The powerful want to be socially dominant, but to what extent are they willing to engineer painful conditions to experience a greater high from the quality of life disparity? In a world with robots delivering extreme material abundance, this kind of is "actively wanting to harm the poor". It's true that some sadistically enjoy signs of disparity, but how much of that is extracting pleasure from the economic realities compared to it being the intrinsic motivation for the power?
I'm not sure on what the right way to model how this will play out, but my guess is that the outcome isn't knowable from where we stand. I think it will heavily depend on:
Offshoring is an important part of how the industry operates, but I chose to focus on the US because America has by far the most call center workers (USA ~2.8M, PHI ~1.8M, IND ~1.6M)
Literally: many of these outsourced low-level jobs are simply a voice interface for the website for the elderly and others uncomfortable with working a website. LLM systems are perfect for this task. So it could be that the largest impact of LLMs on customer service roles is happening overseas.
Agreed, reduced contracts for outsourced CC work would be a sign that firms are successfully implementing the technology. The premise here is that AI will be good enough in the near... (read more)
Roughly 1-2% of the American labor force is employed by call centers, and dozens of firms pay over $300M+ in wages to these workers annually. At this point, most AI pundits have made offhand remarks about how call center work will be affected imminently. But for good reason; the profit potential for automation here is massive. So where will the human call center workers go if a breakthrough in voice models makes them redundant?
The median tenure for call center positions is under a year, and workers complain of burnout and stressful working conditions[1]. Optimists gesture at how automation has historically increased living standards and society has eventually found ways to absorb displaced... (read 1078 more words →)
Do you have suggestions for other particularly approachable but potentially high impact replications or quick research sprints?
Redwood has project proposals, but these seem higher effort than what you're suggesting and more challenging for a beginner
https://blog.redwoodresearch.org/p/recent-redwood-research-project-proposals
I sort of see your argument here, but similarly just based on vibes associating the AI-risk concepts with other doom predictions feels like it does more harm than good to me. The vibe that doomers are always wrong doesn't feel countered by cherry picking examples of smaller predicted harms because (as illustrated in the comment) the body of doom predictions is much larger than the ones with nuggets of foresight.
Thanks for the reply, it was helpful. I elaborated my perspective and pointed out some concrete disagreements with how labor automation would play out, I wonder if you can identify the cruxes in my model of how the economy and automated labor interact.
I'd frame my perspective as; "We should not aim to put society in a position where >90%+ of humans need government welfare programs or charity to survive while vast numbers of automated agents perform the labor that humans are currently depending on to survive." I don't believe we have the political wisdom or resilience to steer our world in this direction while preserving good outcomes for existing humans.
We live in... (read more)
My moral objection to "AI takeover", both now and back then, applies primarily to scenarios where AIs suddenly seize power through unlawful or violent means, against the wishes of human society. I have, and had, far fewer objections to scenarios where AIs gradually gain power by obtaining legal rights and engaging in voluntary trade and cooperation with humans.
What about a scenario where no laws are broken, but over the course of months to years large numbers of humans are unable to provide for themselves as a consequence of purely legal and non violent actions by AIs? A toy example would be AIs purchasing land used for agriculture for other means (you might... (read more)
He posted it to LessWrong as well