How are your plumbing skills?
replyYou mean my meat proxy skills while wearing a Ratatouille machine-vision head camera that tells me what wrench to pick up and how to crimp the Pex rings?
replyYou're telling me Google Gemini robot 2 tying a trash bag isn't also gonna be able to crimp PEX rings?
replyThe solution is probably a trash bag with a mini forklift compatible lift rings, an optical center mark, a ratcheting closure, and make a raspberry PI do the computing millions of dollars of tooling to make a robot compatible trash bag but it might be worth it, deploy the bean counters!
replyIt will. But having watched the video, I can tie one faster and cheaper. This week. Next week, who knows?
replyPlumbing is kind of a hard job, definitely not fun for anyone above middle age. And given it will pay minimum wage, I think I'd just take a life of leisure instead.
replyMinimum wage? Where I live, the plumber median wage is pretty much exactly the national median.
replySure, but that is today. When AI decimates the knowledge fields, a whole lot of people are going to be looking at different career options. There will not be any shortage of people hoping to make money in the trades, and with that surge in supply will come a collapse in prices.
replyAh, then I understand you. But please, let's stop with this inevitability. If AI decimates, not when.
replyApologies, I'm with you. I was speaking to the hypothetical, not trying to suggest it is inevitable. I think it is uncertain how this plays out, but I am an optimist and I think it ends up a net positive.
replyWhy would it not? The economic incentives make it inevitable. Might as well expect water to not flow downhill.
replyIt is very plausible that LLMs never get to 100% replacement for knowledge workers and the winners will the people who use both, leaving behind the people who thought all they needed to do was cut costs by doing existing workloads without humans. It remains to be seen if the constraint on quantity of knowledge work was the people or the work.
replyActually had a plumber here earlier today which was an ordeal so have been asking that myself too...
replyThe knowledge economy was already on the way out in favour of the performance economy even before LLMs. LLMs have also shown that they can produce in the performance space, of course, so it remains to be seen how valuable humans are in that position but so far it would appear that many are willing to pay for a "human connection".
replyPlenty if not all people put more value into handmade things, but they can't afford to have everything handmade. An IKEA coffee table is $15. Handmade one from a woodworker is $400 - $1000.
replyAbsolutely. Hence why manufacturing died long ago, and why the knowledge economy was already on the verge of death even before LLMs, and why we were already moving to the performance economy: because in the performance economy the consumer and the buyer are able to be disparate entities, where the buyers can have deep pockets even if the consumers don't.
replyIn the performance economy it doesn't matter how rich the consumer is, but what the consumer wants to consume does matter. Because the buyer and consumer are disjointed in the performance economy, the consumer isn't swayed by cost. However, if the consumer prefers AI performances, which they quite easily could, then humans are in trouble. But so far it seems human performances remain what the consumer wants to consume.
(Technically manufacturing and knowledge work could have established the same separation, but since the bright minds went to performance nobody thought to before it was too late)
> Become a useless class?
replyLike our capital class overlords?