Netflix has a great movie right now, Subservience. I was depressed after the first 15 mins where we see a bunch of construction workers and tradesmen fired and replaced by robots with no indication or idea of what they’re supposed to do afterwards, just replaced, bye, don’t care if you survive. They’re starting with programmers, white collar jobs like accounting, BI, tech support. Then they’ll move onto skilled trades. Subservience doesn’t sound so far fetched, so how long do we have?
A long time. AI ≠ AGI, and it’s prone to errors with even the most basic tasks. We already have robots that can do various things without AI, and they mostly replace workers doing tasks that are repetitive or dangerous, yet we still have plenty of factories and other jobs with human workers.
On top of that, these robots need maintenance (including code), and they’re incredibly expensive. Replacing a human isn’t a simple drop-in, and they have a long way to go before they’re even close to parity with human cognition and context awareness.