“Full Automation” is a Slippery Metric
Research Status: Written & researched quickly. I think the key point is fairly simple and obvious. I relied on Claude to help with rewriting.
There’s been a growing interest in predicting when various products or jobs will be “fully automated.” Will we soon have popular movies, books, or even CEOs that are entirely AI-generated?
Some very quickly-found links:
- https://manifold.markets/ChaseStevens/will-an-aigenerated-paper-be-accept
- https://manifold.markets/GabeGarboden/will-aigenerated-art-win-a-major-tr
- https://manifold.markets/probajoelistic/-by-2026-will-any-fully-aigenerated
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/sherzododilov/2024/01/11/can-ai-become-your-next-ceo/
It’s an intriguing question, but I believe its definition is slippier than some realize. Here’s why.
First, the idea of “full automation” on complex tasks (movies, books, CEO duties) is somewhat of a false dichotomy. In practice, automation exists on a spectrum, with diminishing returns at the extreme. Consider self-driving cars. Even the most advanced autonomous vehicles still have remote human monitors who can intervene if necessary. This human involvement might be significant at first (one intervention for every few miles, in the cases of Tesla and Cruise) but will likely diminish over time as the technology improves. However, even if there’s just 1 person left overseeing all vehicles, we technically wouldn’t reach “full automation.”
This leads to what I call the Hilda[1] Scenario. If we ask, “When will movies be 100% automated?” we’re effectively asking, “When will Hilda, the very last human involved in the moviemaking process, be let go?” Perhaps Hilda has a unique talent for crafting prompts that yield remarkable AI-generated special effects, or a keen eye for making subtle but impactful script adjustments. If the cost of retaining Hilda is minimal, her involvement could persist even in an otherwise automated workflow. As long as Hilda remain cost-effective to have in the loop somewhere, it’s not fully automated.
The question of a “fully automated CEO” also highlights the limitations of this framing. Even if the vast majority of a CEO’s responsibilities could be automated, there might still be significant value in having a human in the role. It’s one question to ask, “When are ~99.99% of current CEO duties able to be automated?” It’s an entirely different question to ask, “When will companies officially deem it best to not technically have a human at the helm?” In this case, it might well be the case that a human will be needed in the role for legal reasons, even if they functionally have few duties.
Separately, there’s the complexity that sometimes automation makes humans more valuable over time.
Consider fields like visual effects. Despite the rapid advancement of automation and innovation in VFX, the industry hasn’t seen a drastic reduction in human workforce. Instead, the rising quality standards and the increasing demand for VFX shots have led to a growth in VFX artist employment.
This phenomenon mirrors the Jevons paradox in economics: as efficiency increases, consumption of a resource may rise rather than fall. In the context of automation, as certain tasks become more efficient, the demand for those tasks may grow, ultimately leading to an increase in human labor rather than a decrease.
Rather than fixating on the notion of “full automation,” I think we should focus more on other, more precise benchmarks. Coming up with these is difficult, but here are suggestions.
For different industries (like visual effects, software engineering, management, etc):
When will X be “mostly” automated? As in, it takes 80%+ less time than normal from a human, for a quality level that we’d expect in [2024]?
How will employment and salaries change over time?
When will it be possible to generate the work equivalent to a ~[2020, 2024] employee, using less than [$100, $1M] of compute spending?
How much computation will be used? How much money will be spent on compute, vs. employees?
Which tasks might get outsourced, using a system augmented by AI? (For example, “autonomous driving” arguably now means, “driving is outsourced to a company that heavily relies on AI.”)
Will any specific economic benchmarks (productivity, revenue) be impacted?
Can we measure changes in quality and cost over time?
More work thinking along these lines seems useful.
- ^
Hilda is an example person here. My guess is that the absolute last person in this chain won’t be named Hilda, but it’s a possibility. The name Hilda was one of the first to come from a random name generator.
This is an interesting question to ask, and as you say “More work thinking along these lines seems useful”.
However, I couldn’t help feeling that you were trying to understand how long something would take, given the current state of technology, and yet making predictions about what tasks technology will be able to perform in the future is at least in part about what the capacity will be in the future, which assumes the capacity and range of abilities will be necessarily greater.
You address this in part, but still posit one person in the loop, which still seems to me like an extrapolation from current tech, rather than assuming new (unforeseen) tech (which has caught us by surprise numerous times in the past few years).
I would also argue that a prompt like...
”Here are the specs for an art competition, create an artwork for it” arguably allows an AI to create their own artwork. If you were to ask an AI now, they might ask follow up questions to get your guidance, but again we are not talking about today’s AIs.
or
“Create a paper for the journal Nature”. Again the article specifies no content, only the journal, leaving the AI to imagine something relevant for the journal.
I don’t think I’d see this (prompting) person in the loop as significant in terms of answering the questions posed in the linked surveys.
In saying this, I’m meaning only to offer a question, I think you’re correct that it is worthwhile thinking about what this means for different industries, and how phenomena like Jevon’s Paradox come into play—I generally think this will play a large role, and will offset many of the woes we might worry about.