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Originally Posted by jyl
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A lot of higher education, higher pay jobs seem quite ripe for AI productivity boost and hence headcount reductions. Thinking back to my lawyer days, AI could have significantly sped up legal research, document review, drafting briefs. As a junior equity analyst, a lot of what I did is stuff that AI can do or will soon be able to do. For what I do today, AI can eventually be a big timesaver. The quant and algorithmic trading shops are quick to adopt any new tool, and have been using other forms of AI for some time.
To be clear, I think there may be not that many jobs that can be done *entirely* by AI, whether generative or other. But I think there will be more and more, and ultimately quite a lot, of jobs where AI can do part of the job with humans using the AI output, selecting from choices prepared by the AI, or supervising the AI. Fewer humans. And eventually, humans who never learned to do the work now entrusted to the AI, so that more and more of the knowledge and skills required to run the business or operate the equipment exists only in the AI.
Where do you get experienced CPAs from, if 50% or 80% of the junior and trainee CPAs no longer exist? Ditto radiologists, pilots, insurance agents, lawyers, programmers, librarians, etc.
I’m not liking where this is going.
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I have a bet going with my wife that lawyers will be replaced by AI/machines before burger flippers. It's a race between machine learning and robot dexterity, I think. But that's generative AI, the next step is general AI.
With general AI
every job can be replaced by a mixture of AI and robotics. This isn't like the industrial revolution at all, where whole new fields of work opened up when previous ones closed; every new job created will be replaced, at some point, by AI, until such time that new fields are limited
only to AI.
We're 30-50 years away from that sort of general AI, but it will come.
What will be left to us? The purely theoretical? Brand new concepts in math and physics? Maybe for some tasks the energy requirement will be too high for AI and it will let us handle them because it's cheaper to do it on caloric intake in lieu of electrical power.
Back to your point, I hadn't really considered the training aspect before. It's interesting but in the short to medium term I think a shift in education could train new experts who are aware of and understand the basics now handled by automation but who focus, from the start, at the higher level management functions.
The question, I think, is how quickly education can keep up with the advancement of AI. ChatGPT went from a 10th percentile to a 90th percentile on the Bar exam in a year. Dall-E was an interesting little low-resolution picture generator in 2021, now AI art is replacing real jobs and nearly able to generate believable video from text.
How does college prepare someone with a four year degree when AI advances at the rate it does?
Edit: I think the biggest question underneath all of this is is how do we guide nascent AI? There's no stopping it, that's for sure. No matter what regulations are put in place to protect this or that industry they'll be only temporary at best. I feel like we're fully aware of the onset of nuclear weapons fifty years ahead of time, and nobody wants to talk about the rules of engagement.