I completely agree that AI is far better at humans at some tasks and far worse at others, so when you pick an age of humans to be comparable to AI, the comparison will be full of tasks where one side beats the other by a large margin.
However, that doesn’t imply that “outperforming” can’t be defined. It’s the thought experiment of randomly picking a real world job (maybe from 2020, before ChatGPT existed). We have 12 year olds try to do it. If they all get fired in the first week, it means the job is too hard for 12 year olds to do. If they don’t get fired, it means 12 year olds can do the job.
We then imagine asking the AI model to attempt all the jobs 12 year olds can do. If they outperform the 12 year olds on most of these jobs, it means the AI’s Job Replacement Age is higher than 12. If they underperform the 12 year olds on most of these jobs, it’s lower, because 12 year olds have more “real world employability” than the AI.
I guess you’re right that AI coding ability complicates things, maybe we should ignore jobs which the AI does better because the 12 year old can’t do the job at all. You’re right that we shouldn’t be comparing their abilities in disjoint sets of jobs!
I completely agree that AI is far better at humans at some tasks and far worse at others, so when you pick an age of humans to be comparable to AI, the comparison will be full of tasks where one side beats the other by a large margin.
However, that doesn’t imply that “outperforming” can’t be defined. It’s the thought experiment of randomly picking a real world job (maybe from 2020, before ChatGPT existed). We have 12 year olds try to do it. If they all get fired in the first week, it means the job is too hard for 12 year olds to do. If they don’t get fired, it means 12 year olds can do the job.
We then imagine asking the AI model to attempt all the jobs 12 year olds can do. If they outperform the 12 year olds on most of these jobs, it means the AI’s Job Replacement Age is higher than 12. If they underperform the 12 year olds on most of these jobs, it’s lower, because 12 year olds have more “real world employability” than the AI.
I guess you’re right that AI coding ability complicates things, maybe we should ignore jobs which the AI does better because the 12 year old can’t do the job at all. You’re right that we shouldn’t be comparing their abilities in disjoint sets of jobs!