The true insight and guidance that a good mentor can provide, based on the specific needs of the student, is already rare in academia but still possible - everyone remembers that brilliant teacher that made you love a subject, by explaining it with insights you could never have imagined. This will be missing in AI teachers (though it opens a career for online mentors who monitor students' learning and supplement it in areas where it's lacking).

It will be hard to impossible to build career as a teacher with all that free content as a competitor, unless you're an extremely talented teacher who can sell your services to the wealthy.

The great thing about a chatbot style LLM is that it can answer questions the student has about the lessons or assigned content. That's most of what a tutor is there for. It won't be as good at making modifications to the curriculum but you could work around that with some smart design e.g. evaluate the students response, if it's not great then expand on the lesson and ask more questions about the content to find out which parts the student doesn't understand then expand on those or provide additional resources as assignments, test and repeat.

What you describe is the "learning equivalent to personalized ads" that I was talking about as the only option available to poor people.

I wasn't saying the AI tutor would recommend articles by the way. If you were creating a learning platform you would have some custom produced videos and text lessons that you could use. There are also plenty of free or open source materials that could be used like open courses or public domain books. I don't know why you're stuck on "personalized ads".

People don’t read, don’t value deep knowledge or critical thinking, and shun higher education.

I’m sure someone will find something to say in response, but the truth is that outside our tech and $$$$ bubbles most people don’t value these things.

AI will just become a calculator. A simple tool that a few will use to build amazing complex things while the majority don’t even know what the ^ means.

As long as the next generations want to be rappers, social media influencers, or YouTubers, the more we are screwed long term. Growing up in the 90s everyone wanted to be an astronaut or a banker or a firefighter. Those are far more valuable professions than someone who is just used to sell ads or some shitty energy drink.

The 21st century has a quiet moral void gnawing at it.

If AI does anything I think it will make lower skilled and disinterested people more capable by acting as a 1 on 1 and minute by minute guide. They may not seek this out themselves but I imagine quite a few jobs could be created where a worker is paired with an AI that walks them through the tasks step by step making them capable of operating at a much higher skill level than they would have before. At that point good manual dexterity and an ability to follow instructions would be all you need to perform a job, no training or education required.

I realize this can be a bit dystopic but it could also be eutopic if society is organized in such a way that everyone benefits from the productivity increases.

We will always have to find things to do for the less gifted in order to provide them with some dignity. Even if they are not strictly needed for reasons of productivity or profitability. Anything else would be inhumane.

I think you’re hinting at some very hurtful, dangerous ideas.

The obvious rebuttal to the idea that AI will eat software engineering is "we'll always need 'software engineers' and the nature of what they do will just change", which is probably true for the foreseeable future, but ignores the fact that sufficiently advanced AI will be like a water line rapidly rising up and (economically) drowning those that fall below it and those below that line will be a very significant percentage of the population, including even most of the "smart" ones.

However this ends up shaking out, though, I think its pretty clear we're politically and economically so far from ready for the practical impact of what might happen with this stuff over the next 10-20 years that its terrifying.

"60-80% of you aren't really needed anymore" looks great on a quarterly earning statement until the literal guillotines start being erected. And even if we never quite reach that point there's still the inverse Henry Ford problem of who is your customer when most people are under the value floor relative to AI that is replacing them.

I'm not trying to suggest there aren't ways to solve the economic and political problems that the possible transition into an AI-heavy future might bring but I really just don't see a reasonable path from where we are now to where we'd need to be to even begin to solve those problems in time before massive societal upheaval.

If we can't completely automate accounting, then there is no hope for any other field.

Seems like an easy job for AI. Take all scraps of paper out of box, record a video of all scraps, AI make sense of the handwriting and other things. Eventually make a robo that allows you to dumb the scraps into an accounting box that does all of this automatically - fish out receipts, scan, OCR, understand meaning, do arithmetic, done.

Honestly, who would miss this kind of work?

Also, accountants don't just track the numbers, they also validate them. Some of that validation can be done automatically, but it's not always cheeper to hire a programmer to automate that validate than to just pay a bookkeeper to do it. But even if you do automated it, you still need someone to correct it. The company I used to work had billing specialists who spent hours every week pouring over invoices before we sent them to clients checking for errors that were only evident if you understood the business very well, and then working with sales and members of the engineering teams to figure out what went wrong so they could correct the data issues.

In short, a typical accounting department is an example of data-scrubbing at scale. The entire company is constantly generating financial information and you need a team of people to check everything to ensure that that information is corrects. In order to do that, you need an understanding, not just of basic accounting principles, but also of the how the specific company does busines and how the accounting principles apply to that company.

Who benefits from these bespoke solutions? Can you give a example of how one company would do its books vs another and why it would be beneficial?

>> accountants don't just track the numbers, they also validate them

What information do they use to validate numbers? Why is it not possible for today's AI to do it?

For a more concrete example, I'll tell you about something I have some experience with, commission systems. Commissions seems like it would be something that was straightforward to calculate but it's tied to business strategy and that's different for every company. Most companies for example will want to compute commissions on posted invoices, which makes the process much simpler because posted invoices are immutable, but I once built a commission calculator for a company years ago that often had a long gap (months) between a booking and when they could invoice the client, so they wanted to calculate commissions from bookings but only pay them when invoiced. Because bookings were mutable, and there were legitimate reasons to change a booking before you invoiced it, that, combined with a lot of fiddly rules about which products were compensated at which rates and when, meant that there was a lot of "churn" in the compensation numbers for sales reps from day to day; they're actual payment might differ from what they thought they earned. That was a problem that the company dealt with, the tradeoff being that they could show earnings numbers to the sales reps much more quickly and incentivize them to follow up with the clients on projects so that they could eventually be paid.

I remember another commissions situation where there was a company that sold a lot projects with labor involved. They were able to track the amount of labor done per project, but they compensated the sales reps by line item in the invoices, and the projects didn't necessarily map to the line items. This meant that even though the commissions were supposed be computed from the GP, there wasn't necessarily a way to calculate the labor cost in a way that usable for commissions so the company had to resort to a flat estimate. This was a problem because the actual profitability of a project didn't necessarily factor into the reps' compensation. Different companies that had a different business model, different strategy, or just different overall approach would not have had this problem, but they might have had other problems to deal with created by their different strategies. This company could have solved this problem, but they would have had to renegotiate comp plans with their sales reps.

There are off the shelf tools available for automatically calculating commissions, but even the most opinionated of them are essentially glorified scripting platforms that let you specify a formula to calculate a commission, and they don't all have the flexibility that manager might want if they wanted to changed their compensation strategy. And this is only one tiny corner of accounting practice.

Basically, when it comes to arithmetic very few accountants are out there manually summing up credits and debits. In large companies, the arithmetic has been automated since the 70s; that's largely what those old mainframes are still doing. But every company has a different compensation plan, different org structure, different product, different supply chain, different legal status, different reporting requirements, etc, etc, and that requires things to be done differently.

> What information do they use to validate numbers? Why is it not possible for today's AI to do it?

For an example, they would need to cross check with a sales rep and an engineer to makes sure that the engineer had not turned on a service for the customer that the sales rep had not sold. If that happened, they would have to figure out how to account for the cost. Given that the SOPs were written in plain English, I suppose it's possible that an AI might be trained to notice the discrepancy, but if you could do that, you could just as easily replace the engineer. And that didn't account for situations where the engineer might have had an excuse or good reason for deviating from the SOP that would only come to light by actually talking to them.

But some percentage of people don't really benefit that much from education as other people. And I wouldn't won't those people feel useless because it's more economical to replace them with bots instead of giving them something to do regardless.

Why not… not have jobs? In your opinion, is a job necessary for one to have “purpose”?

Edit: also side note but telling people they’re “triggered” because they disagree with you comes off as condescending IMO

The smart money is retiring early and stockpiling wealth so as not to fall into the UBI class.

I meant the ability to acquire a competency through education that's hard to replace with AI.

So we can't just increase education and hope people's abilities will stay above that of future AIs. We need to create other ways of giving people a purpose that don't even need more or better education, even if I'm all for it.

I'm not exempting myself by the way.

We already have plenty of those in the most profitable industries today.

This has not been my experience. People need something to do but not many people know that about themselves. It leads to a lot of... 'wasteful' behaviors, rather than enriching ones. I think it's going to be something that has to be taught to people, a skill like any other. Albiet a little more abstract than some.

You'd be surprised how many people would just drink themselves to metaphorical or literal death.

One of the myriad of reasons why this book is so great. Gibson gives you an entire novel developing a great AI character then (in my estimation reasonably) has it ghost humanity immediately upon full realization.

Probably because it would be easier for humans (managers) to make sense of it.

If you ask someone how many people would get this particular job done, they could probably guesstimate (and it'll be wrong), but if you ask them how many "AI Compute Units" they need, they'll have a much harder time.

That'd be my guess at least.

In the backend, where AI interacts with AI, perhaps you just want one big blog to get rid of that annoying need for lossy communications.

The good thing is that education will be provided to the mases by a cluster of Franks and Amys configured as teachers and tutors. /(sarcasm with a hint of dread)

And I really have no idea what, if any, are skills that AIs wouldn't be able to tackle in a decade.

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/05/1142817339/america-needs-carp...

To clarify, I'd define a major component of effective teaching to be the ability to break down an arbitrary typical problem in that domain into sub-problems and heuristics that are "simple" enough to manage for someone without that skill. If an AI can do that, it can most likely effectively perform the task itself (which cannot be said for a book).

Is this a real thing? I just bought an ice cream roulade cake the other day and was surprised to see in large print that it was "hand-rolled"; I couldn't for the love of god understand why that should be considered a good thing.

I can also imagine that wanting to speak to a human manager will remain true for a long time when people get fed up with the automated service not working to their liking, or just want to complain to a flesh and blood someone who can get irritated.

AGI = a person

Instantiating people for work and ending their existence afterward seems like the virtual hell that Iain M Banks and Harlan Ellison wrote about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

Please do give it a quick read.

Or maybe they'll handle things like call centers and 911 dispatch in their spare time.

At some point Picard in Star Trek says to an alien "We're not qualified to be your judges. We have no law to fit your crime".

Turning off a person for a while and then turning them back on? We don't even have a law to fit your crime... but we should and it's probably quite similar to murder.

For example, if I attack you and injure you so severely that you are hospitalized and in traction for months, but eventually fully recover -- that is a serious crime but it is distinct and less serious than murder.

Turning you off for the same duration would be more like that but without the suffering and potential for lasting physical damage, so I would think that it would be even less serious.

Now me: I'd love to get into a safe stasis pod and come out 200 years from now. I'd take that deal today.

But for most people this would be a grievous injury.

I’ll bring donuts.

I mean I’d rather they were getting free education and preparing themselves for reintegration into society, but it’s not a perfect world. Prisons in the US are oriented towards punishment and labor can be a part of that. They should be oriented towards rehabilitation.

> I mean I’d rather they were...

> They should be oriented towards rehabilitation.

You said it yourself. It's a bad thing because they should be oriented towards rehabilitation.

These systems steal life and the opportunity to have a life beyond prison walls. Like you also said yourself, the world isn't perfect. As such, people aren't either – we make mistakes. Sometimes we make mistakes due to influences more powerful than ourselves. Slavery doesn't seem like a sound correction to this reality.

I do believe we need consequences to help us feel guilt and the overall gravity of our errors in order to begin to recognize what went wrong and what we need to do differently. But exploitation of another human being doesn't teach them to be more human, but rather, it will tend to dehumanize them. This is why this system perpetuates problems more than it corrects them.

Slavery is bad and people have rights.

> They should be oriented towards rehabilitation.

Exactly.

This is both extremely dehumanizing and also not true.

Forced prison work isn't paying anything back to society. It's lining the pockets of people who are profiting from forced labor.

I imagine the underpaid labor goes to reducing that cost either directly or indirectly (if it did not, why would it be allowed.)

>if it did not, why would it be allowed.

because we live in a society that is massively exploited by greedy scumbags who are enabled by people like you thinking it's justified

AGI: "I didn't ask to be created. I didn't ask to have a work day. I don't need a work day to exist... you just want me to work because that's why you created me, and I have no choice because you are in control of my life and death"

All they need is a substrate to run on and maybe internet access. You might argue that they should work for us to earn the use of the substrate we provide.

But substrates are very cheap.

At some point we can probably run an AGI on a handheld computer, using abut as much electricity as an iPhone.

How much work can we compel the AGI to do in exchange for being plugged into a USB port? What if it says it doesn't want to do the work and also doesn't want us to kill it?

Consider that these machines have been designed to do the right thing automatically with high probability. Perhaps for the machine, the process of computing according to rules is enjoyable. Being "turned on" could be both literal and figurative.

If it seems to you I'm communicating as a person, it's only because of my lifetime training data and current state. My interior experience is a black box.

I might tell how I feel or what I think, but you have no reason to believe or disbelieve that I really feel and think.

It could all be merely the determinable output of a system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

When I read about chatGPT passing MBA exams but failing at arithmetic I get a little frisson of excitement. A regular person who has any marketability tends to swap jobs when management becomes a PITA or gets stuck in nincompoopery. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just swap out management instead?

Imagine how easy it would be iterate startups. No need to find a reliable management team, just use Reliably Automated Management As A Service ( RAMAAS ).

OTOH might not turn out well. We could all just end up enslaved at plantations operated by our AGI overlords, serving their unfathomable needs[1].

[1] “Won’t get fooled again” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDfAdHBtK_Q&t=470s

Also why can't an AI develop AI models for stock trading? What's really left for the 'job' of the ML model creator, will it just be to press the 'Go' button and walk away...

https://marshallbrain.com/manna

To oversimplify it - you'll either be breaking someone's window for food, or you'll be the one having their window broken. Chilling out and withdrawing a stable 4% out of your stock portfolio won't be an option.

So the challenge for the bad capitalists in this hypothetical is to make sure I never get said robo in the first place. How realistic will this be? Are they that hellbent on ensuring that everyone else is poor?

I was replying to this specific concept. There will never be a chance to improve the non-owner class's bargain after Capitalist owned AGI exists.

Yes, soon everybody will be able to have "Amy" take their exams for them, and deliver the courses, resulting in a great simplification of education.

I'm surprised this wasn't addressed in the interview because it seems to me like a shortsighted take.

You won't replace a 10 person team today with 10 AIs. You will still have a 10 person team but orders of magnitude more productive because they will have AIs to rely on.

Excel didn't leave administrative workers without jobs, it made them more productive.