Altman sees mass job loss — and plans to counter with more AI

In what was surely supposed to be an inspirational essay from Sam Altman, he drops a few more tidbits around his «scary times ahead» warning from earlier this month.

Whole categories of jobs will be wiped out, he writes — but then says AI will bring us so many benefits and new policy options we won’t care much:

— There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before, he writes.

He then goes on to talk about space exploration, cures for diseases and real scientific progress. It reads like science fiction, if it wasn’t so close.

The «scary» part is that there are signs of this already happening, and if we take in Anthopic’s Dario Amodei’s warning from May, that we are looking at a rapid rise in unemployment to about 10—20% within the next five years, it starts making sense.

About to change fundamentally
Altman says coding has permanently changed, that cognitive tasks can now be done by AI, that AI will help in meaningful discovery by next year — and that 2027 could already be the year of the robots doing human tasks:

— 2025 has seen the arrival of agents that can do real cognitive work; writing computer code will never be the same. 2026 will likely see the arrival of systems that can figure out novel insights. 2027 may see the arrival of robots that can do tasks in the real world.

That tracks with what we are hearing from Amodei, That Ai will fundamentally change the world within as little as two years.

Coping with the new reality
Amodei’s statement was designed to bring awareness that this is real, this happening, and people need to learn how to use AI as soon as they can.

Then he was constructive and said we might want to tax tokens, the data units used by AI, or maybe tax the AI companies themselves, pretty soon.

Altman offers no solution to this problem, other than painting a rosy picture of the benefits of AI over the long term, and dropping another warning, that:

— We probably won’t adopt a new social contract all at once, but when we look back in a few decades, the gradual changes will have amounted to something big.

Democratizing AI
So while people are out there talking about Universal Basic Income and debating how to get there, the most important issue for AI in the near term seems no closer to being resolved.

Altman does write at length along the lines of democratizing AI, giving everyone access to compute time, and set them free to enjoy the benefits, economical and otherwise.

But finding a new social contract seems somewhat urgent if AI is indeed about to take away «whole classes of jobs» in the very near future.

Read more: Sam Altman: The Gentle Singularity, see also Tag: work