P(doom) vs P(permanent underclass)
Importance: 4 | # | zvi, agi, post-agi
zvi:
Jordi Hays: I'm updating my timelines. You now have have at least 4 years to escape the permanent underclass.
Luke Metro: This is the best news that founding engineers have received in years.
Nabeel Qureshi: The 'vibe shift' on here is everyone realizing they will still have jobs in 2030.
(Those jobs will look quite different, to be clear...)
It's a funny marker of OpenAI's extreme success that they released what is likely going to be most people's daily driver AI model across both chat and coding, and people are still disappointed.
Part of the issue is that the leaps in the last two years were absolutely massive (gpt4 to o3 in particular) and it's going to take time to work out the consequences of that. People were bound to be disappointed eventually.
Zvi: On the question of economic prospects if and when They Took Our Jobs and how much to worry about this, I remind everyone that my position is unchanged: I do not think one should worry much about being in a ‘permanent underclass’ or anything like that, as this requires a highly narrow set of things to happen - the AI is good enough to take the jobs, and the humans stay in charge and alive, but those humans do you dirty - and even if it did happen the resulting underclass probably does damn well compared to today.
You should worry more about not surviving or humanity not remaining in control, or your place in the social and economic order if transformational AI does not arrive soon, and less about your place relative to other humans in positive post-AI worlds.
So how likely is the scenario that (most people + you lose your jobs to AI) AND (powerful people decide to fuck over everyone else) AND (AI good enough to do all of human labour does not kill us all)? We can ignore the issue of the underclass having a way better quality of life - should come included in the second event.