Comment by kelseyfrog 4 days ago
Except the services that are intractably human: educators, judges, lawyers, social workers, personal trainers, childcare workers.
Those will suffer the Baumol effect and their prices will rise to extraordinary levels.
There's already examples of lawyers offloading work to ChatGPT even though they weren't allowed to. Also educators (and students), though if all other work is automated, what's there to educate for, and how would the prospective students pay?
Social work, childcare, for now I agree:
My expectation is that general purpose humanoid robots, being smaller than cars and needing to do a strict superset of what is needed to drive a car, happen at least a decade after self driving cars lose all of the steering wheels, and the geofences, and any remote safety drivers. And that's even with expected algorithmic improvements, if we don't get algorithmic improvements then hardware improvements alone will force this to be at least 18 years' between that level of FSD and androids.
One would assume - if this were to happen - that supply and demand would bring prices back down, as everyone would rush to those fields.
Our increased efficiency producing manufactured goods, technology, food, and clothing has already produced this effect in healthcare, education, childcare, and more. That's how the effect works.
The only question is, are we prepared to deal with the social ramifications of the consequences? Are we ok with new crises? Imagine the current problems dialed up 10x. Are we prepared to say, "the market is in a new equilibrium, and that's ok"?
How scalable is that in the sense that teachers have been obsoleted and we can run zero-staff schools?
The big tech AI barons absolutely claim that their LLMs can replace educators, judges, lawyers, and personal trainers. I've seen some vague claims about childcare robots, but for whatever reasons anything that's not pure software appears to be currently outside their field of vision. They're unlikely to make any claims about social workers because there's not enough money in it.
No; the services that seem most intractably human, at least given the current state of things, are very much those in personal care roles—nurses, elder care workers, similar sorts of on-the-ground, in-person medical/emotional care—and trades, like plumbing, construction, electrical work, handcrafts, etc.
Until we start seeing high-quality general-purpose robots (whether they're humanoid or not), those seem likely to be the jobs safest from direct attempts to replace them with LLMs. That doesn't mean they'll be safe from the overall economic fallout, of course, nor that the attempts to replace knowledge work of all types will actually succeed in a meaningful way.