"The Obsolescence of Knowledge Work"

From Palladium, May 17:

My Last Five Years of Work

I am 25. These next three years might be the last few years that I work. I am not ill, nor am I becoming a stay-at-home mom, nor have I been so financially fortunate to be on the brink of voluntary retirement. I stand at the edge of a technological development that seems likely, should it arrive, to end employment as I know it. 

I work at a frontier AI company. With every iteration of our model, I am confronted with something more capable and general than before. At this stage, it can competently generate cogent content on a wide range of topics. It can summarize and analyze texts passably well. As someone who at one point made money as a freelance writer and prided myself on my ability to write large amounts of content quickly, a skill which—like cutting blocks of ice from a frozen pond—is arguably obsolete, I find it hard not to notice these advances. Freelance writing was always an oversubscribed skillset, and the introduction of language models has further intensified competition. 

The general reaction to language models among knowledge workers is one of denial. They grasp at the ever diminishing number of places where such models still struggle, rather than noticing the ever-growing range of tasks where they have reached or passed human level. Many will point out that AI systems are not yet writing award-winning books, let alone patenting inventions. But most of us also don’t do these things.

The economically and politically relevant comparison on most tasks is not whether the language model is better than the best human, it is whether they are better than the human who would otherwise do that task. This makes the objection that AI systems are not yet coding long sequences or doing more than fairly basic math on their own a more relevant one. But these systems will continue to improve at all cognitive tasks. The shared goal of the field of artificial intelligence is to create a system that can do anything. I expect us to soon reach it. If I’m right, how should we think about the coming obsolescence of work?  

It is worth noting up front that even today, work is far from the only way to participate in society. Nevertheless, it has proven to be the best way to transfer wealth and resources; it provides personal goods like social connection, status, and meaning; and it offers social goods like political stability.

Given this, should we meet the possibility of its loss with sadness, fear, joy, or hope? The overall economic effects of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) are difficult to forecast, and here I will focus on the question of how people will feel without work—whether they will, or can, be happy. There are obviously other vital questions, like how people will be able to meet their material needs. Many have examined this question, with no final answer yet adopted as official policy for this contingency by any government. I am instead going to do something that may feel like cheating. I will go ahead and assume that people can meet their financial needs through universal basic income or other transfers and will solely concentrate on the question of whether people can and will be happy—or at least as happy as they are now—without work.

The Obsolescence of Knowledge Work 

I expect AI to get much better than it is today.... 

....MUCH MORE