sam altman is lying about the future of work
i don't begrudge sam for saying this, having people come after u and ur family in ur home is more than enough justification. but i think he's lying, and i think it's quite bad that instead of engaging and grappling with these policy issues openai is choosing to ignore and mislead. we as a country need to be figuring out how the fuck to handle this, what society should or could look like, and burying our heads in the sand is not going to help. it makes it much harder to coordinate political will when one of the AI leaders makes placating statements like this, "everything will shake out fine, weird transition but things will be alright".
the only way humans have long-term meaningful contributions to the economy is if we hit hard walls on the generality or cost of artificial intelligence. you do not get humans directing agents towards goals if the models are better than the humans at very human shaped tasks like "managing others to achieve a goal" and "determining which goals to pursue". sure, if we have aligned models perhaps those goals are implicitly or explicitly determined by human desires, but that doesn't mean we have any real day to day or week to week or month to month input on how to get there.
"comparative advantage" cmon man. think about it. that only actually makes sense in a world we're hard limited on compute. a country's population grows very slowly, it has meaningful opportunity cost on the labor it does. if it turns out we can really only support five Mythos 9 instances running globally then sure, maybe they'll spend their time directing humans. but realistically why would you pay a human for a task rather than just another model instance, maybe weaker maybe not? why would you be interested in outputs that come 100x slower, that require massively more double checking and verification, that can't be coordinated with and steered except over incredibly bandwidth inefficient channels? nah just spawn another instance!! and if the reason we're doing this is truly that every GPU is maxxed out running full tilt... then the *work* humans are going to be doing isn't then can't "directing agent swarms", it can't be "creative and high value intellectual labor utilizing the full value of AI". the models have the advantage there, so we're spending our time as exogenous bio-compute, mechanical turks for the machines, shifting around uninterpretable bits succession style. hardly a vision of the future we want.
maybe the answer is physical or relational. we can do things in the real world that machines can't, we have meaning to other humans that they don't. granting that for a moment, ignoring the looming shadow of increasingly functional humanoid robotics and superstimulus companions, what does that economy actually *look like*? humans as factory workers and nurses who are always looking down at their phone or listening in their earpiece for the next instruction from chatgpt 9.4-mini? artists?? a whole economy of artists?? humans don't seem to value art enough *now* for many to be able to make a living off it. it's very tough for me to see *who is paying* here! we relegate humans to exclusively low paid and low impact jobs, for which their value is exclusively to each other. meanwhile the models have discovered a cure for cancer. how exactly do the artists scrape enough together from their circular human-value economy to afford the cancer cure?
if the machines are just *giving* us the cancer cure, then we're *not* buying it, and clearly our jobs and economic intuitions are in fact irrelevant! we're working under a totally different system. and we have yet to figure out what that system *is* or how to get there.
@samai think a lot of people are going to be busier (and hopefully more fulfilled) than ever, and jobs doomerism is likely long-term wrong.
though of course there will be disruption/significant transition as we switch to new jobs, the jobs of the future may look v different, etc.