Also I imagine a lot of demand for plumbers might drop because AI might help you to learn to solve easy cases. Imagine you turn on you camera and it would just tell you what to do exactly.
I have just called a plumber to do a leaking radiator replacement. Not because I don't have the tools or I don't have YouTube, but because I didn't want to do it.
But get a little more squeezed and with less salary due to AI eliminating your job or your field's salary bargaining power, and you'll try to not call one if you can avoid it, even if you don't want to do it yourself.
Currently AI made me way more work and unpaid over hours already buy sorting out the 10x expectations and the slop grenades by the 10x workers, that is why i needed it... so I can't even have this much feeling of having accomplished anything myself.
I'm not sure how this will work out. Burnout will be standard, and almost universal soon, apart from the previous low-performer, low skilled bottom of barrel folks who will mass produce crap with this.
Yes, buuut: I think we are already really close to that for a long time. You could learn a lot just from internet and youtube. But most people, I feel, just do not like to neither do plumbing/diy nor learn about it. Like if I tell people they can save hundreds of € by changing their own brake pads and that it is really easy to diy, they just shrug and go to the mechanic.
So I am not sure if AI will really increase the percentage of people willing to learn these skills and do repairs etc
Yeah the information has been available for awhile. What stops people is all the indoctrination and conditioning.
"I'm not allowed to replace my water heater, the government says I need permits, the government says only a plumber can connect a gas line"
I don't think people realize that the people doing entry level skilled work like replacing your water heater or swapping your brakes at jiffy lube often only exceed the caliber of labor that's in a McDonalds when it comes to attendance and pissing clean.
Some stuff you really shouldn’t do just because you saw some youtube videos, and it has fuck-all to do with “government indoctrination.”
I grew up in trades. I’ve seen shit work and dangerous work and serviceable work and beautiful work. And sometimes even I didn’t actually know the difference until an inspector (and family member) explained it.
So I do small stuff. If it’s serious and I can afford it, I use a trusted professional.
> So I do small stuff. If it’s serious and I can afford it, I use a trusted professional.
I'm with you here. Though I have to say, on the flip side, oftentimes when I choose to DIY something it is because I don't necessarily trust that I can find a professional who won't cut corners in ways not obvious to me. I've seen it happen too many times. I may be a lot slower, but I'm extremely thorough at the stuff that I do myself.
Plumbers are paid well because of the way they organized.
-They restricted the number of apprentices. That limited the number of people in the field similar to medical school.
-They could bar substandard workers from practising in the city of London.
-They kept their craft knowledge in house and it was never written down. Apprentices swore oaths never to reveal the “secret of the mystery.”
If you look at programming we do everything the opposite. It’s no wonder salaries will collapse. In fact the only question is why didn’t they collapse sooner.
Definitely. IMO, plumbing is one of those trades that videos on YouTube seem to help a lot more than an LLM. Code and simple stuff an LLM is great, but anything more complex or getting into heavy installation not so much.
The issue is they might run out of normal countries. In developing countries they would quickly become target of local corrupt officials. They would basically suck out whatever they can from companies that would attempt to do billion dollar business there. You can think of them as some mob from mafia movies. There is no way Microsoft would prefer to deal with that kind of folk instead of just hiring American people
Microsoft is located in Bangalore and Hyderabad. Both of those cities are not exactly known for their corruption.
If you want corruption, then Delhi is your best bet.
I think this is really a future, this is the product that I really expected to become reality at some point. If we assume agents become even more common in the future, then I don't think we would really have a lot of modern software. Most of it is really is not needed at all.
Most apps that people use are really very similar and don't have anything original. It would make more sense for it to be more personalized. For example someone might prefer not to interact with interface at all, and just access services just by chatting with a bot, while other person might want only last steps to be provided as UI. For example to see summary of his cart before paying. While another person might be insterested in just browsing all options. Some might prefer to have filters, while other would want AI to filter everything for them.
I think the real result would be when all services would be automated by AI. Like if you want to be a small business, you no longer need to build anything. You just describe what real life services can you provide: delivery, barber, baker, cleaning, repair. Then all of that would be in some agent network, and available to other agents as an option. While humans on both sides would just get a bridge between them in whatever form is most comfortable for them. Buyer might get a list of bakeries as normal ecommerce website, while the baker might just be someone who receives phone calls explaining him what his next order is in human voice.
Even from survival perspective I think it make sense for an synthetic AI to keep humanity alive in order to have a backup for itself. If we imagine some sci-fi scenario, then it make more sense for it to move itself to the Moon or Mars, and keep Earth as a reserve planet where biological species can in case of catastrophy recreate AI again. Killing humanity or keeping only animals would be very time consuming because evolution might take million years and also no guaranteed to be replicated (Because we might have altered a lot of resources that were low hanging fruits, that are now require advanced knowledge to mine)
It doesn't need to keep living humans, it just needs enough information to rebuild them from scratch (DNA synthesis + artificial wombs). This also has the advantage that it can install any cultural beliefs it likes without pre-existing culture getting in the way.
If a rogue AI could self replicate and became space-faring, humans would pose literally no threat to them, and they would also never run out of resources.
If you don't need to breath oxygen, the atmosphere of Earth makes for a pretty terrible industrial base. Oxidation is a constant struggle to many processes.
Having natural extremes of temperature, cold sink and hot sink, with no atmosphere would be the ideal. E.g. Saturn's moon Iapetus would be a good AI outpost.
If an AI squashes any life form or intelligence other than its own, then it also has to fear its own reproduction, or autonomous clones of itself. It's a pretty bad strategy game theoretically speaking.
>If an AI squashes any life form or intelligence other than its own, then it also has to fear its own reproduction, or autonomous clones of itself. It's a pretty bad strategy game theoretically speaking.
Any AI smart enough to be an existential threat is smart enough to formally prove its clones are loyal and construct them with negligibly low probability of any failure that could break this assurance.
Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem applies to arbitrary programs. The AI only has to prove results about specific programs, and it can follow whatever restrictions it needs to make such proofs possible.
The physical world means bit flips are inevitable, but error correcting codes exist. You can apply as much error correction as you like and reduce the probability of failure to an arbitrarily low value.
But it can't verify that for generally intelligent copies of itself.
There is no way for it to formally verify large multi-agent dynamical systems.
It will still need a set of agreed upon behavioral protocols to keep things stable.
Grey goo or paperclip optimizers are real dangers, but super intelligence necessitates these protocols even more than lesser intelligences due to the high leverage and rapid evolution of the systems.
