I think my answer would depend on your answer to “Why do you want a job?”. I think that when AI and robotics have advanced to the point where all physical and intellectual tasks can be done better by AI/robots, we’ve reached a situation where things change very rapidly and “what is a safe line of work long term?” is hard to answer because we could see rapid changes over a period of a few years, and who knows what the end-state will look like? Also, any line of work which at time X it is economically valuable to have humans do, will have a lot of built-in incentive to make it automateable, so “what is it humans can make money at because people value the labour?” could change rapidly. For example, you suggest that sex work is one possibility, but if you have 100,000 genius-level AIs devising the best possible sex-robot, pretty quickly they’d be able to come up with something where the people who are currently paying for sex would feel like they’re getting better value for money out of the sex-robot than out of a human they could pay for sex. Of course people will still want to have sex with people they like who like them back, but that isn’t typically done for money.
We’ll live in a world where the economy is much larger and people are much richer, so subsistence isn’t a concern, provided that there’s decent redistributive mechanisms of some sort in place. Like let’s say we keep the tax rate the same but the GDP has gone up 1,000x—then the amount of tax revenue has gone up 1,000x, and UBI is easy. If we can’t coordinate to get a UBI in place, it would still only need 1 in 1,000 people to somehow have lucked into resources and say “I wish everyone had a decent standard of living” and they could set up a charitable organization that gave out free food and shelter, with the resources under their command. So you won’t need a job. Meaning, any work people got other people to do for them would have to pay an awful lot if it was something a worker didn’t intrinsically want to do (if someone wanted a ditch dug for them by humans who didn’t like digging ditches, they’d have to make those humans a financial offer they found made it worthwhile when all of their needs are already met—how much would you have to pay a billionaire to dig you a ditch? There’s a price, but it’s probably a lot.), and otherwise, you can just do whatever “productive” thing you want because you want to, you enjoy the challenge, it’s a growth experience for you or whatever, and it likely pays 0, but that doesn’t matter because you value it for reasons other than the pay.
I guess it could feel like a status or dignity thing, to know that other people value the things you can do, enough to keep you alive with the products of your own labour? And so you’re like “nah, I don’t want the UBI, I want to earn my living”. In that case, keep in mind “enough to keep you alive with the products of your own labour” will be very little, as a percentage of people’s income. So you can busk on a street corner, and people can occasionally throw the equivalent of a few hundred thousand of today’s dollars of purchasing power into your hat, because you made a noise they liked, in the same way that I can put $5 down for a busker now because that amount of money isn’t particularly significant to me, and you’re set for a few years at least, instead of being able to get yourself a cup of coffee as is the case now.
Or, do you want to make a significant amount of money, such that you can do things most people can’t do because you have more money than them? In that case, I think you’d need to be pushing the frontier somehow—maybe investing (with AI guidance, or not) instead of spending in non-investy ways would do it. If the economy is doubling every few years, and you decide to live on a small percentage of your available funds and invest the rest, that should compound to a huge sum within a short time, sufficient for you to, I dunno, play a key role in building the first example of whatever new technology the AI has invented recently which you think is neat, and get into the history books?
Or do you just want to do something that other people value? There will be plenty of opportunities to do that. When you’re not constrained by a need to do something to survive, you could, if you wanted, make it your goal to give your friends really good and thoughtful gifts—do things for them that they really appreciate, which yes they could probably train an AI agent to do, but it’s nice that you care enough to do that, the fact that you put in the thought and effort matters. And so your relationships with them are strengthened, and they appreciate you, and you feel good about your efforts, and that’s your life.
Of course, there are a lot of problems in the world that won’t magically get fixed overnight even if we create genius-level AIs and highly dexterous robots and for whatever reason that transition causes 0 unexpected problems. Making it so that everybody’s life, worldwide, is at least OK, and we don’t cause a bunch of nonhuman animal suffering, is a heavy lift to do from where we are, even with AI assistance. So if your goal is to make the lives of the people around you better, it’ll be a while before you have a real struggle to find a problem worth solving because everything worthwhile has already been done, I’d think. If everything goes very well, we might get there in the natural un-extended lifetimes of people alive today, but there will be work to do for at least a decade or two even in the best case that doesn’t involve a total loss of human control over the future, I’d think. The only way all problems get solved in the short term and you’re really stuck for something worthwhile to do, involves a loss of human control over the situation, and that loss of control somehow going well instead of very badly.
I didn’t say this, but my primary motivation for the question actually has more to do with surviving the economic transition process: if-and-when we get to a UBI-fueled post-scarcity economy, a career becomes just a hobby that also incidentally upgrades your lifestyle somewhat. However, depending on how fast the growth rates during the AGI economic transition are, how fast the government/sovereign AI puts UBI in place, and so forth, the transition could be long-drawn out, turbulent, and even unpleasant, even if we eventually reach a Good End. While personally navigating that period, understanding categories of jobs more or less safe from AGI competition seems like it could be very valuable.
Ok. I thought after I posted my first answer, one of the things that would be really quite valuable during the turbulent transition, is understanding what’s going on and translating it for people who are less able to keep up, because of lacking background knowledge or temperament. While it will be the case after a certain point that AI can give people reliable information, there will be a segment of the population that will want to hear the interpretation of a trustworthy human, and also, the cognitive flexibility to deal with a complex and rapidly changing environment and provide advice to people based on their specific circumstances, will be a comparative advantage that lasts longer than most.
Acting as a consultant to help others navigate the transition, particularly if that incorporates other expertise you have (there may be a better generic advice giver in the world, and you’re not likely to be able to compete with Zvi in terms of synthesizing and summarizing information, but if you’re for example well enough versed in the current situation, plus you have some professional specialty, plus you have local knowledge of the laws or business conditions in your geographic area, you could be the best consultant in the world with that combination of skills).
Also, generic advice for turbulent times: learn to live on as little as possible, stay flexible and willing to move, save up as much as you can so that you have some capital to deploy when that could be very useful (if the interest rates go sky high because suddenly everyone wants money to build chip fabs or mine metals for robots or something, having some extra cash pre-transition could mean having plenty post-transition) but also you have some free cash in case things go sideways and a well placed wad of cash can get you out of a jam on short notice, let you quit your job and pivot, or do something else that has a short term financial cost but you think is good under the circumstances. Basically make yourself more resilient, knowing turbulence is coming, and prepare to help others navigate the situation. Make friends and broaden your social network, so that you can call on them if needed and vice versa.
I think my answer would depend on your answer to “Why do you want a job?”. I think that when AI and robotics have advanced to the point where all physical and intellectual tasks can be done better by AI/robots, we’ve reached a situation where things change very rapidly and “what is a safe line of work long term?” is hard to answer because we could see rapid changes over a period of a few years, and who knows what the end-state will look like? Also, any line of work which at time X it is economically valuable to have humans do, will have a lot of built-in incentive to make it automateable, so “what is it humans can make money at because people value the labour?” could change rapidly. For example, you suggest that sex work is one possibility, but if you have 100,000 genius-level AIs devising the best possible sex-robot, pretty quickly they’d be able to come up with something where the people who are currently paying for sex would feel like they’re getting better value for money out of the sex-robot than out of a human they could pay for sex. Of course people will still want to have sex with people they like who like them back, but that isn’t typically done for money.
We’ll live in a world where the economy is much larger and people are much richer, so subsistence isn’t a concern, provided that there’s decent redistributive mechanisms of some sort in place. Like let’s say we keep the tax rate the same but the GDP has gone up 1,000x—then the amount of tax revenue has gone up 1,000x, and UBI is easy. If we can’t coordinate to get a UBI in place, it would still only need 1 in 1,000 people to somehow have lucked into resources and say “I wish everyone had a decent standard of living” and they could set up a charitable organization that gave out free food and shelter, with the resources under their command. So you won’t need a job. Meaning, any work people got other people to do for them would have to pay an awful lot if it was something a worker didn’t intrinsically want to do (if someone wanted a ditch dug for them by humans who didn’t like digging ditches, they’d have to make those humans a financial offer they found made it worthwhile when all of their needs are already met—how much would you have to pay a billionaire to dig you a ditch? There’s a price, but it’s probably a lot.), and otherwise, you can just do whatever “productive” thing you want because you want to, you enjoy the challenge, it’s a growth experience for you or whatever, and it likely pays 0, but that doesn’t matter because you value it for reasons other than the pay.
I guess it could feel like a status or dignity thing, to know that other people value the things you can do, enough to keep you alive with the products of your own labour? And so you’re like “nah, I don’t want the UBI, I want to earn my living”. In that case, keep in mind “enough to keep you alive with the products of your own labour” will be very little, as a percentage of people’s income. So you can busk on a street corner, and people can occasionally throw the equivalent of a few hundred thousand of today’s dollars of purchasing power into your hat, because you made a noise they liked, in the same way that I can put $5 down for a busker now because that amount of money isn’t particularly significant to me, and you’re set for a few years at least, instead of being able to get yourself a cup of coffee as is the case now.
Or, do you want to make a significant amount of money, such that you can do things most people can’t do because you have more money than them? In that case, I think you’d need to be pushing the frontier somehow—maybe investing (with AI guidance, or not) instead of spending in non-investy ways would do it. If the economy is doubling every few years, and you decide to live on a small percentage of your available funds and invest the rest, that should compound to a huge sum within a short time, sufficient for you to, I dunno, play a key role in building the first example of whatever new technology the AI has invented recently which you think is neat, and get into the history books?
Or do you just want to do something that other people value? There will be plenty of opportunities to do that. When you’re not constrained by a need to do something to survive, you could, if you wanted, make it your goal to give your friends really good and thoughtful gifts—do things for them that they really appreciate, which yes they could probably train an AI agent to do, but it’s nice that you care enough to do that, the fact that you put in the thought and effort matters. And so your relationships with them are strengthened, and they appreciate you, and you feel good about your efforts, and that’s your life.
Of course, there are a lot of problems in the world that won’t magically get fixed overnight even if we create genius-level AIs and highly dexterous robots and for whatever reason that transition causes 0 unexpected problems. Making it so that everybody’s life, worldwide, is at least OK, and we don’t cause a bunch of nonhuman animal suffering, is a heavy lift to do from where we are, even with AI assistance. So if your goal is to make the lives of the people around you better, it’ll be a while before you have a real struggle to find a problem worth solving because everything worthwhile has already been done, I’d think. If everything goes very well, we might get there in the natural un-extended lifetimes of people alive today, but there will be work to do for at least a decade or two even in the best case that doesn’t involve a total loss of human control over the future, I’d think. The only way all problems get solved in the short term and you’re really stuck for something worthwhile to do, involves a loss of human control over the situation, and that loss of control somehow going well instead of very badly.
I didn’t say this, but my primary motivation for the question actually has more to do with surviving the economic transition process: if-and-when we get to a UBI-fueled post-scarcity economy, a career becomes just a hobby that also incidentally upgrades your lifestyle somewhat. However, depending on how fast the growth rates during the AGI economic transition are, how fast the government/sovereign AI puts UBI in place, and so forth, the transition could be long-drawn out, turbulent, and even unpleasant, even if we eventually reach a Good End. While personally navigating that period, understanding categories of jobs more or less safe from AGI competition seems like it could be very valuable.
Ok. I thought after I posted my first answer, one of the things that would be really quite valuable during the turbulent transition, is understanding what’s going on and translating it for people who are less able to keep up, because of lacking background knowledge or temperament. While it will be the case after a certain point that AI can give people reliable information, there will be a segment of the population that will want to hear the interpretation of a trustworthy human, and also, the cognitive flexibility to deal with a complex and rapidly changing environment and provide advice to people based on their specific circumstances, will be a comparative advantage that lasts longer than most.
Acting as a consultant to help others navigate the transition, particularly if that incorporates other expertise you have (there may be a better generic advice giver in the world, and you’re not likely to be able to compete with Zvi in terms of synthesizing and summarizing information, but if you’re for example well enough versed in the current situation, plus you have some professional specialty, plus you have local knowledge of the laws or business conditions in your geographic area, you could be the best consultant in the world with that combination of skills).
Also, generic advice for turbulent times: learn to live on as little as possible, stay flexible and willing to move, save up as much as you can so that you have some capital to deploy when that could be very useful (if the interest rates go sky high because suddenly everyone wants money to build chip fabs or mine metals for robots or something, having some extra cash pre-transition could mean having plenty post-transition) but also you have some free cash in case things go sideways and a well placed wad of cash can get you out of a jam on short notice, let you quit your job and pivot, or do something else that has a short term financial cost but you think is good under the circumstances. Basically make yourself more resilient, knowing turbulence is coming, and prepare to help others navigate the situation. Make friends and broaden your social network, so that you can call on them if needed and vice versa.
That sounds like good advice — thanks!