Anything that fosters complexity will create jobs.

Jobs won't dissolve into the ether. If the human civilization system grows bigger and complex, it necessitates more people.

If humans were a high energy configuration in the evolution of intelligent systems, we'd never come into being. That Earth's ecosystem has begotten us indicates we're some low energy configuration for packing more information density into the energy flows from the Sun through Earth's biosphere.

Unless we create replicating machines, any machine system we build will only grow more complex by enabling more humans to work on it. We'd be in trouble if we somehow created autonomous self replicating and evolving machinery but chatbots built on natural language machine learning ain't it.

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fc417fc802 a day ago | parent [-]

This take only makes sense when the required inputs are human exclusive. As soon as the abilities of the "chatbots" near that of the average human (a point that we are fast approaching if we haven't reached it already) the logic falls apart because any newly created task that a human can do can instead be automated in turn. Even if we're left with a few highly difficult tasks at the top of the pyramid by definition the vast majority of people won't be capable of performing them.

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briHass a day ago | parent | next [-]

If anything, this report actually made me feel a bit better about AI-led job extinction not being that close. The sheer complexity of the swarm's actions required AI to parse and aggregate, but even with the METR team effectively having an unmetered token budget to do so, the output/summary still required extensive human review.

Even if we ignore the hinted possibility that the agents used to summarize the voluminous data may be acting deceptively (i.e. no snitching), the agents' summaries often 'missed the mark'. Maybe this is another example of 'taste', but it seems less subjective than arguments I've seen for that. It could be that an LLM is no better able to define 'usefulness' or 'relevance' to humans absent being told exactly what that is.

	▲	fc417fc802 a day ago \| parent [-]
		Fair enough, but even so surely putting together the METR report is an example of a highly difficult task that the vast majority of humans are incapable of? It's easy to forget how heavily skewed the crowds on HN and those surrounding engineering and science operations are.

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huurtehoog a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> As soon as the abilities of the "chatbots" near that of the average human (a point that we are fast approaching if we haven't reached it already)

That is entirely not clear. Besides, these tools are limited to producing text and software. There is indeed a lot of employment predicated on producing a bloated output of text and software but this is not existential. Incentives will shift behavior.

But the idea that LLM based 'agents' will (1) be on par with a human using a computer, and (2) disruptively displace the workforce, well that's just not what we're seeing. Unemployment is down across the board, and these tools might be very useful but they are not displaying autonomous intelligence at all.

	▲	fc417fc802 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> these tools are limited to producing text and software Oh good, so they can't produce images or do graphic design work. Thus it follows that movies being sequences of images are obviously completely safe. And since they can't synthesize sounds obviously things like voice acting, call center jobs, and certainly music production are entirely off the table. And it sure is a good thing they can't accept video and audio streams as input because otherwise we might need to worry about their application to robotics and all the trade jobs that could eventually be automated as a result. But those are 100% immune thanks to the aforementioned limitations. Yeah. Definitely. /s > LLM based 'agents' will (1) be on par with a human using a computer They are already substantially more capable when it comes to writing exploits and decompiling binaries than the vast majority of professionals. Sure a lot of that is raw persistence as opposed to novel reasoning but when it comes to employment prospects the "how" doesn't matter only the "what". > disruptively displace the workforce, well that's just not what we're seeing You would deny that we fast approach a cliff on the basis that we are not yet in free fall? Surely you see how absurd that is?