An optimistic view of post-AI labor

I am stumped as to why the most outspoken pessimists of the AI future are leaders of frontier labs. If they are genuine doomers, they would surely not dedicate their lives to bring about the apocalypse?

That leaves me with two theories:

1. They are very bad at communicating and aren't actually pessimistic about AI.
2. They are exaggerating in order to:
   • Attain a regulatory moat
   • Inflate the TAM of LLMs to investors.

I will let you decide which is more likely, but the luddites have certainly taken Altman and Dario at face value. The anti-AI movement is growing and will likely continue to grow absent a positive vision of the AI future.

So I will try my best to put one forward:

The Human Advantage

Humans have an absolute advantage in two types of activities:

• operating in nonstandard physical settings
• creating high value human connection

The jobs being displaced by AI and robotics almost entirely satisfy one of two conditions:

• they are monotonous
• they require minimal human interaction.

Monotony

If an employee was given a decision tree to follow on their first day, that decision tree is likely to be given to a computer who can do it quicker and cheaper. There will be people who lose their jobs, and these people will struggle in the short term.

But just as with assembly lines and cars, input costs getting cheaper will, through the grace of competition, lower prices for consumers, who will in turn pour money into new industries, employing humans to do less monotonous labor that we cannot conceive of.

It is easier to imagine a customer service rep at a large firm, or an assembly line worker getting replaced than it is a plumber, electrician or roofer. The latter are not given decision trees on their first day. They work in diverse environments, diagnose the ill-defined, and interact with consumers to balance tradeoffs.

The things about these jobs which make them hard to automate, are precisely the things that make these jobs fulfilling for a human being. Computers will handle the monotony, humans will handle everything else.

Human Interaction

Contrary to what many tech companies want you to believe, the soul yearns for human connection beyond what can be provided by digital facsimiles.

A teacher is not one who writes on chalkboards, a therapist is not a sycophant, and an influencer is not a friend. No one who has tasted the highs of human connection would, all else equal, choose to get that connection through LEDs.

There are a number of professions who are protected by that fact.

Consider waiters.

Waiters have been "replaceable" for nearly a decade via online ordering systems and robots who bring out food, so why are waiters still everywhere? Because the job of a waiter was not just to take an order and bring out food; the job of a waiter is to be human.

Teachers, personal trainers, and tour guides would not be pervasive careers were it not for the fact that we need human connection.

Humans can motivate us, guilt us, and comfort us in a way that a machine never can. You cannot automate the soul, you can only mold hollow golems.