Suppose you are magically transported to a society + economy “peopled” and run by present-day LLM-shaped intelligences. Suppose further that for whatever reason you can’t do manual labor.
What remote-only work can you do that’d still be economically valuable?
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I ask this because I think the “obvious” answers for what LLMs can’t do today often rely on either embodiment or specific human preferences. For the later, either intrinsic preferences for the human touch (eg priests, therapists), or idiosyncratic preferences (eg liking The Linchpin blog style, a preference some humans have, but AIs generally don’t share).
If we stipulate both a primarily AI economy and embodiment irrelevance, the ways in which human cognitive performance is superior to AI is still there (I have several key candidate answers), but I think it’s far more subtle.
I’m not sure exactly how I’d set it up but I’d think there’d be opportunities relating to long-run coherence. If we’re imagining a working society populated by present-day LLMs there’d necessarily be some sort of systems aiding in keeping coherence over time but I have to imagine that I would be a lot better in certain ways or in helping specific projects to make me valuable.
Too much is unspecified to make any predictions. present-day LLMs aren’t self-motivated and holistic-desire-driven enough to have a working economy, let alone a society. Exactly what shape their improvements take, and what is the path from human-dominated to AI-entirely matters a lot.
In the most naive sense, the answer is “whatever other humans do in that world”. If it’s “nothing”, then that’s your answer.
Are we talking about present-day capability levels? If so then one possible answer is “run a vending machine business”, based on comparisons of frontier model VendBench scores to human baselines. (or if we are saying that there are no customers for this because LLMs don’t want things out of vending machines, I suspect a human could currently still probably find some kind of remote-only business where they could compete, given how bad LLMs seem to be at long-horizon business decisions.)
Weird thought-experiment I came up with:
Suppose you are magically transported to a society + economy “peopled” and run by present-day LLM-shaped intelligences. Suppose further that for whatever reason you can’t do manual labor.
What remote-only work can you do that’d still be economically valuable?
__
I ask this because I think the “obvious” answers for what LLMs can’t do today often rely on either embodiment or specific human preferences. For the later, either intrinsic preferences for the human touch (eg priests, therapists), or idiosyncratic preferences (eg liking The Linchpin blog style, a preference some humans have, but AIs generally don’t share).
If we stipulate both a primarily AI economy and embodiment irrelevance, the ways in which human cognitive performance is superior to AI is still there (I have several key candidate answers), but I think it’s far more subtle.
I’m not sure exactly how I’d set it up but I’d think there’d be opportunities relating to long-run coherence. If we’re imagining a working society populated by present-day LLMs there’d necessarily be some sort of systems aiding in keeping coherence over time but I have to imagine that I would be a lot better in certain ways or in helping specific projects to make me valuable.
Prediction market trading.
Too much is unspecified to make any predictions. present-day LLMs aren’t self-motivated and holistic-desire-driven enough to have a working economy, let alone a society. Exactly what shape their improvements take, and what is the path from human-dominated to AI-entirely matters a lot.
In the most naive sense, the answer is “whatever other humans do in that world”. If it’s “nothing”, then that’s your answer.
Are we talking about present-day capability levels? If so then one possible answer is “run a vending machine business”, based on comparisons of frontier model VendBench scores to human baselines. (or if we are saying that there are no customers for this because LLMs don’t want things out of vending machines, I suspect a human could currently still probably find some kind of remote-only business where they could compete, given how bad LLMs seem to be at long-horizon business decisions.)