★What will AI do to jobs?
There is already a huge gap between what current models are capable of, and how they’re being currently used. Even if AI doesn't improve at all from the current state of the art: AI will automate lots of jobs away; AI will also increase productivity and create new jobs.
The good news. Take programming, for example: if one AI-assisted programmer can do the work of 10 mere StackOverflow-assisted programmers, then we will build much more software. This is the Jevons Paradox. Programming teams may shrink, but more will proliferate. And we’ll also need more prompt engineers and product managers. So, perhaps fewer programmers per team, but more teams, and work created for other roles. We might imagine that the same will be true for many of the other fields where AI-assistance will turbocharge productivity. There will be orders of magnitude more writing, more medicine, more data insights, more architecture, more therapy, and indeed more pop songs, more personalised advertising messages, more lawsuits.
The bad news. The wave of AI-automation is going to be larger and faster than any technological unemployment we’ve seen before. It won’t be obvious in the next year or two, but it will be stark by the 2030s. Even if new jobs are being created, there will be a lag, and the people who lost their jobs may not be qualified for the new jobs. This is terrifying. People will move towards jobs in lingering niches where AI can’t yet compete, perhaps involving physical interactions (like hairdressing and plumbing), and rich human interactions (like therapy and care work).
Will there be a limit to how far AI improves? In the long run, no. And even in the short run, AI will exceed many humans for many tasks, even if AI doesn't exceed all humans for all tasks.
So there will be more automation, but also more demand, and the equilibrium between the two will fluctuate. But the trend will be for technological unemployment to outpace Jevons Paradox.
What hope is left? The optimistic, post-scarcity vision is that we fund Universal Basic Income through taxation. But that feels like a global optimum, with many deep local pessimums in between - in other words, it's hard to see how we get there from here, without a few rapacious winners taking all.