alt Hacker News> Only humans can do some tasks
> For instance, AI can’t bathe a patient.
Until there are robots. Or the AI gets creative in an attempt to find a solution to this "problem" and orders a fatal dose of morphine for the patient.
> And new tasks will appear
> Historically, new technologies have also created new tasks for workers. For a nurse, that might be checking how well an AI triages patients, or reviewing an AI-proposed care plan.
You can see where they're going with this.
> At the individual level, it means coders and call service center agents may have to switch to jobs like electrician and nurse, which are less exposed to AI.
It's weird they call nurses "less exposed to AI" when the earlier section discusses how AI could turn nurses into underlings for AI taskmasters.
> How might powerful AI change the economy?
Worth noting that this discussion is built around 2030, which is now less than 3.5 years away.
The hedges that make the Extreme scenario sound less bad fail to explain how anyone is going to pay electricians when the highest paid group (human knowledge workers) is being decimated. It sounds like the theory is that everyone is either going to become an electrician or a totally fair and efficient wealth redistribution scheme will magically appear.
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You really ought to study recent developments in the service industry. Olive Garden added a tablet to every table so that customers can place their orders without talking to or waiting for a waiter. The goal was faster, more accurate service, since now the waiter did not need to remember your extremely detailed order.
And yet most people prefer talking to a waiter. There are other restaurants that have tried similar approaches and people would almost always deal with people rather than a robot.
I would love a robot to clean my home and do household chores, but in the service industry I would prefer real humans doing the work.
It's genius for Anthropic: data centers are their main expense. If they convince everyone to become an electrician, then the electrician labor supply swells, and the price of hiring electricians to service their data centers shrinks. 4-D chess at its finest.