To the extent that humans sometimes intrinsically value things about other humans for their own sake rather than for their consequences (e.g. companionship, romance, empathy, competition, religious purposes) it seems that humans will always have things to do for each other that are not replaceable, regardless of how capable AIs are.
My sense is that is a pretty large extent, and perhaps eventually it will fade or be selected against, but it doesn’t seem like literally running out of things to do that others value is a serious risk for the median human.
Of course, if you keep decreasing the number of things, it may be increasingly hard for more and more people to find something that they both want to do and that others want them to do, even if the number doesn’t go to zero.
Fully agree! I should say I’m writing a series of posts on the AGI economy and one of the next ones is exactly that there are some “singularity-proof jobs” like the ones you describe. I don’t think we can all move into them so I would still except a shifting labor to capital ratio—but it’s definitely not zero.
To the extent that humans sometimes intrinsically value things about other humans for their own sake rather than for their consequences (e.g. companionship, romance, empathy, competition, religious purposes) it seems that humans will always have things to do for each other that are not replaceable, regardless of how capable AIs are.
My sense is that is a pretty large extent, and perhaps eventually it will fade or be selected against, but it doesn’t seem like literally running out of things to do that others value is a serious risk for the median human.
Of course, if you keep decreasing the number of things, it may be increasingly hard for more and more people to find something that they both want to do and that others want them to do, even if the number doesn’t go to zero.
Fully agree! I should say I’m writing a series of posts on the AGI economy and one of the next ones is exactly that there are some “singularity-proof jobs” like the ones you describe. I don’t think we can all move into them so I would still except a shifting labor to capital ratio—but it’s definitely not zero.
Here’s the post about the preference for humans even if machines can outperform in terms of price / performance: https://machinocene.substack.com/p/these-jobs-are-singularity-proof