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Comment by rtwrtwefdsf | Hacker News Reader

The chances are that the automation enabled by LLMs like GPT-4 and beyond, will erase billion of jobs in the world, no further than in a couple of years. This time it won't be a warm-up time, like it happened with previous technological evolutions.

But, most societies will be mostly full of unemployed humans, and that will also probably cause some big changes (the ones required for the meat bags to keep eating, having health, homes, etc.), as big as the ones caused by AI revolution.

The question is what changes will happen and how societies will rewrite themselves anew, to overcome the practical full absence of open positions to earn an income.

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If machines were truly able to replace most jobs, we'd need to move to a post-work society. There would be no need for money and for small powerful groups to control the means of production. There needs to be a new philosophical and political framework for a society of people that does not need to work, and no one is building it. Perhaps we should ask an AI to design one. But it will probably be too late, and those currently in power will do everything they can to maintain their privileged positions, and will end up living in small walled gardens while the bulk of humanity live in slums.

This all assumes that AI continue to do the bidding of humanity, which is not guaranteed. There are already security/safety researchers testing AI for autonomous power-seeking behavior, and this is basically gain-of-function research that will lead to power seeking AI.

This prediction is pretty bold.

We already have the technology to fully automate many processes carried out by humans.

Actually the technology has existed for several decades now, still those jobs are not only not being replaced by machines, but new ones are being created for humans.

One of the reasons are unions, which are pretty strong in many wealthy and powerful nations like the US, UK, Germany and Japan.

I work in manufacturing automation and we have customers that could technically run their entire operations without one single human stepping on plant floor, however their unionized labor makes that feat, at least for now, impossible.

It's also pretty naive to believe new ways of earning income won't appear in the future and that all traditional careers will be entirely replaced.

We have 65" 4K TVs at home and we still go to the theaters and we can walk the streets of Venice from our computer screens and still spend a small fortune to travel.

Society will be disrupted just like it was with printing, the industrial revolution, communications, transportation and information.

In each of these disruptions we were doomed to dissappear.

When I was a kid my dad brought home a 100 year celebratory edition of the local newspaper.

It was published as a book were you could read pretty much every single cover and editorial of the last century.

There was one article about the car, described by the author as a bizarre evil invention, horrendous steel machines traveling at ridiculous speeds of up to 15 mph, threatening the lives of both pedestrians and horses alike.

For a long time to come there are lots of physical tasks that AI can't do, at least not as long as robots are nowhere near humans in their physical ability. At the same time the world is aging, and there's a big shortage of care workers in most countries. By nature that work also benefits from genuine human interaction and emotion.

So, to me an obvious solution would be to employ many of those people as care workers. Even more obvious would be shortening the work-week without reducing pay, which would allow many more to work in other physical labour requiring professions, and those that simply benefit from human interaction. In the end it's also a preferable outcome for companies, people without money can't buy their products / services.

We have the most automation and AI we have ever had right now, and roughly the lowest unemployment.

It is a bit unstable... we have all these things because we keep people working and it makes the rich insanely rich. If too many people get unemployed then that threatens the rich with violence.

But when we get to the point that bots both fight for the rich and make the rich peoples stuff then there is no real reason for the current system to remain.

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