> If 40-50% of the workforce ends up like that then we're living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland failed state.
I a lot less than that. Most people don’t have jobs that can be done remotely, which I think is a good proxy for the ceiling of who can be replaced by AI. Almost nobody on my block besides me is going to be replaced (beer brewer, several nurses, navy servicemen, cops, and teachers).
I think you’re failing to factor in the rapid improvement in robotics.
I was at the hospital a few days ago, and was pondering the numerous nurses who were wheeling around portable nursing stations with monitors and various types of equipment. They’d stop at a room, take a patient’s blood pressure (among various other things), type some notes, and move on. I can easily imagine most nursing tasks being subsumed by robotics.
The same goes for brewers, soldiers, cops, and teachers. Soldier, cop, and teacher robots are already being tested, or actually deployed…and it’s early yet. If a safe, highly dense source of power is developed, that will vastly accelerate the process. At best, there will be far fewer humans involved, monitoring the robots, much as software engineers are now monitoring the agentic AIs.
I’m not sure how human society will adapt. The optimistic view (championed by Elon Musk) is that we’re headed for a “Star Trek economy” of essentially endless abundance for everyone. I hope things play out somewhere along those lines…
I’ve personally been impacted very heavily by LLM technology. Two of my major skills, coding and writing, have been greatly devalued by it. I’m relying on one of the truly core human traits to compensate - adaptability. That’s an area where LLMs currently lag far behind.
> I can easily imagine most nursing tasks being subsumed by robotics
I think you are greatly underestimating the difficulty of automating nursing tasks.
About teachers: some amount teaching profession can be automated, but the parts that cannot (in any reasonable way in the foreseeable future) are perhaps the most core aspects of teaching.
> About teachers: some amount teaching profession can be automated, but the parts that cannot (in any reasonable way in the foreseeable future) are perhaps the most core aspects of teaching.
Yeah, but "we" (note the scare-quotes) can always just decide skimp on those "core aspects of teaching," which may even be a tempting option when "we" decide "we" have less need for educated workers.
That’s not how technology works. We went from first flight in 1903 to a man on the moon in 1969. Then we basically did almost nothing in aerospace for the next 50 years. We never got past the supersonic barrier for feasible commercial air travel. Apart from somewhat worse fuel efficiency, a 747 from 1969 can achieve basically the same trips in the same amount of time as a 787 or A350.
What looks like exponential curves turn into S-shaped curves everywhere. In the last century, coal power plants have gotten less than twice as efficient. A professor at law school was giving a lecture on technological singularity back in 2011. And I pointed out that Moore’s law was already dead. And in fact in the decade since then improvements came far slower than they did from 1990-2000.
It allows people with half the available money to do what others could do before. That's more than twice as many people.
It allows you to move freight really fast at half the cost. That's a lot of things that can move around the world 100X faster than they could on the next-fastest available mode: ships and trains.
It allows you to move freight really fast at half the cost
That's leaving out fuel prices. The planes may use half the fuel, but aviation fuel has increased 7x in price since 1990. I couldn't find prices for 1969, but if you take the price of crude since then you're looking at a CPI-adjusted increase close to 100x.
Great point. Even more value to halving the fuel cost, then, but fewer products able to take advantage of it.
Of course, inflation should be canceled out before evaluating the overall benefit. If you can self the goods for 7X then the fuel savings is back to 2X.
When things are spread out over time people are able to adjust to the point that society, as a whole, might not even notice there was a problem, even if for some segment of that society it might feel like the end of the world - or at least an incomparable inflection point. The only real problem you have is when things come on hard and fast, like a tsunami.
We shall see about how much of nursing can be automated. I do think that the human presence of a nurse (particularly if of the opposite sex to the patient) is helpful. That could still be provided on a less frequent basis.
As to the rest of their function, I think probably the biggest obstacle will be the ability to safely manipulate the human body, as in turning or moving the patient. That requires delicacy, advanced tactile sensors, and physical power. For fine detail work, such as finding a vein with a needle, the technology already exists. Elon Musk also predicts that robotic surgery will rapidly outpace human surgeons, and I agree there.
On the subject of human teachers, my comment is similar to that about human nurses. A human connection helps with motivation. That said, I think video serves much the same function, and with video one teacher can reach an unlimited number of classrooms. That’s independent of how humanistic the teaching robots will become, and I expect that will also improve rapidly. We are nearing singularity like situations with engineering problems, in other words recursive improvement without much if any human intervention.
It’s gonna be a long time before we have robots that can replace 100% of a nurse at a cost lower than a nurse. Right now we have nothing close to someone being able to replace those tasks. The industries that have had most robotics and automation such as warehousing still have human workers. Heck I would not be suprised if more people work in warehouses in USA today than 25 years ago.
It is sufficient to make existing workers more effective to be able to fire some of them. If turning a patient to change a diaper is a two person job and somebody buys a robot that assists to make it a one person job, suddenly you need fewer people during a shift.
There are a lot fewer workers per warehouse today than 25 years ago. There is fortunately much less flexible demand for changing nappies in elderly care homes.
> I a lot less than that. Most people don’t have jobs that can be done remotely, which I think is a good proxy for the ceiling of who can be replaced by AI. Almost nobody on my block besides me is going to be replaced (beer brewer, several nurses, navy servicemen, cops, and teachers).
That's just first order effects. What's going to happen to the beer brewer when sales are down because the knowledge workers have cut back, and what will happen to those nurses when a lot of those knowledge workers lose their health insurance?
Beer consumption is already trending down. Numerous smaller breweries have already closed. Younger people are drinking less alcohol in general. Beer in particular has too many carbs. This isn't an AI issue, just a change in consumer preferences.
I a lot less than that. Most people don’t have jobs that can be done remotely, which I think is a good proxy for the ceiling of who can be replaced by AI. Almost nobody on my block besides me is going to be replaced (beer brewer, several nurses, navy servicemen, cops, and teachers).