> That it's been tried so many times shows the demand is enormous

Capitalists want to pay their workers as little as possible or even not have workers and pocket close to 100% of the profits since forever. Whether they'll be able to do it this time is yet to be seen. Putting the tech itself aside, which is far from good enough yet imo, the only way to avoid a massive social backslash would be to use some of the additional profit they're able to keep because of AI for social spending. And I just don't think they realize yet that it's probably in their interest to do so if they want to replace 'human resources' with AI.

Well, it is good enough for a huge percentage of what general administrative office staff are doing all day. Essentially copying information between textboxes, slightly rephrasing, clicking buttons, formulating emails to people to send in various documents, scheduling meetings, making reports that are fairly mechanical summaries of other information etc. Not all of it is like this, but probably in the range of 30-70%? Some of it may involve human judgment though, which is harder to automate, like whether some expenses are justified enough etc. But you can just replace those kinds of judgments with more clearly defined rules and cost limits etc.

Have you tried using "computer use" models? They just started to get good in the last few months. They can comfortably use GUIs, click the right buttons, enter the data faster etc. This is very significant and my programmer friends often don't appreciate the earth shattering consequences. The vast majority of software in such applications is legacy stuff or proprietary and does not and likely will never have a programmatic API. The only way to interact with it is via GUI. And an AI working that GUI can be deployed unilaterally by the customer of the software company who made the GUI program. This makes adoption and automation much easier. My prediction is that within 1 year (maybe 2) GUI-using AI will be much more powerful and it will be everywhere (of course it doesn't need to be displayed on a screen, it will do its virtual clicks based on a virtual screen buffer rendering in an isolated virtual machine, along with countless other agents in parallel).

There will be huge controversy around it, because this will be the first instance that regular people will see AI do work that resembles their day job all over social media. There will be panic. There will be new license terms saying only humans are allowed to operate the GUI, and AI use is either forbidden or costs extra. But this will not be checkable properly. Even when forbidden, some employees will pay from their own pockets to have cheap AI do the job instead of them.

Agreed but the AI lab investors and CEOs aren’t ideologically aligned with concepts like UBI. Some of them have even commented on social media about the unsustainability of social security and need for cuts. Also why would you they do trillions in capex investments just to give their returns away.

They are clearly smart/dumb enough to think pushing labor replacement to 20%+++ unemployment levels would have no consequences for them personally. Maybe with their private jets, private islands, doomsday shelters, etc they are right.

Seems like a bit of a gamble to me, or probably anyone who has read a bit of history. But I’m not a billionaire.