You know it’s going to be good when an AI executive goes off on a tangent about “hey, what’s a job anyway!” while addressing — or failing to address — the topic of how their tech just might wipe out entire categories of human professions.
Today’s offending party, you’ll be shocked to hear, is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who talks about job destruction an awful lot, and usually in a pretty mealy-mouthed way.
His latest spiel is no exception. In an interview with Rowan Cheung at OpenAI’s DevDay conference on Wednesday, Altman floated the idea that the work you do today, which might imminently be transformed or eliminated by AI, isn’t “real work.”
The idea was brought up after Cheung invoked his favorite thought experiment of considering how a farmer half a century ago might view our current reality. “If you told a farmer fifty years ago that this magical thing called the internet is going to create a billion new jobs,” Cheung said, “he probably wouldn’t believe you.”
In the “intelligence” era, Cheung said, a billion knowledge workers’ jobs will be threatened before new ones are created. Seemingly, Cheung’s point is that it’s not clear what jobs AI will create several decades down the line, just like how a farmer in the past wouldn’t be able to envision how the internet spawned an entire economy.
You could probably poke a few holes in this, like why we’re comparing the future of AI’s impact to asking a farmer about the implications of another emerging technology, in a conversation with the CEO of a half-trillion dollar company that’s building the AI and who would presumably know better than most people — but point taken.
We bring it up because Altman returns to the “farmer” analogy when he’s asked about how a billion jobs might be destroyed before new ones are realized.
“The thing about that farmer,” Altman said, is not only that they wouldn’t believe you, but “they very likely would look at what you do and I do and say, ‘that’s not real work.'”
This, Altman said, makes him feel “a little less worried” but “more worried in some other ways.”
“If you’re, like, farming, you’re doing something people really need,” Altman explained. “You’re making them food, you’re keeping them alive. This is real work.” But the farmer would see our modern jobs as “playing a game to fill your time,” and therefore not a “real job.”
“It’s very possible that if we could see those jobs of the future,” Altman said, we’d think “maybe our jobs were not as real as a farmer’s job, but it’s a lot more real than this game you’re playing to entertain yourself.”
If Altman has a salient case he’s trying to make here, it’s that jobs change. And so ye of little faith and even littler paycheck should stop worrying about your job disappearing as AI takes over the economy, because some hypothetical farmer communicating with us through a rift in spacetime would think your job is fake anyway. But actually, it’s not that fake, because a hypothetical future you will think the post-AI jobs will be even faker than the ones we’re doing now. Have we got that right?
Anyway, Altman seems to think that this will all just sort itself out somehow.
“I’m so willing to bet on human drives being what they are,” Altman said. “And I think we’ll find plenty of things to do.”
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