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I'm thinking about this from the female side at the moment, as a mom of two young girls. They are, of course, interconnected, but actually physically implementing public works projects is a young man's task.
As I understand things, people got washing machines, vacuums, off the rack clothing, children started going to school younger and staying longer, cheese came pre-shredded, veggies come frozen and chopped in bags, and so on. On the one hand: great! Hand washing and ironing clothing is horribly tedious. On the other hand, by the 60s there wasn't all that much left, and despondent housewives sitting alone at home, vacuuming for the third time that day became a trope. It's as easy for a man as a woman to type, so there were suddenly lots of secretaries and stenographers and whatnot. Lower class women could work at Macy's instead of making custom dresses at a small shop. This is ambiguously good -- there are a lot of tragic stories about impoverished women slowly losing their eyesight in centuries past, unable to replace their handwork with anything less visually exacting as they aged. But it's difficult to enjoy leisure when one is mostly just stuck at home alone all day operating various cleaning devices.
At the same time, female offices are kind of miserable, and most of the tasks can be automated anyway. I worked in an office a few years ago where I spent hours every week physically filing paperwork. This paperwork was, as far as I could tell, not required by law. Something about their business cycle made it easier to hire a relatively low skilled part time position year-round, rather than hiring a mid-skilled technician once for a couple of months. Probably related to the administrative assistant's desire to have assistants herself, ultimately for status reasons. There was all sorts of bad behavior around this, like setting up her chair to stare directly at her assistant's monitor at all times, and going on and on about how she couldn't go eat lunch until she had dispensed enough tasks to her subordinate. Alas.
Anyway, these sorts of positions can and should be automated already, and probably will be in reality soon. Where does that leave us? With a lot of home health aids, teachers, food service workers, and retail workers, apparently. Of those, most can be pithed of the more meaningful portions of the jobs, with only the tedious parts remaining. Medications can be automated; bedside manner cannot. Academic instruction can be automated; classroom management cannot. POS and much of food preparation can be automated; people feeling special because a somewhat attractive woman delivered their food in a polite way cannot. The parts of retail that can't be automated are mostly things like sweatshop labor, stocking, warehouse work, and deliveries. Amazon can pretend as though they've been automated by remaining surprised that someone might go to the bathroom more than average.
Community organizing, meetups, and church ladies have genuine value, but are not exactly scalable. You want probably 5 of them in a group of 100.
I'm not certain where this leaves us in the upcoming era of automated typing work. Faux homesteading and homeschooling families are still pretty fringe. I'm not completely sure even where I want things to go, though my aesthetic sensibilities head in the direction of more handcrafting and church like communities.
Perhaps even if not every woman goes back into community building, we could focus more on child rearing or keeping up social connections?
I know in my personal life I wish I could spend more time with children teaching them, and I have plenty of friends I would’ve kept in touch with were it not for the demands of time. I see a noble and crucial position for women in repairing and maintaining the social fabric.
Frankly I’m more worried about how men will cope when most of the useful work is taken away.
What do you have against Altman?
This is 100% coherent. He believes that we need to make AI popular and start working on alignment research now, before there is a hard takeoff. His concerns are that if AI stayed closed and only worked on by a small amount of researchers, capabilities would outpace alignment.
I tend to agree with his assessment. Profit motive is one of the only consistent incentives we have, and we can hopefully align it well with... alignment.
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If we do end up in a stable equilibrium once most jobs are automated, which I doubt, I peredict endless culture wars about which leisure activities are truly life-embracing, and which are thinly-veiled wireheading. E.g. Amish-larpers looking down on homesteaders who use robots, looking down on people who mostly live in the city but go camping with their kids, looking down on those who play video games with their kids, looking down on those who each retire to their respective screens, etc, all the way to opioid users.
I can imagine the central struggle of my life becoming trying to keep my kids from wireheading themselves one way or another.
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Nah, you want a participatory pitchfork where every one turns up regularly to the local volksrat. I don't expect such a thing, but it's what we need.
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I am a doctor, and I fully believe that both the dispensation of medication and a bedside manner will end up automated within 5 years, the first obviously before the latter, unless regulatory inertia stops it being deployed till approximately the same time.
I have no (ok, just a little) in admitting that GPT-4 is a better clinician than me, or most doctors for the matter.
Bedside manner isn't that hard to automate, humans will empathize with pretty much anything that's somewhat anthropomorphic, so put a cute face or even just a deepfaked human one on the monitor of a medical robot and you're already there. Give it a soothing voice, a kind personality, infinite patience, and there goes my job.
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