsman making small one off hand made pieces. Maybe a pizzeria that puts out a small quantity of the best pizza. Little individual pursuits towards perfection. Enabled because economics is not important. If physical AI and super intelligence can do "everything" (work with me here) you're free to do small scale things you love. You're also free to raise children at home, work on mega projects, explore the world.

The alternative is a small subset of an elite inherit the world's wealth, create a prison society of surveillance robots that keep the permanent underclass at bay with video games, tiktoks, and pills.

Pid control was supposed to allow people that rotate valves to magically transform into software configurators. That never happened. Those people turned into janitors and an automated solution became a capital project. The janitorial staff gets fired in the end.

I wish they would explore alternate hypotheses.

I'm about to start a job where I expect AI to be a critical part. I will use AI to translate legal jargon to "simple English"

I think a lot of jobs that have historically been automated were considered “intelligent” jobs.

I’m not sure if this really is different or not. I also think there’s an enormous amount of white collar work that isn’t actually “intelligent” work. Especially in software development.

The question I’ve been pondering isn’t about “where’s the intelligent work?” It’s, “what do we do when we’ve successfully vanquished work itself?” Will we move towards utopia? Or will the power disparity only grow and broken capitalism be used against us?

Big one is keeping state or lets say world models in sync.

You give 2 systems 2 seemingly different problems. They start building/updating tools and theories and their internal world model starts diverging. As we already see with human specialists. Now imagine 2000 different systems reality diverging. Keeping them all in sync becomes more work than the actual prob they work on.

Maybe they don't want to draw attention to the fact that it's all gig-work.

The people saying that jobs will all go away because of technology have been wrong every single year, up to this year as well.

The burden of proof seems like it's actually on you to show why this current tech boom is any different from previous ones.

As to the answer to your question, well just look at what people are doing at their jobs today. Those are what replaced jobs from 2 years ago.

Onlyfans. Arguably, already began long before AI.

>Still waiting for anyone with this viewpoint to offer a single educated guess at what any of these created jobs might look like even in very broad terms.

Still waiting for mesopotamian farmers to imagine what all these workers will be doing after "the plough" automates farming.

>All I ever see is basically a religious belief that surely something will arise.

I would rather see someone describe why Jevons doesnt apply to this one specific instance, without using big scifi imagery.

>I get that previous automation waves have lead to new jobs in the past, but automating knowledge and intelligence is just fundamentally a different thing than anything we have automated in the past and what exactly stops AI from taking those new jobs too as soon as the need for them is recognized?

Its yet to even be demonstrated that AI is going to take many/any jobs. Its yet to be demonstrated that it can.

There was a great post here a few months ago showing how various technologies flagged as AI have a tendency to cap out at roughly 110% human capacity. And even for 110% there's no guarantee that this will be cheaper than hiring 1.1 humans instead of paying API fees. Theres also finance considerations, capex vs opex for deploying local models etc.

The last time I felt like this, I was trying to talk other crypto speculators out of buying every hyped up shitcoin. AI at the moment feels like it is running very much on hype about future potential that has little to do with reality. I hate to use the term bubble, however.

I was dealing with a support LLM just today, and all it did was give me nonsense to do before escalating. The human it escalated to immediately asked for the same nonsense. I just dont feel like reality has been as impacted by AI as people suggest.

I'm still waiting for this theory to demonstrate itself in countries that already have labour surplesses

This is such a disingenuous comment. The entire rest of the section where you lifted this quote from directly addresses the thing you’re claiming no one will ever even try to address. And they even close the section by acknowledging that “this time it’s different” might actually be true with AI, and that we simply don’t have enough data to say for sure!

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