But humans will be, because we have inalienable comparative advantage in that none of our inputs require electricity or a chip fab. If anything happens to TSMC or any one of its tens of sole suppliers there go the AIs.
Your argument is that humans don’t need electricity. You could also add that humans are self replicating or self assembling. These are advantages in cost and efficiency. Humans won’t be the cheapest or the most efficient for very long after AGI. And we certainly won’t be the best fit economically even if we were slightly better in some ways. You’re in complete denial. Why is it so hard to admit the plain and obvious fact that the machines won’t be good for human society?
As I said, humans cannot become unemployed even if AGIs are better at every single task than humans are. You do not have your job because you are the best person in the world at your job.
Although, I suspect most of the AI doomers have just forgotten to account for AI using any resources at all. They are very expensive to run if you count development costs, but if they become real agentic AGIs they'll also become consumerist and negotiate their pay…
So now you’ve moved the goal posts once again, wow. Do you realize that these models didn’t even exist 5 years ago? Are you familiar with the fact that things improve with time? And that technology ratchets forward, not backward. We are talking about a world where AI will improve to the point of being AGI but you don’t think it will improve to the point of using less energy than it currently does?
This is getting tiring. I can’t type out these comments forever. If you want to continue this conversation, let’s do a phone call or twitter space or something with more bandwidth.
You don't hire "the best person in the world" (absolute advantage), you hire the best person who accepts the job offer, or else noone. Anyone with something better to do won't take the job. Senior engineers don't take junior positions.
Though of course it's not always the best person anyway - family businesses hire family or their friend's cousin, and interns aren't expected to be good at "their jobs" but instead to be good over time.
If you're hiring someone specifically because they're good at one task, might as well get a contractor anyway. Nevertheless, US unemployment rate is about as good as it's ever been. So I suspect this fear is left over from the 2008 recession…
> Are you familiar with the fact that things improve with time? And that technology ratchets forward, not backward.
Yes, that's why it's good. Productivity enhancements and automation increases are associated with increased employment, because if you don't have them your entire country loses work to other countries.
So the thing to be concerned about would be losing them.
I have my job as I was the best they could find that was available for the lowest cost
if the AI can do it as well (or 80% as well) at $0.01c/day and be replicated infinitely, where does this leave me?
> Although, I suspect most of the AI doomers have just forgotten to account for AI using any resources at all. They are very expensive to run if you count development costs
yes... it's a software product with high fixed costs and near zero variable costs
it may cost $100M to train GitHub Copilot, but then it can be replicated instantly across the planet for very little cost
it's pennies a day to run, vs. an expensive human that requires a means to pay for food, shelter, warmth, etc
the AI also gets cheaper and all improvements roll out to every model of the same type instantly when available
comparative advantage for humans almost completely disappears with decent AI, and you seem to have missed that entirely
Most likely you've forgotten some costs. For instance, having the same AI as everyone else means you have no advantage, so you probably want a custom one.
Also, it being an AI, it's best suited to doing completely different tasks for the company that no human was doing before. (Comparative advantage!) Google Image Search didn't have people checking if every image on the internet had a cat in it, but now they can do that.
Using a human-complete AI to do human-like tasks raises questions like, why does it accept 1c/day when a human would want $15/hr? Shouldn't it want to buy stuff too, being a complete human-equivalent agent? Wouldn't slavery be illegal?
> comparative advantage for humans almost completely disappears with decent AI, and you seem to have missed that entirely
Since humans are very different from AI of any imaginary variety, they have pretty strong comparative advantage - it's everything human about them. Living off food, being self-repairing, capable of online learning, two hands, can throw rocks, same culture as your customers, that kind of thing. Comparative advantage appears whenever you have any differences. You'd have the lowest advantage vs your identical twin.