I often read comments where people doubt there will be much work left after AGI. I think on the contrary, it will keep us busy, even busier than before. The moment the road widens, more cars fill it up to the brim. Will lawyers lose their jobs? Looks like the opposite trend is happening. With each capability unlocked, we got more work not less.
Remember that reminder about the fate of horses after the automobile was invented? How about the fate the transportation jobs? In 1910, approximately 13% of the workforce (about 6.7 million people) were involved in transportation-related employment. By 2023, this percentage decreased to 10.3%, but the absolute number grew to around 21.3 million people due to population growth.
Desire is like fire: feeding it only makes it grow, it consumes leaving ash.
One of the primary points of human life is learning the undesirability of desire itself.
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Jevons paradox, on the other hand, isn't metaphysical. When you make the road wider more people drive on it, but widening the road didn't conjure up those people and their cars. The road was too narrow. If you kept adding lanes to the freeway eventually everyone who needed or wanted to drive on it would have enough space.
Now metaphorically speaking we're considering a situation where widening the freeway is so cheap that we can make the freeway as wide as we like, and we're making free self-driving cars, and people can send the cars on the freeway to do anything at all, even really trivial things, and we imagine endless freeway and endless cars until the world is covered in freeways. Something like that?
I guess we do have to solve the problem of human nature and our tendency to flagrantly waste our time and resources on dumb stuff, eh? How does AI help us do that?
I share this view too, especially about law. There is going to be a huge increase in demand for white collar work, but the problem we will face is that the skills required to supply this demand will go up, and there further will be demand for technology to lower the skill barrier to do the jobs. I think the paper to CAD transition is a perfect example.
We started with more demand for computer skills to increase manufacturing efficiency, and now there is increasingly cheaper and better software to lower the barrier to learning CAD
I envision a similar transition for law and justice.
Remember that reminder about the fate of horses after the automobile was invented? How about the fate the transportation jobs? In 1910, approximately 13% of the workforce (about 6.7 million people) were involved in transportation-related employment. By 2023, this percentage decreased to 10.3%, but the absolute number grew to around 21.3 million people due to population growth.