> There is no moat in any profession outside of entrenched wealth or guns at the moment
That's just not true at all.
Plumbers and electricians and carpenters are not going anywhere. A residential plumber will not have their job automated this or next decade, at best they'll have some fancier tools to play with.
No one expected natural language to be solved in 2020. At the time the smart money was on 20 to 80 years. Many people are still acting like it's not.
Things happen not at all and then all at once.
We have the cheap humanoid platforms coming out of China and they cost six months minimum wage salary in the developed world. Once a model is developed that can use those platforms to match humans for simple tasks we will see the hollowing out of all unskilled physical labor overnight.
NLP still isn't solved. LLMs are a big step change, but NLP still isn't solved.
I can talk to a computer and it can talk back. The rest is commentary.
ELIZA passed the Turing test in the 60s. That's not a statement of technological progress towards AI, that's a statement on 1) the uselessness of the Turing test, which has been known for decades and 2) the gullibility of the human psyche when it comes to assigning intelligence to anything that can mimic human communication patterns.
It did not.
Even Turing didn't respect the "Turing test", and your willingness to ignore reality in order to defend such a useless metric on the path to AI marks you as one of the gullible ones.
I have no idea why you're bringing up the Turing test, then saying it doesn't matter when you used it wrong.
What I'm talking about is that I use Claude daily to find stupid bugs in my code. I can now spend my time on things that matter.
This was science fiction 5 years ago.
Not quickly at least, but technology can gradually reduce the labor content of a plumbing job thanks to things like solderlerss fittings, plastic tubing etc. For carpenters, prefab assemblies made in automated factories, etc.
Most tradework is not new construction. It is mostly assorted rennovations and returns on existing structures dating back over a century.
A person knowing how some brick houses in Y neighborhood tended to be built back in 1890 won't be replicated by prefab anything.
The biggest risk they face is perhaps competition from unskilled workers who can do trades by just wearing Meta AR glasses and following instructions from an AI.
Of course you’d still need training on how to work with your hands but it would cut down on the need for years of experience and planning.
There is literally zero chance of that actually working, and no one who thinks it could has ever set foot on a job site.
... electricians ... are not going anywhere.
I wouldn't be so sure about that.
Power systems have a long way to go in terms of integration with data. One can envisage an inherently safe system whereby a data signal is superimposed on the wire (related to data-over-power) and every power source continually interrogates its loads and conditions on the wire are being continually monitored. Any unsafe situation will result in a shutdown of supply.
I'm describing a system that goes well beyond existing breakers and earth leakage: one that is able to fully map the connections between components, know the topology of the system and compare actual and expected behaviour. The idea is that any dummy could do electrical wiring, as the system itself would make it impossible to create an unsafe situation.
Cost would be higher to start with, but with economies of scale reducing the difference, my guess is that the higher cost of components could be offset by lower installation cost and the increased safety.
Yeah, that's not going to be retrofitted into a double digit percentage of homes by 2040.
Electricians are not going anywhere, this decade or next. I stand by what I said.
Every plumber, electrician, and carpenter relies on a union to prevent hordes of people from taking their jobs which requires any tradesman to go through five years of schooling in order to qualify to become hired at above minimum wage. To become the highest certification of plumber and open your own store (which you own) in some states requires fifteen years or more of certification or proven work experience.
In Indiana if you do nothing but take the tests it requires you have (depending on county) ten years of experience in order to open your own store and call yourself a plumber. I may as well buy a wrench and call myself a plummer and fix people's leaky faucets and then charge 90 percent of what they do. Or I would if I wanted my legs broken.
They vote themselves money in order to keep out immigrants for connecting pipes together. All the flow calculations require simple calculus you can have a cell phone tell you. They're a voting block not a profession.
And the stupidest thing is that if you got rid of the stupid shit like this you could absorb all the immigrants you wanted who would all go into construction and the price of a house would plummet. And instead we have phds that are never going to pay back what it cost to get a degree in computer science which no longer matters. But they couldn't write a science fiction book that wouldn't be derivative where I would say "oh this is like this author I've already read this one".
This reads like someone who is quite out of touch with the trades. A large number of states implement right to work laws that discourage union membership. I could go out and get a framer job today (and with the current immigration crackdown probably have one by the end of the day). Having worked as a framer before college, it will be incredibly long before these jobs have any level of automation (a thought which gives me comfort when I consider my own job prospects).
However, I'm thankful everyday that I get to sit in an A/C office and type on a computer. Framing is hard work and ruthless. Most people won't last a day doing it because of how challenging it is.
Who is going to buy the houses? Who is going to own the land? Not many people need a plumber. Look back some decades. We can't all just work in the trades. It doesn't make sense from a supply and demand stance.
A decrease in quality of life is an acceptable cost to stay alive. In a very different economy, people will just fix their own toilet with scavenged or bartered parts.
> Not many people need a plumber
Do you… not have running water?
My point was that humans can do most residential plumbing tasks easily, and the effort and cost involved in learning and acquiring tools might outweigh the desire to pay for a service in a future economy with scarce labor opportunities.
Also, in such a bleak future, there might not be running water where you currently own property.
But really you're answering your own question. The economy is not a zero sum game- It adapts. Why do our current jobs exist? Because somebody is paying for what we produce. Then we take our pay and buy what other people produce. There could be an equilibrium today (or 20 years ago) where nobody has any jobs but there are generally feedback loops that help get to a functioning economy.
It's not impossible that unemployment will go up but it's not as simple as LLMs will take our jobs. There's always more jobs to do and there are always some other equilibrium points. And it's not even clear LLMs are taking our jobs, one might argue that they'll end up creating more jobs.
>Why do our current jobs exist? Because somebody is paying for what we produce. Then we take our pay and buy what other people produce.
Because ample property and resources exist that require your (human) labor to turn into products.
If for example pumping water to AI data centers is more profitable than using it on crops and drinking water "the economy" would gladly watch you dehydrate and die. Economic short circuits such as war or governments have to step in and ensure basic human needs are met or a collapse of society can occur, and such things have occurred in the past, so this just isn't some kind of hypothetical.
Just remember there is no need for you in the post labor economy. If rich robot owners get the labor they need from other sources they'll gladly exterminate you and live in a much less populated planet.
> There's always more jobs to do and there are always some other equilibrium points.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooverville
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_in_Venezuela
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_Brazil#Sta...
> This reads like someone who is quite out of touch
No, it’s Indiana. They practice self-sabotage across many industries in the belief that the big-city folks just across the border will take all the jobs. Chicago, Cincinnati, Louisville. All of them just across the state line. Of course, very little thought about why large metros are just across the state line…