What will knowledge workers do when most knowledge work is done with AI?

Question

It seems that fairly quickly here 7 or 8 (my estimate) out of every 10 knowledge workers will be out of a job.There&rsquo;s nothing malicious about it, they will (and I will too) just be irrelevant.I get the whole argument about humans have done this before, agrarian > industrial > service economic transitions blah blah. Not saying it&rsquo;s impossible for broad swaths of people to reskill/repurpose themselves, I just think the structural displacement this time around because of the massive amount of human labor AI makes irrelevant is pretty hardcore.It doesn't seem like a humans created value X way and now we&rsquo;ll just create value Y way situation. Instead we'll have to reconsider value creation from zero, post-capitalist world type stuff, no?

anenefan · Accepted Answer

Given a more immediate time frame of next 20 years or so, a job being replaced with cheap A.I. will most definitely come down to context of the job regardless how talented the person was filling that role. Even mission critical circumstances, A.I. will probably end up doing the heavy lifting with talent overseeing all aspects of the A.I. performance - that is providing training data is or becomes sufficiently knowledgeable.
Some fields are going to be more susceptible to being replaced faster and harder, given a long history of knowledge which has already been published and peer reviewed that is suitable for more than 90% .. 95% of existing issues. As it happens some fields just are not well documented, cryptic at best and any ideas A.I. would be adequate will cost whatever company dearly.
In saying that, since so much information has been or in the process of being censored, those running A.I. will have to be very careful to ensure their knowledge is complete as it can be. The company will have to get their hands on obscure books and work out some copyright deal with numerous publishing companies. I say that as the web seems in recent years to have been uncluttered of small but fascinating facts, with a focus of streamlining broader facts into single entry easy to consume packages.
Here is a specific example where I expect A.I. to fall short hard -- when I found out an intolerance condition I had worked out myself in childhood, that actually I in fact was not alone to being extremely sensitive to olive oil back in early 00s, especially extra virgin olive oil, the web was full of half decent articles describing the issue in detail and I was actually surprised the condition had a specific name for the sensitivity to the extra virgin component. Given Google search returns nothing of value (yup I well know the various common seed oil components (which is not what it was - I tolerate other seed oils much better) or adulteration and contamination are separate things) I doubt their A.I. would actually be able to display the name of the condition which was specific to extra virgin olive oil sensitivity /toxicity.

dave4420 · Answer

The same thing that happened to industrial workers as the areas they lived in deindustrialised.

allears · Answer

Yes. Gonna be a shitshow. There are zero plans for retraining or repurposing displaced workers -- it's the "every man for themselves" (conservatives generally don't consider women) theory. UBI, which is objectively a very good idea, doesn't stand a chance in the current political climate, and whatever safety net may exist is being shredded even as we speak. It's almost like we're purposely creating an underclass.We live in interesting times indeed.