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Ok_Homework9290 t1_jadtgrb wrote

I've commented something similar in the past on this sub:

I get the impression that this sub seems to believe that white collar work is nothing more than just crunching numbers and shuffling papers, and therefore, it shouldn't be too hard to automate it in the near future.

Knowledge work (in general) is a lot more than that, and anyone who works in a knowledge-based field (or is familiar with a knowledge-based field) knows this. Not only do I think you're underestimating the complexity of cognitive labor, I also think you're (as impressive as AI progress has been the last few years) overestimating how fast AI progresses and also gets adopted.

AI that's capable of fully replacing what a significant amount of knowledge workers do is still pretty far out, in my humble opinion, given how much human interaction, task variety/diversity, abstract thinking, precision, etc. is involved in much of knowledge work (not to mention legal hurdles, adoption, etc). I strongly suspect a multitude of breakthroughs in AI are needed in order for it to cover the full breadth of any and every white-collar job, as merely scaling up current models to their limits will only fully automate some aspects of knowledge work and many will remain to be solved (again, that's my suspicion, I'm not 100% sure).

Will some of these jobs disappear over, let's say, the next 10 years? 100%. There's no point in even denying that, nor is there any point in denying that much of the rest of knowledge work will undoubtedly change over the next time span and even more so after that, but I'm pretty confident we're a ways away from it being totally disrupted by AI.

That's just what I think.

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Exarch_Maxwell t1_jadwm2n wrote

A lot of people tend to forget middle grounds as well, the AI doesn't need to be as good or better than you to replace you, it just has to make the guys next to you productive enough so you are not necessary, adjust for scale and you could have 30% of the currently employed people be unemployed really soon, how many of those can re skill quick enough is another story.

Do give examples tho, cognitive labor that cannot be simplified into a series of smaller tasks which can then be automated.

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Ok_Homework9290 t1_jadzu5s wrote

You make a good point, but I will say that productivity has always risen in the workplace, and there's more people working than ever before.

At some point, I do think what you described will happen, but I just don't think that that's gonna happen soon.

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NotASuicidalRobot t1_jaduoxu wrote

That is reasonable, however I think another significant factor is the massive improvement in job efficiency. For example, if 1 artist (just an easy example that I know of) can take on 5 times the work (including the human communications aspect since now the pure work crunching aspect is accelerated), unless demand somehow increases 5 times as well thats a few extra artists out of work

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Ok_Homework9290 t1_jadxzvx wrote

That's not necessarily true. Work in general is as efficient as ever, but there's also more workers than ever.

At some point, yes, there will start be significant reductions, but I don't think that's gonna happen for the foreseeable future.

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