Reason this post exists: I’m a layman when it comes to AI, and I just learned the extent of how AI can impact the economy. I’m writing my thoughts down because my acute experience may be somewhat representative of how normies will react—how our friends and family members will react—should this version of the future transpire.
My reaction, initially spiraling in one direction, unexpectedly changed on Day 7.
Day 1 Reaction
A fun question I sometimes ask people is: how would you survive the zombie apocalypse?
People get delightedly creative in their answers: some say they would build a treehouse in the woods and live off the land; others say they would build a walled community in the frigid north. Sometimes they ask for my strategy:
“So, Declan, how would you try to survive?”
“Ah, I wouldn’t.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“It’s simple. I have no appreciable survival skills. I wouldn’t last long. Besides, that doesn’t sound like a world I would want to live in. So, in this scenario, I would choose to hole up in my apartment and play Chopin on piano 16 hours a day. Once my food rations are depleted, I would then play one final song—Chopin’s Funeral March.”
I just finished reading The Intelligence Curse. Putting aside the issue of surviving the x-risk of alignment[1], the author explains that humanity still has to contend with a world in which white-collar cognitive work is automated away by accelerating AI technology.
How could this happen? It’ll be the result of AGI becoming the ultimate cost-saving business tool:
[AGI] will easily slot in, reliably do a job, and do it better than any of its predecessors (including you) could ever do. Every actor – every company, every bureaucracy, every government – will be under competitive pressure to get humans out and their AI successors in. AGI will be domain agnostic – the goal is not to get superhuman abilities in one field, but in all of them. It will come for the programmer and the writer and the analyst and the CEO.[2]
This is not hypothetical. We are starting to see pre-AGI systems shrink analyst classes, change personnel strategies, and trigger layoffs. Remember that today is the worst these systems will ever be. You should expect that they will become more capable as time goes on. As they get better, their impact on the labor market will grow rapidly.
I am not confident in my ability to be part of the tech elite who exploit the AI revolution and profit tremendously. I fear getting left behind.
Hopefully the mega-rich, or a benevolent government, takes pity on the rest of us by distributing wealth via UBI. Or in the worst case, I could become part of the future impoverished underclass—as described in this post:
In a worse case, AI trillionaires have near-unlimited and unchecked power, and there's a permanent aristocracy [that’s] locked in based on how much capital they had at the time of labour-replacing AI. The power disparities between classes might make modern people shiver, much like modern people consider feudal status hierarchies grotesque. But don't worry—much like the feudal underclass mostly accepted their world order due to their culture even without superhumanly persuasive AIs around, the future underclass will too.
Near-term economic implications
Companies are catching wind that AI can be used to (permanently) downsize their workforce.[3]
Walking around San Francisco a couple months ago, I saw these ads promoting the end of human employees (and whoever took this photo likely included the homeless person next to it on purpose):
I’ve never before, until now, felt the urge to deface a public advertisement with a sledgehammer. Currently, I’m thinking of a line from Dylan Thomas’ 1952 poem written for his dying father:
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
The rage I feel comforts me, but I know it’ll do me no good. Time slows down for no one. The march of progress is inevitable.
Already, Time Magazine is reporting that AI progress is unlikely to slow down given the increasing number of tasks it now performs better than humans:
Career changes are coming
In the short to medium term (1-5 years), I’m now rethinking my current tech career. The fate of tech as a stable career choice seems precarious as AI’s coding abilities keep improving. Sure, some new jobs will be created (like entrepreneurs who exploit AI to create fully automated AI-run businesses). But by and large, I wouldn’t advise my younger friends to dive head first into a tech career without first considering the near-term economic implications of AI.
It would be difficult, in good conscience, for me to try to convince a fresh-eyed high school senior today to take the traditional trade-off of:
(massive debt[4]) + (four-year degree in computer science) = (lucrative tech job to pay off the debt)
Does that still make sense given that many of the current tech jobs may not exist by the time they graduate university?
In a different sector—art & design—my friend who went to college for 2D/3D animation no longer recommends other people do the same. She’s already seen mass layoffs affect her friends and colleagues—some of them are now working minimum wage jobs because they can’t find work in the art community.
Unfortunately for artists, the bad news keeps coming:
AI-powered tools can produce content much faster and more affordably than humans, making competition fierce for artists. These tools continually improve, potentially leading to further wage decline, fewer job opportunities and increased financial instability.[5]
Eventually, my friend was also let go from her design job—but only after she was forced to teach her company’s machine learning team how to automate her job away.
This leaves me with the dilemma of what to pivot to:
- Being a writer would be the dream. I already spend the majority of my free time writing.
- But I’m worried about LLMs supplanting creative writing professions.
- People working those jobs are currently learning to coexist with LLMs. But the threat of automation will, from now on, loom over them like the sword of Damocles.
- Teaching has always appealed to me.
- But in a world where cognitive work will be dramatically less valued, the stability of teaching as a profession seems uncertain. As described in The Intelligence Curse:
A common rebuttal I’ve heard is that some jobs can never be automated because we will demand humans do them. I hear this a lot about teachers. I think most parents would strongly prefer a real, human teacher to watch their kids throughout the day. But this argument totally misses the bigger picture: it’s not that there won’t be a demand for teachers, it’s that there won’t be an incentive to fund schools. I can repeat this ad nauseam for anything that invests in regular people’s productive capacity.
By default, powerful actors won’t build things that employ humans or provide them resources, because they won’t have to.
- Blue-collar work seems viable.
- Because of AI, humanity may recede from cognitive relevance and return to the world of manual labor.
- The advancements in the field of robotics today, fortunately, are not nearly as pronounced as in the AI field. So for now, blue-collar work is insulated from automation.
- We likely won’t be seeing robot plumbers anytime soon.
- Many people have fulfilling and well-paid careers as electricians, welders, and mechanics.[6] And while I’m confident in my ability to graduate from trade school, the tediousness of doing the same work every day, combined with the back-breaking nature of it, might exhaust me.
- Minimum wage jobs will likely always exist.
- Being a psychologist could work.
- I enjoy listening to people’s problems and helping them overcome obstacles.
- Even though the field of psychology is already coevolving with AI and people are increasingly using LLMs for therapy, I believe (perhaps naively) that people will prefer relating, empathizing, and communicating with a human being.
- Or maybe just rich people will be able to afford a human therapist, while everyone else will have to use robots for emotional support.[7]
- I could specialize in existential dread research (which will allow me to continue to grow intellectually—something I cherish being able to do in life).
- I’m starting to consider going back to school…
Hopefully I’m committing the Luddite fallacy and I’m miscalculating the (supposedly) huge number of new jobs that will be created due to technological innovation (as was the case for the industrial and computing revolutions). Hopefully the automating away of jobs continues to progress at the same gradual rate it always has, instead of precipitously accelerating and sweeping us off our feet by eliminating entire industries at the same time.
AI-related riots?
Sometime in the future, I wouldn’t be surprised if unemployment due to AI sparks mass riots and waves of suicide (which are up 33% from 2001 to 2018—perhaps because the accelerating modern world is too complicated for people, whose brains evolved in a hunter/gatherer setting, to comprehend and cope with the speed at which everything is changing and passing them by).
On the violence front, it’s good to remember that the social fabric can tear surprisingly easily. In the book Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela, the author noted that the 2019 Venezuelan electricity blackouts (caused by government mismanagement and corruption) had a curious effect:
Three days. It only took three days for the shit to hit the fan.
On day one without electricity, people didn’t know what was happening and they remained calm—they had candlelit dinners with friends to pass the time. On day two, worry began spreading, but people rationalized that soon the government would fix everything. Day three? People didn’t know if the electricity was ever coming back. Suddenly, it became a matter of survival. Massive looting ensued that devastated the country’s infrastructure, leading eventually to the largest recorded refugee crisis in the Americas.
If large groups of people in the US are made obsolete by AI, how will they feed their families? How will the 3.5 million truck drivers respond when self-driving technology makes them redundant? How about the 1.4 million accountants?
If job displacement happens too quickly and all at once, it’s good to remember: hungry people are extremely motivated people.
We could see violence, unless, by then, our population still cares to even fight back after having been reduced to passivity by the various nutritional and technological opiates of the masses pushed on us. The internet, for example, is increasingly becoming dominated by hyper-personalized algorithms that pacify us with non-stop brain-rot slop—reminiscent of WALL-E:
Those already wealthy are safe. And the rest of us?
I’m not worried about my retired family members who are living off their (non-government subsidized) wealth.
Me on the other hand? I’ve only been in the workforce for a few years. During this short time, I’ve been able to amass decent wealth via aggressive saving and investing, but not nearly enough to retire now. If I’m able to survive (and hopefully thrive) in the new economic landscape post-AI, then cool. If not, well…
Falling down the rabbit hole
I’m noticing my thoughts are drifting to the zombie scenario—with no marketable skills that allow me to survive in a world without human-based cognitive work, do I even want to live in that world?
Learning about this AI-induced plausible near-term scenario has brought me back to a dark place—a place I haven’t visited since my six-month bout of depression in college. Here’s a journal excerpt from around that time (after I had recovered):
As the weeks wore on, my mental health deteriorated. The stress I carried on my back was heavy such that it hurt to lie down to sleep. Everything hurt. Every step I took, trudging around campus, was in pain. In pain and wishing things were different. Headphones practically molded to my ears permanently—I did everything I could to mentally check out. And, for the first time in my life, dark thoughts began creeping into the recesses of my mind—whispering terrible things to me.
It’s been seven years since that journal entry. Since then I’ve thrived in life. But reading The Intelligence Curse, and related posts, instantly transported me back to that dark place. I can feel the same stress in my back—like someone is clamping down on my shoulders in a vise grip. I’m taking shorter breaths; I feel lightheaded. Psychologically, my very survival feels threatened.
I’ve never had a panic attack before, but I think I was close to having one last night before I went for a walk to calm down.
Fuck. It feels like I’ve aged five years in the last day. I’m thinking of this quote often attributed to Lenin:
There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.
If in the new AI-transformed economy I’m made irrelevant, then I’ll use what money I’ve accumulated to travel the world until my funds are exhausted. And after 20 years of playing piano, I will begin practicing for my final performance—Chopin’s Funeral March.
Day 2 Reaction
After getting some sleep, I’m feeling better now, but in an eerie way—like I’m sitting in the eye of a hurricane.
My mind is swirling with ideas…
I wonder if there’ll be a resurgence of religion?
After the Enlightenment, the need for religion to hold our hands through the dark mysteriousness of our world was slowly usurped by the warm glow of science. And now that light is shining bright, maybe too brightly—like the light of a dying star—and blinding humanity to recognize that perhaps its cleverness is merely hubris in disguise.
We so desperately want to kill and replace the gods that once consoled and guided us.
Nietzsche warned us of this:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
Back in 2009, scientist and author Edward O. Wilson portended:
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. It is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.
Go back a further forty-five years to 1964, and Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan forewarned that:
Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms.
Go back another three thousand years. In Genesis 3:19 we are told:
From dust we came, to dust we shall return.
For two days I spiraled in existential dread. I read more and more about the implications of AI until, feeling overwhelmed, I took an extended break from the internet.
Day 7 Reaction
During my time off, the pendulum of my mind began to swing back…
People’s lists of “The Best Books I’ve Ever Read” are replete with one book in particular—Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.
Frankl, a psychologist and holocaust survivor, wrote about his experience in the concentration camps. He observed two types of inmates—some prisoners collapsed in despair, while others were able to persevere in the harsh conditions:
Psychological observations of the prisoners have shown that only the men who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camp’s degenerating influences.
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They [were] few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitudes in any given set of circumstances.
A depressed person honestly believes there’s no hope that things will improve. Consequently, they collapse into a vegetative state of despair. It follows, therefore, that hope is literally the prerequisite for action.
So if I didn’t implicitly believe there’s a tomorrow worth living, then I wouldn’t have written this post. In some respects, I feel like I have no choice but to be optimistic, otherwise I would sit and do nothing.
I don’t know what the future will hold. I can’t predict if AI will displace more jobs than it will create with innovation. But I know that it pays to be optimistic—author Philip Tetlock affirms this in his book Superforecasting (which examines how people can become better at predicting future events):
The strongest predictor of rising in the ranks of superforecasters is perpetual beta, the degree to which one is committed to belief updating and self-improvement. It is roughly three times as powerful a predictor as its closest rival, intelligence.
After years of hard work and self-improvement, I managed to create a thriving life for myself—one that is worth living. If circumstances change, I’ll find a way to do it again.
If a storm disturbs the rock garden of a Zen monk, the next day he goes to work to restore its beauty.
- ^
The average AI engineer now thinks there’s a roughly 40% chance AI destroys the world.
I notice Fermi’s Paradox is lingering in the back of my mind…
- ^
Reminds me of the famous quote from a German pastor during World War II:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
- ^
See this tweet thread for a list of potential jobs that will be displaced in the next 6-24 months. While the list is not exhaustive, nor is every job necessarily at risk of being automated away in the near future, it’s worth thinking about to prepare for the future.
- ^
Consider that the average cost of college has more than doubled in the 21st century, consider that the average cost of 4-year college in the United States is $38,270 per student per year, and finally consider that student loan interest and loss of income can mean that investing in a bachelor’s degree can ultimately cost in excess of $500,000.
- ^
A “fun” video to think about AI’s impact on the art community:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMThdgg1m5Y - ^
4-year colleges have been overprescribed in the last two decades. Researchers found in 2022 that “52% of graduates with a terminal bachelor’s degree are underemployed one year after completing; [and] 10 years after completing, 45% are underemployed.”
Meanwhile there’s a burgeoning shortage of skilled labor in the US. For example, while 7,000 new electricians enter the field annually, 10,000 retire annually.
- ^
Which reminds me of the joke: “Rich people get Ozempic, poor people get body positivity.”