The full interview this comes from is off the rails. Gawdat says we'll have AGI by 2026 at the absolute latest, and that we will have artificial super intelligence in the immediate future. He guarantees that after destroying jobs, within 15 years we will be in a "utopia" controlled by AI. It's an absurd level of confidence for an extremely bold prediction.
In his last interview from this series in 2023, Gawdat said that LLMs are "alive in every possible way," have a "very deep consciousness," are "definitely aware," and "feel emotions."
His current endeavors involve an unlaunched combination LLM relationship coach and dating site (matchmaking humans with humans, not with LLMs, as far as I can tell).
The future is looking more and more like Elysium every day. Probably with well-defended walled/gated communities for the elite instead of a space station, but we're on the same societal path...
> He guarantees that after destroying jobs, within 15 years we will be in a "utopia" controlled by AI.
Given the Holocaust took ~12 years (including all the legal/political groundwork) and the Holodomor a year, the "between" doesn't fill me with confidence...
Think about what happened when we got advances in agriculture.
We have gone from something like 90% of people employed growing food to something in the single digits (I'm too lazy at the moment to get exact figures, but this is close enough for my point).
Did all those advances in agriculture create jobs? I would say yes and no.
For the specific industry the advances happened in? No, definitely not. There are way fewer jobs in agriculture now.
But what did happen is that people were freed up to do different things. Those jobs were indirectly created by the fact that people did not need to spend so much time growing food. That allowed people to do other things to create value and improve our lives. Without those agriculture advances, we wouldn't have AI right now.
I suspect AI will be similar. We aren't going to have more jobs in the technology section because of AI. But that guy who hears "Code Monkey" for the first time and marvels that someone wrote a song about his life? He won't be a code monkey anymore he will be doing something else. If he's lucky something more personally fulfilling.
Funny thing is, it wasn't agricultural advances, at least initially. It was chemistry and mechanics. Haber-Bosch process of ammonia synthesis created cheap fertilizer, mechanization dramatically increased productivity. New plant varieties with higher yields came later.
Synthetic fertilizer and mechanization are commonly seen as agricultural advances in the same way that quantum computing is an advance in the field of computer science even though much of the implementation is physics.
Yeah, it's not the ag-tech that created new jobs, it's that human's like to be useful and get paid so they'll come up with new things like web dev or instagram influencer. Come AGI people will still probably come up with things to do. The wages and payment bit will likely need to be modified along the UBI or to each according to their needs lines.
I keep thinking of that investment disclaimer whenever people cite the - 100 year old - example of mechanization of agriculture: "Past performance is no guarantee of future results"
The next generation of children is already being conditioned for women leaving the workplace and society reverting to a pre-WW2 social structure. That's a solution. Jobs are lost forever, women are out of the workforce and the number of workers is halved. We all live in a trad-conservative paradise.
Interestingly, even in western countries there is basically unlimited demand for agricultural work, and it pays well. The issue is that it's hard work and to get into the higher payment tiers you must take on some risks.
Even in small rural areas the demand for locally produced sustainable and consciously produced agricultural products is largely unmet.
I think the current capabilities of AI are basically trash. But at the same time, just because something has not happened, does not mean that it cannot happen. I think AI becomes salable as a replacement for people not because it's amazing, but because there are things outsourced labor is truly bad at. So in the work units where execs have already proven they are happy to destroy jobs to gain incremental revenue, they will do so again. At the same ttime, CEOs will not replace themselves with AI simply because they will make the business decision not to.
Detroit's decline wasn't really caused by tech. More that unions jacked the wages and other costs for car production there so the production moved elsewhere.
Are you saying that we can't tell people whose jobs were created by technology (cars destroying the jobs of carriage makers elsewhere) that they jobs were affected by technology?
Agree. Being enough for these people isn't enough, they also think we should care what they have to say.
I would not include simonw with the other 3 at all. His opinions are informed by use instead of just other thoughts. Simon also releases a lot of utility tools.
These are sales speeches. They are over hyping it. AI has its niche but they are trying to plug it everywhere.
Maybe they have a point. Maybe hooking people up on software tools so they are incompetent without will pay off.
Hinton talks are hilarious. He goes from explaining perceptrons to huge claims like "this is what understanding is", "that's how our brain works", "linguists are cranks if they don't agree", and "this proves there is no god" but the last one as some weird little anecdote involving some religious migrant worker, and implies heavily that disagreeing with him is equivalent with having religious beliefs.
In general, the idea with technology is it's cheaper to do things.
It's easier to start the next widget company because building widgets with the technology is cheaper.
It's easier to consume other things because goods are cheaper to make with the tech.
A third option is that the tech enables something all together new, eg television, that starts a new industry.
As far as direct job creation, the third way is the most obvious but probably not the case at the moment. So I guess we're stuck waiting for goods and services made with AI to get cheaper.
Seriously, carpenters and plumbers and maybe more electricians. All those copy writers, graphic designers and junior coders are going to have to do something else.
I'm joking, but not. I think a lot of fat is going to get trimmed of the bone of most industries. That may include myself which is a worry.
With this much shoddy code out there, I'm expecting a LOT more testers are going to be needed. This is job creation but not the good kind.
Think Tesla Optimus robot grabbing popcorn. Instead of one cashier filling bags of popcorn, you now have a dedicated teleoperator + sweeper to pickup all the popcorn that's spilled. One job turned into two jobs.
It's just basic economics; when something makes the economy more efficient, it doesn't destroy jobs forever, people get new, better jobs in a more efficient economy.
Perhaps AI will finally raise the bar so high lower-IQ individuals won't be able to find any meaningful employment, but this has never happened in before and I doubt it'll happen again. I don't think I've seen a respected economist go on a news broadcast and say AI will lead to mass unemployment.
How does "ai" make "the economy" more efficient exactly ?
> people get new, better jobs
Which law dictate that these jobs are better ?
I don't see people getting better jobs personally, I see a shit load of people pushed into more and more precarious jobs, with less and less workers rights and job security, with stagnating wages despite rise in productivity, &c.
Yeah, lower IQ people can use AI too...it might even close the gap to the high IQ people depending on their talents, what they learn, what they apply it to, and so on.
> high lower-IQ individuals won't be able to find any meaningful employment, but this has never happened in before and I doubt it'll happen again
"Meaningful" is a bit weasely here. If a skilled factory worker had their job offshored in the past and wound up employed at Walmart after, they did not find "meaningful" work
> it doesn't destroy jobs forever, people get new, better jobs in a more efficient economy.
Still doesn’t explain how new jobs are created. Efficient economy doesn’t mean more jobs. You could displace a thousand workers and create a single new better job, but that means nothing.
Probably if the capital owners who have automated away the need for intellectual labor want to take advantage of their increased income and the increasingly cheap/desperate labor, they might hire back some of the fired white-collar AI-replaced folks to give them Roman villa treatment (hand-feeding grapes, performing plays and theater at their homes, ever more elaborate massage/grooming/pampering or the more illicit variety).
One team to re-do the work to double check the right answer.
The second team to reconcile the right answer with the AI result.
I'm not even joking ... I've professionally been extremely embarrassed once by an AI result. Now I check it so often that I might as well just do the work I asked it to do.
No doubt, quick questions and rough ideas, LLM is the bomb.
Anything that contains drudgery that nobody wants to do. AI is automating away all the cool creative jobs, leaving only the garbage ones. Once robotics is up there, those garbage jobs will be gone as well. Then the humanity implodes within 2 generations.
I wouldn't worry about it. Within two generations, the remaining humans will be mainly concerned with surviving in a wrecked ecosystem as best they can.
The idea that LLMs will replace us all just seems untethered from reality. Yes, they are extremely powerful and useful, with incredible potential, but I am not convinced that the cost/benefit ratio scales to the size of the entire economy.
As amazing as LLMs are, the statistical unreliability of the SOTA models means human intervention is always necessary. That's based on today's SOTA models which are already so absurdly gigantic that the DCs are disrupting civic infrastructure due to their water and power demands, and these companies still have to rate limit aggressively just to keep the service up.
Everyone knows quadratic growth doesn't scale, so I don't see how these models continue to grow in capability, while also growing in capacity to meet the demand of an "agentic economy", while still ultimately needing to pay human SMEs to verify correctness and fix mistakes. It doesn't add up.
My prediction is that we'll see increased efficiency in knowledge workers and reshaping/consolidation of certain job functions, but the structure of the economy over the next two decades won't be upended due to LLMs.
I don't understand such statement. Automation has already created more job opportunities, why should this be any different? Jobs don't go away, they just transform. And since this AI (whatever that means, nobody really knows) isn't a human-like AGI, it will most certainly not replace humans, but it will automate processes and speed things up.
If you're a business that offers 3 services to the public and "AI" could automate one person's salary out of your payroll, why would do that as opposed to keeping your headcount and instead offer 9 services to the public generating more streams of revenue?
Especially when companies lay off the workers that would normally consume license seats or purchase consumer goods with job wages.
Funny how all these boosters bragging about automating the economy seem to conveniently forget how much of the economy, in some way, is based around headcount and consumption - both of which are going down due to AI with no replacement being pitched, almost as if that were the plan all along.
What you're saying is that no matter the level of automation we have to keep working as much, and we have to consume as much as the system asks us to consume, because now we need a sucker to pay for these 6 new extra "services"
Maybe, just maybe, we could slow things down, profit from the time saved instead of trying to squeeze more out of every fucking thing we put our hands on.
Much of what was automated is physical labor which allowed workers to move into "service/intellectual" jobs. When tractors and dump trucks removed the need for masses of people to move dirt, it didn't create more jobs of moving dirt around since those jobs could also be tackled by more tractors and dump trucks. If AI is what all these "AI evangelicals" claim, then most intellectual jobs would be gone. And it won't create more service/intellectual jobs for humans because whatever new jobs are created would be tackled by AI.
> If you're a business that offers 3 services to the public and "AI" could automate one person's salary out of your payroll, why would do that as opposed to keeping your headcount and instead offer 9 services to the public generating more streams of revenue?
If AI could automate one person's job, why would you keep him? You can offer 9 services with one less person.
Moving dirt around is an input into many other things. Because moving dirt around is now cheap, we now build a lot more and a lot better roads than we did when moving dirt had to be done with human / animal labor. That road system directly and indirectly created millions of jobs.
Similarly, software is a crucial input to pretty much everything in modern society. More / better software would create tons of new jobs.
I'm not so sure that more worse software will create those jobs though, and that seems to be the direction we're moving with AI.
> When tractors and dump trucks removed the need for masses of people to move dirt, it didn't create more jobs of moving dirt around since those jobs could also be tackled by more tractors and dump trucks
It created dump truck driver / maintenance / engineer / safety / fuel supply / parts factoring / etc jobs. I wouldn't say that's an example of creating zero jobs.
>If you're a business that offers 3 services to the public and "AI" could automate one person's salary out of your payroll, why would do that as opposed to keeping your headcount and instead offer 9 services to the public generating more streams of revenue?
Because cost cutting increases share-holder value. See Jack Welch at GE. Over time he destroyed the company but also raised the share price tremendously.
And lo, new companies were created to fill the void. AI will cause quite a shakeup but short term stock manipulation eventually needs to be paid off (let's call it "management debt" like "tech debt").
The simpler way to view this is that AI creates value. We can argue how much and what kind, but our economy is reliant on ever-increasing value and is pretty good at utilizing it.
Microsoft didn't get smaller when computers got better, their market got much bigger.
Software industry needs a healthy shake out anyway. Too many people came in for the money. The current shake out involves either stunting people inside vibe coding such that they are functionally retarded, or straight up leave them long-term unemployed. Honestly, the only reason anyone would stick around is because this is all they know or like. I would not fuck around with this career if you ain’t about that life.
But this goes for all, so all the project managers, and basically anyone that acted as middle-men between text editor and production, they all need to go. It’s going to be a nice trim job, better for everyone.
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In his last interview from this series in 2023, Gawdat said that LLMs are "alive in every possible way," have a "very deep consciousness," are "definitely aware," and "feel emotions."
His current endeavors involve an unlaunched combination LLM relationship coach and dating site (matchmaking humans with humans, not with LLMs, as far as I can tell).
...has he looked at a calendar lately? I just did, and it turns out that 2026 is less than five months away.
I'm not even going to touch the "alive in every possible way" bullshit.
Given the Holocaust took ~12 years (including all the legal/political groundwork) and the Holodomor a year, the "between" doesn't fill me with confidence...
it's been only ~6 months or so since Trump took office and he's already annihilated the US Fed Gov and is now declaring martial law.
and he's concerned with appearances, sorta. AI won't be.
shoutout to Paul Virilio and how technology drives speed which drives war and destruction
We have gone from something like 90% of people employed growing food to something in the single digits (I'm too lazy at the moment to get exact figures, but this is close enough for my point).
Did all those advances in agriculture create jobs? I would say yes and no.
For the specific industry the advances happened in? No, definitely not. There are way fewer jobs in agriculture now.
But what did happen is that people were freed up to do different things. Those jobs were indirectly created by the fact that people did not need to spend so much time growing food. That allowed people to do other things to create value and improve our lives. Without those agriculture advances, we wouldn't have AI right now.
I suspect AI will be similar. We aren't going to have more jobs in the technology section because of AI. But that guy who hears "Code Monkey" for the first time and marvels that someone wrote a song about his life? He won't be a code monkey anymore he will be doing something else. If he's lucky something more personally fulfilling.
Funny thing is, it wasn't agricultural advances, at least initially. It was chemistry and mechanics. Haber-Bosch process of ammonia synthesis created cheap fertilizer, mechanization dramatically increased productivity. New plant varieties with higher yields came later.
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Anyways, if I put my cynnical hat on after looking at this: https://blog.waldrn.com/p/american-boys-have-become-less-sup...
The next generation of children is already being conditioned for women leaving the workplace and society reverting to a pre-WW2 social structure. That's a solution. Jobs are lost forever, women are out of the workforce and the number of workers is halved. We all live in a trad-conservative paradise.
Before they existed, few would have believed the disappearing jobs would be replaced by web designers, uber drivers, youtubers, drone pilots etc.
Even in small rural areas the demand for locally produced sustainable and consciously produced agricultural products is largely unmet.
It's very counterintuitive, but for 250 years tech has constantly eliminated jobs, while unemployment rates have stayed the same.
People have always predicted this would lead to mass unemployment, they've always been wrong, and yet they've kept predicting it.
One way to explain it is that unemployed people are an unused resource, and free market economies are very good at finding uses for those.
Two examples out of plenty others, where people had to move out as means of survival.
Geoffrey Hinton seems to be in the headlines constantly going "godfather of AI" and giving some random obtuse warning or call for action.
Eric Schmidt also spends a lot of time yapping.
And of course people like Gary Marcus.
Simon Willison also does a lot of writing but at least his blog is actually useful information of actual tests and news.
I would not include simonw with the other 3 at all. His opinions are informed by use instead of just other thoughts. Simon also releases a lot of utility tools.
It's pretty wild.
It's easier to start the next widget company because building widgets with the technology is cheaper.
It's easier to consume other things because goods are cheaper to make with the tech.
A third option is that the tech enables something all together new, eg television, that starts a new industry.
As far as direct job creation, the third way is the most obvious but probably not the case at the moment. So I guess we're stuck waiting for goods and services made with AI to get cheaper.
I'm joking, but not. I think a lot of fat is going to get trimmed of the bone of most industries. That may include myself which is a worry.
With this much shoddy code out there, I'm expecting a LOT more testers are going to be needed. This is job creation but not the good kind.
Think Tesla Optimus robot grabbing popcorn. Instead of one cashier filling bags of popcorn, you now have a dedicated teleoperator + sweeper to pickup all the popcorn that's spilled. One job turned into two jobs.
Perhaps AI will finally raise the bar so high lower-IQ individuals won't be able to find any meaningful employment, but this has never happened in before and I doubt it'll happen again. I don't think I've seen a respected economist go on a news broadcast and say AI will lead to mass unemployment.
Is it ?
> when something makes the economy more efficient
How does "ai" make "the economy" more efficient exactly ?
> people get new, better jobs
Which law dictate that these jobs are better ?
I don't see people getting better jobs personally, I see a shit load of people pushed into more and more precarious jobs, with less and less workers rights and job security, with stagnating wages despite rise in productivity, &c.
"Meaningful" is a bit weasely here. If a skilled factory worker had their job offshored in the past and wound up employed at Walmart after, they did not find "meaningful" work
It has happened plenty of times
Still doesn’t explain how new jobs are created. Efficient economy doesn’t mean more jobs. You could displace a thousand workers and create a single new better job, but that means nothing.
One team to re-do the work to double check the right answer. The second team to reconcile the right answer with the AI result.
I'm not even joking ... I've professionally been extremely embarrassed once by an AI result. Now I check it so often that I might as well just do the work I asked it to do.
No doubt, quick questions and rough ideas, LLM is the bomb.
Professionally? Nah. Not yet.
As amazing as LLMs are, the statistical unreliability of the SOTA models means human intervention is always necessary. That's based on today's SOTA models which are already so absurdly gigantic that the DCs are disrupting civic infrastructure due to their water and power demands, and these companies still have to rate limit aggressively just to keep the service up.
Everyone knows quadratic growth doesn't scale, so I don't see how these models continue to grow in capability, while also growing in capacity to meet the demand of an "agentic economy", while still ultimately needing to pay human SMEs to verify correctness and fix mistakes. It doesn't add up.
My prediction is that we'll see increased efficiency in knowledge workers and reshaping/consolidation of certain job functions, but the structure of the economy over the next two decades won't be upended due to LLMs.
If you're a business that offers 3 services to the public and "AI" could automate one person's salary out of your payroll, why would do that as opposed to keeping your headcount and instead offer 9 services to the public generating more streams of revenue?
This is the "the climate has changed before" argument for economics.
> why would do that as opposed to keeping your headcount and instead offer 9 services to the public generating more streams of revenue?
Because there might not be enough demand for those 9 services.
Funny how all these boosters bragging about automating the economy seem to conveniently forget how much of the economy, in some way, is based around headcount and consumption - both of which are going down due to AI with no replacement being pitched, almost as if that were the plan all along.
I think it's a very different question to ask "how would this create jobs" and "will this create jobs...in today's market."
It's really not, you cannot cause a recession by increasing productivity, money doesn't disappear.
Maybe, just maybe, we could slow things down, profit from the time saved instead of trying to squeeze more out of every fucking thing we put our hands on.
> If you're a business that offers 3 services to the public and "AI" could automate one person's salary out of your payroll, why would do that as opposed to keeping your headcount and instead offer 9 services to the public generating more streams of revenue?
If AI could automate one person's job, why would you keep him? You can offer 9 services with one less person.
Similarly, software is a crucial input to pretty much everything in modern society. More / better software would create tons of new jobs.
I'm not so sure that more worse software will create those jobs though, and that seems to be the direction we're moving with AI.
It created dump truck driver / maintenance / engineer / safety / fuel supply / parts factoring / etc jobs. I wouldn't say that's an example of creating zero jobs.
Because cost cutting increases share-holder value. See Jack Welch at GE. Over time he destroyed the company but also raised the share price tremendously.
The simpler way to view this is that AI creates value. We can argue how much and what kind, but our economy is reliant on ever-increasing value and is pretty good at utilizing it.
Microsoft didn't get smaller when computers got better, their market got much bigger.
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Seems like a current trend.
The idea that a massive tax increase (aka "tariffs") will create jobs is also 100% crap.
1. Say it will protect children
2. Say it will create jobs
But now I put it like that, it's a little strange I've not heard of any politicians even implying that their policies will get people more sex…