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Tony Asdourian's avatar

Your last two posts, in conjunction with Amodei’s “50% of entry-level white collar jobs will quite possibly be gone by 2027” the other day, just highlight the increasingly bimodal and heightened reactions that everyone, including people with deep AI expertise, are having towards the prospect of AGI/ASI coming soon. At least subjectively, it seems even more polarized and with more extreme rhetoric than a year ago.

I appreciate how carefully you have examined the assumptions on both sides without resorting to hyperbole, boosterism, or doomism. But I have to be honest that it is sort of amazing that informed opinion is divided between thinking that a)the world will be unrecognizable in 2-5 years or b) it’s not going to be much different at all, maybe there will be job loss for white collar people on the order of what NAFTA was for blue collar, and it’ll take a few decades. We are living in bizarre times.

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Matt Bamberger's avatar

Thank you for this excellent analysis.

It seems to me that a lot of this comes down to capability. If state of the art AI systems remain roughly at their current level of capability, then a lot of the article's arguments are plausible. But if we get to AGI (defined as approximately human-level capabilities across the board), then everything changes.

To take the example of autonomous cars, I'd argue the problem isn't that diffusing technology is slow, it's that the technology in question just wasn't good enough. Human high schoolers routinely go from never having touched a steering wheel to being fully licensed drivers with just a few tens of hours of training and practice.

More generally, we know that smart-ish humans with college degrees take at most a few years to become fully productive at most jobs. It seems almost tautological that the same would be true for AGI (modulo regulatory barriers, of course).

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